Elizabeth George - Missing Joseph

Interior painting, exterior repairs, replacing wallpaper, refinishing woodwork, extirpating an entire rear garden of weeds, cleaning old carpets…the list seemed endless. And beyond the fact that she was only one person attempting to see to the renovation of a house that had gone uncared for since she’d left secondary school — which was depressing enough in and of itself — there was the vague sense of unease that she felt each time a project was actually completed.

At issue was her mother. For the past two months, she had been living in Greenford, some distance out of London on the Central line. She’d made the adjustment to Hawthorn Lodge fairly well, but Barbara still wondered how much she would be tempting fate if she sold the old house in Acton and set herself up in a more desirable neighbourhood, in an intriguingly bohemian little cottage that wore the label new life — enter hopes and dreams , in which her mother would have no real place. For wasn’t she doing more than merely selling an overlarge house in order to fi nance what might be her mother’s lengthy stay in Green-ford? Indeed, wasn’t the very idea of selling the house in order to do that merely a blind for her own selfishness? Or were these occasional twinges of conscience that accompanied her pursuit of freedom really nothing more than a convenient focal point for her attention so that she didn’t have to face what lay beneath them?

You have your own life, she’d been telling herself stoutly more than a dozen times each day. There’s no crime in getting on with it, Barbara. But it felt like a crime, when the project itself didn’t feel more overwhelming than she could bear. She fluctuated among making lists of everything that needed to be done, despairing that she would be able to do it, and fearing the day when the work was completed and the house was sold and she was finally on her own.

In her rare introspective moments, Barbara admitted that the house gave her something to cling to, a last vestige of security in a world in which she no longer had relations into whom she could sink even the slightest hook of emotional dependence. No matter that she had not been able to sink a hook into any relation’s empathy or reliability for years — her father’s lingering illness and her mother’s mental deterioration had long precluded that — living in the same old house in the same old neighbourhood at least bore the appearance of security. To give it up and forge ahead into the unknown…Sometimes Acton seemed infinitely preferable.

There are no easy answers, Inspector Lynley would have said, there’s only living through the questions. But the thought of Lynley made Barbara shift restlessly in his desk chair and force herself to read the first paragraph on the third page of Hillier’s memorandum.

The words meant nothing. She couldn’t concentrate. Having inadvertently conjured up the presence of her superior offi cer, she was going to have to deal with him.

How to do so? She squirmed, lay the memorandum down among the various reports and folders that were stacking up during his absence, and sank her hand into her shoulder bag in search of her cigarettes. She lit one and blew smoke at the ceiling, eyes narrowed against the smoke’s acrid sting.

She was in Lynley’s debt. He would deny it, naturally, no doubt with an expression of such bemusement that she would momentarily distrust her own deductions. But scanty as they were, she had the facts, and she didn’t much like the position in which they placed her. How to repay him when he would never allow it as long as their circumstances were so imbalanced? He would never begin to entertain the word debt as a given between them.

Damn him, she thought, he sees too much, he knows too much, he’s too fl aming clever to get caught in the act. She swivelled the chair to face a cabinet on top of which sat a picture of Lynley and Lady Helen Clyde. She scowled at him.

“Get knotted,” she said, flicking ash to the floor. “Stay out of my life, Inspector.”

“Now, Sergeant? Or will later do as well?”

Barbara spun round quickly. Lynley stood in the doorway, his cashmere overcoat slung over one shoulder and Dorothea Harriman— their divisional superintendent ’s secretary — bobbing up and down behind him. Sorry , Harriman mouthed at Barbara with wildly exaggerated and decidedly apologetic movements of her arms, I didn’t see him coming. I couldn’t warn you . When Lynley glanced over his shoulder, Harriman waggled her fi ngers, smiled brilliantly at him, and disappeared in a blaze of heavily lacquered blonde hair.

Barbara got to her feet at once. “You’re on holiday,” she said.

“As are you.”

“So what’re you…?”

“What are you? ”

She dragged long on her cigarette. “Thought I’d stop by. I was in the area.”

“Ah.”

“You?”

“The same.” He entered and hung his coat on the rack. Unlike herself, who had at least kept up the I’m-on-holiday pretence by coming to the Yard wearing blue jeans and a tatty sweat shirt across which had been stencilled Buy British, By George beneath a faded depiction of that saint making hash of an extremely dispirited-looking dragon, Barbara saw that Lynley was dressed for work in his customary fashion: three-piece suit, crisp shirt, silk maroon tie, with the ubiquitous watch chain looped across his waistcoat. He went to his desk — the immediate vicinity of which she quickly vacated — favoured the smouldering tip of her cigarette with a look of displeasure as he passed her, and began sorting through the folders, reports, envelopes, and numerous departmental directives. “What’s this?” he asked, holding up the remaining eight pages of the memorandum which Barbara had been reading.

“Hillier’s thoughts on working with the IRA.”

He patted his jacket pocket, brought out his spectacles, and ran his eyes down the page. “Odd. Is Hillier losing his touch? It appears to start in the middle,” he noted.

Sheepishly, she reached into the rubbish and rescued the two top pages which she smoothed out against her chunky thigh and handed to him, dropping cigarette ash on the cuff of his suit jacket in the process.

“Havers…” His voice was patience itself.

“Sorry.” She flicked the ash off. A spot of it remained. She rubbed it into the material. “Good for it,” she said. “Old wives’ tale.”

“Put out that blasted thing, will you?”

She sighed and squashed the remaining stub of tobacco against the heel of her left plimsoll. She flicked the butt in the direction of the rubbish bin, but it missed its mark and landed on the floor. Lynley lifted his head from Hillier’s memorandum, observed the butt over the tops of his spectacles, and raised a single, querying eyebrow.

“Sorry,” Havers said and went to place the offending article in the rubbish. She returned the bin to its original position at the side of his desk. He murmured his thanks. She plopped onto one of the visitor chairs and began to worry an incipient hole in the right knee of her jeans. She stole a look or two at him while he continued to read.

He appeared perfectly refreshed and entirely untroubled. His blond hair lay neatly against his head in its usual well-scissored fashion— she’d always wanted to know who saw to the miraculous cutting that produced the effect of its never growing so much as a millimetre beyond an established length — his brown eyes were clear, no circles darkened the skin beneath them, no new lines of fatigue or worry had joined the age lines on his brow. But the fact remained that he was supposed to be on a holiday that had long been arranged with Lady Helen Clyde. They were off to Corfu. They were supposed to be leaving, in fact, at eleven. But it was now a quarter past ten, and unless the Inspector was planning on a trip to Heathrow via helicopter within the next ten minutes, he wasn’t going anywhere. At least not to Greece. At least not today.