A Great Deliverance Page 7

  “Not terrible often. But I…” She swallowed, and suddenly they saw that this was no amusing legend for lovestruck honeymooners, for to her the fear and the story were real. “But I heard i’ myself some three years back! ’Tis not something I’ll soon forget!” She got to her feet. “You’ll remember what t’ do? You’ll not forget?”

  “We’ll not forget,” Deborah reassured the girl as she vanished from the room.

  They were quiet at her departure. Deborah rested her head against St. James’s knee. His long, thin fingers moved gently through her hair, smoothing the curly mass back from her face. She looked up at him.

  “I’m afraid, Simon. I didn’t think I would be, not once this last year, but I am.” She saw in his eyes that he understood. Of course he did. Had she ever truly doubted that he would?

  “So am I,” he replied. “Every moment today I felt just a little bit mad with terror. I never wanted to lose myself, not to you, not to anyone in fact. But there it is. It happened.” He smiled. “You invaded my heart with a little Cromwellian force of your own that I couldn’t resist, Deborah, and I find now that rather than lose myself, the true terror is that I might somehow lose you.” He touched the pendant he’d given her that morning, nestling in the hollow of her throat. It was a small gold swan, so long between them a symbol of commitment: choosing once, choosing for life. His eyes moved from it back to her own. “Don’t be afraid,” he whispered gently.

  “Make love to me then.”

  “With great pleasure.”

  Jimmy Havers had little pig’s eyes that darted round the room when he was nervous. He might feel as if he were putting on the bravura performance of a lifetime, lying his way grandly out of everything from an accusation of petty larceny to being caught in flagrante delicto, but the reality was that his eyes betrayed him every time, as they were doing now.

  “Didn’t know if you’d be home in time to get your mum the Greece stuff, so Jim went out himself, girl.” It was his habit to speak of himself in the third person. It allowed him to evade responsibility for virtually any unpleasantness that cropped up in his life. Like this one now. No, I didn’t go to the turf accountant. Didn’t pick up snuff, either. If it was done at all, was Jimmy that done it, not me.

  Barbara watched her father’s eyes dance their way round the sitting room. God, what a grim little death pit it was: a ten-by-fifteen-foot room whose windows were permanently sealed shut by years of filth and grime, crammed with that wonderful three-piece suite so essential to delicate living, but this one a creation that had billed itself as “artificial horsehair” thirty-five years ago when even real horsehair was a hideous concept of comfort. The walls were papered with a maddening design of interlocking rosebuds that simpered their way to the ceiling. Racing magazines overflowed from tables onto the floor and argued there with the fifteen simulated leather albums that assiduously documented every inch, every mile of her mother’s breakdown. And through it all Tony smiled and smiled and smiled.

  A corner of the room held his shrine. The last picture of him before his illness—a distorted, unfocused little boy kicking a football into a temporary goal net set up in a garden that had once leapt with flowers—was enlarged to beyond life-size proportions. On either side, suitably framed in mock oak, hung every school report he had ever done, every note of praise from every teacher he’d had, and—God have mercy on us all—given pride of place, the certificate of his death. Beneath this, an arrangement of plastic flowers did obeisance, a rather dusty obeisance considering the state of the room itself.

  The television blared, as it always did, from the opposite corner, placed there “so Tony can watch it as well.” His favourite shows still played regularly to him, frozen in time, as if nothing had happened, as if nothing had changed. While the windows and doors were closed and locked, chained and barred to hold out the truth of that August afternoon and the Uxbridge Road.

  Barbara strode across the room and switched off the set.

  “Hey, girl, Jim was watching that!” her father protested.

  She faced him. My God, he was a pig. When was the last time he’d had a bath? She could smell him from here—the sweat; the body oils that collected in his hair, on his neck, behind the creases of his ears; the unwashed clothing.

  “Mr. Patel told me you were by,” she said, sitting down on the horrible couch. It prickled against her skin.

  The eyes flicked around. From the dead television to the plastic flowers to the obscene roses scaling the wall. “Jim went to Patel’s, sure.” He nodded.

