“Robin?”
“Robin Payne. The DC here in Wiltshire. It’s his mum’s B and B I’m staying in. Lark’s Haven. Like I said. His mum runs it.”
“Ah.”
“There’s no hotel in the village, and with Amesford eighteen miles away and the body site here, I thought—”
“Sergeant, your logic is impeccable.”
She said, “Okay. Yes. Right,” and went on to delineate her plan for the next day. Body site first, autopsy second, a meeting with Sergeant Stanley third.
“Do some scouting round Salisbury as well,” Lynley said. He told her about Alistair Harvie, his antagonism towards Eve Bowen, his presence in Blackpool eleven years past, and his opposition to the prison site in his constituency. “Harvie’s our first direct link between the Tory conference and Wiltshire,” Lynley concluded. “He may be too convenient a link, but he needs to be checked out.”
“Got it,” Havers said. She muttered, “Harvie…Salisbury,” and Lynley could picture her scribbling into her notebook. Unlike Nkata’s, it would be cardboard-covered, its edges sprouting dog-earred blooms. Sometimes, he thought, the woman seemed to be living in another century.
“You do have your mobile phone with you, Sergeant?” he verified pleasantly.
“Sod them,” she said with equal affability. “I hate the bloody things. How did it go with Simon?”
Lynley deflected the question with a recitation of all the facts from his compendium, ending with, “He found a fingerprint on the tape recorder. In the battery compartment, which makes him think it’s genuine and not a plant. SO4’s running it, but if they come up with a name and we find we’ve got a member of the Old Lags Brigade behind the kidnapping, I’ve no doubt someone hired him to do the job.”
“Which may lead us back to Harvie.”
“Or to any number of people. The music teacher. The Woodwards. Stone. Luxford. Bowen. Nkata’s checking everyone out.”
“As to Simon?” Havers asked. “Things okay there, Inspector?”
“They’re fine,” Lynley said. “Perfectly fine.”
He rang off on the lie. He downed the rest of the coffee—room temperature now—and tossed the empty cup into the rubbish. He spent ten minutes avoiding the thought of his encounter with St. James, Helen, and Deborah, and during this time he read through the police report from Wiltshire once again. After that he added a few lines to his notes. Then he organised the case material into separate and neat folders. Then he admitted he could no longer avoid the thought of what had passed between himself and his friends in Chelsea.
So he left the office. He told himself he was done for the day. He was tired. He needed to clear his mind. He wanted a whisky. He had a new Deutsche-Grammophon CD that he hadn’t yet heard and a stack of business mail from his family home in Cornwall that he hadn’t yet opened. He needed to get home.
But the closer he got to Eaton Terrace, the more he knew he should be driving to Onslow Square. He resisted the inclination by telling himself all over again that he had been in the right from the first. But it was as if the car had a will of its own because despite his determination to go home, throw a whisky down his throat, and soothe his savage breast with a few bars of Moussorgsky, he found himself in South Kensington instead of Belgravia, sliding into a vacant parking space a few doors to the south of Helen’s flat.
She was in the bedroom. But she wasn’t in bed, in spite of the hour. Instead, she had the wardrobe doors open and the drawers of the chest pulled out onto the floor, and she appeared to be in the middle of either a spate of late-spring housecleaning or a sartorial purge. A large cardboard box was sitting between the chest of drawers and the wardrobe. Into this box she was placing a carefully folded trapezoid of plum-coloured silk that he recognised as one of her nightgowns. In the box already were other garments, also precisely folded.
He said her name. She didn’t look up. Beyond her, on the bed, he saw that she’d left a newspaper spread open, and when she spoke, it was in apparent reference to this.
“Rwanda,” she said. “The Sudan, Ethiopia. I trifle away my life in London—in circumstances helpfully financed by my father—while all those people starve to death or die from dysentery or cholera.” She glanced his way. Her eyes were very bright, but not with happiness. “Fate’s ugly, isn’t it? I’m here, with all this. They’re there, with nothing. I can’t justify it, so how do I find a balance?”
