Just One Evil Act il-18

by Elizabeth George

  She said, “Of course. And what about you, Thomas? It’s late and if you’d rather—”

  “I’d rather spend an hour or so with you,” he said. “Sloane Square it is, Charlie. You’re sure about the walk?”

  “Brilliant night for it,” Denton said. He said nothing more—thank God, Lynley thought—till they reached Sloane Square, where Lynley dropped him in front of Peter Jones. Then it was, “Cheerio, then,” to which Lynley rolled his eyes. He reckoned he was lucky Denton hadn’t added “Pip-pip” to his farewell. He was definitely going to have to speak to him. The Voice was bad enough. The vocabulary was worse.

  “He’s rather sweet,” Daidre said as Denton crossed over into the square and made for the Venus fountain in its centre. From there it was a short stroll to Lynley’s home in Eaton Terrace. Denton seemed to bounce as he walked. He was, Lynley reckoned, entertained by his own performance.

  “Sweet wouldn’t quite be my word of choice,” Lynley said to Daidre. “He’s a lodger with me, actually. It’s a favour to his brother.”

  Their own destination wasn’t far from Sloane Square. A wine bar on Wilbraham Place stood three doors away from a pricey boutique on the corner. The only table available was one by the door, which wasn’t what he would have wished for considering the cold, but it would have to do.

  They ordered wine. Something to eat? Lynley offered Daidre. She demurred. He said he would do likewise. There was, he told her, something to be said for the staying power of nachos and hot dogs.

  She laughed and fingered the stem of a single rose that was vased on the table. She had the hands one would expect of a doctor, he thought. Her nails were clipped short, to the end of her fingers, and her fingers were strong-looking and not at all slender. He knew what she would call them. Peasant hands, she would say. Or gypsy hands. Or tin-streamer hands. But not the hands one would expect of an aristo, which she most definitely was not.

  Suddenly it seemed there was nothing to say after all the time that had passed since last they’d met. He looked at her. She looked at him. He said, “Well,” and then he thought what an idiot he was. He had wanted to see her again and here she was and the only thing he could think of was to tell her that he never could quite make out if her eyes were hazel or brown or green. His own were brown, very dark brown at complete contrast to his hair, which was blond in the height of summer but which now, in mid-autumn, was washed-out brown.

  She smiled at him and said, “You’re looking quite well, Thomas. Very different from the night you and I met.”

  How true that was, he realised. For the night they’d met was the night he’d broken into her cottage, the only structure on Polcare Cove in Cornwall where an eighteen-year-old cliff climber had fallen to his death. Lynley had been looking for a phone. Daidre had been arriving for a few days’ respite from her job. He remembered her outrage at finding him there inside her cottage. He remembered how quickly that outrage had changed to concern for him from something she had read upon his face.

  He said, “I am well. Good days and bad days, of course. But most of them are good now.”

  “I’m glad of it,” she said.

  They fell into silence again. There were things that could have been said. Such as, “And you, Daidre? And what about your parents?” But he couldn’t say them, for she had two sets of parents and it would be cruel to force her to talk about one of them. He’d never met her adoptive parents. Her natural parents, on the other hand, he’d seen: at their ramshackle caravan by a stream in Cornwall. Her mother had been dying but hoping for a miracle. She may have passed at this point, but he knew better than to ask.

  She said suddenly, “So how long have you been back?”

  “At work?” he said. “Since the summer.”

  “And how do you find it?”

  “Difficult at first,” he replied. “But of course, it would be.”

  “Of course,” she said.

  Because of Helen went unsaid between them. Helen his wife, a victim of murder, and her husband, a detective employed by the Met. The facts of Helen didn’t bear thinking about, much less commenting upon. Daidre wouldn’t go near that topic of conversation. Nor would he.

  He said, “And yours?”

  She frowned, obviously not knowing what he was referring to. Then she said, “Oh! My job. It’s quite fine. We have two of our female gorillas pregnant and a third not, so we’re watching that. We’re hoping it won’t cause a problem.”

