NKATA ARRIVED AT THE POLICE STATION ON LOWER Clapton Road in record time. He found it not overly far from Hackney Marsh, in an area of town he’d never before seen. An old redbrick Victorian affair, the station looked like something Bobby Peel might emerge from at any moment, and at this early hour, it was still lit up as if for night, exterior lights thwarting the would-be terrorists unheard of in the 1800s.
What had awakened him was his mobile phone ringing, with Barb Havers on the other end. She’d said tersely, “It’s Kilfoyle, Winnie. We’ve got the bugger. Lower Clapton Road if you want to be in on things. Do you?”
He’d said, “What? I thought you went to tell the super-”
“Kilfoyle was there. He snatched him out of the carpark. I followed and…bloody hell, I wrecked his Bentley, Win, but it was the only way-”
“You telling me you saw the guv get snatched and d’in’t ring for help? Fuck all, Barb-”
“I couldn’t.”
“But-”
“Winnie. Stuff a sock in it. If you want to be in on things, get over here now. They’ve got him in a cell while they wait for John Stewart to get here, but they’ll let us talk to him in advance if the duty solicitor gets here first. So d’you want in?”
“I’m on my way.”
He’d banged round in the dark in his haste to be gone, which had roused his mother. She’d come storming out of her bedroom with a tatting hook held aloft-God only knew what she’d intended to do with it-and when she’d seen him, she demanded to know what in the name of Jamaica he was doing out here at four thirty-two o’clock in the morning?
“You just gettin in?” she’d cried.
Just going out, he’d said.
“Without your breakfast? You sit down and let me do a proper fry-up for you.”
Can’t, Mum. Case is closing and I want to be there for it. Only so much time before I get muscled aside by the higher-ups.
So he’d grabbed his coat, kissed her cheek, and he’d taken off, sprinting down the corridor, hurtling down the stairs, dashing to his car. He had a general sense of where the police station was. Lower Clapton Road was just north of Hackney.
Now he hustled into reception, where he gave his name and showed his identification. The special on duty placed a call somewhere, and in less than two minutes, Barb Havers came to fetch him.
She brought him into the picture quickly: what she’d seen in the carpark of St. Thomas’ Hospital, her miserable wreck of a flaming worthless Mini breaking down, her appropriation of Lynley’s Bentley, the Lea Valley Ice Centre, the hurried plan, the crash of the Bentley into the van, finding Lynley and Ulrike Ellis within it, the brief confrontation with the killer himself.
“He didn’t count on the frying pan,” Barbara concluded. “I could’ve hit him round six times more, but the super shouted I’d bashed him enough.”
“Where is he?”
“The guv? In casualty. That’s where we all went when triple nine got these blokes”-with a gesture round her to indicate their colleagues from the Lower Clapton Road station-“over there. Kilfoyle’d hit him with the stun gun so much, they wanted to watch him for a while. Same for Ulrike.”
“And Kilfoyle?”
“Bugger’s head’s like a brick wall, Winnie. I didn’t break anything, more’s the pity. He’s probably got concussion, a contusion, whatever, but his vocal cords are operable, so he’s doing just fine ’s far as we’re concerned. Oh, and I got him with the stun gun ’s well.” She grinned. “Couldn’t resist.”
“Police brutality.”
“And proud to have it written on my tombstone. Here we are.” She shouldered open the door to an interview room. Inside, Robbie Kilfoyle sat with a duty solicitor who was speaking to him urgently.
Nkata’s first thought was that Kilfoyle didn’t, in fact, look very much like any e-fit they’d come up with during the course of the investigation. He bore only a mild resemblance to the man seen lurking round Square Four Gym, where Sean Lavery worked out, and he bore no resemblance at all to the man who’d bought the van from Muwaffaq Masoud late the previous summer, had he, in fact, even been that man. So much for people’s memories, Nkata thought.