  He grinned at his daughter. His teeth were badly stained, and along the gumline Barbara saw the liquid building within his mouth. The coffee tin was by his chair, inexpertly hidden by a racing form. She knew he wanted her to look away for a moment so that he’d have time to do his business without getting caught. She refused to play along.

  “Spit it out, Dad,” she said patiently. “There’s no use swallowing it and making yourself sick, is there?” Barbara watched her father’s body sag in relief as he reached for the tin and spat the snuff-induced brown slime from his mouth.

  He wiped himself off with a stained handkerchief, coughed into it heavily, and adjusted the tubes that fed the oxygen into his nose. Mournfully, he looked at his daughter for tenderness and found none. So his eyes quickly shifted and began their slither round the room.

  Barbara watched him thoughtfully. Why wouldn’t he die? she wondered. He’d spent the last ten years decaying by degrees; why not one big jump into black oblivion? He’d like that. No more gasping for breath, no more emphysema. No more need for snuff to soothe his addiction. Just emptiness, nothingness, nothing at all.

  “You’ll get cancer, Dad,” she said. “You know that, don’t you?”

  “’Ey, Jim’s okay, Barb. Don’t you worry, girl.”

  “Can’t you think of Mum? What would happen if you had to go into hospital again?” Like Tony. It hung unspoken in the air. “Shall I speak to Mr. Patel? I don’t want to have to do that, but I shall, you know, if you persist in this business with snuff.”

  “Patel gave Jim the idea in the first place,” her father protested. His voice was a whine. “After you told him to cut off Jim’s fags.”

  “You know I did that for your own good. You can’t smoke round an oxygen tank. The doctors told you that.”

  “But Patel said snuff was okay for Jim.”

  “Mr. Patel is not a doctor. Now, give me the snuff.” She held out her hand for it.

  “But Jim wants—”

  “No argument, Dad. Give me the snuff.”

  He swallowed. Twice. Hard. His eyes darted here and there. “Got to have something, Barbie,” he whimpered.

  She winced at the name. Only Tony had called her that. On her father’s lips it was a malediction. Nonetheless, she moved to him, put her hand on his shoulder, and forced herself to touch his unwashed hair. “Dad, try to understand. It’s Mum we have to consider. Without you, she would never survive. So we’ve got to keep you healthy and fit. Don’t you see? Mum…loves you so much.”

  Was there a glimmer there at that? Did they still see each other in this little hell they so richly deserved, or was the fog too thick?

  He gave a choked sob. A dirty hand went into his pocket and the small, round tin was produced. “Jim don’t mean no harm, Barbie,” he said as he handed the tin to his daughter. His eyes slid from her face to the shrine, to the plastic flowers in their plastic vases beneath it. She went to them at once, dumped out the flowers, and confiscated the additional three tins of snuff hidden there.

  “I’ll speak to Mr. Patel in the morning,” she said coldly and walked out of the room.

  Of course it would be Eaton Terrace. Eaton Place was simply too, too Belgravia, and Lynley would never stoop to ostentation. Besides, this was just the city townhouse. Howenstow—the Cornish estate—was where the Lynleys really hung their hats.

  Barbara stood looking at the elegant white building. How enchantingly clean everything was in Bel
gravia, she thought. How upper-class chic. It was the only area in the city where people would consent to live in converted stables and boast about it to all their friends!

  We’re in Belgravia now. Did we mention it? Oh, do stop by for tea! It’s nothing much. Just three hundred thousand pounds, but we like to think of it as such an investment. Five rooms. With the sweetest little cobblestone street that you’ve ever seen. Do say you’ll be here at half past four. You’ll recognise the place. I’ve planted begonias in every window box.

  Barbara mounted the spotless marble steps and, with a scornful shake of her head, noted the small Asherton coat of arms beneath the brass light fixture. Armigerous, Lynley! No converted stable for you.

  She lifted her hand to press the bell but stopped herself and turned to survey the street. Since yesterday there had been no time to consider her position. Her initial meeting with Webberly, fetching Lynley from the wedding, and the subsequent meeting at Scotland Yard with the peculiar little priest had all followed so swiftly that there had been no moment in which she could sort out her feelings and devise a strategy for surviving this new apprenticeship.