She went to the wardrobe and pulled out the plum dressing gown that matched the nightgown. She laid it carefully on the bed, tied its belt in a bow, and began to fold it.
He said, “What are you doing, Helen? You can’t possibly be thinking of—” When she looked up, her bleak expression stopped his words.
“Going to Africa?” she said. “Offering someone my help? Me? Helen Clyde? How completely absurd.”
“I didn’t mean—”
“Good Lord, if I did that, I might ruin my manicure.” She placed the dressing gown with the other clothes, returned to the wardrobe, flicked past five hangers, and pulled out a coral sundress. She said, “And anyway, it would be wildly out of character, wouldn’t it? Making myself useful at the expense of my nails?”
She folded the sundress next. The care she took each time she gathered up another piece of the linen told him how much needed to be said between them. He started to speak.
She cut him off, saying, “So I thought at least I could send them some clothes. I could at least do that. And please don’t tell me how ridiculous I’m being.”
“I hadn’t thought that.”
“Because I know what it looks like: Marie Antoinette offering cake to the peasants. What on earth is some poor African woman going to do with a silk dressing gown when what she needs is food, medicine, and shelter, not to mention hope?”
She finished the sundress. She put it in the box. She returned to the wardrobe and whisked through more of the hangers. She chose a wool suit next. She took it to the bed. She used a lint brush against it, checked all of the buttons, found one loose, and went to the chest where she rummaged through one of its drawers on the floor and produced a small straw basket. She took a needle and a reel of cotton from it. She tried twice and failed to thread the needle.
Lynley went to her. He took the needle from her. He said, “Don’t do this to yourself because of me. You were in the right. I was set off by the fact that you’d lied to me, not by the girl’s death. I’m sorry for everything.”
She lowered her head. The light from a lamp on the chest of drawers caught itself in her hair. When she moved, a colour like brandy shimmered through the strands.
He said, “I want to believe that what you saw this evening is the worst that I am. When it comes to you, something feral takes over. It subverts whatever sense of breeding I have. What you saw is the result. And it’s nothing I’m proud of. Forgive me for it. Please.”
She made no reply. Lynley found that he wanted to take her into his arms. But he didn’t make a move to touch her because he was suddenly afraid, for the very first time, what it would mean if she repulsed him now. So he waited, his heart rather than his hat in his hand, for her to respond.
When she did, her voice was low. Her head was bent and her gaze was fixed on the box of clothing. She said, “Righteous indignation carried me through the first hour. How dare he, I thought. What sort of godhead does he think he is?”
“You were right,” Lynley said. “Helen, you were right.”
“But Deborah did me in.” She closed her eyes as if to remove an image from them. She cleared her throat as if to shake off an emotion. “Simon didn’t want to have anything to do with it from the first. But Deborah persuaded him to look into things. And now she feels she’s responsible for Charlotte’s death. She wouldn’t even let Simon throw that picture away. She was taking it with her upstairs when I left.”
Lynley couldn’t have imagined feeling worse about what had happened among them, but now he did. He said, “I’ll put things right somehow. With them. With us.
”
“You’ve dealt Deborah some sort of death blow, Tommy. I don’t know what it is, but Simon knows.”
“I’ll talk to him. I’ll talk to them both. Together. Separately. I’ll do what needs to be done.”
“You’re going to have to. But I don’t expect Simon will want to see you for a while.”
“I’ll give it a few days, then.”
He waited for her to give him a sign even though he knew it was cowardly of him to do so. When she didn’t, he realised that the next move, however difficult, would have to be his. He raised his hand to the small, defenseless curve of her shoulder.
She said quietly, “I’d like to be alone tonight, Tommy.”
He said, “All right,” although it wasn’t and would never be so. He went out into the night.
