“No, but I’m not a fifteen-year-old boy. And anyway, there would be arrangements. They’d be drawn up by the solicitor.”
“No,” she said. “Please don’t ask me again. I just can’t.”
He let a moment pass. She’d turned away. Her hair tumbled down her back nearly to her waist, and he touched a lock of it, saw how it curled naturally round his fingers. He said, “Will you just think about it a bit longer before you decide? As I said, she’d like to meet us. We could do that much if nothing else. You might well like her, her family, the boy. You know, the fact that she wants to keep contact with the child… That’s not a bad thing, Deborah.”
“How is it good?” she asked, still turned from him.
“It indicates a sense of responsibility. She doesn’t just want to walk away and get on with her life as if nothing ever happened to change it. In a way she wants to provide for the child, be there to answer questions should questions come up.”
“We could answer questions. You know that very well. And why on earth— if she wants to be involved in the child’s life— would she choose a couple from London to be the parents anyway, instead of a couple from Southampton? That doesn’t make sense. She’s from Southampton, isn’t she?”
“She is.”
“So you see…”
He reckoned she couldn’t bear another disappointment and he didn’t blame her. But if they didn’t continue to push forward, if they didn’t follow whatever avenue opened up before them, an opportunity could easily be missed and if they wanted a child, if they truly wanted a child …
That was, of course, the real question. Asking it, however, constituted a mine field, and he’d been married to Deborah long enough to know that some fields were too dangerous to venture into. Still, he said, “Have you another solution, then? Another possibility?”
She didn’t reply at once. He had the sense, though, that she did have something else in mind, something she was reluctant to mention. He repeated the question. She quickly responded with, “Surrogacy.”
He said, “Good God, Deborah, that route’s fraught with— ”
“Not a donor mother, Simon, but a host mother. Our embryo, our baby, and someone willing to carry it. It wouldn’t be hers. She’d have no attachment. Or at least she’d have no right to an attachment.”
His spirits plummeted. He wondered how something that for other people was so damnably natural could have, for them, turned into such a mire of appointments, doctors, specialists, procedures, solicitors, questions, answers, and more questions. And this, now? Months and months would pass while a surrogate was sought and interviewed and checked out in every possible way while Deborah took drugs that would do God only knew what to her system in order to harvest (God, what a word) eggs while he disappeared into a lavatory stall with container in hand to make the required, passionless, and loveless deposit and all of this to result— perhaps, if they were lucky, if nothing went wrong— in a child that was biologically their own. It seemed wildly complicated, inhumanly mechanised, and only partially guaranteed of success.
He blew out a breath. He said, “Deborah,” and he knew that she recognised in his tone a form of hesitation that she would not want to hear. That it had to do with his desire to protect her would not occur to Deborah. And that was just as well, he thought. For she hated him to protect her from life, even as she felt life’s blows more than he thought either necessary or good.
She said in a low voice, “I know what you’re thinking. And this puts us at an impasse, doesn’t it?”
“We just see things differently. We’re coming at it from different directions. One of us sees an opportunity where the other sees an insurmountable difficulty.”
She thought about this. She said slowly, “How odd. It seems there’s nothing to be done, then.”
She lay next to him, then, but her back was to him. He switched out the light and put his hand on her hip. She didn’t respond.
WANDSWORTH
LONDON
It was nearly midnight when Lynley arrived. Regardless of his promise to her, he knew he should have gone home instead and slept however he was meant to sleep on this particular night, which would be fitfully, no doubt. But instead he made his way to Isabelle’s, and he let himself in with his key.
She met him at the door. He’d expected she would have long gone to bed, and it did seem she’d been there at first. But a light was on next to the sofa in the sitting area of her flat, and he saw a magazine spread out there, evidently discarded when she’d heard his key in the lock. She’d left her dressing gown on the sofa as well, and as she wore nothing beneath, she came to him nude and when he closed the door behind him, she stepped into his arms and lifted her mouth to his.
She tasted of lemons. For a moment he allowed himself to wonder if the taste of her indicated that she was trying to hide the fact that she’d been drinking again. But then he didn’t care as his hands travelled the distance from her hips to her waist to her breasts.
She began to undress him. She murmured, “This is very bad, you know.”
He whispered, “What is?”
“That I’ve thought of little else all day.” His jacket fell to the floor and she worked the buttons of his shirt. He bent to her neck, her breasts.
“That,” he said, “is very bad in your line of work.”
“In yours as well.”
“Ah, but I’ve more discipline.”
“Have you indeed?”
“I have.”
“And if I touch you here, like this?” She did so. He smiled. “What happens to your discipline then?”
“The same thing, I daresay, that happens to yours if I kiss you here, if I decide on more, if I use my tongue… rather like this.”
She drew in a sharp breath. She chuckled. “You’re an evil man, Inspector. But I’m fully able to match evil for evil. Rather, as you say, like this.” She lowered his trousers. She made him as naked as she was herself. She used her nakedness to force action from him.
She was, he found, as slick and as ready as he was. He said, “The bedroom?”
She said, “Not tonight, Tommy.”
“Here, then?”
“Oh yes. Right here.”
2 NOVEMBER
BRYANBARROW
CUMBRIA
Because of the hour of the day, Zed Benjamin had been able to score a good table at the Willow and Well, and he’d been sitting there for fifty minutes, waiting for something to happen on the other side of a window whose lead mullions were in need of replacement. The cold seeped past them like a visitation of the angel of death, but the benefit of this discomfort was the fact that no one would question the knitted ski cap that Zed was thus able to keep planted on his head. The cap was his bow to making himself less memorable since it fully covered his flame-coloured hair. There was nothing he could do about his extreme height save slouching whenever he remembered to do so.
He was managing just that at his table in the pub. He’d been going from hunching over his pint of lager to slumping in his chair with his legs stretched out till his arse was as numb as the heart of a pimp, but in all the time he’d maintained one posture or another, nothing suggesting that illumination was in the offing had occurred in what he could see of the village of Bryanbarrow just outside of the window.
This was his third day in Cumbria, his third day of searching for the sex that would keep his story on Nicholas Fairclough from being binned by Rodney Aronson, but so far he’d come up with nothing except fifteen lines of a new poem, which, God knew, he wasn’t about to mention to Aronson when the odious editor of The Source made his daily phone call to ask meaningfully how things were going and to remind Zed that whatever costs he was incurring would be his own. As if he didn’t know that already, Zed thought. As if he were not staying in the most modest room in the most modest bed-and-breakfast he could find in the entire region: an attic bedroom in one of the multitudinous Victorian terraces that lined virtually every street in Windermere, this one on Broad Street within walking distance of the public library. He had to duck to get through the door of the room and practically do the limbo if he wanted to walk to the single window. The loo was on the floor below and the heat was by means of whatever came up from the rest of the house. But all of this made the price extremely right, so he’d snapped it up upon a single glance once he learned how little it was going to cost him. In recompense, it seemed, for the myriad inconveniences of the room, the landlady provided sumptuous breakfasts involving everything from porridge to prunes, so Zed hadn’t had to eat lunch since he’d arrived, which was just as well since he used the time he would have otherwise spent in a café trying to suss out who— besides himself— was prowling round the death of Ian Cresswell. But if Scotland Yard was indeed here in Cumbria in the person of a detective on the scent of the unfortunate drowning of Nicholas Fairclough’s cousin, Zed had not been able to locate that person, and until he saw him, he wasn’t going to be able to mould The Ninth Life into the Nine Lives and a Death that Rodney Aronson apparently wanted.