by Diane Capri
“Well, that went better than planned,” Fiona said when Ami walked into the room still wearing her night shirt and carrying a bowl of cornflakes.
“Just the hospital to deal with, now. Are you sure you don’t want me to come with you? I have a free lesson, first thing.”
Fiona screwed up her nose and shook her head. “I’m heading off now. I’d rather have a few minutes alone with Linda, if you don’t mind. You know, assess her state of mind.”
“The offer still stands, but I absolutely understand.”
Fiona picked up her Yves Saint Laurent Muse designer handbag, and her coat from the coat rack, and headed for the front door. “See you later.”
Chewing on a mouthful of cornflakes, Ami nodded.
The traffic around London was horrendous as usual, but Fiona stopped caring about the length of time the trip was taking her by focussing on her sister, instead. As much as her usually organised brain warned her to remain calm for Linda’s sake, it didn’t stop her seething at the injustice of the situation. Linda was such a gentle soul who definitely didn’t deserve to be treated like that.
Not that any woman deserved to be raped. The situation still surprised Fiona; she always considered her sister to be the cautious one, as far as men were concerned. She usually chose her boyfriends after several weeks of consideration. She was never one of those girls who jumped into bed with a guy after meeting him a few hours before.
Which was why Fiona found it hard to fathom how her sister had got herself into such a deplorable, unthinkable position.
Finally, she arrived at St Thomas’ hospital. She asked at reception where she could find her sister and rushed through the corridors, her heels clicking on the tiled floor and echoing off the walls.
Thankfully, Linda had been allocated a private ward. Fiona tapped on the door lightly before pushing it open.
The sight that greeted her caused her to inhale sharply. Fiona was both sickened and repulsed by the bruises that had caused Linda’s face to swell. She was almost unrecognisable. Her left eye was a mere slit; the swelling surrounding it was a rainbow of colours.
Okay, now. Remain calm. Don’t break down. Fiona approached the bed and kissed her sister gently on her bandaged forehead. Then she sat on the bed beside her battered sister.
“Oh, Fi. What did I do to deserve this?” Linda asked her voice croaky and full of emotion.
Tears welled up as Fiona studied her sister’s appalling injuries. She swallowed down the lump in her throat and patted Linda’s hand. “You mustn’t blame yourself, sweetheart. You don’t or can’t have any control over another person’s instincts. If this man set out to hurt a stranger, you were just unfortunate, to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Linda remained silent for a few seconds, but as fresh tears cascaded down her puffy cheeks, she whispered, “He wasn’t a stranger…”
CHAPTER TWO
Lorne clutched at the excruciating pain attacking her sides as tears streamed down her face.
Tony glanced up at her and shook his head. “Some bloody support you are.”
His hand sunk into the mud behind him as he tried to retrieve his false leg. Annoyance creased up his eyes. He held out his other arm in her direction. “When you’ve quite finished laughing at me, any chance you can help a disabled man out of this damn quagmire?”
Lorne knew she shouldn’t laugh at him, knew he’d exact his revenge on her somehow in the not-too-distant future, but the way he’d tumbled reminded her of one of those old black and white films she used to watch as a child. In her youth, the Three Stooges had held her captivated for hours.
When she’d married Tony six months ago, she had no notion her life would be filled with so much laughter and love that had been missing throughout her previous marriage to Tom. Although, looking at the way he was sinking in the mud around their two-acre paddock, Tony wasn’t doing much laughing at the moment.
She ventured forward on the outskirts of the innocent-looking mud patch and held out her hand to help. Their fingers touched tentatively. She reached further, not wishing to spoil the new pink wellies her daughter, Charlie, had bought her the previous weekend. Her hand slipped into his.
Instead of Lorne pulling Tony out of the mud, he jerked his hand quickly and pulled her on top of him. “Laugh at me at your peril, Lorne Warner.”
Her screams of disbelief quickly extinguished, replaced by hoots of laughter. “You really don’t like me missing out on anything, do you?” she asked as he placed a muddy hand either side of her face and looked at her, his eyes brimming with love.
“For better, for worse, the vicar said. It doesn’t get much worse than this.”
They laughed before he kissed her deeply.
The truth was that the mess they were sitting in at the moment was a breeze, compared to what they’d both encountered through life thus far. As an ex-MI6 agent, Tony had been tortured several times for the sake of queen and country. His final mission, after he’d been captured and publicly tortured by the Taliban, had been the one where he’d actually lost his leg. So far, Lorne had been utterly impressed by the way he’d adapted and coped with his disability.
Lorne’s own life experiences had hardly been run-of-the-mill, either. In the line of duty as one of the Met’s best serving detective inspectors, she’d met her fair share of callous villains and come close to losing more than a limb several times herself, in the last decade, mostly at the hands of her archenemy the Unicorn.
The Unicorn had succeeded in killing her partner in the force and had kidnapped and raped her daughter. Those two events had done more damage to her mentally than anything he could’ve conjured up physically, if ever he’d had the chance. There had been an incident where she had found herself naked in his presence, but Lorne, being Lorne, had managed to squirm her way out of the situation before the Unicorn had laid his mucky paws on her.
