“No! I’m not going back inside there. Not with that man there.”
“Of course not. I’ll phone them and tell them something’s come up. William will understand. He’s as eccentric as they come and won’t worry about your disappearance. We’ve done what we came here to do.”
Somehow, his sympathy made her worse. She fell to her haunches and put her arms around her legs, and wept as if she were a wounded animal. He was becoming more and more alarmed.
He bent down and lifted her up into his arms. “I’m taking you to see a doctor.”
She buried her head in his chest and shook it against him as he walked. “No,” she said in a half-sob. “No doctor.” Her breathing hitched as she tried to get it under control.
Only when they reached the car park did he let her slide to her feet. But he continued to hold her. “You have to tell me.”
“I will. It’s just hard. I’ve never told anyone.”
“Not even my father?”
“My mother told your father everything. I didn’t have to say a word. He understood.”
“And I’m sureIwill.” He took her hand, and they crossed the road and got into the car. He passed her a bottle of water. “In your own time.”
And it took some time. They drove off along the narrow Norfolk lanes with him glancing at her from time to time, but he didn’t push her. Eventually, he noticed her head roll back and fall to one side. She looked washed out. He gritted his teeth. Whatever her secret was, he could see it was important. At least to her.
She tried to speak, but had to clear her throat of its hoarseness first. “I was twelve when it happened.”
He gripped the steering wheel as he fought with an impulse to pull over and drag her into his arms and make sure no one hurt her. He pressed his foot on the accelerator instead.
“Go on,” he managed to say between gritted teeth. “Whenwhathappened?”
“My father and my brother were murdered.”
He knew they’d died, but assumed it had been in an accident. He hadn’t imagined anything like this. All he could do was repeat the last word she said, the word his mind wouldn’t move on from.
“Murdered?”
“Yes. And they wouldn’t have been if I’d stayed hidden and quiet like I’d been told to do. But I was like a little butterfly, proud of my looks, proud that people said how pretty I was, and so when these men turned up and called out for me, I didn’t hesitate. I revealed myself and exposed my family.”
He allowed his tongue to run over his teeth, giving himself precious seconds to keep himself together, not wanting, but needing, to know what had happened next.
“Who were they?”
“Russian business associates of my father’s.” She looked away, out at the passing countryside. “Past business associates. Associates for whom the business hadn’t gone their way. I loved my father, but he made a terrible decision and paid for it with his life.”
“What was his business?”
She didn’t speak for a few minutes. Then she looked back at him, as if eager to watch how he would respond.
“Armaments,” she mumbled. She snatched in a breath. “He bought and sold armaments and made and lost a fortune doing it.”
He’d thought it must have been something like this. There were a few key industries upon which life and death played out, and the armament industry was definitely one of them.
“And he crossed these men?”
“He did more than cross them. They lost a fortune because of him and they were determined to make him pay. And they did. When they found me, it was a simple matter of finding my father and brother, and their execution in front of me. It was only a fluke that my mother and I escaped at all. And we fled with only the clothes on our backs and our precious passports to come to England.”
“And your mother applied for a job as far away from the cities as possible.”
“Yes.”
“And my father fell in love with her and kept you both out of harm’s way. Safe.”