  “Would it? Normally?”

  “The third one lost a baby. Failure to thrive. So things could develop because of that.”

  “Sounds sad,” he said. “Failure to thrive.”

  “It is, rather.”

  They were silent again. He finally said, “Your name was on the handbill. Your skating name. I saw it. Have you skated in London prior to this?”

  “I have,” she said.

  “I see.” He twirled his wineglass and watched the wine. “I do wish you’d phoned me. You have my card still, don’t you?”

  “I do,” she told him, “and I could have phoned but . . . It’s just that it felt . . .”

  “Oh, I know how it felt,” he said. “Same as before, I daresay.”

  She gazed at him. “My sort don’t say ‘I daresay,’ you see.”

  “Ah,” he said.

  She took a sip of wine. She looked at the glass and not at him. He thought of how different she was, how completely different to Helen. Daidre hadn’t Helen’s insouciant wit and carefree nature. But there was something compelling about her. Perhaps, he thought, it was everything that she kept hidden from people.

  He said, “Daidre,” as she said, “Thomas.”

  He let her go first. “Perhaps you might drive me to my hotel?” she said.

  BAYSWATER

  LONDON

  Lynley wasn’t stupid. He knew that driving her to her hotel meant exactly that. It was one of the things he liked about Daidre Trahair. She said exactly what she meant.

  She directed him to Sussex Gardens, which lay to the north of Hyde Park in the midst of Bayswater. It was a busy thoroughfare, heavily trafficked both day and night, lined with hotels differentiated one from the other only by their names. These were displayed on the hideous plastic signs that had become so prevalent all over London. Cheap and lit from within, they were a depressing statement about the decline of individual neighbourhoods. These particular signs identified the sort of hotels that dwelled in the land between essentially all right and utterly horrible, with ubiquitous dingy white sheer curtains at the windows and ill-lit entries with brass fixtures in need of polishing. When Lynley pulled the Healey Elliott up to Daidre’s hotel—which was called the Holly—he reckoned he knew which end of the spectrum between all right and horrible the place actually lay.

  He cleared his throat.

  She said, “Not exactly up to your standards, I expect. But it’s a bed, it’s only for the night, there’s an en suite bathroom, and the expense for the team is minimal. So . . . you know.”

  He turned to look at her. She was backlit from a streetlamp near the car, and there was a nimbus of light round her hair, putting him in mind of Renaissance paintings of martyred saints. Only the palm leaf was missing from her hand. He said, “I rather hate to leave you here, Daidre.”

  “It’s a bit grim, but I’ll survive. Believe me, this is far better than the last place we stayed. An entire cut above, it is.”

  “That’s not actually what I meant,” he said. “At least not altogether.”

  “I suppose I knew that.”

  “What time do you leave in the morning?”

  “Half past eight. Although we never quite manage to get off on time. Heavy partying the night before. I’m probably the first one back.”

  “I’ve a spare room in my house,” he told her. “Why not sleep there? You could have breakfast with me, and I’d have you back here in time to ride with your teammates to Bristol.”

  “Thomas . . .”

  “Charlie does the
breakfasts, by the way. He’s an exceptional cook.”

  She let this one rest there for a minute before she said, “He’s your man, isn’t he?”

  “What on earth do you mean?”

  “Thomas . . .”

  He looked away. On the pavement a short distance from them, a girl and boy began to have an argument. They’d been holding hands, but she tossed his away like the wrapper from a takeaway burger.

  Daidre said, “No one says deucedly any longer. At least not this side of a costume drama.”

  Lynley sighed. “He does get carried away.”

  “So is he your man?”

  “Oh no. He’s definitely his own man. I’ve been trying to rein him in for years, but he enjoys acting the role of servant. I think he believes it’s extraordinarily good training. He’s probably right.”

  “So he’s not a servant?”

  “Lord no. I mean, yes and no. He’s an actor, or at least he would be if he had things his way. In the meantime, he works for me. I’ve no trouble with him going to auditions. He has no trouble with my failing to show up for a dinner he’s slaved over for hours in the afternoon.”

