by Zoe Sharp
I matched my tone to hers and there was no warmth in any of it. ‘If Reynolds has something special planned for us, it’s going to be hard to make it look like just another accident.’
‘Oh, you’d be amazed what can be covered up by a good strong fire,’ she said.
‘Sean will know.’
She smiled with every indication of amusement. ‘What makes you think he won’t be dead by then, too?’
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
An hour goes by very slowly when you have nothing to do but sit and listen to every second of it pass, and wait for an opportunity that never comes. I tried to tell myself that there would be a better chance, somewhere along the line, but that didn’t help Sean and Neagley now, on their way to Vaughan’s place out towards Bretton Woods. And it didn’t help Ella.
Rosalind was not a nervous waiter. She sat without impatience, without signs of anxiety, without apparent fatigue. She sat and watched us and kept the gun pointed in our direction firmly enough that there was no window.
Matt disintegrated visibly as time wore on. Somewhere around the thirty-minute mark he began to weep, quietly, into his hands. Whether for himself or his daughter I didn’t ask, but I’d prefer to think his tears were for Ella.
‘What will you do with your husband?’ I asked Rosalind. ‘Providing, of course, that Vaughan doesn’t kill him for you.’
She shrugged. ‘The truth about him is bound to come out now, one way or another,’ she said. ‘If he had stayed away from Simone, well, who knows? But I assume you have people in England who’ve been digging out your information for you and I can’t silence them all.’ Another shrug, indifferent. ‘He’s brought this on himself.’
I nodded. ‘So now his usefulness is over.’ I glanced at her impassive face. ‘You would have been happier, wouldn’t you, if I’d shot him that night in the forest?’
‘Yes,’ she said without hesitation. ‘And you were so close, Charlie. So close. I saw what you could do on the range that day and I couldn’t believe it when you didn’t take the shot.’ Her lips twisted. ‘Very disappointing. I really thought you had it in you.’
‘I wasn’t about to blow anyone’s brains out when he was so close to a child,’ I said sharply. ‘She—’
And my voice deserted me as my brain stopped driving it, suddenly entirely diverted onto another track like it had swerved off a highway and gone crashing into an icecold river. My eyes flew to Rosalind’s and her smile widened.
‘Well, well,’ she murmured. ‘You finally got it. I was beginning to think I was going to have to come right out and say it.’
‘It was you who shot me,’ I whispered.
‘That’s right,’ she said, pride overlapping. ‘Must have been at least forty yards, in poor light, moving target. One heck of a piece of shooting, even if I do say so myself.’
‘Not particularly,’ I said. ‘After all, I’m not dead yet.’
Her satisfaction dimmed. ‘As good as,’ she said, gesturing with the barrel of the Beretta. ‘Look at you, Charlie, all crocked up. What use are you to anyone? Didn’t the British Army teach you that old rule about it being better to wound an enemy soldier than to kill him?’
‘Yes they did,’ I said, remembering Sean telling me much the same thing as we left the hospital. My reply to him still stood. That only applies if the soldier can’t fight, Rosalind. Give me half a chance and then see what I can still manage…
Matt had raised his blotchy face from his hands, confused. ‘But they said Simone shot you,’ he said unsteadily, his eyes streaked with red. ‘That’s why the police killed her. She shot you.’ His insistence was almost childlike. Say it isn’t so.
I shook my head, gently. ‘Rosalind did it,’ I said. I turned back to her. ‘How did you fool the ballistics people? The police told me the gun they found with Simone was a match.’
‘She dropped it in the snow and they didn’t find it right away – what with the EMTs scrambling around working on you,’ she said. ‘Did you know your heart stopped at the scene, by the way?’
I shook my head again. ‘No, I didn’t.’ I gave her a tight little smile. ‘I suppose then, technically, you did kill me.’
She pulled a face. ‘So anyway, what with all the confusion, it wasn’t hard to get the gun I’d been using into Simone’s hand. All it needed was for you not to make it, and the whole thing would have been neat and tidy. But, they called in the Life-Flight helicopter and flew you over to Lewiston and damn me if they didn’t put you back together again.’
