A Place of Hiding (Inspector Lynley, #12)(137)

Stop it! Those documents are fragile!” Which asked the question in the mind of anyone reasonable, of course, of what they were doing crammed into the filing cabinet higgledy-piggledy. But this was not the moment for worrying about that.

As Frank plunged across the room, Graham looked up. “It’s time, boy,” he said. “I’ve said it and said it. You know what we’ve got to do.”

“Are you mad?” Frank demanded. “Get out of that stuff!” He took his father’s arm and tried to ease him a step backwards. His father jerked away. “No! Those men’re owed. There’re debts to be paid and I mean to pay them. I survived, Frank. Three of them dead and me still alive. All these years later when they could have been. Granddads, Frank. Great-granddads by now. But all of that come to nothing because of a God damn quisling who needs to face the music. You got that, son? Time for people to pay.”

He fought Frank like a teenager being disciplined, but without a teenager’s youthful agility. His frailty made Frank reluctant to get rough with him. At the same time, however, it served the purpose of making the effort to control him so much more difficult.

The redhead said, “I think he believes we’re journalists. We did try to tell him...We’ve actually come to talk to you.”

“Just get out,” Frank said over his shoulder to her, and he tempered the order with “For a minute. Please.”

River and the redhead left the cottage. Frank waited till they were safely outside. Then he pulled his father away from the filing cabinet and slammed the drawer home, saying, “You God damn fool,” between his teeth.

This curse got Graham’s attention. Frank rarely swore, and never at his father. His devotion to the man, the passions they shared, the history that bound them, and the lifetime they’d spent together had always obviated any inclination he might have had towards either anger or impatience when it came to his father’s stubborn will. But this circumstance constituted the absolute limit of what Frank was willing to endure. A dam burst inside him—despite having been so meticulously constructed in the last two months—and he let forth a stream of invective that he hadn’t known was part of his vocabulary.

Graham shrank back from the sound of it. His shoulders fell, his arms dropped to his sides, and behind his thick spectacles, his vague eyes filled with frustrated and frightened tears.

“I meant...” Hi s stubbled chin dimpled. “I meant to do good.”

Frank hardened his heart. “Listen to me, Dad,” he said. “Those two are not journalists. Do you understand me? They are not journalists. That man...He’s...” God. How to explain? And what would be the point of explaining? “And the woman...” He didn’t even know who she was. He thought he’d seen her at Guy’s funeral, but as to what she was doing at the water mill...and with the River woman’s brother...He needed to have the answer to that question at once.

Graham was watching him in utter confusion. “They said...They’ve come to...” And then dismissing this entire line of thinking, he grabbed Frank’s shoulder and cried, “It’s time, Frank. I could die any day, I could. I’m the only one left. You see that, don’t you? Tell me you see. Tell me you know. An’ if we’re not to have our museum...” Hi s gri p was tighter than Frank would have thought possible. “Frankie, I can’t let them die in vain.”

Frank felt pierced by this remark, as if it lanced his spirit as well as his flesh. He said, “Dad, for God’s sake,” but he couldn’t finish. He pulled his father to him and hugged the old man hard. Graham let a sob escape against his son’s shoulder.

Frank wanted to cry with him but he didn’t have the tears. And even if a well of them had been stored within him, he could not have let that well overflow.

“I got to do it, Frankie,” his father whimpered. “It’s important, it is.”

“I know that,” Frank said.

“Then...” Graham stepped away from his son and wiped his cheeks on the sleeve of his tweed jacket.

Frank put his arm round his father’s shoulders and said, “We’ll talk about it later, Dad. We’ll find a way.” He urged him towards the door and, the “journalists” being gone from his sight, Graham cooperated as if they were completely forgotten as, indeed, they probably were to him. Frank took him back to their own cottage where the door still stood open. He assisted his father inside and to his chair.

Graham leaned fully against him as Frank turned him towards the chair’s comfortable seat. His head drooped as if it had grown too heavy, and his spectacles slid to the end of his nose. “Feeling a bit queer, lad,” he said in a murmur. “P’rhaps best to have a bit of a kip.”

“You’ve overdone it,” Frank told his father. “I mustn’t leave you alone any more.”

“ ’M not a dirty-arsed infant, Frank.”

“But you get up to no good if I’m not here to watch you. You’re as stubborn as gum on a shoe sole, Dad.”

Graham smiled at the image, and Frank handed him the remote for the television. “Can you keep yourself out of trouble for five minutes?” Frank asked his father kindly. “I want to see what’s what out there.” He indicated the sitting room window, and hence the out-of-doors, with a tilt of his head.