The Hotel Riviera(16)

Tom was a man who’d lived dangerously and he’d died violently, as she had predicted he would.

“Rubbish,” he’d said, dismissing her fears with a contemptuous curl of the lip as he stood in front of the mahogany cheval mirror that had been her father’s, knotting his tie—always a striped silk rep, he must have had two dozen of them, all the same style but in different colors. It was Mollie’s task each morning to select the “colors of the day,” which pleased her, made her feel in some small way she was sharing part of his life. Silly, she knew, but that was the way it was between them.

Tom had lived his life as the hard-nosed detective at Scotland Yard with a reputation for pushing the envelope into dangerous territory. And she’d had her life as the refined schoolmistress, head of a select London day school for girls where calm and decorum were the watchword and the only crimes were sneaking a smoke in the bathroom or—the worst—cheating in a test.

Her and Tom’s lives could not have been more different and, like creatures from alien planets, they met cautiously in the neutral territory of her tiny London flat, and also—when Tom the workaholic could no longer claim he had to work weekends and was actually forced into going—at her favorite place, the equally tiny cottage in the village of Blakelys.

Mostly, though, Miss Nightingale was at the cottage alone on weekends, soaking up the peace and quiet, and quite often, the drizzle as she gardened enthusiastically, spilling her spare love and emotions—those not reserved for Tom—into the heavy brown earth where she’d created a tangled beauty of a garden from the simplest of country flowers. She had sculpted daisies into topiaries; built great banks of delphiniums and hydrangeas; and scattered spring primroses under the lime trees, the true old-fashioned pale yellow primroses that came after the great clusters of daffodils, which, corny though Tom said it was, somehow always caused Mollie to quote Wordsworth:

“A host of golden daffodils,” she’d say, admiring that springtime bonanza, while huddling from the cold wind under several layers of jumpers and cardigans. She thought Wordsworth had got it exactly right. Then, in summer, came her joy of joys, the roses, especially the climbing variety, the Gloire de Dijon with its huge cabbagy blooms in palest buff tinged with yellow and apricot and with a scent that knocked her socks off on a fine summer morning. And Golden Showers, which, true to its name, shimmered over the honey-stone cottage walls with golden abandon.

“A difficult plant,” Tom had said about her Gloire de Dijon, “but like a beautiful woman, worth the extra attention.” Which had left her wondering what on earth Tom knew about beautiful women who needed extra attention.

She’d taken a long look at her husband of five years (they had found each other later in life when she was in her fifties and he a couple of years younger), contemplating what it might be like to have been young and beautiful and courted by the handsome, dangerous Tom Knight. Her Knight in Shining Armor, she’d called him when he’d finally suggested, after drinks in a pub on the Kings Road—a place to which she was unaccustomed—that perhaps their lives should be joined.

Not exactly at the hip, of course, he’d added jokingly. After all, I’ve got my life and you’ve got yours. But it seems to me, Mollie, we get along very well. We’ve known each other a few years now, and you are exactly the kind of woman I need to add ballast to my life.

And she’d smiled and flushed a rosy pink that he said matched her dress, and two months later she found herself “plighting her troth” as she liked to call it, with this world-weary man with the eyes that said he’d seen it all and then some, and an expression in his taut, lean face that said, better not mess with me, fella, I’m smarter and tougher and harder than you are.

Blakelys Manor had been her girlhood home, but all Miss Nightingale had inherited, after the tax man had taken his share, was the gardener’s old cottage, crammed now with treasures from the Blakely Nightingales’ exotic past. She and Tom had “honeymooned” in that old cottage, which was to become their “true home.” Then finally, her home. Alone.

Sighing, Miss Nightingale sat up in the comfortable bed in the Marie-Antoinette room at the Hotel Riviera, bringing her thoughts deliberately back to her plans for the following day. And what exactly were her plans? she wondered as she pushed her plump feet into pink velvet slippers and shrugged a pink cotton robe over her Marks & Spencer lavender nightie. She smiled, remembering Tom saying how she looked like a summer garden in her favorite pastels, and how later she’d worried about whether that was a compliment or not.

He was difficult to read, Tom was, or at least in the beginning he was. Later, though, he’d opened up to her. He enjoyed her simplicity, he said, and her uncomplex, unworldly approach, and that’s when he’d begun to share his “other life” as a detective with her. His real life, he called it. And of course Mollie’s own life became more exciting as she began to live vicariously through him.

It was at the cottage over after-dinner brandies in front of the fire on a bitter cold winter’s night, that she first coaxed the story of his latest case out of him.

It was a real toughie, he said worriedly, because it was a particularly gruesome murder and there was a dearth of clues. Plus it involved a child, something that incensed every cop who had to deal with such perversion.

It’s the loss of innocence I keep thinking about, Tom said to her, brandy glass clasped between his big hands, staring into the flames leaping in the grate. I can’t stop thinking about what the poor little thing must have gone through before the bastard finally killed her.