Second Shot (38 page)

She kept us standing in the hallway while she moved farther into the lounge area, sweeping books off the coffee table and even the scatter cushions off the sofa before she motioned the pair of us to sit there. Not giving us anything we could throw, however lightweight, to distract her.

“What now?” Matt asked, trying to control the waver in his voice and not quite succeeding.

“We wait,” Rosalind said. She sat in one of the chairs opposite and pulled the mobile phone out of her coat pocket again. She keyed in a different number rather than hitting redial, her eyes flicking to her wrist-watch before she put the phone up to her ear.

“It’s me,” she said when the call was answered. “How’s our little guest behaving?”

Reynolds.

I felt Matt stiffen alongside me, felt him draw breath and hold it, trying to hear what was being said even though he knew he didn’t stand a chance.

“Good, let’s hope she stays that way,” Rosalind said now, giving the pair of us a cold straight look.

There was another burst of speech that might have been agitated, or it might just have been the quality of the speaker in the handset.

“Not much longer,” Rosalind said in reply, soothing. “Listen, I may need you to arrange another nice little auto accident for me—Charlie and the child’s father.” A smile. “Yes, I thought you might. By all means make it look that way I’ll bring them down to you shortly. Who?” The smile widened. “Oh, I’ve sent Sean Meyer and Greg off on a wild-goose chase. Divide and conquer. They won’t be any trouble.” The smile blinked out. “When
Tm
ready. Just you be ready to move the child. I’ve offered her to Felix Vaughan. Oh, you’ll still get paid. Don’t worry about that. Just make sure she’s ready to go in an hour.” And she ended the call. Clearly not one for long good-byes, Rosalind.

“Where is she?” The question fought its way past Matt’s clenched teeth, as though he’d been trying to force himself not to beg.

“Somewhere safe, nearby,” Rosalind said, putting the phone away, giving him a look that clearly said he wasn’t going to get any more than that out of her.

“I assume from that,” I said, “that you and the charming Mr. Reynolds were behind Barry O’Halloran’s crash.”

She nodded.

Frances Neagley would be relieved to find out the truth behind her partner’s death, I thought. If only I could be sure I was going to live long enough to tell her the news.

“What happened, Rosalind? You decided to get rid of him and then you found out about the money, was that it?”

“Something like that,” she agreed. “I thought it was too risky for Greg to meet with her, but I let him talk me into it—of course, I didn’t realize at the time why he was so keen on that.” She shook her head, almost crossly. “I wanted just to let Reynolds get in there and snatch the child from the start, keep us out of it, but Greg hightailed it down to Boston with his tongue hanging out. Couldn’t wait to bring her back up here and parade her in front of me.” She let her breath out fast, annoyed. “Maybe it would have been simpler all round if I’d gotten Reynolds to arrange an accident for Greg instead.”

“Very probably,” I said. I paused and only kept my voice neutral by sheer force of will. “You’re very patient, keeping Reynolds on when he bungled Ella’s kidnap first in Boston, and then again at the house. Must have been quite a shock for you when I caught him.”

“I told him to make sure he took care of you first,” she said, shaking her head. “He was lucky I managed to help him get loose while you were downstairs. Good thing Greg
isn’t
a soldier, or we’d never have gotten away with it right under his nose like that.” She allowed herself a small smile. “Reynolds sure wasn’t happy, though. You made yourself quite an enemy there.”

I matched my tone to hers and there was no warmth in any of it. “If Reynolds has something special planned for us, it’s going to be hard to make it look like just another accident.”

“Oh, you’d be amazed what can be covered up by a good strong fire,” she said.

“Sean will know.”

She smiled with every indication of amusement. “What makes you think he won’t be dead by then, too?”

A
n hour goes by very slowly when you have nothing to do but sit and listen to every second of it pass and wait for an opportunity that never comes. I tried to tell myself that there would be a better chance, somewhere along the line, but that didn’t help Sean and Neagley now, on their way to Vaughan’s place out towards Bretton Woods. And it didn’t help Ella.

