The Hotel Riviera(24)

She met his eyes frankly, assessing him the way he was assessing her. “You have nice eyes,” she said. “Blue like my Tom’s, only his were more of a Nordic-blue. Kind of icy if I were truthful; to match his icy personality some said. He was never icy with me though, but then only I knew the true Tom. He was a shy man, you know, a loner, uncomfortable with his colleagues except when he was on the job. He was never one to prop up the bar with the boys after work, unless it was to talk about a case, of course. Though I don’t get the feeling you’re a shy man, Jack,” she added. “Just a bit of New England reserve, I’d guess. Anyhow, I don’t mind your sizing me up. It’s always good to know who you’re dealing with, especially in tricky situations.”

“Who exactly are you, Miss Nightingale, behind that fa?ade of the nice English lady?” Jack said with a smile, and Miss N thought that smile was the kind most women would find too seductive for their own good.

Jack asked Miss N if she’d fancy a little boat ride, then he apologized for calling her Miss N, and said he’d heard Lola call her that. “Somehow it fits,” he added. “Kinda Agatha Christie, everybody gathered in the library to find out if the butler did it.”

Miss N threw back her head, laughing delightedly. “That’s just what my Tom said. A latter-day Miss Marples, he called me. The original one, in the books, he meant. Not that he was right, of course, it’s just that I’ve always been nosy and that doesn’t hurt when you’re looking for criminals. It’s amazing how people will talk: neighbors, friends, barmen.”

“But not in Lola’s case. Seems nobody round here wants to talk, and if they know anything they’re certainly not saying. Anyhow, Miss N, what d’ya say about that sail around the harbor? It’s a bit of a walk, my dinghy’s moored all the way at the end. I wouldn’t have liked to see her tucked in with all these big boys, not quite her style.”

Miss N trusted her gut instinct with Jack Farrar: he was definitely better than he’d seemed at first sight. Of course, she’d had her doubts on the second sighting when she’d seen him hugging that sexy blonde so tightly she’d thought he might squeeze her right out of that tiny red top.

“Who’s the blonde?” she asked, with her prim Queen smile. “Is she your girlfriend?”

Jack threw her a startled look, then he groaned. “The answer to that is Sugar is an ex, though I admit that’s only of recent vintage.”

“Like ten minutes ago in Le Gorille? I must say that that certainly didn’t look like a kiss-off hug to me.”

“And what exactly do you know about kiss-off hugs?”

He was getting exasperated, and Miss N let it go, even though it was important, because if Jack Farrar were going to get close to Lola, she needed to vet him first. There was no time for any more “mistakes” in Lola’s life.

“You’ve got me there, young man,” she said. “And it’s true I don’t know much about goodbye kisses, but that’s because I never had one. Never had boyfriends, you see. Tom was my first and only.”

Just speaking of Tom conjured the two of them sitting companionably in their pretty cottage garden as they often did after supper, watching the sunset. On evenings like these, Tom would finally be at ease with himself. They would slip off their shoes and socks and wiggle their bare toes in the grass, which Tom said, quite romantically for him, somehow made him feel at one with the earth. Or at least their own small part of it. She laughed at his huge feet, size fifteen. “Proper policeman’s feet,” she teased, making him laugh too. He put on the woolly jumper she’d knitted, which he said was his favorite and that he wore to keep out that dratted north wind. “That wind will kill the tulips and one day it’ll kill me,” he said one extra-chilly spring evening.

“Don’t say that, Tom,” she cried, alarmed, unable to bear the thought of him dying even from so remote a possibility as the English spring wind. And he gave her a quick kiss on the cheek and said thanks for worrying about me, darling Mollie, but no cold wind’s ever going to carry me off—not as long as I’ve got you to knit jumpers for me and keep me warm in bed. Then he gave her the eye and said how about it, girl, gesturing to the narrow wooden stairs leading to their bedroom, smiling at her.

She swore she’d turned beet-red because she was always rather shy about things “like that.” Shy in a way that Jack Farrar and his gorgeous girlfriend would never have been, not in their entire lives.

But Tom had taught her a thing or two about sex as well as love. And knowing about sex, really understanding it as a primal urge, had helped in her detective “work” too; knowing how men felt about it and what they really thought about sex and women, and how often “love” was not even in the equation.

Sex was sex. Tom said it stood alone as the primary motivating force in murder. Nothing else touched it for a motive, not even money. And that’s what she needed to talk to Jack about.

“How about it, Miss N,” Jack said again, and she came back to the present, startled. “The boat ride around the bay?” he added.

“Oh. Oh, of course,” she said, and she smiled, a very mischievous smile, because her head was still up in the past, in bed with Tom.

“I’m not made of Wedgwood china, you know,” she said as Jack helped her too carefully into the dinghy. She hated to be thought “old” when, inside, she was still that spring chicken.