from her, buying time, seeking calm, trying to think what to do. 'You've got them, Sash. All the facts. All in order.'
'It was all right, wasn't it, if I took the fall? What difference would that make? Sasha Nifford. Nobody. Nothing in the newspapers about her, right? But what would it look like if the Honourable Peter got his little hands slapped?'
'Shut up about that.'
'Making smelly little messes on the family name?' 'Shut up!'
'Upsetting the apple-carts of three hundred years of law-abiding Lynleys? Upsetting Mummy? Upsetting big brother at Scotland Yard CID?'
'God damn you, shut up!'
Someone below them pounded on the ceiling, shouting for peace. Still Sasha glared at him, her posture and expression daring him to disprove what she'd said. He couldn't.
'Let's just think this out,' he muttered. He noticed that his hands were shaking — every joint had begun to sweat as well — and he shoved them into his pockets. 'There's always Cornwall.'
'Cornwall?' Sasha sounded incredulous. 'Why the hell—?'
'I don't have enough money here.'
'I don't believe it. If you're out of money, ask your brother for a cheque. He's rolling in cash. Everyone knows that.'
Peter went back to the window, gnawing his thumb. 'But you won't do that, will you?' Sasha continued. 'You wouldn't dare ask your brother for a loan. We're going to traipse all the way to Cornwall because you're scared to death of him. You're absolutely petrified at the thought of Thomas Lynley's getting wise to you. And what if he does? What is he, your keeper? Just some big toff holding an Oxford degree? Are you such a little pansy that—?' 'Stow it!'
'I won't. What the hell's in Cornwall that we've got to go there?'
'Howenstow,' he snapped.
Her jaw dropped. 'Howenstow? A little visit with Mummy? Jesus, that's just about what I'd expect of you next. Either that or sucking your thumb. Or playing with yourself.'
'Fucking bitch!'
'Go ahead! Hit me, you pathetic little twit. You've been aching to do it ever since I walked in the door.'
His fist clenched and unclenched. God, how he wanted to. Years of upbringing and codes of behaviour to hell. He wanted to pound on her face, see blood pour from her mouth, break her teeth and her nose, blacken both of her eyes.
Instead, he fled the room.
Sasha Nifford smiled. She watched the closed door, meticulously counting the seconds that it would take Peter to crash down the stairs. When a sufficient amount of time had elapsed, she cracked the bedsheet back from the window and waited for him to fling himself from the building and stumble down the street towards the corner pub. He did not disappoint her.
She chuckled. Getting rid of Peter hadn't been difficult at all. His behaviour was as predictable as a trained chimpanzee's.
She went back to the sofa. From the spilled contents of her carpet-bag, she took a chipped compact and flipped it open. A pound note was folded into the mirror. She removed it, rolled it, and reached into the V neck of her jersey.
Brassieres, she thought drily, have such varied uses. She removed a plastic bag which held the cocaine she'd bought for them in Hampstead. Cornwall be damned, she smiled.
Her mouth watered as she poured a small quantity of the drug on to the compact's mirror, hastily using a fingernail to chop it into dust. Using the rolled pound note, she inhaled in greedily.
Heaven, she thought, leaning back against the sofa. Unutterable ecstasy. Better than sex. Better than anything. Bliss.
Thomas Lynley was on the telephone when Dorothea Harriman entered his office, a sheet of memo paper in her hand. She gave the paper a meaningful shake and winked at him like a fellow conspirator. Seeing this, Lynley brought his conversation with the fingerprint officer to a conclusion.
Harriman waited until he had hung up the phone. 'You've got it, Detective Inspector,' she announced, using his full organizational title in her cheerfully perverse fashion. Harriman never referred to anyone by 'mister', 'miss' or 'ms' when she had the opportunity to string six or ten syllables together as if she were making introductions at the Court of St James. 'Either the stars are in the right position, or Superintendent Webberly's won the football pools. He signed without a second glance. I should be so lucky when I want time off.'
Lynley took the memo from her. His superior officer's name was scrawled in approval across the bottom along with the barely legible note, 'Have a care if you're flying, lad,' seven words that telegraphed Webberly's accurate guess that he planned upon heading to Cornwall for a long weekend. Lynley had no doubt that the superintendent had also deduced his reason for the trip. Webberly had, after all, seen and remarked upon the photograph of Deborah on Lynley's desk, and although he was not himself uxorious the superintendent was always first with congratulations when one of his men got married.
The superintendent's secretary was examining this picture herself at the moment. She squinted to bring it into focus, once again eschewing the spectacles which Lynley knew were in her desk. Wearing spectacles detracted from the marked resemblance Harriman bore to the Princess of Wales, a resemblance which she did much to promote. Today, Lynley noted, Harriman was wearing a reproduction of the black-sashed blue dress which the Princess had worn to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in America. Royalty had looked quite svelte with it on. Harriman, however, was given over just a bit too much to hips.
'Rumour has Deb back in London,' Harriman said, replacing the picture and frowning at the unorganized clutter of his desk-top. She gathered up a fan of telephone messages, clipped them together, and straightened five files.
'She's been back for more than a week,' Lynley answered.
'That's the change in you, then. Grist for the marriage mill, Detective Inspector. You've been grinning like a fool these last three days.'
'Have I?'
'Walking on bubbles with not a trouble in the world. If this is love, I'll take a double portion, thank you.'
He smiled, sorted through the files and handed two of them to her. 'Take these instead, will you? Webberly's waiting for them.'
Harriman sighed. 'I want love and he gives me' — she examined them — 'fibre optic reports from a killing in Bayswater. How romantic. I'm in the wrong line of work.' 'But it's noble work, Harriman.'
'Just what I need to hear.' She left him, calling out to someone to answer a phone that was ringing in an unmanned office nearby.
Lynley folded the memo and flipped open his pocket watch. It was half-past five. He'd been on duty since seven. There were at least three more reports on his desk waiting for comment, but his concentration was dwindling. It was time to join her, Lynley decided. They needed to talk.
He left his office, making his way down to the lobby and out the revolving doors onto Broadway. He walked along the side of the building — such an unprepossessing combination of glass, grey stone, and protective scaffolding — towards the green.
Deborah still stood where he had seen her from his office window, in the corner of that misshapen trapezoid of lawn and trees. She appeared to be alternating between studying the top of the Suffragette Scroll and gazing at it through her camera, which she had mounted on its tripod perhaps ten feet away.
Whatever she hoped to capture through the lens seemed to elude her, however. For, as Lynley watched, she scrunched up her nose, dropped her shoulders in disappointment, and began disassembling her equipment, packing it away in a sturdy metal case.
Lynley prolonged the moment before he crossed the green to join her, taking pleasure in a study of her movements. He savoured her presence. He had no fondness for the tender angst of being in love with a woman who was six thousand miles away. So Deborah's absence had created anything but an easy time for him. Most of it he had spent with his mind fixed upon when he would next see her on one or another of his quick trips to California.