Robson, on the other hand and for his sins, had been fairly close to the mark from the start with his profiling of the serial killer, and the meagre facts they were able to glean from Kilfoyle-when the duty solicitor wasn’t telling him to mind what he said or to plug his mug altogether-confirmed this. Kilfoyle’s age of twenty-seven was dead within range and his circumstances weren’t far off either. Mum deceased, he’d lived with his dad till the older man had dropped dead in late summer. That would’ve been the stressor, Nkata reckoned, because the first of the killings started not long afterwards. They already knew that his past fit the profile, with truancy problems, peeping Tom allegations, and AWOL concerns in his record. But in the limited time they had with him prior to DI John Stewart’s arrival to take over, they saw that the rest of the details were going to come from the evidence that would be gleaned from his home, possibly from the environs of the ice-rink carpark, and from his van.
The van was waiting for the arrival of SOCO. The environs of the ice-rink carpark were waiting for full daylight. That left his house in Granville Square. Nkata suggested they check it out. Barb was reluctant “to leave the bloody sod,” but she agreed to do so. They met DI Stewart on the way out. He already had his clipboard in hand, and the parting in his razor-cut hair might have been put there with a straight edge. There were still comb marks in it as well.
He nodded at them both. He directed his comments to Barb. “Well done, Havers. Doubtless you’ll be reinstated now. Back to rank. For what it’s worth, I approve. How is he?”
Nkata knew the DI wasn’t referring to Kilfoyle. Barb answered the question. “In casualty. For now. I expect they’ll release him in a few hours. I phoned his mum. She’ll fetch him. Or his sister will. They’re both here in London.”
“And otherwise?”
Barb shook her head. “He’s not saying much.”
Stewart nodded and looked bleakly at the police building. Barb’s face altered and Nkata could see she was thinking she could almost like the bloke for the instant in which he’d actually evidenced a modicum of compassion. “Poor bloody sod,” Stewart murmured. And then to them in his usual tone, “Carry on. Have something to eat. I’ll see you later.”
A meal was not of interest to them. They made their way instead to Granville Square. By the time they got there, it had come to life. A crime-scene van parked out front hailed SOCO’s presence within, and curious neighbours gathered on the pavement. Nkata flashed his ID at the constable at the front door, explained why Barb didn’t have hers, and got them both inside.
Within, more of the pieces of the killer’s personality became revealed. In the basement, a neat stack of newspapers and tabloids displayed stories that chronicled Kilfoyle’s exploits, and an A to Z sitting on a nearby table x-marked-the-spots he’d carefully selected to deposit bodies. Upstairs, the kitchen contained a wide variety of knives-all being tagged and bagged by SOCO-while over the chairs in the sitting room lay the same sort of tatting-edged mats that had been used to fashion a flimsy and respectful codpiece for Kimmo Thorne. Everywhere, tidiness reigned. The place was, in fact, a testament to tidiness. Only in one room were there signs-other than with the newspapers and the A to Z-that an extremely unsteady mind was at work: In a bedroom upstairs, a dated wedding picture had been defaced, with the shaggy-haired groom disemboweled by means of pen and ink and the same mark upon his forehead as had been made as the signature of the letter Kilfoyle had sent to New Scotland Yard. In the wardrobe as well, a disturbed hand had slit every male garment down its centre.
“Didn’t care for Dad much by the looks of things, did he?” Barb remarked.
A voice spoke from the doorway. “Thought you two might want to see this before we cart it off.” One of the white-suited forensic-team members stood there, an urn in his hands. It was a funeral urn by the look and the size of it, suitable for containing human ashes.
“What’ve you got?” Nkata asked.
“His souvenirs, I’ll wager.” He carried the urn to the chest of drawers on which the wedding picture stood. He tipped off its top. They looked inside.
Human dust formed the majority of the contents, along with several ash-covered lumps. Barb was the one who twigged what they were.
“The navels,” she said. “Whose ashes d’you expect those are? Dad’s?”
“Could be the Queen Mum’s for all I care,” Nkata remarked. “We got the bastard.”