Rosalind was not a nervous waiter. She sat without impatience, without signs of anxiety, without apparent fatigue. She sat and watched us and kept the gun pointed in our direction firmly enough that there was no window.

Matt disintegrated visibly as time wore on. Somewhere around the thirty-minute mark he began to weep, quietly, into his hands. Whether for himself or his daughter I didn’t ask, but I’d prefer to think his tears were for Ella.

“What will you do with your husband?” I asked Rosalind. “Providing, of course, that Vaughan doesn’t kill him for you.”

She shrugged. “The truth about him is bound to come out now, one way or another,” she said. “If he had stayed away from Simone, well, who knows? But I assume you have people in England who’ve been digging out your information for you and I can’t silence them all.” Another shrug, indifferent. “He’s brought this on himself”

I nodded. “So now his usefulness is over.” I glanced at her impassive face. “You would have been happier, wouldn’t you, if I’d shot him that night in the forest?”

“Yes,” she said without hesitation. “And you were so close, Charlie. So
close.
I saw what you could do on the range that day and I couldn’t

believe it when you didn’t take the shot.” Her lips twisted. “Very disappointing. I really thought you had it in you.”

“I wasn’t about to blow anyone’s brains out when he was so close to a child,” I said sharply. “She-”

And my voice deserted me as my brain stopped driving it, suddenly entirely diverted onto another track like it had swerved off a highway and gone crashing into an ice-cold river. My eyes flew to Rosalind’s and her smile widened.

“Well, well,” she murmured. “You finally got it. I was beginning to think I was going to have to come right out and say it.”

“It was you who shot me,” I whispered.

“That’s right,” she said, pride overlapping. “Must have been at least forty yards, in poor light, moving target. One heck of a piece of shooting, even if I do say so myself.”

“Not particularly,” I said. “After all, I’m not dead yet.”

Her satisfaction dimmed. “As good as,” she said, gesturing with the barrel of the Beretta. “Look at you, Charlie, all crocked up. What use are you to anyone? Didn’t the British Army teach you that old rule about it being better to wound an enemy soldier than to kill him?”

“Yes they did,” I said, remembering Sean telling me much the same thing as we left the hospital. My reply to him still stood.
That only applies if the soldier cant fight, Rosalind. Give me half a chance and then see what I can still manage. .
..

Matt had raised his blotchy face from his hands, confused. “But they said Simone shot you,” he said unsteadily, his eyes streaked with red. “That’s why the police killed her. She shot you.” His insistence was almost childlike.
Say itisntso.

I shook my head, gently “Rosalind did it,” I said. I turned back to her. “How did you fool the ballistics people? The police told me the gun they found with Simone was a match.”

“She dropped it in the snow and they didn’t find it right away—what with the EMTs scrambling around working on you,” she said. “Did you know your heart stopped at the scene, by the way?”

I shook my head again. “No, I didn’t.” I gave her a tight little smile. “I suppose then, technically, you did kill me.”

She pulled a face. “So anyway, what with all the confusion, it wasn’t hard to get the gun I’d been using into Simone’s hand. All it needed was for you not to make it, and the whole thing would have been neat and tidy But, they called in the LifeFlight helicopter and flew you over to Lewiston and damn me if they didn’t put you back together again.”

I was silent. I thought of the shadowy figure I’d registered watching me as I lay bleeding into the bottom of that ditch, and of the doctor with the perfect smile. I thought of Simone, bursting through the trees with the wild look in her eyes and the gun held rigid out in front of her—of how it had looked and how it was. And I thought of Ella’s terrified face when I’d been moments from killing her grandfather and, at some level, she’d known what I was contemplating.

Is that why you hurt Charlie?
she’d asked when Neagley and I had gone back to see Rosalind. I’d thought Ella meant the slap in the face, but she must have seen who was behind me….

