Elizabeth George - Missing Joseph

He said, “I haven’t lived as a celibate any more than have you. We’ve always known that about each other, haven’t we?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It’s just a fact. And if we start trying to walk a tightrope between the past and the future in our life together, we’re going to fall off. It can’t be done. What we have is now. Beyond that, the future. To my way of thinking, that ought to be our primary concern.”

“This has nothing to do with the past, Tommy.”

“It does. You said not ten minutes ago that you felt just like ‘his lordship’s squalid little Sunday-night score.’”

“You’ve misunderstood my concern.”

“Have I?” He leaned over the edge of the bed and scooped up his dressing gown which had fallen to the floor in a heap of blue paisley sometime during the night. “Are you angrier about a tie on the door knob—”

“About what the tie implies.”

“—or more specifically about the fact that, by my own extremely cretinous admission, it’s a device I’ve used before?”

“I think you know me well enough not to have to ask a question like that.”

He stood, shrugged his way into the dressing gown, and spent a moment picking up the clothing he’d been in such a tearing hurry to divest himself of at half past eleven on the previous night. “And I think you’re at heart more honest with yourself than you’re being at the moment with me.”

“You’re making an accusation. I don’t much like that. Nor do I like its connotation of egocentricity.”

“Yours or mine?”

“You know what I mean, Tommy.”

He crossed the room and pulled open the curtains. It was a bleak day outside. A gusty wind was scudding heavy clouds from east to west in the sky above, while on the ground a thin crust of frost lay like fresh gauze on the lawn and the rose bushes that comprised his rear garden. One of the neighbourhood cats perched atop the brick wall against which heavy solanum climbed. He was hunched into dual humps of head and body with his calico fur rippling and his face looking shuttered, demonstrating that singularly feline quality of being at once imperious and untouchable. Lynley wished he could say the same about himself.

He turned from the window to see that Helen was watching his movements in the mirror. He went to stand behind her.

“If I choose,” he said, “I could drive myself mad with thinking of the men you’ve had as your lovers. Then in direct avoidance of the madness, I could accuse you of using them to meet your own ends, to gratify your ego, to build your self-esteem. But my madness would still be there all the time, just beneath the surface, no matter the strength of my accusations. I’d merely be diverting and denying it by focusing all my attention — not to mention the force of my righteous indignation — on you.”

“Clever,” she said. Her eyes were on his.

“What?”

“This way of avoiding the central issue.”

“Which is?”

“What I don’t want to be.”

“My wife.”

“No. Lord Asherton’s little dolly bird. Detective Inspector Lynley’s hot new piece. The cause of a little wink and a smirk between you and Denton when he sets out your breakfast or brings you your tea.”

“Fine. Understandable. Then marry me. I’ve wanted that for the last twelve months and I want it now. If you’ll agree to legitimatising this affair in the conventional manner — which is what I’ve proposed from the first and you know it — then you’ll hardly have to concern yourself with idle gossip and potential derogation.”

“It’s not as easy as that. Idle gossip’s not even the point.”

“You don’t love me?”

“Of course I love you. You know that I love you.”

“Then?”

“I won’t be made an object. I won’t .”

He nodded slowly. “And you’ve felt like an object these past two months? When we’ve been together? Last night perhaps?”

Her glance faltered. He saw her fi ngers close round the handle of the brush. “No. Of course not.”

“But this morning?”

She blinked. “God, how I hate to argue with you.”

“We’re not arguing, Helen.”

“You’re trying to trap me.”

“I’m trying to look at the truth.” He wanted to run his fingers the length of her hair, turn her to him, cup her face in his hands. He settled for resting his hands on her shoulders. “If we can’t live with each other’s past, then we have no future. That’s the real bottom line no matter what else you claim it to be. I can live with your past: St. James, Cusick, Rhys Davies-Jones, and whomever else you’ve slept with for a night or a year. The question is: Can you live with mine? Because that’s really what this is all about. It has nothing to do with how I feel about women.”

“It has everything to do with it.”

He heard the intensity in her tone and saw the resignation on her face. He turned her to him then, understanding and mourning the fact at once. “Oh God, Helen,” he sighed. “I haven’t had another woman. I haven’t even wanted one.”

“I know,” she said, resting her head against him. “Why doesn’t that help?”

After reading it, Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers crumpled up the second page of Chief Superintendent Sir David Hillier’s lengthy memorandum, rolled it into a ball, and lobbed it neatly across the width of Inspector Lynley’s office, where it joined the previous page in the rubbish bin which she’d placed, for a bit of an athletic challenge, next to the door. She yawned, rubbed her fi ngers vigorously against her scalp, rested her head on her fist, and continued reading. “Pope Davy’s Encyclical on Keeping Yer Nose Clean,” MacPherson had called the memorandum sotto voce in the offi cers’ mess.

Everyone agreed that they had better things to do than to read Hillier’s epistle on the Serious Obligations Of The National Police Force When Investigating A Case With Possible Connection To The Irish Republican Army. While they all recognised that Hillier was taking his inspiration from the release of the Birmingham Six — and while few of them had any sympathy for those members of the West Midlands police force who had been the focus of Her Majesty’s Investigation as a result — the fact remained that they were far too burdened by their individual workloads to spend time committing to memory their Chief Superintendent’s prescriptive treatise.

Barbara, however, wasn’t currently fl oundering in the middle of half a dozen cases, as were some of her colleagues. Rather, she was engaged in experiencing a long-anticipated two-week holiday. During this time, she had planned to work on her childhood home in Acton, preparing to hand it over to an estate agent and move herself to a tiny studio-cumcottage she’d managed to find in Chalk Farm, tucked behind a large Edwardian house in Eton Villas. The house itself had been subdivided into four flats and a spacious ground floor bed-sit, none of which were within Barbara’s limited budget. But the cottage, sitting in the rear of the garden beneath a false acacia tree, was practically too small for anyone but a dwarf to live in comfortably. And while Barbara was not a dwarf, her living aspirations were defi nitely dwarfish: She did not look to entertain visitors, she did not anticipate marriage and family, she worked long hours and simply needed a place to lay her head at night. The cottage would do.

She had signed the lease with no little excitement. This would be the first home she had had away from Acton in the last twenty of her thirty-three years. She thought of how she would decorate it, where she would buy her furniture, what photographs and prints she would hang on the walls. She went to a garden centre and looked at plants, making note of what grew well in window boxes and what needed sun. She paced the length of the cottage and then the width, she measured the windows and examined the door. And she returned to Acton with her mind awash with plans and ideas, all of which seemed unrealistic and impossible to attain when she was confronted with the amount of work that needed to be done to her family’s home.