A Suitable Vengeance (Inspector Lynley, #4)(18)

“Yes. Cornwall. Howenstow. I think it’s time, don’t you? I know you’ve only just come back and perhaps this is rushing things. But after all, you’ve never met my mother.”

Deborah said only, “Ah. Yes.”

“Your coming to Cornwall would give your father an opportunity to meet her as well. And it’s time they met.”

She frowned at her scuffed shoes and made no reply.

“Deb, it can’t be avoided forever. I know what you’re thinking. They’re worlds apart. They’ll have nothing to say to each other. But that isn’t the case. They’ll get on. Believe me.”

“He won’t want to do this, Tommy.”

“I’ve already thought of that. And of a way to manage it. I’ve asked Simon to come along. It’s all arranged, in fact.”

He did not include in the information the details of his brief encounter with St. James and Lady Helen Clyde at the Ritz, they on their way to a business dinner and he en route to a reception at Clarence House. He also didn’t mention St. James’ ill-concealed reluctance nor Lady Helen’s quick excuse. An enormous backlog of work, she’d said, promising to keep them busy for every weekend over the next month.

Helen’s declining the invitation had been too quick to be believable, and the speed of her refusal, in combination with the effort she made not to look at St. James, told Lynley how important absence from Cornwall was to them both. Even if he had wanted to lie to himself, he couldn’t do so in the face of their behaviour. He knew what it meant. But he needed them in Cornwall for Cotter’s sake, and the mention of the older man’s possible discomfort was what won them over. For St. James would never send Cotter alone to be wretchedly enthroned as a weekend visitor to Howenstow. And Helen would never abandon St. James to what she clearly visualised as four days of unmitigated misery. So Lynley had used them. It was all for Cotter’s sake, he told himself, and refused to examine the secondary reasons he had—even more compelling than Cotter’s comfort—for arriving at Howenstow with a surfeit of companions.

Deborah was inspecting the silver letters on the Yard’s revolving sign. She said, “Simon’s to go?”

“And Helen. Sidney as well.” Lynley waited for her further reaction. When there was none other than the smallest of nods, he decided they were finally close enough to the single area of discussion which they had long avoided. It lay between them, unspoken, putting down roots of potential doubt which needed to be extirpated once and for all.

“Have you seen him, Deb?”

“Yes.” She shifted her tripod from one hand to the other. She said nothing else, leaving everything up to him.

Lynley felt in his pocket for cigarette case and lighter. He lit up before she had a chance to admonish him. Feeling weighted down by a burden he did not wish to define, he sighed.

“I want to get us through this, Deb. No, that’s not quite true, is it? We need to get through it.”

“I saw him the night I got home, Tommy. He was waiting up for me in the lab. With a homecoming present. An enlarger. He wanted me to see it. And then the next afternoon, he came to Paddington. We spoke.”

That’s all was left unsaid.

Lynley tossed his cigarette to one side, angry with himself. He wondered what it was that he really wanted Deborah to say and why he expected her to account for a relationship with another man that had spanned her entire life, and how on earth she could ever begin to do so. He disliked the belief that was eating at his confidence, a gnawing conviction that somehow Deborah’s return to London had the power to nullify every word and act of love that had passed between them in the last several years. Perhaps, hidden beneath the most troubling of his feelings, was the real reason he was determined to have St. James with them in Cornwall: to prove to the other man once and for all that Deborah was his. It was a contemptible thought.

“Tommy.”

He roused himself to find that Deborah was watching him. He wanted to touch her. He wanted to tell her how he loved the way her green eyes were flecked with bits of gold, the way her skin and hair reminded him of autumn. But all of that seemed ridiculous right now.

“I love you, Tommy. I want to be your wife.”

That, Lynley decided, didn’t seem ridiculous at all.





* * *



BLOOD SCORE





CHAPTER 4


Nancy Cambrey scuffed her feet along the gravel drive that wound from the Howenstow lodge to the great house. She sent up delicate puffs of dust like miniature brown rain clouds. It had been an unusually dry summer thus far, so a greyish patina of grime dressed the leaves of the rhododendrons that lined the roadway, and the trees arching overhead seemed not so much there to provide shade as to trap the heavy, dry air beneath their boughs. Out from under the trees the wind whipped round from Gwennap Head on its way into Mount’s Bay from the Atlantic. But where Nancy walked, the air was still as death, and it smelled of foliage burnt to cinders by the sun.

Perhaps, she thought, the heaviness pressing so uneasily upon her lungs was not really born of the air at all, but was instead a child of her dread. For she had promised herself that she would speak to Lord Asherton the first time he came on one of his rare visits to Cornwall. Now he was coming.

She ran her fingers through her hair. It felt limp, its ends brittle. In the last few months she had taken to wearing it pulled back with a piece of plain elastic at the nape of her neck, but today she had given herself a shampoo and left her hair to dry, hanging straight and simple, bluntly cut round her face and shoulders. It didn’t feel right. She knew it didn’t look right, unattractive and unflattering when once it had been a source of bashful pride.