Second Shot

Lucas sighed and turned to his wife. “Rosalind, honey,” he said gently, “you better take them.”

“Greg, let me come with you,” she said, urgent. “I can help. I can be useful. We can still come out of this — ”

“I know,” Greg said, his voice soothing. He reached out a hesitant hand and stroked her pale cheek. “But it’s too late for all that now. All that matters is Ella.”

Rosalind’s face hardened and she stepped back out from under his touch in much the same way, I thought, that I must have done from Sean’s.

“Very well,” she said, almost snatching the keys out of Matt’s hands.

We stood, the three of us, and watched as Sean got behind the wheel of the Explorer. Neagley and Lucas climbed aboard, and they drove quickly away into the darkness and the softly falling snow. We none of us moved until the big Ford’s taillights had reached the end of the hotel car park and disappeared completely from view

Then Rosalind eyed the pair of us with much the same disfavor she’d shown towards me and Neagley earlier that day.

“Get in,” she said, jerking her head towards the Range Rover, still standing in the middle of the car park with its lights on and its doors open and nobody at home. If the plain resentment in her voice was anything to go by, I wasn’t the only one who was completely and utterly pissed off to be left behind.

Twenty-one

So, I don’t suppose you’d care to tell us the whole story now, would you?” I asked as we drove down the sloping driveway away from the White Mountain Hotel.

Rosalind paused as she reached a junction, pretending a preoccupation with checking for other cars when the darkness would have made it easy to spot them. She was a slow and cautious driver, and I didn’t think that was just down to the conditions.

“What ‘whole story’ is that?” she said, noncommittal.

“You’ve been married to the guy for fifteen years,” I said, “and you were an army brat. You’ve spent most of your life around soldiers. There’s no way Lucas could have kept up the pretense of being ex-SAS for long, Rosalind. Not in front of you.”

In the glow from the car’s instrument lighting I saw her suppress a small smile. A compliment’s a compliment, after all. I was sitting alongside her in the front, with Matt relegated to the rear seat.

“You’re right,” she said. “But I knew he wasn’t who he said he was, long before I married him.”

“So why did you?” It was Matt who asked the question, sounding baffled. “You loved him, right?”

“Love?” Rosalind almost scoffed. Then her voice turned bitter. “Do you have any idea how hard it is for a woman to be in the kind of business I’m in?” she demanded as she pulled away. “After my daddy died I couldn’t get anyone to deal with me on any account. We were going under and there were plenty of my daddy’s so-called friends who were just waiting for that to happen so they could step in and buy up the business for a rock-bottom price.”

We were driving past individually designed houses set close to the shoulder of the road, home lights spilling out brightly across the crystallized snow.

“So he was a figurehead,” I said, almost to myself. “Weren’t you worried someone else might spot him for a fake?”

She shrugged. “The British SAS has a certain reputation and I coached him some,” she said with just a hint of a sneer in her voice. ‘As long as he talked quiet, stared hard, and didn’t blink, people believed he was what he said he was.”

“And he was,” I agreed. “Or the real Lucas was, at any rate, if anyone cared enough to check the records. Speaking of which, did Greg ever tell you what happened to the real Lucas?”

We stopped at a junction and turned left, the road twisting through the trees looming over us, over a small flat bridge with steel barriers at either side.

“He was in the house alone, just Greg and Simone,” she said at last, her voice dull, almost monotone. It took me a moment to realize when she said “Greg” she wasn’t talking about the original.

“Simone was in her room. It was a tiny cottage somewhere in Scotland, he told me, a cheap rental, but they moved around a lot and they couldn’t afford to be fussy. Lucas was searching for them, threatening them, but they’d been there six months and heard nothing. They thought they might be safe. They weren’t.”

“He found them.”

She nodded, slowing again as we reached another junction, each one connecting to a larger road. This one had houses set back farther into the woods, with mailboxes lining the edges of the road.

“Greg said there was a phone call that afternoon, but when he answered there was nobody there, and he knew that they were going to have to run again, and the child was just starting nursery and she was old enough to be making friends and Pam had a job that she enjoyed. And he knew they couldn’t keep doing this forever.”

“So he killed him.”