Believing the Lie

MARYLEBONE LONDON

He managed to avoid her quite successfully for two days although he was able to tell himself that he wasn’t attempting to avoid her at all because he spent those days hanging about the Royal Courts of Justice. There his testimony had been called for in the ongoing trial of a serial killer with whom he’d come into very close and nearly fatal contact the previous February. After those two days, however, his presence being no longer required in the vicinity of Courtroom Number One, he politely refused three requests from journalists for interviews, which he knew would end up touching upon the one subject he could not face touching upon — the death of his wife — and he returned to New Scotland Yard. There Isabelle unsurprisingly asked him if he’d been avoiding her since he’d phoned in his necessary absences not to her but to the departmental secretary. He said of course not and what possible reason had he to avoid her and he’d been at court as had been his longtime partner DS Barbara Havers. Surely Isabelle didn’t think DS Havers was also trying to avoid her?

He shouldn’t have said this last because it gave too much away, and what it gave away was the truth of the matter, which was, naturally, that he hadn’t particularly wished to have a conversation with Isabelle till he’d sorted out in his own head the reasons for his reaction at the door to her flat. Isabelle said that, frankly, avoiding her was precisely what she’d expect DS Havers to be doing as she made a regular habit of that. To which he’d replied, Be that as it may, I’m not trying to do so.

She said, “You’re angry and you’ve a right to be, Tommy. I behaved badly. He turned up with the children and I was completely unnerved. But see it from my position, please. It’s not beyond Bob to phone one of the higher-ups here and drop the word: ‘Are you aware that Acting Detective Superintendent Ardery is having it off with a subordinate officer? Just thought you might want to know.’ And he’d do that, Tommy. He would do that. And you know what would happen if he did.”

He thought she was being overly paranoid, but he didn’t say as much. To do so would lead them into an argument, if not here in her office to which she’d summoned him then somewhere else. He said, “You could be right,” and when she said, “So…?” he knew that it was another way of saying Tonight, then? so that they could see to what they’d had to postpone. Steaks, wine, a shag that would be very energetic and very, very good. Which, he realised, was the hell of it for him. Isabelle in bed was inventive and exciting, and in bed was the only place she allowed him even a moment of control over her.

He was considering her proposition when Dorothea Harriman, the lithesome and well-turned-out departmental secretary, popped into the doorway, which he’d left open. She said, “Detective Inspector Lynley?” and when he turned, “I’ve just had a call. I’m afraid you’re wanted.”

“By whom, Dee?” He assumed he was meant to return to the Old Bailey for some reason.

“Himself.”

“Ah.” Not the Old Bailey, then. Himself would be the assistant commissioner, Sir David Hillier. When Hillier beckoned, one set off to do his bidding. “Now?” he asked.

“That would be the case. And he’s not here. You’re to go straight to his club.”

“At this hour? What’s he doing at his club?”

Harriman shrugged. “Not a clue. But you’re meant to be there as soon as possible. Traffic permitting, he’d like you there in fifteen minutes. His secretary made that clear.”

“That seals it, then, doesn’t it?” He turned back to Isabelle and said, “If you’ll excuse me, guv?” When she gave a curt nod, he went on his way, everything still unresolved between them.

Sir David Hillier’s club was near Portland Place, and it was a ludicrous idea that Lynley would be able to get there from New Scotland Yard within fifteen minutes. But the mention of time suggested urgency, so he took a cab and told the driver to rat-run and, for God’s sake, to do everything possible to avoid Piccadilly Circus, a regular source of congestion. That got him to Twins — Hillier’s club — in twenty-two minutes, something of a record considering the time of day.

Twins had been fashioned from three of the few remaining town houses in the area not razed by someone’s idea of redevelopment in the nineteenth century. It was marked only by a discreet bronze plaque to the right of the doorbell and by an azure flag with the eponymous founders of the club memorialised upon it. They’d been conjoined, or so at least it seemed by their depiction on the flag. As far as Lynley knew, no one had delved deeply enough into the history of the place to learn whether this was an apocryphal account of the club’s genesis.

He was admitted not by a doorman but rather by an elderly woman in black with a crisp white pinafore apron pinned to her chest. She looked like someone from another century and, as things developed, she moved like that as well. He stated his business in an entry hung with Victorian paintings of uncertain quality that loomed above a marble draughtsboard floor. The woman nodded and negotiated something like a three-point turn before leading him to a door to the right of an impressive staircase broken by a mezzanine. There a sculpture of Venus on the half shell stood, backed by a window that arched to display the upper part of a garden, evidenced by the remains of a tree strangled by ivy.

The woman knocked, opened, and admitted him into a darkly panelled dining room, closing the door behind him. The room was empty of diners at this hour but occupied by two men at one of the linen-covered tables. They had a porcelain coffee service between them. There were three cups.

