stalling, so I had to fight my way farther up the food chain. Epps—the guy you just saw—let me just say you don’t get much higher without being voted into office.”
“So, he has the power to make all this … go away?” I said faintly. I scrubbed a tired hand over my face, but the image of Vondie’s crumpled body and Collingwood’s damaged spine was imprinted on my retinas. I glanced at my father. He and my mother were sitting thigh-to-thigh on the sofa to Sean’s left, not quite listening, but not quite oblivious to the conversation going on around them, either.
Parker nodded. “Once I laid it all out for Epps, he took immediate action. Guy at his level wants something done, it gets done. We were already in the air with a full HRT—Hostage Rescue Team,” he elaborated for Terry’s and my parents’ benefit, “when Sean’s messages came through.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw my father straighten, very slowly.
Sean must have seen it, too.
“You did what you had to, Richard,” he said, speaking fast. “We had no way of knowing how close Parker was when we went back in.”
“But if we’d only waited a little longer,” my father said, swallowing the bitterness that threatened to spill out over his words, “I wouldn’t have had to do any of it, wouldn’t you agree?”
“Twenty-twenty hindsight,” Sean said with quiet vehemence. “We didn’t know, and couldn’t afford to wait.”
My mother reached out and threaded her fingers through her husband’s. Her gaze was fixed on his face, which was still pale and shiny from the aftermath, anxious at his obvious distress. He glanced sideways at her and flinched away from the absolute trust he saw there, like it burned him.
Because he no longer trusted himself.
“I’ve always prided myself on being a rational man—one who doesn’t let my emotions rule me,” he said in that remote voice. “I know you sometimes find me cold, Charlotte. I am required by my profession to be clinical, but I have never considered myself to be without compassion.”
He broke off, swallowed again. “But I realize now that what I did back there … in that room, was utterly indefensible in human terms. I can offer no justification for it.”
“They would have killed her,” Terry said suddenly, conviction in her voice. “I think Collingwood would have killed all of us.”
“Perhaps,” my father said, dismissive, like maybe she was humoring him. “But he didn’t get the chance, so we’ll never know for certain.” He looked up, met my eyes and I saw the violent slur of emotions washing behind his own. “I honestly do not know how you live with yourself, Charlotte. Doing what you do. Knowing what you can do. Why do you think I worked so hard to save that man after we were ambushed in Boston—in spite of what he’d done? So my own daughter wouldn’t have another death on her hands, on her conscience.” He took a breath to shore up his voice enough to go on.
“But now I have to live with the fact that while I was in that room, torturing another human being, I had no doubts whatsoever about what I was doing. None. And I should have done, don’t you think?”
And with that, my cold, detached and rational father put his face in his hands and wept like a child.
A month after we got back from Texas, I sat alone in the lofty apartment in Manhattan, staring at a small white box on the coffee table in front of me. I’d faced loaded guns with less trepidation, but that small white box scared the shit out of me.
I’d gone ten blocks out of my way to visit a pharmacy I’d never been to before on the edge of Chinatown. I loitered at the back of the store until the checkout came free, so I could snatch up my purchase and rush it through, hardly breaking stride. Guilty as a teenage kid buying their first pack of condoms.
The irony of that comparison wasn’t lost on me. I’d already worked out that the only time Sean and I had been too careless—in too much of an all-fired hurry—to think about such basic precautions, had been that time in the hotel in Boston. That one time. But sometimes, I knew, one time was all it took.
I knew I’d been putting off finding out for certain if Vondie had been lying when she’d read out the results of that allencompassing blood test with such sly conviction. That’s the secret of a good interrogator, after all, to inject a writhing, squirming sense of self-doubt into the subject. To catch you off balance and batter you down, and to strike while the soft skin over the jugular is exposed.
She’d stripped away my bravery down to bone-level fear and I’d responded in the only way I knew. I’d killed her.
So, what kind of mother would I make?
I thought of my own parents and, somehow, knowing they’d been in the room next to ours, had heard with mortifying clarity what might turn out to have been the conception of their grandchild, made it all the worse.
Surprisingly, perhaps, I’d been in regular contact with my mother since I’d got back. She seemed to have emerged from the events of the previous month with a kind of serene calm, rediscovering an inner core to herself that had been long buried.
“I just feel lucky to be alive,” she told me frankly, during one of the chatty transatlantic calls I’d grown, strangely, to enjoy. “It’s so easy to waste the time we have, don’t you think?”
I wished my father had responded with the same composure but, as my mother had come out into the light, so he’d withdrawn, like the little figures on an ornamental clock. He’d taken a leave of absence from his surgical work at home, my mother told me, was considering early retirement. I didn’t get my father’s take on it directly. He never seemed available to come to the phone.
The mysterious Mr. Epps, meanwhile—true to his word—had done some considerable cleaning up on our behalf. In return for complete silence on the subject of the whole Storax affair and Collingwood’s involvement in it, Epps had seen to it that Vondie’s death, and what had been done to Collingwood, was swept under the carpet. My only thought was that it must be one huge carpet—with a bloody big lump in the middle of it.
Collingwood, so I was told, had suffered a partial paralysis of his right leg, and other areas of impaired function. I didn’t inquire as to the details. It was not quite enough to put him in a wheelchair, as my father had so eloquently outlined, but it did mean he had to rely heavily on a cane to take the daily half hour of exercise that was all his current incarceration allowed. I doubt I’ll ever know if my father spared him the full cut by chance or choice, but I’m inclined towards the latter.
Epps magicked away the charges arising from my father’s enforced visit to the brothel in Bushwick. The Boston hospital suddenly clammed up on the subject of Jeremy Lee’s accelerated demise. We were not even questioned over the shooting of Don Kaminski during the roadside ambush Vondie had organized just outside Norwood. But, on the downside, Miranda Lee’s death remained officially a suicide.
Storax announced a delay in the launch of their new treatment for osteoporosis. Manufacturing inconsistencies were cited as the main reason.
There wasn’t much even Epps could do about the news reports that had already gone out regarding my father, or the opinions that had been formed from his own damning statement on TV, which I’d seen at the gym with Nick that day. It seemed a long time ago. But without any ongoing charges to propel the story forwards, it was already old news.
Now, too restless to sit, I jumped up, stuffed my hands into my trouser pockets and paced to the window.
It was edging towards November, early evening. A wet day, where a sneaky wind had surfed between the skyscrapers to tug at hats and umbrellas down at street level. It had driven the rain down the back of my bike jacket and penetrated the fingers of my gloves as I’d ridden the Buell home through traffic. And I hadn’t cared.
I loved my job. More than that, it fitted me, gave me a unique sense of place, of belonging. I didn’t have to explain to these people who I was, or excuse what I could do. They already knew and they accepted me in spite or maybe because of it.
I thought back to the conversation I’d had with Madeleine when Sean and I had gone to Cheshire to retrieve my mother, and I realized that I could finally tell her yes, at last, I had the respect for which I’d been searching.
