A Place of Hiding (Inspector Lynley, #12)(93)

“Legal battle over what?”

“The terms of my former husband’s will.”

A glint in his eye indicated heightened interest. Margaret saw this and realised compromise was something that might work: settling on a lesser sum to avoid having to spend it all on solicitors—or whatever they called them over here—who would hash things out in court for years as if members of the Jarndyce clan had come calling. She said, “I’m not going to lie to you, Mr. Moullin. Your daughter’s been left a considerable fortune in my former husband’s will. My son—

Guy’s oldest child and his only male heir, as you may know—has been left far less. I’m sure you’ll agree there’s a gross inequity here. So I’d like to set it right without legal recourse.”

Margaret hadn’t thought in advance about what the man’s reaction might be to learning about his daughter’s inheritance. In fact, she hadn’t much cared what his reaction would be. All she’d thought of was sorting this situation out to Adrian’s benefit in any way she could. A person of reason, she’d decided, would see things her way when she laid them out in terms that were tinged with allusions to future litigation. Henry Moullin said nothing at first. He turned from her. He went back to his digging, but his breathing had altered. It was harsh and his pace was faster than it had been before. He jumped on the shovel and drove it into the ground. Once, twice, three times. As he did so, the back of his neck changed from unsoaped leather to so deep a red that Margaret feared he might have a seizure on the spot. Then he said, “My daughter, God damn it,” and stopped his digging. He seized the bucket of pellets. He hurled them into the second trench with no regard for how they spilled up and over its sides. He said, “Does he think he can...Not for a single God damn moment...” And before Margaret could say another word, before she could sympathise, however factitiously, with his obvious distress over Guy’s intrusion into his ability to support his own child, Henry Moullin grabbed up the shovel again. This time, though, he swung round on her. He raised it and advanced.

Margaret cried out, cringing, hating herself for cringing, hating him for making her cringe, and looking for a quick escape. But her only option for flight was to leap over the shell firestation, the shell chaise longue, the shell tea table, or—like a long-jumper—the shell-crusted pond. As she started to head for the chaise longue, however, Henry Moullin shoved past her and went after the shell firestation. He struck at it blindly, “God damn. ” Fragments flew everywhere. He reduced it to rubble in three brutal blows. He went on to the barn and then to the school while Margaret watched, awestruck by the power of his rage.

He said nothing more. He flung himself from one fanciful shell creation to the next: the schoolhouse, the tea table, the chairs, the pond, the garden of artificial shell flowers. Nothing seemed to spend him. He didn’t stop till he’d worked all the way back to the path that led from the drive to the front door. And there he finally threw his shovel at the yellow house itself. It narrowly missed one of the grated front windows. It fell with a clatter onto the walk.

The man himself stood panting. Some of the cuts on his hands had reopened. Fresh cuts had been made by fragments of the shells and the concrete that had held the shells together. His filthy jeans were white with dust, and when he wiped the backs of his hands along them, blood stained that white in feathery streaks.

Margaret said, “Don’t!” without even thinking. “Don’t let him do this to you, Henry Moullin.”

He stared at her, breathing hard, blinking as if this would somehow clear his head. All aggression seeped out of him. He looked round at the devastation he’d wrought in the front of his house and he said, “Bastard had two already.”

JoAnna’s girls, Margaret thought. Guy had his daughters. He’d had and lost the opportunity for fatherhood given to him. But he hadn’t been a man to take such a loss lightly, so he’d replaced all of his abandoned children with others, others much more likely to turn a blind eye to the faults so apparent to his own flesh and blood. For they were poor, and he was rich. Money bought love and devotion where it could. Margaret said, “You need to see to your hands. You’ve cut them. They’re bleeding. No, don’t wipe them—”

But he did so anyway, adding more streaks onto the dust and grime on his jeans and, when that didn’t suffice, wiping them on his dust-caked work shirt as well. He said, “We don’t want his damn money. We don’t need it. You can set fire to it in Trinity Square for all it means to us.”

Margaret thought he might have said that at first and saved them both from a frightening scene, not to mention saved the front garden as well. She said, “I’m very happy to hear that, Mr. Moullin. It’s only fair to Adrian—”

“But it’s Cyn’s money, isn’t it,” Henry Moullin went on, dashing her hopes as effectively as he’d dashed to pieces the creations of shell and cement that surrounded them. “If Cyn wants the payoff...” He trudged to the shovel where it lay on the path to the door. He picked it up. He did the same to a rake and a dustpan. Once he had them, however, he gazed round, as if unsure what he’d been doing with them in the first place. He looked at Margaret and she saw that his eyes were bloodlined with grief. He said, “He comes here. I go there. We work side by side for years. And it’s: You’re a real artist, Henry. You aren’t meant to do greenhouse work all your life. It’s: Break out and break away from it, man. I believe in you. I’ll help you a bit. Let me take you on. Nothing ventured, nothing ever God damn gained. And I believed him, see. I wanted it. More than this life here. For my girls, I wanted it, yes, for my girls. But for me as well. Where’s the sin in that?”