In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner

CHAPTER 14

Samantha came across her uncle Jeremy in the parlour when she was making her final rounds of the night. She'd been checking doors and windows-by virtue of habit rather than by virtue of the fact that the family had anything of value worth burgling at this point-and she'd marched into the parlour with the intention of seeing to the windows in there before she realised that he was present.

The lights were off, but not because Jeremy was sleeping. He was, instead, running an old eight-millimeter film through a projector that clacked and whirred as if on its last legs. The picture itself flickered not on a screen, because Jeremy couldn't be bothered setting that up. Rather, it moved against a bookshelf, where the curved backs of mildewing volumes distorted the figures whose images had been filmed.

He was reliving what appeared to be a long-ago birthday. Broughton Manor rose in the background-long before the building had fallen into ruinous disrepair-while in the foreground a floppy-hatted clown played the Pied Piper to a group of little children wearing party hats. The clown led them down the slope to the ancient footbridge that provided access to a meadow beyond the River Wye. And in that meadow a pony stood waiting, its reins in the hand of a man whose resemblance to the adult Jeremy told Samantha that she was looking at her maternal grandfather as a very young man. As she watched, the little boy her uncle once had been ran across the meadow and flung himself ecstatically into his fathers arms. He was lifted onto the pony's back as the other children-Samantha's own mother among them-clustered round and the clown danced a jig to soundless music.

The scene shifted in the way of home films, and they were under a tree where a table had been laid with a birthday cloth and decorations. The same children bobbed and squirmed on either side of the table, and a woman carried into the picture a cake on which five candles burned. The child Jeremy stood upon his chair to make his wish and extinguish the candles. He lost his balance and nearly toppled, to be saved from the fall by his mother. She laughed, waved at the camera, and dropped her arms to hold her son safely on the chair.

“Dead in less than two years,” Jeremy Britton said without turning from the picture that undulated against the backs of the books. His words were only mildly slurred, not nearly as incomprehensible as they usually were after a day of drinking. “She was counting out change to buy me a packet of crisps in Longnor, Mum was-Jesus, can you credit that?-and she dropped dead at the till. Gone before she hit the floor. And I said, ‘Mum, what about my crisps?’ Jesus have mercy on us all.” Jeremy lifted his glass and drank. He replaced it with such precision on the table next to his chair that Samantha wondered what he was actually drinking. He turned his head and squinted in her direction as if the light from the corridor were too bright. “Ah. It's you, Sammy. Come to join the resident insomniac?”

“I was checking the windows. I didn't know you were still up, Uncle Jeremy.”

“Didn't you.”

Jeremy turned from his scrutiny of Samantha, giving his attention back to the film. “You lose your mum, and you're marked forever,” he murmured, taking up his glass once more. “Did I ever tell you, Sammy-”

“Yes. You did.” Numerous times since her arrival in Derbyshire, Samantha had heard the story that she already knew: his mother's untimely death, his father's rapid remarriage, his own banishment to boarding school at the tender age of seven while his only sister was allowed to remain at home. “Ruined me,” he'd said time and again. “Robs a man of his soul, and don't you forget it.”

Samantha decided it was best to leave him to his musings, and she began to depart the room. But his next words stopped her.

“It's nice to have her out of the way, isn't it?” he asked with absolute clarity. “Opens things up the way they should be opened up. That's what I think. What about you?”

She said, “What? I don't… what?” and in her surprise she feigned misunderstanding in a circumstance where no misapprehension was really feasible, especially with the High Peak Courier sitting on the floor next to her uncle's chair with its front-page headline shouting Death at Nine Sisters. So it was foolish to attempt to dissemble with her uncle. Nicola's dead was going to be the subtext of every conversation Samantha had with anyone from this time forward, and it would serve her interests far better to become used to Nicola Maiden as a Rebecca-like figure in the background of her life than it would to pretend the woman had never existed at all.

