She faced him in anger, but the anger was more to mask her own horror and pity. Pity he didn't want, couldn't use. Horror -- she spared a glance at the plethora of small plastic medicine bottles he'd flung on top of the dresser mere moments before -- horror he didn't need more of at this point.

"How could you?" she demanded. "He's been searching and searching his whole life and you just sit here in this overstuffed mausoleum, pat him on the arm, call him `my boy' and say absolutely nothing he really needs to hear! How can you do that?"

The elegant silver head bowed briefly and a sigh escaped Daniel Chalmers lips. "My dear, I hardly have the words to explain."

"You have enough words to tell me that the man I've known for four years as Remington Steele is your son, your own flesh and blood, but you don't have the words to explain why you've never told him about it?" She managed an almost-convincing sneer. "Somehow I'm not buying this one. You're slipping, Mr. Chalmers. You're losing your touch."

"Perhaps I am, my dear. But what am I to do about it at this late date?"

Something in his eyes wormed it's way into her. They were a clear blue, like his son's (and why hadn't she ever notice that before, she wondered), and there was a pain in them so deep she was afraid to look too long for fear of getting lost.

"You could start by telling me about it," she said softly. He looked started, as if her gentle tones were the last thing he'd expected. Which, she admitted to herself, they probably were. Her relationship with Daniel Chalmers had always been adversarial. Perhaps it was too late to change that. But a slight tremor in his elegant hands and a swiftly-muffled cough said that, while it was indeed too late for many things, if any moment could be seized, it would have to be now.

"Please? If you could manage to explain it to me, it might make it easier to deal with . . . your son . . . later. You'll have to deal with him on some level at this point, won't you?" She forced herself to face those anguished eyes. "You wouldn't just leave him behind, without a word of goodbye, would you? Too many people have done that to him already. He couldn't bear it if you did as well."

This time his bowed head was a sign of submission. "Very well, my dear." He looked up and a small, impish twinkle shone deep in his eyes. "But what do you say we get out of this `overstuffed mausoleum' for a bit, grab ourselves some fresh air? A walk would do us both good!"

So she found herself strolling across an expanse of green velvet lawn, arm-in-arm with a distinguished older gentleman, just two dear friends, out for a breath of air, nothing simpler in all the world.

"You can start anytime now," she said with a hint of asperity when he'd been silent for at least 10 minutes.

"Yes, of course. But where to begin, I wonder? My life? His? His mother's? There's so much and I don't honestly know how much I really want to get into with you at this point."

Laura perked up. "His mother? You could tell me about her."

"No my dear," he said with pleasant finality. "I couldn't do that at all, I'm afraid. We'll have to begin somewhere else, I think. Let me see, you need to understand why I've never told Harry the truth about myself. Perhaps it's best if I explained our rather unique relationship. From the beginning of course."

"Of course." She watched his eyes scan the few clouds in the sky, searching for the words to begin and wondered how much of what she would hear would be the actual truth and how much would be pure fabrication. Well, she'd dropped her dime, now she could just take her chances.

"I first met Harry as a young lad. He wasn't much more than twelve, but tall for his age and quick. Both in physical speed and in intelligence. Perhaps you'll think it's just a fond parent's wishful thinking, but Harry was a decidedly unusual young man, given how he'd lived up until that point." Daniel Chalmers' voice had taken on a storyteller's cadence and Laura found herself hanging on every word.

"I'd been looking for the lad for years, you understand. I'd known about his birth, but hadn't been in any position to do a thing about it. His mother died shortly after he was born and by the time I was able to make inquiries, the child had been whisked off into the murky depths of the `system' and, of course, all the records were sealed."

"Did you tell them you were his father?"

"Times were different back then, my dear. And the boy was already placed out. And there were, shall we say, extenuating circumstances, which I will not go into at this point. So I went away with my tail between my legs and crawled into a bottle for awhile. But I'm not really the wastrel type, it seems, so it was a short-lived debauch and when it was done I decided to hell with the system."

"What did you do?"

"I set out to find the lad on my own. Damn fool notion, of course. Hadn't the least idea how to go about it. Still, I had a bit of luck here and there and eventually I picked up something of a trail."

"How?"

"Well, I'd like to claim special gifts and vast intelligence, but the plain fact is, the agency he'd been placed with came under a good deal of official scrutiny a few years down the road. The child had been born in a small hospital in Wales and the agency was supposed to place its children in Wales. Or, at the very least, in England. But over half of their charges were sent off to Ireland, to the farm areas, where a child who could be trained to work was of some value. As I said, it was a different era back then, but still, once the official sectors took some notice of what was happening, the situation changed."