The families could be given the news now. There would be no satisfactory justice for them; there never was. But there would be a conclusion.
Nkata drove Barb back to St. Thomas’ Hospital to arrange for her car to be towed away and put into running order again. There, they parted, and when they did, neither of them looked at the hospital itself.
Nkata headed towards New Scotland Yard. It was nine in the morning by then, and traffic was slow. He was negotiating Parliament Square when his mobile rang. He reckoned it was Barb, all attempts at coping with her car a failure. But a glance told him the number was not one he knew, so he said, “Nkata,” and nothing else.
“You arrested him, then. It was on the news this morning. Radio One.” A woman’s voice spoke, familiar, but not one he’d heard on the phone before.
“Who’s this?”
“I’m glad it’s over. And I know you meant good towards him. Towards us. I know that, Winston.”
Winston. “Yas?” he said.
“I knew it before but I d’in’t want to look at what that meant, unnerstan? I still don’t. Want to look at it, I mean.”
He considered this, considered the fact she’d phoned at all. “C’n you give it a glance, you think?”
She was silent.
“A glance’s not much, innit. Just a flick when you move the eyes. Tha’s all. Not looking at nothin, really, Yas. Just sneaking a look. Tha’s it. Tha’s all.”
“I don’t know,” was what she finally said.
Which was better than things had been before. “When you do know, you ring me, then,” he told her. “Waitin’s not a trouble to me.”
LYNLEY RECKONED that one of the reasons they forced him to stay in Casualty was their worry that he would do something to Kilfoyle if they released him. And the truth was that he would have done something, although not what they obviously thought he would do. Instead, he would merely have asked a question of the man: Why? And perhaps that question would have led to others: Why Helen and not me? And why in the way he had done it, with a boy in his company? What sort of statement did that make? Power? Indifference? Sadism? Pleasure? To destroy as many lives as possible in as many ways as possible in one swift blow because he knew the end was coming? Was that why? He’d be famous now, infamous, notorious, with all the attendant bells and whistles. He’d be up there with the best of the best, those names like Hindley that would forever light the firmament of iniquity. Avid followers of crime would flock to his trial and writers would document him in their books and he would thus never fade from public memory like an ordinary man or, for that matter, like an innocent woman and her unborn child, both dead now and soon to become yesterday’s news.
Obviously, those in power had believed that Lynley would spring to the attack if he came face-to-face with the monster again. But springing to the attack suggested a life force within, driving one forward. That was gone from him now.
They said they would release him to a relative and, since they had his clothing tucked away somewhere, he was forced to wait until a member of his family arrived. They had no doubt suggested in their phone call to Eaton Terrace that that person take as long as possible in making the trip to the hospital, so it was midmorning when his mother came to fetch him. She had Peter with her. A taxi, she said, was just outside.
“What’s happened?” She looked older to him than she had days earlier. He understood from this that the experience in living chaos, which they all were enduring, was taking a toll on her as well. He hadn’t thought of that before. He wondered what it meant that he thought of it now.
Beyond their mother, Lynley’s brother stood, lanky and ill at ease, as always. They’d been close once, but that was years in the past, with cocaine and alcohol and fraternal abandonment leering like spectres in the space between them. Too much disease ran through his family, Lynley thought, part of it of the body, the rest of it of the mind.
Peter said, “You all right, Tommy?,” and Lynley saw his brother’s hand reach out, then drop uselessly to his side. “They wouldn’t tell us on the phone…just to fetch you, they said. We thought…They said you’d come from near the river. But up here…What river? What were you-”
His brother was afraid, Lynley thought. Another possible loss in his life and Peter did not know how he’d cope with that if he had no crutch to lean upon: up the nose, in a vein, out of the bottle, whatever. Peter didn’t want that, but it was always out there, beckoning to him.
Lynley said, “I’m all right, Peter. I didn’t try anything. I won’t try anything,” although he knew that latter statement was neither a promise nor a lie.