One of the men was the assistant commissioner, and the other was a bespectacled bloke who was, perhaps, too well-dressed for the time of day and the present environment, although, for that matter, so was Hillier. They seemed of an age but unlike Hillier, the other man had a receding hairline that he emphasised rather than hid, by combing his remaining locks straight back, where they lay flat against his skull in defiance of fashion and looks. His hair was uniform in colour — mousy brown would have best described it — and thus seemed to be dyed. Also in defiance of fashion, his spectacles were thick rimmed with enormous black frames, and these in combination with an astoundingly overlarge upper lip unmatched to his lower made him look like someone begging to be caricatured. This, in fact, suggested to Lynley that he knew of the man, although he couldn’t have stated his name.

Hillier did that. “Lord Fairclough,” he said. “Bernard, this is DI Lynley.”

Fairclough stood. He was far shorter than both Lynley and Hillier, perhaps five feet five inches, and he carried something of a gut on him. His handshake was firm, and during the ensuing meeting, nothing he said or did indicated that he was anything but strong willed and confident.

“David’s told me about you,” Fairclough said. “I hope we can work well together.” His accent placed him from the north and its nature surprised Lynley, for it spoke of an education decidedly not undergone in a hallowed public school. He glanced at Hillier. It was completely like the AC to rub elbows with someone in possession of a title. It was completely unlike the AC, on the other hand, to do this elbow-rubbing with someone whose title had come not via the blood but rather, like his, via the Honours List.

“Lord Fairclough and I were knighted on the same day,” Hillier said, as if he felt an explanation for their association was required. He added, “Fairclough Industries,” as a means of clarification, as if the name of Fairclough’s source of wealth — if he had any — would be apparent at once.

“Ah,” Lynley said.

Fairclough smiled. “The Fairloo,” he said as means of clarification.

That did it, of course, as it would do. Bernard Fairclough had come to prominence first because of a most unusual lavatory invented and then widely produced by Fairclough Industries. He’d sealed his place in the firmament of those receiving titles from a grateful nation, however, by establishing a charitable foundation whose focus was raising funds to research a cure for pancreatic cancer. However, Fairclough had never been able to escape his association with the lavatory, and much amusement had been generated by tabloids referring to his knighthood and subsequent elevation to the peerage with such declarations as “It was a royal flush.”

Hillier gestured at the table. Lynley was meant to join them. Without asking, Hillier poured him a cup of coffee and, as Lynley sat and Fairclough resumed his own place at the table, slid the cup in his direction along with the milk and sugar.

“Bernard’s asked a favour of us,” Hillier said. “It’s an entirely confidential matter.”

Which explained their meeting at Twins, Lynley thought. Which also explained their meeting at Twins at a time of day when the only members in the building were probably either dozing over newspapers in the library or playing squash in a basement gym. Lynley nodded but said nothing. He glanced at Fairclough, who removed a white handkerchief from his pocket and patted it against his forehead. This bore a moderate sheen of sweat. It was not overly warm in the room.

He said, “My nephew — Ian Cresswell, my late sister’s son — drowned ten days ago. South end of Lake Windermere sometime after seven in the evening. His body wasn’t found till the next afternoon. My wife was the one who found him.”

“I’m sorry to hear it.” It was, of course, an automatic response to being given such information. Hearing it, Fairclough’s face remained a blank.

“Valerie likes to fish,” he told Lynley, a remark that sounded apropos of nothing till he went on with, “She takes a small rowingboat out a few times each week. Odd hobby for a woman but there it is. She’s fished for years. We keep the boat along with several other craft in a boathouse on the property, and that’s where Ian’s body was. Facedown in the water, open gash on his head, although at that point there was no blood.”

“What seems to have happened?”

“Lost his footing getting out of a single scull. It’s how he took his exercise, that, the scull. He went down, hit his head on the dock — it’s stone — and fell into the water.”

“Couldn’t swim or unconscious?”

“The latter. A terrible accident, according to the inquest.”

“You think otherwise?”

Fairclough turned in his seat. He seemed to look at a painting over a fireplace at the far side of the room. This was a circus scene painted in the style of Hogarth: part of the rake’s progress, with assorted human oddities from the circus in place of the rake. It was another vote for the conjoined twins. They’d have been circus material, certainly. Fairclough studied the scene depicted before he finally said, “He fell because two large stones came loose on the dock. They dislodged.”

“I see.”

Hillier said, “Bernard thinks there’s a chance the stones had some help, Tommy. The boathouse has stood for more than one hundred years and it was built to stand a hundred more. So was the dock.”

“Yet if the coroner has ruled an accident — ”

“I don’t actually disbelieve him,” Fairclough said quickly. “But …” He looked at Hillier as if asking the AC to finish.

Hillier complied. “Bernard wants to be certain it was an accident, as anyone might. There are family concerns.”

“What sort of family concerns?”

The other men were silent. Lynley looked from one to the other. He said, “I can hardly make certain of anything if I’m in the dark, Lord Fairclough.”

“It’s Bernard,” Fairclough said, although Hillier’s look in his direction suggested that such familiarity was going to breed the usual. “It’s Bernie, actually, among the family. But Bernard will do.” Fairclough reached for his coffee cup. Hillier had topped it up, but it seemed that Fairclough wanted the cup more for something to do with his hands than for drinking. He turned it, examined it, and finally said, “I want to be certain that my son Nicholas wasn’t involved in Ian’s death.”

