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“I saw it on TV. I thought you were dead.” To Alexia’s astonishment, her daughter reached over the bed and took her hand. For a moment Alexia was too stunned to respond. It was the first genuinely kind gesture Roxie had made toward her in so many long years. But then she pulled herself together and squeezed back, caressing her daughter’s fingers as though they were precious jewels.
“You’ve been crying,” she said gently.
Roxie nodded. “I’ve already lost Michael. I . . . I can’t lose you too.”
Alexia’s eyes welled up with tears. All the emotion she’d repressed since Michael’s accident erupted out of her now, like floodwaters breaching a levee.
“You’re crying!” Roxie sounded astonished.
“It’s the drugs.” Alexia laughed, then winced as the pain in her side reasserted itself,
“What the devil’s going on here?” An overbearing man in a three-piece suit, obviously a surgeon, came storming into the room. “I gave very clear instructions. You need rest. No visitors.”
Roxie swiveled around in her chair. “Bugger off,” she said firmly. “I’m her daughter and I’m not going anywhere.”
“Oh, yes you are, young lady.”
Watching the two of them argue, Alexia felt suffused with happiness.
Her daughter had come back to her.
Nothing, absolutely nothing else mattered anymore.
Chapter Twenty-nine
The mechanic looked at the mangled Ducati Panigale and shook his head sadly.
“That’s a shame, that is. A real shame. Beautiful bike.”
Summer begged to differ. As far as she was concerned, Michael’s bike was the ugliest thing she’d ever seen, a hideous, lethal weapon.
Armed with the ownership papers that Teddy had given her, Summer had convinced the Oxfordshire police to release what was left of the motorbike into her care. No tests had been done on it. As far as the police were concerned, Michael De Vere’s accident was just that: an accident, not a crime to be investigated. As such, the bike wasn’t evidence, it was simply private property. His girlfriend was welcome to it.
In full investigative journalist mode, Summer chipped away at every possible angle, determined to uncover Michael’s “secret” and what relation it might bear to his accident. With this in mind, she’d hired a van, dumped the bike’s twisted hulk in the back with the help of a neighbor, and driven down to East London at the crack of dawn. According to the Internet reviews, St. Martin’s Garage and Body Shop in Walthamstow was the top Ducati specialist in the country. Certainly the young man in front of Summer now seemed to know what he was talking about, earnestly informing her about belt drives and cylinder heads and twist-and-go transmissions as he ran his hands lovingly over the Panigale’s scraped red chassis.
“It’s not salvageable, I’m afraid. I mean, technically we could rebuild it. But it’d be more new parts than old and it’d cost a fortune.”
“What if I needed you to look at individual parts for me?”
“Such as?”
“I don’t know. The steering. The brakes. If
there were a technical fault of some kind, would you be able to find it? Or is it too far gone for that?”
The mechanic looked up at the gorgeous girl in front of him. Not many of St. Martin’s clients looked like Summer Meyer, with those endless legs and that glossy mane of hair, like polished wood, rippling down her back. But there was something else about the girl, a steely determination in her eyes and the jut of her jaw that he hadn’t noticed when she walked in. It was seriously sexy.
“I won’t know for sure till I take her apart,” he said. “But if there was a fault with the bike, then yeah, I reckon I’d clock it.” He hoped he was impressing her. “I know these bikes like the back of me ’and.”
“And how long might that take? Roughly.”
“Come back at six and I should have some answers for you. I gotta tell you, though, these bikes are beautifully made. I’d be surprised if you find anything wrong with her.”
Summer left her car in the garage forecourt—it was impossible to park in central London, so she might as well keep it here—and took the tube to Sloane Square. If the bike wouldn’t be ready till six, it made sense to stay the night in town and head back up to Oxford tomorrow.
Everywhere she went, people were talking about the attempt on Alexia De Vere’s life. Pictures of Gilbert Drake, the man who’d shot her, were on the front page of every newspaper, and updates on the home secretary’s condition remained the lead item on every radio station’s news. Summer had watched the thing happen live on television. Sitting at Michael’s bedside, she’d even seen the glint of Drake’s gun before he fired the shot. She wanted to call Teddy immediately, then realized this might be seen as an intrusion. Besides, with her mother calling her every five minutes for updates on Alexia’s condition, she barely had time.
Now that she was up in London, however, and a few days had passed, she probably should give Teddy a call. She checked into the Orange, a pretty pub-cum-hotel on Pimlico Road and had a long soak in the Victorian copper bath before lying down on the bed with her phone. Her first call was to the John Radcliffe to check on Michael. (No change.) Then, steeling her nerves, she dialed Teddy De Vere’s number.
