Jill Foster had never run into a serious snag while she was ticking off accomplishments from the Master List that she'd first compiled as a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl. Reading all of Shakespeare (done by age twenty), hitchhiking the length of Ireland (done by twenty-one), taking a double first at Cambridge (by age twenty-two), traveling alone in India (by twenty-three), exploring the Amazon River (twenty-six), kayaking the Nile (twenty-seven), writing a definitive study of Proust (still in progress), adapting the novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald for television (also in the works) … From athleticism to intellectualism, Jill Foster hadn't experienced even a hiccup on her progress through life.
In the personal realm, however, she'd had more difficulty. She'd placed the achievement of marriage and children before her thirty-fifth birthday, but she'd found it more challenging than she'd anticipated to attain a goal that involved the enthusiastic cooperation of another person. And it was marriage and children that she'd wanted: in that order. Yes, it was trendy to be “partners” with someone. Every third pop singer, film star, or professional athlete was living proof of that, congratulated in the tabloids on a daily basis for their mindless ability to reproduce, as if the act of reproduction itself took some sort of talent that only they possessed. But Jill was not a woman easily swayed by what bore the appearance of a trend, particularly when it came to her Master List of Accomplishments. One did not achieve one's goals by taking shortcuts that were nothing but passing vogues.
The aftermath of her affair with Jonathon had for a time seriously undermined her confidence in her ability to reach her marital and maternal objective. But then Richard had come into her life, and she'd quickly seen that an accomplishment that had so far eluded her was finally within her reach. In the world of her grandparents—even of her parents—to have become lovers with Richard before a formal commitment had been made between them would have been both foolhardy and ruinous. Indeed, even today there were probably a dozen agony aunts whose advice—considering Jill's ultimate objective—would have been to wait for the ring, the church bells, and the confetti before embarking on any kind of intimacy with one's intended bridegroom, or at least to have used what were euphemistically called “precautions” until such a time as the deal was signed, sealed, and registered in the customary way. But Richard's earnest pursuit of her in the aftermath of Jonathon's failure to leave his wife constituted a phase in Jill's life that was both flattering and essential. His desire for her had aroused an equal desire in her, and she was deeply gratified to feel it since, after Jonathon, she'd begun to wonder if she would ever feel that hot aching hunger—unlike any other hunger—for a man again.
And that hunger, Jill had found, was firmly tied to impregnation. It might have been due to a dawning knowledge of how few years she actually had left for childbirth, but every time she and Richard made love in those first months, her body had strained to take him into her more deeply, as if the sole act of surging towards him would ensure that their contact produced a child.
So she'd gone at marriage backwards, but what did it matter? They were happy with each other, and Richard was devotion itself.
Still, she had the occasional flicker of doubt, a memento left her by Jonathon's promises and Jonathon's lies. And while, when doubts surfaced, she reminded herself that the two men were absolutely nothing alike, there were times when a shadow cast on Richard's face or a silence in the midst of a discussion between them triggered a set of worries within her that she tried to tell herself were unnecessary and unreal.
Even if Richard and I don't marry, she would lecture herself in her worst moments, Catherine and I shall be perfectly all right. I've a career to fall back on, for heaven's sake. And the age of unmarried mothers being social pariahs has long since passed.
But that wasn't really the point, was it, her long-range-planning self would argue. The point was marriage and husband as well. And the larger point was family, which she chose to define as father-mother-child.
So now she said pleasantly to Richard with that ultimate goal in mind, “Darling, if you'd only see it, I know you'd agree.” They were in Richard's car on the way to South Kensington from Shepherd's Bush in order to keep an engagement with an estate agent who was going to determine a selling price for Richard's flat. This was progress in the right direction to Jill's way of thinking, since they obviously couldn't live en famille in Braemar Mansions once the baby was born. There was far too little room.
