by Zoe Sharp
“Don’t worry, Clare. They’ll fix you,” I said, my voice fierce with unshed tears. “I promise.”
She made a sort of fluttering motion with her other hand. “Just as long as they make it stop hurting,” she said faintly.
“They’ll do that, too,” I said. I hesitated, but couldn’t put off the next question. “Where’s Jacob?”
She shifted uncomfortably, gasped as a new spasm gripped her body. “Ireland,” she managed. “Don’t know where exactly. You know how he hates mobile phones. He’s travelling. Somewhere in the south. Buying trip.”
She began to cry without seeming to be aware of it, tears spilling down her cheeks. One of the theatre nurses threw me a sharply reproachful glance.
“You’ll have to leave now,” she said.
“I’ll find him,” I said to Clare, ignoring the nurse. It wasn’t Jacob’s fault. Thank Christ for that. “What the hell hit you?”
“Transit van,” she murmured. “Determined sod.” Her eyelids fluttered closed for a moment then snapped open like she was having to fight to stay with me. “Take care of the dogs for me, Charlie. They’ve been stuck in all day. Poor old Bonny. And don’t let—”
“You really will have to leave,” the nurse said. “Right now!”
“I will,” I said, answering both of them at the same time. I leaned forwards, urgent. “Clare, what do you mean about the van? Determined to do what? Knock you off?”
The nurse grabbed my arm but I shook her loose. Another of the surgical team seized me by the shoulder. I stopped struggling.
“All right, all right, I’m going!” I snapped, allowing them to hustle me outside.
As the doors swung shut behind me I got one last look at Clare. Her eyes were closed again and she lay still and quiet as a corpse against the white pillows.
***
The same nurse who’d ejected me reappeared after a few minutes and passed me a set of keys. I recognised the key-ring as Clare’s and realised the nurse must have been sent scurrying back up to the ward to collect it.
“Mr Foxcroft strongly suggests that you go home and get some food and some sleep,” she said. “He’ll call you as soon as she comes out of theatre.” There was a respectful note in her voice that hadn’t been there previously.
I nodded. “I’ll be at Clare’s,” I said, and left her the phone number on another scrap of paper. I seemed to be handing a lot of those out today.
I retrieved the Suzuki from the car park where, surprisingly enough, it hadn’t been either clamped or stolen. Then I rode sedately through the centre of Lancaster and back out again, heading north.
And all the time I was turning over what Clare had said. The main feeling was one of relief that, no matter what Tess might have insinuated, Jacob could not be involved. I hadn’t thought so for a moment, but being able to prove it made things so much better.
And then there was the accident itself. I appreciated that, as my father had predicted, she was pumped full of morphine, but Clare had seemed surprisingly clear about it. She’d known it wasn’t just a van, but a Transit, which suggested she might have a clear recall of exactly what had happened.
And then we could find out who was to blame.
***
I made a considerable detour back to the cottage on the way to Jacob and Clare’s place. I was conscious of the passing of time and the fact that I might be missing some vital phone call from my father, but I had to have some clean clothes or even I wouldn’t want to know me by morning.
My home looked shabby and depressing when I walked back in. The sledgehammer was still propped up against the wall upstairs where I’d left it and a thick layer of dust had settled over just about everything, like I’d slept for a hundred years. I picked my way across the rubble and felt the weight of the work I still had to do there lying heavy across my shoulders.
At the time I’d agreed to take the cottage on I’d desperately needed something that was physically demanding enough to occupy my mind. And, for a time, it had worked. Now, though, it just felt like a burden.
My parents had bought the place intending it to be a weekend getaway but it had proved a little too rustic for my mother’s refined tastes and they’d barely used it.
The idea in offering the cottage to me was that I’d oversee the alterations. Something to keep me out of trouble – and away from Sean. By the time they found out I was actually carrying out most of the work myself, it was too late for them to do much about it.
Now, I stripped off my dirty clothes and pulled on my Dainese leathers, zipping the jacket and jeans together to form a one-piece suit and transferring all the accumulated junk from one set of pockets to the other. I stuffed clean jeans, underwear and shirts into a bag that I could clip onto the Suzuki’s tank. The whole operation took less than ten minutes. Then, with a last regretful look at the debris, I pulled the door shut behind me and was back on the road.
It would keep.
***
Twenty minutes later I was turning into the gateway of Jacob and Clare’s house near Caton village. It was big and old and rather beautiful in a faded kind of a way. A remnant of Jacob’s ill-fated but prosperous marriage, the house was a sprawling hotchpotch of a place, three-quarters hidden by creepers. The driveway swept down from the main road and across a field until it opened out onto a moss-coated forecourt.
Jacob dealt in classic motorbikes and antiques from the outbuildings around the house itself. Because of this he’d always been security conscious and I knew that somewhere in the trees at the top of the driveway was an alarm connected to various buzzers and bells at the house to give advance warning of approaching visitors. I’d never been able to spot its location and Jacob had always refused, laughing, to show me exactly where it was.
