Careless in Red (Inspector Lynley, #15)(23)

She would take him up to a room, she said. She was all business, as if there was nothing strange about him. This room, she went on, was above the restaurant, not the bar. He’d find it quiet there. It was a good place to sleep.

She didn’t wait for his reply. His thoughts likely didn’t interest her anyway. His presence meant custom, which was hard to come by until late spring and summer. When beggars went begging, they couldn’t exactly choose their benefactors, could they?

She headed for another door at the far side of the public bar. This gave onto an icy stone passage. The inn’s restaurant operated in a room off this passage, although no one was seated within it, while at the far end a stairway the approximate width of a suitcase made the climb to the floor above. It was difficult to imagine how furniture had been worked up the stairs.

There were three rooms only on the first floor, and Lynley had his choice, although his guide?her name was Siobhan Rourke, she’d told him, and she was Brian’s longtime and apparently long-suffering partner?recommended the smallest of them as it was the one she’d mentioned earlier as being above the restaurant and quiet at this time of year. They all shared the same bathroom, she informed him, but that ought to be of no account as no one else was staying.

Lynley wasn’t particular about which room he was given so he took the first one whose door Siobhan opened. This would do, he told her. It suited him. Not much larger than a cell, it was furnished with a single bed, a wardrobe, and a dressing table tucked under a tiny casement window with leaded panes. Its only bow to mod cons were a washbowl in a corner and a telephone on the dressing table. This last was a jarring note in a room that could have done for a serving maid two hundred years earlier.

Only in the centre of the room could Lynley actually stand upright. Seeing this, Siobhan said, “They were shorter in those days, weren’t they? P’rhaps this isn’t the best choice, Mr….?”

“Lynley,” he said. “This is fine. Does that phone work?”

Indeed, it did. Could she bring him anything? There were towels in the wardrobe and soap as well as shampoo in the bathroom?she sounded encouraging as she said this last bit?and if he wanted a meal, that could be arranged. Up here. Or in the dining room below, naturally, if that was what he wanted. She added this last as a hasty afterthought although it was fairly clear that the more he kept to his room, the happier everyone would be.

He said he wasn’t hungry, which was more or less the truth. She left him then. When the door closed behind her, he gazed at the bed. It was nearly two months since he’d slept in one, and even then he’d not done much sleeping anyway. When he slept, he dreamed, and he dreaded his dreams. Not because they were disturbing but because they ended. It was, he’d found, more bearable not to sleep at all.

Because there was no point in putting it off, he went to the phone and punched in the numbers. He was hoping that there would be no answer, just a machine picking up so that he could leave a brief message without the human contact. But after five double rings, he heard her voice. There was nothing for it but to speak.

He said, “Mother. Hullo.”

At first she said nothing and he knew what she was doing: standing next to the phone in the drawing room or perhaps her morning room or elsewhere in the grand sprawling house that was his birthright and even more his curse, raising one hand to her lips, looking towards whoever else was in the room and that would likely be his younger brother or perhaps the manager of the estate or even his sister in the unlikely event that she was still down from Yorkshire. And her eyes?his mother’s eyes?would communicate the information before she said his name. It’s Tommy. He’s phoned. Thank God. He’s all right.

She said, “Darling. Where are you? How are you?”

He said, “I’ve run into something…It’s a situation up in Casvelyn.”

“My God, Tommy. Have you walked that far? Do you know how?” But she didn’t say the rest. She meant to ask whether he knew how worried they were. But she loved him and she wouldn’t burden him further.

As he loved her, he answered her anyway. “I know. I do. Please understand that. It’s just that I can’t seem to find my way.”

She knew, of course, that he wasn’t referring to his sense of direction. “My dear, if I could do anything to remove this from your shoulders…”

He could hardly bear the warmth of her voice, her unending compassion, especially when she herself had borne so many of her own tragedies throughout the years. He said to her, “Yes. Well,” and he cleared his throat roughly.

“People have phoned,” she told him. “I’ve kept a list. And they’ve not stopped phoning, the way you think people might. You know what I mean: One phone call and there, I’ve done my duty. It hasn’t been like that. There has been such concern for you. You are so deeply loved, my dear.”

He didn’t want to hear it, and he had to make her understand that. It wasn’t that he didn’t value the concern of his friends and associates. It was that their concern?and what was worse, their expression of it?rubbed a place in him already so raw that having it touched by anything was akin to torture. He’d left his home because of this, because on the coast path there was no one in March and few enough people in April and even if he ran across someone in his walk, that person would know nothing of him, of what he was doing trudging steadily forward day after day, or of what had led up to his decision to do so.