A Great Deliverance Read online

  “It’s fine, sir,” Lynley replied easily. “I understand.”

  A knock on the door announced Miss Harriman’s successful quest for the Schweppes, which she placed triumphantly on the table in front of Sergeant Havers. She glanced at the clock. Its hands were nearing six.

  “As this isn’t a regularly scheduled workday, Superintendent,” she began, “I thought I might—”

  “Yes, yes, go on home.” Webberly waved.

  “Oh no, it isn’t that at all,” Harriman said sweetly. “But I think in Regulation Sixty-five-A regarding compensatory time…”

  “Take Monday and I’ll break your arm, Harriman,” Webberly said with equivalent sweetness. “Not in the middle of this Ripper business.”

  “Wouldn’t think of it, sir. Shall I just put it on the tick? Regulation Sixty-five-C indicates that—”

  “Put it anywhere, Harriman.”

  She smiled understandingly at him. “Absolutely, Superintendent.” The door closed behind her.

  “Did that vixen wink at you as she left the room, Lynley?” Webberly demanded.

  “I didn’t notice, sir.”

  It was half past eight when they began gathering together the papers from the table in Webberly’s office. Darkness had fallen and the fluorescent lighting did nothing to hide the room’s genial air of disarray. If anything, it was worse now than it had been before, with the additional files from the North spread out on the table and an acrid cirrus of cigarette and cigar smoke that, in conjunction with the mixed scents of whisky and sherry, produced the effect of being in a rather down-at-heel gentlemen’s club.

  Barbara noticed the deep lines of exhaustion that were drawn on Lynley’s face and judged that the aspirin had done him little good. He had gone to the wall of Ripper photographs and was inspecting them, moving from one to the next. As she watched, he lifted a hand to one of them—it was the King’s Cross victim, she noted needlessly—and traced a finger along the crude incision that the Ripper’s knife had made.

  “‘Death closes all,’” he murmured. “He’s black and white, flesh with no resilience. Who could ever recognise a living man from this?”

  “Or from this, for that matter,” Webberly responded. He brusquely gestured to the photographs that Father Hart had brought.

  Lynley rejoined them. He stood near Barbara but was, she well knew, oblivious of her. She watched the expressions pass quickly across his face as he sorted through the photographs one last time: revulsion, disbelief, pity. His features were so easy to read that she wondered how he ever managed to conduct a successful investigation without giving everything away to a suspect. But he did it all the time. She knew his record of success, the string of follow-up convictions. He was the golden boy in more ways than one.

  “We’ll head up there in the morning, then,” he said to the superintendent. He picked up a manila envelope and tucked all the materials inside.

  Webberly was examining a train schedule which he had unearthed from the jumble on his desk. “Take the eight-forty-five.”

  Lynley groaned. “Have a bit of mercy, sir. I’d like at least the next ten hours to get rid of this migraine.”

  “Then the nine-thirty. And no later than that.” Webberly glanced round his office one last time as he shrugged into a tweed overcoat. Like his other clothing, it was becoming threadbare in spots, and a small patch was worked poorly into the left lapel where, no doubt, cigar ash had done its worst. “Report in on Tuesday,” he said as he left.

  The superintendent’s absence seemed to rejuvenate Lynley at once, Barbara noted, for he moved with amazing alacrity of spirit to the telephone the moment the man was gone. He dialled a number, tapped his fingers rhythmically against the desk top, and peered at the face of the clock. After nearly a minute, his face lit with a smile.

  “You did wait, old duck,” he said into the phone. “Have you broken it off with Jeffrey Cusick at last?…Ha! I knew it, Helen. I’ve told you repeatedly that a barrister can’t possibly make you happy. Did the reception end well?…He did? Oh Lord, what a scene that must have been. Has Andrew ever cried in his life?…Poor St. James. Was he absolutely slain with mortification?…Well, it’s the champagne does it, you know. Did Sidney recover?…Yes, well, she did look for a while as if she’d get a bit maudlin at the end. She’s never made a secret of it that Simon’s her favourite brother…. Of course dancing’s still on. We promised ourselves, didn’t we?…Can you give me, say, an hour or so?…Hmm, what was that?…Helen! My God, what a naughty little girl!” He laughed and dropped the phone back onto its cradle. “Still here, Sergeant?” he asked when he turned from the desk.