18
WHEN HER ALARM WENT OFF at half past four the next morning, Barbara Havers awoke in her usual manner: She gave a startled cry and flung herself upright as if the pane of glass that was her dream had been shattered by a hammer and not by a noise. She fumbled for the alarm and silenced it, blinking into the darkness. A thin film of dim light the width of a finger seeped through a break in the curtains. She observed this and frowned, knowing she wasn’t awakening in Chalk Farm and for a moment wondering where the hell she was. She sorted her thoughts. They constituted yesterday, London, Hillier, Scotland Yard, and the motorway. Then she recalled a jungle of chintz, lace pillows, overstuffed furniture, sentimental aphorisms rendered in needlepoint, and floral wallpaper. Yards of floral wallpaper. Miles of it, in fact. Lark’s Haven B and B, Barbara concluded. She was in Wiltshire.
She swung herself to the edge of the bed and reached for the light. She squinted in its brightness and she fumbled her way to the foot of the bed for the plastic black mackintosh that did duty as her dressing gown whenever she travelled. She shrugged into it and crackled across the room to the basin where she turned on the water and, when her courage would allow, raised her head to the mirror.
She couldn’t decide what was worse: the sight of her sleep-puffed face still bearing the imprint of the pillow along one of her cheeks or the reflection of more of the Lark’s Haven wallpaper. In this case, it was yellow chrysanthemums, mauve roses, blue ribbons, and—blithely defying all reason and botany—blue and green leaves. This charming motif was repeated in both the bedspread and the curtains with an abandon that suggested Laura Ashley gone mental. Barbara could just hear all those foreign visitors, eager to experience life among the natives, exclaiming at the perfect Englishness of the B and B. Oh, Frank, isn’t this just what we always expected an English cottage would look like? How delicious. How charming. How utterly sweet.
How bloody nauseating, Barbara thought. And it wasn’t a cottage at all, anyway. It was a solid brick house just outside the village on the Burbage Road. But there was no accounting for taste, was there, and Robin Payne’s mother seemed to like the place just fine.
“Mum did the redecorating last year,” Robin had explained when he’d led the way to her room. A small ceramic plate on the mercifully unpapered door had announced her accommodation as Cricket’s Hideaway. He added, “With Sam’s tender guidance, of course,” and rolled his eyes.
Barbara had met them both below in the sitting room: Corrine Payne and her “recently intended,” as she called Sam Corey. They were billers and cooers of the first order, which seemed somehow in keeping with the overall atmosphere of the B and B, and when Robin had guided Barbara from her car to the kitchen and from there to the sitting room, the pair had made short work of communicating to her their mutual devotion. Corrine was Sam’s “sweet pear.” Sam was Corrine’s “little chappie.” And until Corrine saw the plaster covering the cut on her son’s face, they only had eyes for each other.
The plaster was a momentary diversion from the hand patting, arm squeezing, thigh pinching, and cheek kissing. When she spied it, Corrine vaulted from the sofa and said, “Robbie! What’ve you done to your lovely face?” She called for her “little chappie” to fetch the iodine, the alcohol, and the cotton wool so that Mum could see to her precious boy, but before Sam Corey could do her bidding, Corrine’s rising anxiety gave way to what was apparently an attack of asthma, and with a shout of “I’ll see to it, sweet pear,” her recently intended went in search of her inhaler instead. With Corrine drawing from it gratefully, Robin took the opportunity to hustle Barbara from the room.
“Sorry,” he’d said in a low voice at the top of the stairs. “They’re not always that bad. They’ve just got engaged. So they’re a bit over the top about each other at the moment.”
Barbara thought a bit was an understatement.
Robin went on somewhat miserably when she didn’t reply. “We should have put you up at the King Alfred, shouldn’t we? Or at a hotel in Amesford. Or at another B and B. This place is too much. They’re too much as well. But he isn’t always here, and I thought—”
“Robin, it’s great. Everything’s fine,” Barbara interrupted supportively. “And they’re…” Bloody smarmy was what she wanted to say. But what she said was “They’re in love.” And “You know what it’s like when you fall in love,” as if she herself did.
Robin paused before opening the door for her. He seemed to register her as female for the very first time, which she found disconcerting without knowing why. He said, “You’re quite nice, aren’t you?” And then seemed to realise how his question might be taken. He hurried on with, “Look. Your bathroom’s next door. I hope…Yes. Well, anyway, sleep well.” Then he opened the door and left her in a hurry, suddenly having become all elbows, kneecaps, and shins in his haste to “let her settle in.”