"I didn't know you were Welsh," she said, glancing at him.

"I'm not, nor was Harry's mother. But she was staying with an aunt who was living in that part of the world when she went into labor, so that was where she had the child."

"Oh, I see."

"Do you? Well, be that as it may, I was able to track the youngster through hints given in the news reports and then by word-of-mouth. It wasn't pretty, I'm afraid. As a small child he was passed about through this so-called `system' all the way to hell and back. One home worse than another. And a stint in a `boys home' that turned out to be something out of one of Charles Dickens' worst nightmares. Harry's told me, from time to time, about some of his childhood experiences, but that place he won't bear mention of. I shudder to think what happened to him there."

"Was this still in Ireland?"

"Yes, though that particular hellhole is closed now, thankfully. All the lads that survived it were rescued and sent to better places, but Harry'd run off. Turns out he hopped a boat to London. He'd been hoping for America, but he wasn't literate back then and couldn't read well enough to know where he was bound. He wound up at age 10, wandering some of the meanest streets Europe has to offer."

"Brixton?"

"He told you some of it, then, did he?"

"Very little. He mentioned Brixton, but never went into detail. He doesn't seem to relish any of the memories of that time."

"Oh, it wasn't all bad," Daniel said, surprising her. "It was better than his early years in Ireland at any rate. And he fell in first with a fellow I think I would have liked to have met myself. A locksmith. Found the boy rooting about in his dustbin one early morning, took him in for a cup of tea and a cold biscuit and ended up making him a sort of apprentice."

"Is that where he learned to pick locks?"

"And nowhere else. Solomon Mears was the best locksmith in London, if Harry's skills are any indication, but he stayed in Brixton for some unfathomable reason, living on the near-edge of poverty."

"What happened to him?"

"Died of a heart attack. Harry'd been with him almost a year at that point and it was a crushing blow to the lad. He'd nowhere to turn at that point. He had the skills of a locksmith, but he was only eleven. No one would take him seriously. Or take him in. Brixton was, and still is, a hard place filled with hard people. It's no place for a child down on his luck. Unless it's a bright child, like Harry. He'd taught himself to read a little by that point and he'd been around enough to know that, in order to survive, he'd had to live by his wits and his fists. So he did."

"But how did he manage?"

"Oh a con here, a pilfer there. A scrap or two along the way, for turf or peace of mind or rights to an abandoned building for a night. He began to think of himself as a tough little number." Daniel let out a short, barking laugh that metamorphosed into a hacking cough. Laura patted him uselessly on the back until he'd recovered sufficiently to continue.

"Tough? The boy was a walking skeleton, animated by adrenaline and not much more. A rare feast was a packet of fish and chips nicked from a streetcorner stall, and if he came across that much more than once every three months or so it was a miracle. He was thin and filthy and half-sick almost constantly. It's a wonder he stayed alive at all. I believe it was pure willpower that got him through that portion of his life. I can't think of a single mitigating circumstance that helped him in the slightest."

"Not even you?" she asked, one eyebrow cocked inquisitively. This drew a laugh.

"You learned that eyebrow trick from Harry, didn't you?" She had to laugh herself and nodded.

"It drives him crazy when I do it."

"Drives me crazy when he does it to me," Daniel told her, "so good for you. The little bugger picked it up from me in the first place."

"How did you finally find him?"

"I'd been searching for so long and refusing to give up, tracking every lead, following every rumor of every boy that seemed even remotely likely. And in the end, it was pure dumb luck and nothing else."

She waited patiently as a coughing spasm shook him again. Finally, he straightened and continued.

"I was meeting a friend that day. You heard of him, but never had the good fortune to become acquainted before his untimely demise. The Major. Splendid fellow. We'd served together years before, struck up a friendship. He said he had a possible score for us to look into and gave me the address of a pawnshop in Brixton of all places. I wasn't keen on the idea, mind you. Brixton isn't the sort of place I frequented, or would have expected to find a reasonable gain in. But I couldn't let the Major down, so I was on time as expected. Of course, the Major wasn't. Bugger the fellow, he was always late for everything. This once, though, it worked to my advantage."

"What happened?"

"Well, I didn't want to just wander into the place without knowing what the score was or who I was dealing with, so I bought a cheap sheet, one of the scandal rags they sell on the street corner, and lounged around for a bit, pretending to read. But I was bored stiff, quite honestly, and when a scuffle broke out among some lads on the walk opposite me, it was livelier than what was in the paper, so I took an interest."

