“You said if we keep going, as things stand now. What things?”
“You know what things.”
“Charlie. And his mum.” She crossed the room to him. It was so small she was able to do it in two steps. Directly in front of him, she put her hands on his shoulders and gazed into his face. She said, “This is a favour I’m doing for Charlie. It’s something I’d do for any friend. Charlie’s flat is small and he meets his clients there and—”
“You’ve told me. But I can’t see that it makes any difference at the end of the day.”
“—and please take note that without even thinking, darling Nat, I said ‘Charlie’s flat’ and not ‘our flat’ because there is no ‘our’ between me and Charlie. I’m not going to return to him. But after all that’s happened in the last few years with his brother dying and him falling apart and . . . Heavens, Nat, you’ve met his mother. She’d love it if Charlie was never able to stand on his own two feet again. That would give her such power, and I see that in ways I couldn’t see when he and I were together. I see how she always wanted him to fail as a brother, which he did. And she always wanted him to fail as a husband, which he also did. And now she’d love it if he failed in his career as well. He’d be forced, then, to return to Dorset just like his brother. And there she’d get her claws into him once and for all.”
“He’s an adult. It can’t be that bad.”
“It can and it is. If you knew what she reduced me to when he and I were married . . .”
“You are married.”
“Just for now.”
“Right. So I suppose what I’m trying to say is that when things change for you, India—”
“No! You’re not hearing me and I insist that you hear me. If taking Caroline in for a few days helps Charlie stay the course, I can’t say no to that. But it doesn’t mean . . . I don’t want you ever to think it means . . .” She felt the heat of tears at the back of her eyes, but she was determined not to cry. How humiliating, she thought. Like being a schoolgirl whose boyfriend is attempting to rid himself of her. What did he really want her to say? she asked herself. What sort of promise did he need her to make him? She finally settled on, “I can’t bear your walking out of my life, not when it seems I’ve only just found you.”
He closed his eyes briefly. He opened them. He lifted his hand, and his fingers passed so gently over her hair that she could barely feel his touch. He said, “I want you to be that fixed point I’m heading towards.”
“I am,” she said. “I’m as much yours as anything can make me in the present moment and nothing will change that. I’m whole with you, I’m alive with you, I’m the woman I want to be with you and only with you.”
He pulled her to him. He kissed her and she matched his passion with her own. “Yes,” he murmured. “It’s the same for me.”
Had they been in some other location, she would have undressed him, so badly did she want to prove to him that she was his. But here in this filthy place it seemed that lovemaking of the kind she had in mind would be a form of sacrilege that she couldn’t admit into what she shared with Nat. But then his hands moved across her body, relieving her of buttons and enclosures and lifting her skirt even as she reached blindly for him and the zipper to his trousers for suddenly the where of it didn’t matter at all.
Unexpected footsteps outside hurried along the path between the two sets of cottages. And then, “India? Are you here?”
She and Nat were simultaneously motionless.
“India?”
God in heaven, she thought. Charlie. But how . . . ? And in an instant she not only knew but actually saw it all play out in her mind’s eye: Herself in the shower and Caroline using those moments to tiptoe into the second bedroom where India had been sleeping on the sofa that defined the space as a sitting room and office; Caroline quickly going through India’s mobile phone to check for messages and make note of anything and everything she could use to do damage; Caroline reading the text from Nat and learning from it and from India’s answer where she would be and at what time; Caroline reporting it all to Charlie but in such a way that he felt he had to dash over from Leyden Street in order to . . . what? Who knew? India only knew that he was there, just outside, striding down the pavement with worry in his voice.
Nat said, “What the hell . . . ?” and released her. Quickly he sorted out his clothing. She wanted to say, “No, don’t. We must move forward,” as if lovemaking in a derelict cottage under renovation would mean some sort of commitment to him that Charlie’s presence couldn’t obviate.
“India? Are you here?”
She held her breath. Surely he wouldn’t rattle the door handles or try to enter any of the cottages. She hadn’t come in her car, so all they needed to do was to wait in silence until he departed.
But Nat wasn’t having any of that. He said, “Your clothes . . . ?” in a way that indicated to her she was meant to straighten them as he had done to his, and ever the obedient child when ordered to be one, she did as he asked. She buttoned and tucked, and soon enough Nat opened the cottage door and went outside and what could she do but follow him?
Charlie was at the far end of the row of cottages and he’d just turned to retrace his steps when India, on Nat’s tail, stepped into the unkempt front garden of the dwelling Nat had showed her. Charlie stopped at once. His face altered, and in its alteration India knew at once that he had been his mother’s dupe. She wanted to call out “What did she actually tell you, Charlie?” but she reckoned she could work it out well enough: Darling, India’s gone into a worrying area this afternoon and I’m terribly concerned about the nature of this place. Don’t even ask me why she’s doing it, but apparently she’s paying a call on someone in a neighbourhood worse than where Will and that wretched Lily lived. I think it’s so very unwise of her and I’ve tried to tell her that alone at the time of day she intends to visit . . . Anything could happen to her. You see that, don’t you?