As it was, the dogs were already going loopy when I pulled up in front of the house and cut the engine. I could see Beezer, the wire-haired terrier, scrabbling about on the kitchen window sill, her wet nose leaving slither marks across the glass.
Before I went in I unlocked the ramshackle coach house with one of the keys from Clare’s ring and wheeled the bike in alongside Jacob’s classic Laverda Jota and Clare’s Ducati. And still I wondered why hadn’t she ridden her own bike today? Maybe, if she had . . .
The dogs were ecstatic to see me. Poor old Bonneville, the arthritic Labrador, had suffered most from the unexpected confinement. She waddled up to me feathering her tail in anxious apology. I patted her head in forgiveness and fetched some old newspapers from the pile in the scullery to put down over the puddle. Good job the kitchen had a stone flagged floor that was easy to mop.
I left both dogs wolfing down food like they’d been starved for a month and went through the silent house to Jacob’s wood-panelled study. I don’t think I’d ever seen him actually do any work in there – he preferred to run his business from the scrubbed pine kitchen table – but it was at least a repository for his paperwork. Stacks of it.
I sighed and sat in the swivel captain’s chair behind the desk, staring moodily at the mass of scrawled notes and shipping inventories. Somewhere in all this lot might be some clue about where Jacob was staying in Ireland, or who with. Possibly. I knew he tended to keep most things balanced in his head. Good for him. Not so good for me.
The phone was sitting half-buried under auction catalogues. I reached for it twice, pulling my hand back each time, before my courage was up enough to dial. Even so, I wasn’t prepared for the call to be picked up on the second ring.
“Meyer,” said the terse voice at the other end of the line.
It shouldn’t have taken me by surprise. That was the way Sean always answered his mobile but I had to draw another breath before I could launch in.
“Sean? It’s Charlie.”
It was his turn for silence. Then I thought I heard a sigh that my paranoid brain translated as annoyance. “What is it?” he said at last.
“Look, I’m sorry to trouble you on a Sunday evening—” I rushed on.
&nb
sp; “Charlie,” he cut across me, gently this time. Definitely gently. “Don’t apologise for calling me. Never apologise for calling me. But you sound stressed out. What’s happened?”
So I told him the whole story, from Sam’s mad dash to find me to Clare’s news about Jacob’s uncertain whereabouts. “I need to find him but I don’t know where to start,” I finished, a little lamely. “I thought maybe Madeleine could help.”
Madeleine Rimmington worked for Sean’s close protection agency, mainly handling electronic security, and there was very little she couldn’t coax out of a computer. If anyone could track down Jacob, she could.
“Hang on,” Sean said. “She’s here. I’ll ask.” And there was the sound of muffled voices in the background.
I recognised the flush that rode over me as jealousy, pure and simple. In my head I knew there was nothing going on between Madeleine and Sean. That there never had been. But in my heart I wanted to scratch her eyes out.
When he came back on the line I couldn’t hold back a snitty comment. “She working overtime?”
“No. Actually, she and Dominic are round for dinner,” Sean said evenly, amusement in his voice now. “He’s in the kitchen – as you would expect. We’re having duck. Would you like to speak to him?”
The closest I’d come to actually meeting Madeleine’s chef boyfriend was looking at a photo of him. I wouldn’t have any idea what to say to him over the phone, as Sean very well knew.
“No,” I muttered quickly, ashamed and trying to make light of it. “Why would I want to talk to a dead duck?”
Sean laughed, a momentary brightness. Then I heard a woman’s voice in the background and he was all business again. “Madeleine says she’ll get straight onto it as soon as she gets home later,” he said. “Meanwhile, does Jacob keep an address book? If so you might want to try and pinpoint any Irish-sounding contacts and give them a call. If he’s in the south, look for phone numbers that start zero-zero-three-five-three. What’s he doing over there?”
I wondered briefly why it didn’t surprise me in the slightest that Sean would know international phone codes off the top of his head.
“Clare mentioned a buying trip. He’s probably heard about some private classic bike collection coming up for sale and he’ll have nipped over to snap the whole lot up,” I said with a smile.
“Hmm,” Sean said, noncommittal. “If he’s hired a van to go over that might explain why his car’s still there. Look, he must have a fax machine there. Get a list of likely-sounding contacts to me as soon as you can and I’ll have someone check out the local hire companies first thing in the morning. Meanwhile, change the outgoing answering machine message, just in case he phones home. Just tell him to call you urgently and leave him your mobile number. And for heaven’s sake leave the damned thing switched on.”
I thought of my recently-acquired mobile which was currently languishing in the pocket of my leather jacket.
“OK,” I said meekly. “I keep forgetting about it.”
“I know,” he said, and I could tell he was smiling again. “Whenever I try and call, it’s always switched off.”
He’d called. The realisation pleased me far more than it should have done. I found myself grinning silently to the empty room.
