lukewarm water, which was now a grubby pink color and had disgusting mushy clumps of tissue floating in it. For a moment he stood there, watching my efforts, then he reached into his jacket to pull out his gold-framed glasses.
“Sit down, Charlotte,” he said with quiet authority, and snapped open the first-aid kit.
For once, I didn’t put up a fight. Pointless to cobble something together myself when there was an expert on tap. I sank onto the closed lid of the toilet and let him empty the sink in order to wash his hands.
“I’m assuming you didn’t hit your head?” he said when he was done, tipping my chin up to watch the way my pupils reacted to the strong overhead spots.
“I’m not concussed and there’s nothing broken,” I said, twisting my face out of his grasp. “Trust me, I know what broken bones feel like.”
“Yes,” he murmured. “So you do.”
“Where’s Sean?” I asked, trying not to sound too hopeful.
“He and Mr. Armstrong are giving statements,” my father said shortly. “The police want your side of it, naturally, but Meyer’s stalling them until you feel up to it.”
I pulled a wry face. Sean was very good at keeping the unwanted at bay. “Are they really willing to wait that long?”
He picked a handful of sterile wipes out of the kit, tore them open and began cleaning my left palm.
“The man driving the cab,” he said, almost conversational as he worked. “I think I recognized him.”
I looked up sharply from what he was doing to my hand but his face, bent close to mine, was a picture of closed concentration.
“Who was he?”
“I don’t know his name, of course,” my father said. “But I believe he may have been the one who drove me across the river to Brooklyn. I hadn’t seen him before that. It was always the other chap who called or visited—the one with the shortback-and-sides.”
He straightened, ripped open another packet. This one contained a pair of tweezers, which he used to pinch a sliver of glass out of my flesh. Probably from the front screen—I’d certainly hit it hard enough.
“I see,” I said. “So, they’ve tried to discredit you and blackmail you, and, now that’s failed, they’re just settling for a spot of good old-fashioned murder. Nice people you’re mixing with.”
He dug the tweezers in again and I flinched, letting my breath out on a hiss. Just when I thought he’d done it simply for badness, he emerged with a second chunk of glass, which he dropped into the stainless-steel waste bin. It was big enough to bounce when it hit the bottom.
“You do realize that he was there, don’t you?” he said suddenly. “In the hotel, the morning you came to see me and brought me that bottle of rather expensive whisky.” He smoothed his thumbs over my palm, searching for any residual splinters. There weren’t any.
“Buzz-cut?” I said, and even as I asked I remembered the tightly closed door to the bedroom in my father’s shabby little suite. No wonder Buzz-cut had looked at me twice when I’d pulled up outside the hotel the next morning.
My father glanced up at me for a moment, frowning before he got the reference. “Hm” was all he said.
He put my left hand down and picked up the right. I’d sliced into the heel of my thumb, small but deep, and the cut was dirty but the damage was generally less widespread. In fact, my knee was shouting loudest. I ignored it.
“Is that why you told me I was a cripple?” I asked without rancor.
He cleansed the cut and applied the self-adhesive closure strips. His hands were cool, dry and confident.
“I was under the strictest instructions—I’m quite sure you don’t need me to go into details. It was impressed upon me that I was not to counter any attempts made to discredit me. Nor,” he added grimly, “was I to elicit any help or assistance from anyone. Any offers were to be firmly … rebuffed, or the consequences would be severe. They were most definite about that.”
“So you chose brutality to get your message across.”
My father finished a fast cleanup of my elbow, which had come off best in the injury stakes, and put the tweezers down roughly, almost slamming them. He touched a finger to his discolored cheekbone. “It seemed a method you would best understand,” he said, almost haughty. But underneath that veneer of pride I caught just a glimpse of genuine sorrow. I recalled my own bitter, angry words, hurled without thought to the wounds they would inflict, only aware of the desire to cause him as much pain as he had caused me.
And I had, I realized, by so readily believing the things I’d heard about him were true. Just as I’d been left stripped and wasted by his lack of belief in me, all that time ago.
“Besides,” he went on, remorseless, “I knew if I wasn’t hard enough on you, you would be too stubborn to give up.” He allowed a glint of bleak humor to break through as he bent to examine my knee. “As it was, I think I was convincing, don’t you?”
I forced my mind to concentrate on what he was saying, rather than on what he was doing. The grit seemed to have gone a long way into my knee, and the patella itself felt strangely disconnected. All that work to rid myself of my limp, and now I’d gone and got myself another. And in that distracted moment, I finally understood.
“You weren’t simply rebuffing me,” I murmured as the thought coalesced.
“You’re going to need to take some painkillers for a few days, Charlotte,” he said. “Please don’t be stubborn about it.”
“I’ve got some … something in my bag I can take,” I said, dismissive, suddenly wary of telling him what. My left leg had settled into a sullen throb along most of its length, burning brightest around my knee. “You weren’t just rebuffing me, were you?” I repeated. “You were trying to make me seem too weak to be a threat to them. You were trying to protect me.”
He paused, frowning slightly again. Then he was tearing open more wipes, leaving the packets scattered across the marble surface next to the sink. He was used, I recognized, to having a team to clear up after him.
“Yes,” he said at last, cautiously. “Yes, I suppose I was.”
“Why?”
His eyes flicked to mine in silent censure. “In case it escaped your notice, Charlotte, I’m your father.” He sprayed me with a coat of sealant dressing and straightened, nodding to signify he was done. “It’s what fathers do.”
And I realized then that, despite my earlier jealousy, whenever I’d called on him in the past, he’d come. He might not have agreed with my actions. In some cases he might not even have fully supported them, but he’d come nevertheless.
I stood, trying not to stagger as I put weight through my left leg, testing the knee to make sure it wasn’t going to fold on me.
“You know you can’t leave this here, don’t you?” I said. “Not now.”
My father looked up from scrubbing his hands, met my eyes in the mirror for a moment. Then he was back to his brisk rubbing.
“I was prepared to,” he said remotely, “but clearly
“So, are you going to tell the police the whole story?”
He had been drying his hands, and that halted him for a few long moments while he gave it due consideration. “What good will it do?” he said, sounding weary. “Do you honestly think they’ll give due credence to anything I have to say?”
I opened my mouth to respond but got no further. There was another knock on the door and Sean put his head round without waiting for an invitation. His eyes slid darkly from me to my father, who turned away, throwing the last paper towel into the waste bin and straightening his shirt cuffs.
“You okay?” Sean asked.
“I’ll live,” I said.
He advanced and folded my new clothing onto the counter next to the sink—a spare suit and shirt, still in their drycleaning bags. It was a rule of Parker’s that everyone kept a decent change of clothes at the office, just in