  “You’ve no car, sir,” she replied stonily. “I thought I’d wait to see if you needed a ride home.”

  “That’s awfully good of you, but we’ve all been kept here long enough for one evening, and I’m sure you’ve far better things to do on a Saturday night than see me home. I’ll catch a cab.” He bent over Webberly’s desk for a moment, writing quickly on a piece of paper. “This is my address,” he said, handing it to her. “Be there at seven tomorrow morning, will you? That should give us some time to make more sense of all this before we head to Yorkshire. Good evening, then.” He left the room.

  Barbara looked down at the paper in her hand, at the handwriting which even in a hurry still managed to be an elegant scrawl. She studied it for more than a minute before she ripped it into tiny pieces and tossed them into the rubbish. She knew quite well where Thomas Lynley lived.

  The guilt began on the Uxbridge Road. It always did. Tonight it was worse when she saw that the travel agency was closed, preventing her from gathering the material on Greece as she’d promised. Empress Tours. Where had they ever come up with a name like that for such a grubby little shop where people sat behind plastic-topped desks that were painted to look as if they were wood? She slowed the car, peering through the dirty windscreen to look for signs of life. The owners lived above the shop. Perhaps if she banged on the door a bit, she could rouse them. No, it was too ridiculous. Mum was no more going to Greece than to the moon; she’d just have to wait for the brochures a bit longer.

  Still, she’d passed at least a dozen agencies in the city today. Why hadn’t she stopped? What else did Mum have to live for but those silly little dreams? Overcome with the need to compensate in some way for her failure, Barbara pulled the car over in front of Patel’s Grocery, a ramshackle affair of green paint, rusting shelves, and precariously stacked crates from which emanated that peculiar blend of odours that comes from vegetables not quite as fresh as they ought to be. Patel was still open, at least. Leave it to him never to miss a chance to make ten pence.

  “Barbara!” He greeted her from inside the shop as she bent over the boxed fall fruit on the pavement outside. Mostly apples. A few late peaches shipped in from Spain. “Whassa doin’ out so late?”

  He couldn’t imagine her having a date, of course. No one could. She couldn’t herself. “Had to work late, Mr. Patel,” she replied. “How much for the peaches?”

  “Eighty-five a pound, but for you, pretty face, we say eighty.”

  She picked out six. He weighed them, wrapped them, and handed them over. “I was seeing your father today.”

  She looked up quickly and caught the guard dropping over Mr. Patel’s dark face like a mask when he saw her expression. “Was he behaving himself?” she asked casually, shouldering her handbag.

  “My goodness, yes. He always behaves!” Mr. Patel took her money, counted it twice carefully, and dropped it into his register. “You take care now, Barbara. Men see a nice girl like you and—”

  “Yes, I’ll take care,” Barbara interrupted. She tossed the peaches onto the front seat of the car. Nice girl like you, Barb. You take care. Keep those legs crossed. Virtue like yours is definitely easy to lose, and a woman fallen is fallen forever. She laughed bitterly, jerked the car into gear, and pulled out onto the road.

  In Acton there were two potential areas of residence, simply called by in
habitants the right and wrong streets. It was as if a dividing line split the suburb arbitrarily, condemning one set of residents while it elevated others.

  On the right streets of Acton, pristine brick houses boasted woodwork which always sparkled admirably in the morning sun in a multiplicity of colours. Roses grew in abundance there. Fuchsias flourished in hanging pots. Children played games on unlittered pavements and in patchwork gardens. Snow kissed gabled roofs in peaks of meringue in the winter, while in summer tall elms made green tunnels through which families strolled in the perfumed evening light. There was never an argument in the right streets of Acton, never loud music, the smell of cooking fish, or fists raised in a fight. It was sheer perfection, the single ocean on which every family’s boat of dreams sailed placidly forward. But things were much different as close as a single street away.

