Second Shot

I’d been right about the bear’s ominous demeanor. Ella had been so unsettled by its presence that, after the first night, she’d refused to sleep in the same room. Now she was sharing with Simone, which meant the bear was rooming with me. I’d privately named him Hannibal and already decided that he was spending the night in the closet so I wouldn’t wake up and find him looming over me.

Sean listened to my brief report on the situation without interruption, then said, “I can see why you’re not happy, but Simone is the client. Unless there’s a direct threat you can’t insist she pulls out of there, and a dodgy sense of humor doesn’t really count. Just watch for signs of that temper, though.”

“I will. I just don’t think Simone’s asking nearly enough questions about this guy, and she doesn’t like it when I try and get straight answers out of him,” I said. “There’s something that doesn’t quite ring true about him for me. And we still don’t really know how he managed to find us in Boston.”

“Mm, that is a bit of a worrying one, I admit. I’ll check with the hotel, but I’d be very surprised if they’d given out any information. Madeleine stressed the need for discretion when she booked with them.”

“Have you managed to find out anything more about him?”

“Just that he had a mean streak and he liked to fight-on or off the battlefield. I get the feeling there’s a lot more they’re not saying about that, but I’ll keep digging.”

“If he was a brawler, he was either very good or very lucky,” I said, “because he’s picked up very little by way of scarring and if his nose was ever broken, he’s had it very well fixed.”

“That’s not so unusual these days,” Sean said. “Just as many men go in for cosmetic surgery as women.”

“Maybe,” I said. “But a photo would be good, so we’ve got visual confirmation that he is who we think he is, at least. I think this new phone’s got picture messaging, hasn’t it?” I’d been slow to catch on to the technological age, but I suppose I was making up for lost time now.

“I’ll see what I can do. In the meantime, you need to push Simone to ask more awkward questions about her father, see how he reacts. What do you make of the new wife?”

I shrugged. “She seems OK,” I said, cautious. “Businesslike and no-nonsense, though. If you don’t dig your heels in she rides right on over you.”

She’d tried it with me over the matter of which room I was due to sleep in. After the initial awkwardness of the introductions, Rosalind Lucas quickly regained her composure. Lucas might have been the army man, but his second wife had command of the home and he seemed happy to leave the domestic decisions to her in the same way officers casually deferred to their NCOs in the matter of day-to-day logistics. Rosalind gave us a tour of the house with brisk efficiency, automatically assuming that we’d fall in with her arrangements.

The house had four bedrooms in total, which would have worked out fine apart from the fact that three of them, including the master suite, were on the upper floor, and the fourth was in the basement.

Fitted-out basements are not a common thing in the UK. The only things that are normally kept in the cellar-apart from wine — are old tins of paint, mildew, and an inordinate number of spiders. In the Lucases’ case “basement” was a bit of a misnomer. The guest suite had its own windows to the outside, courtesy of the fact that at the rear of the house the land dropped down towards the ski slope a hundred meters or so away through the trees.

The whole of the lower floor was luxuriously appointed, with a fully equipped exercise room, a home cinema, and several locked doorways to rooms that were just described as “storage.” I eyed the heavy-duty padlocks and assumed that was where Lucas kept his gun collection. If Si-mone came to the same conclusion, she didn’t mention it.

Rosalind had put Simone and Ella in the two spare rooms upstairs, leaving me in the dungeon, and looked very put out when I objected, ostensibly on the grounds that I ought to be nearer Ella, just in case she woke in the night.

“But surely… is that likely?” Rosalind had asked, looking baffled. She’d glanced across to where Ella had been sitting on the sofa alongside the man who claimed to be her grandfather, proudly showing him the motheaten Eeyore and, from the slightly bemused look on his face, giving him the stuffed animal’s life history and quirks of character.

Simone had hesitated, not wanting to be awkward with her hosts, but then she saw the way my eyebrows had come down meaningfully.

“Well, it is Charlie’s job,” she said then, with an apologetic smile. Rosalind had done her best to make friends with her stepdaughter, but I don’t think Simone would have been fighting my corner quite so hard if it had been Lucas himself who’d raised the query.