A Place of Hiding (Inspector Lynley, #12)(118)

“She’s worried about Christmas coming. This first one without Corey.”

“Rough, that is. She’s going to miss him for a long long time. Like I’d miss you, Kev.” Valerie dug a fresh dishcloth out of the linen drawer and set to wiping down the work tops with it. They didn’t need it, but she wanted to be doing something to stop the truth spilling out. Keeping occupied went hand in glove with making sure her voice, her body, and her expressions did nothing to betray her, and she wanted that: the comfort of knowing that she was safe, with her feelings guarded. “It’s trying as well, I expect, when she sees you. She looks at you, sees Corey.”

Kevin didn’t reply. She was forced to look at him. He said, “It’s the girls she’s worried over. They’re asking Father Christmas to bring their daddy back. Mary Beth’s worried what’ll happen with them when he doesn’t.”

Valerie rubbed at the work top, where a too-hot pot had burnt a black smudge into its old surface. Rubbing wouldn’t alleviate the problem, though. It had been created too long ago and should have been seen to then.

Kevin said again, “What’re the police doing here, Val?”

“Searching.”

“For?”

“They’re not saying.”

“It’s to do with...?”

“Yes. What else? They’ve taken Ruth’s pills—”

“They’re not thinking Ruth—”

“No. I don’t know. I don’t think so.” Valerie stopped her rubbing and folded the dishcloth. The spot remained, unchanged.

“Not like you to be here this time of day,” Kevin said. “Work to be done in the big house? Meals to prepare?”

“Had to stay out of the way of that lot,” she said, meaning the police.

“They ask that of you?”

“Just the way it seemed.”

“They’ll search here if they’ve searched there.” He gazed towards the window as if he could see the manor house from the kitchen, which he could not. “I wonder what they’re looking for.”

“I don’t know,” she told him again, but her throat felt tight. From the front of the cottage, a dog began to bark. The barking changed to yelping. Someone shouted. Valerie and her husband went to the sitting room, where the windows looked out onto a lawn and beyond it the drive, at the point where it circled round the bronze sculpture of the swimmers and the dolphins. There, they saw, Paul Fielder and Taboo were having a run-in with the local police in the person of a single constable, backed against a tree as the dog snapped at his trousers. Paul dropped his bicycle and began to pull the dog away. The constable advanced, red of face and loud of voice.

“I’d better see to that,” Valerie said. “I don’t want our Paul ending up in trouble.”

She grabbed her coat, which she’d left on the back of an armchair when she’d come into the cottage. She headed for the door. Kevin said nothing till her hand was on the knob, at which point he merely spoke her name.

She looked back at him: the rugged face, the work-hardened hands, the unreadable eyes. When he next spoke, she heard his question but could not bring herself to reply:

“Is there anything you want to tell me?” he asked her. She smiled at him brightly and shook her head.

Deborah sat beneath the silver sky not far from the looming statue of Victor Hugo, whose granite cloak and granite scarf billowed back forever in the wind that blew from his native France. She was alone on the gentle slope of Candie Gardens, having walked up the hill from Ann’s Place directly after leaving the hotel. She’d slept badly, far too aware of the proximity of her husband’s body, and determined not to roll next to him unconsciously during the night. This frame of mind didn’t welcome Morpheus: She rose before dawn and went out for a walk. After her angry encounter with Simon on the previous evening, she’d returned to the hotel. But there she felt like a guilt-stricken child. Furious at herself for welcoming the smallest sense of remorse into her consciousness when she knew she had done nothing wrong, she soon left again and she didn’t return till after midnight, when she could be reasonably assured that Simon would be asleep.

She’d gone to China. “Simon,” she told her, “is being completely impossible.”

“Ain’t that the definition of m-a-n.” China drew Deborah inside and they made pasta together, with China at the cooker and Deborah leaning against the sink. “Tell all,” China said affably. “Auntie is here to apply the Band-Aids.”

“That stupid ring,” Deborah said. “He’s worked himself into a state about it.” She explained the entire story as China poured a jar of tomato sauce into a pan and commenced stirring. “You’d think I’d committed a crime,” she concluded.

“It was stupid anyway,” China said when Deborah was finished. “I mean even buying it in the first place. It was an impulse thing.” She cocked her head in Deborah’s direction. “Just the kind of thing you’d never do.”

“Simon seems to feel that bringing the ring round here was impulsive enough.”

“He does?” China stared at the cooking pasta for a moment before replying matter-of-factly. “Well. I c’n see why he hasn’t been exactly desperate to meet me, then.”