Jeremy was watching the film, a smile playing round the corners of his mouth as if he found amusement in the sight of his five-year-old self skipping along the path in one of the gardens, dragging a stick along the edge of what was then a well-tended herbaceous border. “Sammy, my angel,” he said to the screen, and again his voice was remarkable for the unusual clarity of his enunciation, “how it happened isn't the point. That it happened is. And what we're going to do now that it's happened is the most important point of all.”

Samantha made no reply. She felt unaccountably rooted to the spot, both trapped and mesmerised by what could destroy her.

“She was never right for him, Sammy. Obvious whenever they were together. She held the reins. And he got ridden. Whenever he wasn't riding her, of course.” Jeremy chuckled at his own joke. “P'rhaps he would've seen the wrongness of it all at the end of the day. But I don't think so. She'd worked herself under his skin too deep. Good at that, she was. Some women are.”

You're not was what he didn't say. But Samantha didn't need him to say it. Pulling men had never been her forte. She'd always believed that an outright demonstration of her virtues would serve to establish her firmly in someone's affections. Womanly virtues had a longevity to them that sexual allure could never match. And when lust and passion died the death of familiarity, one needed something of substance to take their place. Or so she had taught herself to believe through an adolescence and a young adulthood remarkable for their solitude.

“Couldn't have happened any better,” Jeremy was saying. “Sammy, always remember this: Things generally work out the way they're meant to.”

She felt her palms dampening and she rubbed them surreptitiously against the skirt that she'd donned for dinner.

“You're right for him. The other… She wasn't. What you have to offer, she couldn't touch. She would've brought nothing to a marriage with Julie-aside from the only decent pair of ankles the Brittons have seen in two hundred years-whereas you understand our dream. You can be part of it, Sammy. You can make it happen. With you, Julie can bring Broughton Manor back to life. With her… Well. Like I said, things generally work out the way they're meant to. So what we've got to do now-”

“I'm sorry she's dead,” Samantha broke in, because she knew she must say something eventually, and a conventional expression of sorrow was the only statement she could think of at the moment to stop him from going on. “For Julian's sake, I'm sorry. He's devastated, Uncle Jeremy.”

“Isn't he just. And that's exactly where we begin.”

“Begin?”

“Don't play the innocent with me. And for God's sake, don't be a fool. The way's clear and there're plans to be laid. You've taken enough trouble to woo him-”

“You're mistaken.”

“-and what you've done is lay a decent foundation. But this is the point where we start building on that foundation. Nothing hasty, mind you. No going to his bedroom and dropping your knickers just yet. Everything in good time.”

“Uncle Jeremy. I hardly think-”

“Good. Don't think. Let me do that. You keep it simple from this time on.” He raised his glass to his lips and eyed her sharply over its rim. “It's when a woman complicates her plans that her plans get cocked up. If you know what I mean. And I expect you do.”

Samantha swallowed, pinned to his gaze. How was it that an ageing alcoholic-a bloody drunk, for the love of God-could manage to discompose her so easily? Except he didn't seem very much like a drunk right now. Flustered, she went to the windows and locked them, as had been her intention. Behind her, the film came to an end, and the tail of it slapped noisily against its spool as the projector continued to run. Kickateck, kickateck, kickateck. Jeremy didn't seem to notice.

“You want him, don't you?” he asked her. “And don't lie to me about it, because if I'm to help you catch the boy, I want to know the facts. Oh, not all of them, mind you. Just the important one, about you wanting him.”

“He's not a boy. He's a man who-”

“Isn't he just.”

“-knows his own mind.”

“Bollocks, that. He knows his own dick and where he wants to stick it. We just need to see that he learns to want to stick it in you.”

“Please, Uncle Jeremy…” It was horrible, inconceivable, humiliating: to be listening to this. She was a woman who'd forged her own path throughout her life, and to place herself in the position of depending on someone other than herself to mould events and people to her wishes was not only foreign to her thinking, it was also foolhardy and it could be dangerous.

