The house was impressive, even by American standards. What I would have called a one-and-a-half-story building, with huge gables in the roof to show rooms on an upper floor. Directly in front of us was a three-car garage, with the house itself set back slightly to the left. A raised deck ran right the way round the outside, and there were steps leading up to it and the glass-paneled front door. The walls were covered in green shingles and dark-stained clapboard. With the trees overhanging from all sides, it seemed a little dark and forbidding, but I suppose it was meant to blend.
Sitting behind her, I couldn’t see Simone’s face to judge her reaction, but she was leaning forwards slightly as we swung onto the cleared driveway, craning her neck to look at the place. I glanced at Ella, but she was still spark out, head lolling sideways against the bunched-up coat she was using as a pillow. It was only as Lucas pulled up in front of the garages and actually switched off the Range Rover’s engine that she snuffled into wakefulness, squinting in the bright sunlight, her hair all flattened on one side. Lucas, Simone and I all climbed out. The cold took your breath away.
“How’re you doing, princess?” Lucas asked Ella. Mistake. Even on my limited acquaintance with Ella I knew she always woke grumpy. Now, she scowled furiously at him and, showing an early feminine awareness of her appearance, hid her face in her mother’s shoulder as soon as she was unbuckled from her seat. Lucas seemed a little taken aback by the little girl’s response.
“Don’t worry,” Simone said apologetically, smiling at him. “She’s always like this.” She seemed to have forgotten her earlier reservations.
“OK, well, let’s get her inside and see about that food I promised,” Lucas said, recovering.
We’d just reached the bottom of the steps when the front door opened and a woman came out onto the porch. She was medium height, the stiffness of her spine making her seem taller, with iron gray hair pulled into a tight French pleat at the back of her head. She was wearing khaki trousers and a rust-colored blouse with a kind of big floppy collar that might have been trying to soften down her rather severe features but only served to emphasize them. Nevertheless, she was smiling in welcome.
My first reaction was that she was Lucas’s housekeeper. She seemed older than he was and slightly out of step in both appearance and manner. It was Lucas himself who dispelled this myth, bounding lightly up the steps and planting a chaste kiss on the woman’s cheek before taking her arm and turning to face the three of us.
“Simone, honey, I’d like you to meet Rosalind … my wife.”
I felt rather than saw Simone’s jaw sag. For a moment she said nothing at all, just stared blankly. Eventually, it was Rosalind who disentangled herself from her husband and came down the stairs to meet us. She stopped in front of Simone and smiled with every appearance of real affection at Ella.
“I can see that Greg’s kind of dropped this on you,” Rosalind said, flicking Lucas a reproachful glance. Her voice was low and husky, like she was a heavy smoker, although I smelt no tobacco on her clothes. “But it’s a pleasure to finally meet you,” she said. She shrugged, the sudden uncertainty of the gesture at odds with her competent appearance. “I guess … well, I guess this makes me your stepmom.”
So how well did that go down?” Sean asked. “Like a lead balloon,” I said wryly “Simone’s only just found Daddy-I think the idea of having to share him with anyone other than Ella came as a bit of a shock to her.”
I was closeted in the guest room I’d been allocated and had taken advantage of the momentary solitude to check in with Sean. I sat on the bed alongside the giant teddy bear that Simone had bought for Ella in Boston.
I’d been right about the bear’s ominous demeanor. Ella had been so unsettled by its presence that, after the first night, she’d refused to sleep in the same room. Now she was sharing with Simone, which meant the bear was rooming with me. I’d privately named him Hannibal and already decided that he was spending the night in the closet so I wouldn’t wake up and find him looming over me.
Sean listened to my brief report on the situation without interruption, then said, “I can see why you’re not happy, but Simone is the client. Unless there’s a direct threat you can’t insist she pulls out of there, and a dodgy sense of humor doesn’t really count. Just watch for signs of that temper, though.”
“I will. I just don’t think Simone’s asking nearly enough questions about this guy, and she doesn’t like it when I try and get straight answers out of him,” I said. “There’s something that doesn’t quite ring true about him for me. And we still don’t really know how he managed to find us in Boston.”
“Mm, that is a bit of a worrying one, I admit. I’ll check with the hotel, but I’d be very surprised if they’d given out any information. Madeleine stressed the need for discretion when she booked with them.”
“Have you managed to find out anything more about him?”
“Just that he had a mean streak and he liked to fight-on or off the battlefield. I get the feeling there’s a lot more they’re not saying about that, but I’ll keep digging.”
“If he was a brawler, he was either very good or very lucky,” I said, “because he’s picked up very little by way of scarring and if his nose was ever broken, he’s had it very well fixed.”
“That’s not so unusual these days,” Sean said. “Just as many men go in for cosmetic surgery as women.”
“Maybe,” I said. “But a photo would be good, so we’ve got visual confirmation that he is who we think he is, at least. I think this new phone’s got picture messaging, hasn’t it?” I’d been slow to catch on to the technological age, but I suppose I was making up for lost time now.
“I’ll see what I can do. In the meantime, you need to push Simone to ask more awkward questions about her father, see how he reacts. What do you make of the new wife?”
I shrugged. “She seems OK,” I said, cautious. “Businesslike and no-nonsense, though. If you don’t dig your heels in she rides right on over you.”
She’d tried it with me over the matter of which room I was due to sleep in. After the initial awkwardness of the introductions, Rosalind Lucas quickly regained her composure. Lucas might have been the army man, but his second wife had command of the home and he seemed happy to leave the domestic decisions to her in the same way officers casually deferred to their NCOs in the matter of day-to-day logistics. Rosalind gave us a tour of the house with brisk efficiency, automatically assuming that we’d fall in with her arrangements.
The house had four bedrooms in total, which would have worked out fine apart from the fact that three of them, including the master suite, were on the upper floor, and the fourth was in the basement.
Fitted-out basements are not a common thing in the UK. The only things that are normally kept in the cellar-apart from wine — are old tins of paint, mildew, and an inordinate number of spiders. In the Lucases’ case “basement” was a bit of a misnomer. The guest suite had its own windows to the outside, courtesy of the fact that at the rear of the house the land dropped down towards the ski slope a hundred meters or so away through the trees.
The whole of the lower floor was luxuriously appointed, with a fully equipped exercise room, a home cinema, and several locked doorways to rooms that were just described as “storage.” I eyed the heavy-duty padlocks and assumed that was where Lucas kept his gun collection. If Si-mone came to the same conclusion, she didn’t mention it.
Rosalind had put Simone and Ella in the two spare rooms upstairs, leaving me in the dungeon, and looked very put out when I objected, ostensibly on the grounds that I ought to be nearer Ella, just in case she woke in the night.