Deception on His Mind (Inspector Lynley, #9)(4)
It wasn't a seal and they weren't through with their tormenting, though. He saw this at the same moment his stomach lurched upward and his sphincter quivered.
A thin-haired young man sat upright with his back against the old concrete machine-gun placement. The fact that he was dead was demonstrated by the two remaining sea gulls who picked at his eyes.
Ian Armstrong took one step towards the body, his own body feeling like ice. When he could breathe again and believe what he saw, he uttered only four words. “Well, Jesus be praised.”
HOEVER SAID APRIL IS THE CRUELLEST MONTH HAD never been in London in the midst of a summer heat wave. With air pollution dressing the sky in designer brown, diesel lorries draping the buildings—and the inside of noses—in basic black, and tree leaves wearing the very latest in dust and grit, London in late June was the cruellest month. Indeed, it was a veritable hellhole. This was Barbara Havers's unsentimental evaluation of her nation's capital as she drove through it on Sunday afternoon, heading homeward in her rattling Mini.
She was ever so slightly—but nonetheless pleasantly—tanked up. Not enough to be a danger to herself or to anyone else on the streets, but enough to review the events of the day in the pleasant afterglow produced by expensive French champagne.
She was returning home from a wedding. It hadn't been the social event of the decade, which she'd long expected that the marriage of an earl to his longtime beloved was supposed to be. Rather, it had been a quiet affair in a tiny church close to said earl's home in Belgravia. And instead of bluebloods dressed to the nines, its guests had been only the earl's closest friends as well as a few of his fellow police officers from New Scotland Yard. Barbara Havers was one of this latter group. At times, she liked to think that she was also one of the former.
Upon reflection, Barbara realised that she should have expected of Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley just the sort of quiet wedding that he and Lady Helen Clyde had produced. He'd been downplaying the Lord Asherton side of his life for as long as she'd known him, and the last thing he would have wanted in the way of nuptials was an ostentatious ceremony attended by a well-heeled crowd of Hooray Henrys. So instead of that, sixteen decidedly unHenrylike guests had assembled to watch Lynley and Helen take the marital plunge, after which they'd all repaired to La Tante Claire in Chelsea, where they'd tucked into six kinds of hors d'oeuvre, champagne, late lunch, and more champagne.
Once the toasts were made and the couple seen off to a honeymoon destination which they had both laughingly refused to disclose, the rest of the wedding party disbanded. Barbara stood on the frying-pan pavement of Royal Hospital Road and exchanged a few words with the other guests, among them Lynley's best man, a forensic specialist called Simon St. James. In best English fashion, they'd commented upon the weather first. Depending upon the speaker's level of toleration for heat, humidity, smog, fumes, dust, and glare, the atmosphere was deemed wonderful, hideous, blessed, bloody awful, delightful, delectable, insufferable, heavenly, or plain effing hell. The bride was pronounced beautiful. The groom was handsome. The food was delicious. After this, there was a general pause in which the company decided upon two courses of action: talk that ventured beyond banalities or friendly farewells.
The group parted ways. Barbara was left with St. James and his wife, Deborah. Both were wilting in the merciless sun, St. James dabbing a white handkerchief to his brow and Deborah fanning herself enthusiastically with an old theatre programme which she'd fished from her capacious straw bag.
“Will you come home with us, Barbara?” she asked. “We're going to sit in the garden for the rest of the day, and I plan to ask Dad to turn the hose pipe on us.”
“That sounds like the ticket,” Barbara said. She rubbed her neck where sweat had soaked her collar.
“Good.”
“But I can't. To tell you the truth, I'm whacked.”
“Understandable,” St. James said. “How long has it been?”
Deborah added quickly, “How stupid of me. I'm sorry, Barbara. I'd completely forgotten.”
Barbara doubted this. The bandages across her nose and the bruises on her face—not to mention her chipped front tooth—made it unlikely that anyone who saw her would miss the fact that she'd recently served sentence in a hospital. Deborah was merely too polite to notice this. “Two weeks,” Barbara replied to St. James's question.
“How's the lung?”
“Functioning.”
“And the ribs?”
“Only when I laugh.”
St. James smiled. “Are you taking time off?”
“Under orders, yes. I can't go back till I've got clearance from the doctor.”
“I'm sorry about it all,” St. James said. “It was a rotten piece of luck.”
“Yeah. Well.” Barbara shrugged. Heading part of a murder investigation for the first time, she'd been injured in the line of duty. It wasn't something she wanted to talk about. Her pride had taken as serious a blow as had her body.
“So what will you do?” St. James asked.
“Escape the heat,” Deborah advised her. “Go to the Highlands. Go to the lakes. Go to the sea. I wish we could.”
Barbara tossed Deborah's suggestions round in her mind as she drove up Sloane Street. Inspector Lynley's final order to her at the conclusion of the investigation had directed her to take a holiday, and he'd repeated that order in a private moment between the two of them after his wedding.