I was silent. I thought of the shadowy figure I’d registered watching me as I lay bleeding into the bottom of that ditch, and of the doctor with the perfect smile. I thought of Simone, bursting through the trees with the wild look in her eyes and the gun held rigid out in front of her – of how it had looked and how it was. And I thought of Ella’s terrified face when I’d been moments from killing her grandfather and, at some level, she’d known what I was contemplating.
Is that why you hurt Charlie? she’d asked when Neagley and I had gone back to see Rosalind. I’d thought Ella meant the slap in the face, but she must have seen who was behind me…
And finally, I remembered Reynolds’ words that day right here in this very room. I wonder what will happen, he’d said, if I put another round through your leg in just the same place as the last…
At the time I’d had too many other things on my mind for that last piece of information to penetrate. How could he have known the details of exactly how I was shot, unless someone had told him? Someone who’d been there at the time and seen it happen.
When I looked up again I found Rosalind checking her watch. She got to her feet, smoothing down her clothes. As businesslike and no-nonsense as she’d been since our first meeting.
‘OK,’ she said. ‘Time’s up. Let’s go.’
I’d stiffened with sitting for so long and getting up off the sofa again was a struggle. Matt hooked his hand under my elbow and for once I didn’t shrug off the assistance. Rosalind watched from across the room, her expression cynical as the pair of us staggered upright.
‘She can manage – get the door,’ she said sharply, and Matt dropped my arm right away, obeying without hesitation. He looked beaten. His eyelashes were so wet they had clumped together, and the end of his nose had turned very red.
No help there, then.
As I made my way across the room behind him, limping heavily, my mind was turned inwards, and it was burning.
I needed a way out, and right now the prospects for that looked slim enough to qualify as anorexic.
* * *
Rosalind forced Matt to drive us back down to the main street and out on Route 302 towards Intervale. I sat in the front seat alongside him, with Rosalind in the back this time, where she could cover the pair of us with the Beretta.
Matt was an awful driver, slow and jerky even with the Range Rover’s automatic transmission and cushioned ride. He had no idea how to judge the width of the vehicle or place it on the road, and he wandered alarmingly.
Eventually, Rosalind jammed the silenced end of the Beretta against the base of his skull and growled at him to quit messing around. I thought Matt was going to burst into tears again at any moment.
‘Ease up on him,’ I snapped over my shoulder. ‘He’s never driven on the wrong side of the road before.’
‘And if he carries on like this,’ Rosalind said grimly, ‘he never will again.’
The snow had stopped coming down now and already people with pick-up trucks that had snowploughs attached to the front of them were out clearing the streets. There was a quiet efficiency to it all, a kind of small-town neighbourliness that was totally at odds with the woman in the back seat. I wondered when her determination to succeed with her father’s business had passed over into the kind of obsession that meant she was willing to shoot someone in the back and use a four-year-old child as a pawn in the game.
We didn’t talk again until Rosalind instructed Matt to turn off the main roa
d into the parking area for the surplus store. It was well past closing time, but there were still lights on inside the building, although there were no tyre tracks in the fresh coating of snow in front of it. Matt nosed the Range Rover gingerly into a space at the side and braked to a halt.
‘What now?’ he said, swallowing. ‘Where’s Ella?’
‘She’s inside – being well looked after, don’t you worry about that,’ Rosalind said, and something about the way she said it made my skin shimmy over my bones.
Reynolds. The images of what he might be doing to Ella twisted and writhed and shrieked through my subconscious.
I heard the muted bleep of a mobile phone dialling and knew without turning round that Rosalind was calling Vaughan again. She’d said she’d give him an hour to make his decision and that time was gone. It was so quiet inside the car I could hear the sound of the phone ringing out at the other end of the line.
