“Is this Tommy in a temper?” St. James asked.
But it hadn't been anger behind Lynley's actions, and desolate as she was, Barbara wouldn't accuse him of that.
Deborah joined them then, saying, “What's happened?” and fondly kissing her husband on the cheek as she passed him and poured herself a small sherry.
The story was repeated, Barbara telling it, St. James adding details, and Helen listening in thoughtful silence. Like Lynley, the others were in possession of the facts connected to Barbara's professional insubordination and her assault on a superior officer. Unlike Lynley, however, they appeared capable of seeing the situation as Barbara herself had seen it: unavoidable, regrettable, but fully justified, the only course open to a woman who was simultaneously under pressure and in the right.
St. James even went so far as to say, “Tommy'll doubtless come round to your way of thinking at the end of the day, Barbara. It's rough that you have to go through this though.” And the other two women murmured their agreement.
All of this should have been intensely gratifying. After all, their sympathy was what Barbara had come to Chelsea in order to gather. But she found that their sympathy merely enflamed her pain and the sense of betrayal that had driven her to Chelsea in the first place. She said, “I guess it boils down to this: The inspector wants someone he knows he can trust to work with him.”
And no matter the ensuing protests of Lynley's wife and Lynley's friends, Barbara knew she was not, at the present time, anywhere close to being that someone.
CHAPTER 4
Julian Britton could picture exactly what his cousin was doing on the other end of the telephone line. He could hear a steady thwack thwack thwack punctuating her sentences, and that sound told him that she was in the old, ill-lit kitchen of Broughton Manor, chopping up some of the vegetables that she grew at the bottom of one of the gardens. “I didn't say that I was unwilling to help you out, Julian.” Samantha's comment was accompanied by a thwack that sounded more decisive than the earlier ones. “I merely asked what's going on. There's nothing wrong with that, is there?”
He didn't want to reply. He didn't want to tell her what was going on: Samantha, after all, had never made a secret of her aversion for Nicola Maiden.
So what could he say? Little enough. By the time the police in Buxton had made the assessment that it might behoove them to phone the force headquarters in Ripley, by the time Ripley had sent two panda cars to examine the location in which Nicola's Saab and an old Triumph motorcycle were parked, and by the time Ripley and Buxton in conjunction reached the obvious conclusion that Mountain Rescue was needed, an old woman on a morning stroll with her dog had stumbled into the hamlet of Peak Forest, pounded on a door, and told a tale about a body she'd come across in the ring of Nine Sisters Henge. The police had gone there at once, leaving Mountain Rescue waiting at their meeting point for further directions. When those directions came, they were ominous enough: Mountain Rescue would not be needed.
Julian knew all this because as a member of Mountain Rescue, he'd gone to his team's rendezvous site once the call had come through-passed along that morning by Samantha, who intercepted it in his absence at Broughton Manor. So he was standing among the members of his team, checking his equipment as the leader read from a dog-eared checklist, when the mobile rang and the equipment check was first interrupted and then canceled altogether. The team leader passed on the information he was given-the old woman, her dog, their morning walk, the body, Nine Sisters Henge.
Julian had returned immediately to Maiden Hall, wanting to be the one to break the news to Andy and Nan before they heard it from the police. He intended to say that it was only a body after all. There was nothing to indicate that the body was Nicola's.
But when he arrived, there was a panda car drawn up to the front of the hunting lodge. And when he dashed inside, it was to find Andy and Nan in a corner of the lounge where the diamond panes of a large bay window cast miniature rainbows against the wall. They were in the company of a uniformed constable. Their faces were ashen. Nan was holding on to Andy's arm, her fingers creating deep indentations in the sleeve of his plaid flannel shirt. Andy was staring down at the coffee table between them and the constable.
All three of them looked up when Julian entered. The constable spoke. “Excuse me, sir. But if you could give Mr. and Mrs. Maiden a few minutes…”
Julian realised that the constable assumed he was one of the guests at Maiden Hall. Nan clarified his relationship to the family, identifying him as “my daughter's fiancé They've only just become engaged. Come, Julian,” and she extended a hand to him and drew him down onto the sofa so that the three of them sat together as the family they were not and could never be.
The constable had just got to the unsettling part. A female body had been found on the moor. It might be the Maidens’ missing daughter. He was sorry, but one of them was going to have to accompany him to Buxton to make an identification.
“Let me go,” Julian had said impulsively. It felt inconceivable that either of Nicolas parents would have to be subjected to the grisly task. Indeed, it felt inconceivable that the identification of Nicola's body should fall to anyone but himself: the man who loved her, wanted her, and tried to make a difference in her life.
The constable said regretfully that it had to be a member of the family. When Julian offered to go along with Andy, Andy demurred. Someone needed to stay with Nan, he said. And to his wife, “I'll phone from Buxton, if… if.”
He'd been as good as his word. It had taken several hours for the call to come through, owing to the time involved in getting the body from the moor to the hospital where the post-mortems would be performed. But when he'd seen the young woman's corpse, he'd phoned.
Nan hadn't collapsed as Julian thought she might do. She'd said, “Oh no,” shoved the phone at Julian, and run from the lodge.
Julian had spoken to Andy only long enough to hear from his own mouth what Julian already knew to be the fact. Then he'd gone after Nicola's mother. He found her on her knees in Christian-Louis's herb garden behind the Maiden Hall kitchen. She was scraping up handfuls of the freshly watered earth, mounding them round her as if she wished to bury herself. She was saying, “No. No,” but she wasn't weeping.
She fought to break loose when Julian put his hands on her shoulders and began to lift her to her feet. He'd never suspected how strong such a small woman could be and he'd had to shout for help from the kitchen. Both of the Grindleford women had come running. Together with Julian, they'd managed to get Nan back into the lodge and up the staff stairs. With their help, Julian got her to drink two shots of brandy. And it was at this point that she began to weep.
“I must do…” she cried. “Give me something to do.” That last word rose on a chilling wail.
Julian was aware of being out of his depth. She needed a doctor. He went to phone one. He could have left it to the Grindleford duo. But making the decision to call in a doctor got him out of Nan and Andy's bedroom, a space suddenly so close and confined that Julian felt in another minute he would be unable to breathe.
So he'd descended the stairs and commandeered the telephone. He rang for a doctor. And then, finally, he rang Broughton Manor and spoke to his cousin.
Whether they were appropriate or not, Samantha's questions were logical. He'd failed to come home on the previous night, as his unusual absence at breakfast had no doubt telegraphed to his cousin. It was now midday. He was asking her to take on one of his responsibilities. Naturally, she would want to know what had occurred to spur him to behaviour as uncharacteristic as it was mysterious.