It was perfectly quiet inside, aside from the well-muted sound of traffic on Kensington Road, just beyond Rutland Gate. She passed along a marble floor, treading silently on a faded Turkey carpet. The doors to two ground-floor flats faced each other here, and a table upon which sat cubbies for the day’s post was positioned beneath a heavy gilt mirror. She gave a quick glance to the cubbies, but like the bells outside next to the door, they offered flat numbers only and not names.
Just beyond the stairway and a lift, she found a door marked Porter. The porter in question opened it to her knock. He looked like a pensioner and he wore a uniform too tight in the collar and too loose in the stomach. He gave Barbara the once-over and his expression said that if she was intending to make a purchase of a flat in the building, she had better prepare herself for an accepting-offers-beginning-at situation that was going to knock her out of her high-top trainers.
He said, “Don’t know about any flat on offer, do I,” without any introduction.
She said, “This is a bit of a preemptive strike, if you know what I mean. C’n I…?” She indicated his office and smiled pleasantly. “I’ll just take a minute of your time,” she added.
He stepped back and tilted his head towards a desk situated in a corner of the room. He had a nice little setup here, Barbara thought, with part of the place made into a snug sitting room complete with television currently tuned in to an ancient film in which Sandra Dee and Troy Donahue were locked in a timeless, adolescent, agonizing embrace as music swelled with a familiar theme. She thought for a moment before she came up with the title. A Summer Place, that was it. All about young, tormented love. Nothing quite like it, she thought. Shoot me first.
The porter saw the direction of her gaze and, perhaps determining his choice of film was some sort of revelation about him, went to the television and hastily switched it off. That done, he moved to his desk and sat behind it. This left Barbara standing, but that apparently was his intention.
Barbara expressed what she felt was a suitable amount of gratitude for the porter’s willingness to talk to her. She asked some questions about the building, the sorts of queries she expected a potential buyer might have before plunking down hard-earned cash on a piece of outrageously priced Kensington property. Age, condition, problems with heating and plumbing and ventilation, difficulties encountered with other residents, presence of undesirables, the neighbourhood, noise, pubs, restaurants, markets, corner shops, and on and on. When she’d run the gamut of everything she could possibly think of— jotting his answers in her small spiral notebook— she said, laying out her bait and hoping he’d go for it, “Brilliant. Can’t thank you enough. Most of this matches up with what Bernard told me about the place.”
He bit. “Bernard? That your estate agent? ’Cause like I said, I don’t know of a place that’s going up for sale.”
“No, no. Bernard Fairclough. He told me an associate of his lives here and she apparently told him about a flat. I can’t remember her name…”
“Oh. That’d be Vivienne Tully, that would,” he said. “Don’t think it’s her place going up for sale, though. Situation’s too convenient for that.”
“Oh, right,” Barbara said. “It’s not Vivienne’s. I thought it might be and got a bit excited about the possibility but Bernie”— she especially liked the touch of Bernie— “said she’s quite established here.”
“That’d be the case,” he said. “Nice woman, as well. Remembers me at Christmas, she does, which is more than I can say for some of ’em.” He shot a look at the television, then, and cleared his throat. Barbara saw that on a squat table next to a reclining chair, a plate of beans on toast was waiting. Doubtless, he wanted to get back to that as well as back to Sandra, Troy, and more of their passionate, forbidden love. Well, she couldn’t exactly blame him. Passionate and forbidden love made life more interesting, didn’t it?
LAKE WINDERMERE
CUMBRIA
Lynley was having a preprandial sherry with Valerie and Bernard Fairclough when Mignon showed up. They were in what Valerie had referred to as the small drawing room, where a fire was doing a fine job of cutting the chill. None of them heard Mignon enter the house— the front door being some distance from the room in which they sat— so she was able to make something of a surprise entrance.
The door swung open and she shoved her zimmer frame in ahead of her. It had begun to rain again, quite heavily, and she’d come from the folly without raingear. This omission— which Lynley reckoned had to be deliberate— had caused her to become wet enough to provoke a reaction from both of her parents. Her hair was flattened, her Alice-in-Wonderland hairband dripped water onto her forehead and into her eyes, and her shoes and clothing were soaked. It was not a far enough walk from the folly to the main house to have become so wet. Lynley concluded that she’d stood for a while in the downpour for the drama a thorough soaking might provide. Seeing her, her mother jumped to her feet and Lynley— who couldn’t have stopped himself if he’d tried— politely rose to his.
“Mignon!” Valerie cried. “Why’ve you come from the folly without an umbrella?”
Mignon said, “I can hardly hold an umbrella while using this, can I?” in reference to the zimmer.
“A mac and a hat might have solved that problem,” her father said guilelessly. Notably, he hadn’t risen and his expression indicated he was fully aware of her ploy.
“I forgot it,” Mignon said.
Valerie said, “Here. Sit by the fire, darling. I’ll fetch some towels for your hair.”
“Don’t bother,” Mignon said. “I’ll be walking back in a moment. You’re dining soon, aren’t you? As I had no invitation to join you this evening, I don’t want to take up too much of your time.”
“You don’t need an invitation,” Valerie said. “You’re always welcome. But since you’ve preferred… because of…” Clearly, she didn’t want to say more in front of Lynley.
Just as clearly, Mignon did. She said, “I’ve had a gastric band, Thomas. Big as an ox, I was. You wouldn’t believe how big. Destroyed my knees heaving my fat round the planet for a good twenty years, so they’ll be replaced next. The knees, I mean. Then I’ll be as good as new and some bloke’ll come along and take me off my parents’ hands. Or so they hope.”
She made her way across the room and lowered herself into the chair her mother had vacated. She said to her father, “I could do with a sherry myself,” and to Lynley, “I thought at first that’s why you’d come. Stupid of me, I know, but you’ve got to consider who my father is. Always has a scheme, my dad. I knew you were part of one as soon as I saw you. I just misjudged what the scheme actually was, thinking you’d come to have a look at me, if you know what I mean.”
“Mignon, really,” her mother said.
“I think I’ll take those towels after all.” Mignon seemed to like the idea of ordering Valerie about. She looked quite gratified when her mother went off to do her bidding. Her father in the meantime hadn’t moved, so she said to him, “That sherry, Dad?”
Bernard, Lynley thought, looked like a man who was about to say something he’d regret. In any other circumstances, Lynley would have waited to see what that something was, but his natural inclination towards civility got the better of him. He set his own glass of sherry on the table next to his chair. He said, “Let me,” and Bernard cut him off with, “I’ll get it, Tommy.”
“Make it a big one,” Mignon told her father. “I’ve just had a successful romantic interlude with Mr. Seychelles and while normally one has a fag for afters, I’d prefer to get sloshed.”