“What?”
“This way of avoiding the central issue.”
“Which is?”
“What I don’t want to be.”
“My wife.”
“No. Lord Asherton’s little dolly bird. Detective Inspector Lynley’s hot new piece. The cause of a little wink and a smirk between you and Denton when he sets out your breakfast or brings you your tea.”
“Fine. Understandable. Then marry me. I’ve wanted that for the last twelve months and I want it now. If you’ll agree to legitimatising this affair in the conventional manner—which is what I’ve proposed from the first and you know it—then you’ll hardly have to concern yourself with idle gossip and potential derogation.”
“It’s not as easy as that. Idle gossip’s not even the point.”
“You don’t love me?”
“Of course I love you. You know that I love you.”
“Then?”
“I won’t be made an object. I won’t.”
He nodded slowly. “And you’ve felt like an object these past two months? When we’ve been together? Last night perhaps?”
Her glance faltered. He saw her fingers close round the handle of the brush. “No. Of course not.”
“But this morning?”
She blinked. “God, how I hate to argue with you.”
“We’re not arguing, Helen.”
“You’re trying to trap me.”
“I’m trying to look at the truth.” He wanted to run his fingers the length of her hair, turn her to him, cup her face in his hands. He settled for resting his hands on her shoulders. “If we can’t live with each other’s past, then we have no future. That’s the real bottom line no matter what else you claim it to be. I can live with your past: St. James, Cusick, Rhys Davies-Jones, and whomever else you’ve slept with for a night or a year. The question is: Can you live with mine? Because that’s really what this is all about. It has nothing to do with how I feel about women.”
“It has everything to do with it.”
He heard the intensity in her tone and saw the resignation on her face. He turned her to him then, understanding and mourning the fact at once. “Oh God, Helen,” he sighed. “I haven’t had another woman. I haven’t even wanted one.”
“I know,” she said, resting her head against him. “Why doesn’t that help?”
After reading it, Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers crumpled up the second page of Chief Superintendent Sir David Hillier’s lengthy memorandum, rolled it into a ball, and lobbed it neatly across the width of Inspector Lynley’s office, where it joined the previous page in the rubbish bin which she’d placed, for a bit of an athletic challenge, next to the door. She yawned, rubbed her fingers vigorously against her scalp, rested her head on her fist, and continued reading. “Pope Davy’s Encyclical on Keeping Yer Nose Clean,” MacPherson had called the memorandum sotto voce in the officers’ mess.
Everyone agreed that they had better things to do than to read Hillier’s epistle on the Serious Obligations Of The National Police Force When Investigating A Case With Possible Connection To The Irish Republican Army. While they all recognised that Hillier was taking his inspiration from the release of the Birmingham Six—and while few of them had any sympathy for those members of the West Midlands police force who had been the focus of Her Majesty’s Investigation as a result—the fact remained that they were far too burdened by their individual workloads to spend time committing to memory their Chief Superintendent’s prescriptive treatise.
Barbara, however, wasn’t currently floundering in the middle of half a dozen cases, as were some of her colleagues. Rather, she was engaged in experiencing a long-anticipated two-week holiday. During this time, she had planned to work on her childhood home in Acton, preparing to hand it over to an estate agent and move herself to a tiny studio-cum-cottage she’d managed to find in Chalk Farm, tucked behind a large Edwardian house in Eton Villas. The house itself had been subdivided into four flats and a spacious ground floor bed-sit, none of which were within Barbara’s limited budget. But the cottage, sitting in the rear of the garden beneath a false acacia tree, was practically too small for anyone but a dwarf to live in comfortably. And while Barbara was not a dwarf, her living aspirations were definitely dwarfish: She did not look to entertain visitors, she did not anticipate marriage and family, she worked long hours and simply needed a place to lay her head at night. The cottage would do.