“Sammy, my angel, I'm on your side.” Jeremy's voice coaxed, urging her to declare herself in the very same way that one might urge a frightened puppy to come forward from beneath a chair. She found herself turning from the windows. She saw that he was watching her, his eyes hooded and his chin held by fingers adopting a pious attitude of prayer. “I'm on your side completely and one hundred percent. Only listen, my angel. I need to know exactly what your side is before I take action on your behalf.”

Samantha tried to move her eyes away from him, but she failed completely.

“One little fact, Sammy. You want the boy. Believe me, you don't need to say anything more. Fact is, I don't want to know any more. Just that you want him. End of story.”

“I can't.”

“You can. Simple as anything. Three little words. And they won't kill you. Words, that is. Words don't kill. But I fancy you know that already, don't you?”

She couldn't look away. She wanted to, she was desperate to, and yet she couldn't.

The words came from her at last without volition, as if he drew them from her and she was powerless to stop him. “All right. I want him.”

Jeremy smiled. “Don't tell me anything else.”

Barbara Havers felt as if someone had planted thorns beneath her eyelids. It was her fourth hour into her adventure with the SO 10 files on CRIS, and she was mightily regretting her promise to Nkata that she'd work nights and dawns to fulfill her obligations to the assignment given her by Inspector Lynley. She wasn't getting anywhere with this rubbish, aside from becoming aware of her potential for arriving at destinations marked Damaged Retinas and Imminent Hypermetropia.

Following their recce of Terry Cole's flat, Nkata and Barbara had driven to the Yard. There, after transferring the cannabis and the box of postcards to the front seat of Barbara's Mini-to be dealt with later-they had parted ways. Nkata drove off to return the inspector's Bentley to his home in Belgravia. Barbara reluctantly trudged off to keep her promise to Nkata to do her duty in the Crime Recording Information System.

She'd come up with sod bloody all so far, which hardly surprised her. As far as she was concerned, after the discovery of the postcards in the Battersea flat, neon arrows had begun pointing to Terry Cole as the killer's main target-not to Nicola Maiden-and unless there was some manner in which she could tie Cole to Andy Maiden's time in SO 10, this business of delving through files was a waste of her time. Only a name leaping off the screen, drooling blood, and screaming “I'm the one, baby!” was going to convince her otherwise.

Still, she'd known it was in her best interest to comply with Lynley's orders. So for the fifteen names he had given her, she'd read the cases and organised each into arbitrary-albeit useless-categories that she'd called Drugs, Potential for Blackmail, Prostitution, Organised Crime, and Murder for Hire. Dutifully, she'd placed the names from Lynley's list into these categories and she'd added the prisons to which each malefactor had been sent to while away a few years at Her Majesty's pleasure. She'd tracked down terms of imprisonment and added those to the mix, and she'd begun the process of determining which of the convicts were now on parole. Locating the former lags, however, was something which she knew would be impossible at the time. So feeling that she'd been virtuous, obedient, and responsive to her superior's order to return to CRIS, she decided, at half past twelve, to call it a night.

Traffic was light, so she was home by one. With Terry on her mind and a motive for his murder to be fished from the evidence, she scooped up the box of postcards and carried them through the dark garden to her digs.

Inside, her phone was blinking its message light when she shouldered open the door of her bungalow and heaved the cardboard box onto the table. She switched on a lamp, gathered up a selection of the postcards-which were bundled together with elastic bands-and crossed the room to listen to her calls.

The first was Mrs. Flo, telling her that “Mum looked right at your picture this morning, Barbie dear, and she said your name. Bright and clear as ever was. She said, ‘This is my Barbie.’ What do you think of that? I wanted you to know because… Well, it is distressing when she's got herself into one of her muddles, isn't it? And that silly business about… what was she called? Lilly O'Ryan? Well, no matter. She's been right as rain all day. So don't you worry that she's forgotten you, because she hasn't. All right, dear? I hope you're well. See you soon. Bye now, Barbie. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.”