He had seen that and here he’d come, ending up being confronted not only by India but also by her lover. Or her erstwhile lover. Or whatever he was because Nat was saying to her quietly, “We must speak later,” and before she could tell him to stay or insist that he remain at her side or use some sort of wily female act at which she was so miserable anyway . . . he was gone. He said nothing to Charlie and did not acknowledge him with so much as a nod. He strode in the direction of Hunton Street where earlier she had seen his car.
“What did she tell you?” India asked Charlie. “And did she mention that she went through my mobile? Because that’s the only way she would have known where I was. And let me ask you this: Do you think that’s even remotely acceptable?”
Charlie came to her and she could see from his face that he felt no triumph at his successful interruption of her time with Nat, but only misery. He knew very well that his mother had manoeuvred him into this jaunt, and he hated this fact as much as did India. Still, he said, “I can’t be angry with her.”
India ran her hands back through her hair, felt its tangles from Nat’s caresses. She said, “Oh for God’s sake. What’s it going to take?”
“How can I be angry when she wants what she assumes is the best for me?”
“So it’s appropriate for her to lie to you? For her to invade my privacy in order to manufacture something designed to move you? This is all fine?”
“Of course it’s not fine.” Charlie indicated that she was to join him on the path and when she’d done so automatically, he began to walk in the direction Nat had taken. She followed him as the only course of action available at this point. He said, “I’m offended that she lied to me but I’m not offended at her intentions because they’re the same as mine. I want my wife back. I want my life back. Mum knows this and she wants to help me make that happen. Her approach is clumsy and stupid. This entire situation is clumsy and stupid. D’you think I actually wanted to stumble on you and him
? To interrupt . . . whatever it was.”
“She wanted you to stumble upon us. She knew I was meeting him. God knows what she thought was going to happen between us in a building site but whatever she thought, she wanted you to be here to witness it. That’s cruel, Charlie, and if you don’t see that, I don’t know what will ever make you understand that your mother—”
“I understand,” he said sharply. “All right? I understand. Her. You. Nat. This entire bloody situation. What you two were up to when I came on the scene just now. I understand that. Perfectly.”
India felt like a balloon with the air released in one fell swoop. She so much longed for Nat to be there, for the taste of him and the touch of him and the blessedly wonderful normal of him. She said to her husband, “I can’t do this. I’m bringing her back to you tonight.” She looked at her watch and evaluated how long it all would take: the trip to Camberwell, packing up Caroline, returning her to Charlie. She reckoned she could have her at the flat by eight o’clock and that was what she told her husband.
He said, “India, you know I have obligations.”
She said, “Then put her up at a hotel. You should have done that from the first. I should have insisted. I’m finished with this business.”
“Give me till tomorrow. I’ll get on the phone with Alastair and convince him to come to—”
“This is all about Alastair when it’s not about you,” India argued. “She’s run off from him in a ploy to get him away from Sharon and to get herself into London where she can mix herself into our lives. Which she’s doing quite well. I want her gone. I don’t care how you manage it but I want it to happen. Tonight.”
“I’ve the suicide hotline tonight, India.”
“Skip it.”
“You know that I can’t.”
“What time do you finish, then? I’ll have her packed and waiting by the front door. I’ll ring a taxi. I’ll hire a car and driver. Whatever it takes because I’ve reached my limit.”
He rubbed his brow, fingers so hard against his flesh that his nails turned pure white, speckled with small, angry blotches of red. “I’m on till two A.M., India. What would you have me do? Shall I come for her then?” He waited for her to see the impossibility of what she was demanding. After a moment, he went on. “Let me drive you home. Let’s find some takeaway and have a meal with her before I go to the hotline. I have time for that. I’ll have a word with her. Then tomorrow, I’ll arrange for her to return to Shaftesbury. I’ll phone Alastair, I’ll put her on a train, or I’ll drive her down myself. You have my promise. If you’ll just keep her with you one more night.”
“I don’t want—”
“I know. And after this”—he gestured at the line of cottages—“I quite understand. I’m sorry for what happened. I should have suspected or at least wondered, but I didn’t. And believe me, I intend to speak with her at some length about what she’s manufactured here between us.”
India wondered about that. It seemed to her that one could speak and speak and speak to Caroline, and never did it make the slightest difference in whatever her intentions were. But she had Charlie’s promise and it was only for a night and he would make certain his mother knew how deep his displeasure ran when it came to what she’d done to him this day.
She said, “All right, then. But she’s gone tomorrow.”
He nodded. “Thank you,” he said. And then casually, “You’ve entirely misbuttoned your blouse, by the way. And I’m afraid you’ve somehow lost an earring as well.”
VICTORIA
LONDON
“Do you know what the hell time it is, whoever you are?” told Lynley that he’d probably awakened the man from sleep. He hadn’t a clue what time it was in Wellington, New Zealand, and having tracked Adam Sheridan down in the antipodes after spending considerable effort on the task, he’d rung the B & B that Sheridan and his wife operated in that town without dwelling upon the time change at all.
He said, “I beg your pardon, Mr. Sheridan. This is Adam Sheridan, isn’t it?”
“And who the hell am I speaking to?”
