Believing the Lie

He didn’t reply at once. He was trying to think of a way to tell her what he was doing without actually telling her what he was doing, but she apparently took his silence for avoidance because she said tartly, “Ah. I see. Is this to do with what happened?”

“With what? What happened?”

“Please. Don’t. You know what I’m saying. With Bob. That night. The fact that we’ve not been together since — ”

“Lord, no. It’s nothing to do with that,” he cut in, although the truth of the matter, if he had to admit it, was that he wasn’t exactly sure.

“Then why’ve you been avoiding me?”

“I’m not aware that I have been avoiding you.”

There was a silence that greeted this. He found himself wondering where she was. The time of day suggested she might still be at the Yard, perhaps in her office, and he could see her there at her desk with her head lowered to speak into the phone and her smooth hair — rather the colour of amber — tucked behind one ear to show a conservative but fashionable earring. One shoe off, perhaps, and there she was leaning down to rub her calf as she thought what she would say to him next.

What she said surprised him. “Tommy, I told Bob yesterday. Not who exactly because, as I explained, I do know very well he’d use it against me at some time when he believes I’m out of order. But that. I told him that.”

“That what?”

“That I’m involved with someone. That you’d come to the door when he and Sandra were there, that I’d sent you off because I thought the boys weren’t ready to meet… after all, they’d come into London for the first time to see me and they needed to adjust to my being in London and to the flat itself and everything that goes along with it. To have a man there as well… I told him I felt it was too soon and I’d asked you to leave. But I wanted him to know that you do exist.”

“Ah. Isabelle.” Lynley knew what it had cost her: telling her former husband about him when the man held such power over her life and now telling him that she’d done so when she was a proud woman and God how he knew that about her.

“I’m missing you, Tommy. I don’t want us to be at odds.”

“We’re not at odds.”

“Are we not?”

“We are not.”

Another pause. Perhaps she was at home after all, he thought, sitting on the edge of the bed in that claustrophobic bedroom of hers with its single window virtually sealed against anyone’s attempt to open it fully and its bed too small to accommodate both of them comfortably for an entire night. Which could or could not have been the point of it, he realised. And what would that mean to him if she admitted to that?

“Things are complicated,” he said. “They always are, aren’t they?”

“After a certain age, yes. There’s so much bloody baggage.” And then after an indrawn breath, “I want you tonight, Tommy. Will you come to me?” And most remarkably, “Have you the time?”

He wanted to say that it wasn’t at all a matter of time. It was a matter of how he felt and who he wanted to be. But this, too, was complicated. So he said, “I can’t say exactly.”

“Because of the Hillier thing. I was hoping you’d notice I hadn’t insisted on knowing what’s going on. And I won’t. You’ve my promise on it. Even afterwards, I won’t, and you know what that means because I do know how you are afterwards. Sometimes I think I could get anything out of you afterwards, you know.”

“And why don’t you?”

“Well, it doesn’t seem quite fair, does it? Besides, I like to think I’m not that sort of woman. I don’t scheme. Well, not much at least.”

“Are you scheming now?”

“Only to have you and it can’t be a scheme if I’m admitting to it, can it?”

He smiled at that. He felt a softening towards her and he recognised this as the desire he continued to feel for her, despite the fact that the timing of their relationship was wretched and they were ill matched anyway and always would be. He wanted her. Still.

“It might be late when I arrive,” he said.

“That hardly matters. Will you come to me, Tommy?”

“I will,” he told her.

CHELSEA LONDON

He had arrangements to make first, however. While he could have made them over the phone, he decided that making them in person would allow him to gauge whether what he was asking was an inconvenience to the people he needed. For they would never tell him so.

The fact that this was not to be a formal police investigation hobbled him considerably. It also called for a creative approach to appease the demands for secrecy. He could have insisted that Hillier allow him the services of another officer, but the only officers he cared to work with were unlikely candidates for a surreptitious crawl round Cumbria. At six feet four inches tall and with skin the colour of very strong tea, DS Winston Nkata would hardly fade into the autumn scenery of the Lake District. And as for DS Barbara Havers — who under other circumstances would have been Lynley’s first choice, despite her score of maddening personal habits — the idea of Barbara chain- smoking her belligerent way round Cumbria under the pretext that she was, perhaps, a walker out for a bracing week on the fells… It was too ludicrous to contemplate. She was a brilliant cop, but discretion was not her strong suit. Had Helen been alive, she would have been perfect for the job. She would have loved it, as well. Tommy darling, we’ll be incognito! Lord, how delicious. I’ve spent my life absolutely longing to do a Tuppence. But Helen was not alive, was not alive. The very thought of her sent him on his way as rapidly as he could manage.

He drove to Chelsea, choosing the route that took him down the King’s Road. It was the most direct way to get to Cheyne Row but not the quickest as the narrow road led him through the area’s trendy shopping district with its fashion boutiques, shoe shops, antiques markets, pubs, and restaurants. There were crowds on the pavements as always, and seeing them — especially seeing their youth — made him melancholy and filled him with what felt like regret. He couldn’t have said what he regretted, though. He didn’t much want to try to find out.

He parked in Lawrence Street, near Lordship Place. He walked back the way he’d come but rather than going on to Cheyne Row, he went in through the garden gate of the tall brick house that stood on the corner.

The garden was showing its autumn colours and readying itself for the winter. The lawn was strewn with leaves needing gathering while the herbaceous borders offered plants whose flowers were long gone now and whose stalks leaned perilously, as if weighted towards the ground by an unseen hand. The wicker furniture wore canvas shrouds. Moss grew between the bricks. Lynley followed a path of these, which led to the house. There, steps descended to the basement kitchen. A light was on there against the coming evening. He could see a shape moving behind the window, itself steamed from the heat inside.

He knocked sharply twice and when the usual barking of the dog commenced, he opened the door and said, “It’s me, Joseph. I’ve come in the back way.”

“Tommy?” It was a woman’s voice, however, not the voice Lynley had been expecting but rather the man’s daughter. “Are you playing at Victorian tradesman?”

She came round the corner from the kitchen in the wake of the dog, a long-haired dachshund with the unlikely name of Peach. Peach barked, jumped, and did her usual by way of greeting him. She was as undisciplined as always, living proof of what Deborah St. James often declared: that she required a dog she could pick up as she was utterly hopeless at training anything.

“Hullo, you,” Deborah said to Lynley. “What a very nice surprise.” She scooted the dog to one side and hugged him. She brushed a kiss against his cheek. “You’re staying for dinner,” she announced. “For many reasons but most of all because I’m cooking it.”