Darling Sweetheart by Stephen Price Page B

have flattened elephants with it – if there’d been elephants at Whin Abbey.
    Darling Sweetheart never let Froggy in the plane, because he said if he fell on the floor he could jam a pedal and cause a crash. So Froggy always huffed when she went up and said she could sod off because he didn’t care, but she knew he was jealous because he would wait until bedtime and then ask questions about it. He always wanted to know what she could see from up there, apart from Whin Abbey and Kilnarush – were there other places to explore?
    Mummy never went in Darling Sweetheart’s plane because she said it was sodding dangerous.
    She woke just as the jet landed. She couldn’t believe she’d fallenasleep – she must be more tired than she imagined. She felt her chin, afraid she might have dribbled. Levine, who had his back to her, seemed to have stolen a nap too. When the jet stopped taxiing and the roar of the engines died, the pilot spoke over the intercom.
    ‘Welcome to Bristol, Miss Palatine, I hope you enjoyed your flight. As you can see, it’s considerably wetter here than in France and it’s a couple of degrees cooler too. It’s one thirty p.m. local time, so have a pleasant visit and see you for the return trip.’
    Levine stood and stretched. He removed his black blazer, revealing a shirt – black, of course – and a brown leather strap across his back. He unbuckled the strap and removed a large, pendulous object from under his armpit that Annalise, after a stunned instant, recognised as a gun in a holster. The pilots took no notice as he placed the whole affair in a cabinet and locked it, pocketing the key.
    ‘Excuse me, what is that for?’
    ‘Miss Palatine?’
    ‘The gun?’
    ‘Oh, we are licensed to carry weapons in France and on this aircraft, but we didn’t plan on bein’ in Britain for another month so I gotta leave it on board until our permits come through.’
    ‘No, I meant why would you carry a gun in the first place?’
    ‘When you as famous as H.E., you get all sortsa people–’
    ‘Do you, though?’ she interrupted, ‘do you, really?’
    ‘The world is fulla terrorists, Miss Palatine.’
    ‘Have you ever met one?’
    ‘Not personally, but I seen plenty on TV.’
    ‘And in your boss’s movies?’
    He smiled. ‘There’s a car waitin’ to take us into town, so if I could have your passport to show immigration–’
    ‘A car waiting for
us?
Sorry, I don’t mean to be rude, but you’re not coming with me to see my boyfriend, surely?’
    ‘H.E. told me to adopt a medium-range watchin’ brief.’
    ‘H.E. can adopt a running bloody jump. You’re probably in much more danger in Bristol than I’ll ever be.’
    ‘Huh?’
    ‘You’re a big, tough-looking American, so absolutely everyone will want to pick a fight with you. This is England, Levine, not Beverly Hills.’
    ‘But–’
    ‘But nothing! You can drop me at the hotel, then I’ll meet you back here at the plane at midnight. And please, I need to stop at a newsagent’s on the way.’
    The front-page photograph wasn’t too dreadful – she didn’t look old, tired or ugly, just surprised. But the headline shocked her silly, because the big black letters seemed to make it true: ‘EMERSON’S ENGLISH ROSE’. She showed it to Levine, who sat beside her in the back seat of the Mercedes.
    ‘Can I ask you something?’
    ‘You ask me a lotta stuff, Miss Palatine.’
    ‘Last night – did you know those photographers were waiting?’
    ‘How could I have known?’ There was a sulkiness in his tone that told her he wasn’t lying.
    ‘Do you not think there’s something a bit odd about all this?’
    ‘Newspapers and magazines in the States, they usedta print all sortsa shit about H.E.’
    ‘Used to?’
    ‘Sometimes you get a lotta stuff, sometimes it goes quiet. We don’t pay much attention.’
    ‘What was Donna Wentworth like?’
    He smiled. ‘She was before my time.’
    ‘I thought you said you’d been doing this job