When he said hello to his sergeant, he realised that Havers must have heard more in his voice than he intended to convey, for she launched into her report without prefatory remarks of any kind, saying, “You’ll be chuffed to know that the C of E take police work dead to heart down here in Truro. The bishop’s secretary kindly gave me an appointment to see him a week from tomorrow, thank you very much. Busy as a bee in the roses, the bishop, if his secretary’s to be believed.” She blew out a long, loud breath. She’d be smoking, as usual. “And you should see the digs these two blokes live in. Sodding bloody hell. Remind me to hold on to my money the next time the collection plate is passed round in church. They should be supporting me, not vice versa.”
“So it’s been a waste.” Lynley watched Helen return to the table where she sat and began unfolding the corners of the magazine pages she’d previously folded down. She was pressing each one deliberately flat and smoothing it with her fingers. She wanted him to see the activity. He knew that as well as he knew her. Realising this, he felt the momentary grip of an anger so irrationally powerful that he wanted to kick the table through the wall.
Havers was saying, “So evidently the term ‘boating accident’ was a euphemism.”
Lynley tore his eyes from Helen. “What?”
“Haven’t you been listening?” Havers asked. “Never mind. Don’t answer. When did you tune in?”
“With the boating accident.”
“Right.” She began again.
Once she had realised that the bishop of Truro wasn’t going to be of help, she’d gone to the newspaper office, where she’d spent the morning reading back issues. There she discovered that the boating accident that had claimed the life of Robin Sage’s wife—
“Her name was Susanna, by the way.”
—hadn’t occurred on a boat in the first place and hadn’t been deemed an accident in the second.
“It was the ferry that runs from Plymouth to Roscoff,” Havers said. “And it was suicide, according to the newspaper.”
Havers sketched in the story with the details she’d gathered from her perusal of the newspaper accounts. The Sages had been making a crossing in bad weather, on their way to begin a two-week holiday in France. After a meal midway through the crossing—
“It’s a six-hour ride, you know.”
—Susanna had gone off to the Ladies’ while her husband returned to the lounge with his book. It was more than an hour before he realised that she ought to have turned up, but as she’d been feeling a bit low, he assumed she wanted some time alone.
“He said he had a tendency to hover when she was in a mood,” Havers explained. “And he wanted to give her some space. My words, not his.”
According to the information Havers had been able to gather, Robin Sage had left the lounge two or three times during the remainder of the crossing, to stretch his legs, to get a drink, to purchase a chocolate bar, but not to look for his wife about whose continued absence, it seemed, he did not appear to be worried. When they docked in France, he went below to the car, assuming that she would be there waiting. When she failed to show up as the passengers began to leave, he set about looking for her.
“He didn’t raise the alarm until he noticed that her handbag was on the front passenger seat of the car,” Havers said. “There was a note inside. Here, let me…” Lynley heard the noise of pages turning. “It said, ‘Robin, I’m sorry. I can’t find the light.’ There was no name but the writing was hers.”
“Not much of a suicide note,” Lynley remarked.
“You’re not the only one who thought that,” Havers said.
The crossing had been made in bad weather after all. It was dark for the latter half of it. It was cold, as well, so no one had been on deck to see a woman throw herself from the railing.
“Or be thrown?” Lynley asked.
Havers agreed obliquely. “The truth is that it could have been suicide, but it could have been something else as well. Which is, apparently, what the rozzers on both sides of the Channel thought. Sage was put through the wringer twice. He came up clean. Or as clean as he could because no one witnessed anything at all, including Sage’s trip to the bar or his saunters to stretch his legs.”
“And the wife couldn’t simply have slipped off the boat when it docked?” Lynley asked.
“An international crossing, Inspector. Her passport was in her handbag, along with her money, her driving licence, credit cards, and the whole bloody bit. She couldn’t have got off the boat at either end. And they searched every inch of it in France and in England.”
“What about the body? Where was she found? Who identified her?”
“I don’t know yet, but I’m working that angle. D’you want to place any bets?”
“Sage liked to talk about the woman taken in adultery,” Lynley said, more to himself than to her.
“And since there were no stones handy on the boat, he gave her the old heave-ho as her just deserts?”
“Perhaps.”
“Well, whatever happened, they’re sleeping in the bosom of Jesus right now. In the graveyard in Tresillian. They all are, in fact. I went to check.”
“They all are?”
“Susanna, Sage, and the kid. All of them. Lying in a tidy little row.”
“The kid?”
“Yeah. The kid. Joseph. Their son.”
Lynley frowned, listening to his sergeant and watching Helen. The former was supplying the rest of the details. The latter was playing a knife across the wedge of brie in an aimless pattern, her magazines closed and set to one side.
“He was three months old when he died,” Havers said. “And then her death…let me see…here it is. She died six months later. That supports the suicide theory, doesn’t it? She’d have been depressed as hell, I’d guess, to have her baby die. And how did she put it? She couldn’t find the light.”
“What was his cause of death?”
“Don’t know.”
“Find out.”
