Bearing in mind Jamie’s comment about digging in the alarm sensor, I made particular attempts to ride round anything on the driveway that I thought might be a likely candidate. I’m not entirely sure why. Maybe I wanted to check the dogs’ reaction, or maybe I wanted to catch Jamie doing something he shouldn’t when he thought he had the place to himself.
In the event, it wasn’t Jamie I had to worry about.
His Honda was parked up at a rakish angle outside the house. No surprise there. But what I wasn’t expecting was a big square Mercedes saloon to be lying alongside it.
The front door was open and as soon as I shut off the Suzuki’s engine I could hear the racket the dogs were making. Just for a moment I hesitated over what I might be walking into, then anger got the better of my judgement.
I left my helmet hooked over one of the Suzuki’s mirrors and went straight into the house with no further hesitation. I ignored the dogs who were going ballistic behind the closed kitchen door and headed straight for the study, where the noise was of a different and more human nature.
I nudged the door open and found a middle-aged woman was just in the middle of sweeping piles of paperwork off Jacob’s desk onto the floor and looking like she was enjoying her work.
Jamie was standing near the fireplace, looking unusually defensive, with his hands rammed in his pockets like he’d been told not to touch anything. I shot him a vicious look. When he saw me his face went into a kind of shameful spasm. He was not, I realised at that moment, an entirely willing participant in this enterprise.
“Charlie!” he said quickly. “Look, I’m sorry. I didn’t—”
The woman’s head snapped up, her eyes glittering.
“And who in hell’s name are you?” she demanded and, not waiting for an answer, “Get the hell out of my house!”
She had a deep slightly husky voice that might have been attractive without the harsh note now flattening it. Her face was strong, full of character, mapped by fine thread veins under the surface of her skin.
“Your house?” I said mildly, not moving. I’d never met Jacob’s ex-wife but in this case I didn’t think I needed a formal introduction. “I don’t think so.”
For a moment Isobel Nash glared at me. Her gaze had turned calculating now, flicking from me to her son and back again. She might have been weighing up the possibilities of forcibly ejecting me and realising that Jamie probably wasn’t going to be any help in the matter. She looked physically strong enough to consider doing the job herself but, if nothing else, she could see I had the best part of thirty years on her. Common sense prevailed.
After a moment she gave a slight nod, almost to herself, and seemed to relax. She dragged a battered pack of Dorchesters out of her pocket and shook one out before offering it halfheartedly in my direction. I shook my head. She shrugged as though I’d deliberately slighted her and lit up.
“Well now, there’s no reason we can’t be civilised about this,” she said as she exhaled her first deep drag. For someone who was pretending to be civilised she seemed to have been the cause of a lot of wanton destruction. I eyed it without comment as she perched on the corner of the desk, watching me intently through the smoke.
“Civilised about what?”
“Well, we’re both after the same thing,” she said carefully. She had suddenly dropped her voice and seemed to be making an effort to keep impatience at bay, as though I was being unutterably dense. “I expect we can come to some kind of arrangement.”
I had no idea what she was on about but Jamie’s face was a picture of horrified embarrassment. His eyes slid away over my shoulder like they wouldn’t stick.
“I expect we can,” I said evenly. “How about you leave right now and I don’t call the police. That civilised enough for you?”
She made a snorting sound that might have signified amusement. Jamie stood silent between us, equally ignored. I kept my eyes on Isobel’s face and her hands and paid him no attention.
“If it came to it I do have a right to be here,” she pointed out at last. “Legally I am, after all, still Jacob’s wife.”
That was news to me. I knew Jacob and Isobel had been separated since before I’d moved to Lancaster to begin with, but that didn’t mean they had ever actually jumped through the hoops and made it official. I tried to remember if he’d ever mentioned it but couldn’t bring it to mind. She still could be lying, though. Isobel struck me as the kind who would try to brazen out being caught in the wrong.
I inclined my head, mentally crossing my fingers.
“Technically, yes,” I agreed with just enough of a drawl to be insulting. “As far as the laws on trespass go, probably not. Would you care to put it to the test?”
Her eyes narrowed again at that. Her hair was dark and glossy, the colour younger than her face. She pursed her lips and let out a long stream of smoke towards the ceiling. “So Jacob’s left you to play guard dog, has he?” she said sharply. “Where is the old bastard, by the way?”
“Away,” I said. “In Ireland, as a matter of fact.”
She cast a glance towards Jamie but he didn’t catch it. I saw something flicker behind her eyes, fast as a flame, then it was gone and I was left wondering if I’d seen it at all.
“Well, that’s all right then.” She stood up and stubbed the last half of her cigarette out in a saucer containing foreign coins on the mantelpiece. “Last chance. Are you going to play ball or not?”
I shook my head.
She hid the faintest flicker of a smile and shrugged. “Well, if that’s your attitude, I can’t help you,” she said, then raised her voice and barked, “Eamonn!”
I heard a door open behind me and footsteps moving quickly down the flagged passageway from the living room. I’d time to turn as a slim man in a pale grey suit came bowling across the hallway and scooped me up as he came by with an ease that took me by surprise.
“Get rid of her,” Isobel instructed, her tone indifferent.
I heard Jamie begin to protest as I was borne away down the hall towards the front door. His mother told him to shut up in the same crushing kind of voice she must have been using since he was six.
I cursed myself for not expecting that Jacob’s wife might have brought some extra muscle. The man wasn’t a traditional heavy but he was deft and professional, nonetheless. He’d undoubtedly done this kind of thing before and the confines of the hallway was not where I wanted to find out how much. I went limp in his arms and waited for the space to make a stand.
When we reached the forecourt Eamonn let go with a jerk, so I was abruptly sent scattering across the mossy cobbles on my hands and knees. Thankful I was in my bike leathers, I rolled through the fall without injury and came back up on my feet.
I found myself facing a pale man with narrow pointed features and dark reddish hair parted at the side. He wasn’t wearing a tie and his shirt collar was open. The jacket of his suit had been intended for someone with wider shoulders, so the front bagged. Maybe he just liked to have plenty of room to manoeuvre, which was probably not a good sign.
He’d also been expecting the surprise manhandling to have thoroughly unnerved me. That it had clearly failed to do so must, I suspected, have been something of a disappointment to him. But there was a gleam of speculation and interest there, too, and that I did find disturbing.