Peter chewed on the inside of his lip, a habit from his childhood. He gave a nervous nod.
Lynley explained what had happened in two simple sentences: He’d had an encounter with the killer. Barbara Havers had taken care of matters.
“Remarkable woman,” Lady Asherton said.
“She is,” Lynley replied.
He discovered that Ulrike Ellis had been released to the police several hours earlier to make her statement. She was shaken, he learned, but otherwise unharmed. Kilfoyle had done nothing save stun her, gag her, and restrain her. That was bad enough but so far from what it could have been that it was ludicrous to suggest she would not recover.
In the taxi, he sank into a corner, his mother next to him and his brother perched on the jump seat opposite. He said to Peter, “Tell him Scotland Yard,” and his mother protested with, “You’re to come straight home.”
He shook his head. “Tell him,” and nodded towards the driver.
Peter leaned to the opening in the shield between driver and passengers. He said, “Victoria Street. New Scotland Yard. And after that, Eaton Terrace.”
The driver swerved into the street with the flow of traffic and headed in the direction of Westminster.
“We should have stayed with you, at the hospital,” Lady Asherton murmured.
“No,” Lynley said. “You did what I asked.” He looked out of the window. “I’ll want to bury them at Howenstow. I think that’s what she would have wanted. We never discussed it. There was no need. But I’d like-”
He felt his mother’s hand take his. “Of course,” she said.
“I don’t know when yet. I didn’t think to ask when they’d release the…her body. There are all sorts of details…”
“We’ll handle things, Tommy,” his brother said. “All of them. Let us.”
Lynley looked at him. Peter was leaning forward, closer to him than he’d been in ages. Slowly he nodded his agreement. “Some of them, then,” he said. “Thank you.”
They rode the rest of the way in silence. When the taxi made the turn from Victoria Street into Broadway, Lady Asherton spoke again. She said, “Will you let one of us come in with you, Tommy?”
“There’s no need,” he told her. “I’ll be all right, Mum.”
He waited till they drove off before he entered. Then he went inside, not to Victoria Block but to Tower Block. He made his way to Hillier’s office.
Judi MacIntosh looked up from her work. Like his mother, she seemed to be able to read him, and it appeared that what she read was accurate, for he had not come for a confrontation. She said, “Superintendent, I…All of us here…I can’t imagine what you’re going through.” She held her hands at her throat, as if beseeching him to relieve her of saying anything more.
He said, “Thank you,” and he wondered how many more times he would have to thank people in the coming months. Indeed, he wondered what he was even thanking them for. His breeding called for this expression of gratitude when he wanted instead to raise his head and shriek into the eternal night that was falling round him. He despised good breeding. But even despising it, he relied upon it again when he said, “Would you tell him I’m here? I’d like a word. It won’t take long.”
She nodded. Rather than phone into Hillier’s office, however, she went through the door. She closed it softly behind her. A minute passed. Another. They were probably phoning someone to come up. Nkata again. Perhaps John Stewart. Someone capable of restraining him. Someone to escort him from the premises.
Judi MacIntosh returned. “Do go in,” she said.
Hillier wasn’t in his usual position, behind the desk. He wasn’t standing at one of the windows. Instead, he’d come across the carpet to meet Lynley halfway. He said quietly, “Thomas, you must go home and get some rest. You can’t continue-”
“I know.” Lynley couldn’t recall the last time he’d slept. He’d been running on anxiety and adrenaline for so long he no longer remembered what it felt like to be doing otherwise. He removed his warrant card and every other vestige of police identification that he had upon him. He extended them to the assistant commissioner.
Hillier looked at them but did not take them. “I won’t accept this,” he said. “You’ve not been thinking straight. You’re not thinking straight now. I can’t allow you to make a decision like this-”
“Believe me, sir,” Lynley cut in, “I’ve made far more difficult decisions.” He passed Hillier then and went to his desk. He lay his identification upon it.
