In The Presence Of The Enemy (44 page)

“You were right,” Lynley said. “Helen, you were right.”

“But Deborah did me in.” She closed her eyes as if to remove an image from them. She cleared her throat as if to shake off an emotion. “Simon didn’t want to have anything to do with it from the first. But Deborah persuaded him to look into things. And now she feels she’s responsible for Charlotte’s death.

She wouldn’t even let Simon throw that picture away. She was taking it with her upstairs when I left.”

Lynley couldn’t have imagined feeling worse about what had happened among them, but now he did. He said, “I’ll put things right somehow. With them. With us.”

“You’ve dealt Deborah some sort of death blow, Tommy. I don’t know what it is, but Simon knows.”

“I’ll talk to him. I’ll talk to them both.

Together. Separately. I’ll do what needs to be done.”

“You’re going to have to. But I don’t expect Simon will want to see you for a while.”

“I’ll give it a few days, then.”

He waited for her to give him a sign even though he knew it was cowardly of him to do so. When she didn’t, he realised that the next move, however difficult, would have to be his.

He raised his hand to the small, defenseless curve of her shoulder.

She said quietly, “I’d like to be alone tonight, Tommy.”

He said, “All right,” although it wasn’t and would never be so. He went out into the night.

WHEN HER ALARM WENT OFF
at half past four the next morning, Barbara Havers awoke in her usual manner: She gave a star-tled cry and flung herself upright as if the pane of glass that was her dream had been shattered by a hammer and not by a noise. She fumbled for the alarm and silenced it, blinking into the darkness. A thin film of dim light the width of a finger seeped through a break in the curtains. She observed this and frowned, knowing she wasn’t awakening in Chalk Farm and for a moment wondering where the hell she was. She sorted her thoughts. They constituted yesterday, London, Hillier, Scotland Yard, and the motorway. Then she recalled a jungle of chintz, lace pillows, overstuffed furniture, sentimental aphorisms rendered in needle-point, and f loral wallpaper. Yards of f loral wallpaper. Miles of it, in fact. Lark’s Haven B

and B, Barbara concluded. She was in Wiltshire.

She swung herself to the edge of the bed and reached for the light. She squinted in its brightness and she fumbled her way to the foot of the bed for the plastic black mackin-tosh that did duty as her dressing gown whenever she travelled. She shrugged into it and crackled across the room to the basin where she turned on the water and, when her courage would allow, raised her head to the mirror.

She couldn’t decide what was worse: the sight of her sleep-puffed face still bearing the imprint of the pillow along one of her cheeks or the reflection of more of the Lark’s Haven wallpaper. In this case, it was yellow chrysan-themums, mauve roses, blue ribbons, and—

blithely defying all reason and botany—blue and green leaves. This charming motif was repeated in both the bedspread and the curtains with an abandon that suggested Laura Ashley gone mental. Barbara could just hear all those foreign visitors, eager to experience life among the natives, exclaiming at the perfect Englishness of the B and B. Oh, Frank, isn’t this
just
what we always expected an English cottage would look like? How delicious.

How charming. How utterly sweet.

How bloody nauseating, Barbara thought.

And it wasn’t a cottage at all, anyway. It was a solid brick house just outside the village on the Burbage Road. But there was no accounting for taste, was there, and Robin Payne’s mother seemed to like the place just fi ne.

“Mum did the redecorating last year,”

Robin had explained when he’d led the way to her room. A small ceramic plate on the mercifully unpapered door had announced her accommodation as Cricket’s Hideaway. He added, “With Sam’s tender guidance, of course,” and rolled his eyes.

Barbara had met them both below in the sitting room: Corrine Payne and her “recently intended,” as she called Sam Corey. They were billers and cooers of the fi rst order, which seemed somehow in keeping with the overall atmosphere of the B and B, and when Robin had guided Barbara from her car to the kitchen and from there to the sitting room, the pair had made short work of communicating to her their mutual devotion. Corrine was Sam’s

“sweet pear.” Sam was Corrine’s “little chappie.” And until Corrine saw the plaster covering the cut on her son’s face, they only had eyes for each other.