She had signed the lease with no little excitement. This would be the first home she had had away from Acton in the last twenty of her thirty-three years. She thought of how she would decorate it, where she would buy her furniture, what photographs and prints she would hang on the walls. She went to a garden centre and looked at plants, making note of what grew well in window boxes and what needed sun. She paced the length of the cottage and then the width, she measured the windows and examined the door. And she returned to Acton with her mind awash with plans and ideas, all of which seemed unrealistic and impossible to attain when she was confronted with the amount of work that needed to be done to her family’s home.
Interior painting, exterior repairs, replacing wallpaper, refinishing woodwork, extirpating an entire rear garden of weeds, cleaning old carpets…the list seemed endless. And beyond the fact that she was only one person attempting to see to the renovation of a house that had gone uncared for since she’d left secondary school—which was depressing enough in and of itself—there was the vague sense of unease that she felt each time a project was actually completed.
At issue was her mother. For the past two months, she had been living in Greenford, some distance out of London on the Central line. She’d made the adjustment to Hawthorn Lodge fairly well, but Barbara still wondered how much she would be tempting fate if she sold the old house in Acton and set herself up in a more desirable neighbourhood, in an intriguingly bohemian little cottage that wore the label new life—enter hopes and dreams, in which her mother would have no real place. For wasn’t she doing more than merely selling an overlarge house in order to finance what might be her mother’s lengthy stay in Greenford? Indeed, wasn’t the very idea of selling the house in order to do that merely a blind for her own selfishness? Or were these occasional twinges of conscience that accompanied her pursuit of freedom really nothing more than a convenient focal point for her attention so that she didn’t have to face what lay beneath them?
You have your own life, she’d been telling herself stoutly more than a dozen times each day. There’s no crime in getting on with it, Barbara. But it felt like a crime, when the project itself didn’t feel more overwhelming than she could bear. She fluctuated among making lists of everything that needed to be done, despairing that she would be able to do it, and fearing the day when the work was completed and the house was sold and she was finally on her own.
In her rare introspective moments, Barbara admitted that the house gave her something to cling to, a last vestige of security in a world in which she no longer had relations into whom she could sink even the slightest hook of emotional dependence. No matter that she had not been able to sink a hook into any relation’s empathy or reliability for years—her father’s lingering illness and her mother’s mental deterioration had long precluded that—living in the same old house in the same old neighbourhood at least bore the appearance of security. To give it up and forge ahead into the unknown…Sometimes Acton seemed infinitely preferable.
There are no easy answers, Inspector Lynley would have said, there’s only living through the questions. But the thought of Lynley made Barbara shift restlessly in his desk chair and force herself to read the first paragraph on the third page of Hillier’s memorandum.
The words meant nothing. She couldn’t concentrate. Having inadvertently conjured up the presence of her superior officer, she was going to have to deal with him.
How to do so? She squirmed, lay the memorandum down among the various reports and folders that were stacking up during his absence, and sank her hand into h
er shoulder bag in search of her cigarettes. She lit one and blew smoke at the ceiling, eyes narrowed against the smoke’s acrid sting.
She was in Lynley’s debt. He would deny it, naturally, no doubt with an expression of such bemusement that she would momentarily distrust her own deductions. But scanty as they were, she had the facts, and she didn’t much like the position in which they placed her. How to repay him when he would never allow it as long as their circumstances were so imbalanced? He would never begin to entertain the word debt as a given between them.
Damn him, she thought, he sees too much, he knows too much, he’s too flaming clever to get caught in the act. She swivelled the chair to face a cabinet on top of which sat a picture of Lynley and Lady Helen Clyde. She scowled at him.
“Get knotted,” she said, flicking ash to the floor. “Stay out of my life, Inspector.”
“Now, Sergeant? Or will later do as well?”
Barbara spun round quickly. Lynley stood in the doorway, his cashmere overcoat slung over one shoulder and Dorothea Harriman—their divisional superintendent’s secretary—bobbing up and down behind him. Sorry, Harriman mouthed at Barbara with wildly exaggerated and decidedly apologetic movements of her arms, I didn’t see him coming. I couldn’t warn you. When Lynley glanced over his shoulder, Harriman waggled her fingers, smiled brilliantly at him, and disappeared in a blaze of heavily lacquered blonde hair.