She was privately grateful for this additional indication of Richard's positive marital intentions, but she hadn't yet been able to understand why they couldn't take the next step and have a look at a suitable detached house—completely renovated—that she'd managed to locate in Harrow. Looking at the house didn't mean they were going to have to buy it, for heaven's sake. And since she hadn't yet put her own flat up for sale—“let's not both be homeless at once,” Richard had advised when she'd suggested doing so—there was little chance that having a simple look at a building on offer would result in their owning it on this very day. “It would give you a sense of what I have in mind for us,” she told him. “And if you don't like what I have in mind once you see it, at least we'll know straightaway and I can change course.” Not that she would, naturally. She would merely expend more careful and subtle effort to bring him round to her way of thinking.
“I don't need to see it to know what you have in mind, darling,” Richard replied as they trundled along in moderately bearable traffic, considering the time of day. “Modern conveniences, double glazing, fitted carpet, and large gardens in both front and back.” He looked over at her and smiled affectionately. “Tell me I've got it wrong and I'll buy you dinner.”
“You'll buy me dinner either way,” she told him. “If I'm on my feet long enough to cook you a meal, I'll swell up like a ham.”
“But tell me I've got it wrong about the house.”
“Oh, you know you haven't got it wrong,” she laughed. And she touched him fondly, smoothing her fingers against his temple where his hair was grey. “And don't begin a lecture, if you're thinking of one, all right? I didn't go anywhere on my own to find it. The estate agent drove me up to Harrow.”
“Which is as it should be,” Richard said. His hand moved to her stomach, monstrously huge, the skin stretched taut like a kettle drum. “Are you awake, Cara Ann?” he enquired of their child.
Catherine Ann, Jill corrected him patiently. But she didn't make the correction aloud. He'd somewhat recovered from the distress in which he'd arrived in Shepherd's Bush earlier that day. There was no point to upsetting him all over again. While an argument concerning the name of their child was hardly going to cause an emotional upheaval, she did believe that what Richard had been through deserved her sympathy.
He didn't still love the woman, she assured herself. After all, they'd been divorced for years. It was merely the shock of everything that had made him so ill, having to gaze upon the bloodied corpse of someone who had once shared his life. That was something to make anyone ill, wasn't it? Asked to look upon the broken body of Jonathon Stewart, wouldn't she have reacted likewise?
With this in mind, she decided she could compromise on the house in Harrow. She was confident that her willingness to do so would prompt an important compromise on his part. She led into this compromise by saying, “All right, then. We won't go up to Harrow today. But the modern bit, Richard. Are you quite happy with that?”
“Decent plumbing and double glazing?” he asked. “Fitted carpet, dishwasher, and all the rest? I dare say I can live with it. As long as you're there. Both of you, that is.” He smiled at her, but still she sensed something deeper in his eyes, looking like regret for what might have been.
But he doesn't still love Eugenie, she thought insistently. He doesn't and he can't, because even if he does, she's dead. She's dead.
“Richard,” she said, “I've been thinking about the flats. Mine and yours. And which of them we should sell first, actually.”
He braked for a light near N
otting Hill station, where an unappealing crowd dressed in London black were clogging the pavements and distributing into the street their share of London rubbish. “I thought we'd decided all that.”
“We had done, yes. But I've been thinking …”
“And?” He looked wary.
“Well, it seems to me that my flat would go faster, that's all. It's been done up. It's completely modernised. The building's smart. The neighbourhood's lovely. And it's freehold. I expect it would fetch quite enough for us to put money down on a house and not have to wait to sell both flats before we have a place for all of us.”
“But we've already made the decision,” Richard pointed out. “We've an estate agent coming—”
“We can put him off, surely. We can say we've changed our minds. Darling, let's face it. Your flat's hopelessly out of date. It's as ancient as Methuselah. And it's got less than fifty years left on the lease. It's in a good enough building—if the owners would ever get round to fixing it up—but it's going to be months before it sells. Whereas mine … You must see how different things could be.”