Their kiss ended, and Lorne let out a satisfied sigh.
“What was that for?” Tony asked.
“Just thinking.”
“About?”
“How we got to be here. The obstacles we’ve both had to overcome. You more than me.”
“Come on. Help me up.”
Lorne salvaged Tony’s prosthetic limb before they attempted to leave the mud. They grunted and groaned as they fought against the stickiness and slipperiness of the mud, then laughed at the way it made slurping noises as they trudged through it back to the safety of the grassy part of the paddock.
He took her in his arms and smiled down at her. “If we hadn’t been together, I doubt I would have got through the last six months, darling.”
Lorne shook her head and wrinkled her nose. “I doubt that’s true, Tony. You’re one of life’s survivors. You wouldn’t know what failure was if it was tattooed on your forehead and you had to look at it in the mirror every morning.”
“Have I told you lately how much I love you?” he asked, running a muddy finger down the length of her nose.
She pretended to think about her reply. “Umm…not since this morning. Let’s grab a coffee and see if the post has come yet.”
Tony strapped his artificial leg in place and slipped an arm around her shoulder as they set off for the main house.
“Are you sure you want to set out on this new venture? Isn’t it a bit soon?” he asked tentatively.
Lorne glanced up at him as they continued walking. “I need to do it. I love having this place. Love the fact that we’re able to save and nurture all these animals that are crying out to be cared for, but there is still something missing. I thought we’d been through all this before I’d applied for the diploma.”
“I know we did. But I kind of like having you around twenty-four, seven.” He gave her shoulder a squeeze.
That was when her brain really kicked in and she felt the beginning of a plan hatching. “I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before. How dumb of me. We could both run the agency. Both be PIs…”
He stopped abrup
tly and turned to face her. “Now, wait just a minute.” His arm swept around him. “Have you forgotten about this place? Who’s going to run it?”
Lorne waved her hand in front of her, pooh-poohing his question as if the answer were obvious. “Don’t worry about that. I have someone special in mind to look after this place. Hey, we’ll still be around to do the majority of the chores. Neither of us would be able to cope with sitting on our backsides not doing anything all day. We need stimulation. Need our brains to be functioning properly.”
He tutted and shook his head. “Once you have a plan in place, there really is no stopping you, is there?”
“Nope. What do you say?”
“I say, we talk about this over a mug of coffee before I start cleaning out the kennels.”
They were both chuckling about the antics of Henry, their Border collie, chasing the chickens in the yard outside, when they stepped into the kitchen of the farmhouse they’d purchased four months earlier.
The property had been bought on the cheap because the former owners had been in financial difficulties and unable to pay the exorbitant mortgage after the economy had crashed. Lorne and Tony had a couple of flats for sale that they’d renovated, and offered one of the flats in exchange for a reduction on the farmhouse, which was set in ten acres of land. The vendor had virtually snapped their hands off. The transaction had been good for everyone concerned.
The farmhouse, which was in need of minor renovations, came with a kennel block, a two-acre paddock, a small wooded area—ideal to keep their wood-burning stove running during the winter months—and several barns, that could be turned into holiday lets, if needed. Off the main house was an adjoining two-bedroomed annex that had Lorne’s father’s name written all over it.
After they moved in, Lorne had asked the builders who’d carried out the renovations on the flats she had updated, if they would knock the annex into shape for her father to live in, as a complete surprise to Sam Collins.
A month after Tony and Lorne had moved in, her father had visited the farmhouse. That was when Lorne had dangled the idea in front of him. Her father had gone home that evening and immediately contacted an estate agent. The agent had told him that if he wanted a quick sale on his property, he would need to sell it at a lower price than he was expecting to get after owning the house for over twenty years. Lorne had reassured him it was the right thing to do and that the money side of things didn’t really matter.
He sold the house after a couple of weeks, and by the time the sale had gone through, the builders had finished his ‘little house’ as he called it. He’d moved in before the paint had time to dry.
Since the move, her father had seemed like his old self, walking around as if he had a purpose in life. He’d been drifting like a lost soul since Lorne’s mother had died of breast cancer four years earlier, struggling daily to cope with his retirement from the force and being thrust into living a solitary life. He’d been crying out for more of a social life with his two daughters and their respective partners just to keep his sanity intact.
Her father greeted them at the back door, his face beaming as he studied the state of their clothes. “What on earth have you two been up to?”
“Tony was sampling the mud out by the paddock to see if it would be viable to sell it to the health spa up the road,” Lorne told him as she walked over to the kitchen sink to wash the mud off her face.
Her father laughed. “I’m not sure I believe you on that score, dear.”
Lorne dried her face and hands, pecked her father on the cheek and headed into the hallway. “I’m just going to get out of these clothes, then I have a proposition for you, Dad.”
She could hear her father asking Tony what she meant, but she disappeared up the stairs before she heard her husband’s response.
