Private London (Private 4)

I HAD EXPECTED the precious cargo I was going to be babysitting to be just that.

West Coast precious. Serious money, serious Valley attitude. I had her pictured pretty clearly in my mind’s eye – young, tanned and beautiful.

She was young, I got that much right at least. Looked even younger than she actually was.

Hannah’s hair was mousy brown, tied back. She wore tortoiseshell glasses, a simple skirt and blouse with a cardigan, flat shoes. I don’t know the name of the geeky girl from Scooby Doo, but she was like a thinner version of her without the confidence. Maybe a taller Ugly Betty. No make-up discernible to my eye, and my eye was pretty good in that respect. Nervous.

Hannah Shapiro looked like she wouldn’t say boo to a waddling duck, let alone a goose.

‘Hi, I’m Dan,’ I said. ‘Dan Carter.’ I held out my hand.

She shook it with her own small, delicate hand but didn’t say a word or make eye contact.

Maybe it was down to the confident air of masculine authority I exude. Maybe – but she looked as though a strong wind could knock her over. If she was going to be studying psychiatry I was surmising she had ambitions for the research side of the business. I couldn’t see her as a practitioner, with the couch and the reassuring voice and the leading questions. You had to be comfortable around people to do that kind of work.

Perhaps she was right to be nervous – she was standing next to Del Rio, after all.

Del Rio, one of Jack Morgan’s right-hand men from the West Coast office. He’d done four years’ hard time at the state’s pleasure, and looked perfectly capable of doing so again. But he was on our side of the law nowadays, if not exactly working within it.

But that was the whole point of Private, after all. We weren’t constrained by the same rules and regulations that restricted our uniformed counterparts. That was how we earned our money. And if half the rumours I had heard about Del Rio were true, he was more than willing to take the law into his own bare hands – take it with lethal consequences.

I held my hand out and shook his. If the girl’s grip was feather light, this guy had a grip like an anaconda. Del Rio nodded. He didn’t say anything either but I don’t think it was from a lack of self-confidence. I don’t think you could dent his self-confidence with anything short of an oak pickaxe handle.

‘Dan will take care of you now, but if you ever need to speak to me you’ve got my number, right?’ said Jack Morgan to the girl, who still seemed more interested in her feet than in anything else.

‘Yeah, Jack,’ she said. ‘Thanks.’ Then she looked up and smiled. She had a nice smile.

‘Anytime, night or day.’ Jack slapped me on the back. ‘Take good care of her, Dan. I’m counting on you.’

‘You got it,’ I said, falling into the native lingo. I turned to the young woman. ‘We good to go?’

See.

‘Sure,’ she replied. I didn’t get a smile but figured it was just a matter of time. A six-hour flight is plenty of time to get to know people. I’d break her in under four, I reckoned. The old Dan Carter charm. They should put it in a bottle.

Chapter 6

A COUPLE OF hours later I sighed an inward breath of relief and undid my seat belt.

It took a couple of tugs. I turned to look at the young woman next to me who was effortlessly undoing hers, her attention never wavering from the e-book she was reading.

I had let Hannah Shapiro have the window seat and she had pulled the blind down, which had suited me just fine. A little bit of turbulence had been predicted and the fasten-seat-belt sign had lit up. I had got mine on a lot quicker than it took to get it off. Luckily the threatened turbulence hadn’t arrived!

I craned my head to look at the book that Hannah was engrossed in. ‘What are you reading?’ I asked her.

She didn’t look up. ‘The Beautiful and the Damned,’ she said.

‘Tender is the Night is my favourite novel,’ I said.

She looked up then, surprised. ‘Really?’

‘Really. And I know what you’re thinking.’

‘And what’s that?’

‘That a big man has no time really to do anything but just sit and be big.’

There was a slight crack in the corner of her mouth. It might even have been a smile.