CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT
‘I really think she would have done it.’ I glanced across at Sean. ‘That lady has a lot of spine. I’ve a sneaking suspicion you’d like her.’
Sean – lying on his back today with his head tilted slightly towards me on the hospital pillow – did not respond. He had lain without any movement at all throughout my report. I tried to tell myself that I had his full attention, the way he’d focused on me so absolutely in the past, but in truth I found his stillness unnerving. I leant across, stroked the back of his hand with a soft finger. Not a quiver.
The only reason Caroline Willner had not slotted Hunt Trevanion out there on the cross-country course was because of Dina. Bereft of the comforting embrace, the girl had lifted her head – just as her mother raised the gun and aimed it squarely at Hunt’s chest.
‘No!’ she’d cried, her voice raw from the screaming she’d done, I later discovered, when she woke from a pill-induced slumber and found herself in the middle of her own worst nightmare, just as the first shovelfuls of earth splattered down onto the lid of her coffin. ‘
Caroline Willner had paused, her hand already tightening around the grip and trigger, and glanced at her daughter.
‘Why not?’ she’d asked simply.
Dina had swallowed, her throat working convulsively. ‘Please … don’t let him do this to you,’ she said at last, cracked and pleading. ‘I’ll remember what’s happened to me here for the rest of my life. Don’t let him do the same to you.’
Caroline Willner had stared at her for what seemed like a long time, her features very controlled. Then she’d swivelled her gaze towards Hunt, examining him minutely as though he was something she’d found stuck to the bottom of her shoe.
I don’t know exactly what she saw there, but the fire went out of her. Her hand dropped slowly to her side, and I’d stepped in, taking the gun from her unresisting fingers, thumbing the safety back on.
She’d turned, studied me with eyes that were curious and just a little afraid. ‘How do you do it?’ she’d demanded, a tinge of bitter wonder in her voice. ‘How do you make killing seem so … easy?’
‘I told her it was all down to practice,’ I said now to Sean, a half smile twisting my lips. He would have appreciated the irony of it all, but he lay waxy quiet on the sheets, so pale beneath the dark fall of his hair that it was hard to tell where the linen ended and he began.
Caroline Willner, I recalled, had been much the same colour. Shortly after I’d retrieved Hunt’s gun from her, Parker had arrived with the GMC. He’d scanned the taut faces arrayed in front of him, and seemed neither dismayed nor relieved that the status quo remained unchanged. He’d loaded Dina and her mother into the pickup and driven them away, slow and careful, across the grass.
In the whirl of police and federal agents that followed, I hadn’t seen my principal again for twenty-four hours. When I did, she was lying in a hospital bed in a private room not dissimilar to this one.
Dina had been propped up on pillows, though, alert, as well as clean and rested, with a neat antiseptic dressing enclosing her foreshortened ear lobe. She was almost as pale as Sean, but looking into her eyes, I’d seen she had attained at least a surface measure of calm.
‘I’m so sorry, Charlie,’ she’d said, her voice a husky whisper. ‘I—’
‘Forget it,’ I’d told her. ‘There’s no need. Just … get over this. Don’t let him beat you. Live large.’ I’d watched the way her hands knotted nervously with the sheets, and said teasingly, ‘I assume your mother will ask Raleigh for the return of your horses?’
That had got a response. Dina gave a lukewarm smile that could easily have turned into a sob, shaken her head slightly, not meeting my eyes. ‘He’s already offered to give them back. And she’s been … wonderful.’
I’d sighed, pulled my chair a little closer to the bed and bent low enough that she was forced to look at me directly.
‘I’m going to give you some advice, Dina,’ I’d said. ‘You don’t have to take it, but you’re at least going to listen, OK?’
A flush of colour had lit across her cheeks, a confused mash of shame and anger and sadness and self-pity, but she nodded, just once.
‘Don’t waste this experience,’ I’d told her. ‘Never forget that your mother was prepared to kill for you. That is one hell of a declaration of love on her part. And it would have been so easy for you to let her, and then you would have been blaming each other for that wretched haul of guilt for the rest of your lives.’ I held her startled gaze. ‘But you didn’t force her to prove herself to you then. Don’t make her do it later, over and over. Get past this. Move on.’
She’d looked about to protest, but I’d seen something connect in her eyes. Maybe it was the realisation that here was an opportunity to go forwards into an adult-to-adult relationship with her mother, finally. As equals bound by courage in extreme circumstances, like soldiers.
Or maybe that was just wishful thinking on my part.
Whatever, she’d nodded a couple of times. There was a long pause that stretched into discomfort, so I’d asked, ‘How’s the ear?’
‘Sore.’ She’d managed a wavery smile. ‘Now’s my opportunity to become a famous painter, huh?’
I’d smiled back. ‘I think it’s been done, but you can always have cosmetic surgery.’
She gave a small shake of her head. ‘I know. Mother’s already suggested it, but …’ she shrugged diffidently, ‘… I’m kinda tempted to leave it as it is. As a reminder. Does that sound stupid?’
‘No,’ I said slowly.
‘And I guess I can always wear my hair over it, or a clip-on earring, hide it that way.’ Another pause, more of a hesitation this time. ‘Like you hide your scar – round your neck.’
‘You’ll find that hiding it matters less, as time goes on.’
She’d nodded gravely, then a flash of guilt had crossed her face and she’d asked in a small voice, ‘How’s Joe?’
‘As I told her – McGregor’s going to be off in rehab for about three months,’ I said to Sean. ‘So, we need you back. We’re short-staffed. Hell, I think Parker was even tempted to offer Gleason that job she was angling for. She’s a redhead, by the way, so maybe that explains his interest …’
My voice trailed off and I sat in silence for a while, just watching his face with utter concentration, praying to see some rapid movement of his eyes beneath the almost translucent lids.
There was nothing.
How did I tell him what had happened between Parker and me? What I’d felt could still happen. Did I tell him at all?
He would know, I realised, as soon as he saw us together, he’d know by the way we tried to put distance between us. He always had been able to read me like an open book. And what then?
Caroline Willner had known. When I’d left Dina’s hospital room that day, she’d been waiting for me in the corridor outside.
‘Thank you, Charlie,’ she said to me. As much for what I’d said, I realised, as what I’d done.
I shrugged. ‘It would have been better to stop her being taken in the first place,’ I said. ‘Then there wouldn’t have been the need to get her back.’
‘Not just for that, although I rather think I shall be in your debt for some time.’ She gave a slight smile. ‘And I think you’ll find that I always pay my debts.’
I had no ready answer to that one. People often sounded incredibly grateful in situations like these, but I’d learnt not to set too much store by it. The memory would fade.
She held out her hand. ‘Goodbye, Charlie,’ she said. She paused, as if working out whether it was her place to say what she had in mind, then plunged on anyway. ‘I realise the situation is awkward, with your young man in a coma, but I hope you and Mr Armstrong come to some kind of understanding between the two of you. I confess I thought you seemed remarkably well matched.’
Would she have said the same if she’d met Sean? I’d told him he would like her. Would the same be true in reverse?
By Sean’s head sat the open cup of coffee I always brought, its aroma gently wafting upwards and outwards,
