Ultimate Justice (2 page)

“I’m only being honest, love. It’s something you’re going to have to get used to. I’ll be joining your mum soon enough.” Tears misted Lorne’s eyes, and her father hugged her. “You, daft mare. Don’t go getting all maudlin on me. Hey, where’s my breakfast? I fancy scrambled eggs on toast this morning. Have you two eaten?”

Lorne knew that was her cue to back off. Her father was an expert at changing conversations midway through when the subject matter got too tough to handle.

“We had some toast earlier. You sit down and I’ll do it for you, Dad.” His expression reprimanded her without him having to open his mouth. She held up her hands in submission. “Okay, I’ll get the eggs out of the pantry for you. I collected them this morning from the hens. I was wondering whether we should put a small table out the front with an honesty box—what do you think?”

“Sure, if you want the front of the house pelted with eggs,” Tony muttered as he picked up the morning paper.

“You’re such a misanthropist, Mr. Former MI6 Agent.”

“Umm…‌rightly so, if you’ve read any of the papers lately. I wouldn’t trust the youth of today to pick their noses right, let alone do anything else correctly.”

“Yuck, Tony! You know what? You sound like an old man. Wait a minute—are you including Charlie in that sweeping generalisation?”

Tony winced as if he’d received a sucker punch to his gut from an invisible man. “Damn, I forgot about Charlie.”

Lorne’s father was beating his eggs with a fork. “It would take some doing to forget about
that
one.”

“Wow! You two are unbelievable. She’ll be helping out more around here during the summer break. I hope you’ll both try to at least give her a chance.”

“I’m joking. Anyway, I’m sure Tony didn’t mean to tar her with the same brush as the other hoodlums around today. What was it my old granddad used to say, now? Oh yes: ‘there are always exceptions to the rule.’ After what that girl has been through over the years, she’s had to grow up faster than any other kid her age. She’s mature beyond her years, which will stand her in good stead in the future.”

Lorne nodded, but deep down in her gut, the old pangs of guilt started up. Charlie’s childhood had been stripped from her at the hands of a man who had been Lorne’s nemesis for years. She shuddered at the thought of what the Unicorn had done to Charlie almost four years ago.

“Stop that,” Tony ordered, breaking through her dark reverie.

“What?” she pretended she didn’t have a clue what her husband was talking about.

He raised a questioning eyebrow. “You know. I can tell when your thoughts turn to that lunatic and your guilt resurfaces. Stop it now. Tell her, Sam.”

Her father put his breakfast on hold as the conversation became more serious. “Tony’s right, love. You can’t keep punishing yourself for what happened to Charlie. Take a leaf out of her book. She’s accepted it and moved on.”

Lorne spread her arms out and slapped her hands on her thighs. “I know you’re both right, but it doesn’t alter the fact that I still blame myself for involving my family in that case.”

Sam gathered his daughter in his arms and cushioned her head against his chest. “You didn’t. Baldwin involved Charlie,
not
you.”

“I know, Dad. I try not to think of it, but sometimes—just sometimes—it catches me out.”

Sam pushed her away from him and tucked a loose lock of hair behind her ear, like he used to do when she was a child. “It’s bound to, love. Events of that awful day—those few days—changed all of our lives. Look at it this way: if that day hadn’t happened, then you and Tony would never have met.”

Tony snorted. “Any chance I can turn the clock back four years to before that day?”

Lorne flew out of her father’s arms and clipped Tony around the head. “You cheeky sod. I’ll get my own back, just you wait and see.”

Tony held his hand out horizontally in front of him. “Look, steady as a rock. You don’t scare me, Mrs. Former Detective Inspector.”

“Huh, we’ll see,” Lorne retorted. She let the idle threat linger between them for a while before she spoke again. “I hope the weather is better than yesterday’s. That storm caused havoc to the roads across the country. There were flashfloods in several areas, apparently.”

Tony picked up his paper again. “How typically British of you, Lorne, to change the subject to the weather like that.”

“A trick I picked up from you, I believe, dear hubby.”