Well, Barbara thought, she was as settled in as she could hope to be in a room called Cricket’s Hideaway. Her knickers and socks were unpacked. Her sweatshirt swung from a hook on the back of the door. Her shirts and trousers hung in the cupboard. Her toothbrush stood in a glass by the basin.
She was using this with her customary morning vigour when a knock on the door was followed by a breathy voice calling, “Ready for morning tea, Barbara?”
Mouth still lathered, Barbara opened the door to find Corrine Payne standing with a tray in her hands. Despite the ungodly hour, she was completely dressed, fully made-up, and expertly coiffed. Had she not been wearing different clothes from the previous night and had her nut-brown hair not been curled into a different style, Barbara would have assumed she’d never gone to bed.
She was wheezing slightly, but she flashed a smile as she entered, and she used her hip to shut the door behind her. She set the tray on top of the chest of drawers and said, “Whew. Got to catch myself here,” and leaned against the chest, taking a few gulps of air. She said, “Spring and summer. They’re the worst of the worst. All the pollen in the air.” She waved towards the tray. “Tea. Go ahead. Be fine in a dash.”
Barbara kept one eye leerily upon the other woman as she rinsed away her toothpaste. Corrine’s breathing sounded like air being released from the stretched mouth of a balloon. It would certainly be a wonderful thing if she collapsed while Barbara was happily swilling down the Formosa Oolong.
But after a moment, during which Barbara heard footsteps padding down the corridor outside her door, Corrine said, “Better. Much much better,” and indeed her breathing seemed to ease. She went on with, “Robbie’s already up and about, and as a rule he’d be the one to bring up the tea.” She poured Barbara a cup. It was strong, the colour of baked cinnamon. “But I always draw the line at letting him deliver morning tea to young ladies. Nothing’s worse than a man seeing a woman in the morning before she’s made herself presentable. Am I right?”
The single experience she’d had with a man some ten years in the past hadn’t included the morning, so Barbara merely said, “Morning. Night. It’s all the same to me,” and sloshed some milk into the cup.
“That’s because you’re young and your skin’s just as peachy as it ever was. And…How old are you? Do you mind my asking that, Barbara?” r />
Barbara briefly considered lopping off a few years for the hell of it, but since she’d already revealed her age to Robin, there was no real point in lying to his mother.
Corrine said, “Lovely. I remember what thirty-three was like.”
Which, Barbara decided, wouldn’t have been a difficult proposition. Corrine herself was well under fifty, something which had initially surprised Barbara when she’d seen the woman on the previous night. Her own mother was sixty-four years old. Since Robin Payne was so close to her in age, Barbara hadn’t been prepared to find in his mother a woman who’d obviously given birth to him as a teenager. She wondered, with an uncharacteristic moment of bitterness, what it would actually be like to have a mother who was in the middle of life instead of nearing the end of it, to have a mother who was in possession of her faculties instead of losing a battle against dementia.
Corrine said, “Sam’s a great deal my senior. You noticed, didn’t you? Funny how things work out. I used to think I could never fall in love with a balding man. Robbie’s father had a great deal of hair. Mounds of it. Everywhere.” She smoothed out the lace runner that covered the top of the chest of drawers. “But he’s been so good to me, has Sam. He has such enormous patience with this.” She used three fingers to pat the hollow of her throat. “When he finally asked me, what could I say but yes? And it’s all for the best since it frees up Robbie. He’ll be able to marry his Celia now. She’s a lovely girl, Celia. Perfectly lovely. So sweet. She’s Robbie’s intended, you know.”
The gentleness in her voice was not deceiving. Barbara met her eyes and read the steely meaning there. She wanted to say, “Mrs. Payne, don’t worry. I’m not after your son, and even if I were, he wouldn’t be likely to succumb to my dubious charms.” Instead, she said after another gulp of tea, “I’ll just throw on some rags and be down in a couple of minutes.”