“Thomas,” Hillier said, “don’t do this. Take some time off. Take compassionate leave. With everything that’s happened, you can’t be in a position to decide your future or anyone else’s.”
Lynley felt the hollowness of a laugh rising in him. He could decide. He had decided.
He wanted to say that he didn’t know any longer how to be, let alone who to be. He wanted to explain he was good for no one and nothing now and he did not know if things would ever be any different. Instead what he said was, “For my part of what went between us, sir, I am most deeply regretful.”
“Thomas…” The tone of Hillier’s voice-was it pained? It actually sounded so-stopped him at the door. He turned. Hillier said, “Where will you go?”
“To Cornwall,” he said. “I’m taking them home.”
Hillier nodded then. He said something more as Lynley opened the door. He couldn’t have been certain what the words were, but later he would think they’d been “Go with God.”
Outside, in the anteroom, Barbara Havers was waiting. She looked done in, and it came to Lynley that at this point she’d been working more than twenty-four hours straight. She said, “Sir…”
“I’m fine, Barbara. You needn’t have come up.”
“I’m to take you somewhere.”
“Where?”
“Just…They’re suggesting I drive you home. I’ve a car on loan, so you won’t have to cram yourself into my heap.”
“That’s fine, then,” Lynley said. “Let’s go.”
He felt her hand on his elbow, guiding him from the office to the lift. She spoke to him as they went along, and he gathered from her words that there was evidence aplenty to link Kilfoyle to the deaths of the Colossus boys.
“And the rest?” he asked her as the lift doors opened on the underground carpark. “What about the rest?”
And she spoke of Hamish Robson and then of the boy in lockup at the Harrow Road station. Robson’s was a crime of necessity and opportunity, she said. As for the boy in Harrow Road, he wouldn’t say.
“But there’s no connection at all between him and Colossus,” Havers said as they reached the car. They continued talking over its roof, her on one side and him on the other. “It looks like…Sir, it looks to everyone like a one-off street crime. He won’t talk…this kid. But we’re thinking it’s a gang.”
He looked at her. She seemed underwater to him, and at a great distance. “A gang? Doing what?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know.”
“But you have an idea. You must. Tell me.”
“Car’s unlocked, sir.”
“Barbara, tell me.”
She opened her door but didn’t climb inside. “It could’ve been an initiation, sir. He needed to prove something to someone, and Helen was there. She was just…there.”
Lynley knew from this there was supposed to come absolution for himself, but he could not feel it. He said, “Take me to Harrow Road, then.”
She said, “You don’t need to-”
“Take me to Harrow Road, Barbara.”
She gazed at him and then got into the car. She started it up. She said, “The Bentley…”
“You put it to good use,” he told her. “Well done, Constable.”
“It’s to be Sergeant again,” she said. “Finally.”
He said, “Sergeant,” and he felt his lips curve slightly. “Well done, Sergeant Havers.”
Her own lips trembled and he saw her chin dimple. She said, “Right. Well.” She got them out of the carpark and on their way.
If she worried that he was going to do something rash, she gave no sign of it. Instead she told him how Ulrike Ellis had got herself into the company of Robbie Kilfoyle, and from there she went on to say that the announcement of the arrest had been handed over to John Stewart to make before the media once Nkata refused to do it. “Stewart’s moment of glory, sir,” was how she concluded. “I think he’s been waiting for stardom for years.”
“Keep on his good side,” Lynley told her. “I don’t want to think of you with enemies in the future.”
She glanced at him. He could see what she feared. He wished he could tell her the situation was otherwise.
In the Harrow Road station, Lynley told her what he wanted. She listened, nodded, and in an act of friendship he welcomed with gratitude, she did not try to talk him out of it. When strings had been pulled and arrangements had been made, she came to fetch him. As she’d done in Victoria Street, she walked along at his side, her hand lightly upon his elbow.
She said, “In here, sir,” and opened a door to a dimly lit room. Beyond it, on the other side of the two-way mirror, Helen’s killer sat. They’d given him a plastic bottle of juice, but he hadn’t opened it. He had his hands clasped round it, and his shoulders were slumped.
