Her skill so far had told me she was trained but was not a fighter by nature. And she clearly didn’t spar with anyone who was willing to mess up those elegant features. I snapped my head forwards to butt her full in the middle of her long slim nose with my forehead, hearing the solid crunching tear of cartilage right before the scream.
I reared back. My mother had shrunk into her chair, terrified into silence by the sudden eruption of violence around her. It was only when she saw the blood start to squirt that she’d let rip.
Blondie tried to boot me in the stomach but I was close enough to downgrade the blow into a shove. Even so, I cannoned back into the arm of my mother’s chair. As I sprawled over it, the abandoned knitting loomed large in my field of vision. I grabbed for one of the needles and yanked it straight out of the web of wool that anchored it.
When Blondie tried to launch another venomous kick—towards my head this time—I stabbed the twelve-inch needle straight through the fleshy part of her right thigh with enough force to penetrate the muscle completely and tent—but not break—the skin on the other side.
She collapsed back onto the sofa, yelping in her distress. I glanced at Sean. He’d got Don on his knees with his face jammed hard up against the wall by the doorway. He had the big man’s feet crossed at the ankles and fingers linked on top of his head. Sean’s hand almost disappeared into the folds of flesh at the back of his captive’s neck with the force he was using to keep him there.
He nodded to me. I nodded back.
“I’m guessing the polo was pushing it too far, huh?”
I managed a rusty half smile. Blondie was still rolling around on the sofa, trying to evade the pain. She certainly knew a lot of very innovative swearwords for someone so well-bred but, other than invective, she was out of fight. The shock of the unexpected blow to the face had more to do with it than the severity of either injury, in my opinion.
Her nervous system had certainly prioritized the broken nose over the hole through her leg. I’d managed to split the skin of the bridge as well as damage the underlying structure. Hardly surprising that my forehead felt like I’d a lump the size of a golf ball on it. Blondie needed her nose packed and set and probably glued back together as well, but it wasn’t life-threatening. She could damn well wait.
Meanwhile, I wasn’t going to leave her with a weapon, albeit an embedded one. I leaned down and, before she could protest, yanked the needle back out of her flesh with deliberate carelessness. That seemed to bring the leg wound back to prominence again. I felt the ache in my own thigh and was aloof to her pain.
I glanced over at my mother. She was quiet now, but with that dangerously calm demeanor that usually denotes a part of the brain is refusing to accept the input offered to it and has temporarily closed for repair.
Very slowly, she got to her feet, her movements jerky and stiff.
“Actually, I think a cup of tea might be a very good idea, Charlotte,” she said, her voice rather reedy. “Don’t you?”
“For heaven’s sake, Mother—” I began, but Sean caught my eye and gave a tiny shake of his head.
I took a breath. “Yes, please,” I said meekly. “That would be lovely.”
She headed for the kitchen, carefully stepping over Don’s feet almost without seeming to register the nature of the obstruction. At the doorway she paused, turned back, and her eyes swept slowly over the alien tableau that had just been acted out in her drawing room, as if seeing it for the first time.
“I’ll bring a tea towel and some ice for that nose,” she murmured vaguely. “Try not to make too much of a mess on the sofa.”
Her eyes focused on me, on the bloodied knitting needle drooping from my left hand.
“I do wish you hadn’t done that, Charlotte,” she went on, a little pained note in her voice. “It was a rather complicated pattern and you’ve made me drop all my stitches.”
“They arrived five days ago,” my mother said. “Introduced themselves as colleagues of your father, from America. Said that he’d issued an open invitation to look us up whenever they were in England. I—I had no real reason to doubt them. From the things they said, they clearly knew Richard, and they seemed very pleasant … at first.”
She took a deep breath that wavered on the way out, and sipped a mouthful of tea from a delicate Spode cup. It rattled slightly when she put it back onto its saucer and she frowned at it, as though the cup had shaken of its own volition.
“When did you realize they were … serious?” I asked.
We were at the long table in the kitchen, sitting across the corner from each other, so I was close but she didn’t feel I was staring right at her, accusing her. Like this was some kind of interrogation.
Sean had found a roll of duct tape in the back of the Shogun. I’d helped him drag my mother’s unwanted houseguests out to the garage and left him to deal with them. I didn’t ask what he intended to do and, if I’m honest, I didn’t much care. I was too busy trying not to concentrate on the throbbing in my left leg, or how easily I could assuage that ache with one of the painkillers I’d wanted ever since we’d got off the flight.
Instead, following Sean’s silent prompting, I’d sat at the table and let my mother go through the ritual of making tea, spooning loose leaves into a warmed pot, adding water right on the boil, letting it brew, and then filtering it through a strainer into cups so translucently fragile that you had to pour the milk in first or they’d shatter. By the time she’d stopped fussing she seemed more settled, but it proved a transient state.
“More or less as soon as they’d finished their first cup of tea,” she said in answer to the last question, looking fretful again. “I should never have let them into the house, but you just don’t expect …”
“They’re professionals,” I said dryly. “I’m not surprised you didn’t clock them.”
She tried for a smile but couldn’t summon the will required for it to stand up by itself. As soon as she let go, it fell over. “As a JP who’s heard I forget how many cases of fake Gas Board inspectors conning their way into old ladies’ houses and rifling their handbags, I feel very foolish to have been taken in by them,” she admitted, “however briefly.”
“I would say you’ve coped extremely well for a hostage,” I said, taking a sip from my own cup. I don’t know if it was the pot or the china, but it tasted perfect. Unless it’s over ice and awash with slices of lemon, the Americans just can’t do tea. A bag on a string dunked into a cup of lukewarm milky water. I’d given up drinking the stuff.
“I didn’t want them to see how afraid I was, so I tried to ignore them as best I could,” she said in a small, austere voice, gesturing to her hair and clothes. “Not let them get to me. Carry on as though nothing was happening. I suppose you find that rather silly.”
“Not at all.” I shook my head. “Most people would have totally fallen apart. Trust me—I’ve watched it happen.”
She stared at me for a moment with a slightly puzzled expression on her face, and I realized with a sense of guilt that I couldn’t remember the last time I’d offered her praise for anything.
But that one, I reminded myself, was very much a two-way street.
I swallowed and asked with great care, “Did they … hurt you?”
She gave me a quick glance, but her gaze wouldn’t latch with mine and went sliding off past my shoulder. “Not as such,” she said, evasive. “But the chap—Don—made it painfully clear what he was prepared to do if I wasn’t ‘a good girl,’ as he put it.”
Her gaze skated round the kitchen walls and finally dropped into my cup, which was three-quarters empty. Relieved by the excuse, she jumped up and stretched for the teapot from beneath its cosy in the middle of the table. I tried not to let my impatience show while she did what she needed to in order to settle. And to come to a decision about how much of it she was willing to let out into the open.
“He seemed to have some particular perversions of a sexual nature that revolved around older women,” she said at last, prim but all in a rush, sitting ramrod-straight on the hard-backed chair. “He spent some time expounding on the subject, about what he—” She broke off, pressed a shaky hand to her mouth as though just to speak of it made her physically sick. I started to reach for her, instinctively, but she waved me off.
