Elizabeth George - Just One Evil Act

Lynley lifted an eyebrow at this.

She laughed and said, “I’m quite serious, Thomas. I take my discretionary time to heart. Besides, the Broads rather depend on me—”

“A good jammer being difficult to find.”

“You’re teasing, of course. And I do know that I could join the Electric Magic. But then I’d be skating on occasion against my former teammates, and I don’t know how I feel about that.”

“These are serious matters,” he said. “I suppose it must come down to the job itself, then. As well as the benefits attached to taking it, should it be offered.”

They gazed at each other for a moment in which he saw the colour rise appealingly to her cheeks. He liked the look of her when she blushed. He said, “Have you listed them?”

“What?”

“The benefits. Or is it early days for that? I assume they’re interviewing other large animal vets as well. It’s an important position, isn’t it?”

“Yes and no.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning they’ve done the interviews. All of the interviews. The initial ones, the secondary ones. The paper screening and checking of documents and references and all of that.”

“So this is something that’s been going on for a while,” he said.

“Since early March. That’s when I was first contacted.”

He frowned. He observed the ruby colour of his wine. He asked himself how he felt about this: that since early March she’d been part of a process that might bring her to London but she’d not told him. He said, “Since early March? You haven’t mentioned it. How am I to take that?”

Her lips parted.

He said, “Never mind. Terrible question. My ego was speaking for me. So where are you in the process, then? Tertiary interviews? Who knew so much was involved in vetting a vet, if you’ll pardon the pun. Is it a pun? I don’t quite know. You’re leaving me at sixes and sevens, Daidre.”

She smiled. “It’s made difficult by—”

“What is?”

“My decision. They’ve offered me the job, Thomas.”

“Have they indeed? That’s wonderful! Isn’t it?”

“It’s complicated.”

“Of course. Moving house is always complicated, and you’ve already listed your other concerns.”

“Yes. Well.” She took up her wine and drank. Looking for courage? he wondered. She said, “That’s not exactly what I mean by complicated.”

“Then what?”

“You, of course. But you know that already, I expect. You’re a complication. You. Here. London.”

His heart had begun to beat more heavily. He tried for lightness in his response. “It’s a disappointment for me, of course. If you take the job, I won’t have the opportunity of enjoying the personal tour of the zoo in Bristol that you once promised me. But I assure you we’ll be able to soldier on under the burden of my disappointment. Rest your mind on that score.”

“You know what I mean,” she said.

“Yes. Of course. I suppose I do.”

She looked away from him, across the wine bar to where a couple had just been seated. They reached spontaneously for each other’s hand, twined fingers, and gazed into each other’s eyes across the candlelight. They looked to be somewhere in their twenties. They looked to be somewhere in the first stages of love.

She said, “You see, I don’t want to see you, Thomas.”

He felt himself blanch, her words unexpectedly like a blow to him.

She moved her gaze from the young couple to him, apparently saw something on his face, and said quickly, “No, no. I’ve said that badly. What I mean is that I don’t want to want to see you. There’s too much danger in that for me. There’s . . .” Again she diverted her gaze from him, but this time she put it on the candle’s flame. It guttered as someone new entered the wine bar. Voices called out a greeting to the young lovers at the table. Someone said, “Don’t trust that bastard, Jennie,” and someone else laughed.

Daidre said, “There’re too many possibilities for pain here. And I promised myself some time ago . . . It’s that I’ve had enough of pain. And I hate saying that to you, of all people, because what you’ve endured and what you’ve somehow come out whole from having endured makes anything I’ve gone through in my little life a very paltry thing and believe me, I know it.”

It was her honesty that he admired, Lynley realised as she spoke. It was her honesty that he knew he could grow to love. Understanding this, he was in that moment as afraid as she was, and he wanted to tell her this. But instead he said, “Dear Daidre—”

“God, that sounds like the beginning of the end,” she declared. “Or something very like.”

He laughed, then. “Not at all,” he said. He considered their predicament from several different angles as he took up his wineglass and drank. He said, “What if you and I screw up our courage and approach the precipice?”

“What precipice would that be exactly?”

“The one in which we admit that we care for each other. I care for you. You care for me. Perhaps we’d both rather not since, let’s face it, caring for anyone is a messy business. But it’s happened and if we get it into the air between us, we can decide what, if anything, we’d like to do about it.”

“We know the truth of things, Thomas,” she said firmly and, he thought, a little fiercely. “I don’t belong in your world. And no one knows that better than you.”

“But that’s what’s at the bottom of the precipice, Daidre. And just now . . . Well, isn’t the truth that we don’t even know if we want to jump?”

“Anything can lead to jumping,” she said. “Oh God. Oh God . I don’t want that.”

He could feel her fears. They were as real a presence at the table as was Daidre herself. Their cause was far different from the fears he himself felt, but they were nonetheless as strong as his own. Loss wears so many guises, he thought. He wanted to tell her this, but he did not. The time wasn’t right for it.

He said, “I’m actually willing to approach the precipice on my own, Daidre. I’m willing to say that I care for you, that I would welcome your presence in London for what it might mean in my life to have you closer than an extremely lengthy drive down the M4 to Bristol. Whether you wish to approach the precipice any closer just now . . . ? That’s up to you, but it’s not required.”

She shook her head and her eyes were bright and he wasn’t at all certain what this meant. She clarified with a nearly voiceless “You’re a very good man.”

“Not at all, really. My point is that we can be whatever we wish to be in each other’s life. What that is . . . ? We don’t need to define it here. Now, have you had your dinner? Would you like to have dinner with me? Not here, actually, because I have a few doubts about the quality of their food. But perhaps somewhere nearby?”

She said, “There’s a restaurant at my hotel.” And then she looked horrified and hastily added, “Thomas, you aren’t intended to think I meant . . . because I didn’t mean . . .”

“Of course you didn’t,” he said. “And that’s precisely why it’s so easy for me to say that I care for you.”

CHALK FARM

LONDON

Barbara Havers was sitting up in bed reading when Taymullah Azhar knocked on her door. His knock was so soft and her interest in her book so intense that she very nearly didn’t hear him. After all, Tempest Fitzpatrick and Preston Merck were in mutual torment over Preston’s mysterious past and his agonising inability to act upon his acutely passionate love for Tempest—although Barbara thought they would be better off in torment over his rather strange and unheroic surname—and she was paragraphs away from discovering how they were going to resolve this troubling issue. Had Azhar not also tentatively called out, “Barbara? Are you awake? Are you there?” she might have missed his visit to her bungalow altogether. As it was, though, when she heard his voice, she cried out, “Azhar? Hang on,” and she leapt out of bed.