  People liked to say that the wrong streets of Acton got the heat of the day and that’s why things were so different there. It was as if an enormous hand had swept down from the sky and jumbled up houses and avenues and people so that everything was always just a bit out of sorts. No one worked quite so hard on appearances: houses sagged moodily into decay. Gardens once planted were soon ignored, then forgotten altogether and left to fend for themselves. Children played noisily on the dirty pavements, disruptive games that frequently brought mothers to doorways, shrieking for peace from the din. The winter wind spit through poorly sealed windows and summer brought rain that leaked through the roofs. People in the wrong streets didn’t think much about being anywhere else, for to think of being elsewhere was to think of hope. And hope was dead in the wrong part of Acton.

  Barbara drove there now, turning the Mini in on a street lined with cars that were rusting like her own. Neither garden nor fence fronted her own house, but rather a pavement-hard patch of dirt on which she parked her little car.

  Next door, Mrs. Gustafson was playing BBC-1. Since she was nearly deaf, the entire neighbourhood was nightly regaled with the doings of her favourite television heroes. Across the street, the Kirbys were engaging in their usual preintercourse argument while their four children ignored them as best they could by throwing dirt clods at an indifferent cat that watched from a nearby first-floor window sill.

  Barbara sighed, groped for her front door key, and went into her house. It was chicken and peas. She could smell it at once, like a gust of foul breath.

  “That you, lovey?” her mother’s voice called. “Bit late, aren’t you, dear? Out with some friends?”

  What a laugh! “Working, Mum. I’m back on CID.”

  Her mother shuffled to the door of the sitting room. Like Barbara, she was short, but terribly thin, as if a long illness had ravaged her body and taken it sinew by sinew on a march towards the grave. “CID?” she asked, her voice growing querulous. “Oh must you, Barbara? You know how I feel about that, my lovey.” As she spoke she raised a skeletal hand to her thin hair in a characteristic, nervous gesture. Her overlarge eyes were puffy and rimmed with red, as if she had spent the day weeping.

  “Brought you some peaches,” Barbara responded, gesturing with the sack. “The travel agent was closed, I’m afraid. I even banged on the door to get them down from above, but they must’ve gone out.”

  Diverted from the thought of CID, Mrs. Havers’s face changed, lighting with a dusty glow. She caught at the fabric of her shabby housedress and held it bunched in one hand, as if containing excitement. “Oh, that doesn’t matter at all. Wait till you see. Go in the kitchen and I’ll be right there. Your dinner’s still warm.”

  Barbara walked past the sitting room, wincing at the chatter of the television and the fusty smell of a chamber too long kept closed. The kitchen, fetid with the odour of tough, broiled chicken and anaemic peas, was little better. She looked gloomily at the plate on the table, touched her finger to the withered flesh of the fowl. It was stone cold, as slippery and puckered as something kept preserved in formaldehyde for forensic examination. Fat had congealed round its edges, and a single, rancid dab of butter had failed to melt on peas that looked as if they had had their last warming in a former decade.

  Wonderful, she thought. Could the “lovely crab salad” have even come close to this epicurean splendour? She looked for the daily paper and found it, as always, on the seat of one of the wobbly kitchen chairs. She grabbed the front section, opened it to the middle, and deposited her dinner on the smiling face of the Duchess of Kent.

  “Lovey, you’ve not thrown away your nice dinner!”

  Damn! Barbara turned to see her mother’s stricken face, lips working in rejection, lines drawn in deep grooves down to her chin, pale blue eyes filled with tears. She clutched an artificial leather album to her bony chest.

  “Caught me, Mum.” Barbara forced a smile, putting an arm round the woman’s bird-like shoulders and leading her to the table. “I had a bite at the Yard, so I wasn’t hungry. Should I have saved it for you or Dad?”

  Mrs. Havers blinked quickly. The relief on her face was pathetic. “I…I suppose not. No, of course not. We wouldn’t want chicken and peas two nights in a row, would we?” She laughed gently and laid her album on the table. “Dad got me Greece,” she announced.

  “Did he?” So that’s what he was doing out of the cage. “All by himself?” Barbara asked casually.