Lynley thought it was a strange way for the owner of a B & B to talk, no matter the hour of the day, since he could have been a potential customer ringing with an enquiry about a lengthy stay at Bay View Lodge. Nonetheless, he identified himself mildly to the man, who then said, “Scotland Yard? At . . . five in the morning . . .” And in the background a woman’s voice spoke, to which the man said in reply, “I don’t bloody know, do I?” and then into the phone to Lynley, “What’s this about?”
“A woman called Caroline Goldacre,” Lynley told him, “although you would have known her as Caroline Garza.”
There was a silence. Lynley could picture the man sorting through this bit of information as he swung himself to the side of the bed where his slippers lay with his dressing gown in a jumble on the floor. He would put them on—the dressing gown as well—and he would leave the bedroom to take their conversation elsewhere. He wouldn’t want his wife to hear what he had to say, Lynley reckoned. It wasn’t going to be a pretty story.
He said, “Are you still there, Mr. Sheridan?”
“Yeah. Hang on.”
A bit more silence, although this time it was broken by breathing whose stertorous nature suggested a life of heavy smoking or asthma or both. When after thirty seconds, Sheridan still hadn’t spoken again, Lynley said again, “Mr. Sheridan? Are you still there?”
“Yeah, yeah. Right. I c’n talk now. Shit. Raining. Wait. Let me . . .”
Finally the man situated himself both out of earshot and out of the rain. He said, “That’s a name I never expected to hear again. What’s this about then? What’s she done?”
Lynley wasn’t entirely surprised by the question since a phone call from New Scotland Yard at five in the morning did suggest that something untoward had occurred. But it was interesting that the man asked what Caroline Garza had done and not what might have happened to her.
Lynley told him that he was ringing to confirm the history that Sheridan shared with Caroline, one revealed to him by Mercedes Garza. He went directly to the heart of the matter: pregnancy, childbirth, adoption, and blackmail. Interestingly and contrary to what Mercedes Garza had told him about her confrontation with the man all those years ago, Sheridan did not deny any of it.
“A childminder. That’s what she was, more or less. She was a mate of our Rosie and what the wife and I thought was that, while Rosie was a bit too immature to mind the younger ones on her own when the wife and I went out, she and Caroline together might do quite well and save us money at the same time.”
His wife had thought at first that both of the girls were too young, Sheridan explained, but as Caroline seemed mature for her age in comparison to Rosie, they decided to give the plan a go. They liked their date nights—“Important to the relationship was how the wife put it.” Sheridan said, “and I was happy to go along with it because we had four kids, and most days and nights we hadn’t the time or energy to say a word to each other”—and this looked a good way to have those nights more regularly than they would have been able to do had they been forced to pay an adult minder.
Caroline would generally spend the night with Rosie but occasionally—“early-morning dance lessons or something . . . can’t remember and don’t want to, frankly”—Sheridan would drive the girl home. It was on one of the drives that things heated up between them.
“She’d been giving me messages all along that I should’ve ignored,” Sheridan said. “But instead, like the bloody fool I was—in my thirties, this was, and overrun with testosterone—I crossed a line with her.”
“Perhaps more than one line,” Lynley noted.
“Yeah. Right. I admit to that. I was the adult. I was the responsible party. But I swear to you by all that’s holy and on my dead mother’s grave that she was . . . It was like she was in season. Look, I don’
t really want to talk about this. It’s in the past and I paid.”
“You’ve served time? Her mother indicated that—”
Sheridan barked a laugh. “That would’ve been easier, believe me. No. I wasn’t stitched up for anything, was I? No word given to the coppers and all that. I denied everything when the girl’s mum confronted me and she let it all go for some reason. But I lost my wife and I lost my kids and to this day the kids’ll have nothing to do with me. Won’t even answer a Christmas card from me and their stepmum, will they. They’ve never met her. And all this despite the fact that I paid that little tart—”
“I understand she was fourteen years old, Mr. Sheridan,” Lynley cut in.
“That gash was never fourteen years old, Inspector. So yes, we had relations, her and me, with all the while her telling me she’s on the pill. Then she comes up pregnant. I start paying her to hold her tongue about who got her that way—I’m not proud of any of this, it sickens me to tell you, you understand?—and her mum somehow uncovers it all. She puts a stop to my paying the girl but the girl herself . . . ? She goes ahead and tells my wife. And I don’t blame her a bit for walking out on me and taking the kids with her because I deserved it. And to this day, Inspector, I don’t know if there was a baby at all or if the girl was lying to get money off me.”
“There was a baby,” Lynley told him. “She’s long gone and the adoption was sealed.”
“So there’s an end to it. But you’ve not answered me. What’s she done? Why’re you ringing me about her?”
“Caroline? We think someone may have tried to kill her.”
Adam Sheridan said, “Tried? You mean without success?”
“That’s correct.”
“Bloody too bad, that. And what? You’re thinking it might’ve been me? Trotting up there from Wellington with blood on my mind?”
“We’re following every possible lead.”
“You can cross me off the list, then. I haven’t left New Zealand for fifteen years. Check if you like. I expect you lot can do that easy enough these days.”