"I see."

"They were a group of ragged young scoundrels, all tucking into one another and using language that even curled my hair, and I'd seen combat. Still, it was an interesting fight. It was seven and two. Seven vicious little toughs, the worst that benighted neighborhood ever spawned, all pitching into a little bit of a fellow, not much more than eight or nine. I never did quite make out what the ruckus was about. He'd nipped something or other that the other boys had their eye on, or something of that sort. Anyway, the lot of them went for him at one go. It should have been a simple slaughter."

"But it wasn't, was it?"

"No, it seemed the little bloke had acquired an unlikely ally. A tall, thin chap with the scrawniest shanks I've ever seen on an upright, living human being and the cockiest grin ever plastered on a dirty face." His voice faltered and his face flushed briefly. "And his mother's eyes."

For a long moment, they walked along in silence. Finally, Daniel drew out his handkerchief again, coughed into it briefly and ran it over his face.

"Unseasonably warm weather we're having, isn't it?"

Laura agreed, hiding a shiver as a chill breeze struck her. "What happened? Did Harry drive them off?"

Daniel laughed. "No. He might have done, though. He was scrappy enough, I think. He might just have lasted long enough. But one of the shopkeepers in the area had heard enough uproar and had called in the local constabulary. They showed up and the lads scattered to the four winds. You just had to blink and whoosh! There they went. Didn't seem to surprise the local forces, but then, they'd seen it all before, hadn't they?"

"And you followed him."

"Not at all. I couldn't have if I'd wanted to. He was too bloody quick for one thing and then there were the police to consider. A fellow dressed as I was, hanging around outside a Brixton pawnshop? No, I cleared out almost as quick as the lads had. Took me two days to run down the Major and apologize for not being there when he showed up. But he understood, bless him."

"Then how"

"Well, now I knew where the boy was, you see. So it was really a simple matter of dressing down a bit and hanging about in the pubs `till I could catch another glimpse. Lord, I did that for the next several months. Seemed like forever."

"You never saw him?"

"Oh, I saw him all right. I'd catch a glimpse here or there. But blink or turn your head to cough and he'd vanish like the morning's mist. And I never got close enough for proper introductions, so to speak. At least not then. But I did learn, oh, I learned a lot."

"What do you mean?"

"Oh, Brixton's really just like any other place. Gossip runs amuck. Drop the right hints and information just comes flying at you, thick and fast. Seems Harry was a neighborhood fixture. Everybody knew Harry. Only they called him by so many different names. It seemed to depend on the day of the week, the location of the pub and the phase of the moon. Still, from the description, you always knew exactly who they were talking about."

He looked up at the sky, remembering. "He was the local bad boy, angry at the world, never had a good word for anybody. Talked more with his fists than his mouth. Failing that, he was the neighborhood saint, always ready to protect the younger, weaker ones, watch out for the elderly or infirm. He was a smart little shit, always had a ready answer, a clever alibi, a handy excuse. He was a dumb little fart, couldn't read or write, always sneaking into the cinema, would never amount to a damn thing. He was, in short, all things to all people. And he was completely alone."

"Didn't the officials take any notice?"

"In Brixton? My dear, you are a bit naïve, aren't you? The only thing the Brixton officials ever took notice of was whether their graft was paid on time. Beyond that, they could give a fuck."

For a moment, Laura was shocked speechless. The raw profanity coming out of that cultivated mouth was so at odds with what she knew of this polite, urbane man.

"You're bitter about it, aren't you?" she said at last.

"Nothing gets past you, does it, my dear?" He sighed again. "He went through so much hell and none of it was necessary. If even one responsible person had taken the slightest notice, it could all have been so different for him. Should have been different. It's hard to let go of the bitterness, the gall. He doesn't talk about a lot of it, I suppose he never will, but even what little I know makes me bleed inside when I think about it for any length of time. It leaves a bad taste in the mouth. Even after all these years."

"So what happened? How did you find him, hook up with him?"

"I'd got wind that Harry considered himself something of a master cannon. A pickpocket. He wasn't that good, of course, but he was too young to know it. He liked to hang out at the Metro during rush hour, nick a few quid here and there, maybe something shiny he could pawn later. I just made certain I put myself in the right place at the right time with the right bait."

"And you grabbed him when he picked your pocket."

"Not I, my dear. The Major was the one that nabbed the young miscreant. Grabbed him by the back of his scrawny neck and began yelling bloody murder for the police."

"You're kidding! But you didn't have him arrested, of course."

