Missing Joseph

desk — the immediate vicinity of which she quickly vacated — favoured the smouldering tip of her cigarette with a look of displeasure as he passed her, and began sorting through the folders, reports, envelopes, and numerous departmental directives. “What’s this?” he asked, holding up the remaining eight pages of the memorandum which Barbara had been reading.

“Hillier’s thoughts on working with the IRA.”

He patted his jacket pocket, brought out his spectacles, and ran his eyes down the page. “Odd. Is Hillier losing his touch? It appears to start in the middle,” he noted.

Sheepishly, she reached into the rubbish and rescued the two top pages which she smoothed out against her chunky thigh and handed to him, dropping cigarette ash on the cuff of his suit jacket in the process.

“Havers…” His voice was patience itself.

“Sorry.” She flicked the ash off. A spot of it remained. She rubbed it into the material. “Good for it,” she said. “Old wives’ tale.”

“Put out that blasted thing, will you?”

She sighed and squashed the remaining stub of tobacco against the heel of her left plimsoll. She flicked the butt in the direction of the rubbish bin, but it missed its mark and landed on the floor. Lynley lifted his head from Hillier’s memorandum, observed the butt over the tops of his spectacles, and raised a single, querying eyebrow.

“Sorry,” Havers said and went to place the offending article in the rubbish. She returned the bin to its original position at the side of his desk. He murmured his thanks. She plopped onto one of the visitor chairs and began to worry an incipient hole in the right knee of her jeans. She stole a look or two at him while he continued to read.

He appeared perfectly refreshed and entirely untroubled. His blond hair lay neatly against his head in its usual well-scissored fashion— she’d always wanted to know who saw to the miraculous cutting that produced the effect of its never growing so much as a millimetre beyond an established length — his brown eyes were clear, no circles darkened the skin beneath them, no new lines of fatigue or worry had joined the age lines on his brow. But the fact remained that he was supposed to be on a holiday that had long been arranged with Lady Helen Clyde. They were off to Corfu. They were supposed to be leaving, in fact, at eleven. But it was now a quarter past ten, and unless the Inspector was planning on a trip to Heathrow via helicopter within the next ten minutes, he wasn’t going anywhere. At least not to Greece. At least not today.

“So,” she said breezily, “is Helen with you, sir? Did she stop to chat up MacPherson in the mess?”

“No to both.” He continued reading. He’d just concluded the third page of the tract, and he was balling it up as she had done with the first two, although in his case, the action appeared to be unconscious, merely something to do with his hands. He’d made it a full year off the evil weed, but there were times when his fingers seemed to need something to do in place of holding the cigarette he’d been used to.

“She’s not ill? I mean, weren’t you two heading off to—”

“We were supposed to, yes. Plans change sometimes.” He looked at her over the rims of his spectacles. It was one of his now-thatwe’re-getting-down-to-it looks. “And what about your plans, Sergeant? Have they changed as well?”

“Just taking a break. You know how it is. Work, work, work and a girl’s hands just start to look like dead lobsters. I’m giving them a rest.”

“I see.”

“Not that I need to give them a rest from painting.”

“What?”

“Painting. You know. The interior of the house. Three blokes showed up at my place two days ago. Contractors, they were. Had a deal all drawn up and signed to paint the inside of my house. Odd, that was, you know, because I hadn’t called a contractor. Odder still when you think the job had been paid for in advance.”

Lynley frowned and placed the memorandum on top of a bound PSI report on the relationship between civilians and police in London. “Decidedly odd,” he said. “You’re certain they were at the right house.”

“Dead certain,” she said. “One hundred percent certain. They even knew my name. They even called me sergeant. They even asked what it was like for a woman to work in CID. Chatty blokes, they were. But I did wonder how they could ever have known I work here at the Met.”

As expected, Lynley’s face was a study in wonderment. She half-expected him to go all Miranda on her, exclaiming on the braveness and newness of a world they both knew to be generally corrupt and largely hopeless. “And you read the contract? You made certain they were in the right place?”

“Oh yes. And they were bloody good, sir, the lot of them. Two days and the house was painted like new.”

“How intriguing.” He went back to the report.

She let him read for the amount of time it took her to count from one to one hundred. Then, “Sir.”

“Hmm.”

“What’d you pay them?”

“Whom?”

“The painters.”

“What painters?”

“Give over, Inspector. You know what I’m talking about.”

“The chaps who painted your house?”

“What’d you pay them? Because I know you did, don’t bother to lie about it. Besides you, only MacPherson, Stewart, and Hale know that I’m working on the place during my holiday, and they can’t exactly put their hands on the kind of lolly we’re talking about to do this job. So what’d you pay them and how much time do I have to pay you back?”

Lynley set the report aside and allowed his fi ngers to play with his watch chain. They removed the watch from his pocket, flipped it open, and he made a show of examining the time.

“I don’t want your bleeding charity,” she said. “I don’t want to feel like anyone’s pet project. I don’t want to owe.”

“It does make demands on one, owing,” he said. “One always ends up putting the debt onto a scale in which future behaviours are weighed. How can I lash out in anger when I owe him something? How can I go my own way without discussion when I’m in his debt? How can I maintain a safe businesslike distance from the rest of the world if I have a connection somewhere?”

“Owing money isn’t a connection, sir.”

“No. But gratitude generally is.”

“So you were buying me? Is that it?”

“Assuming I had anything to do with it in the first place — which, I feel compelled to warn you, is not an inference that will be supported by any evidence you may attempt to glean — I generally don’t purchase my friendships, Sergeant.”

“Which is your way of saying that you paid them cash, and you probably paid them a bonus as well to keep their mouths shut.” She leaned forward, slapping her hand lightly against his desk. “I don’t want your help, sir, not in this way. I don’t want anything from you that I can’t return. And besides…Even if that wasn’t the case, I’m not exactly ready—” She blew out her breath in a gust of sudden nerve loss.

Sometimes she forgot he was her superior officer. Worse, sometimes she forgot the one thing she’d once sworn to keep in the forefront of her mind every instant she was with him: The man was an earl, he had a title, there were people in his life who actually called him my lord. Given, none of his colleagues at the Yard had considered him anything other than Lynley for more than ten years, but she didn’t possess the sort of sang-froid that allowed her to feel on equal footing with someone whose family had been rubbing elbows with the sort of blokes who were used to being referred to as your highness and your grace. It gave her the crawlies when she thought about it, it raised her hackles when she dwelt upon it. And when it caught her unawares — such as now — it made her feel like a perfect fool. One didn’t unburden one’s soul to a blue blood. One wasn’t really sure that blue bloods were possessed of souls themselves.

“And even if that weren’t the case,” Lynley picked up her thought with an unconscious— if typical — correction of her grammar, “I expect as the day when you leave Acton looms closer, the prospect looms larger. It’s