A Place of Hiding (Inspector Lynley, #12)(23)

“You still can be, even if you have a cup of tea. Or coffee if you like. And something to eat.”

“No. You’ve done enough already. Letting me stay here last night?

Inviting me to stay? The soup and the bath and everything? You bailed me out.”

“I’m glad of it. But I’m not going to hear of your going just now. There’s no point. I’ll drive you over there myself in plenty of time to be first in line if that’s what you want.”

“I don’t want you to—”

“You don’t have to want me to anything,” Deborah said firmly. “I’m not offering. I’m insisting. So leave the jacket there and come with me.”

Cherokee appeared to think this over for a moment: He looked at the door where its three window panes allowed the light to come through. Both of them could hear the persistent rain, and as if to emphasise the unpleasantness he would face if he ventured out, a gust of wind shot like a prize fighter’s blow from the Thames and cracked loudly within the branches of the sycamore just along the street.

He said reluctantly, “All right. Thanks.”

Deborah led him downstairs to the kitchen. Peach looked up from her basket and growled. Alaska, who’d taken up his normal daytime position on the window sill, glanced over, blinked, and went back to his perusal of the patterns the rain was making on the panes.

Deborah said, “Mind your manners,” to the dog and established Cherokee at the table, where he studied the scars that knife marks had made upon the wood and the burnt rings left from the assault of too-hot pans upon it. Deborah once again set the electric kettle to work and took a teapot from the ancient dresser. She said, “I’m making you a meal as well. When did you last have a real meal?” She glanced over at him. “I expect not yesterday.”

“There was the soup.”

Deborah snorted her disapproval. “You can’t help China if you fall apart.” She went to the fridge for eggs and bacon; she took tomatoes from their basket near the sink and mushrooms from the dark corner near the outside door, where her father kept a large paper sack for them, hanging from a hook among the household’s macs.

Cherokee got up and walked over to the window above the sink, where he extended his hand to Alaska. The cat sniffed his fingers and, head lowered regally, allowed the man to scratch behind his ears. Deborah glanced over to see Cherokee gazing round the kitchen as if absorbing every one of its details. She followed his gaze to register what she took for granted: from the dried herbs that her father kept hanging in neatly arranged bunches to the copper-bottomed pots and pans that lined the wall within reach above the hob, from the old worn tiles on the floor to the dresser that held everything from serving platters to photographs of Simon’s nieces and nephews.

“This is a cool house, Debs,” Cherokee murmured.

To Deborah, it was just the house in which she’d lived from childhood, first as the motherless daughter of Simon’s indispensable right-hand man, then however briefly as Simon’s lover before becoming Simon’s wife. She knew its draughts, its plumbing problems, and its exasperating lack of electrical outlets. To her, it was simply home. She said, “It’s old and draughty and it’s mostly maddening.”

“Yeah? It looks like a mansion to me.”

“Does it?” She forked nine rashers of bacon into a pan and set them cooking beneath the grill. “It actually belongs to Simon’s whole family. It was quite a disaster when he took it over. Mice in the walls and foxes in the kitchen. He and Dad spent nearly two years making it livable. I suppose his brothers or his sister could move in with us now if they wanted to since it’s everyone’s house and not just ours. But they wouldn’t do that. They know he and Dad did all the work.”

“Simon has brothers and sisters, then,” Cherokee remarked.

“Two brothers in Southampton...where the family business is...shipping...His sister’s in London, though. She used to be a model but now she’s campaigning to be an interviewer of obscure celebrities on an even more obscure cable channel that no one watches.” Deborah grinned.

“Quite the character, is Sidney. That’s Simon’s sister. She drives her mum mad because she won’t settle down. She’s had dozens of lovers. We’ve met one after another at holidays and each one is always the man of her dreams at last at last.”

“Lucky,” Cherokee said, “to have family like that.”

A wistfulness in his voice prompted Deborah to turn from the cooker.

“Would you like to ring yours?” she asked. “Your mum, I mean. You can use the phone on the dresser there. Or the one in the study if you’d like privacy. It’s...” She looked at the wall clock and did the maths. “It’s only ten-fifteen last night in California.”

“I can’t do that.” Cherokee returned to the table and dropped into a chair. “I promised China.”

“But she does have the right—”

“China and Mom?” Cherokee cut in. “They don’t...Well, Mom was never much of a mom, not like other moms, and China doesn’t want her to know about this. I think it’s because...you know...other moms would catch the next plane out, but our mom? No way. There might be an endangered species to save. So why tell her in the first place? At least, that’s what China’s thinking.”