multiple kidnapper.’
I gave him a long level stare while he pretended to be absorbed in negotiating traffic. ‘Either I’m supposed to be protecting Dina or playing detective,’ I said mildly. ‘Which is it, Parker?’
‘The two objectives are not mutually exclusive.’ He allowed himself a fractional smile. ‘You may think you hide it well, but lack of exercise is sending you as stir-crazy as that horse of Dina’s.’
I paused a beat, then said, ‘Even if I do go with her to this regatta thing she mentioned, I’ve no authority to question these other kids. They may still be traumatised, not want to talk about what they’ve been through.’
Every kidnap victim reacted differently, but all too often there was guilt at the sacrifices made by the family, resentment at their own helplessness, and an overwhelming general sense of fear at going out and doing normal things again. Feelings that could last for weeks or even years after the event. Some former hostages never fully recovered.
‘Sure,’ Parker said, and there was satisfaction in his dry tone. He had me hooked, and he knew it. ‘And that’s why they’re all turning out for a birthday party aboard a million-dollar yacht, huh?’
I opened my mouth and shut it again, acknowledging defeat. ‘Good point. Well made.’
‘I thought so.’ He smiled out loud then, creasing the corners of his eyes and taking years off his face, and added casually, ‘Mrs Willner wants you on duty first thing tomorrow morning.’
‘Fine,’ I said. ‘I had nothing else planned.’
‘You were organising logistics for Paraguay …?’
‘All in hand. I emailed my report to Bill Rendelson before we left this morning.’
‘That was fast work.’
‘Ah well, I try constantly to disappoint Bill with my unexpected efficiency.’ It was better than admitting I didn’t sleep much these days, either.
Parker sighed. ‘You don’t have anything to prove, Charlie,’ he said quietly. ‘If anyone ever thought you were just along for the ride, they kinda revised that opinion a long time ago.’
‘Even Bill?’
‘Even Bill,’ he agreed gravely.
Bill Rendelson ran Parker’s office with an iron fist inside an equally iron glove. Invalided out of active duty after the loss of his arm, his only pleasure now, it seemed, was in dissatisfaction with the rest of the staff – and me in particular. I’d only seen one brief flash of humanity from him, gone so fast it might have been a trick of the light, never to be repeated since.
But if I’d been about to comment, it was cut short by Parker’s cellphone ringing from its hands-free cradle on the dashboard. He had, of course, switched it off while we were at the Willners’ and the calls began to pile in now.
He talked on the phone almost constantly for the remainder of the journey onto Manhattan Island, swapping easily from one subject to another, going over itineraries without pause for thought or recollection, smooth, unflustered and professional. An ideal boss.
He’d proved an ideal friend, too, over the past three months, when the shock and pain and all-consuming sense of loss had sometimes threatened to overwhelm me. Sean was, as Parker had once pointed out, my soulmate.
I expected Parker to go directly to the office in midtown, but to my surprise he continued north, eventually pulling up outside the front entrance of my apartment building on the Upper East Side.
Strictly speaking, the building was Parker’s – or some wealthy relative of his at any rate. It was in a prime location and should have been financially way out of reach, but the heavily subsidised rent had been another of the incentives that lured Sean and me to New York in the first place.
As I reached for the door handle, Parker put his hand up suddenly and I stayed put, waiting for him to tie up the last call. The Navigator sat idling by the kerb, sporadic traffic passed, the sun came and went behind high cloud. An elderly lady, wearing a huge amount of make-up and swaddled in furs, tottered by dragging a small shivering hairless dog by its diamante-studded collar and lead. She was a regular fixture of the neighbourhood and I’d never seen her without the fur – or the dog with any – even in the height of summer. Life with all its oddities, staying the same and moving on.
After no more than a minute or so, Parker hit the End button and removed his sunglasses.
‘Sorry about that,’ he said. ‘Look, Charlie, I want you to keep in close contact on this one. If you need help, call me – day or night – OK?’
‘O … K,’ I said slowly. ‘What are you not telling me?’
He shrugged. ‘You know as much as I do.’
‘So why the fuss?’
‘I’m worried about how you’re holding up, that’s all,’ he said at last. He put his hand on my arm, lightly, saw my surprise and lifted it away again. ‘You’re looking tired, Charlie. You should get some rest.’
‘I will – later,’ I said. I opened the door and climbed out, glanced back to find him still watching me, narrow- eyed. ‘After I’ve been to see Sean.’
He smiled briefly, put the car into gear and drove away, and as I watched him go I wondered what he’d
CHAPTER FIVE
When I walked into Sean’s room, he was lying on his right side in the bed, with his back to the doorway.
‘Hi, it’s me,’ I said softly. ‘I brought you coffee.’
He didn’t respond. It was warm in there and the sheet was rumpled around his waist. Above it, I could see the steady rise and fall of his ribcage as he breathed, the bones forming a series of ridges under the skin like sand along the tideline.
He was thinner than he’d been at Christmas, the visible shoulder angular and pointed where once it had been as sleekly clad in muscle as Dina’s white horse. Just as graceful, and just as dangerous to underestimate.
I stood in the doorway for a moment, gripping the frame and uttering the usual silent prayers. That this time it would be different.
It wasn’t.
Carefully, as if afraid of waking him, I moved round to the other side of the bed. He had always been a light sleeper, almost catlike in his reflexes, but his face was soft in total relaxation. I reached out a hand, hesitant, and stroked the pale skin of his upper arm. Under my fingertips, I felt a little quiver of response and I watched his face minutely, as I always did. His eyelids, with their ridiculously long dark lashes, remained resolutely closed, as I had known they would. But, inside my own chest, something twisted.
Sean’s coma had lasted since his near-fatal gunshot injury in California, a hundred days ago. After the shooting, he’d been airlifted to the Los Angeles County/USC Medical Center. The surgical team there had spent seven painstaking hours removing the shattered fragments of skull from his brain and repairing the damage caused by the path of the single 9 mm round. It had been a glancing blow rather than full penetration, but that had been enough.
In the several weeks that followed, it was to LA that Sean’s mother had briefly flown to weep with quiet dignity by his bedside. A calm, sad woman who’d known her share of grief, she’d talked of Sean in the past tense as if he were already lost to her.
My own parents offered to make the trip but I’d refused – to, I suspect, their secret relief as well as my own. My father might have retired from his own speciality as a consultant orthopaedic surgeon, but he would have cut to the heart of the medical jargon with a little too much clinical precision for me to stomach back then.
The doctors had been initially dubious that Sean would survive at all, but he’d defied their gloomiest prognoses. He’d responded well after surgery, to the point where they were able to remove him from the ventilator and allow him to breathe unaided. Sometimes he reacted to touch, moving under my fingers, and sometimes to speech, turning his head towards the sound of my voice.
But he didn’t wake up.
The fact that the guy who’d shot him had been caught – that
As soon as Sean was stable enough to travel, Parker had chartered a private flight and brought him back to