Lynley let a moment hang while he absorbed this information and what it could imply about the father, the son, and the deceased nephew. He said, “Have you reason to believe Nicholas might be involved?”

“No.”

“Then?”

Again that glance towards Hillier, which prompted the AC to say, “Nicholas has had a… We’d have to call it a troubled youth. He seems to have got over it, but as he’s seemed to get over it before, Bernard’s fear is that the boy — ”

“A man now,” Fairclough cut in. “He’s thirty-two. He’s married as well. When I look at him, things seem to have changed. He seems to have changed, but it was drugs, all sorts but particularly methamphetamine, and it went on for years, you see, since he was round thirteen. He’s lucky even to be alive at this point, and he swears he knows it. But that’s what he always said, isn’t it, time after time.”

Lynley heard all this with a dawning of understanding as to how he fitted into what was going on. He’d never spoken of his brother to Hillier, but Hillier had snouts in every part of the Met and how unlikely was it that among the information he gathered was that which told the AC of Peter Lynley’s battles with addiction?

Bernard continued. “Then he met a woman from Argentina. She’s a real beauty, and he fell in love, but she laid down the law. She’d have nothing to do with him till he got the monkey off his back permanently. So he did so. Apparently.”

To Lynley this seemed all the more reason that Nicholas Fairclough was uninvolved, but he waited for more and it came in fits and starts. It seemed that the dead man had grown up in the Fairclough home, playing the role of an older brother whose perfection had created footsteps too large for the younger Nicholas ever to hope he’d be able to walk in. Ian Cresswell had successfully completed schooling at St. Bees in Cumbria, and from there achieved further success at university. This put him in position to serve as the chief of finances for Fairclough Industries as well as the man in charge of Bernard Fairclough’s personal financial affairs. These affairs, it seemed, were considerable.

“No decision’s been made as to who’ll take over the daily running of the firm when I’m no longer around,” Fairclough said. “But obviously, Ian was very high on the list of contenders.”

“Did Nicholas know this?”

“Everyone knew it.”

“Does he stand to gain, then, from Ian’s death?”

“As I’ve said, no decision had — or has — been made.”

So if everyone knew where Ian stood, everyone — whoever everyone was — had a motive for murder, Lynley thought, if murder it was. Yet if the coroner had deemed it an accident, Fairclough should have been relieved, which he clearly was not. Lynley wondered idly if, despite his words, Fairclough in fact wanted his son to be the cause of his own cousin’s death. It was perverse, but in his time at the Met, Lynley had seen his share of perversity.

“Exactly who is everyone?” Lynley enquired. “I take it there are others besides Nicholas with a vested interest in Fairclough Industries?”

There were, as it turned out: There were two older sisters and a former son-in-law, but it was Nicholas about whom Fairclough had concerns. Lynley could leave the rest of them alone. Not a single one of them was a killer. They lacked the bottle for it. Nicholas, it seemed, did not. And besides, with his history… One wished to be sure he had no involvement in this matter. One merely wished to be sure.

“I’d like you to take this on,” Hillier told Lynley. “You’ll have to go up to the Lakes and all of it has to be done with complete discretion.”

A police investigation managed with complete discretion, Lynley thought. He wondered how he was meant to accomplish that.

Hillier elucidated. “No one will know you’ve gone there. And the local police won’t know you’re doing this. We don’t want to give the impression that the IPCC’s about to get involved. No feathers ruffled but no stone unturned. You know how to manage that.”

The fact was that he didn’t. And there was something else that made him uneasy. He said, “Superintendent Ardery is going to want to — ”

“I’ll handle Superintendent Ardery. I’ll handle everyone.”

“So I’m to work on this completely alone?”

“No one at the Yard can be involved,” Hillier said.

This seemed to be code for the fact that Lynley was meant to do nothing at all if Nicholas Fairclough turned out to be a killer. He was to leave him to the hands of his father, to the hands of God, or to the hands of the Furies. All of this amounted to an investigation Lynley wanted no part of. But he knew he wasn’t being requested to make a trip up to Cumbria. He was being told to do so.

FLEET STREET THE CITY OF LONDON

Rodney Aronson had clawed his way to his present position as editor of The Source through means both fair and foul, and one of those means was the cultivation of an impressive collection of snouts. He was where he wanted to be in his life, which was sitting in an impressive if somewhat chaotic office where he could wield absolute power, but this did not prevent him from feeling grievances. He hated arrogance. He hated hypocrisy. He hated stupidity. But most of all, he hated incompetence.

Following a story was not rocket science. Neither was chivvying it along. Following merely required three things: research, shoe leather, and doggedness. Chivvying required a willingness to see one’s fellow humans squirm and, if necessary, be squashed. If this latter requirement itself required a bit of slithering on the part of the reporter, what of it? The end product was the story and if the story was big enough with an appropriate amount of sensation attached to it, big sales were the result. Big sales translated into increased advertising, which translated into increased revenue, which translated into orgasmic delight from The Source’s chairman, the cadaverous Peter Ogilvie. At all costs, Ogilvie needed to be kept well oiled with good news in the form of profits. As to whose head or reputation rolled in pursuit of these, it mattered not.

