For the Sake of Elena (Inspector Lynley, #5)(28)

She said the only thing which she knew to be the single, absolute truth at this point. “I’m sorry.”

“Hold me. Please.” His hands slid beneath her jacket and tightened against her back. After a moment, she heard him breathe her name. He held her closer and eased her blouse from the waistband of her skirt. His hands were warm on her back. They smoothed the way to unfasten her bra. “Hold me,” he said again. He pushed the jacket from her shoulders and lifted his mouth to nuzzle her breasts. Through the thin silk of her blouse, she felt first his breath, then his tongue, then his teeth on her nipple. She felt her nipple harden. “Just hold me,” he whispered. “Just hold me. Please.”

She knew that making love was one of the most normal, life-affirming reactions to a grievous loss. The only thing she couldn’t keep herself from wondering was whether her husband had already engaged in a life-affirming reaction to his grievous loss today.

As if he sensed her resistance, he backed away from her. His spectacles were on the bedside table, and he put them on. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t even know what I’m doing any longer.”

She stood. “Where did you go?”

“You didn’t seem to want—”

“I’m not talking about right now. I’m talking about this afternoon. Where did you go?”

“For a drive.”

“Where?”

“Nowhere.”

“I don’t believe you.”

He looked away from her, to the teak chest of drawers with its sleek, cool lines.

“It’s starting again. You went to see her. You went to make love. Or did you just communicate—how was it between you?—soul to soul?”

He returned his gaze to her. His head shook slowly. “You choose your moments, don’t you?”

“That’s avoidance, Anthony. That’s a play for guilt. But it’s not going to work, not even tonight. Where were you?”

“What do I have to do to convince you it’s over? You wanted it that way. You named your terms. You got them. All of them. It’s over.”

“Is it?” She played her trump card smoothly. “Then where were you last night? I phoned your rooms in the college, right after I spoke to Elena. Where were you, Anthony? You lied to the Inspector, but surely you can tell your wife the truth.”

“Lower your voice. I don’t want you to wake Glyn.”

“I don’t care if I wake the dead.”

She recoiled from her words as immediately as he did. They served to throw water onto the fire of her anger, as did her husband’s broken response.

“If only you could, Justine.”





5





In the London suburb of Greenford, Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers slowly drove her rusting Mini down Oldfield Lane. In the passenger’s seat, her mother huddled like an unstrung marionette within the many folds of a dusty black coat. Round her neck Barbara had tied a jaunty red and blue scarf before they’d left Acton. But sometime during the drive, Mrs. Havers had worked the big square knot loose, and now she was using the scarf as a muff, twirling it tighter and tighter round her hands. Even in the lights from the dashboard, Barbara could see that behind her spectacles her mother’s eyes were large and frightened. She hadn’t been this far from her home in years.

“There’s the Chinese take-away,” Barbara pointed out. “And see, Mum, there’s the hairdresser’s and the chemist’s. I wish it was daylight so we could go to the common and have a sit on one of the benches there. But we’ll do it soon enough. Next weekend, I should guess.”

In response, her mother hummed. Half-shrunk into the door, she made an unconsciously inspired choice of music. Barbara couldn’t have named the origin of the song, but she could put the first seven words to the tune. Think of me, think of me fondly… Something she’d heard on the radio enough times over the past few years, something which her mother had doubtless heard as well and had called upon in this moment of uncertainty to give definition to what she was feeling behind the muddled facade of her dementia.

I am thinking of you, Barbara wanted to say. This is for the best. It’s the only option left.

Instead, she said with a desperately forced heartiness, “Just look how wide the pavement is here, Mum. You don’t see that sort of pavement in Acton, do you?”

She didn’t expect an answer and didn’t get one. She turned the car onto Uneeda Drive.

“See the trees along the street, Mum? They’re bare now, but in the summer think how pretty they’ll be.” They wouldn’t, of course, create that sort of leafy tunnel one often saw along the streets of the finer neighbourhoods in London. They were planted too far apart for that. But they managed to break the bleak monotony created by the line of stucco-and-brick, semi-detached houses, and for this reason alone Barbara noted them with gratitude. As she did the front gardens, pointing them out to her mother as they slowly cruised by, pretending to see details that the darkness obscured. She chatted amiably about a family of trolls, some plaster ducks, a birdbath, and a flowerbed of winter pansies and phlox. It didn’t matter that she hadn’t seen any of this. Her mother wouldn’t recall that in the morning. She wouldn’t even recall it in a quarter of an hour.