‘Felix?… It’s me again,’ Rosalind said, and her voice had a rich quality to it, gloating, riding a crest of self-confidence. She chuckled. ‘Oh, I’m sorry – are you entertaining guests? I kinda thought you might be, by now.’
I was aware of a leaden weight in my chest. Until then I’d clung to a slight conceited notion that Sean and Neagley and Lucas might somehow have avoided the trap Rosalind had engineered at Vaughan’s place out near Bretton Woods. I’d become so used to Sean’s abilities that I’d expected too much this time. They’d thought they were going in under cover of stealth and surprise, only to find they were thoroughly expected. Even so, I’d held out an unrelenting sliver of hope that Sean had sidestepped the trap and prevailed.
I heard Vaughan’s muttered response, not clearly enough to discern the words, but I picked up a vibration in them nevertheless. I heard the quick hiss of Rosalind’s indrawn breath, and when she spoke again her voice was harder and flatter than it had been before. ‘What do you mean, you’ve been having a nice little chat with them?’ she demanded.
‘Felix, you can’t possibly listen to—’ and she was cut off abruptly as Felix Vaughan clearly told her what he thought of being given orders.
Matt kept his eyes fixed on the front windscreen, shoulders hunched and hands on the wheel, like he was still driving. I risked a glance back and found Rosalind sitting stiffly upright, her whole body practically trembling with rage.
‘You’ll regret this, Felix,’ she snapped. ‘Greg won’t be around much longer anyway – did they tell you that? You think you’re showing solidarity with your old comrade in arms and he wasn’t even a soldier, just some goddamn salesman!’
My eyes dropped surreptitiously to the Beretta in her right hand, but she caught the gesture and brought the gun up, glaring at me. She looked agitated enough to shoot me out of sheer temper, just to let off steam. I quickly faced forwards again.
‘Well, you can pass on a message to that worthless no-account husband of mine,’ she said now, low and bitter. ‘You tell him he’s going home to England after all these years and he’s going to jail for what he did, and his precious little granddaughter’s going home with him – in a box.’
She ended the call and sat for a moment, fighting for calm, breathing hard. I heard the hitch in it and realised that she was crying. Beside me, Matt’s shoulders had begun to quiver.
‘She’s only four,’ he said brokenly. ‘For God’s sake show some compassion…’
‘Oh, spare me the woe-is-me crap,’ Rosalind told him harshly. ‘If you want to feel sorry for anyone, feel it for yourselves. I don’t know what kind of a deal your boyfriend worked out with Felix, Charlie, but he’s just ensured that the pair of you won’t last the night.’
‘You were planning on having Reynolds kill us anyway,’ I pointed out.
‘True,’ she said, and I heard the smile in her voice. ‘But now he doesn’t have to make it look accidental, he can have some fun with you first.’
She ordered us out of the Range Rover, Matt first and me after. The cold numbed me again as soon as I opened the car door. It was like I’d never been warm. I slid clumsily to the ground and fumbled with my crutch.
Rosalind began urging us towards the entrance to the store, to where Ella was stashed away and Reynolds awaited. Was he alone? Or did he have the same guy with him who’d been there in the Lucases’ house the night they’d first tried to snatch Ella?
I knew to get out of this I needed speed and strength and right now I didn’t have either. So, what did I have?
Motivation. Experience. Technique.
Motivation. If I didn’t get out of this soon, I was going to die. Matt was going to die. I tried not to think about the method. And while Vaughan might have decided not to accept Rosalind’s offer of a trade, that didn’t mean he and Sean and Neagley were suddenly bosom pals.
As for Ella, the time when she might have been sold to the highest bidder was way past – if, indeed, it had ever been realistic in the first place. The chances of her surviving the ransom exchange had been poor. Even if Harrington and whoever else was in charge of Simone’s money had agreed to pay. Harrington might have claimed to be concerned for Ella’s welfare, but big organisations like his bank tended to have very strict rules about refusing to give in to kidnappers. I imagined them cold-bloodedly discussing the matter over a nice merlot in a smart restaurant somewhere in Soho and I knew then I would die fighting before I let that happen to her. To any of us.
