Amagansett

‘It means a lot of things, none of them good. Legally, we can maybe beat it, but the scandal…’

Manfred got to his feet and wandered on to the lawn. ‘There has to be another way,’ he said eventually.

‘You know there is.’

Manfred turned. ‘It has to end here. Can it be made to look convincing?’

‘With Labarde’s record?’ said Richard. ‘I can’t see that being a problem.’

Thirty-Three

Women swarmed like worker ants across the village green. Those who weren’t chivvying along the men erecting the stalls were chatting like magpies. Very few appeared to be actually achieving anything, just the small handful unpacking boxes of cotton drapes and colorful bunting near the pond.

‘Hello.’

She swept past Hollis like a galleon in full sail, snapped an order then came about, bearing off on another tack. Only then did Hollis recognize her, from Mary’s party.

He moved to intercept her.

‘Barbara.’

‘What now!? Oh, it’s you.’

‘How’s the apron booth coming along?’ he asked, and promptly wished he hadn’t.

‘Don’t talk to me about the apron booth,’ she said, rolling her eyes. ‘Wednesday, he said. But was it ready? Is it here now? Do you see it?’

He glanced around. ‘I’m not sure I’d know it if I did.’

‘What’s that?’

‘See it…the apron booth.’

‘That’s because it’s not here.’

‘I’m sure it’ll show up before tomorrow.’

‘Lunch,’ she snapped. ‘Lunch today. At the latest. It takes time to dress a booth properly, you know.’

‘Is Mary around?’ he asked.

‘Never when you need her.’

Definitely a pretender to the throne, as Mary had told him.

‘She’s picking up Edward from the station,’ she continued.

‘Edward?’

‘Her son. He gets back at…well, any minute,’ she said, glancing at the watch strangling her fleshy wrist. ‘Is it anything I can help with?’

‘It’s about the parking. I’m on traffic duty.’

‘Well, that is Mary’s department,’ she conceded. ‘What did you do last year?’

‘I think we banned parking along the verge there, and on James Lane—’

‘Sounds good to me. I’d go for that if I were you. I’ll tell her you stopped by.’ She raised her hand abruptly. ‘Gordon!’ she bellowed, brushing past him and picking up headway. ‘Gordon, the latch on the door of the tombola’s broken. See what you can do, will you?’

There was no question of intruding on Mary’s reunion with her son, much as he needed to see her. He had hardly slept, the sense of loss deepening with each passing hour, until the cocktail of exhaustion and alcohol had finally prevailed. The dawn had brought a new clarity with it, but the hole was still there. He’d swung by the village green on his way to work in the hope of filling it a little.

It would just have to wait. He’d have another chance to drop by later.

He was wrong.

He arrived at police headquarters to find that Milligan had scheduled a string of fool’s errands for him. First up was a trip to Montauk. Two surfcasters had come to blows out at the Point that morning. A nose had been bloodied, a rod broken. Hollis was forced to sit with the wounded party in a room at Gurney’s Inn, suffering a lengthy discourse on surfcasting etiquette. There had been a flagrant breach of protocol, it seemed, with the result that a large striped bass had got away. It was bad enough—two grown men fighting over a fish—but when it emerged they were good friends, he lost all remaining interest.

His next assignment of the day was chauffeuring the Chief’s wife out to Southampton for some urgent shopping. Dawn Milligan was a short, shy woman, long since bullied into submission, if not servility, by her husband. Hollis liked her. There had always been an unspoken bond between them—the silent complicity of the abused—and he didn’t begrudge her his time, even as she strolled around the shops, chatting idly to friends.

Returning to East Hampton, Hollis slowed the patrol car almost to a crawl as they passed the village green. He failed to spot Mary in amongst the throng of women, and hopes of returning later that afternoon were shattered when the Chief demanded to see his report on the fishermen’s brawl.

By the time he was finished writing it up, Milligan had already left for the weekend, and the village green was deserted. Hollis strolled around it, reading off the names of the empty booths awaiting tomorrow’s cargoes of hot dogs and ice cream, flowers and cakes, candy, cigarettes and scarves.

He wasn’t altogether surprised to see that the apron booth held center stage.