Lorne ignored the pink large-flowered vinyl wallpaper adorning the walls of her boudoir and went over to the wardrobe in the corner. As she pulled on her clean clothes, she mulled over how much better the room would look after she was done with it. She couldn’t wait to put her designer skills into action; she had big ideas for the master bedroom. She’d already made up a mood board for the room. The board contained several magazine clippings of furniture she had her eye on, swatches of material she had chosen for the bedding and curtains, and even a sample of the carpet she had earmarked for the room.
But the changes would have to wait until more funds became available. At present, all their money had been set aside for feeding the menagerie of animals they had already rescued in their short time at the property. It hadn’t taken long for word to spread that Lorne and Tony never turned away an animal in need. Which meant that at the moment, they shared their home with ten dogs, five cats, and a flock of geese that had narrowly escaped being made into foie gras thanks to Lorne’s timely intervention.
Several old sheep grazed in the field next to her father’s annex, and the newest member of their animal family was a donkey that was due to arrive that morning. That was why Lorne and Tony had been out by the paddock earlier, where they had accidentally ended up frolicking in the mud. The object of the exercise had been to ensure that the paddock was safe for the little fellow before putting him in his new home. The poor mite had spent his entire young life living in a grubby barn, up to his knees in his own faeces, without a fresh blade of grass ever having passed his lips.
When Lorne had heard of the poor creature’s plight, it had taken all her strength not to punch the owner on the nose. The second he’d shown her the donkey’s living conditions, Lorne’s heart immediately went out to the poor animal. She had paid the man two hundred pounds, and not yet having access to a horsebox, she had asked him if he would deliver Hercules to the house. The vile owner had ummed and ahhed before he reluctantly agreed.
She arrived back in the kitchen just as the post shot through the letterbox. Lorne skipped up the hallway and pounced on the mixture of brown and white envelopes. Placing the brown bills to the back of the pile, she tore open the A5-sized envelope she’d been expecting and whooped for joy. Punching a fist in the air she let out a relieved, “Yes!”
There was no licence in the UK at present for private investigators, but having a diploma from one of the leading PI courses went a long way to setting up a PI firm. Lorne laughed to herself as she wandered back to the kitchen. Maybe I’ll be the female version of Mike Hammer.
“I see you got it, then,” Tony said, shaking his head with amusement.
“Got what?” Lorne’s father asked, confused.
She handed him the laminated certificate and waited for his reaction. She laughed when his eyes almost popped out of his ageing face.
“A PI! Are you insane?”
That was not how she had anticipated her father would react to the news. “Why not?”
Her father poured the boiling water into the mugs, stirred the coffees, and set the mugs on the kitchen table as the three of them pulled out their chairs and sat down, some of them more heavily than others.
Sam Collins let out a deep breath. His gaze met hers. “For heaven’s sake, Lorne. What about this place? All this was to be your new exciting venture, or have you forgotten that?”
Lorne looked over at Tony for help, but he shrugged once and looked down at his mug of coffee. She was on her own, on this one. “Okay, Dad. You’re right; of course you are. But…”
She paused for a second or two as she searched for the right words, all the while becoming more nervous under her father’s intense stare. She twisted her mug on the table in front of her before taking a sip of the scalding hot liquid. Great. Now she’d have a blister on the roof of her mouth to have to contend with for the rest of the day, too.
She cleared her throat and looked her father in the eye as she’d always done when her determined streak came to the fore. “Dad, you know me—”
“Huh, I should. You’re my flesh and blood, after all. But I sometimes wonder if I really know you at all, Lorne. Over the years, you’ve had some hare
-brained schemes, but this…this definitely tops the lot.”
Lorne frowned. “Why? I’m not sure what it is you’re so against, Dad.” It was difficult for her to push down the feeling of hurt from his reaction.
Instead of answering her, her father turned to Tony. “And you’re all right with this?”
Officially stuck in the middle, Tony rose to his feet. “I think it best if I leave you two alone to discuss this. I’ll be in the lounge. Give me a shout when you’re done.”
Gobsmacked, Lorne’s jaw dropped open as her eyes bore into his traitorous retreating back. That day was turning out to be full of surprises. Both the men in her life had reacted to the situation by giving her the cold shoulder, something she was neither used to nor appreciated.
“I take it Tony agrees with me?” her father asked, a note of triumph in his voice.
Lorne turned back to her father and gathered his hand in hers. “Why all the anger, Dad?”
He seemed shocked by her question. “Oh darling, it’s not anger. It’s concern. In the past three years, you’ve changed your mind so many times I can hardly keep up with you. This was to be your and Tony’s new start. Now you want to start putting your life at risk again. What about the animals? What’s going to happen to them?”
“The animals will be well-cared for.”
“By whom?” he asked through slanted eyes.
“Umm…Well, I thought you could help out there.”
Her father shook his head, and the creases in his forehead disappeared. He smiled and tilted his head. “Oh, you did, did you? You do realise that I’m not getting any younger.”
“I know, Dad, but…”
Amused, he laughed when he understood what she was getting at. “I need to earn my keep, is that it?”
She squeezed his hand affectionately and felt relieved that his anger or concern had momentarily dissipated. “Would you like to hear my plan? My revised plan for this place.”
“I’m all ears.”
“Okay, here goes. No interrupting. Just hear me out. Promise?”