Barbara got to her feet at once. “You’re on holiday,” she said.
“As are you.”
“So what’re you…?”
“What are you?”
She dragged long on her cigarette. “Thought I’d stop by. I was in the area.”
“Ah.”
“You?”
“The same.” He entered and hung his coat on the rack. Unlike herself, who had at least kept up the I’m-on-holiday pretence by coming to the Yard wearing blue jeans and a tatty sweat shirt across which had been stencilled Buy British, By George beneath a faded depiction of that saint making hash of an extremely dispirited-looking dragon, Barbara saw that Lynley was dressed for work in his customary fashion: three-piece suit, crisp shirt, silk maroon tie, with the ubiquitous watch chain looped across his waistcoat. He went to his desk—the immediate vicinity of which she quickly vacated—favoured the smouldering tip of her cigarette with a look of displeasure as he passed her, and began sorting through the folders, reports, envelopes, and numerous departmental directives. “What’s this?” he asked, holding up the remaining eight pages of the memorandum which Barbara had been reading.
“Hillier’s thoughts on working with the IRA.”
He patted his jacket pocket, brought out his spectacles, and ran his eyes down the page. “Odd. Is Hillier losing his touch? It appears to start in the middle,” he noted.
Sheepishly, she reached into the rubbish and rescued the two top pages which she smoothed out against her chunky thigh and handed to him, dropping cigarette ash on the cuff of his suit jacket in the process.
“Havers…” His voice was patience itself.
“Sorry.” She flicked the ash off. A spot of it remained. She rubbed it into the material. “Good for it,” she said. “Old wives’ tale.”
“Put out that blasted thing, will you?”
She sighed and squashed the remaining stub of tobacco against the heel of her left plimsoll. She flicked the butt in the direction of the rubbish bin, but it missed its mark and landed on the floor. Lynley lifted his head from Hillier’s memorandum, observed the butt over the tops of his spectacles, and raised a single, querying eyebrow.
“Sorry,” Havers said and went to place the offending article in the rubbish. She returned the bin to its original position at the side of his desk. He murmured his thanks. She plopped onto one of the visitor chairs and began to worry an incipient hole in the right knee of her jeans. She stole a look or two at him while he continued to read.
He appeared perfectly refreshed and entirely untroubled. His blond hair lay neatly against his head in its usual well-scissored fashion—she’d always wanted to know who saw to the miraculous cutting that produced the effect of its never growing so much as a millimetre beyond an established length—his brown eyes were clear, no circles darkened the skin beneath them, no new lines of fatigue or worry had joined the age lines on his brow. But the fact remained that he was supposed to be on a holiday that had long been arranged with Lady Helen Clyde. They were off to Corfu. They were supposed to be leaving, in fact, at eleven. But it was now a quarter past ten, and unless the Inspector was planning on a trip to Heathrow via helicopter within the next ten minutes, he wasn’t going anywhere. At least not to Greece. At least not today.
“So,” she said breezily, “is Helen with you, sir? Did she stop to chat up MacPherson in the mess?”
“No to both.” He continued reading. He’d just concluded the third page of the tract, and he was balling it up as she had done with the first two, although in his case, the action appeared to be unconscious, merely something to do with his hands. He’d made it a full year off the evil weed, but there were times when his fingers seemed to need something to do in place of holding the cigarette he’d been used to.
“She’s not ill? I mean, weren’t you two heading off to—”
“We were supposed to, yes. Plans change sometimes.” He looked at her over the rims of his spectacles. It was one of his now-that-we’re-getting-down-to-it looks. “And what about your plans, Sergeant? Have they changed as well?”
“Just taking a break. You know how it is. Work, work, work and a girl’s hands just start to look like dead lobsters. I’m giving them a rest.”