The plaster was a momentary diversion from the hand patting, arm squeezing, thigh pinching, and cheek kissing. When she spied it, Corrine vaulted from the sofa and said,

“Robbie! What’ve you done to your lovely face?” She called for her “little chappie” to fetch the iodine, the alcohol, and the cotton wool so that Mum could see to her precious boy, but before Sam Corey could do her bidding, Corrine’s rising anxiety gave way to what was apparently an attack of asthma, and with a shout of “I’ll see to it, sweet pear,” her recently intended went in search of her inhaler instead. With Corrine drawing from it gratefully, Robin took the opportunity to hustle Barbara from the room.

“Sorry,” he’d said in a low voice at the top of the stairs. “They’re not always that bad.

They’ve just got engaged. So they’re a bit over the top about each other at the moment.”

Barbara thought
a bit
was an understate-ment.

Robin went on somewhat miserably when she didn’t reply. “We should have put you up at the King Alfred, shouldn’t we? Or at a hotel in Amesford. Or at another B and B. This place is too much. They’re too much as well.

But he isn’t always here, and I thought—”

“Robin, it’s great. Everything’s fi ne,” Barbara interrupted supportively. “And they’re…”

Bloody smarmy
was what she wanted to say.

But what she said was “They’re in love.” And

“You know what it’s like when you fall in love,”

as if she herself did.

Robin paused before opening the door for her. He seemed to register her as female for the very first time, which she found disconcerting without knowing why. He said, “You’re quite nice, aren’t you?” And then seemed to realise how his question might be taken. He hurried on with, “Look. Your bathroom’s next door. I hope…Yes. Well, anyway, sleep well.”

Then he opened the door and left her in a hurry, suddenly having become all elbows, kneecaps, and shins in his haste to “let her settle in.”

Well, Barbara thought, she was as settled in as she could hope to be in a room called Cricket’s Hideaway. Her knickers and socks were unpacked. Her sweatshirt swung from a hook on the back of the door. Her shirts and trousers hung in the cupboard. Her toothbrush stood in a glass by the basin.

She was using this with her customary morning vigour when a knock on the door was followed by a breathy voice calling, “Ready for morning tea, Barbara?”

Mouth still lathered, Barbara opened the door to find Corrine Payne standing with a tray in her hands. Despite the ungodly hour, she was completely dressed, fully made-up, and expertly coiffed. Had she not been wearing different clothes from the previous night and had her nut-brown hair not been curled into a different style, Barbara would have assumed she’d never gone to bed.

She was wheezing slightly, but she fl ashed a smile as she entered, and she used her hip to shut the door behind her. She set the tray on top of the chest of drawers and said, “Whew. Got to catch myself here,” and leaned against the chest, taking a few gulps of air. She said, “Spring and summer. They’re the worst of the worst. All the pollen in the air.” She waved towards the tray.

“Tea. Go ahead. Be fine in a dash.”

Barbara kept one eye leerily upon the other woman as she rinsed away her toothpaste.

Corrine’s breathing sounded like air being released from the stretched mouth of a balloon. It would certainly be a wonderful thing if she collapsed while Barbara was happily swilling down the Formosa Oolong.

But after a moment, during which Barbara heard footsteps padding down the corridor outside her door, Corrine said, “Better. Much much better,” and indeed her breathing seemed to ease. She went on with, “Robbie’s already up and about, and as a rule he’d be the one to bring up the tea.” She poured Barbara a cup. It was strong, the colour of baked cinnamon. “But I always draw the line at letting him deliver morning tea to young ladies.

Nothing’s worse than a man seeing a woman in the morning before she’s made herself pre-sentable. Am I right?”

The single experience she’d had with a man some ten years in the past hadn’t included the morning, so Barbara merely said, “Morning.

Night. It’s all the same to me,” and sloshed some milk into the cup.

“That’s because you’re young and your skin’s just as peachy as it ever was. And…How old are you? Do you mind my asking that, Barbara?”

Barbara briefly considered lopping off a few years for the hell of it, but since she’d already revealed her age to Robin, there was no real point in lying to his mother.

Corrine said, “Lovely. I remember what thirty-three was like.”

Which, Barbara decided, wouldn’t have been a difficult proposition. Corrine herself was well under fifty, something which had initially surprised Barbara when she’d seen the woman on the previous night. Her own mother was sixty-four years old. Since Robin Payne was so close to her in age, Barbara hadn’t been prepared to find in his mother a woman who’d obviously given birth to him as a teenager. She wondered, with an uncharacteristic moment of bitterness, what it would actually be like to have a mother who was in the middle of life instead of nearing the end of it, to have a mother who was in possession of her faculties instead of losing a battle against dementia.