Lynley felt a large breath leave him. All he could say was, “Young. So young. Good Christ in heaven.”
“He’s twelve years old, sir.”
“Why.”
There was no answer and he knew she knew he did not expect one. He said, “What’s happened to us, Barbara? What in God’s name?” And he also knew she knew he wanted no reply.
Still, she said, “Will you let me take you home now?”
He said, “Yes. You can take me home.”
IT WAS LATE in the afternoon when he went to Cheyne Row. Deborah answered the door. Wordlessly, she held it open for him to enter. They stood facing each other-long-ago lovers that they were-and Deborah gazed as if to make a study of him before she straightened her shoulders in what seemed to be resolve and said, “In here, Tommy. Simon’s not home.”
He didn’t tell her he’d come to see her, not his friend, because she seemed to know this. She took him into the dining room where, in what seemed like another century, she’d been wrapping the baby gift for Helen. On the table, folded neatly upon the carrier bags which had held them, lay the christening outfits that Deborah and Helen had bought. Deborah said, “It seemed to me that you’d want to see them before I…well, before I took them back to the shops. I don’t know why I thought that. But as it was the last thing she did…I hope I was right.”
They were Helen, all of them: her whimsical statement about what was truly important and what was decidedly not. Here was the tiny dinner jacket she’d spoken of, there a miniature clown costume, next to it white velvet dungarees, an impossibly tiny three-piece suit, an equally tiny BabyGro fashioned into a bunny costume…The assortment was appropriate to anything but a christening, but that had been Helen’s point. We’ll start our own tradition, darling. Neither side of our subtly battling families can possibly be offended by that.
Lynley said, “I couldn’t let them do what they wanted to do. I couldn’t face it. She’d become a specimen to them. A few months on life support, sir, and we’ll see how everything turns out. Could be bad, could be worse, but in the meantime we’ll have pushed the envelope of medical science. One for the journals, this will be. One for the books.” He looked at Deborah. Her eyes were bright, but she gave him the gift of not weeping. He said, “I couldn’t do that to her, Deborah. I couldn’t. So I shut things down. I shut them down.”
“Last night?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, Tommy.”
“I don’t know how to live with myself.”
“Without blame,” she said. “That’s how you must do it.”
“You as well,” he told her. “Promise me that.”
“What?”
“That you won’t live a single moment thinking that this was your fault, that you could have done something to stop what happened, to prevent it, to anything. You were parking a car. That’s all you were doing. Parking a car. I want you to see it that way because it’s the truth. Will you do that for me?”
“I’ll try,” she said.
WHEN BARBARA HAVERS arrived home that evening, she spent thirty minutes cruising up and down streets, waiting for someone to vacate a parking space at a time of day when most people were at home for the duration of the night. She finally found a space in Winchester Road, nearly all the way to South Hampstead, and she took it gratefully despite the fact that a lengthy slog awaited her once she locked up and began plodding back to Eton Villas.
As she walked, she realised how much she ached. Her muscles were sore from her legs up to her neck, but particularly in her shoulders. The wrecking of the Bentley had had a greater impact than she’d felt in the immediate aftermath. Clubbing Robbie Kilfoyle with the frying pan hadn’t helped. Had she been a different sort of woman, she would have decided a nice massage was in order. Steam room, sauna, whirlpool, the whole experience. Throw in a manicure and pedicure as well. But she was not that sort of woman. She told herself that a shower would do. And a good night’s sleep, since she’d gone without for some thirty-seven hours and counting.
She kept her mind on that. Up to Fellows Road and along the way, she fixed her thoughts on showering and dropping into bed. She decided she wouldn’t even turn on the lights in her bungalow lest anything keep her from her appointed rounds, which were defined by a journey from front door to dining table (drop off one’s belongings), from dining table to bathroom (turn on the shower, shed clothes onto the floor, let water beat upon throbbing muscles), and from bathroom to bed (the embrace of Morpheus). This allowed her not to think of what she didn’t want to think about: that he hadn’t told her, that she’d had to learn it from DI Stewart.