Praise God for small favours, Barbara thought. A day of lucidity weighed against weeks of dementia was little enough to celebrate, but she'd learned to take her triumphs in teaspoonfuls when it came to her mother's fleeting moments of coherence.

The second message began with a bright “Hello hello”, followed by three breathy notes of music. “Did you hear that? I'm learning flute. I just got it today after school and I'm to be in the orchestra! They asked me special and I asked Dad would it be okay and he said yes so now I play flute. Only I don't play it very well yet. But I'm practising. I know the scale. Listen.” There followed a clatter as the phone was dropped. Afterwards came eight highly hesitant notes, breathy like the first. Then, “See? The teacher says I've a natural talent, Barbara. Do you think so as well?” The voice was interrupted by another, a man's voice speaking quietly in the background. Then, “Oh. This is Khalidah Hadiyyah. Up front in the ground floor flat. Dad says I forgot to tell you that. I expect you know it's me though, don't you?

I wanted to remind you about my sewing lesson. It's tomorrow and you said you wanted to see what I'm making. D'you still want to go? We c'n have the rest of the toffee apple afterwards, for our tea. Pang me back, okay?” And the phone clunked down at her end of the line.

After which Barbara heard the quiet, well-bred tones of Inspector Lynley's wife. Helen said, “Barbara, Winston's just returned the Bentley. He told me you're working on the case here in town. I'm so glad, and I wanted to tell you so. I know your work will put you back in good standing with everyone at the Yard. Barbara, will you be patient with Tommy? He thinks the world of you, and… Well, I hope you know that. It's just that the situation… what happened this past summer… it took him rather by surprise. So… Oh bother. I just wanted to wish you well on the case. You've always worked brilliantly with Tommy, and I know this instance will be no different.”

At which Barbara winced. Her conscience prickled. But she muffled the voice that told her she'd been acting in defiance of Lynley's orders for a good part of the day, and she silently announced that she wasn't defying anyone at all. She was merely taking the initiative, supplementing her assignment with additional activities demanded by the logic of the unfolding investigation.

It was as good an excuse as any.

She kicked off her shoes and flopped onto the day bed, where she pulled the elastic band from the collection of postcards she was carrying. She began to flip through them. And as she did so, she thought of the myriad ways in which Terry Cole's life-as it was unfolding through her investigation of it-was unveiling him as a killer's target while Nicola Maiden's life-no matter how they viewed it-was unveiling her as nothing more than a sexually active twenty-five-year-old who'd had one or two men in every port and a wealthy lover by the string. And while sexual jealousy on the part of one of those men might have led him to give the girl the chop, he certainly wouldn't have needed to do the job out on the moor, especially when he saw that she was with someone. It would have made more sense for him to wait till he found her alone. Unless, of course, she and Terry had been into something at that moment that made him think they were an item. In which case, blinded by rage and jealousy, he could well have stormed into the stone circle and attacked his rival for the Maiden girl's favours, running her down as well after he'd wounded the boy. But that seemed an unlikely scenario. Nothing Barbara had learned about Nicola Maiden had so far suggested that she'd gone for unemployed teenaged boys.

Terry, on the other hand, was turning out to be a field ripe for harvest when it came to activities from which murder could arise. According to Cilia, he'd carried gobs of cash with him, and the postcards that Barbara now arranged on her day bed suggested a field of underworld employment that was absolutely rife with violence. Despite what his mother claimed about the big commission that Terry had, despite what Mrs. Baden had asserted about the boy's good nature and generosity, it was seeming more and more likely that the real Terry Cole had lived close to if not directly within the underbelly of English life. Tied to that underbelly were drugs, pornography, snuff films, paedophilia, exotica, erotica, and white slavery. Not to mention a hundred tasty perversions, all of which could so easily give rise to a motive for murder.