“I see.”
“Not that I need to give them a rest from painting.”
“What?”
“Painting. You know. The interior of the house. Three blokes showed up at my place two days ago. Contractors, they were. Had a deal all drawn up and signed to paint the inside of my house. Odd, that was, you know, because I hadn’t called a contractor. Odder still when you think the job had been paid for in advance.”
Lynley frowned and placed the memorandum on top of a bound PSI report on the relationship between civilians and police in London. “Decidedly odd,” he said. “You’re certain they were at the right house.”
“Dead certain,” she said. “One hundred percent certain. They even knew my name. They even called me sergeant. They even asked what it was like for a woman to work in CID. Chatty blokes, they were. But I did wonder how they could ever have known I work here at the Met.”
As expected, Lynley’s face was a study in wonderment. She half-expected him to go all Miranda on her, exclaiming on the braveness and newness of a world they both knew to be generally corrupt and largely hopeless. “And you read the contract? You made certain they were in the right place?”
“Oh yes. And they were bloody good, sir, the lot of them. Two days and the house was painted like new.”
“How intriguing.” He went back to the report.
She let him read for the amount of time it took her to count from one to one hundred. Then, “Sir.”
“Hmm.”
“What’d you pay them?”
“Whom?”
“The painters.”
“What painters?”
“Give over, Inspector. You know what I’m talking about.”
“The chaps who painted your house?”
“What’d you pay them? Because I know you did, don’t bother to lie about it. Besides you, only MacPherson, Stewart, and Hale know that I’m working on the place during my holiday, and they can’t exactly put their hands on the kind of lolly we’re talking about to do this job. So what’d you pay them and how much time do I have to pay you back?”
Lynley set the report aside and allowed his fingers to play with his watch chain. They removed the watch from his pocket, flipped it open, and he made a show of examining the time.
“I don’t want your bleeding charity,” she said. “I don’t want to feel like anyone’s pet projec
t. I don’t want to owe.”
“It does make demands on one, owing,” he said. “One always ends up putting the debt onto a scale in which future behaviours are weighed. How can I lash out in anger when I owe him something? How can I go my own way without discussion when I’m in his debt? How can I maintain a safe businesslike distance from the rest of the world if I have a connection somewhere?”
“Owing money isn’t a connection, sir.”
“No. But gratitude generally is.”
“So you were buying me? Is that it?”
“Assuming I had anything to do with it in the first place—which, I feel compelled to warn you, is not an inference that will be supported by any evidence you may attempt to glean—I generally don’t purchase my friendships, Sergeant.”
“Which is your way of saying that you paid them cash, and you probably paid them a bonus as well to keep their mouths shut.” She leaned forward, slapping her hand lightly against his desk. “I don’t want your help, sir, not in this way. I don’t want anything from you that I can’t return. And besides…Even if that wasn’t the case, I’m not exactly ready—” She blew out her breath in a gust of sudden nerve loss.
Sometimes she forgot he was her superior officer. Worse, sometimes she forgot the one thing she’d once sworn to keep in the forefront of her mind every instant she was with him: The man was an earl, he had a title, there were people in his life who actually called him my lord. Given, none of his colleagues at the Yard had considered him anything other than Lynley for more than ten years, but she didn’t possess the sort of sang-froid that allowed her to feel on equal footing with someone whose family had been rubbing elbows with the sort of blokes who were used to being referred to as your highness and your grace. It gave her the crawlies when she thought about it, it raised her hackles when she dwelt upon it. And when it caught her unawares—such as now—it made her feel like a perfect fool. One didn’t unburden one’s soul to a blue blood. One wasn’t really sure that blue bloods were possessed of souls themselves.
“And even if that weren’t the case,” Lynley picked up her thought with an unconscious—if typical—correction of her grammar, “I expect as the day when you leave Acton looms closer, the prospect looms larger. It’s one thing to have a dream, isn’t it? It’s quite another when it becomes reality.”