Corrine said, “Sam’s a great deal my senior.

You noticed, didn’t you? Funny how things work out. I used to think I could never fall in love with a balding man. Robbie’s father had a great deal of hair. Mounds of it. Everywhere.”

She smoothed out the lace runner that covered the top of the chest of drawers. “But he’s been so good to me, has Sam. He has such enormous patience with this.” She used three fingers to pat the hollow of her throat. “When he finally asked me, what could I say but yes?

And it’s all for the best since it frees up Robbie. He’ll be able to marry his Celia now. She’s a lovely girl, Celia. Perfectly lovely. So sweet.

She’s Robbie’s intended, you know.”

The gentleness in her voice was not deceiv-ing. Barbara met her eyes and read the steely meaning there. She wanted to say, “Mrs.

Payne, don’t worry. I’m not after your son, and even if I were, he wouldn’t be likely to succumb to my dubious charms.” Instead, she said after another gulp of tea, “I’ll just throw on some rags and be down in a couple of minutes.”

Corrine smiled. “Fine. Robbie’s doing your breakfast. You like bacon, I hope.” And without waiting for a reply, she was gone.

Downstairs, Robin emerged from the kitchen just as Barbara reached the dining room.

He had a pan in one hand from which he slid two fried eggs onto her plate. He said with a glance out of the window where, to Barbara’s eye, the sky was still black with the night,

“Dawn’s not far. We’ll have to be about it if you still want to see the canal by fi ve.”

As they’d walked from their cars to the house last night, she’d announced her intention of viewing the body site at the same time of day as the body had entered the water. Robin had winced—“That means we’re out of here by quarter to fi ve,” he’d pointed out—but when she’d responded with “Fine. Set your alarm,” he hadn’t made any further protest. And now he seemed as awake as if he rose every day while it was still night, although he stifled a yawn as he wished her
bon appétit
and returned to the kitchen.

Barbara tucked into the eggs. She shovelled them down, and since no one was present to comment on her manners, she sopped up the yolk with toast. She crammed the bacon into her mouth, washed it down with orange juice, and was done. She gave a curious glance to her watch. Three minutes of gastronomy. Definitely a new record.

Robin was subdued on the way out to the crime scene. To her immediate gratitude, Barbara discovered that he was a smoker, so they lit up and happily filled his Escort with car-cinogens. After a few minutes of silent nicotine intake, he guided the car off the Marlborough Road and onto a narrower lane that led behind the village post office and out into the country.

“I used to work there,” he said suddenly with a nod at the post office. “I used to think I’d be trapped there forever. It’s why I got such a late start at this CID business.” He glanced her way, and seeming anxious to clarify what he’d just said and whatever worries his words might have aroused in her, he went on quickly.

“But I’ve taken some extra courses to get a leg up.”

Barbara said, “The first investigation is always the roughest. I know mine was. I expect you’ll do just fi ne.”

“I had five O levels,” he went on earnestly.

“I’d thought I’d try for university.”

“Why didn’t you?”

He tapped ash from his cigarette through a speck of an opening he’d created by slightly lowering his window. “Mum,” he said. “The asthma comes and goes. She’s had some bad spells over the years, and I didn’t feel like I could leave her alone.” He tossed another look her way. “I expect that sounds like I’m tied to her apron.”

Hardly, Barbara thought. She considered her own mother—both of her parents in fact—

and the years upon years of her adulthood that she had spent living in the family home in Acton before and after her father’s death, a prisoner to one parent’s ill health and the other’s mental erosion. No one was more likely to understand what it meant to keep one’s life on hold than Barbara. But she settled upon saying, “She has Sam now, so your freedom’s on the horizon, isn’t it?”

“You mean our ‘little chappie’?” he asked sardonically. “Oh yes. Right. If the marriage comes off, I’ll be cut loose.
If
the marriage comes off.”

He had the sound of a man who’d been this close to liberty more than once before, only to have his hopes and plans quashed. Celia, Barbara thought, whoever she was, must have the aspiratory constitution of a congenital opti-mist.