Careless in Red (Inspector Lynley, #15)(67)

Sergeant Collins met her at the door. He said, “Phone’s below.”

She said fervently, “Thank God. Where are they?”

“Who?”

“BT.”

“BT? They’ve not arrived yet.”

“Then what?”

“The phone. You’ve a call downstairs. It’s an officer from?”

“Middlemore,” she finished. “That would be my former husband. Assistant Chief Constable Hannaford. Head him off for me. I need some time.” Ray, she decided, had tried on her mobile, and now he was trying to get through on the land line. He’d have built up a head of steam at this point. She didn’t particularly want to experience it. She said, “Tell him I’ve just set out to see to some business. Tell him to phone me back tomorrow. Or at home later.” She would give him that much.

“It’s not ACC Hannaford,” Collins said.

“You said an officer…”

“Someone called Sir David?”

“What is it with people?” Bea demanded. “I’ve just got off the phone with a Duke Clarence up in Chepstow and now it’s Sir David?”

“Hillier, he’s called,” Collins said. “Sir David Hillier. Assistant commissioner up at the Met.”

“Scotland Yard?” Bea asked. “Now, isn’t that just what I need.”

BY THE TIME HIS regular drinking hour at the Salthouse Inn had rolled round, Selevan Penrule was in need of one. He also was, at least to his way of thinking, deserving of one. Something strong from the sixteen men of Tain. Or however the hell many there were.

Having to cope with both his granddaughter’s pigheadedness and her mother’s hysteria in a single day would have been too much for any bloke. No wonder David had moved them all off to Rhodesia or whatever it was called these days. He’d probably thought a good bout of heat, cholera, TB, snakes, and tsetse flies?or whatever they had in that god-awful bloody climate of theirs?would sort both of them out. But it hadn’t done so if Tammy’s behaviour and Sally Joy’s voice on the phone were anything to go by.

“Is she eating properly?” Sally Joy had demanded from the bowels of Africa, where a decent connection on a telephone line was, apparently, something akin to the spontaneous transmogrification of tabby cat into two-headed lion. “Is she still praying, Father Penrule?”

“She’s?”

“Has she gained any weight? How much time is she on her knees? What about the Bible? Does she have a Bible?”

Jaysus in a sandwich, Selevan thought. Sally Joy made his bloody head swim. He said, “I told you I’d watch over the girl. That’s what I’m doing. ’S there anything else, then?”

“Oh, I’m tedious. I’m tedious. But you don’t understand what it’s like to have a daughter.”

“I had one myself, didn’t I? Four sons as well, if you’re interested.”

“I know. I know. But in Tammy’s case?”

“You either leave her to me or I send her back, woman.”

That got through. The last thing Sally Joy and David wanted was their daughter back in Africa, exposed to its hardships and believing that she could single-handedly do something about them.

“All right. I know. You’re doing what you can.”

And better than you did, Selevan thought. But that was before he’d caught Tammy on her knees. She’d fashioned herself what he called a prayer bench?she’d referred to it as a pree-something but Selevan was not one for fancy terms?in her bitsy sleeping area in the caravan and he’d thought at first she meant to hang her clothing from the back of it, the way gents did with their suits in posh hotels. But not long after breakfast, when he’d gone in search of her in order to drive her in to work, he’d found her kneeling in front of it with a book open on its narrow shelf, and she was reading studiously. This he’d discovered too late?the reading?because the first thing he’d assumed was that the girl was at her God damn beads again, and this despite the fact that he’d already removed two sets of them from her belongings. He’d pounced and hauled her back by her shoulders, saying, “We’ll none of this nonsense,” and then had seen that she was merely reading.

It wasn’t even a Bible. But it also wasn’t much better. She was soaking up some saint’s writing. “St. Teresa of Avila,” she revealed. “Grandie, it’s just philosophy.”

“If it’s some saint’s scribbles, it’s religious muck,” was what he told her as he snatched up the book. “Filling your head with rubbish, you are.”

“That’s not fair,” she said, and her eyes became moist.

They’d driven to Casvelyn in silence, afterwards, with Tammy turned away from him, so all he could see was the curve of her stubborn little jaw and the sheenless fall of her hair. She’d sniffed and he’d understood she was crying and he’d felt…He didn’t know how he felt because?and he cursed her parents soundly for sending her to him?he was trying to help the girl, to bring her to whatever senses she had left, to get her to see she was meant to be living her life and not spending it caught up in reading about the doings of saints and sinners.

He felt irritated with her, then. Defiance he could deal with. He could shout and be rough. But tears…He said, “They’re lezzies, you know, the lot of them, girl. You got that, don’t you?”