"Oh, but we did. He was summarily handed over to the authorities by the indignant Major whilst I expressed my deepest shock and grave concern. You should have seen the look in those blue eyes of his when they hauled him away. Honestly, it was worse that kicking a puppy. He looked so terribly shocked by it all. He was an altar boy, you see, just there to meet his priest, coming in on the late train, and these nasty-minded gentlemen, well, he rambled on, but they hauled him off anyway."

"You're kidding!"

"Not a bit of it. Later, I went down to the jail and had a peek at the lad. He'd fallen asleep in his cell, dog tired from all the yarns he'd spun, no doubt. He had a fertile imagination, but he was just a child, for all of that. I bailed him out on the spot, of course."

"I'm sure he was very grateful for that at least."

"You'd think so, wouldn't you?"

"He wasn't?"

"The little shit kicked me where it counted and tried running for the hills. Of course, the Major was right there, waiting and between us, we wrestled the young ruffian into a cab and dragged him, kicking and screaming into the very maw of a civilized existence. Oh, it was dreadful of us, I'm sure. We were such vicious brutes."

"Were you?" Laura said, and broke into a helpless laugh. Daniel managed a smile.

"Oh, the worst kind. We kept insisting that he bathe regularly and eat healthy food and use words of more than four letters at a time. We were simply monstrous, that's all, simply monstrous."

It was Daniel's turn to wait for Laura, who was doubled over with laughter. Finally, she straightened and dried her streaming eyes. "He must have been quite a handful. How on earth did you keep him from running off."

"Oh that was simplicity itself."

"It was?"

"Indeed."

"And how was it accomplished?"

"We stole his clothes."

"You what???"

"Well, he wasn't going to get very far starkers, was he? And even wrapped in a bedsheet, he'd have trouble taking a tram. It was really the simplest of solutions."

"You get points for ingenuity, I'll say that much."

"With Harry, you had to have ingenuity or you never got anywhere. It took a long while to tame the young beast. A very long while. But I persevered. You see, I'd gotten the lad talking enough to be absolutely certain that I'd been right about him. His past, the part he'd talk about anyway, exactly matched what I'd learned in all those years of searching. Every name, every place, was the same. I'd finally found my son. I wasn't going to let him slip away that easily."

"Why didn't you just tell him who you were?"

"Oh my dear, you should have heard him talk. You think I'm bitter? You haven't heard bitter. With Harry it had deepened over the years to something between antipathy and pure, blind rage."

"And he blamed you?"

"Well, he knew his mother was dead. Someone must have told him, or it was what he'd decided on to comfort himself when things were worst. Better a dead mother than one who just didn't care. But he was fixated on his missing father. And it wasn't a healthy sort of fixation, either. I think the boy would have given the Marquis de Sade the willies with some of his fantasies. Lord knows, I had a few sleepless nights after listening to him."

"That bad?"

"Well, he was just a boy. And he'd had the roughest of possible lives. He needed to blame someone. It was either me or himself. I suppose, in the long run, it's better that it was me. If he'd blamed himself for all the misery he'd endured, he'd never have survived it at all. Still, it made the idea of telling him who I really was . . ."

"Difficult?"

"Try impossible."

Laura sighed. "But that was so long ago. And you've been together for years. Wasn't there ever a time when you could have risked it?"

"Oh, I suppose there've been many times. Ideal moments, in fact. Some tailor-made for the purpose."

"Then why didn't you?"

It was Daniel's turn to sigh. "Because I'm a selfish, miserable old man. Is that what you want to hear? Well, I suppose it's true in a way. I spent twelve years looking for my son. I spent the next several years just trying to undo some of the damage done. Then, at last he was becoming the man I always dreamed he could be. And, finally, we were friends. Can you understand what that meant to me? He would sit, sometimes, and just talk to me. Tell me his plans, his dreams. Talk about who he wanted to be some day. If I'd told him . . ."

"What?"

"He'd have left. It's that simple. He'd have walked away and never come back. And I'd have lost him. I'd also have lost the last thing that was left of his mother. And damn it, if that makes me a selfish old bastard then so be it. It's what I was. It may be what I still am. And God help me, I may just be too old to change now."

They walked along for several long moments in silence. Laura was lost in thought. How many times had she choked on words that perhaps she, herself, should have spoken for fear of losing her Remington Steele? And how much more difficult it would have been for Daniel to lose the son he'd tried so hard to find. Could she really blame him?

And, more importantly, could she force him now, at what was certainly the end of his life, to change the habits of a lifetime for the sake of a son who might not be as appreciative as they could both wish him to be? Did she have that right?

Did she even have a choice?