But in Nicola's case, nearly everything had been accounted for: from her lifestyle in London to her supply of dosh. They still had to discover why she'd gone to work in Derbyshire for the summer, but what on earth could that possibly have to do with her murder?

On the other hand, virtually nothing about Terry Cole's life had made sense at all. Until Barbara had unearthed the postcards.

She gazed upon them in their orderly rows on the day bed and pursed her lips. Come on, she told them, give me something to run with. I know it's here, I know one of you can tell me, I know, I know.

She could still hear Cilia Thompson's passionate reaction to seeing the cards: “He never would've told me about this. Never in a hundred years. He was pretending to be an artist, for God's sake. And artists spend their time on their art. When they're not creating, they're thinking about creating. They're not crawling round London sticking these up everywhere. Art begets art so you expose yourself to art. This”-with a contemptuous gesture towards the cards-“is a life exposed to absolute crap.”

But Terry had never been truly interested in art, Barbara guessed. He'd been interested in something else entirely.

In the first set of postcards, there were forty-five in all. Each, Barbara saw, was different. And no matter how she studied them, categorized them, or attempted to eliminate them one by one, she was finally forced to accept the fact that only the telephone-even at this hour of the night-was going to assist her in sussing out her next move in the investigation.

She deliberately set aside any consideration that Terry Cole might be connected to Andy Maiden's past in SO 10. She set aside any consideration that SO 10 was involved in the case at all.

Instead, she reached for the phone. She knew quite well that-despite the hour-at the other end of the line would be forty-five suspects just waiting for someone to ring them and ask a few questions.

By rising at dawn the next morning and driving to Manchester Airport, Lynley managed to catch the first flight to London. It was nine-forty when his taxi left him at the front door of his house in Eaton Terrace.

He paused before entering. Despite the brightness of the morning-with the sun glittering against the transom windows of the houses that lined the quiet street-he felt as if he were walking directly beneath a cloud. His eyes took in the fine white buildings, the wrought iron railings that fronted them without a spot of rust marring their midnight paint, and regardless of the fact that he'd been born into the longest period of peace that his country had ever experienced, he found himself unaccountably thinking of war.

London had been devastated. Night after night the bombs fell upon it, reducing large areas of the metropolis to bricks, mortar, beams, and rubble. The City, the docklands, and the suburbs-both north and south of the river-had sustained the worst of the damage, but no one in the nation's capital had escaped the fear. It was heralded nightly by the sound of the sirens and the whistling of the bombs. It was embodied by explosions, fires, panic, confusion, uncertainty, and the aftermath of them all.

Yet London had continued to persevere, renewing itself as it had done for two thousand years. Boadicea's tribesmen had not vanquished it, neither the plague nor the Great Fire had subdued it, so the firestorm of the Blitz could not have hoped to defeat it. Because out of pain, destruction, and loss it always managed to rise anew.

So perhaps it could be argued that strife and travail could lead one to greatness, Lynley thought, that ones sense of purpose, once tested by adversity, became reliably firm and one's understanding of the world, once questioned in the midst of sorrow and misconception, was forever enhanced. But the thought that bombs ultimately led to peace as a woman's labour led to birth was not enough to dispel the gloom and dread that he was feeling. Good could come out of bad, it was true. It was the hell in between that he didn't want to ponder.

At six that morning he'd phoned DI Hanken and told him that “some crucial information uncovered by the London officers working the case” required his presence back in town. He would be communicating with Derbyshire as soon as he followed up on that information. To Hanken's logical query about the necessity of Lynley's traveling to London when he had two officers already working there and could-with a simple telephone call-garner two or even two dozen more, Lynley replied that his team had uncovered a few details that were making it look as if London and not Derbyshire was where the facts were leading. It seemed reasonable, he said, for one of the two ranking officers on the case to assess and assemble these facts in person. Would Hanken make available to him a copy of the post-mortem report? he asked. He also wanted to hand that document over to a forensic specialist, to see if Dr. Myles's conclusion about the murder weapon was accurate.