  True, Lynley had not been as appalled at the assignment as she had thought he would be, certainly not as appalled and outraged as she herself had been. But then his mind had been occupied with other matters: the wedding of his friend and, no doubt, his late-night assignation with Lady Helen Clyde. Now, with some time to reflect upon it, he would surely allow her to feel the full brunt of his irritation at being saddled with such a pariah as herself.

  So what to do? Here it was at last, the opportunity she had been waiting for—hoping for, praying for—the chance to prove herself in CID once and for all. It was the chance to make up for the arguments, the slips of the tongue, the impetuous decisions, the foolish mistakes of the past ten years.

  “There’s a lot you might learn from working with Lynley.” Webberly’s words returned to her, and she knotted her brow. What could she possibly learn from Lynley? The right wine to order with dinner, a few dance steps, how to dazzle a roomful of people with engaging conversation? What could she learn from Lynley?

  Nothing, of course. But she knew too well that he represented her only chance of being reassigned to CID. So, as she stood on his fine doorstep, she considered thoughtfully her best approach to getting along with the man.

  It would have to be complete cooperation, she decided. She would offer no suggestions, would agree with every thought he had, with every statement he made.

  Survive, she told herself, and turned and pressed the bell.

  She had been expecting a buxom, uniformed, pert little maid to answer her ring, so she was surprised. For Lynley himself opened the door, a piece of toast in one hand, slippers on his feet, and his reading spectacles perched on the end of his aristocratic nose.

  “Ah, Havers,” he said, looking over them at her, “you’re early. Excellent.”

  He led the way to the back of the house and into an airy morning room, fresh with white wainscoting, pale green walls, and an unusually restrained Adams ceiling. French doors at one end were undraped to allow a view of a late-blooming garden, and breakfast was laid out in silver serving dishes along an ornate walnut sideboard. The room smelled invitingly of warm bread and bacon, and in answer to the odour, Barbara felt her stomach rumble hollowly. She pressed her arm against it and tried not to think of her own morning’s fare of a single overboiled egg and toast. The dining table was laid for two, a number that momentarily surprised Barbara until she remembered Lynley’s evening rendezvous with Lady Helen Clyde. Her ladyship was no doubt at this moment still in his bed, unused to rising before half past ten.

  “Do help yourself.” Lynley motioned absently towards the sideboard with his fork and gathered up a few sheets of the police report that lay in haphazard fashion among the china. “There isn’t a person I know who can’t think better while eating. But avoid the kippers. They seem a bit off.”

  “No, thank you,” she replied politely. “I’ve eaten, sir.”

  “Not even a sausage? They, at least, are remarkably good. Do you find that the butchers are finally having a whack at putting more pork than meal into sausages these days? It’s refreshing, to say the least. Nearly five decades after World War II and we’re finally coming off rationing.” He picked up a teapot. Like everything else on the table, it was antique bone china, no doubt part of the man’s family history. “What about something to drink? I have to warn you, I’m addicted to Lapsang Souchong tea. Helen claims that it tastes like dirty socks.”

  “I…I could do with a cuppa. Thank you, sir.”

  “Good,” he declared. “Have some and tell me what you think.”

  She was adding a lump of sugar to the brew when the front bell rang again. Footsteps came running up a stairway in the back. “I’ll get it my lord,” a woman’s voice called. It was a Cornish accent. “Sorry about the last time. The baby and all.”

  “It’s the croup, Nancy,” Lynley murmured to himself. “Take the poor child to the doctor.”

  The sound of a woman’s voice floated down the hall. “Breakfast?” A lighthearted laugh. “What a propitious arrival I’ve effected, Nancy. He’ll never believe it’s purely coincidental.” Upon her last sentence Lady Helen breezed into the room and paralysed Barbara into a moment of breath-catching, ice-sheathed despair.

  They were wearing identical suits. But while Lady Helen’s had obviously been cut by the designer himself to fit her figure, Barbara’s own was off-the-rack, a through-the-looking-glass chain store copy with rucked seams and altered hemline to prove it. Only the differing colours might possibly save her from complete humiliation, she thought. She grasped her teacup but lacked the will to lift it to her lips.

