Deborah moved restlessly on the ottoman. Out of the corner of his eye, Lynley saw St. James’ hand move to her shoulder.
“I realise why you’ve come to see me,” Lynley said at last.
“Good. Then—”
“And it’s one of those unfortunate quirks of fate, that you’ve walked into the middle of an investigation. You can, of course, telephone your solicitor if you’d prefer to have him here while you answer the question. Where, exactly, did Mrs. Spence come from?” It bent the truth only partially. Lynley gave a mental salute to his sergeant. He could live with that.
The question was whether Townley-Young could do also. They engaged in a silent skirmish of wills, their eyes locked in combat. Townley-Young finally blinked.
“Aspatria,” he said.
“In Cumbria?”
“Yes.”
“How did she come to work for you?”
“I advertised. She applied. She came to interview. I liked her. She’s got common sense, she’s independent, she’s fully capable of taking whatever action is necessary to protect my property.”
“And Mr. Sage?”
“What about him?”
“Where was he from?”
“Cornwall.” And before Lynley could press the point with a further question, “Via Bradford. That’s all I recall.”
“Thank you.” Lynley got to his feet.
Townley-Young did likewise. “As to the Hall…”
“I’ll be speaking to Mrs. Spence,” Lynley said. “But my suggestion is to follow the keys and to think about who might not want your daughter and her husband to move into the Hall.”
Townley-Young hesitated at the door to the residents’ lounge, his hand on the knob. He seemed to be studying it because he kept his head bent for a moment and his forehead was creased as if with thought. He said, “The wedding.”
“Sorry?”
“Sage died the night before my daughter’s wedding. He was to perform the ceremony. We none of us knew where to find him, and we had the devil of a time finding someone else.” He looked up. “Someone who doesn’t want Becky at the Hall could be someone who didn’t want her to marry in the first place.”
“Why?”
“Jealousy. Revenge. Thwarted desire.”
“For?”
Townley-Young gazed back at the door, an act of seeing through it to the pub beyond. “For what Becky already has,” he said.
Brendan found Polly Yarkin in the pub. He went to the bar for his gin and bitters, bobbed his head in good evening to three farmers and two maintenance men from Fork Reservoir, and joined her at her table near the fireplace where she was toeing the bark from a piece of birch at her feet. He didn’t wait for an invitation to sit with her. Tonight, at least, he had an excuse.
She looked up as he decisively placed his glass on the table and lowered himself onto the three-legged stool. Her eyes moved from him to the far door that gave way to the residents’ lounge. She kept them fixed on it as she said, “Bren, you mustn’t sit here. You best go on home.”
She didn’t look well. Although she was sitting right next to the fire, she hadn’t removed either her coat or her scarf, and as he unbuttoned his jacket and slid his stool closer to hers, she seemed to draw her body inward protectively. She said, “Bren,” in a low, insistent voice, “mind what I say.”
Brendan cast a casual glance round the pub. His conversation with Colin Shepherd—and especially the parting remark he’d shot at the constable as he sauntered off—had given Brendan a surge of confidence he hadn’t experienced in months. He felt invulnerable to stares or gossip or even direct confrontation itself. “What have we got here, Polly? Day labourers, farmers, a few housewives, the local teen gang. I don’t care what they think. They’ll think what they want no matter what, won’t they?”
“It’s not just them, all right? Di’n’t you see his car?”
“Whose?”
“His. Mr. Townley-Young’s. He’s in there.” She gave a nod in the direction of the residents’ lounge, her eyes still averted. “With them.”
“With whom?”
“The London police. So be off with you before he comes out and—”
“And what? What?”
She replied with a shrug. He could see what she thought of him in the movement of her shoulders and the settling of her mouth. It was the very same thing that Rebecca thought. It was what they all thought: every man jack of them in the whole bloody village. They saw him under Townley-Young’s thumb, under everyone’s thumb. Like a cart horse in bridle and blinkers for life.
He took an irritated gulp of his drink. The liquor washed back in his throat too quickly, misdirected itself, and made him cough. He fished in his pocket for a handkerchief. His pipe, tobacco, and matches spilled onto the floor.
“God damn.” He snatched them back. He coughed and hacked. He could see Polly looking round the pub, smoothing her scarf, trying to achieve some distance by ignoring his plight. He found his handkerchief and pressed it to his mouth. He took a second, slower sip of the gin. It roared across his tongue and down his throat, leaving fire in its wake. But it warmed him this time, both to his topic and to the situation.
“I’m not afraid of my father-in-law,” he said tersely. “Despite what everyone thinks, I’m fully capable of standing my ground with him. I’m fully capable of a hell of a lot more than this lot round here gives me credit for.” He considered adding an if-they-only-knew innuendo to give his assertion an air of credibility. But Polly Yarkin was nobody’s fool. She’d question and probe and he’d end up revealing what he most wanted to keep to himself. So instead he said, “I have a right to be here. I have a right to sit wherever I please. I have a right to speak to whomever I like.”
“You’re acting the fool.”