Her father settled himself into the chair next to Lorne and started eating his breakfast. Lorne watched, grateful that his appetite hadn’t been affected by his illness like his sleep had. After swallowing a mouthful of bacon, he said, “That was one of the worst storms we’d had in years. I still laugh when I think of weatherman Bill Giles ending up with egg on his face when he totally ignored a viewer’s comment about a hurricane brewing back in ’86. If I recall rightly, Seven Oaks almost had to change its name to ‘One Oak’ after it got battered by a storm.”

“Yes. The UK didn’t cope well with the conditions around that time. The railways came to a virtual standstill and most of the small country roads became impassable, if I remember rightly,” Tony said, looking thoughtful before he continued, “Thankfully, I was oversees at the time, on holiday with my parents in Crete.”

“Lucky you! The farthest we went when we were kids was to Butlins at Minehead.” Lorne sniggered.

“It took a lot to run that old house of ours. Your mother always liked to have nice new furniture every five years or so, something had to give. I’m afraid Minehead was all we could afford back then, love. Mind you, I reckon that nowadays it’s just as cheap to go abroad as to spend a week at a holiday camp in the UK,” her father replied. A sad little smile had settled on his face when he’d mentioned Lorne’s mother. It had been a struggle for him to get over her death from breast cancer. He hadn’t really shown signs of wanting to go on with his own life until Lorne and Tony had bought the rescue centre and asked him to live with them. It was as though they’d given him a new purpose in life.

Lorne smiled to reassure him. “It’s all right, Dad, you don’t have to justify anything. I loved the holidays we went on when we were kids. With you working long hours on the force, any time Jade and I had with you was special to us.”

“What the heck?” Tony angled the paper so his wife could see the article that had caught his eye.

“What’s that?” Lorne’s father asked.

Lorne shook her head as she read and then glanced up at her father. “It’s terrible. A boat capsized off the Kent coastline yesterday. It says here that details are still a little sketchy, but apparently the boat was carrying some kind of human cargo.”

“No! Human trafficking, you mean?”

“That’s how I’m reading it. What’s your take on it, Tony?”

Tony hitched his right shoulder up and his mouth tugged down at the sides. “It’s hard to say without actually knowing what the authorities have found.”

Lorne left the table and went in search of her laptop. She returned and booted it up. “Let’s see what was reported on the news last night, shall we?”

After locating a video clip that had appeared on Sky news the previous evening, they watched in silence as a windswept journalist, standing on a pebbled beach in Kent, told the viewers that rescuers were still recovering bodies from the shipwreck. “So far, at least twenty-five people of Asian origin—all dead—have been recovered.” The camera panned over his shoulder and there, lying on the beach, was a row of bodies covered in tarpaulin sheets. The camera swung out to sea, focusing on an incoming dinghy that had two men in wetsuits on board. Several men on the shoreline awaited their arrival. When the dinghy was pulled ashore, another dead body was lifted out of the boat and gently placed alongside the others.

Lorne’s eyes moistened. “That’s awful, just awful. Those poor people. Do they know how big the boat was?”

Tony looked back at the paper and quickly scanned the article again. “It doesn’t say. But if it hit the rocks, it would have been busted up pretty badly. I doubt they’ll be able to tell what size vessel it was for a while, unless they find out the name of it.”

Lorne stared at the wall in front of her as she imagined Charlie’s dead body lying on the beach. She shook her head ridding her mind of the unwanted image. “Am I being overly sensitive about this, you guys? Or is this story too sad for words?”

Both Tony and her father looked at her, but it was Tony who answered first, “Maybe you are being a touch sensitive about it, but that’s you, babe. You care what happens to people. Old wounds are bound to resurface when stories like this hit the headlines.”

“That’s probably it,” her father agreed. “The similarities to what Charlie went through—that’s what is affecting you. That’s my guess, anyway.”

“You could be right, Dad. I’ve just got a feeling here,” she placed her hand across her stomach and winced as if she was in pain. “Something is pushing me to delve deeper into this case. Is that daft?”

Tony rose from the table and walked over to her. “I’d say there was something wrong with you if you
didn’t
want to look further into this, Lorne. But sweetheart, we’ve got to stop doing
pro bono
cases. Unless someone comes forward asking us to investigate the case, we’re going to have to let this one pass us by.”