Granted, the story of Nicholas Fairclough’s putative redemption from the clutches of drugs had been a snore of monumental proportions. They could have used it in operating theatres in place of anaesthetic, such a soporific had it been. Now, however, things were looking up. Now, it seemed, Rodney might not have to defend the expenditure of Zed Benjamin’s initial trip to Cumbria to develop the story, no matter the incredible cost the reporter had incurred.

But that thought brought forward the whole issue of journalistic stupidity. Rodney could not see how idiot Benjamin could have failed yet a second time to nose his way into a story when the damn smell of it was right in front of him. Another five days tramping round Cumbria had resulted in nothing but an extension of the tedious panegyric he’d already created about Nicholas Fairclough, his doped-up past, his reformed present, and his doubtless sanctified future. Other than that, there was nada to interest the typical Source reader. There was zero, nought, and double nought with nuts.

Receiving the news from a head-hanging Benjamin that there was nothing more he could possibly add to what he’d written, Rodney knew he should kick the bloke out on his ear. He couldn’t explain to himself why he hadn’t done so, and he thought at first he might be getting soft. But then one of his snouts phoned in, passed along a delectable tip, and Rodney reckoned he might not have to sack Benjamin after all.

What the snout had to say constituted an instructive moment, and since Rodney Aronson loved instructive moments nearly as much as he loved anything containing cacao, he sent for the red-haired giant and enjoyed a Kit Kat that he washed down with an espresso from his personal machine, this latter a gift from Butterball Betsy, a wife who knew many ways to please. That most of them were gustatory didn’t bother him.

Rodney had finished the Kit Kat and was making himself a second espresso when Zed Benjamin lumbered into the room. Damn if he still wasn’t wearing the beanie, Rodney thought with a sigh. He had little doubt that the dumbo had yarmulked his way round Cumbria a second time, successfully putting everyone off yet again. Rodney shook his head in resignation. The folly he had to endure as editor of The Source sometimes truly offset its delights. He decided not to mention the headgear again. He’d done so once, and if Benjamin wouldn’t take his advice, there was nothing for it but to let him sink under the weight of his own nonsensical inclinations. He’d learn or he wouldn’t, and Rodney knew which alternative was more likely. End of story.

“Shut the door,” he said to the reporter. “Take a seat. Give me a second here.” He admired the creamy nature of his concoction and turned off the machine. He carried his drink to the desk and sat. “Death is sex,” he said. “I reckoned you’d work that out for yourself, but it seems you can’t. Got to tell you, Zedekiah, this line of work might not be for you.”

Zed looked at him. He looked at the wall. He looked at the floor. He finally said, “Death is sex,” so slowly that Rodney wondered if the man’s brains had gone the way of his footwear because for some reason he was wearing not respectable shoes but instead very odd-looking sandals with tire treads for soles, along with striped socks that appeared to be handmade from remnants of yarn.

“I told you the story needed sex. You went up there a second time and tried to find it. That you failed to find it I can understand, more or less. But what I can’t understand is how you failed to see the moment of potential rescue when it came. You should’ve been in here like a flash yelling eureka or cowabunga or praise Jesus, I’m saved. Well, probably not that last, all things considered, but the point is you got handed a way into the story — and this would be a way to save it and to justify the expense the paper went to in sending you up there in the first place — and you missed it. Completely. The fact that I had to discover it myself concerns me, Zed. It really does.”

“She still wouldn’t talk to me, Rodney. I mean, she talked but she didn’t talk. She says she’s not what’s important. She’s his wife, they met, they fell in love, they married, they came back to England, and there’s an end to her part of the tale. From what I can tell, she’s entirely devoted to him. But everything he’s done, he’s done himself. She did tell me that it would benefit him — encourage was the word she used — if the story featured his recovery alone and not her part in it. She said something like, ‘You need to understand how important it is for Nicholas to be acknowledged as having achieved this on his own.’ She meant his recovery. I did get that the reason for her wanting the recognition to go to him has to do with his relationship with his dad, and I shaded the story that way, but there didn’t seem to be anything more — ”

“I know you’re not completely stupid,” Rodney cut in, “but I’m beginning to think you’re deaf. ‘Death is sex,’ is what I said. You did hear that, didn’t you?”

“Well, yeah. I did. And she’s sexy, the wife. You’d have to be blind not to — ”

“Forget the wife. She’s not dead, is she?”

“Dead? Well, no. I mean, I reckoned you were using a metaphor, Rodney.”

Rodney gulped down the rest of his espresso. This gave him time not to strangle the young man, which was what he badly wanted to do. He finally said, “Believe me, when I use a fucking metaphor, you’re going to know it. Are you aware — remotely or otherwise — that the cousin of your hero is dead? Recently dead as a matter of fact? That he died in a boathouse where he fell into the water and drowned? That the boathouse I’m speaking of is on the property of your hero’s father?”

