“Excellent, thank you. Good to see you, Paul. You’re looking well. May I present my wife, Lane. Lane, Paul Galloway. He did a brief stint in Nelson, where we worked together. He took me under his wing when I first got there. A London man. He is the assistant chief of police here.”
“For my sins. Chief is off on health leave, poor fellow, so I’m more or less in charge of the whole operation now.” Galloway had released Darling’s hand and now opened his arms as if he were planning to embrace Lane, his face wreathed in smiles. Instead, to her enormous relief, he offered a hand to shake.
“Mrs. Darling, what a pleasure. Fred, you dog! Where did you find this lovely creature? She must be a saint, putting up with your gruff self.” Still holding her hand and pulling her close, he said in a stage whisper, “Always took himself too seriously.”
Thank heavens, Lane thought, if this man’s unbridled enthusiasm was the alternative. She had just retrieved her hand when she became aware of a woman standing perfectly still behind their host. Lane nearly gasped at her beauty. She had jet-black hair, pale skin, and piercing blue eyes; she was wearing an emerald-green silk dress that was fitted to her slender waist and then hung in an exquisite flare of silk that seemed to catch the light. Blimey, she thought, I could be meeting Vivien Leigh.
“This is the wife, Priscilla,” Galloway put his arm around his wife’s shoulder and pulled her into the group. “My old chum, Fred Darling. He’s a police inspector now, up in Canada.”
Priscilla smiled and offered a hand. “You’ll have a lot to talk about, then. Please do come in. It’s still warm enough that we can have drinks on the patio.” She spoke with a clipped English accent, her voice pitched low.
Lane wondered if she modulated her voice and adopted this posh accent, which couldn’t quite hide her Cockney roots, deliberately, to add a little weight to her delicate frame. With a touch of regret, Lane reflected that Priscilla’s pretense made her seem more vulnerable, not less.
The house had a spacious rambling quality that made it feel, Lane thought, extremely expensive. The foyer was tiled and dropped two steps to a sunken living room full of English chintz furniture; it was in sharp contrast to the Spanish Colonial feel of the house itself, but together the two styles somehow seemed to work.
“Come, Lane. Let’s get the boys out onto the patio, and you and I will put the drinks together. Martinis? G and Ts? What’s it to be?”
“A couple of G and Ts,” Galloway said. “That do you, Fred? And don’t let Fernanda near them. Hasn’t got a clue,” he confided to Darling, leading him through French doors out to a patio illuminated with gentle light from candles set on a large dark wood table near a tiled fountain that burbled in the centre of the courtyard.
In the kitchen a plump, middle-aged woman in a blue uniform and white apron and cap was assembling something on the counter.
“Fernanda, did you put the glasses out as I instructed?” Priscilla wasn’t unkind, exactly, but she spoke in a peremptory manner that caused Fernanda to turn toward her mistress but not look at her.
“Yes, Mrs. Galloway. They’re on the tray. I cut some limes for you.” A plate of cut limes, releasing their citrus fragrance into the kitchen, sat by the tray upon which glasses, a bucket of ice, and a bottle of tonic sat next to a luminescent blue bottle of gin.
“You’re very beautiful,” Priscilla said, turning to Lane and then beginning her preparations with the gin. “When did you come over?”
Lane glanced anxiously at Fernanda. It would have been unthinkable in her household not to thank the servants. Absolute courtesy had been her grandmother’s gold standard. She gave her a quick smile and was rewarded by Fernanda turning away to open the oven.
“I came over right after the war, in the spring of ’46. Gosh, only last year! I feel like it’s been ages since the war ended. I bought myself a little house in the middle of nowhere. You?”
“And collared a very handsome man. He looks kind, for a policeman. Is he?”
“Yes, very kind,” Lane said. She saw Priscilla’s neat sidestepping of the question about her own background and wondered suddenly if it was her husband who expected her to disavow her London roots. “What can I do?”
“Fernanda, are the canapés out?”
“Yes, ma’am. I put them on the table.”
“Can you stick a sliver of lime on each of the glasses, Lane, then we’ll be ready to hop.” Priscilla put the drinks on a small silver tray and led Lane toward a door that opened onto the courtyard. “Are you planning to have children?” she asked.
“I haven’t given it a thought. We’ve only just got married.” Perhaps Priscilla herself was thinking about it, Lane speculated.
The courtyard smelled of orange blossoms from trees Lane could just see in the shadows beyond the light. Over them, the dark velvet night sky was beginning to populate with stars. Lane, looking skyward, was about to exclaim at the loveliness of the place when Galloway spoke.
“To old friends and new ones. Cheers.” The ice in the glasses gave a soft rattle, and the four of them touched rims. Galloway winked at Lane and drank.
“Not bad, Pris. You’ll get the hang of it. A touch more gin in the next one,” Galloway said, and then he laughed. “My girl used to pull pints in a London bar. Met her during the war. Makes a fine gin and tonic, I think you’ll agree.”
“Very good, indeed,” Darling said.
Lane smiled and lifted her glass, thinking the ratio of gin could not go any higher. She glanced at Paul Galloway and realized she was trying to place him in some social context. She had at first found his accent almost soothing—sounds of home, she realized—but there was something else. A sense of