  “Sounds like you fit hand in glove.”

  “More like foot in sock. Or perhaps sockless foot in shoe.” Lynley looked away from the arguing couple who were now shaking their mobile phones at each other. He turned to Daidre. “So he’ll be there in the house, Daidre. He’ll act as chaperone. And, as I said, we’d have a chance to talk over breakfast. And during the ride back here. Although, of course, I could pop you into a taxi should you prefer that.”

  “Why?”

  “A taxi?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “It’s just that . . . things seem unfinished between us. Or perhaps unsettled. Or merely uneasy. Frankly, I’m not sure what it is, but I expect you feel it as much as I do.”

  She seemed to think about this for a moment, and from her silence Lynley took hope. But then she shook her head slowly and put her hand on the door handle. “I don’t think so,” she said. “And besides . . .”

  “Besides?”

  “Water off a duck’s back. That’s how I’d put it, Thomas. But I’m not a duck and things don’t work that way for me.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You do,” she said. “You know that you do.” She leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. “I won’t lie, though. It was completely lovely to see you again. Thank you. I hope you enjoyed the match.”

  Before he could reply, she got out of the car. She hurried into the hotel. She did not look back.

  BAYSWATER

  LONDON

  He was still sitting there in front of the hotel in his car when his mobile rang. He was still feeling the pressure of her lips against his cheek and the sudden warmth of her hand on his arm. So deep was he into his thoughts that the mobile’s ringing startled him. He realised at its sound that he’d not phoned Barbara Havers back as he’d said he would. He glanced at his watch.

  It was one a.m. Couldn’t be Havers, he thought. And in the way that the mind will go spontaneously from one thought to another, in the time it took to fish the mobile from his pocket, he thought of his mother, he thought of his brother, he thought of his sister, he thought of emergencies and how they generally did occur in the middle of the night because no one made a friendly call at this hour.

  By the time he had the mobile out, he’d decided it had to be a disaster in Cornwall, where his family home was, a heretofore unknown Mrs. Danvers in their employ having set the place alight. But then he saw it was Havers ringing again. He said into the phone hastily, “Barbara. I am so sorry.”

  “Bloody hell,” she cried. “Why didn’t you ring back? I’ve been sitting here. And he’s alone over there. And I don’t know what to do or what to tell him because the worst of it is that there’s sod all anyone can do to help and I know it and I lied to him and said we’d do something and I need your help. Because there has to be something—”

  “Barbara.” She sounded completely undone. It was so unlike her to babble like this that Lynley knew something was badly wrong. “Barbara. Slow down. What’s happened?”

  The story she told came out in disjointed pieces. Lynley was able to pick up very few details because she was speaking so fast. Her voice was odd. She’d either been weeping—which hardly seemed likely—or she’d been drinking. The latter made little sense, however, considering the urgency of the story she had to tell. Lynley put together what he could, just the salient details:

  The daughter of her neighbour and friend Taymullah Azhar was missing. Azhar, a science professor at University College London, had come home from work to find the family flat stripped of nearly all possessions belonging to his nine-year-old daughter as well as to her mother. Only the child’s school uniform remained, along with a stuffed animal and her laptop, all of this lying on her bed.

  “Everything else is gone,” Havers said. “I found Azhar sitting on my front step when I got home. She’d rung me, too, Angelina had done, sometime during the day. There was a message on my phone. Could I look in on him this evening? she’d asked me. ‘Hari’s going to be upset,’ she said. Oh yes, too right. Except he’s not upset. He’s destroyed. He’s wrecked, I don’t know what to do or to say, and Angelina even made Hadiyyah leave that giraffe behind and we both know why because it meant a time when he’d taken her to the seaside and he’d won it for her and when someone took it off her on the pleasure pier—”

  “Barbara.” Lynley spoke firmly. “Barbara.”

  She breathed in raggedly. “Sir?”

  “I’m on my way.”