“If she's made an error about the knife-the length of the blade, for example-I'd like to know that at once,” he said.

How would a forensic specialist be able to discern an error in the report without seeing the body, the x-rays, the photographs, or the wound itself? Hanken queried.

This, Lynley told him, was no ordinary specialist.

But he asked for copies of the x-rays and the photographs as well. And a quick stop at the Buxton station on his way to the airport had put everything into his possession.

For his part, Hanken was going to start a search for the Swiss Army knife and the Maiden girl's missing rain gear. He would also be talking personally to the masseuse who'd seen to Will Upman's ostensibly tense muscles on Tuesday night. And if time allowed, he'd pay a call at Broughton Manor to see if Julian Britton's father could confirm his son's alibi or that of his niece.

“Look hard at Julian,” Lynley told him. “I've found another of

Nicola's lovers.” He went on to summarise his previous night's conversation with Christian-Louis Ferrer.

Hanken whistled. “Are we going to be able to find a bloke anywhere who wasn't shafting this bird?”

“I expect we might be looking for the bloke who thought that he was the only one.”

“Britton.”

“He said he proposed and she refused. But we have only his word for that, don't we? It's a good way to take the spotlight off himself: saying he wanted to marry her when he wanted-and did-something else entirely.”

Now in London, Lynley unlocked the front door and shut it quietly behind him. He called his wife's name. He was half expecting Helen to be out already-somehow knowing his intention to return without having been told and seeking to avoid him in the aftermath of their earlier disagreement-but as he crossed the entry to the stairs, he heard a door crash shut, a man's voice say, “Whoops. Sorry. Don't know my own strength, do I,” and a moment later Denton and Helen came towards him from the direction of the kitchen. The former was balancing a stack of enormous portfolios across his arms. The latter was following him, a list in her hand. She was saying, “I've narrowed things down somewhat, Charlie. And they were willing to part with the sample books till three o'clock, so I'm depending on you to give me input.”

“I hate flowers and ribbons and that sort of rubbish,” Denton said. “All twee, that is, so don't even show it to me. Makes me think of my gran.”

“So noted,” Helen replied.

“Cheers.” Denton saw Lynley then. “Look what the morning's brought, Lady Helen. Good. You won't be needing me, then, will you?”

“Needing you for what?” Lynley asked.

Helen, hearing him, said, “Tommy! You're home? That was a quick trip, wasn't it?”

“Wallpaper,” Denton said in reply to Lynley's question. He gestured with the portfolios he was carrying. “Samples.”

“For the spare rooms,” Helen added. “Have you looked at the walls in there lately, Tommy? The paper looks as if it hasn't been changed since the turn of the century.”

“It hasn't.”

“Just as I suspected. Well, if we don't get it changed before she gets here, I'm afraid your aunt Augusta will change it for us. I thought we might head her off. I had a look through the books at Peter Jones yesterday, and they were good enough to let me pinch a few at closing time. Just for today though. Wasn't that kind of them?” She started up the stairs, saying over her shoulder, “Why're you back so soon? Have you sorted everything out already?”

Denton trailed her. Lynley made a third in their little procession, suitcase in his hand. He'd followed some information to London, he told his wife. And there were documents he wanted St. James to look over. “The post-mortems. Some photos and x-rays,” he said.

“Arguments among the experts?” she asked, a reasonable assumption. It wouldn't have been the first time St. James had been requested to mediate a dispute among scientists.

“Just some questions in my own mind,” Lynley told her, “as well as a need to look over some information Winston's managed to gather.”

“Ah.” She looked over her shoulder and offered him a fleeting smile. “It's quite nice to have you back.”

