Deception on His Mind (Inspector Lynley, #9)(5)
“I meant what I said, Sergeant Havers,” he'd told her. “You're due some time off, and I want you to take it. Are we clear on the subject?”
“We're clear, Inspector.”
But what they weren't clear on was what she was supposed to do with her enforced leisure. She'd greeted the idea of a period away from work with the horror of a woman who kept her private life, her wounded psyche, and her raw emotions in order by not having time to attend to them. In the past she'd used her holidays from the Yard to deal with her father's failing health. After his death she'd used her free hours to confront her mother's mental infirmities, the family home's renovation and sale, and her own move to her current digs. She didn't like to have time on her hands. The very suggestion of a stretch of minutes dissolving into hours leaking into days extending into one week and maybe even two … Her palms began to sweat at the very thought. Pains shot into her elbows. Every fibre of her short, stout being began to shriek, “Anxiety attack.”
So as she veered through traffic and blinked against a particle of soot that floated in her window on the blistering air, she felt like a woman on the edge of an abyss. It dropped down and away and into forever. It was signposted with the dread words free time. What would she do? Where would she go? How would she fill the endless hours? Reading romances? Washing the only three windows she possessed? Learning how to iron, to bake, to sew? How about melting away in the heat? This bloody heat, this miserable heat, this flaming, flipping, sodding heat, this—
Get a grip, Barbara told herself. It's a holiday you're doomed to, not solitary confinement.
At the top of Sloane Street, she waited patiently to make the turn into Knightsbridge. She'd listened to the television news in her hospital room day after day, so she knew that the exceptional weather had brought an even greater than normal influx of foreign tourists into London. But here she saw them. Hordes of shoppers wielding bottles of mineral water shoved their way along the pavement. Hordes more poured out of the Knightsbridge tube station, bee-lining in every direction towards the trendy shops. And five minutes later when Barbara had managed to negotiate her way up Park Lane, she could see even more of them—along with her countrymen—baring their lily-skinned bodies to Apollo on the thirsty lawns of Hyde Park. Under the scorching sun, double decker open-topped buses trundled along, carrying a full load of passengers who listened with rapt attention to tour guides speaking into microphones. And tour coaches disgorged Germans, Koreans, Japanese, and Americans at every hotel she saw.
All of us breathing the same air, she thought. The same torrid, noxious, used-up air. Perhaps a holiday was called for after all.
She bypassed the mad congestion of Oxford Street and instead headed northwest on the Edgware Road. The masses of tourists thinned out here, to be replaced by masses of immigrants: dark women in saris, chādors, and hijabs; dark men in everything from blue jeans to robes. As she crawled along in the flow of traffic, Barbara watched these onetime foreigners moving purposefully in and out of shops. She reflected on the changes that had come upon London in her thirty-three years. The food had undergone a distinct improvement, she concluded. But as a member of the police force, she knew that this polyglot society had engendered a score of polyglot problems.
She detoured to avoid the crush of humanity that always gathered round Camden Lock. Ten minutes more and she was finally cruising up Eton Villas, where she prayed to the Great Angel of Transport to grant her a parking space that was near her personal hovel.
The angel offered a compromise: a spot round the corner about fifty yards away. With some creative shoe-horning, Barbara squeezed her Mini into a space fit only for a motorbike. She trudged back the way she'd come and swung open the gate at the yellow Edwardian house behind which her bungalow sat.
In the long drive across town, the pleasant glow from the champagne had metamorphosed in the way of most pleasant glows arising from alcohol: She was killingly thirsty. She set her sights on the path that led along the side of the house to the back garden. At the bottom of this, her tiny bungalow looked cool and inviting in the shade of a false acacia.
Looks deceived as usual. When Barbara unlocked the door and stepped inside, heat engulfed her. The three windows were open, in the hope of encouraging cross ventilation, but there was no breeze stirring without, so the heavy air fell upon her lungs like a visitation of the plague on the unprepared.
“Bloody hell,” Barbara muttered. She threw her shoulder bag on the table and went to the fridge. A litre of Volvic looked like a tower block among its companions: the cartons and packages of leftover take-away and ready-to-eat meals. Barbara grabbed the bottle and took it to the sink. She swilled down five mouthfuls, then leaned over and poured half of what was left onto the back of her neck and into her cropped hair. The sudden rush of cold water against her skin made her eyeballs throb. It was perfect heaven.
“Bliss,” Barbara said. “I've discovered God.”
“Are you having a bath?” a child's voice asked behind her. “Shall I come back later?”
Barbara swung round to the door. She'd left it open, but she hadn't expected that its position might be interpreted as an invitation to casual visitors. She hadn't actually seen any of her neighbours since being discharged from the Wiltshire hospital where she'd spent more than a week. To avoid the potential of a chance encounter, she'd limited her comings and goings to periods when she knew the residents of the larger building were out.