  Her mother looked away, fingering the edges of her album, picking nervously at the artificial gold leaf. She gave a sudden movement, a quick, brilliant smile, and pulled out a chair. “Sit here, lovey, let me show you how we went.”

  The album was opened. Previous trips through Italy, France, Turkey—now there was a bizarre one—and Peru were flipped through quickly until they arrived at the newest section, devoted to Greece.

  “Now, here’s the hotel we stayed at in Corfu. Do you see how it’s just right there on the bay? We could have gone down to Kanoni to a newer one, but I liked the view, didn’t you, lovey?”

  Barbara’s eyes smarted. She refused to submit. How long will it take? Will it never end?

  “You’ve not answered me, Barbara.” Her mother’s voice quivered with anxiety. “I did work so hard on the trip all today. Having the view was better than the new hotel in Kanoni, wasn’t it, lovey?”

  “Much better, Mum.” Barbara forced the words out and got to her feet. “I’ve got a case tomorrow. Can we do Greece later?” Would she understand?

  “What sort of case?”

  “It’s a…bit of a problem with a family in Yorkshire. I’ll be gone a few days. Can you manage, do you think, or shall I ask Mrs. Gustafson to come and stay?” Wonderful thought, the deaf leading the mad.

  “Mrs. Gustafson?” Her mother closed the album and drew herself stiffly upright. “I think not, my lovey. Dad and I can manage on our own. We always have, you know. Except that short time when Tony…”

  The room was unbearably, stiflingly hot. Oh God, Barbara thought, just a wisp of air. Just this once. For a moment. She went to the back door, which led out to the weed-choked garden.

  “Where’re you going?” her mother asked quickly, that familiar note of hysteria creeping into her voice. “There’s nothing out there! You mustn’t go outside after dark!”

  Barbara picked up the discarded chicken dinner. “Rubbish, Mum. I won’t be a moment. You can wait by the door and see I’m all right.”

  “But I…By the door?”

  “If you like.”

  “No, I mustn’t be by the door. We’ll leave it open just a bit, though. You can shout if you need me.”

  “That sounds the plan, Mum.” She picked up the package and went hurriedly out into the night.

  A few minutes. She breathed the cool air, listened to the familiar neighbourhood sounds, and felt in her pocket for a crumpled pack of Players. She shook one out, lit it, and gazed up at the sky.

  What had started the seductive descent into madness? It was Tony, of course. Bright, freckle-faced imp. Fresh, spring air in the constant darkness of winter. Watchme, watchme, Barbie! I can do anything! Che
mistry sets and rugger balls. Cricket on the common and tag in the afternoon. And horribly, stupidly chasing a ball right onto the Uxbridge Road.

  But he didn’t die from that. Just a stay in hospital. A persistent fever, a peculiar rash. And a lingering, etiolating kiss from leukaemia. The wonderful, delicious irony of it all: go in with a broken leg, come out with leukaemia.

  It had taken him four agonising years to die. Four years for them to make this descent into madness.

  “Lovey?” The voice was tremulous.

  “Right here, Mum. Just looking at the sky.” Barbara crushed her cigarette out on the rock-hard ground and walked back inside.

  4

  Deborah St. James braked the car to a halt on a breath of laughter and turned to her husband. “Simon, have you never been told you’re quite the world’s worst navigator?”

  He smiled and closed the road atlas. “Never once. But have a heart. Consider the fog.”

  She looked out the windscreen at the large, dark building that loomed in front of them. “Poor excuse for not being able to read a road map, if you ask me. Are we at the right place? It doesn’t look as if a soul’s waited up for us.”

  “I shouldn’t be surprised. I told them we’d arrive at nine and now it’s…” he peered at his watch in the weak interior light of the car, “good God, it’s half past eleven.” She heard the laughter in his voice. “Are you for it, my love? Shall we spend our wedding night in the car?”

  “Teenagers grappling hotly in the backseat, do you mean?” She tossed her long hair back with a shake of her head. “Hmm, it is a thought. But I’m afraid in that case you should have hired something larger than an Escort. No, Simon, there’s nothing for it, I’m afraid, but banging on the doors and rousing someone. But you shall make all our excuses.” She stepped out into the chilly night air, taking a moment to study the building before her.