She lectured herself about the way she felt, which was cut off and drifting into space. She told herself that his private life was none of her bloody business anyway. She pointed out to herself that his pain would have been intolerable, and to speak of it-to confide that he had ended things and with them his life as he’d known it and seen it weaving a future for him, for her, for them as a little family-would probably have finished him off. But all her self-talk did was provide a thin patina of guilt over her other feelings. And all the guilt did was momentarily silence the child within her who kept insisting they were supposed to be friends. Friends told each other things, important things. Friends leaned on each other because they were friends.
But the news had come to the incident room via Dorothea Harriman, who’d asked for the ear of DI Stewart, who’d then made a sombre general announcement. No one knew about funeral arrangements, he’d said in conclusion, but he’d keep them informed. In the meantime, though, carry on, you lot. There’re reports to be made to the CPS on more than one front, so let’s make them because I want this signed, sealed, and delivered in such a way that no doubt exists in anyone’s mind what kind of verdict the jury’s intended to hand down.
Barbara had sat there and listened. She’d been unable to prevent herself from thinking that they’d been together from Hillier’s office to Harrow Road and from Harrow Road to Eaton Terrace, and Lynley had never said he’d turned off his wife’s life support. She knew it was not what she ought to be thinking. She knew his decision to keep the information to himself was not about her. Yet still she felt a sorrow renewed rush over her. That child inside her kept insisting, We’re meant to be friends.
Why they were not, and could never be at the end of the day, was the fault not of who they were-man, woman, colleagues-but of who they were beneath all that. This had been both determined and defined before either one of them had seen the first light of day. She could rail against it till the end of time, but she could not change it. Certain strands of certain fabrics made the fabric itself too strong to be torn.
In Eton Villas at last, she turned up the drive and in through the gate. Hadiyyah, she saw, was heaving a rubbish sack along the path to the bins at the back of the building, and Barbara watched her struggling with it for a moment before she said, “Hey, kiddo. C’n I help?”
“Barbara!” Her voice was bright as ever. Her head lifted and her plaits swung round. “Dad and I have cleaned out the fridge. He says spring’s coming and this’s our first step to welcome it. Cleaning the fridge, that is. ’Course that means that we’re going to be cleaning the rest of the flat next, and I’m not much looking forward to that. He’s making a list of what we’re to do. A list, Barbara. And washing walls is at the top of it.”
“That sounds pretty bad.”
“Mummy used to wash them every year, so that’s why we’re doing it. So when she comes home, everything’ll be nice and sparkling for her.”
“Coming home, then, is she? Your mum?”
“Oh my goodness, eventually. One can’t be on holiday forever.”
“No. I expect you’re right.” Barbara handed over her shoulder bag to the little girl and took the rubbish from her. She heaved it like a duffel and manoeuvred it to the bins. Together they heave-hoed it to join the rest of the rubbish.
“I’m going to have tap lessons,” Hadiyyah told her as they brushed themselves off. “Dad said so tonight. I’m ever so pleased, because I’ve wanted them for ages. Will you come to watch me when I do my exhibition?”
“Front-row centre,” Barbara said. “I love exhibitions.”
“Brilliant,” she said. “P’rhaps Mummy’ll be there as well. If I get good enough, she’ll come. I know it. ’Night, Barbara. Got to get back to Dad.”
She scooted off, round the corner of the house. Barbara waited till she heard a door shut, telling her her little friend was safely inside. Then she went to her own digs and unlocked the door. True to her decision, she turned on no lights. She merely walked to the table, dumped her belongings, and turned to head for the shower and its blessed heat.
The damn answering machine stopped her with its blinking light. She thought about ignoring it but knew she couldn’t. She sighed and made her way across to it. She punched the button and heard the familiar voice.
