She said, “We've made the arrest, sir. I thought I'd come to tell—”
“Leach phoned me.” Hillier walked to a door across the corridor and inclined his head at it. She was meant to follow. When they were inside what turned out to be a waiting room, he went to a sofa and sank into it. For the first time, Barbara noted how tired he looked, and she realised he'd been on family duty since the middle of the previous night. Her guard slipped a notch at this thought. Hillier had always seemed superhuman.
He said, “Good work, Barbara. Both of you.”
She said cautiously, “Thank you, sir,” and waited for what would happen next.
He said, “Sit.”
She said, “Sir,” and although she'd have preferred to be off on her way home, she went to a chair of limited comfort and perched on its edge. In a better world, she thought, AC Hillier would at this moment of emotional in extremis see the error of his ways. He'd look at her, recognise her finer qualities—one of which was decidedly not her fashion sense—and he'd summarily acknowledge them. He'd elevate her on the spot to her previous professional position and that would be the end of the punishment he'd inflicted upon her at the end of the summer.
But this was not a better world, and AC Hillier did none of that. He merely said, “He might not make it. We're pretending other-wise—especially round Frances, for what little good it's doing—but it's got to be faced.”
Barbara didn't know what to say, so she murmured, “Bloody hell,” because that's what she felt: bloody, bowed, and consigned to helplessness. And sentenced, with the rest of mankind, to interminable waiting.
“I've known him ages,” Hillier said. “There've been times when I haven't much liked him and God knows I've never understood him, but he's been there for years, a presence that I could somehow depend upon, just to … to be there. And I find I don't like the thought of his going.”
“Perhaps he won't go,” Barbara said. “Perhaps he'll recover.”
Hillier shot her a look. “You don't recover from something like this. He may live. But recover? No. He'll not be the same. He'll not recover.” He crossed one leg over the other, which was the first time Barbara noticed his clothes, which were what he'd thrown on the night before and had never got round to changing during the day. And she saw him for once not as superior but as human being: in hound's-tooth and Tattersall, with a pullover that had a hole in the cuff. He said, “Leach tells me it was all done to divert suspicion.”
“Yes. That's what DI Lynley and I think.”
“What a waste.” And then he peered at her. “There's nothing else?”
“What do you mean?”
“No other reason behind Malcolm's being hit?”
She met his gaze steadily and read the question behind it, the one that asked if what AC Hillier assumed, believed, or wanted to believe about the Webberly marriage and its partners therein was really true. And Barbara didn't intend to give the assistant commissioner any part of that piece of information. She said, “No other reason. Turns out the superintendent was just easy for Davies to track down.”
“That's what you think,” Hillier said. “Leach told me Davies himself isn't talking.”
“I expect he'll talk eventually,” Barbara replied. “He knows better than most where keeping mum can get you.”
“I've made Lynley acting superintendent till this is sorted out,” Hillier said. “You know that, don't you?”
“Dee Harriman passed along the word.” Barbara drew in a breath and held it, hoping, wishing, and dreaming for what did not then come.
Instead, he said, “Winston Nkata does good work, doesn't he, all things considered.”
What things? she wondered. But she said, “Yes, sir. He does good work.”
“He'll be looking at a promotion soon.”
“He'll be glad of that, sir.”
“Yes. I expect he will.” Hillier looked at her long, then he looked away. His eyes closed. His head rested back against the sofa.
Barbara sat there in silence, wondering what she was meant to do. She finally settled on saying, “You ought to go home and get some sleep, sir.”
“I intend to,” Hillier replied. “We all should, Constable Havers.”
It was half past ten when Lynley parked on Lawrence Street and walked back round the corner to the St. James house. He hadn't phoned ahead to let them know he was coming, and on the way down from the Earl's Court Road, he'd determined that if the ground floor lights in the house were off, he wouldn't disturb its occupants. This was, he knew, in large part cowardice. The time was fast approaching when he was going to have to deal with harvesting the crop he'd long-ago sown, and he didn't particularly want to do that. But he'd seen how his past was seeping insidiously into his present, and he knew that he owed the future he wanted an exorcism that could only be managed if he spoke. Still, he would have liked to put it off and as he rounded the corner, he hoped for darkness in the house's windows as a sign that further procrastination was acceptable.
He had no such luck. Not only was the light above the front door blazing, but the windows of St. James's study cast yellow shafts onto the wrought iron fence that edged the property.
He mounted the steps and rang the bell. Inside the house, the dog barked in response. She was still barking when Deborah St. James opened the door.
She said, “Tommy! Good Lord, you're soaked. What a night. Have you forgotten your umbrella? Peach, here. Stop it at once.” She scooped the barking little dachshund from the floor and tucked her under her arm. “Simon's not in,” she confided, “and Dad's watching a documentary about dormice, don't ask me why. So she's taking guard duty more seriously than usual. Peach, none of your growling, now.”
Lynley stepped inside and removed his wet coat. He hung it on the rack to the right of the door. He extended his hand to the dog for purposes of olfactory identification, and Peach ceased both barking and growling and indicated her willingness to accept his obeisance in the form of a few scratches behind her ears.
