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And wasn’t that a fact that burned like acid in their Europe-trained gullets.
“Mick.” Sean Mitchell, his closest friend since the days of striped blazers and lingering corporal punishment at grammar school, shoved past Jennifer and Anya with uncharacteristic roughness and stopped a short distance away, a frown etching grooves into the clean lines of his face. “Wilson just rang the local medical centre to check on the woman who had the asthma attack.”
“Is she all right?” Mick couldn’t hold back the interruption.
“She’s doing much better, apparently, although they’re going to keep her hooked up to the mask for a while. But she can talk now and the nurse said she’s been pretty agitated that a message get to the “man in the leather coat”.” Sean grinned briefly. “I will assume that she’s talking about you, my fashion-averse friend.”
“A message for me?” Mick wasn’t sure what he was feeling at that moment. “What is it?”
Sean was serious again.
“She’s saying that she noticed Darvie earlier, outside the hotel, and he was with a red-haired woman with some kind of deformity of the ear. She claims that she saw the same woman in this room a few moments before Darvie detonated the grenade and that she was hovering near the ceramics display.”
Oh, Christ.
Mick was already striding toward the central pedestal and the display of fiddly cups and saucers that were worth more than his car.
They found the bomb three minutes later.
Chapter Two
A bomb.
Sophy shivered and picked up the remote control, switching from the evening news to the entertainment channel. She tended to feel her brain cells curling at the edges like dying leaves after too many consecutive hours of reality TV, but there was something oddly comforting about watching other people’s crises when they revolved around men and makeup. Nobody tried to blow anyone up, for one thing.
The incident had made the first five minutes of the news programming, trumped only by the breaking sex scandal surrounding a Member of Parliament. Presumably an actual explosion would have pushed the town to top billing. The police experts disabling a minimal-impact device with hours still left on the timer was obviously not the stuff of cinematic thrillers.
The news anchor had stated, in tones Sophy considered inappropriately upbeat, that a second perpetrator had been arrested off-site and it was believed that the artworks had been the target, with the bomb scheduled to detonate at a time when the display hall would be closed for the night. The display hall, however, was still located within a fully occupied hotel and likely had a constant security presence. Only the completely callous or moronic would assume that the explosion ran no human risk.
She was glad that he – that they were all okay.
As it happened, she had supplied the only casualty and the biggest drama for the reporters to seize upon like a bunch of hungry rat terriers. The footage of her gasping person being loaded into the ambulance, trailing medical tubes and fretful friends, had been played three times during the clip. The brunette with the perky voice and perkier boobs had managed to skip any dull details about smoke inhalation and instead make it sound like she’d laid down and expired from sheer terror. And some utter cretin had given the Press her name, which naturally resulted in every person she had ever met texting to see if she was still alive. Her parents and Melissa had run interference with those who had come in person, letting in only Don and a couple of co-workers from the bar where she worked three nights a week.
They hadn’t been able to keep out the police, who had stormed the medical centre while she was still hooked up to the nebuliser. They had requested a description of the red-haired woman at the exhibition, as detailed as she could manage, and had left with a charcoal sketch that the officer in charge, who looked about twelve, had pronounced “wicked good”. She supposed she ought to take these positives where she found them.
The on-call doctor’s insistence on keeping her in overnight had tipped a historically bad day over into complete nightmare territory. She couldn’t stand hospitals. Her aversion was not quite as strong as it was to, say, almost suffocating to death on national television, but it was up there.
Sophy glanced up at the wall clock. Not quite half past six. The sun was still beaming brightly through the windows; it didn’t start to get dark until after nine these days, which was still a nice change after the bleakness of the last winter. Food had been delivered promptly at five, shortly before her last visitor had departed, probably scared off by the sight of her main course, which the menu card claimed was quiche. That fact was yet to be verified. She picked up her fork and poked dubiously at it. It moved with a suspiciously gelatinous wiggle. She sighed, thinking of the leftover lasagne in the fridge at home. And the wine. There was wine in the fridge at home too.
Crappy, crappy day.
A single short knock on the door brought her head up with a jerk. Substantial arms, monstrous shoulders and a definite shortage of neck filled the doorway. It really was a physique that would have the beefiest All Black crying with shame. Sophy’s heart began to behave in a very unreliable manner in her chest.
It was not a rush to the loins of instant, overwhelming lust.
It was sheer horror.
She wasn’t sure what it was about the man, but he reduced her from a shy person with manners and a brain to the walking personification of a blush. On her personal scale of social terror, he was more intimidating than the senior art lecturer, a man who drove most of his students to either drink or copious amounts of cake. And he ranked only marginally below the snotty shop assistants in Parisian boutiques, one of whom had once pinched the flesh of her hip and tsked after a fifteen-second acquaintance. To be fair, he was working a general demeanour of humourless, sleep-deprived assassin. And there was the culture shock of encountering a flesh-and-blood mountain of testosterone, when frankly she was more accustomed to the twig-like variety of male in skinny jeans and paint splatters.
“Miss James?” Earlier that day, his voice had been her sole point of focus in a frightening spiral out of controlled consciousness. It was already as familiar to her as that of many a long-term friend. “May I come in for a moment?”
Sophy managed to nod, even if she’d forgotten how to speak. She was suddenly intensely aware of the strands of sticky hair around her face, her reading glasses, the well-washed cotton gown that was blessedly closed down the back but also stamped all over with the words “Hospital Property”, as if to dissuade any light-fingered fashionistas who might be tempted.
The smell registered as he came fully into the room, hesitated awkwardly for a moment by the visitor’s chair and remained standing. It wasn’t cologne, although she could detect a faint whiff of something yummy and expensive there. She couldn’t wear fragrances because they aggravated her asthma, so she tended to be jealously observant of other people’s scents. In this case, it wasn’t the man who was inciting her envy: it was the aroma coming from a paper bag clutched in his hand.
The bastard had come into her room with Thai food when she was faced with the prospect of rubber quiche and a carton of Dora the Explorer yoghurt.
With difficulty, she pulled her eyes away from the food as he began to speak, and managed not to drool on the quilt.
