Careless in Red (Inspector Lynley, #15)(221)

“There’s truth in that, Beatrice.”

“But what I failed to see is the loopholes. All the ways a killer could plan and organise and commit this…this ultimate crime…and do it in such a way that every bit of it could be explained. Even the most minute forensic bits could be deemed a rational part of one’s daily life. I didn’t see that. Why didn’t I see that?”

“Perhaps you had other things on your mind. Distractions.”

“Such as?”

“Other parts of your own life. You do have other parts to your life, no matter your attempts to deny that.”

She wanted to avoid. “Ray…”

Clearly, he didn’t intend to let her. “You’re not a cop to the exclusion of everything else,” he said. “Good God, Beatrice, you’re not a machine.”

“I wonder about that sometimes.”

“Well, I don’t.”

A blast of music came from upstairs: Pete deciding among his CDs. They listened for a moment to the shriek of an electric guitar. Pete liked his music historical. Jimi Hendrix was his favourite, although in a pinch Duane Allman and his medicine bottle would do just fine.

“God,” Ray said. “Get that lad an iPod.”

She smiled, then chuckled. “He’s something, that child.”

“Our child, Beatrice,” Ray declared quietly.

She didn’t reply. Instead, she took the sticky toffee sponge and tossed it in the rubbish. She washed the spoon she’d been using and set it on the draining board.

Ray said, “Can we talk about it now?”

“You do choose your moments, don’t you?”

“Beatrice, I’ve wanted to talk about it for ages. You know that.”

“I do. But at the present time…You’re a cop and a good one. You can see how I am. Get the suspect in a weak moment. Create the weak moment if you can. It’s elementary stuff, Ray.”

“This isn’t.”

“What?”

“Elementary. Beatrice, how many ways can a man say to you that he was wrong? And how many ways can you say to a man that forgiveness isn’t part of your…what? Your repertoire? When I thought that Pete shouldn’t be?”

“Don’t say it.”

“I have to say it and you have to listen. When I thought that Pete shouldn’t be born…When I said you should abort?”

“You said that’s what you wanted.”

“I said lots of things. I say lots of things. And some of them I say without thinking. Especially when I’m…”

“What?”

“I don’t know. Frightened, I suppose.”

“Of a baby? We’d already had one.”

“Not of that. But of change. The difference it would make in our lives as we had them arranged.”

“Things happen.”

“I understand. And I would have come to understand that then if you’d allowed me the time to?”

“It wasn’t only a single discussion, Ray.”

“Yes. All right. I won’t claim it was. But I will say that I was wrong. In every discussion we had, I was wrong, and I’ve grieved over that…that wrongness, if you will, for years. Fourteen of them, to be exact. More if you include the pregnancy itself. I didn’t want it this way. I don’t want it this way.”

“And…them?” she asked. “You had your diversions.”

“What? Women? For God’s sake, Beatrice, I’m not a monk. Yes, there were women over the years. A whole bloody succession of them. Janice and Sheri and Sharon and Linda and whoever else, because I don’t remember them all. And I don’t remember them because I didn’t want them. I wanted to blot out…this.” He indicated the kitchen, the house, the people within it. “So what I’m asking you is to let me back in because this is where I belong and both of us know it.”

“Do we?”

“We do. Pete knows it as well. So do the bloody dogs.”

She swallowed. It would be so easy…But then again, it wouldn’t. The stuff of men and women together was never easy.

“Mum!” Pete was shouting from upstairs. “Where’d you put my Led Zepppelin CD?”

“Lord,” Bea murmured with a shudder. “Someone, please, get that lad an iPod at once.”

“Mum! Mummy!”

She said to Ray, “I love it when he still calls me that. He doesn’t, often. He’s becoming so grown-up.” She called back, “Don’t know, darling. Check under your bed. And while you’re at it, put any clothes you find there in the laundry. And bring old cheese sandwiches down to the rubbish. Detach the mice from them, first.”

“Very funny,” he shouted and continued to bang about. He said, “Dad! Make her tell me. Make her. She knows where it is. She hates it and she’s hidden it somewhere.”

Ray called to him, “Son, I learned long ago that I can’t make this madwoman do anything.” Then he said to her quietly, “Can I, my dear. Because if I could, you know what it would be.”

She said, “That you can’t.”

“To my eternal regret.”

She thought about his words, those he’d just said and those he’d said before. She said to him, “Not really eternal. Not exactly that.”