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She laughed and agreed, hanging up without saying anything else.
“Initial reports are she’s on her own with this and appears to be both insanely lucky, and incredibly resourceful.”
“Any history of mental illness?” I shouldn’t make such assumptions, but I had been in this job long enough to know that sometimes it was the obvious answer to the question of why.
“Not that we know of yet. It’ll be a few days before we can get her medical records. What we do know is that she’s a thirty-two-year-old divorcee, no kids, no partner to speak of at the minute. She seems to come across on paper as a very average woman.”
“Average people don’t make a habit of becoming stalkers though, do they?”
Eric sighed. “That they don’t. Who have you got on the job?”
“Me.” I busied myself with picking imaginary fluff off my jacket and didn’t make eye contact with Eric. His silence forced me to look up. “I know usually I don’t do this kind of thing, but everyone else is busy so there isn’t much else I can do.”
Eric didn’t buy my answer, but he was polite enough to not comment on it. It had been almost a year since I had taken on an assignment. To be honest, it wasn’t that I couldn’t do it, it was just that it made my life much easier to farm the assignments out to those on my staff. It was becoming too much of a habit.
“I haven’t done it for a while, so I figured it wouldn’t hurt to keep myself fresh,” I explained. Jesus, man, stop talking. “Anyway, I’ve left the client back at the 45RPM offices, so I should make a move.” I stood, thanked Eric for his time, and asked him to keep me up to date with anything else he found out. Day or night, I needed to know everything that he could tell me.
Two hours later, Lennox was sitting beside me in my car as we headed towards the centre of Birmingham and his next concert. We were booked into a hotel with adjoining rooms; Lennox still wasn’t sure of that, and I could feel his concern in every question he asked. I couldn’t blame him, the situation he had found himself in wasn’t exactly something that inspired thoughts of everything going well. He probably thought about all the famous faces who’d had stalkers. Hell, what happened to the Welsh singer Duffy came to my mind when I initially heard one of 45RPMs acts was in trouble with a stalker and a hotel room break-in.
It was one of the biggest things I learned from my time in the Army and the protection business: people were fucking sickos and freaks when they put their minds to it enough. I doubted the person stalking Lennox was going to prove to be any different.
The miles on the M40 passed in silence and by the time we were passing Bicester it was starting to drive me insane. “So, how did you find yourself in a boy band?” I asked, trying to break the silence.
Lennox’s gaze on the Oxfordshire countryside didn’t waiver, but a slight smile pulled at the corners of his mouth. “Uh, it was a talent show. I was seventeen years old, and I was mad enough to try and win the judges over. Auditions went well, but they figured the few of us they had let through in our mid to late teens were probably too young to go forward solo, so they teamed up five of us. I was one of them, and the rest as they say is history.”
“Thrown in at the deep end, huh?”
He glanced in my direction. “Something like that. What about you? How did you get into personal protection?”
I puffed out my cheeks as I exhaled. “Short version of the story? I left the army, couldn’t find any comfort in the standard nine to five of civilian life, and I knew friends had gone into the field in Kuwait. That seemed a little more mercenary than I wanted to get involved with, but it did spark the idea of similar work here in the UK with people who really needed someone to look out for them, and my business was born. Now I work with other ex-forces personnel, and we look after even more people.”
He nodded in appreciation of my story. “Is everyone you protect famous?”
I laughed. “Famous no, but they need to have a certain amount of income to be able to afford my rates.”
“Oh.”
I glanced over at him as he stared out the window again.
“Don’t get me wrong. I’m not talking about ripping people off, or only being available to the very wealthy. But what I do isn’t a simple nine to five position. If I’m on an assignment like this for example, I’m never not working. Should you need me at three in the morning because you can hear someone trying to get into your hotel room, or whatever it happens to be, I’m there.”
He looked back over to me. “How do you not burn out?”
No one I had ever served protection for had ever voiced a single concern about me and my ability to handle my work. It was somewhat refreshing to be seen as an actual human being, not just the hired help.
“When I was first in the business, I smoked a little too much, and I drank a little too much. But then I realised that the mental health of me and my team was paramount given the work we were doing, and I hired someone to be our in-house counsellor. She talks to us when we need it throughout the assignments, and she’s a key part of the debriefing process we have.”
“No one on my team will ever go from one assignment straight into the next. We always have a period of at least two weeks where we can decompress and take time out before we go back out again. Unless, of course, it’s one of our more routine jobs. One guy, Ian, he’s basically just a driver for a diplomat rather than a specific security detail, but he’s got the ability to act instantly should everything ever happen. He’s constantly looking out to see if they are being followed. He’s trained in evasive action, but there isn’t anything overly stressful about that particular assignment.”
“And how did you get this assignment?”
“I wanted it,” I answered a little too quickly. “I have been too busy with the day to day running of the business and keeping everyone up to date on all their licences, and training, and everything else that applies to a business like this. I didn’t want to be in a situation where I was too rusty to take on a role myself, so this is me out here doing what the guys are doing.”
“How long has it been since you were last on assignment?”
“Not as long as you’d think.” I grinned at him. “It’s actually only been about nine months. The last assignment I did basically grew the business’s reputation and I needed to focus on having more bodyguards to be able to handle all the new business that wanted to come my way.”
“Is that what you call yourself then? A bodyguard?”
