face in his hands. He settled for resting his hands on her shoulders. “If we can’t live with each other’s past, then we have no future. That’s the real bottom line no matter what else you claim it to be. I can live with your past: St. James, Cusick, Rhys Davies-Jones, and whomever else you’ve slept with for a night or a year. The question is: Can you live with mine? Because that’s really what this is all about. It has nothing to do with how I feel about women.”
“It has everything to do with it.”
He heard the intensity in her tone and saw the resignation on her face. He turned her to him then, understanding and mourning the fact at once. “Oh God, Helen,” he sighed. “I haven’t had another woman. I haven’t even wanted one.”
“I know,” she said, resting her head against him. “Why doesn’t that help?”
After reading it, Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers crumpled up the second page of Chief Superintendent Sir David Hillier’s lengthy memorandum, rolled it into a ball, and lobbed it neatly across the width of Inspector Lynley’s office, where it joined the previous page in the rubbish bin which she’d placed, for a bit of an athletic challenge, next to the door. She yawned, rubbed her fi ngers vigorously against her scalp, rested her head on her fist, and continued reading. “Pope Davy’s Encyclical on Keeping Yer Nose Clean,” MacPherson had called the memorandum
Everyone agreed that they had better things to do than to read Hillier’s epistle on the Serious Obligations Of The National Police Force When Investigating A Case With Possible Connection To The Irish Republican Army. While they all recognised that Hillier was taking his inspiration from the release of the Birmingham Six — and while few of them had any sympathy for those members of the West Midlands police force who had been the focus of Her Majesty’s Investigation as a result — the fact remained that they were far too burdened by their individual workloads to spend time committing to memory their Chief Superintendent’s prescriptive treatise.
Barbara, however, wasn’t currently fl oundering in the middle of half a dozen cases, as were some of her colleagues. Rather, she was engaged in experiencing a long-anticipated two-week holiday. During this time, she had planned to work on her childhood home in Acton, preparing to hand it over to an estate agent and move herself to a tiny studio-cumcottage she’d managed to find in Chalk Farm, tucked behind a large Edwardian house in Eton Villas. The house itself had been subdivided into four flats and a spacious ground floor bed-sit, none of which were within Barbara’s limited budget. But the cottage, sitting in the rear of the garden beneath a false acacia tree, was practically too small for anyone but a dwarf to live in comfortably. And while Barbara was not a dwarf, her living aspirations were defi nitely dwarfish: She did not look to entertain visitors, she did not anticipate marriage and family, she worked long hours and simply needed a place to lay her head at night. The cottage would do.
She had signed the lease with no little excitement. This would be the first home she had had away from Acton in the last twenty of her thirty-three years. She thought of how she would decorate it, where she would buy her furniture, what photographs and prints she would hang on the walls. She went to a garden centre and looked at plants, making note of what grew well in window boxes and what needed sun. She paced the length of the cottage and then the width, she measured the windows and examined the door. And she returned to Acton with her mind awash with plans and ideas, all of which seemed unrealistic and impossible to attain when she was confronted with the amount of work that needed to be done to her family’s home.
Interior painting, exterior repairs, replacing wallpaper, refinishing woodwork, extirpating an entire rear garden of weeds, cleaning old carpets…the list seemed endless. And beyond the fact that she was only one person attempting to see to the renovation of a house that had gone uncared for since she’d left secondary school — which was depressing enough in and of itself — there was the vague sense of unease that she felt each time a project was actually completed.
At issue was her mother. For the past two months, she had been living in Greenford, some distance out of London on the Central line. She’d made the adjustment to Hawthorn Lodge fairly well, but Barbara still wondered how much she would be tempting fate if she sold the old house in Acton and set herself up in a more desirable neighbourhood, in an intriguingly bohemian little cottage that wore the label
You have your own life, she’d been telling herself stoutly more than a dozen times each day. There’s no crime in getting on with it, Barbara. But it felt like a crime, when the project itself didn’t feel more overwhelming than she could bear. She fluctuated among making lists of everything that needed to be done, despairing that she would be able to do it, and fearing the day when the work was completed and the house was sold and she was finally on her own.
In her rare introspective moments, Barbara admitted that the house gave her something to cling to, a last vestige of security in a world in which she no longer had relations into whom she could sink even the slightest hook of emotional dependence. No matter that she had not been able to sink a hook into any relation’s empathy or reliability for years — her father’s lingering illness and her mother’s mental deterioration had long precluded that — living in the same old house in the same old neighbourhood at least bore the appearance of security. To give it up and forge ahead into the unknown…Sometimes Acton seemed infinitely preferable.
There are no easy answers, Inspector Lynley would have said, there’s only living through the questions. But the thought of Lynley made Barbara shift restlessly in his desk chair and force herself to read the first paragraph on the third page of Hillier’s memorandum.
The words meant nothing. She couldn’t concentrate. Having inadvertently conjured up the presence of her superior offi cer, she was going to have to deal with him.
How to do so? She squirmed, lay the memorandum down among the various reports and folders that were stacking up during his absence, and sank her hand into her shoulder bag in search of her cigarettes. She lit one and blew smoke at the ceiling, eyes narrowed against the smoke’s acrid sting.
She was in Lynley’s debt. He would deny it, naturally, no doubt with an expression of such bemusement that she would momentarily distrust her own deductions. But scanty as they were, she had the facts, and she didn’t much like the position in which they placed her. How to repay him when he would never allow it as long as their circumstances were so imbalanced? He would never begin to entertain the word
Damn him, she thought, he sees too much, he knows too much, he’s too fl aming clever to get caught in the act. She swivelled the chair to face a cabinet on top of which sat a picture of Lynley and Lady Helen Clyde. She scowled at him.
“Get knotted,” she said, flicking ash to the floor. “Stay out of my life, Inspector.”
“Now, Sergeant? Or will later do as well?”
Barbara spun round quickly. Lynley stood in the doorway, his cashmere overcoat slung over one shoulder and Dorothea Harriman— their divisional superintendent ’s secretary — bobbing up and down behind him.
Barbara got to her feet at once. “You’re on holiday,” she said.
“As are you.”
“So what’re you…?”
“What are
She dragged long on her cigarette. “Thought I’d stop by. I was in the area.”
“Ah.”
“You?”
“The same.” He entered and hung his coat on the rack. Unlike herself, who had at least kept up the I’m-on- holiday pretence by coming to the Yard wearing blue jeans and a tatty sweat shirt across which had been stencilled