“Oh and Charlie,” he added, more sober now, “when you do finally get hold of Jacob, you might want to work out what you’re going to tell him about what Clare was doing out with this guy Slick in the first place.”
“I know,” I said, stripped of my smile. “I’m hoping I won’t have to – that by the time Jacob gets home Clare can tell him herself. I’m sure it’s not how it looks.”
He paused, almost a hesitation. “I realise I don’t know them half as well as you do, but you really don’t think there might be anything in what this Tess girl said – that Clare was fooling around while Jacob was away?”
“No,” I said, immediate and adamant.
“Think about it for a moment. There was quite a difference in their ages and—”
“No,” I said again. “You’re right, Sean. You don’t know them well at all. Trust me on this. She wouldn’t cheat on Jacob. And certainly not with a waster like Slick.”
“I admire your loyalty to your friends,” he said dryly. “There’ve been times when I wish you’d had the same kind of blind faith in me.”
I put the phone down slowly after we’d broken the connection and leaned back in the swivel chair. Blind faith, Sean had said. But it was more than that. It was utter conviction.
But even so there was a finger of doubt poking at me. After all, however devoted Jacob and Clare were to each other, and however much I protested on her behalf, Clare had still gone off willingly with Slick while Jacob was conveniently out of the picture in another country.
Three
That night I dreamed of Sean.
It was a kind of buried longing I seemed only able to give free rein to when my subconscious was in control. Talking to him again, hearing his voice and picturing the face behind it as he spoke, had provoked a reaction so strong it frightened me.
The job in Florida back in March was supposed to have been a new beginning for us, an easy couple of weeks in the sun where we could relax in each other’s company. But it hadn’t turned out that way.
I’d spent four nightmare days on the run with my teenage charge, all the while believing Sean was dead. And then, when I’d found out he was still very much alive, I’d had to stand by and watch him commit what was little more than cold-blooded murder. I’d had to kill to survive, but not for personal gratification. And not for revenge either, however close I may have come to it.
Sean had accused me of not having faith in him, but it had been five months since our return and I was still trying to find a way to bridge the gulf between us. He’d pulled away from me, or maybe it was me who’d pulled away from him. I hadn’t even felt able to ask him to come to me now, when I needed him. And – worse – he hadn’t offered.
Then, from somewhere above me a small sound broke through the outer layers and crashed through my unconscious mind like a falling stone.
I came bounding out of sleep much too fast, with my heart screaming. My eyes snapped open allowing the darkness and silence to pour in. For a long suspended second I struggled there, locked between dreams and reality. Then the sound that had woken me came again, and it was reality that elbowed its way to the fore.
Someone was moving about downstairs. Why on earth the dogs weren’t kicking up an unholy stink I had no idea. I was a light enough sleeper to have heard the driveway alarm, too – if it had gone off – which meant no one had tripped it.
For a moment my hopeful brain formed Jacob’s name and I got as far as opening my mouth to call out to him. Sense kicked in and I shut it again.
My eyes were adjusting to the gloom all the time. I’d left the curtains open and the moon threw a trickle of thin silver-grey light into the room. I swung my legs out of bed and carefully picked up the old-fashioned alarm clock from the bedside table, squinting at the luminous figures. It was a little after two-thirty in the morning. I suppressed a groan as I groped for my shirt and jeans.
My father had finally called just before midnight with the news that Clare was out of surgery and doing “as well as could be expected,” and I’d crawled into one of Jacob and Clare’s spare beds soon after.
I’d used the time before he’d rung to hunt for any sign of Jacob’s Irish contacts, as Sean had suggested, feeling like a thief as I’d systematically gone through Jacob’s desk and papers. I’d bunged the resulting half-dozen-name list down the fax to Sean’s office number. Now it was up to him.
Unless, of course, the stealthy intruder downstairs at this moment was indeed Jacob.
I padded on silent bare feet across the polished floorboards and slowly pulled open the bedroom door, praying it wouldn’t creak. At the end of the landing I could see the faint glow of a light on somewhere below. As I tiptoed towards the stairs I reached out and pick
ed up a copy of a bike magazine that was lying on a chest of drawers and took that with me.
I descended with controlled haste, keeping to the outside of the treads. As I went I rolled the magazine up into a tight baton with its thick spine to the outside.
In the hallway downstairs I halted, listening. Over to my left the grandfather clock against the kitchen wall ticked sonorously. Under the study door a thin band of light was showing and I could hear movement inside.
Suddenly, the door opened and a man walked out so quickly we nearly collided. I don’t know who was more shocked by the abruptness of the encounter but he let out a surprised yelp and took an instinctive swipe at my head.
I ducked under the clumsy blow and jabbed him in the Adam’s apple with the coiled end of the magazine. He staggered back, choking, hands up to his throat. I pivoted sideways and brought the rigid edge of the spine slashing up, hard, onto the inner bone of his right elbow, then jabbed again on the backstroke, this time to the collection of nerves centred in his solar plexus. If it had been a sword I was holding, I would have run him through.