“She's impossibly spoiled,” Deborah said.
“She's doing her job. You shouldn't just open the door like that at night anyway, Deb. It's not very wise.”
“I always assume that if a burglar's calling, Peach will go for his ankles before he can get into the first room. Not that we have much worth taking, although I wouldn't mind seeing the last of that hideous thing with peacock feathers that sits on the sideboard in the dining room.” She smiled. “How are you, Tommy? I'm in here. Working.”
She led him into the study where, he saw, she was in the process of wrapping the pictures she'd selected for her December show. The floor was spread with framed photographs yet to be protected by plastic, along with a bottle of window cleaner that she'd been using to see to the glass that covered them, a roll of kitchen towels, myriad sheets of bubble-wrap, tape, and scissors. She'd lit the gas fire in the room, and Peach repaired to her ramshackle basket that stood before it.
“It's an obstacle course,” Deborah said, “but if you can find your way to the trolley, have some more of Simon's whisky.”
“Where is he?” Lynley asked. He worked his way round her photographs and went to the drinks trolley.
“He went to a lecture at the Royal Geographic Society: somebody's journey somewhere and a book signing to follow. I think there are polar bears involved. In the lecture, that is.”
Lynley smiled. He tossed down a hefty gulp of the whisky. It would do for courage. To give himself time for the spirits to work in his bloodstream, he said, “We've made an arrest in the case I've been working on.”
“It didn't take you long. You know, you're completely suited to police work, Tommy. Who would ever have thought it, the way you grew up?”
She rarely mentioned his upbringing. A child of privilege born to another child of privilege, he'd long chafed beneath the burdens of blood, family history, and his duties to both. The thought of it now—family, useless titles that were every year rendered more meaningless, velvet capes
trimmed in ermine, and more than two hundred and fifty years of lineage always determining what his next move should be—served as a stark reminder of what he had come to tell her and why. Still, he stalled, saying, “Yes. Well. One always has to move quickly in a homicide. If the trail begins to cool, you stand less chance of making an arrest. I've come for that computer, by the way. The one I left with Simon. Is it still up in the lab? May I fetch it, Deb?”
“Of course,” she said, although she gave him a curious glance, either at his choice of subject—considering her husband's line of work, she was more than aware of the need for speed in a murder investigation—or the tone with which he spoke about it, which was too hearty to be at all believable. She said, “Go on up. You don't mind my carrying on down here, do you?”
He said, “Not at all,” and made his escape, taking his time to trudge up the stairs to the top floor of the house. There, he flipped on the lights in the lab and found the computer exactly where St. James had left it. He unplugged it, cradled it in his arms, and went back down the stairs. He placed it by the front door and considered calling out a cheerful goodnight and going on his way. It was late, after all, and the conversation that he needed to have with Deborah St. James could wait.
Just as he was thinking of another postponement, though, Deborah came to the study door and observed him. She said, “All's not right with your world. There's nothing wrong with Helen, is there?”
And Lynley found at last that he couldn't avoid it no matter how much he wanted to. He said, “No. There's nothing wrong with Helen.”
“I'm glad,” she said. “The first months of pregnancy can be awful.”
He opened his mouth to reply but lost the words. Then he found them again. He said, “So you know.”
She smiled. “I couldn't help knowing. After … what is it, now? seven pregnancies? … I've become pretty well-attuned to the signs. I never got far in them—the pregnancies, I mean … well, you know that—but far enough to feel that I'd never get over being sick.”
Lynley swallowed. Deborah went back into the study. He followed her, found the glass of whisky where he'd left it, and took a momentary refuge in its depths. He said when he could, “We know how you want … And how you've tried … You and Simon …”
“Tommy,” she said firmly, “I'm pleased for you. You mustn't ever think that my situation—Simon's and mine … well, no … mine, really—would ever keep me from feeling happiness for yours. I know what this means to you both, and the fact that I'm not able to carry a baby … Well, it's painful, yes. Of course it's painful. But I don't want the rest of the world to wallow round in my grief. And I surely don't want to put anyone else in my situation just for the company.”
She knelt among her photographs. She seemed to have dismissed the subject, but Lynley could not because, as far as he was concerned, they had not yet come to the real topic. He went to sit opposite her, in the leather chair St. James used when he was in the room. He said, “Deb,” and when she looked up, “There's something else.”
Her green eyes darkened. “What else?”
“Santa Barbara.”
“Santa Barbara?”
“That summer when you were eighteen, when you were at school at the institute. That year when I made those four trips to see you: October, January, May, and July. July, especially, when we drove the coastal road into Oregon.”
She said nothing, but her face blanched, so he knew that she understood where he was heading. Even as he headed there, he wished that something would happen to stop him so he wouldn't have to admit to her what he could hardly bear to face himself.
“You said it was the car on that trip,” he told her. “You weren't used to so much driving. Or perhaps it was the food, you said. Or the change in climate. Or the heat when it was hot outside or the cool when it was cold indoors. You weren't used to being in and out of air-conditioning so much, and aren't Americans addicted to their air conditioners? I listened to every excuse you made, and I chose to believe you. But all the time …” He didn't wish to say it, would have given anything to avoid it. But at the last moment he forced himself to admit what he'd long pushed from his mind. “I knew.”
