In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner (Inspector Lynley, #10)(204)

Which was when he finally saw what he'd seen without acknowledging upon his arrival.

The spot he'd found for the Bentley had been vacant yesterday because it would always be the last spot chosen to park one's car. No one with half a care for his car's paint job would park it right next to an overloaded skip that was even now, in the wind and the rain, erupting with refuse.

Of course, Lynley thought as the grinding of gears behind him spoke of a lorry's approach.

As it was, he made it to the skip just a stride ahead of the local dustmen who'd arrived to pick up the Black Angel's week's worth of rubbish.

Samantha heard the noise before she saw her uncle. The sound of bottles clinking together echoed on the old stone stairway as Jeremy Britton descended to the kitchen, where Samantha was doing the washing up from breakfast. She glanced at her watch, which she'd set on a shelf near the kitchen's deep sink. Even by Uncle Jeremy's standards, it seemed too early in the day to be drinking.

She scoured the frying pan in which she'd cooked the morning's bacon, and she tried to ignore her uncle's presence. Footsteps shuffled behind her. The bottles continued to clank. When she could no longer avoid doing so, Samantha glanced round to see what her uncle was doing.

Jeremy had a large basket crooked over his arm. Into this he'd deposited perhaps a dozen bottles of spirits. They were mostly gin. He began going through the dole cupboards that they used for storage in the kitchen, rustling through their contents to pull out more bottles. These were miniatures, and he took them from the flour bin, from the containers of rice and spaghetti and dried beans, from among the assorted tins of fruit, from deep within the storage space for pots and pans. As the collection grew in the basket on his arm, Uncle Jeremy clanked and rattled round the kitchen like the Ghost of Christmas Past.

He murmured, “Going to do it this time.”

Samantha put the final pot on the drying rack and pulled the plug on the water in the sink. She dried her hands on the front of her apron and watched. Her uncle looked older than he had done since she'd been in Derbyshire. And the tremors that were jerking his body didn't help the overall impression he gave of serious illness in the offing.

She said, “Uncle Jeremy? Are you ill? What's wrong?”

“Coming off it,” he replied. “It's the bloody devil. Gives you temptation, then sends you to hell.”

He'd begun to perspire, and in the kitchen's meagre light his skin looked like a lemon coated with oil. With unsteady hands, he eased the loaded basket onto the draining board. He clutched at the first of the bottles. Bombay Sapphire, his one true love. He unscrewed the top and upended the bottle into the sink. The smell of gin rose up like leaking gas.

When the bottle was empty, Jeremy broke it against the lip of the sink. “No more,” he said. “Through with this poison. I swear. No more.”

Then he began to cry. He cried with dry, hard sobs that shook his body worse than the absence of alcohol in his veins. He said, “So scared. I can't do it alone.”

Samantha's heart went out to him. “Oh, Uncle Jeremy. Here. Let me help. I'll hold the basket, shall I? Or shall I open the bottles for you?” She took one out—Beefeater's this time—and offered it to her uncle.

“It'll kill me,” he cried. “'S what it's doing already. Look at me.” And he held up his hands to show her what she'd already seen: their terrible shaking. He grabbed the Beefeater's and broke the bottle against the lip of the sink without emptying it first. Gin splashed on both of them. He grabbed another. “Rotten,” he wept. “Miserable. Sot. Drove three of 'em off but that wasn't enough. No. No. He'll not be content till the last one's gone.”

Samantha sorted through this. His wife and the Britton children, she decided. Julian's sister, brother, and mother had fled the manor ages ago, but she couldn't believe that Julian would ever desert his father. She said, “Julian loves you, Uncle Jeremy. He won't leave you. He wants the best for you. You must see that's why he's been working so hard to bring the manor back,” as Jeremy dumped another half litre of gin into the sink.

“He's a wonderful boy. Always was. And I won't, I won't. No longer.” And another bottle's contents joined the others. “'S working so hard to make this place something, and all the while his sot of a dad's drinking everything away. But no more.”

The kitchen sink was rapidly filling with glass, but that didn't matter to Samantha. She could see that her uncle was in the throes of a conversion so important that one or two kilos of broken glass were of small account in comparison. She said, “Are you giving up drinking, Uncle Jeremy? Are you seriously giving up drinking?” She had her doubts about his sincerity, yet bottle after bottle went the way of the first. When Jeremy was finished with the lot of them, he leaned over the sink and began to pray with an earnestness that Samantha could feel in her bones.

He swore on the lives of his children and his future grandchildren that he would not take another drop of drink. He would not, he said, be an advertisement for the evils of life-long inebriation. He would walk away from the bottle here and now and he would never look back. He owed that much, if not to himself, then to the son whose love had kept him here in the rotting family home when he could have gone elsewhere and lived a decent, wholesome, normal life.