Matt reached the outer doorway to the store and opened it, looking back over his shoulder as if anxious to please. I shuffled forwards another step. Rosalind moved in behind me.
Experience. This wasn’t the first time people had tried to kill me, up close and personal. I had the scars to prove it. And not just the one on my neck that Ella had been so curious about that day in her pink bedroom in London.
Rosalind nodded to Matt and he swung the inner door open. That one hinged outwards, into the lobby area. To open it he had to step back. I stopped abruptly and sensed Rosalind close up unintentionally at my back. Her focus was beyond me, on Matt, anxious that he didn’t make any sudden moves once we got inside.
Technique. Rosalind was less than a metre behind me, holding the Beretta in her right hand. She kept herself in shape, but she was a sixty-year-old woman who’d put all her faith in the gun she was carrying and who had never been through the military machine in all its nasty glory.
She was also angry, and so close to home turf she’d already begun to relax. I gambled everything on the fact that while she might know how to shoot, she didn’t know how to fight.
I dropped my crutch, letting it fall away sideways, shifted my weight onto my good leg and pivoted to face her. The shock that I would try something so stupid, when she had a gun and I didn’t, froze her for a vital half a second. Then she started to bring the Beretta up, knuckles whitening as her grip tightened.
I reached over the suppressor and grabbed hold of the top of the slide with my left hand and pushed back as hard as I could manage. Not very, all things considered, but I was counting on Rosalind’s instinct and, sure enough, she immediately pushed against me.
Between the two of us shoving at it, the Beretta’s slide moved back fractionally in relation to the frame, opening up the breech and breaking the positive lock. I could feel the bunching as Rosalind’s finger clenched round the trigger, but as long as the breech is open, however minutely, most semiautomatic pistols will not fire. When nothing happened, she didn’t understand enough about the mechanics to realise why. Her mouth sagged open.
Still with my hand on top of the slide, I forced the gun out sideways, twisting the end of the muzzle to my left, away from me. Her grip on the gun lessened very slightly. I was working against the natural flexion of her joints and her finger was still inside the trigger guard, trapped there.
Too late, she began to counter me, starting to turn to her right to ease the pressure I was putting on her hand in general, and her trigger finger in particular. I couldn’t afford to let her get further than that. Couldn’t affo
rd a straight fair fight. Not with Ella’s life at stake.
Motivation.
With a final jerk, I twisted the gun round so the steel trigger guard bit hard against her tethered finger. I held her there, teetering, just until I saw the realisation sink in, then completed the move.
Her right index finger fractured cleanly halfway between her knuckle and the first joint. By the time the real pain hit and she began to scream, I had the pistol grip firm in my own fist and the end of the extended barrel pointing square at the centre of her body mass.
Rosalind fell back, keening, cradling her injured right hand across her chest with her left. Disbelief that she’d been beaten, and fear of that defeat, amplified her distress.
I took a halting step after her and brought the Beretta up, swapping to a double-handed grip now. My right arm was already trembling with the weight of the gun and the effort of aiming it. The only way I could be sure of my shot was to jam the end of the suppressor against Rosalind’s mouth, forcing her lips open, hearing the click of the steel against her teeth.
For the longest moment we stood like that, suspended almost. I felt every quivering muscle in my arm begin to tighten and felt no hesitation or regret. There was only a fierce roaring glory somewhere in the back of my mind.
‘Charlie, for God’s sake!’ Matt yelped. ‘You can’t!’
‘I can,’ I said through my teeth. ‘She tried to kill me. She even succeeded, however briefly. She’s responsible for Simone’s death. Oh, I could kill her like swatting a fly, Matt, trust me.’
Right at that second I was consumed by the enormous and almost irresistible desire to squeeze that trigger and watch her lifeless body fall. To hell with the legal system. To hell with the security cameras that I knew covered the inside of the store. I wanted justice. I wanted revenge. And I wanted it now…