She lowered her gaze. He saw her reach out for the scissors and bubble-wrap, pulling one of her pictures towards her. She did nothing with it.
“After that trip, I waited for you to tell me,” he said. “What I thought was that when you told me, we'd decide together what we wanted to do. We're in love, so we'll marry, I told myself. As soon as Deb admits that she's pregnant.”
“Tommy …”
“Let me go on. This has been years in the making, and now we're here, I have to see it through.”
“Tommy, you can't—”
“I always knew. I think I knew the night that it happened. That night in Montecito.”
She said nothing.
He said, “Deborah. Please tell me.”
“It's no longer important.”
“It is important to me.”
“Not after all this time.”
“Yes. After all this time. Because I did nothing. Don't you see? I knew, but I did nothing. I just left you to face it alone, whatever ‘it’ was going to be. You were the woman I loved, the woman I wanted, and I ignored what was happening because …” He became aware that still she wasn't looking at him, her face fully hidden by the angle of her head and the way her hair fell round her shoulders. But he didn't stop speaking because he finally understood what had motivated him then, what was indeed the source of his shame. “Because I couldn't sort out how to work it,” he said. “Because I hadn't planned it to happen like that and God help anything that stood in the way of how I planned my life to work out. And as long as you said nothing about it, I could let the entire situation slide, let everything slide, let my whole damned life slide right on by without the least inconvenience to me. Ultimately, I could even pretend that there was no baby. I could tell myself that surely if there was, you'd have said something. And when you didn't, I allowed myself to believe I'd been mistaken. When all the time I knew at heart that I hadn't. So I said nothing throughout July. In August. September. And whatever you faced when you finally made your decision to act, you faced alone.”
“It was my responsibility.”
“It was ours. Our child. Our responsibility. But I left you there. And I'm sorry.”
“There's no need to be.”
“There is. Because when you and Simon married, when you lost all those babies, what I had to think was that if you'd had that first child, ours—”
“Tommy, no!” She raised her head.
“—then none of this would have happened to you.”
“That's not how it was,” she said. “Believe me. That's not how it is. You've no need to punish yourself over this. You've no obligation to me.”
“Now, perhaps not. But then I did.”
“No. And it wouldn't have mattered, anyway. You could have spoken about it, yes. You could have phoned. You could have returned on the very next plane, and confronted me with what you believed was going on. But nothing would have changed with all that. Oh, we might have married in a rush or something. You might even have stayed with me in Santa Barbara so that I could finish at the institute. But at the end of it all, there still wouldn't have been a baby. Not mine and yours. Not mine and Simon's. Not mine and anyone's as it turns out.”
“What do you mean?”
She leaned back on her heels, setting the scissors and the tape to one side. She said, “Just what I say. There wouldn't have been a baby no matter what I did. I just didn't wait long enough to find that out.” She blinked rapidly and turned her head to look hard at the bookshelves. After a moment, she returned her gaze to him. “I would have lost our baby as well, Tommy. It's something called balanced translocation.”
“What is?”
“My … what do I call it? My problem? Condition? Situation?” She offered him a shaky smile.
“Deborah, what are you telling me?”
/> “That I can't have a baby. I'll never be able to have one. It's incredible to think that a single chromosome could hold such power, but there you have it.” She pressed her fingers to her chest, saying, “Phenotype: normal in every way. Genotype … Well, when one has ‘excessive foetal wastage’—that's what they call it … all the miscarriages … isn't that obscene?—there's got to be a medical reason. In my case, it's genetics: One arm of the twenty-first chromosome is upside down.”
“My God,” he said. “Deb, I'm—”
“Simon doesn't know yet,” she said quickly, as if to stop him from going on. “And I'd rather he not just now. I did promise him that I'd let a full year go by before having any more tests and I'd like him to think I've kept that promise. I intended to. But last June … that case you were working on when the little girl died …? I just had to know after that, Tommy. I don't know why except that I was … well, I was so struck by her death. Its uselessness. The terrible shame and waste of it, this sweet little life gone … So I went back to the doctor then. But Simon doesn't know.”
“Deborah.” Lynley said her name quietly. “I am so terribly sorry.”
Her eyes filled at that. She blinked the tears back furiously, then shook her head just as furiously when he reached out to her. “No. It's fine. I'm fine. I mean, I'm all right. Most of the time I don't think about it. And we're going through the process of adoption. We've filled out so many applications … all this paperwork … that we're bound to … at some time. And we're trying in other countries as well. I just wish it could be different for Simon's sake. It's selfish and I know it, it's all sorts of ego, but I wanted us to create a child together. I think he wanted … would have liked that as well, but he's too good to say so directly.” And then she smiled despite one large tear that she couldn't contain. “You're not to think I'm not all right, Tommy. I am. I've learned that things work out the way they're meant to work out no matter what we want, so it's best to keep our wants to a minimum and to thank our stars, our luck, or our gods that we've been given as much as we have.”