“Drowned while I was there? No way,” Zed declared. “You may think I’m blind, Rod — ”

“You’ll get no argument from me.”

“ — but I would have hardly missed that fact. When did he die and which cousin are we talking about?”

“Is there more than one?”

Zed shifted in his chair. “Well, not that I know of. Ian Cresswell drowned?”

“Yes indeedy doodah,” Rodney said.

“Murdered?”

“Accident according to the inquest. But that’s hardly the point because the death’s nicely suspicious and suspicion is our bread and butter. Metaphor, by the way, in case you’re thinking otherwise. Our purpose is to fan the fire — another metaphor, I think I’m on a roll here — and see what comes crawling out of the woodwork.”

“Mixed,” Zed muttered.

“What?”

“Never mind. Is that what you want me to do, then? I take it I’m to suggest there’s reason to believe foul play is involved, with Nicholas Fairclough the player. I can see how it fits: The former drug addict falls off the wagon of recovery and does in his cousin for some obscure reason and as of this writing, gentle readers, he apparently has walked away scot-free.” Zed slapped his hands against his thighs as if he was about to rise and do Rodney’s bidding directly. But instead of getting up to leave, he said, “They grew up as brothers, Rodney. The original story does indicate that. And they didn’t hate each other. But of course I could make it sound like Cain going after Abel if that suits you.”

“Do not,” Rodney said, “take that tone with me.”

“What tone?”

“You bloody well know what tone. I should kick your arse from here to down under, but I’m going to do you a favour instead. I’m going to say three little words that I hope to God will make your pointed ears prick up. Are you listening, Zed? I don’t want you to miss them. Here they come, now: New Scotland Yard.”

That, Rodney saw to his satisfaction, appeared to stop Zed Benjamin in his self-righteous tracks. The reporter frowned. He thought. He finally said, “What about New Scotland Yard?”

“They’re in.”

“Are you saying they’re investigating the drowning?”

“I’m saying something better than that. They’re sending a bloke up there wearing brothel-creepers, if you receive my meaning. And he’s not a bloke from the IPCC.”

“So it’s not an internal investigation? What is it, then?”

“A special assignment. Completely hush-hush, mum’s the word, and on the big QT. He’s apparently been given the job of making a list and checking it twice. And reporting back when he’s finished.”

“Why?”

“That’s the story, Zed. That’s the sex behind the death.” Rodney wanted to add that it was also what Zed himself would have learned had he put in the effort that Rodney himself would have put in had he been in the same position with his story shit-canned by his editor and, potentially, with his job on the line.

“So I’m not to make something up to add sex to the story,” Zed said, as if he needed clarification. “What you’re saying is that it’s already there.”

“At The Source,” Rodney intoned religiously, “we don’t need to make things up. We just need to find them in the first place.”

“And can I ask… How’d you know this? About the Met, I mean. How’d you find out if it’s all hush-hush?”

It was one of those moments when paternal superiority was called for, and Rodney loved those kinds of moments. He rose from behind his desk, went round to the front of it, and lifted a bulky thigh to rest it on the corner. It wasn’t the most comfortable position — considering the chafing of his skin against his trousers — but Rodney liked to think it communicated a degree of journalistic savoir faire that would underscore the importance of what he had to say next. “Zedekiah, I’ve been in this business since I was a kid. I’ve sat where you’re sitting and this is what I learned: We’re nothing without the snouts we cultivate, and I’ve cultivated them from Edinburgh to London and all points in between. Particularly in London, my friend. I’ve got snouts in places that other people don’t even recognise as being places. I scratch their backs with great regularity. They scratch mine whenever they can.”

Benjamin looked suitably impressed. Indeed, he looked humbled. He was in the presence of his journalistic better and it seemed that he finally knew it.

Rodney went on, enjoying his moment. “Nicholas Fairclough’s dad has a tie to the Met. He’s the one asking for an investigation. Can I reckon you know what that means, Zed?”

“He thinks it wasn’t an accident that Ian Cresswell drowned. And if it wasn’t an accident, we’ve got a story. Fact is, we’ve got a story either way because we’ve got the Met up there nosing round and that suggests something might have gone on and all we ever need for a story is a suggestion.”

“Amen to that,” Rodney said. “Get back to Cumbria, my good man. On the double.”

CHALK FARM LONDON

Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers arrived home in an uneasy mood that she didn’t want to name. Having found a parking space not too far from Eton Villas, she should have been grateful, but she couldn’t summon up the appropriate feeling of joy attendant on not having to hike to her front door. As usual, the Mini coughed a few times after Barbara cut the ignition, but she barely took note. Through the windscreen a splattering of rain began to fall, but she hardly clocked that either. Instead, her thoughts remained where they’d been largely fixed — save for one brief distraction — during her long drive home from the Met. Those thoughts battled in her head with a voice that judged them childish, but that didn’t matter and it certainly wasn’t enough to quash them, although she would, at this point, have been grateful had that only been the case.