The light changed and they continued through the traffic. Richard didn't speak till he made the turn into the antiques shop heaven that was Kensington Church Street. He said, “Months. Yes. Right. It could take months to sell my flat. But is that really a problem? You can't want to move house for at least six months anyway.”
“But—”
“It would be impossible in your condition, Jill. Worse, it would be nothing short of torture, and it might be dangerous.” He swung them past the Carmelite Church and onwards down towards Palace Gate and South Kensington, weaving his way through buses and taxis. Another stretch of road, and he made the turn into Cornwall Gardens, going on to say, “Are you nervous, darling? You haven't said much about actually having the baby. And I've been preoccupied—first Gideon, now this … this other business—so I haven't done as right by you as I should have. Listen, I do know that.”
“Richard, I quite understand how concerned you've been with Gideon unwell. I don't mean you to think—”
“I think nothing but that I adore you, you're having our child, and we've a life to establish together. And if you'd like me to be in Shepherd's Bush with you more frequently now that you're nearly due, I'm happy to do that.”
“You're there every night already. I can hardly ask for more than that, can I?”
He reversed into a parking space some thirty yards distant from Braemar Mansions, after which he switched off the engine and turned to her. “You can ask me for anything, Jill. And if it pleases you to offer your flat for sale before mine, then it pleases me. But I won't have any part of your moving house till you've had the baby and recovered from that, and I seriously doubt your mother would disagree with me.”
Jill herself couldn't disagree. She knew her mother would have a seizure at the thought of her packing up her belongings and trekking anywhere other than from kitchen to loo in less than three months after giving birth. “Childbirth puts the female body through a trauma, darling,” Dora Foster would have said. “Coddle yourself. It may be your only chance to do so.”
“Well?” Richard said, smiling at her fondly. “What's your reply?”
“You are so wretchedly logical and reasonable. How can I argue? What you've said makes such sense.”
He leaned towards her and kissed her. “You're ever gracious in defeat. And if I'm not mistaken”—he nodded towards the old Edwardian building as he came round her side of the car and eased her up and onto the pavement—“our estate agent is right on time. Which bodes well, I think.”
Jill hoped that was the case. A tall blond man was mounting the front steps of Braemar Mansions, and as Jill and Richard approached, he studied the line of bells and pushed what appeared to be Richard's.
“You're looking for us, I believe,” Richard called out.
The man turned, saying, “Mr. Davies?”
“Yes.”
“Thomas Lynley,” he said. “New Scotland Yard.”
Lynley always made it a habit to gauge reactions when he introduced himself to people who weren't expecting him, and he did so now as the man and woman on the pavement paused before mounting the front steps to what was a considerably down-at-heel building at the west end of Cornwall Gardens.
The woman looked as if she'd normally be quite small, although at the moment she was swollen in every conceivable way from pregnancy. Her ankles in particular were the size of tennis balls, giving undue emphasis to her feet, which were themselves large and out of proportion to her height. She walked with the rolling gait of someone trying to keep her balance.
Davies himself walked with a stoop that promised to worsen as he grew older. He had hair that was faded from its original colour—ginger or blond, it was difficult to tell—and he wore it swept straight back from his forehead with no effort made to disguise its thinness.
Both Davies and the woman appeared surprised when Lynley introduced himself, the woman perhaps more so because she looked at Davies and said, “Richard? Scotland Yard?” as if she either needed his protection or wondered why the police were coming to call.
Davies said, “Is this about …?” but changed course, perhaps with the realisation that a conversation on the front steps wasn't what he wanted to engage in with a police officer. He said, “Come in. We were expecting an estate agent. You've given us a surprise. This is my fiancée, by the way.”
He went on to say that she was called Jill Foster. She looked to be somewhere in her thirties—plain but with very good skin and hair the colour of currants, cut simply just beneath her ears—and Lynley had assumed upon seeing her that she was another of Richard Davies' children or perhaps a niece. He nodded to her, taking note of the tightness with which she clutched Davies' arm.
