His old friend kept a hand on his arm, as if expecting Lynley to bolt from the car. He said, “They’ve got a trauma team with her. They’ve given her blood. O-negative, they said. It’s universal. But you’ll know that, won’t you. Of course you will.” St. James cleared his throat and Lynley looked at him. He thought at that moment, unnecessarily, that St. James had once loved Helen, had so many years ago intended to be her husband himself.
“Where?” Lynley’s voice was raw. “Simon, I told Deborah…I said that she was to-”
“Tommy.” St. James’s hand tightened.
“Where, then? Where?”
“In Eaton Terrace.”
“At home?”
“Helen was tired. They parked the car and unloaded their parcels at the front door. Deborah took the Bentley round to the mews. She parked it, and when she got back to the house-”
“She didn’t hear anything? See anything?”
“She was on the front step. At first, Deborah thought she’d fainted.”
Lynley raised his hand to his forehead. He pressed in on his temples as if this would allow him to understand. He said, “How could she have thought-”
“There was virtually no blood. And her coat-Helen’s coat-it was dark. Is it navy? Black?”
Both of them knew the colour was meaningless, but it was something to cling to and they had to cling to it or face the unthinkable.
“Black,” Lynley said. “It’s black.” Cashmere, hanging nearly to her ankles, and she loved to wear it with boots whose heels were so high that she laughed at herself at the end of the day when she hobbled to the sofa and fell upon it, claiming she was a mindless victim of male Italian shoe designers with fantasies of women bearing whips and chains. “Tommy, save me from myself,” she would say. “Only foot binding could be worse than this.”
Lynley looked out of the window. He saw the blur of faces and knew they’d made it as far as Westminster Bridge, where people on the pavements were caught in their own little worlds into which the sound of a siren and the sight of a panda car zooming by caused them only an instant of wondering, Who? What? And then forgetting because it didn’t affect them.
“When?” he said to St. James. “What time?”
“Half past three. They’d thought to have tea at Claridge’s, but as Helen was tired, they went home instead. They’d have it there. They bought…I don’t know…tea cakes somewhere? Pastries?”
Lynley tried to absorb this. It was four forty-five. He said, “An hour? More than an hour? How can that be?”
St. James didn’t reply at once, and Lynley turned to him and saw how drawn and gaunt he looked, far more than normal for he was a gaunt and angular man by birth. He said, “Simon, why in God’s name? More than an hour?”
“It took twenty minutes for the ambulance to get to her.”
“Christ,” Lynley whispered. “Oh God. Oh Christ.”
“And then I wouldn’t let them tell you by phone. We had to wait for a second panda car-the first officers needed to stay at the hospital…to speak to Deborah…”
“She’s there?”
“Still. Yes. Of course. So we had to wait. Tommy, I couldn’t let them phone you. I couldn’t do that to you, say that Helen…say that…”
“No. I see.” And then he said fiercely after a moment, “Tell me the rest. I want to know it all.”
“They were calling in a thoracic surgeon when I left. They haven’t said anything else.”
“Thoracic?” Lynley said. “Thoracic?”
St. James’s hand tightened on his arm once again. “It’s a chest wound,” he said.
Lynley closed his eyes, and he kept them closed for the rest of the ride, which was mercifully brief.
At the hospital, two panda cars stood at the top of the sloping entrance to Accident and Emergency, and two of the uniformed constables who belonged to them were just coming out as Lynley and St. James entered. He saw Deborah at once, seated on one of the blue steel chairs with a box of tissues on her knees and a middle-aged man in a crumpled mackintosh talking to her, notebook in hand. Belgravia CID, Lynley thought. He didn’t know the man, but he knew the routine.
Two other uniforms stood nearby, affording the detective privacy. Apparently, they knew St. James by sight-as they would, since he’d already been at the hospital earlier-so they let both of them approach the interview that was going on.
Deborah looked up. Her eyes were red. Her nose looked sore. A pile of sodden tissues lay on the floor next to her feet. She said, “Oh, Tommy…,” and he could see her try to pull herself together.
He didn’t want to think. He couldn’t think. He looked at her and felt like wood.
The Belgravia man stood. “Superintendent Lynley?”
Lynley nodded.
“She’s in the operating theatre, Tommy,” Deborah said.
Lynley nodded again. All he could do was nod. He wanted to shake her, he wanted to rattle the teeth in her head. His brain shouted that it was not her fault, how could it be this poor woman’s fault, but he needed to blame, he wanted to blame, and there was no one else, not yet, not here, not now…
He said, “Tell me.”
Her eyes filled.
The detective-somewhere Lynley heard him say his name was Fire…Terence Fire, but that couldn’t be right because what sort of name was Fire, after all?-said that the case was well in hand, he was not to worry, all stops were being pulled out because the entire station knew not only what had happened but who she was, who the victim-
“Don’t call her that,” Lynley said.
“We’ll be in close contact,” Terence Fire said. And then, “Sir…If I may…I am so terribly-”
“Yes,” Lynley said.
The detective left them. The constables remained.
Lynley turned to Deborah as St. James sat next to her. “What happened?” he asked her.
“She asked would I park the Bentley. She’d been driving, but it was cold and she’d got tired.”
“You’d done too much. If you hadn’t done too much…those God damn bloody christening clothes…”
A snaking tear spilled over the rim of Deborah’s eye. She brushed it away. She said, “We stopped and unloaded the parcels. She asked me to take care parking the car because…You know how Tommy loves his car, she said. If we put a scratch on it, he’ll have us both for dinner. Watch the left side of the garage, she said. So I took care. I’d never driven…You see, it’s so big and it took me more than one try to get it into the garage…But not five minutes, Tommy, not that even. And I assumed she’d go straight into the house or ring the bell for Denton-”
“He’s gone to New York,” Lynley said, unnecessarily. “He isn’t there, Deborah.”
“She didn’t tell me. I didn’t know. And I didn’t think…Tommy, it’s Belgravia, it’s safe, it’s-”
“No where is God damn safe.” His voice sounded savage. He saw St. James stir. His old friend raised a hand: a warning, a request. He didn’t know nor did he care. There was only Helen. He said, “I’m in the middle of an investigation. Multiple murders. A single killer. Where in the name of heaven did you get the idea any place on earth is safe?”
Deborah took the question like a blow. St. James said his name, but she stopped him with a movement of her head. She said, “I parked the car. I walked back along the mews.”
“You didn’t hear-”
“I didn’t hear a sound. I came round the corner back into Eaton Terrace and what I saw was the shopping bags. They were spread on the ground, and then I saw her. She was crumpled…I thought she’d fainted, Tommy. There was no one there, no one nearby, not a single soul. I thought she’d fainted.”