Believing the Lie

WANDSWORTH LONDON

Their arrangement was the same as it had been from the first. She would communicate in some way, and he would go to her. Sometimes it was a quarter smile, just an upturn of her lips gone so quickly that anyone unaware of what it meant would not even have noticed. Sometimes it was the word tonight murmured as they passed in a corridor. At other times she said something openly if, perhaps, they met on the stairway or in the officers’ mess or if, perhaps, they saw each other in the underground car park arriving by chance at the same moment in the morning. But in any case, he waited until she gave the word. He didn’t like it this way, but there was no other. She would not under any circumstances come to him, and even had she been willing to do so, she was his superior officer so he was hers to command. It did not work the other way round.

He’d tried it only once, early on in their arrangement. He’d thought it might mean something if she spent the night with him in Belgravia, as if their relationship had turned some sort of corner, although he wasn’t exactly certain that he wanted it to do so. She’d said firmly in that way she had of making things so pellucid there were no further avenues of discussion available to him, That will never happen, Thomas. And the fact she called him Thomas rather than the more intimate Tommy by which his every friend and colleague referred to him said more than the other, larger truth that he knew she would not say: The house in Eton Terrace was still redolent of his murdered wife, and eight months after her death on the front steps of the building, he hadn’t been able to bring himself to do a single thing about that. He was insightful enough to realise that there was little likelihood of any woman’s sleeping in his bed while Helen’s clothes still hung in the wardrobe, while Helen’s scent bottles still stood on the dressing table where Helen’s hairbrush still held strands of Helen’s hair. Until Helen’s presence was eradicated from the house, he could not realistically hope to share it with anyone else, even for a night. So he was caught, and when Isabelle said that word — Tonight? — he went to her, drawn by a force that was at once a physical need and a form of oblivion, however brief.

He did as much on this evening. In the afternoon they’d had a meeting with the head of IPCC on the matter of a complaint registered that past summer by a solicitor on the behalf of her client: a paranoid schizophrenic who had run into traffic in a London street while being pursued by the police. The resulting internal injuries and fractured skull demanded monetary compensation, and the solicitor meant to have it. The police complaints commission was investigating the matter and this constituted meeting upon meeting with everyone involved explaining his or her take on the story, with CCTV footage viewed, with eyewitnesses interviewed, and with the London tabloids breathlessly eager to snatch up the story and run with it as soon as the IPCC made a determination as to guilt, innocence, malfeasance, accident, circumstances beyond anyone’s control, or whatever else they chose to conclude. The meeting had been tense. He was as tightly strung as Isabelle at its conclusion.

She’d said to him as they walked through the corridors to return to their offices in Victoria Block, I’d like to have you tonight, Thomas, if you’ve the energy. Dinner and a shag. Very good steaks, very nice wine, very clean sheets. Not Egyptian cotton as I expect yours are, but fresh all the same.

And then the smile and something in her eyes that he’d not yet been able to interpret, these three months after they’d first coupled in the soulless bedroom of her basement flat. Damn if he didn’t want her, he thought. It had to do with an act the nature of which allowed him to believe he’d mastered her when the truth was she had quickly mastered him.

The arrangement was simple enough. She would go to the shops, and he could either go straight to the flat and let himself in with his key or go to his own home first on one pretext or another, killing time till making the drive to that dismal street at the halfway point between Wandsworth prison and a cemetery. He chose the latter. It allowed him the semblance of being his own man.

To further this illusion, he took his time with his preparations: reading his mail, having a shower and a shave, returning a phone call from his mother on the matter of rainwater heads along the west side of the house in Cornwall. Should they be replaced or repaired, did he think? Winter’s coming, darling, and with the rains getting heavier… It was a pretext call on her part. She wanted to know how he was, but she didn’t like to ask directly. She knew very well that the rainwater heads had to be repaired. They could not possibly be replaced. It was a listed building, after all. It would probably be falling down round their ears before they’d receive permission to alter it. They chatted on of family matters. How was his brother doing? he asked, which was family code for Is he still coping without turning back to cocaine, heroin, or whatever other substance he might use to remove himself from reality? The answer was Perfectly well, darling. This was family code for I’m monitoring him, as always, and you’ve no cause to worry about it. How was his sister? meant had Judith yet given up the idea of permanent widowhood, to which the answer Terribly busy as always was code for She has no intention of risking another dreadful marriage, believe me. So went the conversation till all topics were exhausted and his mother said, I do so hope we’ll see you for Christmas, Tommy, and he assured her that she would.