Davies let them into the building, where he led the way up the stairs to his first-floor flat. It had a sitting room that overlooked the street, a dim rectangle broken by a window that was at the moment covered by shutters. Davies went to fold these back, saying to his fiancée, “Sit down, darling. Put your feet up,” and to Lynley, “May I offer you something? Tea? Coffee? We're expecting an estate agent—as I said—and we haven't a great deal of time before he gets here.”
Lynley assured them that the visit wouldn't take long, and he accepted a cup of tea to buy time to have a look round the sitting room at its clutter of belongings. These took the form of amateur photographs of outdoor scenes, countless pictures of Davies' virtuoso son, and a collection of hand-carved walking sticks that formed a circular decoration over the fireplace in the fashion of weaponry found in Scottish castles. There was also a surfeit of prewar furniture, stacks of newspapers and magazines, and a display of other memorabilia related to his son's career as a violinist.
“Richard's a bit of a pack rat,” Jill Foster told Lynley as she lowered herself with some care into a chair whose need for re-stuffing and reupholstering was evidenced by the tufts of what looked like yellowish cotton wool pushing upwards like springtime's new growth. “You should see the other rooms.”
Lynley picked up a photograph of the violinist in childhood. He was standing attentively, his instrument in his hand, gazing up at Lord Menuhin, who was in turn gazing down at him, instrument also in hand, smiling beneficently. “Gideon,” Lynley said.
“The one, the only,” Jill Foster replied.
Lynley glanced at her. She smiled, perhaps to take the sting from her words. “Richard's joy and the centre of his life,” she said. “It's understandable but sometimes it does wear upon one.”
“I expect it does. How long have you known Mr. Davies?”
With a grunt and a heave, she said, “Bother. This won't do,” and moved from the armchair she'd chosen to lower herself to the sofa, where she raised her legs and put a cushion into position beneath her feet. She said, “God. Two more weeks. I begin to understand why they call it ‘being delivered.’” She rested her back against a second cushion. Both were as threadbare as the furnitur
e. “Three years now.”
“He's looking forward to new fatherhood?”
“When most men his age are looking forward to grandfather-hood,” Jill replied. “But even at his age, yes. He's looking forward.”
Lynley smiled. “My own wife's pregnant.”
Jill's face altered brightly, the connection between them made. “Is she? Is this your first, Inspector?”
Lynley nodded. “I can take a leaf out of Mr. Davies' book. He seems devoted.”
She smiled and rolled her eyes in good humour. “He's like a mother hen. Don't walk down the stairs too quickly, Jill. Don't take public transport. Don't drive in traffic. No. Don't drive at all, my dear. Don't go for a walk without a companion. Don't drink anything that contains caffeine. Carry your mobile everywhere you go. Avoid crowds, cigarette smoke, and preservatives. The list is endless.”
“He's anxious for you.”
“It's rather touching when it doesn't make me want to lock him in a cupboard.”
“Did you have a chance to compare notes with his former wife? About her own pregnancies?”
“Eugenie? No. We never met. Previous wives and current wives. Or in my case wives-to-be. Sometimes it's in the interest of wisdom to keep them apart, isn't it.”
Richard Davies returned to them then, bearing a plastic tray on which sat a single cup and saucer accompanied by a small jug of milk and a bowl of sugar cubes. He said to his fiancée, “Darling, you weren't wanting tea as well, were you?”
Jill said that she wasn't, and Richard settled in next to her, raising her painfully swollen feet to his lap after placing Lynley's tea on the side table next to the chair in which Jill had first been sitting.
“How can we help you, Inspector?” he asked.
Lynley took a notebook from his jacket pocket. He thought it an interesting question. Indeed, he thought all of Davies' behaviour interesting. He couldn't remember the last time he'd turned up on someone's doorstep unexpected, offered his identification, and been offered a cup of tea in welcome. The general responses to an unanticipated visit from the police were suspicion, alarm, and anxiety, no matter how hidden the recipient of the visit attempted to keep them.