No one had noticed, Barbara thought. Not a single, sodding individual. Well, all right, Detective Superintendent Ardery had noticed, but she hardly counted as she’d given the initial order — although she’d claimed it was only a suggestion — and from Barbara’s nearly four months of experience with Isabelle Ardery, she knew the superintendent noticed everything. Ardery seemed to make noticing a habit. She seemed, in fact, to have raised it to a fine art. So whenever she took note of something, it mattered not, unless her taking note was connected intimately to one’s performance at work. If it was connected to anything else, one could say that Isabelle Ardery was merely engaging in her irritating habit of sitting in judgement upon the superficial, with the number one superficial within the superintendent’s gaze being Barbara Havers’s personal appearance. As to the rest of the team, when Barbara had arrived back at the Yard from her final appointment with the dentist, they’d gone about their business without a word, a raised eyebrow, or anything else.

Barbara had told herself she didn’t care, and there was truth in this since she really didn’t care about the notice of most of her colleagues. But the notice of one of them she cared about deeply, and it was this caring that sat uneasily upon her, asking to be acknowledged or at least dealt with by the downing of something of a pastry orientation. French would be nice, but it was too late in the day to score a chocolate croissant, although not too late in the day to snag an entire torte, which of course would have been Austrian, but at this hour who was quibbling about such minor details as country of origin? Yet Barbara knew that that direction would lead her straight into the evils of an extended carb wallow from which she might not emerge for weeks, so instead of pausing at a bakery en route to her home, she’d decided to engage in retail therapy in Camden High Street. There she’d made the purchase of a scarf and a blouse, whereupon she’d celebrated the fact that she’d just behaved in a manner entirely different from her usual mode of reacting to disappointment, stress, frustration, or anxiety, but this celebration lasted only till she parked the Mini. At that point, her final encounter with Thomas Lynley forced its way into her consciousness.

After their time at the Old Bailey that day, they’d parted: Lynley heading back to the Yard and Barbara heading to the dentist. They’d not seen each other again until the end of the day when they met in the ascending lift. Barbara was taking it from the underground car park and when it stopped at the lobby, Lynley got on. She could see that he was preoccupied. He’d been preoccupied outside Courtoom Number One earlier in the day, but she’d reckoned that had to do with having to testify to his near encounter with the Grim Reaper in the back of a Ford Transit kitted out as a mobile murder scene some months earlier. This preoccupation seemed different, though, and when he vanished into Superintendent Ardery’s office after the lift doors opened, Barbara reckoned she knew the reason why.

Lynley thought she didn’t know what was going on between Ardery and him. Barbara could understand the reason for this conclusion. No one else at the Met had a clue that he and the superintendent were dancing inside each other’s knickers two or sometimes three nights a week, but no one else at the Met knew Lynley as well as Barbara did. And while she couldn’t imagine anyone actually wanting to shag the superintendent — bloody hell, it had to be like going to bed with a cobra — she’d spent the last three months of their affair telling herself that, if nothing else, Lynley deserved it. He’d lost his wife to a street murder at the hands of a twelve-year-old, he’d spent five months afterwards wandering the coast of Cornwall in a sodding daze, he’d returned to London barely functioning … If he wanted the questionable diversion of plugging Isabelle Ardery’s drainpipes for a time, so be it. They could both be in big trouble if anyone found out about it, but no one was going to find out about it because they were discreet and Barbara wasn’t going to say a word. Besides, Lynley wasn’t going to hook himself up permanently to someone like Isabelle Ardery. The man had something like three hundred years of family history to contend with, and if nothing else, he knew his duty and it had very little to do with an interlude in which he bonked a woman on whom the title Countess of Asherton would hang like a hundredweight. His type was meant to reproduce obligingly and send the family name hurtling into the future. He knew this and he’d act accordingly.

Still, it did not sit easily with Barbara that Lynley and the superintendent were lovers. That relationship comprised the malodorous elephant present in every encounter Barbara had with him. She hated this. Not him, not the affair itself, but the fact that he wouldn’t talk to her about it. Not that she expected him to. Not that she really wanted him to. Not that she would actually be able to think of something reasonable to say should he turn to her and make a comment alluding to it. But they were partners — she and Lynley — or at least they had been and partners were meant to… What? she asked herself. But that was a question she preferred not to answer.

She shoved open her car door. The rain wasn’t bad enough to use a brollie, so she pulled up her jacket’s collar, grabbed the bag that held her new purchases, and hurried towards home.

As was her habit, she glanced at the basement flat of the Edwardian house behind which her tiny bungalow sat. The day was falling towards dusk, and lights were on. She saw her neighbour move past the French windows.

All right, she thought, she was ready to admit it. The truth was, she needed someone to notice. She’d endured hours in the dentist’s chair and her reward had been Isabelle Ardery’s nod and her words, “See to the hair next, Sergeant,” and that had been it. So instead of heading down the side of the house to the back garden where her bungalow sat beneath a towering false acacia, Barbara headed over to the flagstones that marked the outside area of the basement flat, and there she knocked on the door. The notice of a nine-year-old was better than nothing, she decided.