After that, with no other reason to hold him in Belgravia, he worked his way over to the river and south from there to Wands worth Bridge. He reached the house in which Isabelle lived just after half past seven. Parking was murder in the area, but he got lucky when a van pulled away from the kerb some thirty yards down the street.

At Isabelle’s door, he fished out his key. He had it in the lock and was letting himself in when she opened the door from within and quickly stepped outside onto the flagstones of the area at the base of the stairs from the pavement above them. She shut the door behind her.

She said, “We can’t tonight. Something’s come up. I would have rung your mobile but I couldn’t. I’m sorry.”

He was nonplussed. Stupidly, he looked over her shoulder at the panels of the closed door. He said, “Who’s here?” because that much was obvious enough. Another man, he reckoned, and in that he was right, although it was not a man he expected.

“Bob,” she said.

Her former husband. How could this, he wondered, possibly be a problem? “And?” he enquired pleasantly.

“Thomas, it’s awkward. Sandra’s with him. The boys as well.”

Bob’s wife. The twin sons that were Isabelle’s own, children of her five-year marriage. They were eight years old and he’d had yet to meet them. As far as he knew, they’d not even been into London to see her.

He said, “This is good, Isabelle. He’s brought them to you, then?”

“You don’t understand,” she said. “I wasn’t expecting — ”

“I know that, obviously. So I’ll meet them, we’ll have dinner, and I’ll leave.”

“He doesn’t know about you.”

“Who?”

“Bob. I’ve not told him. This was all a surprise. He and Sandra have come into town for some sort of dinner. A big affair. They’re dressed to the nines. They’ve brought the boys and they thought we could have a visit — the boys and I — while they’re at this event.”

“They didn’t phone you first? What if you hadn’t even been at home? What would he have done with them then? Have them wait in the car while he went to dinner?”

She looked irritated. “You know, that’s hardly important, Thomas. The fact is, I am at home and they’re here in London. I’ve not seen the boys in weeks, this is the first time he’s actually allowing me to be alone with them, and I have no intention of — ”

“What?” He looked at her more evenly now. She was pinched round the mouth. He knew what this meant. She was wanting a drink and the last thing she’d now be able to do was to have one. “What is it you suppose I’d do, Isabelle? Corrupt them with my dissolute ways?”

“Don’t be difficult. This has nothing to do with you.”

“Tell them I’m your colleague, then.”

“A colleague with the key to my door?”

“For the love of God, if he knows I have the key to your door — ”

“He doesn’t. And he won’t. I told him I thought I heard someone knock and I’ve come to check if anyone’s at the door.”

“Are you aware you’re contradicting yourself?” Again, he looked beyond her shoulder to the door. He said, “Isabelle, is there someone else in there? Not Bob at all? Not his wife? Not the boys?”

She drew herself taller. She was six feet tall, nearly his height, and he knew what it meant when she made the most of that fact. “What are you suggesting?” she demanded. “That I’ve another lover? God in heaven. I cannot believe you’re doing this. You know what this means to me. These are my children. You’ll meet them and Bob and Sandra and God only knows who else when I’m ready and not before. Now I’ve got to get back inside before he comes to see what’s happening, and you’ve got to go. We’ll talk about this tomorrow.”

“And if I walk in anyway? You leave me out here, I use the key, I come inside? What then?” Even as he spoke the words, he couldn’t believe it of himself. His dignity seemed to have gone the way of his brains, his patience, and his self-control.

She knew it. He could see that in her eyes no matter what else she was able to hide from him so well. She said, “Let’s forget you said that,” and she went inside, leaving him to cope with what looked every moment more like a tantrum thrown by a five-year-old.

God, what had he been thinking? he wondered. Thomas Lynley, detective inspector of New Scotland Yard, titled member of the landed gentry, graduate of Oxford University with a first-class degree in being a fool.