“Barbie, dear, I’ve got the appointment.” Mrs. Flo, Barbara thought, her mother’s keeper. “My Lord, it wasn’t easy to get one, the NHS being what it is these days. Now I do have to tell you that Mum’s gone back to the Blitz, but I don’t want you to worry about it. If we must sedate her, we simply must, my dear, and that’s all there is to it. Her health-”
Barbara cut off the message. She would listen to the rest another time, she vowed. But not tonight.
A hesitant knock sounded on her front door. She crossed back to it. She’d not switched on a single interior light, so she reckoned only one person knew she was finally at home. She opened the door, and he stood before her, a covered pan in his hand.
Azhar said, “I believe you have not had your dinner, Barbara,” and extended the pan in her direction.
She said, “Hadiyyah told me you were cleaning out the fridge. Are these leftovers? If yours are anything like mine, Azhar, I’d be taking my life in my hands to eat them.”
He smiled. “This is freshly made. Pilau, to which I’ve added chicken.” He lifted the lid. In the dim light, she couldn’t see the contents, but she could smell their fragrance. Her mouth watered. Hours, days, weeks since she’d had a decent meal.
She said, “Cheers. Sh’ll I take it, then?”
“If I might set it down?”
“’Course.” She held the door open wider but still did not turn on the light. At this point it had more to do with the terminal disarray of her digs than with a desire for sleep. Azhar, she knew, was akin to a neat freak on steroids. She didn’t trust the strength of his heart if he saw the mess she’d not dealt with in weeks.
He placed the pan in the kitchen area, on the work top. She waited by the door, assuming he’d leave after that. He didn’t.
Instead he said, “Your case is concluded, then. The news is full of it.”
“This morning, right. Or last night. Or somewhere in between. I don’t actually know. Things start running together after a while.”
He nodded. “I see.”
She waited for more. More did not come. A silence hung between them. He finally broke it.
“You have worked long with him, haven’t you?”
His voice was kind. Her insides gave warning. She said lightly, “Lynley? Yeah. Few years. A decent enough bloke if you can get past that voice. He finished school in the days before estuary English, when they turned out toffs who did world tours and spent the rest of their lives chasing foxes round the countryside.”
“Things are very bad for him.”
She didn’t reply. Instead she saw Lynley at the front door to his house in Eaton Terrace. She saw the door open before he could put his key in the lock, his sister framed in the light from inside. She waited, thinking he might turn and wave a farewell, but his sister put her arm round his waist and drew him within.
“Terrible things happen to very good people,” Azhar said.
“Well yeah. Right.”
She couldn’t-and wouldn’t-talk about it. Too fresh, too sore, vinegar washing over open wounds. She ran her hand back through her chopped-up hair and gave a big sigh that he was meant to read as tired-woman-needing-her-rest-thank-you. But he’d been a fool only once in his life, and he’d learned to be a wiser man from that experience. So she couldn’t drive him off with theatrics. She would have to be direct or stand there and tolerate what he had to say.
“Such a loss. One does not recover completely from that.”
“Yeah. Well. I reckon that’s right. He’s got a row to hoe and I don’t envy him it.”
“His wife. And the child. There was a child, the papers said.”
“Helen was pregnant, yeah.”
“And did you know her well?”
She. Would. Not. She said, “Azhar…” and took an unsteady breath. “You see, I’m knackered. Absolutely done in. Pickled. Dead on my-”
The word. The word itself and she stopped herself on it. She strangled back a cry. Tears sprang to her eyes. She brought a fist to her mouth.
Leave, she thought. Please go. Bloody leave.
But he didn’t do that, and she saw that he wouldn’t, that he’d come for a reason beyond what she could, at that moment, comprehend.
She waved a hand at him, waved him off and away, but he didn’t do as she hoped he would do. Instead he crossed the small room to her, said only, “Barbara,” and took her into his arms.
She began to weep, then. Like the child she’d been and the woman she’d become. It seemed the safest place to do so.