Careless in Red (Inspector Lynley, #15)(172)

“And then your son died.”

“And then Jamie died.” She set her knife and fork down and folded her hands in her lap. “Jamie was a lovely boy. Oh, he had his quirks?what boy his age doesn’t?but at heart he was lovely. Lovely and loving. And very very good to his little sisters. We were all devastated by his death, but Jon couldn’t come to grips with it. I thought he would, eventually. Give it time, I told myself. But when a person’s life becomes all about the death of another and about nothing else…I had the girls to think of, you see. I had myself to think of. I couldn’t live like that.”

“Like what?”

“It was all he talked about and, as far as I could tell, it was all he thought about. It was as if Jamie’s death had invaded his brain and eaten away everything that wasn’t Jamie’s death.”

“I’ve learned he wasn’t satisfied with the investigation, so he mounted his own.”

“He must have mounted half a dozen. But it made no difference. And each time that it made no difference, he went just a bit more mad. Of course, he’d lost the business by then and we’d gone through our savings and had lost our home, and that made things worse for him because he knew he was responsible for it happening, but he couldn’t get himself to stop. I tried to tell him it would make no difference to his grief and his loss to bring someone to justice, but he thought it would. He was sure it would. Just the way people think that if the killer of their loved one is put to death, that’s somehow going to assuage their own desolation. But how can it, really? The death of a killer doesn’t bring anyone else back to life, and that’s what we want and can never have.”

“What happened to Jonathan when you divorced?”

“The first three years or so, he phoned me occasionally. To give me ‘updates,’ he said. Of course, there never were any viable updates to give me, but he needed to believe he was making progress instead of doing what he was really doing.”

“Which was?”

“Making it less and less likely that anyone involved in Jamie’s death would…would crack, I suppose the word is. He saw in this an enormous conspiracy involving everyone in Pengelly Cove, with himself the outsider and them the close-mouthed community determined to protect its own.”

“But you didn’t see it that way?”

“I didn’t know how to see it. I wanted to be supportive of Jon and I tried to be at first, but for me the real point was that Jamie was dead. We’d lost him?all of us had lost him?and nothing Jon could do was going to alter that. My…I suppose you might call it my focus…was on that one fact, and it seemed to me?rightly or wrongly?that the result of what Jon was doing was to keep Jamie’s death fresh, like a sore that one rubs and causes to bleed instead of allowing it to heal. And I believed that healing was what we all needed.”

“Did you see him again? Did your girls see him again?”

She shook her head. “And doesn’t that compile tragedy upon tragedy? One child died terribly, but Jon lost all four upon his own choice because he chose the dead over the living. To me, that’s a greater tragedy than the loss of our son.”

“Some people,” Lynley said quietly, “have no other way to react to a sudden, inexplicable loss.”

“I daresay you’re right. But in Jon’s case, I think it was a deliberate choice. In making it, he was living the way he’d always lived, which was to put Jamie first. Here. Let me show you what I mean.”

She rose from the table and, wiping her hands down the front of her apron, she went into the sitting room. Lynley could see her walk over to the crowded bookshelves where she extricated a picture from among the large group on display. She brought it to the kitchen and handed it over, saying, “Sometimes photographs say things that words can’t convey.”

Lynley saw that she’d given him a family portrait. In it, a version of herself perhaps thirty years younger posed with husband and four winsome children. The scene was wintry, deep snow with a lodge and a ski lift in the background. In the foreground, suited up for sport with skis leaning up against their shoulders, the family stood happily ready for action, Niamh with a toddler in her arms and two other laughing daughters hanging on to her and perhaps a yard from them, Jamie and his father. Jonathan Parsons had his arm affectionately slung round Jamie’s neck, and he was pulling his son close to him. They both were grinning.

“That’s how it was,” Niamh said. “It didn’t seem to matter so very much because, after all, the girls had me. I told myself it was a man-man and woman-woman thing, and I ought to be pleased that Jon and Jamie were so close and the girls and I were as thick as thieves. But, of course, when Jamie died Jon saw himself as having lost it all. Three-quarters of his life was standing right in front of him, but he couldn’t see that. That was his tragedy. I didn’t want to make it mine.”

Lynley looked up from his study of the photo. “May I keep this for a time? I’ll return it to you, of course.”

She seemed surprised by the request. “Keep it? Whatever for?”

“I’d like to show it to someone. I’ll return it within a few days. By post. Or in person if you prefer. I’ll keep it quite safe.”

“Take it by all means,” she said. “But…I haven’t asked and I ought to have. Why have you come to talk about Jon?”