Elizabeth George - Missing Joseph

“So,” she said breezily, “is Helen with you, sir? Did she stop to chat up MacPherson in the mess?”

“No to both.” He continued reading. He’d just concluded the third page of the tract, and he was balling it up as she had done with the first two, although in his case, the action appeared to be unconscious, merely something to do with his hands. He’d made it a full year off the evil weed, but there were times when his fingers seemed to need something to do in place of holding the cigarette he’d been used to.

“She’s not ill? I mean, weren’t you two heading off to—”

“We were supposed to, yes. Plans change sometimes.” He looked at her over the rims of his spectacles. It was one of his now-thatwe’re-getting-down-to-it looks. “And what about your plans, Sergeant? Have they changed as well?”

“Just taking a break. You know how it is. Work, work, work and a girl’s hands just start to look like dead lobsters. I’m giving them a rest.”

“I see.”

“Not that I need to give them a rest from painting.”

“What?”

“Painting. You know. The interior of the house. Three blokes showed up at my place two days ago. Contractors, they were. Had a deal all drawn up and signed to paint the inside of my house. Odd, that was, you know, because I hadn’t called a contractor. Odder still when you think the job had been paid for in advance.”

Lynley frowned and placed the memorandum on top of a bound PSI report on the relationship between civilians and police in London. “Decidedly odd,” he said. “You’re certain they were at the right house.”

“Dead certain,” she said. “One hundred percent certain. They even knew my name. They even called me sergeant . They even asked what it was like for a woman to work in CID. Chatty blokes, they were. But I did wonder how they could ever have known I work here at the Met.”

As expected, Lynley’s face was a study in wonderment. She half-expected him to go all Miranda on her, exclaiming on the braveness and newness of a world they both knew to be generally corrupt and largely hopeless. “And you read the contract? You made certain they were in the right place?”

“Oh yes. And they were bloody good, sir, the lot of them. Two days and the house was painted like new.”

“How intriguing.” He went back to the report.

She let him read for the amount of time it took her to count from one to one hundred. Then, “Sir.”

“Hmm.”

“What’d you pay them?”

“Whom?”

“The painters.”

“What painters?”

“Give over, Inspector. You know what I’m talking about.”

“The chaps who painted your house?”

“What’d you pay them? Because I know you did, don’t bother to lie about it. Besides you, only MacPherson, Stewart, and Hale know that I’m working on the place during my holiday, and they can’t exactly put their hands on the kind of lolly we’re talking about to do this job. So what’d you pay them and how much time do I have to pay you back?”

Lynley set the report aside and allowed his fi ngers to play with his watch chain. They removed the watch from his pocket, flipped it open, and he made a show of examining the time.

“I don’t want your bleeding charity,” she said. “I don’t want to feel like anyone’s pet project. I don’t want to owe .”

“It does make demands on one, owing,” he said. “One always ends up putting the debt onto a scale in which future behaviours are weighed. How can I lash out in anger when I owe him something? How can I go my own way without discussion when I’m in his debt? How can I maintain a safe businesslike distance from the rest of the world if I have a connection somewhere?”

“Owing money isn’t a connection, sir.”

“No. But gratitude generally is.”

“So you were buying me? Is that it?”

“Assuming I had anything to do with it in the first place — which, I feel compelled to warn you, is not an inference that will be supported by any evidence you may attempt to glean — I generally don’t purchase my friendships, Sergeant.”

“Which is your way of saying that you paid them cash, and you probably paid them a bonus as well to keep their mouths shut.” She leaned forward, slapping her hand lightly against his desk. “I don’t want your help, sir, not in this way. I don’t want anything from you that I can’t return. And besides…Even if that wasn’t the case, I’m not exactly ready—” She blew out her breath in a gust of sudden nerve loss.

Sometimes she forgot he was her superior officer. Worse, sometimes she forgot the one thing she’d once sworn to keep in the forefront of her mind every instant she was with him: The man was an earl, he had a title, there were people in his life who actually called him my lord . Given, none of his colleagues at the Yard had considered him anything other than Lynley for more than ten years, but she didn’t possess the sort of sang-froid that allowed her to feel on equal footing with someone whose family had been rubbing elbows with the sort of blokes who were used to being referred to as your highness and your grace . It gave her the crawlies when she thought about it, it raised her hackles when she dwelt upon it. And when it caught her unawares — such as now — it made her feel like a perfect fool. One didn’t unburden one’s soul to a blue blood. One wasn’t really sure that blue bloods were possessed of souls themselves.

“And even if that weren’t the case,” Lynley picked up her thought with an unconscious— if typical — correction of her grammar, “I expect as the day when you leave Acton looms closer, the prospect looms larger. It’s one thing to have a dream, isn’t it? It’s quite another when it becomes reality.”

She sank back in her chair, staring at him. “Christ,” she said. “How the hell does Helen put up with you?”

He smiled briefly and removed his spectacles which he returned to his pocket. “She doesn’t, at the moment, actually.”

“No trip to Corfu?”

“I’m afraid not. Unless she goes alone. Which, as we both know, she’s been perfectly willing to do before.”

“Why?”

“I upset her equilibrium.”

“I don’t mean why then. I mean why now.”

“I see.” He swivelled the chair, not towards the cabinet and the picture of Helen, but towards the window where the upper fl oors of the dreary post-war construction that was the Home Office nearly matched the colour of the leaden sky. He steepled his fingers beneath his chin. “We fell out over a tie, I’m afraid.”

“A tie?”

As a means of clarification, he gestured to the one he was wearing. “I’d hung a tie on the door knob last night.”

Barbara frowned. “Force of habit, you mean? Like squeezing toothpaste from the middle of the tube? Something that gets on one’s nerves once the stars of romance start twinkling less brightly?”

“I only wish.”

“Then what?”

He sighed. She could tell he didn’t want to go into it. She said, “Never mind. It’s none of my business. I’m sorry it didn’t work out. I mean the holiday. I know you were looking forward to it.”

He played with the knot at his throat. “I’d left my tie on the door knob — outside the door — before we went to bed.”

“So?”

“I didn’t pause to think she might notice, and beyond that it’s something I’m used to doing on occasion.”

“So?”

“And she didn’t notice, actually. But she did ask how it was that Denton has never once disturbed us in the morning since we’ve been…together.”

Barbara saw the dawn. “Oh. I get it. He sees the tie. It’s a signal. He knows that someone’s with you.”