  CHALK FARM

  LONDON

  Barbara Havers lived in north London, not far from Camden Lock Market. At one in the morning, getting there was merely a matter of knowing the route, as there was virtually no traffic. She lived in Eton Villas, where parking one’s car depended upon very good luck. There was none of that at an hour when the residents of the area were all tucked up into their beds, though, so Lynley made do with blocking the driveway.

  Barbara’s digs sat behind a conversion, a yellow Edwardian villa done into flats at some point during the late twentieth century. She herself occupied a structure behind it, a wood-framed building that had once done duty as God only knew what. It had a tiny fireplace, which suggested it had always been used as some sort of living space, but its size suggested that only a single occupant had ever lived there, and one needing very little room.

  Lynley cast a glance at the ground-floor flat inside the conversion as he made his way along the paved path towards the back of the villa. This was, he knew, the home occupied by Barbara’s friend Taymullah Azhar, and the lights within it were still blazing out onto the terrace in front of the flat’s French windows. He assumed from his conversation with Barbara that she’d been inside her own digs when he’d spoken to her, though, and when he got behind the villa, he saw the lights were on inside her bungalow as well.

  He knocked quietly. He heard a chair scraping against the floor. The door swung open.

  He was unprepared for the sight of her. He said, “God in heaven. What have you done?”

  He thought in terms of ancient rites of mourning in which women chopped off their hair and poured ashes upon the stubble that remained. She’d done the first, but she’d skipped the second. There were, however, ashes aplenty on the small table in what went for the kitchen. She’d sat there for hours, it seemed to Lynley, and in a glass dish that had served as her ashtray, the remains of at least twenty cigarettes lay crushed, spilling burnt offerings everywhere.

  Barbara looked ravaged by emotion. She smelled like the inside of a fireplace. She was wearing an ancient chenille dressing gown in a hideous shade of mushy-peas green, and her sockless feet were tucked into her red high-top trainers.

  She said, “I left him over there. I said I’d be back but I haven’t been able to. I didn’t know what to tell him. I thought if you came . . . Why didn’t you ring me? Couldn’
t you tell . . . Bloody hell, sir, where the hell . . . Why didn’t you . . . ?”

  “I’m so sorry,” he said. “I couldn’t hear you on my mobile. I was . . . It doesn’t matter. Tell me what happened.”

  Lynley took her arm and guided her to the table. He took away the glass dish of cigarette dog ends as well as an unopened packet of Players and a box of kitchen matches. He put all of this on the worktop of her kitchen area, where he also set the kettle to boil. He rustled in a cupboard and came up with two bags of PG Tips as well as some artificial sweetener, and he excavated through a sink filled with unwashed crockery till he discovered two mugs. He washed them, dried them, and went to the small refrigerator. Its contents were as appalling as he’d expected they would be, heavily given to takeaway food cartons and to-be-heated ready-made meals, but among all of this he found a pint of milk. He brought it out as the kettle clicked off.

  Throughout everything, Havers was silent. This was completely uncharacteristic of her. In all the time he’d known the detective sergeant, she’d never been without a comment to toss in his direction, particularly in a situation like this one in which he was not only making tea but actually giving some thought to toast as well. It rather unnerved him, this silence of hers.

  He brought the tea to the table. He placed a mug in front of her. There was another sitting near to where the cigarettes had been, and he removed this. It was cold, a skin of someone’s indifference to it floating on its surface.

  Havers said, “That was his. I did the same thing. What is it about tea and our bloody society?”

  “It’s something to do,” Lynley told her.

  “When in doubt, make tea,” she said. “I could do with a whiskey. Or gin. Gin would be nice.”

  “Have you any?”

  “’Course not. I don’t want to be one of those old ladies who sip gin from five o’clock in the afternoon till they’re comatose.”

  “You’re not an old lady.”

  “Believe me, it’s out there.”

  Lynley smiled. Her remark was a slight improvement. He pulled the other chair out from the table and joined her. “Tell me.”