Lorne dipped her head and rested it on Tony’s chest. Her husband was right—of course he was. She glanced over at her father and smiled. His eyes rose to the ceiling before he continued to eat his breakfast. He knew her so well, well enough to know that she would grab the case if the slightest opportunity came her way. Especially as the private eye side of things was relatively slow at the moment.

“Okay, I’m tired of all this maudlin news. What’s on the agenda for today?” Tony planted a tender kiss on her forehead and then pushed her away from him.

“The usual, I guess. Cleaning out the kennels and feeding the hounds. I do have to make a home visit this afternoon, though. Could you both spare me for an hour or two?”

Tony tutted and sighed heavily. “If we must.”

Lorne playfully punched him in the stomach. “That’s twice I’ll need to get my own back now.”

They all laughed, and Lorne reached over to turn off the depressing news channel and put on ITV’s Daybreak, instead. She cringed when the presenter introduced a celebrity Lorne strongly disliked. She strode over to the back door. “Think I’d rather clean up dog poo than listen to what that idiot has to say.”

Tony laughed and followed her out. “I think I would, too.”

For the next hour, the husband and wife team messed around in the kennels, cleaning and playing with the permanent inmates before they moved over to the new kennel block, which housed the temporary boarders whose owners were enjoying themselves on holiday.

At eleven o’clock that morning Tony began going through the list of repairs he had to carry out, and Lorne headed inside to start on some paperwork.

After a quick bite to eat at lunchtime, Lorne jumped in her father’s Nova and drove to Natasha Wallace’s elegant house in the country.

CHAPTER TWO

L
orne approached the Wallaces’
mansion for the second time in as many months. It never ceased to amaze her how the other half lived. It rankled her that the rich seemed to flaunt their wealth so arrogantly when there were so many starving people in the world who could benefit from the loose change in their pockets. She knew that Natasha Wallace sat on the boards of several well-known charities both at home and abroad, and did her very best to aid those in desperate need, but Lorne wished that more rich people were as philanthropic as Bill Gates.

The gardener tending the circular rose bed in front of the house tipped his hat as she passed him. Lorne drew to a halt and pressed the button to lower the passenger’s side window in order to talk to him. “The garden is looking gorgeous, Frank. You’re doing an excellent job.”

“Why, thank you, miss. The lady of the house is around the back with that little minx of a dog. Bloomin’ thing got in the walled garden the other day and dug up some of me carrots.”

Lorne’s face flushed with embarrassment, she’d always regarded the dog as well-behaved when he was with her. “Oops, sorry about that. Hope they weren’t damaged too much.”

He waved a hand in front of him. “Nah, not really. He’s a real cutie, that one. I quite often wonder if Mrs. Wallace would miss him if I tucked the little fellow in my pocket and took him home to the missus.”

“By all accounts, Mrs. Wallace has become very attached to the little chap. I’m sure she would miss him terribly if you did that.”

“That she would, miss, that she would. Have a pleasant visit.”

Lorne smiled, pushed the button to put the window back up, and continued her drive up the crunching gravelled driveway. She parked the car at the front and stepped onto the narrow path that ran along the side of the property and led to the pool area at the back. The view momentarily took Lorne’s breath away as she walked through the wooden arch which was covered by fragrantly scented pink and white roses. The garden expanded into an abundance of late spring-early summer colour. Lorne suspected the garden was around two acres or thereabouts, but the extended view of the green fields beyond added to the garden’s width and length.

“Lorne! Over here.”

She waved at Natasha and slowly made her way over to the pool area, which was surrounded by a variety of assorted coloured lavenders. She could hear the bees contentedly working their way through their nectar. Several butterflies took flight as the lavender brushed against her calf. The place had a magical and calming effect that made Lorne let out a satisfied sigh.
Ah, how the other half live!

She could hear the yapping of the Pekingese before she saw the tiny dog. “I see he’s settled in well.” At the sound of her voice, the dog left Natasha’s side and ran up to Lorne. She scooped up the white dog, which resembled a powder puff, into her arms and kissed the excited creature on the nose. “Tiny, you’re still as adorable as ever.”

Natasha cleared her throat and hesitantly stated, “Umm…‌we had a little name change. He’s called Timmy now. Although he should be called ‘Terror,’ the amount of mischief he gets into.”