“It would be so much easier.”
“Yes. It would. But only at first.” He stood. “I must go out to Kent for the afternoon. Will you have dinner with me?” He smiled. “Will you have breakfast as well?”
“Love-making isn’t what I’m avoiding, Tommy.”
“No,” he agreed. “Making love is easy enough. It’s living with it that’s the devil.”
Lynley pulled into the car park of the train station in Sevenoaks just as the fi rst raindrops hit the windscreen of the Bentley. He fumbled in his overcoat pocket for the directions they’d found among the vicar’s belongings in Lancashire.
They were simple enough, taking him to the high street for a brief jaunt before heading out of the town altogether. A few turns past the point where the prehurricane, eponymous oaks of the town had once stood, and he was in the country. Down two more lanes and up a slight rise, and he found himself following a short drive labelled Wealdon Oast. This led to a house, with white tile cladding above and brick below, decorated by the distinctive, bent-chimneyed oast roundel attached to the building at its north end. The house had a view of Sevenoaks to the west and a mixture of farmland and woodland to the south. The land and the trees were winter-drab now, but the rest of the year, they would provide an ever-changing palette of colour.
As he parked between a Sierra and a Metro, Lynley wondered if Robin Sage had walked this distance out from the town. He wouldn’t have driven all the way from Lancashire, and the set of directions seemed to indicate two facts: He had arrived by train with no intention of taking a taxi from the station, and no one had met him or intended to meet him, either at the station or somewhere in the town.
A wooden sign, neatly lettered in yellow and affixed to the left of the front door, identifi ed the oast house not as a home but as a place of business.
Kate, Lynley thought. Another answer was emerging to the questions that had arisen from Sage’s engagement diary and the odd bits carton.
A young woman looked up from a reception desk as Lynley entered the house. What had once been the sitting room was now an offi ce with ivory walls, green carpeting, and modern oak furniture that smelled faintly of lemon oil. The girl nodded at him, as she said into the thin wire headpiece of a telephone receiver,
“I can let you have Sandy again, Mr. Coatsworth. She got on well with your staff and her skills…Well, yes, she’s the one with the braces on her teeth.” She rolled her eyes at Lynley. They were, he noted, skilfully shaded with an aquamarine shadow that exactly matched the jumper she wore. “Yes, of course, Mr. Coatsworth. Let me see…” On her desk, which was otherwise free of clutter, lay six manila folders. She opened the first. “It’s no trouble, Mr. Coatsworth. Really. Please, don’t give it a thought.” She riffled through the second. “You’ve not tried Joy, have you?…No, she doesn’t wear braces. And she types…let me see…”
Lynley glanced to his left through the door that opened into the roundel. Into its circular wall a half-dozen neat cubicles had been built. At two of them, girls were pecking at electric typewriters while a timer ticked to one side. In a third, a young man worked upon a word processor, shaking his head at the screen and saying, “Jesus, this
“May I help you, sir?”
Lynley swung back to the reception desk. Aquamarine held a pencil poised as if to take notes. She’d cleared the desk of the folders and replaced them with a yellow legal pad. Behind her, from a vase on a glistening credenza, a single petal fell from a spray of hot-house roses. Lynley expected a harried custodian with dustpan in hand to appear from nowhere and whisk the offending bit of fl oribunda from sight.
“I’m looking for Katherine Gitterman,” he said, and produced his warrant card. “Scotland Yard CID.”
“You want Kate?” The young woman’s incredulity apparently prevented her from giving his warrant card any attention at all. “
“Is she available?”
Eyes still on him, she nodded, lifted a finger to keep him in place, and punched in three numbers on the telephone. After a brief and muffled conversation which she conducted with her chair swivelled in the direction of the credenza, she led him past a second desk on which a maroon leather blotter held the day’s post, arranged artfully into a fan with a letter opener acting the part of its handle. She opened the door beyond the desk and gestured towards a stairway.
“Up there,” she said and added with a smile, “You’ve put a spanner in her day. She doesn’t much like surprises.”
Kate Gitterman met him at the top of the stairs, a tall woman dressed in a tailored, plaid flannel dressing gown whose belt was tied in a perfectly symmetrical bow. The predominant colour of the garment was the same green as the carpeting, and she wore beneath it pyjamas of an identical shade.
“Flu,” she said. “I’m battling the last of it. I hope you don’t mind.” She didn’t give him the opportunity to respond. “I’ll see you in here.”
She led him down a narrow corridor that gave way to the sitting room of a modern, well-appointed flat. A kettle was whistling as they entered and with a “Just a moment, please,” she left him. The soles of her slim leather slippers clattered against the linoleum as she moved about the kitchen.
Lynley glanced round the sitting room. Like the offices below, it was compulsively neat, with shelves, racks, and holders in which every possession appeared to have its designated place. The pillows on the sofa and on the armchairs were poised at identical angles. A small Persian rug before the fireplace lay centred perfectly. The fireplace itself burned neither wood nor coal but a pyramid of artifi cial nuggets that were glowing in a semblance of embers.
He was reading the titles of her video-tapes — lined up like guardsmen beneath a television — when she returned.
“I like to stay fit,” she said, in apparent explanation of the fact that beyond a copy of Olivier’s
He could see that fitness was approximately as important to her as neatness, for aside from the fact that she was herself slender, solid, and athletic looking, the room’s only photograph was a framed, poster-sized enlargement of her running in a race with the number 194 on her chest. She was wearing a red headband and sweating profusely, but she’d managed a dazzling smile for the camera.
“My first marathon,” she said. “Everyone’s first is rather special.”
“I’d imagine that to be the case.”
“Yes. Well.” She brushed her thumb and middle finger through her hair. Light brown carefully streaked with blonde, it was cut quite short and blown back from her face in a fashionable style that suggested frequent trips to a hairdresser who wielded scissors and colour with equal skill. From the lining round her eyes and in the room’s daylight, despite the rain that was beginning to streak the fl at’s casement windows, Lynley would have placed her in mid to late forties. But he imagined that dressed for business or pleasure, made up, and seen in the forgiving artificial light of one restaurant or another, she looked at least ten years younger.
She was holding a mug from which steam rose aromatically. “Chicken broth,” she said. “I suppose I should offer you something, but I’m not well versed in how one behaves when the police come to call. And you
He offered her his warrant card. Unlike the receptionist below, she studied it before handing it back.
“I hope this isn’t about one of my girls.” She walked to the sofa and sat on the edge with her mug of chicken broth balanced on her left knee. She had, he saw, the shoulders of a swimmer and the unbending posture of a Victorian woman cinched into a corset. “I check into their backgrounds thoroughly when they first apply. No one gets into my fi les without at least three references. If they get a bad report from more than two of their employers, I let them go. So I never have trouble. Never.”
Lynley joined her, sitting in one of the armchairs. He said, “I’ve come about a man called Robin Sage. He had the directions to this oast house among his belongings and a reference to
“Robin? Yes.”
“When?”
