A Place of Hiding (Inspector Lynley, #12)(75)
“No,” Kevin said. “A troubled conscience is a nasty thing. Keeps you up at night. Makes it hard to think of anything else but what you did to get it in the first place.” He stopped walking and Valerie did the same. They stood on the lawn. A sudden gust of wind from the Channel brought the salt air with it and with it as well the reminder of what had happened by the bay.
“Do you think, Val,” Kevin said when a good thirty seconds had crawled by between them with Valerie making no reply to his comment,
“that Henry’s going to wonder about that will?”
She glanced away, knowing his gaze was still on her and still attempting to draw her out. He usually could cajole her into speaking, this husband of hers, because no matter the twenty-seven years of their marriage, she loved him the way she’d done from the first, when he’d stripped the clothes from her willing body and loved that body with his own. She knew the true value of having that kind of celebration with a man in your life and the fear of losing it pulled at her to speak and ask Kevin’s pardon for what she’d done despite the promise she’d made never to do it because of the hell it might cause if she did.
But the pull of Kevin’s look upon her wasn’t enough. It drew her to the brink, but it couldn’t shoot her over into certain destruction. She remained silent, which forced him to continue. He said, “I can’t see how he won’t wonder, can you? The whole oddity of it begs for questions to be asked and answered. And if he doesn’t ask them...” Kevi n looked over in the direction of the duck ponds, where the little duck graveyard held the broken bodies of those innocent birds. He said, “Too many things mean power to a man, and when his power’s taken from him he doesn’t deal with that lightly. Because there’s no laughing it off, you see, no saying ‘Ah, it didn’t mean all that much in the first place, did it.’ Not if a man’s identified his power. And not if he’s lost it.”
Valerie started them walking again, determined not to be caught another time by the pin of her husband’s stare, fixed onto a display board like a captured butterfly, with the label female forsworn beneath her. “Do you think that’s what’s happened, Kev? Someone’s lost his power? Is that what you think this is all about?”
“I don’t know,” he replied. “Do you?”
A coy woman might have said “Why would I...?” but the last attribute Valerie possessed was the one of being coy. She knew exactly why her husband was asking her that question and she knew where it would lead them if she answered him directly: to an examination of promises given and a discussion of rationalisations made.
But beyond those things that Valerie didn’t want to have present in any conversation with her husband, there was the fact of her own feelings that she had to consider now as well. For it was no easy matter to live with the knowledge that you were probably responsible for a good man’s death. Going through the motions of day-after-day with that on your mind was trying enough. Having to cope with someone other than yourself knowing about your responsibility would make the burden of it intolerable. So there was nothing to be done save to sidestep and obfuscate. Any move she might make appeared to Valerie to be a losing one, a short journey on the long path of covenants broken and responsibilities not faced. She wanted more than anything to reverse the wheel of time. But she could not do it. So she kept walking steadily towards the cottage, where at least there was employment for both of them, something to take their minds off the chasm that fast was developing between them.
“Did you see that man talking to Miss Brouard?” Valerie asked her husband. “The man with the bad leg? She took him off upstairs. Just near the end of the reception this was. He’s no one I’ve seen round here before, so I was wondering...Could he have been her doctor? She isn’t well. You know that, Kev, don’t you? She’s tried to hide it, but now it’s getting worse. I wish she’d say something about it, though. So I could help her more. I can understand why she wouldn’t say a word while he was alive— she wouldn’t want to worry him, would she?—but now that he’s gone...We could do a lot for her, you and I, Kev. If she’d let us.”
They left the lawn and crossed a section of the drive that swung by the front of their cottage. They approached the front door, Valerie in the lead. She would have strode straight through it and hung up her coat and got on with her day, but Kevin’s next words stopped her.
“When’re you going to stop lying to me, Val?”
The words comprised just the sort of question that she would have had to answer at some other time. They implied so much about the changing nature of their relationship that in any other circumstances the only way to refute that implication would have been to give her husband what he was asking for. But in the current situation, Valerie didn’t have to do that because as Kevin spoke, the very man she’d been talking about the moment before came through the bushes that marked the path to the bay. He was accompanied by a red-haired woman. The two of them saw the Duffys and, after exchanging a quick word, they walked immediately over. The man said he was called Simon St. James and he introduced the woman, who was his wife, Deborah. They had come from London for the funeral, he explained, and he asked the Duffys if he could have a word with them both.
The most recent of the analgesics—that which her oncologist had called the “one last thing” they were going to try—no longer possessed the strength to kill the brutal pain in Ruth’s bones. The time had obviously come to bring on morphine in a very big way, but that was the physical time. The mental time, defined by the moment when she admitted defeat over her attempt to govern the way her life would end, still had not arrived. Until it had, Ruth was determined to carry on as if the disease were not running amok in her body like invading Vikings who’d lost their leader.