Nkata realised he was reading the heading on the creamy paper over and over. He frowned. He focussed. He read again. He’d been taught that there were no coincidences at the end of the day and he’d just, after all, seen Lynley’s notes and Havers’ report. He reached for the phone.
Barbara Havers burst into the office. She said, “Didn’t you get my message? Bloody hell, Winnie. I phoned. I asked you to ring me back. I’ve got…What the hell’s going on round here?”
Nkata handed the report to her. “Read this,” he said. “Take your time.”
WITH REASON, everyone not only wanted a part of him but also needed a part of him. Lynley accepted this even as he knew he could do next to nothing to accommodate anyone. He could barely accommodate himself.
When he returned to the hospital, he was aware of virtually nothing. He found his family and hers where he’d left them, along with Deborah and St. James. Holding the fort came ridiculously into his mind. There was no fort to hold and nothing to hold it for.
Helen’s sister Daphne had arrived from Italy. Her sister Iris was due from America, anticipated at any moment, although no one knew when that moment might be. Cybil and Pen were tending to their parents, while his own siblings sat with their mother, no stranger to hospitals, certainly no stranger to sudden and violent death.
The room they’d been allotted was small, and they crowded it, perched uncomfortably on whatever chairs and settees had been scavenged, sent to this particular place to shield them from the other families of other patients because of their numbers, because of the sensitivity of the situation, and because of who they were. Not who they were by class but who they were by occupation: the family of a cop whose wife had been shot in the street. Lynley was aware of the irony of it alclass="underline" being granted this privacy because of his career and not because of his birth. It seemed to him that this was the only moment in his life that was honestly defined by his chosen occupation. The rest of the time, he’d always been the earl, that odd bloke who’d eschewed life in the country and mingling among his own kind for work of the commonest sort. Tell us why, Superintendent Lynley. He couldn’t have done so, especially now.
Daphne, the latest arrival, came to him. Gianfranco, she told him, had wanted to be there as well. But that would have meant leaving the children with-
“Daph, it’s fine,” Lynley said. “Helen wouldn’t have wanted…thank you for coming.”
Her eyes-dark like Helen’s, and it came to him how much Helen looked like her eldest sister-grew bright, but she did not weep. She said, “They’ve told me about…”
“Yes,” he replied.
“What’re you…?”
He shook his head. She touched his arm. “Dear heart,” she said.
He went to his mother. His sister, Judith, made a spot for him on the settee. He said, “Go to the house, if you’d like. There’s no need for you to stay here hour after hour, Mother. The spare room’s available. Denton’s in New York, so he won’t be there to do a meal for you, but you can…in the kitchen…I know there’s something. We’ve been fending for ourselves, so in the fridge there’re cartons-”
“I’m fine,” Lady Asherton murmured. “We’re all fine, Tommy. We don’t need a thing. We’ve been to the café. And Peter’s been fetching coffee for everyone.”
Lynley glanced at his younger brother. He saw that Peter still could not look at him for longer than a second. He understood. Eyes upon eyes. Seeing and acknowledging. He himself could barely stand the contact.
“When does Iris get here?” Lynley asked. “Does anyone know?”
His mother shook her head. “She’s in the middle of nowhere over there. I don’t know how many flights she’s had to take or even if she’s taken them yet. All she said to Penelope was that she was on her way and she’d be here as soon as possible. But how does one get here from Montana? I’m not even sure where Montana is.”
“North,” Lynley said.
“It’s going to take her forever.”
“Well. It doesn’t matter, does it?”
His mother reached for his hand. Hers was warm but quite dry, which seemed to him an unlikely combination. And it was soft as well, which was also strange because she loved to garden and she played tennis every day the Cornwall weather allowed it, every season of the year, so why were her hands still soft? And God in heaven, what did that matter?
St. James came over to him while Deborah watched from across the room. Lynley’s old friend said, “The police have been, Tommy.” He glanced at Lynley’s mother and then said, “Do you want to…?”
Lynley rose. He led the way out of the room to the corridor. “By the worst means the worst” came to him from somewhere. A song? he wondered. No, it couldn’t be that.
“What is it?” he asked.
“They’ve determined where he went after he shot her. Not where he came from, although they’re working on that, but where he went. Where they went, Tommy.”
“They?”
“It appears there may have been two. Males, they think. An elderly woman was walking her dog along the north end of West Eaton Place. She’d just come round the corner from Chesham Street. Do you know where I mean?”
“What did she see?”
“From a distance. Two individuals were running round the corner from Eaton Terrace. They seemed to have seen her and they ducked into West Eaton Place Mews. A Range Rover was parked alongside a brick wall there. It took a dent in the bonnet. Belgravia think these blokes-individuals, whoever they were-jumped onto the Range Rover and leapt into the garden beyond that brick wall. Do you know where I’m talking about, Tommy?”
“Yes.” Beyond the brick wall a line of gardens-each one defined by yet another brick wall-comprised the back of the houses on Cadogan Lane, itself another mews that was one of hundreds in the area, once housing stables for the sumptuous dwellings nearby, now housing homes converted from garages that themselves had been converted from the stables. It was a complicated area of streets and mewses. Anyone could fade into the woodwork there. Or make good an escape. Or anything.
St. James said, “It’s not what it sounds like, Tommy.”
“Why is that?” Lynley asked.
“Because an au pair on Cadogan Lane also reported a break-in, shortly after Helen…shortly after. Within the hour. She’s being interviewed. She was home when the break-in occurred.”
“What do they know?”
“Just about the break-in at the moment. But if it’s related-and good God, it has to be related-and if whoever broke in went out of the front of the house, then there’s further good news. Because one of the larger houses along Cadogan Lane has two CCTV cameras mounted on the front of it.”
Lynley looked at St. James. He wanted desperately to care about this because he knew what it meant: If the au pair’s housebreaker had gone in that direction, there was a chance the closed-circuit television cameras had caught him on film. And if he’d been caught on film, that was a step in the direction of bringing him to whatever justice there was, which was little enough, and what did it matter at the end of the day?
Lynley nodded, however. It was expected of him.
St. James said, “The house with the au pair?”
“Hmm. Yes.”
“It’s quite a distance from where the Range Rover was, in the mews, Tommy.”
Lynley struggled to think what this meant. He could come up with nothing.
St. James went on. “There’re perhaps eight-maybe fewer, but still a number of them-gardens along the route. Which means whoever went over the wall where the Range Rover stood had to continue going over walls. So Belgravia are doing a search of every one of the gardens. There’ll be evidence.”
“I see,” Lynley said.
“Tommy, they’re going to come up with something. It’s not going to take long.”