“Right.” She rustled some papers, jotting down instructions in her notebook, probably. She said suddenly, “Hell, Inspector, he was three months old. D’you think this bloke Sage might’ve…or even the wife…”
“I don’t know, Sergeant.” On the other end of the line, he heard the brief, distinct snap of a match being struck. She was lighting up again. He longed to do so himself. He said, “Dig a little deeper on Susanna as well. See if you can find anything at all about her relationship to Juliet Spence.”
“Spence…Got it.” More paper crinkled. “I’ve made copies of the newspaper articles for you. They’re not much, but shall I fax them to the Yard?”
“For what they’re worth, I suppose so.” It seemed little enough.
“Right. Well.” He could hear her drawing on the cigarette. “Inspector…” The word was not so much spoken as drawled.
“What?”
“Soldier on up there. You know. Helen.”
Easy to say, he thought as he replaced the phone. He returned to the table, saw that Helen had cross-hatched the entire top of the brie. She’d given up eating her yogurt, and the salami was still only partially cut. At the moment, she was using a fork to roll a black olive round her plate. Her expression was disconsolate. He felt oddly moved to compassion.
“I expect your father wouldn’t approve of your playing with your food, either,” he said quietly.
“No. Cybele never plays with her food. And Iris never eats, as far as I know.”
He sat and looked without hunger at the brie he’d spread on a biscuit. He picked it up, put it down, reached for the pickle bowl, pushed it away.
He finally said, “Right. I’ll be off. I must go out to—” just as she said quickly, “I’m so sorry, Tommy. I don’t mean to keep hurting you. I don’t know what comes over me or why I do it.”
He said, “I push you. We push each other.”
She took the ribboned elastic from her hair and played the elastic round her hand. She said, “I think I’m lookin
g for evidence, and when it isn’t there, I create it from nothing.”
“This is a relationship, Helen, not a court of law. What are you trying to prove?”
“Unworthiness.”
“I see. Mine.” He tried to sound objective but knew he didn’t manage it.
She looked up. Her eyes were dry, but her skin was blotched. “Yours. Yes. Because God knows I already feel my own.”
He reached for the ribbon she’d twisted in her hands. She’d bound them loosely together, and he unwove the binding. “If you’re waiting for me to end things between us, it’s not going to happen. So you’ll have to do the ending yourself.”
“I can, if you ask me.”
“I don’t intend to.”
“It would be so much easier.”
“Yes. It would. But only at first.” He stood. “I must go out to Kent for the afternoon. Will you have dinner with me?” He smiled. “Will you have breakfast as well?”
“Love-making isn’t what I’m avoiding, Tommy.”
“No,” he agreed. “Making love is easy enough. It’s living with it that’s the devil.”
Lynley pulled into the car park of the train station in Sevenoaks just as the first raindrops hit the windscreen of the Bentley. He fumbled in his overcoat pocket for the directions they’d found among the vicar’s belongings in Lancashire.
They were simple enough, taking him to the high street for a brief jaunt before heading out of the town altogether. A few turns past the point where the prehurricane, eponymous oaks of the town had once stood, and he was in the country. Down two more lanes and up a slight rise, and he found himself following a short drive labelled Wealdon Oast. This led to a house, with white tile cladding above and brick below, decorated by the distinctive, bent-chimneyed oast roundel attached to the building at its north end. The house had a view of Sevenoaks to the west and a mixture of farmland and woodland to the south. The land and the trees were winter-drab now, but the rest of the year, they would provide an ever-changing palette of colour.
As he parked between a Sierra and a Metro, Lynley wondered if Robin Sage had walked this distance out from the town. He wouldn’t have driven all the way from Lancashire, and the set of directions seemed to indicate two facts: He had arrived by train with no intention of taking a taxi from the station, and no one had met him or intended to meet him, either at the station or somewhere in the town.
A wooden sign, neatly lettered in yellow and affixed to the left of the front door, identified the oast house not as a home but as a place of business. Gitterman Temps, it read. And beneath that in smaller letters of yellow, Katherine Gitterman, Prop.
Kate, Lynley thought. Another answer was emerging to the questions that had arisen from Sage’s engagement diary and the odd bits carton.
A young woman looked up from a reception desk as Lynley entered the house. What had once been the sitting room was now an office with ivory walls, green carpeting, and modern oak furniture that smelled faintly of lemon oil. The girl nodded at him, as she said into the thin wire headpiece of a telephone receiver,
“I can let you have Sandy again, Mr. Coatsworth. She got on well with your staff and her skills…Well, yes, she’s the one with the braces on her teeth.” She rolled her eyes at Lynley. They were, he noted, skilfully shaded with an aquamarine shadow that exactly matched the jumper she wore. “Yes, of course, Mr. Coatsworth. Let me see…” On her desk, which was otherwise free of clutter, lay six manila folders. She opened the first. “It’s no trouble, Mr. Coatsworth. Really. Please, don’t give it a thought.” She riffled through the second. “You’ve not tried Joy, have you?…No, she doesn’t wear braces. And she types…let me see…”
Lynley glanced to his left through the door that opened into the roundel. Into its circular wall a half-dozen neat cubicles had been built. At two of them, girls were pecking at electric typewriters while a timer ticked to one side. In a third, a young man worked upon a word processor, shaking his head at the screen and saying, “Jesus, this is screwed for sure. I’ll bet a hundred quid it was another power surge.” He leaned towards the floor and rattled through a repair case filled with circuit boards and arcane equipment. “Disk crash city,” he murmured. “I sure as hell hope she was backing up.”
