A Suitable Vengeance (Inspector Lynley, #4)(117)

He hadn’t come down for dinner. Deborah and her father had finally taken their meal alone after nine o’clock in the dining room. Dover sole, asparagus, new potatoes, green salad. A glass of wine with the food. A cup of coffee afterwards. They didn’t speak. But every few minutes, Deborah caught her father glancing her way.

A division had come into their relationship since her return from America. Where once they had spoken freely to each other, with great affection and trust, now they were wary. Entire subjects were taboo. She wanted it that way. She had been in such a rush to move from the Chelsea house in the first place to avoid a sharing of confidences with her father. For in the long run, he knew her better than anyone. And he was the most likely person to push back through the present to examine the past. He had, after all, the most at stake. He loved them both.

She pushed back her chair and began gathering their plates. Cotter stood as well. “Glad to have you here tonight, Deb,” he said. “Old times, seems like. The three of us.”

“The two of us.” She smiled in what she hoped would be affectionate and dismissive at once. “Simon didn’t come to dinner.”

“Three of us in the house, I meant,” Cotter said. He handed her the tray from the sideboard. She stacked the plates on it. “Works too much, does Mr. St. James. I worry the man’ll wear ’imself down to nothing.”

Cleverly, he’d moved to stand near the door. She couldn’t escape without making obvious her desire to do so. And surely, her father would pounce upon that. So she cooperated by saying, “He is thinner, Dad, isn’t he? I can see that.”

“That ’e is.” And then adroitly he took the opening. “These last three years didn’t go easy on Mr. St. James, Deb. You think they did, don’t you? But you’ve got it wrong.”

“Well, of course, there were changes in all of our lives, weren’t there? I expect he hadn’t thought much about my running round the house until I wasn’t here to do it any longer. But he got used to it in time. Anyone can see—”

“You know, luv,” her father interrupted, “you’ve never in your life been one to talk false to yourself. I’m sorry to see you start doing it now.”

“Talk false? Don’t be ridiculous. Why would I do that?”

“You know the answer. Way I see it, Deb, you and Mr. St. James both know the answer more’n quite well. All it takes is one o’ you to be brave enough to say it and the other brave enough to stop living a lie.”

He put their wine glasses on the tray and took it from her hands. She had inherited her mother’s height, Deborah knew, but she’d forgotten how that only made it easier for her father to look directly into her eyes. He did so now. The effect was disconcerting. It drew a confidence from her when she wanted to avoid giving it.

“I know how you want it to be,” she said. “But it can’t be that way, Dad. You need to accept it. People change. They grow up. They grow apart. Distance does things to them. Time makes their importance to each other fade away.”

“Sometimes,” he said.

“This time.” She saw him blink rapidly at the firmness of her voice. She tried to soften the blow. “I was just a little girl. He was like my brother.”

“He was that.” Cotter moved to one side to let her pass.

She felt bereft by his reaction. She wanted nothing so much as his understanding but didn’t know how to explain the situation in any way that would not destroy the dearest of his dreams. “Dad, you must see that it’s different with Tommy. I’m not a little girl to him. I never was. But to Simon, I’ve always been…I’ll always be…”

Cotter’s smile was gentle. “You’ve no need to convince me, Deb. No need.” He straightened his shoulders. His tone became brisk. “At least we need to get some food in the man. Will you take a tray up? He’s still in the lab.”

It was the least she could do. She followed him down the stairs to the kitchen and watched him put together a tray of cheese, cold meats, fresh bread, and fruit, which she carried up to the lab where St. James was sitting at one of the worktables, gazing at a set of photographed bullets. He held a pencil, but it lay unused between his fingers.

He’d turned on several lights, high intensity lamps scattered here and there throughout the sprawling room. They created small pools of illumination within great caverns of shadow. In one of these, his face was largely screened by the darkness.

“Dad wants you to eat something,” Deborah said from the doorway. She entered the room and set the tray on the table. “Still working?”

He wasn’t. She doubted that he’d got a single thing done in all these past hours he’d spent in the lab. There was a report of some sort lying next to one of the photographs, but its front page didn’t bear even a crease from having been folded back. And although a pad of paper lay beneath the pencil he held, he’d written nothing upon it. So all of this was rote behaviour on his part, a falling back on his work as an act of avoidance.

It all involved Sidney. Deborah had seen that much in his face when Lady Helen told him she hadn’t been able to find his sister. She had seen it again when he had returned to her flat and placed call after call, trying to locate Sidney himself. Everything he had done from that moment—his journey to Islington-London, his discussion with Tommy about Mick Cambrey’s death, his creation of a scenario to fit the facts of the crime, his need to get back to work in the lab—all of this was diversion and distraction to escape the trouble that had Sidney at its core. Deborah wondered what St. James would do, what he would allow himself to feel, if someone had hurt his sister. Once again, she found herself wanting to help him in some way, giving him a peace of mind that appeared to elude him.