  Lady Helen paused only fractionally at the sight of the policewoman. “I’m in a mess,” she said frankly. “Thank God you’re here as well, Sergeant, for I’ve a terrible feeling it’ll take three heads to see me clear of the muddle I’ve made for myself.” That said, she deposited a large shopping bag on the nearest chair and went directly to the sideboard, where she began browsing through the covered dishes as if food alone were sufficient to see her through her dilemma.

  “Muddle?” Lynley asked. He glanced at Barbara. “How do you like the Lapsang?”

  Her lips felt stiff. “It’s very nice, sir.”

  “Not that awful tea again!” Lady Helen groaned. “Really, Tommy. You’re a man without mercy.”

  “Had I known you were coming, I’d hardly have been so remiss as to serve it twice in one week,” Lynley replied pointedly.

  Unoffended, she laughed. “Isn’t he piqued, Sergeant? From the way he talks, you’d think I was here every morning, eating him out of house and home.”

  “There is yesterday, Helen.”

  “You vicious man.” She turned her attention back to the sideboard. “These kippers smell appalling. Did Nancy bring them up in her suitcase?” She joined them at the table with a plate piled high with a gastronomic argument of eggs and mushrooms, grilled tomatoes and bacon. “What’s she doing here, by the way? Why isn’t she at Howenstow? Where’s Denton this morning?”

  Lynley sipped his tea, his eyes on the report on the table before him. “As I’ll be out of town, I’ve given Denton the next few days off,” he replied absently. “No need for him to come with me.”

  A crisp piece of bacon halted in midair. Lady Helen stared. “You’re joking, of course. Tell me you’re joking, darling.”

  “I’m perfectly capable of getting along without my valet. I’m not totally incompetent, Helen.”

  “But that’s not what I mean!” Lady Helen drank a mouthful of the Lapsang Souchong, grimaced at the taste, and set down the cup. “It’s Caroline. She’s gone off on holiday for this entire week. You don’t think…Tommy, if she’s run off with Denton, I’ll be absolutely lost. No”—this as he was about to speak—“I know what you’re going to say. They have every right to their personal lives. I agree completely. But we simply mu
st come to some sort of compromise over this—you and I—because if they get married and live with you—”

  “Then you and I shall get married as well,” Lynley replied placidly. “And we’ll be as happy as hedgehogs, the four of us.”

  “You think it’s amusing, don’t you? But just look at me. One morning without Caroline in the flat and I’m a complete disaster. Surely you don’t think this is an ensemble that she would approve of?”

  Lynley regarded the ensemble in question. Barbara didn’t need to do so. The vision of Lady Helen was branded into her mind: a smartly tailored burgundy suit, silk blouse, and a mauve scarf that cascaded down to a trim waist.

  “What’s wrong with it?” Lynley asked. “It looks fine to me. In fact, considering the hour”—he glanced at his pocket watch—“I’d say you’re almost too sartorially splendid.”

  Lady Helen turned to Barbara in exasperation. “Isn’t that every bit just like a man, Sergeant? I end up this morning looking like an overripe strawberry and he murmurs ‘looks fine to me’ and buries his nose in a murder file.”

  “Far better that than assist you with your clothing for the next few days.” Lynley nodded at the ignored shopping bag that had toppled over and now spilled a few assorted pieces of material onto the floor. “Is that why you’ve come?”

  Lady Helen pulled the bag towards her. “I only wish it were that simple,” she sighed. “But it’s worse by far than the Denton-Caroline affair—we’ve not finished with that, by the way—and I’m at a total loss. I’ve mixed up Simon’s bullet holes.”

  Barbara was beginning to feel as if she’d walked into something designed by Wilde. Surely at any moment Lane would enter stage left with the cucumber sandwiches.

  “Simon’s bullet holes?” Lynley, more accustomed to Lady Helen’s pirouettes of thought, was patient.

  “You know. We were working on the patterns of blood splattering based on trajectory, angle, and calibre. You remember that, don’t you?”