“Besides, this is business.” He threw back more gin. It went down smoothly. He considered a trip to the bar for a second glass. He’d toss that down and perhaps have a third and bugger anyone who tried to stop him.
Polly was toying with a stack of beer mats, concentrating on them as if by that action she could continue to avoid an open acknowledgement of his presence. He wanted her to look at him. He wanted her to reach over and touch his arm. He was important in her life now and she didn’t even know it. But she would soon enough. He would make her see.
“I was out at Cotes Hall,” he said.
She didn’t reply.
“I came back on the footpath.”
She stirred on the stool as if to leave. One hand went to the back of her neck. Her fingers dug into its nape.
“I saw Constable Shepherd.”
Her movement ceased. Her eyelids seemed to tremble, as if she wanted to look at him but couldn’t allow herself even that much contact. “So?” she said.
“So you’d better watch where you’re stepping, all right?”
Contact at last. She met his gaze. But it wasn’t curiosity he read in her face. It wasn’t a need to possess information or obtain clarity. A slow, ugly flush was climbing her neck and spreading streaks of crimson up from her jaw.
He was disconcerted. She was supposed to ask what he meant by his statement, which was supposed to lead to a request for his advice, which he would be only too happy to give, which would lead to her gratitude. Gratitude would prompt her to establish a place for him in her life. Obtaining that would lead her to love. And if it wasn’t love exactly that she ended up feeling, desire would do.
Except that his statement wasn’t engendering anything close to that primary domino of curiosity that would topple the defences she’d kept raised against him from the instant he’d met her. She looked enraged.
“I’ve done nothing to her or to anyone,” she hissed. “I don’t know nothing about her, all right?”
He drew back. She leaned forward. “About her?” he said blankly.
“Nothing,” she repeated. “And if a chat with Constable Shepherd on the footpath makes you think Mr. Sage told me something I could use to—”
“Kill him,” Brendan said.
“What?”
“He thinks you’re responsible. For the vicar’s death. He’s looking for evidence Shepherd is.”
She sat back on her stool. Her mouth opened and closed, opened again. She said, “Evidence.”
“Yes. So watch where you’re stepping. And if he questions you, Polly, you phone me at once. You’ve got the number of my office, don’t you? Don’t talk to him alone. Don’t be with him alone. Do you understand?”
“Evidence.” She said it as if to convince herself, as if to try out the word for size. The menace behind it didn’t seem to reach her.
“Polly, answer me. Do you understand? The constable’s looking for evidence to establish the fact that you’re responsible for the vicar’s death. He was heading out towards Cotes Hall when I saw him.”
She stared at him without appearing to see him. “But Col was only angry,” she said. “He didn’t mean it. I pushed him too far—I do that sometimes—and he said something he didn’t really mean. I knew that. He knew it as well.”
She was speaking Greek as far as Brendan was concerned. She was drifting in space. He needed to bring her back to earth, and more importantly, back to him. He took her hand. Eyes still unfocussed, she didn’t withdraw it. He twined his fingers with hers.
“Polly, you’ve got to listen.”
“No, it’s nothing. He didn’t mean a thing.”
“He asked me about keys,” Brendan said. “Whether I’d given a set of keys to you, whether you’d asked for them.”
She frowned, said nothing.
“I didn’t answer him, Polly. I told him that line of enquiry wasn’t on. I told him to bugger off as well. So if he comes to see you—”
“He can’t think that.” She spoke so low that Brendan had to lean forward to hear her. “He knows me, does Colin. He knows me, Brendan.”
Her hand tightened round his, pulled his towards her breast. He was startled, delighted, and more than ready to be of whatever assistance he could.
“How can he think I would ever, ever…No matter what…Brendan!” She flung his hand to one side. She backed her stool into the corner. She said, “Now it’s worse,” and just as Brendan was about to question her, seeking to understand how anything could possibly be worse if she’d finally started to accept him, a heavy hand descended on his shoulder.
Brendan looked up into the face of his father-in-law. “Flaming bloody hell,” St. John Andrew Townley-Young said concisely. “Get outside before I thrash you to pieces, you miserable worm.”
Lynley shut the door of his room and stood with his back to it, his eyes on the telephone next to the bed. On the wall above it, the Wraggs continued to display their love affair with the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists: Monet’s tender Madame Monet and Child made an odd companion piece to Toulouse-Lautrec’s At the Moulin Rouge, both of them mounted and framed with more enthusiasm than care, the latter hanging at an angle that suggested all of Montmartre had been hit by an earthquake just as the artist was rendering immortal its most famous nightclub. Lynley straightened the Toulouse-Lautrec. He pinched a cobweb that seemed to be dangling from Madame Monet’s hair. But neither a contemplation of the prints nor a few minutes’ consideration of their quixotic pairing was sufficient to prevent his reaching for the telephone and punching in her number.
He dug in his pocket for his watch. It was just after nine. She wouldn’t be in bed. He couldn’t even use the hour as a plausible reason for avoidance. He had no excuse for not placing the call.