The spare rooms in need of refurbishment were on the second floor of the house. Lynley left his suitcase inside the door of their bedroom and then joined his wife and Denton up above. Helen was laying sample sheets of wallpaper out on the bed in the first of the rooms, removing the portfolios from Denton's outstretched arms one at a time and making her selections with infinite care. The younger man was wearing an expression of long-suffering patience throughout this activity. But he brightened considerably when Lynley walked into the room.

He said hopefully, “Here he is. So if you won't be needing me…?” to Lynley's wife.

“I can't stay, Denton” was Lynley's reply.

The other man drooped.

“A problem?” Lynley said. “Have you a sweet young thing waiting somewhere today?” It wouldn't be unusual. Denton's pursuit of ladies was the stuff of legend.

“I've the half-price ticket booth waiting,” Denton answered. “I hoped to make it in advance of the crowd.”

“Ah, yes. I see. Not another musical, I hope?”

“Well…” Denton looked embarrassed. His love of the spectacles posing regularly as West End theatre soaked up a good part of his wages each month. He was almost as bad as a cocaine addict when it came to greasepaint, dimmed lights, and applause.

Lynley took the portfolios from Denton's arms. “Go,” he said. “God forbid that we keep you from experiencing the latest theatrical extravaganza.”

“It's art,” Denton protested.

“So you keep telling me. Go. And if you buy the accompanying CD, I'll ask you not to play it when I'm home.”

“He's a real culture snob, isn't he?” Denton asked Helen, his voice confidential.

“As ever there was.”

She continued laying wallpaper samples out on the bed once Denton had left them. She rejected three samples, replaced them with three others, and took another portfolio from her husband's arms. She said, “You don't need to stand there holding them, Tommy. You've work to do, haven't you?”

“It can wait a few minutes.”

“This will take far longer than a few minutes. You know how hopeless I am when it comes to making up my mind about anything. I had thought of something rather pretty with flowers. Subdued and calming. You know what I mean. But Charlie's put me off that idea. God forbid we ask him to escort Aunt Augusta into a room he considers twee. What about this one, unicorns and leopards? Isn't it ghastly?”

“But suitable for guests whose visits one wishes to curtail.”

Helen laughed. “There is that.”

Lynley said nothing until she'd made her selections from all the portfolios he was holding. She covered the bed with them and went on to litter most of the floor. All the time he thought how strange it was that two days previously they'd been at odds with each other. He felt neither irritation nor animosity now. Nor did he feel that sense of betrayal that had triggered within him such righteous indignation. He experienced only a quiet surging of his heart towards hers, which some men might have identified as lust and dealt with accordingly but which he knew had nothing to do with sex and everything on earth to do with love.

He said, “You had my number in Derbyshire. I gave it to Den-ton. To Simon as well.”

She looked up. A lock of chestnut hair caught at the corner of her mouth. She brushed it away.

“You didn't ring,” he said.

“Was I meant to ring?” There was nothing coy about the question. “Charlie gave me the number, but he didn't say you'd asked me to-”

“You weren't supposed to ring. But I hoped you would. I wanted to talk to you. You left the house in the middle of our conversation the other morning, and I felt uneasy with the way things were left between us. I wanted to clear the air.”

“Oh.” The word was small. She went to the room's old Georgian dressing table and sat tentatively on the edge of its stool. She watched him gravely, a shadow playing across her cheek where her hair shielded her face from a shaft of sunlight that streamed in through the window. She looked so much like a schoolgirl waiting to be disciplined that Lynley found himself reassessing what he'd believed were his rational grievances against her.

He said, “I'm sorry about the row, Helen. You were giving your opinion. That's more than your right. I jumped all over you because I wanted you on my side. She's my wife, I thought, and this is my work and these are the decisions that I'm forced to take in the course of my work. I want her behind me, not in front of me blocking my way. I didn't think of you as an individual in that moment, just as an extension of me. So when you questioned my decision about Barbara, I saw red. My temper got away from me. And I'm sorry for it.”