Hadiyyah answered, although Barbara heard the girl’s mother say, “Darling, I do wish you wouldn’t do that. It could be anyone.”

“Just me,” Barbara called out.

“Barbara, Barbara!” Hadiyyah cried. “Mummy, it’s Barbara! Shall we show her what we’ve done?”

“Of course, silly girl. Do ask her to come in.”

Barbara stepped inside to the scent of fresh paint, and it took less than a moment to see what mother and daughter had accomplished. The lounge of the flat had been repainted. Angelina Upman was putting her mark upon it. She’d arranged decorative cushions on the sofa as well, and there were fresh flowers in two different vases: one low artistic arrangement on the coffee table, another on the mantel above the electric fire.

“Isn’t it lovely?” Hadiyyah gazed up at her mother with such adoration that Barbara felt her throat close. “Mummy knows how to make things special and it’s simple, really. Isn’t it, Mummy?”

Angelina bent and kissed the top of her daughter’s head. She lifted the little girl’s chin and said to her, “You, my darling, are my biggest admirer, for which I thank you. But a more disinterested eye is required.” She shot a smile at Barbara. “What do you think, Barbara? Have Hadiyyah and I made a success of our redecorating?”

“It’s meant to be a surprise,” Hadiyyah added. “Barbara, think of it. Dad doesn’t even know.”

They’d chosen to cover the heretofore dingy cream walls with the pale green of early spring. It was a colour well suited to Angelina, and she had to have known that. Sensible decision, Barbara thought. Against it, she looked even more attractive than she already was: light haired, blue eyed, delicate, a sprite.

“I like it,” she said to Hadiyyah. “Did you help pick out the colour?”

“Well …” Hadiyyah shifted on her feet. She was standing next to her mother and she looked up at Angelina and sucked a tiny part of her upper lip.

“She did,” Angelina lied blithely. “She had the final say. Her future in interior design is laid out in front of her, I daresay, although it’s not likely her father will agree. It’ll be science for you, Hadiyyah pet.”

“Pooh,” Hadiyyah said. “I want to be” — with a glance at her mother — “a jazz dancer, that’s what.”

This was news to Barbara, but not surprising. She’d learned that life as a professional dancer had been what Angelina had ostensibly been attempting for the fourteen months during which she’d disappeared from her daughter’s life. That she hadn’t disappeared alone was something Hadiyyah had not been told.

Angelina laughed. “A jazz dancer, is it? We’ll keep that a secret, you and I.” And to Barbara, “Will you have a cup of tea with us, Barbara? Hadiyyah, put the kettle on. We need to put our feet up after our day’s labours.”

“No, no, can’t stay,” Barbara said. “Just stopped by to…”

Barbara realised that they hadn’t noticed either. Hours upon hours in the blasted dental chair and no one… and that meant… She pulled herself together. God, what was wrong with her? she wondered.

She remembered the bag in her hand, the scarf and blouse within it. “Bought something in the high street. I reckoned Hadiyyah’s approval is all I need to wear it tomorrow.”

“Yes, yes!” Hadiyyah cried. “Let’s see, Barbara. Mummy, Barbara has been making herself over. She’s been buying new clothes and everything. She wanted to go to Marks and Spencer at first, but I wouldn’t let her. Well, we bought a skirt there, didn’t we, Barbara, but that was all because I told her only grannies ever go to Marks and Spencer — ”

“Not exactly true, darling,” Angelina said.

“Well you always said — ”

“I say many silly things you’re to take no notice of. Barbara, show us. Put it on, in fact.”

“Oh yes, will you put it on?” Hadiyyah said. “You must put it on. You c’n use my room — ”

“Which is chaos unleashed,” Angelina said. “Use Hari’s and mine, Barbara. Meanwhile, we’ll make the tea.”

Thus Barbara found herself in the last place she actually would have chosen to be: in the bedroom of Angelina Upman and Hadiyyah’s father, Taymullah Azhar. She closed the door behind her with a tiny expulsion of breath. All right, she told herself, she could do this. All she had to do was take the blouse from the bag, unfold it, whip off the pullover she had on… She didn’t have to look at anything but what was directly in front of her.

Which, naturally, she found impossible to do, and she didn’t want to begin to think why. What she saw was what she expected to see: the signs of a man and woman who were partners to each other and specifically partners in the one way necessary to create a child. Not that they were attempting to create another, since Angelina’s birth control pills were on the bedside table next to a clock radio. But contained within the fact of them was also the fact of what they meant.

So bloody what? Barbara asked herself. What the dickens had she expected and what business was it of hers anyway? Taymullah Azhar and Angelina Upman were doing the deed. Better said, they had resumed doing the deed at some point after Angelina’s sudden reappearance in Azhar’s life. The fact that she’d left him for another man was now apparently forgiven and forgotten, and there was an end to it. Everyone got to live happily whatever. Barbara told herself it behooved her to do likewise.