“May I help you, sir?”
Lynley swung back to the reception desk. Aquamarine held a pencil poised as if to take notes. She’d cleared the desk of the folders and replaced them with a yellow legal pad. Behind her, from a vase on a glistening credenza, a single petal fell from a spray of hot-house roses. Lynley expected a harried custodian with dustpan in hand to appear from nowhere and whisk the offending bit of floribunda from sight.
“I’m looking for Katherine Gitterman,” he said, and produced his warrant card. “Scotland Yard CID.”
“You want Kate?” The young woman’s incredulity apparently prevented her from giving his warrant card any attention at all. “Kate?”
“Is she available?”
Eyes still on him, she nodded, lifted a finger to keep him in place, and punched in three numbers on the telephone. After a brief and muffled conversation which she conducted with her chair swivelled in the direction of the credenza, she led him past a second desk on which a maroon leather blotter held the day’s post, arranged artfully into a fan with a letter opener acting the part of its handle. She opened the door beyond the desk and gestured towards a stairway.
“Up there,” she said and added with a smile, “You’ve put a spanner in her day. She doesn’t much like surprises.”
Kate Gitterman met him at the top of the stairs, a tall woman dressed in a tailored, plaid flannel dressing gown whose belt was tied in a perfectly symmetrical bow. The predominant colour of the garment was the same green as the carpeting, and she wore beneath it pyjamas of an identical shade.
“Flu,” she said. “I’m battling the last of it. I hope you don’t mind.” She didn’t give him the opportunity to respond. “I’ll see you in here.”
She led him down a narrow corridor that gave way to the sitting room of a modern, well-appointed flat. A kettle was whistling as they entered and with a “Just a moment, please,” she left him. The soles of her slim leather slippers clattered against the linoleum as she moved about the kitchen.
Lynley glanced round the sitting room. Like the offices below, it was compulsively neat, with shelves, racks, and holders in which every possession appeared to have its designated place. The pillows on the sofa and on the armchairs were poised at identical angles. A small Persian rug before the fireplace lay centred perfectly. The fireplace itself burned neither wood nor coal but a pyramid of artificial nuggets that were glowing in a semblance of embers.
He was reading the titles of her videotapes—lined up like guardsmen beneath a television—when she returned.
“I like to stay fit,” she said, in apparent explanation of the fact that beyond a copy of Olivier’s Wuthering Heights, the cassettes all contained exercise tapes, featuring one film actress or another.
He could see that fitness was approximately as important to her as neatness, for aside from the fact that she was herself slender, solid, and athletic looking, the room’s only photograph was a framed, poster-sized enlargement of her running in a race with the number 194 on her chest. She was wearing a red headband and sweating profusely, but she’d managed a dazzling smile for the camera.
“My first marathon,” she said. “Everyone’s first is rather special.”
“I’d imagine that to be the case.”
“Yes. Well.” She brushed her thumb and middle finger through her hair. Light brown carefully streaked with blonde, it was cut quite short and blown back from her face in a fashionable style that suggested frequent trips to a hairdresser who wielded scissors and colour with equal skill. From the lining round her eyes and in the room’s daylight, despite the rain that was beginning to streak the flat’s casement windows, Lynley would have placed her in mid to late forties. But he imagined that dressed for business or pleasure,
made up, and seen in the forgiving artificial light of one restaurant or another, she looked at least ten years younger.
She was holding a mug from which steam rose aromatically. “Chicken broth,” she said. “I suppose I should offer you something, but I’m not well versed in how one behaves when the police come to call. And you are the police?”
He offered her his warrant card. Unlike the receptionist below, she studied it before handing it back.
“I hope this isn’t about one of my girls.” She walked to the sofa and sat on the edge with her mug of chicken broth balanced on her left knee. She had, he saw, the shoulders of a swimmer and the unbending posture of a Victorian woman cinched into a corset. “I check into their backgrounds thoroughly when they first apply. No one gets into my files without at least three references. If they get a bad report from more than two of their employers, I let them go. So I never have trouble. Never.”
Lynley joined her, sitting in one of the armchairs. He said, “I’ve come about a man called Robin Sage. He had the directions to this oast house among his belongings and a reference to Kate in his engagement diary. Do you know him? Did he come to see you?”
“Robin? Yes.”
“When?”
She drew her eyebrows together. “I don’t recall exactly. It was sometime in the autumn. Perhaps late September?”
“The eleventh of October?”
“It could have been. Shall I check that for you?”
“Did he have an appointment?”
“One could call it that. Why? Has he got into trouble?”
“He’s dead.”
She adjusted her grip on the mug slightly, but that was the only reaction that Lynley could read. “This an investigation?”
“The circumstances were rather irregular.” He waited for her to do the normal thing, to ask what the circumstances were. When she didn’t, he said, “Sage lived in Lancashire. May I take it that he didn’t come to see you about hiring a temporary employee?”