A Place of Hiding (Inspector Lynley, #12)(104)

“Sometimes,” Cherokee said to her quietly, “right and wrong get twisted. What looks right turns out to be wrong and what looks wrong—”

“Forget it,” China interrupted. “Cherokee, forget it.”

“But it would be no big deal.”

“Forget it, I said.” China reached for Deborah’s hand and curved her fingers closed round the linen-covered ring. “You do what you have to do, Deborah.” And to her brother, “She’s not like you. It’s not as easy as that for her.”

“They’re fighting dirty. We’ve got to do the same.”

“No,” China said, and then to Deborah, “You’ve come to help me out. I’m grateful for that. You just do what you have to do.”

Deborah nodded but felt the difficulty of saying “I’m sorry.”

She couldn’t escape the sensation of having let them down. St. James wouldn’t have thought himself the kind of man who let agitation get the better of him. Since the day he’d awakened in a hospital bed—remembering nothing but a final shot of tequila that he shouldn’t have drunk—and gazed up into the face of his mother and had seen there the news he himself had confirmed not an hour later by a neurologist, he’d governed himself and his reactions with a discipline that would have done a military man proud. He’d considered himself an unshakeable survivor: The worst had happened and he had not broken on the wheel of personal disaster. He’d been maimed, left crippled, and abandoned by the woman he loved, and he’d emerged from it all with his core intact. If I can cope withthat, I can cope with anything.

So he was unprepared for the disquiet he began to feel the moment he learned that his wife had not delivered the ring to DCI Le Gallez. And he was ultimately undone by the level that disquiet reached when the minutes passed without Deborah’s return to the hotel.

He paced at first: across their room and along the small balcony outside their room. Then he flung himself into a chair for five minutes and contemplated what Deborah’s actions might mean. This only heightened his anxiety, however, so he grabbed up his coat and finally left the building altogether. He would set out after her, he decided. He crossed the street without a clear idea of what direction he needed to take, thankful only that the rain had eased, which made the going easier.

Downhill seemed good, so he started off, skirting the rock wall that ran along a bear-pit sort of garden sunk into the landscape across from the hotel. At its far end stood the island’s war memorial, and St. James had reached this when he saw his wife coming round the corner where the dignified grey fa?ade of the Royal Court House stretched the length of Rue du Manoir.

Deborah raised her hand in greeting. As she approached him, he did what he could to calm himself.

“You made it back,” she said with a smile as she came up to him.

“That’s fairly obvious,” he replied.

Her smile faded. She heard it all in his voice. She would. She’d known him for most of her life, and he’d thought he knew her. But he was fast discovering that the gap between what he thought and what was was beginning to develop the dimensions of a chasm.

“What is it?” she asked. “Simon, what’s wrong?”

He took her arm in a grip that he knew was far too tight, but he couldn’t seem to loosen it. He led her to the bear-pit garden and forcibly guided her down the steps.

“What’ve you done with that ring?” he demanded.

“Done with it? Nothing. I’ve got it right—”

“You were to take it straight to Le Gallez.”

“That’s what I’m doing. I was going there now. Simon, what on earth...?”

“Now? You were taking it there now? Where’s it been in the meantime? It’s hours since we found it.”

“You never said...Si mon, why’re you acting like this? Stop it. Let me go. You’re hurting me.” She wrenched away and stood before him, her cheeks burning colour. There was a path in the garden along its perimeter and she set off down this, although it actually went nowhere but along the wall. Rainwater pooled here blackly, reflecting a sky that was fast growing dark. Deborah strode right through it without hesitation, uncaring of the soaking she was giving her legs.

St. James followed her. It maddened him that she’d walk away from him in this manner. She seemed like another Deborah entirely, and he wasn’t about to have that. If it was to come to a chase between them, she would win, naturally. If it was to come to anything other than words and intellect between them, she would also win. That was the curse of his handicap, which left him weaker and slower than his own wife. This, too, angered him as he pictured what the two of them must look like to any watcher from the street above the sunken park: her sure stride carrying her ever farther from him, his pathetic mendicant’s plea of a hobble in pursuit. She reached the far end of the little park, the deepest end. She stood in the corner, where a pyracantha, heavy with red berries, leaned its burdened branches forward to touch the back of a wooden bench. She didn’t sit. Instead, she remained at the arm of the bench and she ripped a handful of berries from the bush and began to fling them mindlessly back into the greenery.

This angered him further, the childishness of it. He felt swept back in time to being twenty-three to her twelve, confronted with a fit of incomprehensible pre-adolescent hysteria about a hair cut she’d hated, wrestling scissors from her before she had a chance to do what she wanted to do, which was to make the hair worse, make herself look worse, punish herself for thinking a hair cut might make a difference in how she was feeling about the spots on her chin that had appeared overnight and marked her as forever changing. “Ah, she’s a handful, she is, our Deb,” her father had said. “Needs a woman’s touch,” which he never gave her. How convenient it would be, St. James thought, to blame Joseph Cotter for all of it, to decide that he and Deborah had come to this moment in their marriage because her father had remained a widower. That would make things easier, wouldn’t it. He’d have to look no further for an explanation of why Deborah had acted in such an inconceivable manner. He reached her. Foolishly, he said the first thing that came into his head. “Don’t ever run from me again, Deborah.”