And finally, I remembered Reynolds’s words that day right here in this very room. I
wonder what will happen,
he’d said,
if I put another round through your leg in just the same place as the last..
..

At the time I’d had too many other things on my mind for that last piece of information to penetrate. How could he have known the details of exactly how I was shot, unless someone had told him? Someone who’d been there at the time and seen it happen.

When I looked up again I found Rosalind checking her watch. She got to her feet, smoothing down her clothes. As businesslike and no-nonsense as she’d been since our first meeting.

“OK,” she said. “Time’s up. Let’s go.”

I’d stiffened with sitting for so long and getting up off the sofa again was a struggle. Matt hooked his hand under my elbow and for once I didn’t shrug off the assistance. Rosalind watched from across the room, her expression cynical as the pair of us staggered upright.

“She can manage—get the door,” she said sharply, and Matt dropped my arm right away, obeying without hesitation. He looked beaten. His eyelashes were so wet they had clumped together, and the end of his nose had turned very red.

No help there, then.

As I made my way across the room behind him, limping heavily, my mind was turned inwards, and it was burning.

I needed a way out, and right now the prospects for that looked slim enough to qualify as anorexic.

R
osalind forced Matt to drive us back down to the main street and
out on Route 302 towards Intervale. I sat in the front seat along-V side him, with Rosalind in the back this time, where she could cover the pair of us with the Beretta.

Matt was an awful driver, slow and jerky even with the Range Rover’s automatic transmission and cushioned ride. He had no idea how to judge the width of the vehicle or place it on the road, and he wandered alarmingly

Eventually, Rosalind jammed the silenced end of the Beretta against the base of his skull and growled at him to quit messing around. I thought Matt was going to burst into tears again at any moment.

“Ease up on him,” I snapped over my shoulder. “He’s never driven on the wrong side of the road before.”

“And if he carries on like this,” Rosalind said grimly, “he never will again.”

The snow had stopped coming down now and already people with pickup trucks that had snowplows attached to the front of them were out clearing the streets. There was a quiet efficiency to it all, a kind of small-town neighborliness that was totally at odds with the woman in the backseat. I wondered when her determination to succeed with her father’s business had passed over into the kind of obsession that meant she was willing to shoot someone in the back and use a four-year-old child as a pawn in the game.

We didn’t talk again until Rosalind instructed Matt to turn off the main road into the parking area for the surplus store. It was well past closing time, but there were still lights on inside the building, although there were no tire tracks in the fresh coating of snow in front of it. Matt nosed the Range Rover gingerly into a space at the side and braked to a halt.

“What now?” he said, swallowing. “Where’s Ella?”

“She’s inside—being well looked after, don’t you worry about that,” Rosalind said, and something about the way she said it made my skin shimmy over my bones.

Reynolds.
The images of what he might be doing to Ella twisted and writhed and shrieked through my subconscious.

I heard the muted bleep of a mobile phone dialing and knew without turning round that Rosalind was calling Vaughan again. She’d said she’d give him an hour to make his decision and that time was gone. It was so quiet inside the car I could hear the sound of the phone ringing out at the other end of the line.

“Felix?… It’s me again,” Rosalind said, and her voice had a rich quality to it, gloating, riding a crest of self-confidence. She chuckled. “Oh, I’m sorry—are you entertaining guests? I kinda thought you might be, by now.”

I was aware of a leaden weight in my chest. Until then I’d clung to a slight conceited notion that Sean and Neagley and Lucas might somehow have avoided the trap Rosalind had engineered at Vaughan’s place out near Bretton Woods. I’d become so used to Sean’s abilities that I’d expected too much this time. They’d thought they were going in under cover of stealth and surprise, only to find they were thoroughly expected. Even so, I’d held out an unrelenting sliver of hope that Sean had side stepped the trap and prevailed.