Her gaze lowered. She ran her fingers along the edge of the stool and examined their route. “I didn't leave the house because you lost your temper. God knows I've seen you lose it before.”

“I know why you left. And I shouldn't have said it.”

“Said…?”

“That remark. The tautology bit. It was thoughtless and cruel. I'd like to have your forgiveness for having said it.”

She looked up at him. “They were only words, Tommy. You don't need to ask forgiveness for your words.”

“I ask nonetheless.”

“No. What I mean is that you're already forgiven. You were forgiven at once if it comes to that. Words aren't reality, you know. They're only expressions of what people see.” She bent and took up one of the wallpaper samples, holding it the length of her arm and evaluating it for some moments. His apology, it seemed, had been accepted. But he had the distinct feeling that the subject itself was miles away from being put at rest between them.

Still, following her lead, he said helpfully in reference to the wallpaper, “That looks like a good choice.”

“Do you think so?” Helen let it fall to the floor. “Choices are what defeat me. Having to make them in the first place. And having to live with them afterwards.”

Warning flares shot up in Lynley's consciousness. His wife hadn't come into their marriage the most eager of brides. Indeed, it had taken some time to persuade her that marriage was in her interests at all. The youngest of five sisters who'd married in every possible circumstance, from into the Italian aristocracy to on the land to a Montana cattleman, she'd been a witness to the vicissitudes and vagaries that were the offspring of any permanent attachment. And she'd never prevaricated about her reluctance to become a party to what might take from her more than it could ever give. But she'd also never been a woman to let momentary discord prevail over her common sense. They'd exchanged a few harsh words, that was all. Words didn't necessarily presage anything.

Still, he said to counter the implication in her statements, “When I first knew that I loved you-have I ever told you this?-I couldn't understand how I'd managed to go so long blind to the fact. There you were, a part of my life for years, but you'd always been at the safe distance of a friend. And when I actually knew that I loved you, risking having more than your friendship seemed like risking it all.”

“It was risking it all,” she said. “There's no going back after a certain point with someone, is there? But I don't regret the risk for a moment. Do you, Tommy?”

He felt a rush of relief. “Then we're at peace.”

“Were we anything else?”

“It seemed-” He hesitated, uncertain how to describe the sea change he was experiencing between them. He said, “We've got to expect a period of adjustment, haven't we? We aren't children. We had lives that were independent of each other before we married, so it's going to take some time to adjust to lives that include each other all the time.”

“Had we.” She said it as a statement, reflectively. She looked up from the wallpaper samples, to him.

“Had we what?”

“Independent lives. Oh, I see that you did. Who would ever argue with that? But as to the other half of the equation…” She made an aimless gesture at the samples. “I would have chosen flowers without a moment's hesitation. But flowers, I'm told by Charlie, are twee. You know, I never actually considered myself hopeless in the arena of interior design. Perhaps I've been kidding myself about that.”

Lynley hadn't known her for more than fifteen years to fail in understanding her meaning now. “Helen, I was angry. Angry, I'm the first to climb on the highest horse I can find. But as you pointed out, what I said was words. There's no more truth in them than there's truth in suggesting I'm the soul of sensitivity. Which, as you know, I'm not. Full stop.”

As he spoke, she'd begun setting the floral samples to one side. As he finished, she paused. She looked at him, head cocked, face gentle. “You don't really understand what I'm talking about, do you? But then, how could you? In your position I wouldn't understand what I was talking about either.”

“I do understand. I corrected your language. I was angry because you weren't taking my side, so I responded as I believed you'd responded: to the form instead of to the substance beneath it. In the process, I hurt you. And I'm sorry for that.”

She got to her feet, sheets of wallpaper held to her chest. “Tommy, you described me as I am,” she said simply. “I left the house because I didn't want to listen to a truth I've avoided for years.”