She buttoned the blouse and tried to smooth out its wrinkles. She took out the scarf she’d bought to go with it, and she wound this inexpertly round her neck. She moved to a mirror on the back of the door and gazed at herself. She wanted to retch. She should have gone for the torte, she decided. It would have cost less and been infinitely more satisfying.

“Are you changed, Barbara?” Hadiyyah asked from behind the closed door. “Mummy wants to know do you need any help.”

“No. Got it,” Barbara called. “I’m coming out. You ready? Have your sunglasses on? Be prepared to be dazzled.”

Silence greeted her. Then Hadiyyah and her mother spoke at once: “A striking choice, Barbara,” came from Angelina, while, “Oh no! You forgot about the jawline and the neckline!” came from Hadiyyah, this latter in something of a wail, to which she added, “They’re s’posed to mirror each other, Barbara, and you forgot.”

Another fashion disaster, Barbara thought. There really was a reason she’d spent the last fifteen years of her life wearing slogan-fronted tee-shirts and drawstring trousers.

Angelina hastened to say, “Hadiyyah, that’s not true.”

“But she’s meant to choose rounded and she’s chosen — ”

“Darling, she’s only failed to use the scarf as it’s meant to be used. One can still create the effect by rounding the scarf. One doesn’t want to be limited by believing that only a single kind of neckline… Here, Barbara, let me show you.”

“But, Mummy, the colour — ”

“ — is perfect and I’m pleased you see that,” Angelina said firmly. She removed the scarf from around Barbara’s neck and with a few deft and maddening moves, she rearranged it. This put her closer to Barbara than she’d been before, and Barbara caught the scent of her: She was fragrant like a tropical flower. She also had the most flawless skin Barbara had ever seen. “There,” Angelina said. “Look in the mirror now, Barbara. Tell me what you think. It’s very easy to do. I’ll show you.”

Barbara went back into the bedroom within sight of those pills, which, this time, she refused to look at. She wanted to dislike Angelina — a woman who’d left her daughter and her daughter’s father to have a lengthy fling for which she’d actually been forgiven? — but she found that she couldn’t. This went some distance, she supposed, in explaining how and why Azhar had apparently forgiven her.

She saw her reflection and she had to admit it: The bloody woman knew how to tie a scarf. And now it was tied, properly, Barbara could see that it wasn’t actually the appropriate concomitant garment to the blouse. Damn it all, she thought. When would she learn?

She was about to emerge and ask Angelina if she and Hadiyyah would accompany her on her next adventure in Camden High Street since she hadn’t a great deal of money to waste on making the wrong sartorial decisions. But she heard the flat door open and the sounds of Taymullah Azhar arriving home. The last place she wanted to be found was in the bedroom he shared with the mother of his child, so she hastily untied the scarf, removed the blouse, shoved them back into the bag, and donned the pullover she’d worn to work that day.

When she rejoined them, Azhar was admiring the new paint on the walls, with Hadiyyah clinging onto his hand and Angelina linked to his arm. He turned, and his surprised face told Barbara that neither Hadiyyah nor her mother had mentioned her presence.

He said, “Barbara! Hullo. And what do you think of their handiwork?”

“I’m hiring them to do my digs next,” Barbara said, “although I’m demanding purple and orange for my colours. Think that’ll do me right, Hadiyyah?”

“No no no!” Hadiyyah cried.

Her parents laughed. Barbara smiled. Aren’t we all a happy family? she thought. Time to exit stage right. She said, “Leave you to your dinner,” and to Angelina specifically, “Thanks for the help with the scarf. I could see the difference. If I can get you to dress me every morning, I’ll be set for life.”

“Anytime,” Angelina said. “Truly.”

And the damn thing was, she meant it, Barbara thought. Maddening woman. If she’d merely cooperate and be a sodding cow, things would be so much easier.

She nodded a good night to them all and let herself out. She was surprised when Azhar followed her, but she understood when he lit a cigarette, something he would not do indoors now that nonsmoking Angelina had returned.

He said, “Congratulations, Barbara.”

She stopped, turned, and said, “For what?”

“Your teeth. I see they’ve been repaired, and they look very good. I expect people have been telling you that all day, so let me count myself among them.”

“Oh. Right. Ta. The guv — she’s ordered the entire thing. Well, not ordered exactly, ’cause she can’t do that in a personal matter like appearance. So let’s say she suggested it strenuously. She wants the hair fixed next. I don’t know where we go from there but I’ve a feeling it’ll involve liposuction and serious cosmetic surgery. When she’s finished with me, I expect I’ll be beating men off with a broom.”

“You’re making light of it and you shouldn’t,” Azhar told her. “No doubt Angelina and Hadiyyah have already told you — ”

“They haven’t actually,” Barbara cut in. “But thank you for the compliment, Azhar.”

So there was irony in a soap dish, she thought: a compliment from the very last man on earth who should have noticed her teeth and the very last man from whom she should have wanted notice in the first place. Well, it didn’t mean anything either way, she told herself.

On that set of lies, she walked on to her bungalow, bidding Taymullah Azhar good night.