In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner (Inspector Lynley, #10)(21)
She gave up on the soup. She gave up on the Yard. She signed herself out—“going home ill” would doubtless be welcomed by those who clearly saw her as a form of contagion anyway—and made her way to her Mini. One half of her was ascribing her actions to a mixture of paranoia and stupidity. The other half was trapped in an endless repetition of her final encounter with Lynley, playing the game of what-I-could-have-would-have-and-should-have-said after learning the outcome of his meeting with Webberly.
In this frame of mind, she found herself driving along Millbank before she knew what she was doing, not heading for home at all. Her body on automatic pilot, she came up to Grosvenor Road and the Battersea Power Station with her brain engaged in a mental castigation of DI Lynley. She felt like a shattered mirror, useless but dangerous with broken edges. How easy it had been for him to cut her loose, she thought bitterly. And what an idiot she had been, believing for weeks that he was on her side.
Obviously, it hadn't been enough for Lynley that she'd been demoted and humiliated by a man whom both of them had loathed for years. It seemed now that he'd also needed an opportunity to do some disciplining on his own. As far as she was concerned, he was wrong wrong wrong taking the direction he'd chosen. And she needed an ally straightaway who would agree with her point of view.
Spinning along the River Thames in the light midday traffic, she had a fairly good idea where to find just such a confederate. He lived in Chelsea, little more than a mile from where she was driving.
Simon St. James was Lynley's oldest friend, his schoolmate from Eton. A forensic scientist and an expert witness, he was regularly called upon by defence counsel as well as Crown Prosecutors to bolster one side or the other of a criminal case that was relying on evidence rather than eyewitnesses to win a conviction. Unlike Lynley, he was a reasonable man. He had the ability to stand back and observe, disinterested and dispassionate, without becoming personally embroiled in whatever situation was roiling round him. He was exactly the person she needed to talk to. He'd see Lynley's actions for what they were.
What Barbara didn't consider in the midst of her turbulent mental gymnastics was that St. James might not be alone in his house in Chelsea's Cheyne Row. However, the fact that his wife was also at home—working in the darkroom that adjoined his own top floor laboratory—didn't make the situation nearly as delicate as did the presence of St. James's regular assistant. And Barbara didn't know that St. James's regular assistant was there until she was climbing the stairs behind Joseph Cotter: father-in-law, housekeeper, cook, and general factotum to the scientist himself.
Cotter said, “All three of them's at work, but it's time to break for lunch and Lady Helen, for one, ‘11 be glad of the diversion. Likes her meals regular, always ’as done. No change there, married or not.”
Barbara hesitated on the second floor landing, saying, “Helen's here?”
“She is.” Cotter added with a smile, “'S nice to know some things's the same as ever was, isn't it?”
“Damn,” Barbara muttered under her breath.
For Helen was also Countess of Asherton, titled in her own right, but also the wife of Thomas Lynley who—although he made no bones about preferring it otherwise—was the other half of the Asherton equation: the official, belted, velvet-and-ermine-clad Earl. Barbara could hardly expect St. James and his wife to join her in a round of denigration doo-dah with the wife of the object of denigration in the room. She realised that retreat was in order.
She was about to beat a hasty one, when Helen came onto the top floor landing, laughing over her shoulder into the lab as she said, “All right, all right. I'll fetch a new roll. But if you'd claw your way into the current decade and replace that machine with something more up-to-date, we wouldn't be out of fax paper at all. I'd think you'd notice these things occasionally, Simon.” She turned away from the door, began to come down the stairs, and spied Barbara on the landing below her. Her face lit. It was a lovely face, not beautiful in any conventional sense, but tranquil and radiant, framed by a smooth fall of chestnut hair.
“Heavens, what a wonderful surprise! Simon. Deborah. Here's a visitor for us, so you'll absolutely have to break for lunch now. How are you, Barbara? Why haven't you called round in all these weeks?”
There was nothing for it but to join her. Barbara nodded her thanks to Cotter, who called up, “I'll lay another place at the table, then,” in the general direction of the lab and headed back down the way they'd come. Barbara climbed upwards and took Helen's extended hand. The handshake turned into a swift kiss on the cheek, a welcome so warm that Barbara knew Lynley hadn't yet contacted his wife about what had occurred at Scotland Yard that day.
Helen said, “This is brilliant timing. You've just saved me from a slog down the King's Road in search of fax paper. I'm famished, but you know Simon. Why stop for anything as incidental as a meal when one has the opportunity to slave for a few more hours? Simon, detach yourself from the microscope, please. Here's someone more interesting than fingernail scrapings.”
Barbara followed Helen into the lab where St. James regularly evaluated evidence, prepared reports as well as professional papers, and organised materials for his recently acquired position as a lecturer at the Royal College of Science. Today he appeared to be in expert-witness mode, because he was perched on a stool at one of the work tables, and he was assembling slides from the contents of an envelope that he'd unsealed. The aforementioned fingernail scrapings, Barbara thought.