Except cowardice, which he had in spades whenever it came to dealing with Helen. Did I really want love, he wondered wryly, and if so when did I want it? And wouldn’t an affair—a dozen affairs—be less difficult and more convenient than this? He sighed. What a monstrosity love was; it was nothing so simple as the beast with two backs.
The sex part had been effortless between them from the first. He’d driven her home from Cambridge on a Friday in November. They’d not stirred from her flat until Sunday morning. They didn’t even have a meal until Saturday night. He could close his eyes—even now as he thought of it—and still look up into her face, see the way her hair framed it in a colour not so different from the brandy he’d just drunk, feel her moving against him, sense the warmth beneath his palms as he ran them from her breasts to her waist to her thighs, and hear the way her breathing caught then changed altogether as it rose with her climax and she cried out his name. He’d touched his fingers beneath her breast and felt her heart pounding. She laughed, a little embarrassed at the ease of it all between them.
She was what he wanted. Together, they were what he wanted. But life never took a permanent definition from the hours they spent with each other in bed.
Because one could love a woman, make love to her, and have her make love completely in return and, with considerable care and a refusal to reveal, still never be touched at the core of one’s being. For that was a final breaking of barriers from which one never walked away the same. And both of them knew it, because both of them had crossed all conceivable boundaries with other people before.
How do we learn to trust, he wondered. How do we ever develop the courage to make the heart vulnerable a second or third time, exposing it to yet another chance of breaking? Helen didn’t want to do that, and he couldn’t blame her. He wasn’t always certain that he could risk it himself.
He thought with chagrin about his behaviour that day. He’d been eager enough to take the first opportunity to dash out of London this morning. He knew his motivations well enough to admit that, in part, he’d snatched at the promise of distance from Helen as well as the chance to punish her. Her doubts and fears exasperated him, perhaps because they so accurately mirrored his own.
Wearily, he sank onto the edge of the bed and listened to the steady plink…plink of water dripping from the tap in the bath. In the way of all night noises, it dominated as it could never do at any other time, and he knew that if he didn’t do something to stop it, he would toss, turn, and fight with the pillow once he put out the light and attempted to sleep. He decided it probably wanted a washer, if bath taps had washers the way basin taps did. Ben Wragg could no doubt provide him with one. All he needed to do was pick up the phone and ask. What would it take to repair the thing, anyway? Five minutes? Four? And he could think while he did it, taking the time to engage his hands with an odd job so that his mind was free to make a decision regarding Helen. He couldn’t, after all, telephone her without knowing what his objective was in doing so. Five minutes would prevent him from rushing in thoughtlessly and just as thoughtlessly taking the risk of exposing himself—not to mention Helen who was far more sensitive than he—to…He paused in the mental colloquy with himself. To what? What? Love? Commitment? Honesty? Trust? God alone knew how either one of them might survive the challenges of that.
He laughed sourly at his own capacity for self-deception and reached for the telephone just as it rang.
“Denton told me where to find you,” was the first thing she said.
The first thing he said was, “Helen. Hullo, darling. I was just about to phone you,” realising that she probably wouldn’t believe him and that he couldn’t blame her if that was the case.
But she said, “I’m glad of it.”
And then they grappled with the silence. In it, he could imagine where she was—in her bedroom in the Onslow Square flat, on the bed, with her legs curled beneath her and the ivory-and-yellow counterpane acting as contrast to her hair and her eyes. He could see how she was holding the phone—two-handed and cradled as if she would protect it, herself, or the conversation she was having. He could guess at her jewellery—earrings that she’d already removed and placed on the walnut table by the bed, a thin gold bracelet still encircling her wrist, a matching chain round her neck that her fingers touched talisman-like when they moved the scant inches from the phone to her throat. And there at the hollow of her throat was the scent she wore, something between flowers and
citrus.
They both spoke at once, saying,
“I shouldn’t have—”
“I’ve been feeling—”
—and then breaking off with the quick laughter of nerves that serves as the underpinning of a conversation between lovers who are both afraid of losing what they’ve so recently found. Which is why in an instant Lynley mentally abjured every plan he’d just been pondering before she had phoned.
He said, “I love you, darling. I’m sorry about all this.”
“Were you running away?”
“This time, I was. Yes. After a fashion.”
“I can’t be angry over that, can I? I’ve done it often enough myself.”
Another silence. She would be wearing a silk blouse, wool trousers, or a skirt. Her jacket would be lying where she’d laid it, at the foot of the bed. Her shoes would be sitting nearby on the floor. The light would be on, casting its inverted triangular glow against the blossoms and stripes of the wallpaper at the same time as it diffused through the lampshade to touch her skin.
“But you’ve never run away to hurt me,” he said.
“Is that why you’ve gone off? To hurt me?”
“Again, after a fashion. It’s nothing I’m proud of.” He reached for the cord of the telephone and twined it between his fingers, restless for something of substance to touch since he’d placed himself more than two hundred and fifty miles to the north, and he couldn’t touch her. He said, “Helen, about that blasted tie this morning…”