In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner (Inspector Lynley, #10)(38)
Hanken's reply was a sharp nod. It's yours, the nod said.
“There isn't going to be an easy time to talk about your daughter's death,” Lynley began gently. “But in a murder investigation—and I know that you're already aware of this, Andy—the first hours are critical.”
As he spoke, Nan Maiden raised her head. She tried to speak, failed, then tried again.
“Murder investigation,” she repeated. “What are you saying?”
Lynley looked from husband to wife. Hanken did likewise. Then they looked at each other. Lynley said to Andy, “You've seen the body, haven't you? You've been told what happened?”
“Yes,” Maiden said. “I've been told. But I—” “Murder?” His wife cried out in horror. “Oh my God, Andy. You never said Nicola was murdered!”
Barbara Havers had spent the afternoon in Greenford, making the decision to use the rest of her sick day to visit her mother in Hawthorn Lodge, an overnamed postwar semi-detached where Mrs. Havers had lived as a permanent resident for the last ten months. In the way of most people who attempt to gain support from others for a position that might be untenable, Barbara had found that there was a price to pay for successfully cultivating advocates among Inspector Lynley's friends and relatives. And because she didn't want to face any more price-paying in one afternoon, she sought a distraction.
Mrs. Havers was nothing if not adept at providing escape hatches from reality, since she herself no longer lived in that realm on a regular basis. Barbara had found her in the back garden of Hawthorn Lodge, where she was engaged in putting together a jigsaw puzzle. The puzzle's box top had been propped up against an old mayonnaise jar that was filled with coloured sand holding seven plastic carnations in position. On this box top, a smarmy cartoon prince—perfectly proportioned and demonstrating a sufficient amount of adoration for the occasion—was slipping a high-heeled glass shoe onto the slender and curiously toeless foot of Cinderella while the girl's two cowlike and resentful stepsisters watched jealously to one side, culling a richly deserved comeuppance.
With the tender encouragement of her nurse and keeper Mrs. Flo—as Florence Magentry was called by her three elderly residents and their families—Mrs. Havers had managed successfully to assemble Cinderella, part of the stepsisters, the prince's shoe-wielding arm, his manly torso, and his bent left leg. However as Barbara joined her, she was in the midst of attempting to pound the prince's face onto one of the stepsisters’ shoulders and when Mrs. Flo gently guided her hand towards the proper placement of the piece, Mrs. Havers shouted, “No, no, no!” and pushed the whole puzzle away, knocking over the jar, scattering its plastic carnations, and spilling sand across the table.
Barbara's intervention didn't help matters. Whether her mother recognised her during visits was always a matter of chance, and on this day Mrs. Havers’ clouded consciousness attached Barbara's face to someone called Libby O'Rourke, who apparently had been the school temptress during Mrs. Havers’ childhood. It seemed that Libby O'Rourke had operated in a female version of Georgie Porgie mode most of the time, and one of the boys whom she'd kissed was none other than Mrs. Havers’ own beau, an act of effrontery that Mrs. Havers felt compelled to avenge on this very day by throwing puzzle pieces, shouting invective coloured by the sort of language Barbara wouldn't have thought part of her mother's vocabulary, and ultimately crumpling into a weeping heap. It was a situation that had taken some handling: persuading her mother to leave the garden, urging her upstairs to her room, coaxing her to look through a family album long enough to see that Barbara's round and snubby face appeared on its pages far too often for her to be the loathsome Libby.
“But I don't have a little girl,” Mrs. Havers protested in a voice more frightened than confused when she'd been forced to agree that Libby O'Rourke's being given a position of prominence in the family album made no sense, considering the offence she had once given. “Mummy won't let me have babies. I c'n only have dolls.”
Barbara had no answer for that. Her mother's mind made the tortuous journey into the past too often and with so little warning that she'd long ago forgiven herself her inability to deal with it with any expertise. So, after the album was set aside, she hadn't made any further attempts to argue, persuade, dissuade, or appeal. She'd merely selected one of the travel magazines that her mother loved to thumb through and she'd spent ninety minutes sitting shoulder to shoulder on the edge of the bed with the woman who'd forgotten she'd ever given birth, looking at photographs of Thailand, Australia, and Greece.
That was when her conscience finally gained some dominance over her resistance, and the internal voice that had earlier decried Lyn-ley's actions was confronted by a voice that suggested her own actions might have been wanting. What ensued was a nonverbal argument taking place in her head. One side insisted that Inspector Lynley was a vindictive prig. The other informed her that—prig or not—he didn't deserve her disloyalty. And she had been disloyal. Trotting round to Chelsea in order to denounce him to his intimates was not the behaviour of a steadfast friend. On the other hand, he'd been disloyal as well. Taking it upon himself to amplify her formal punishment by overlooking her on a case, he'd more than illustrated whose side he was on in her battle to save her professional hide, no matter what he claimed about her need to keep a low profile for a while.