Elizabeth George - Missing Joseph

He drew back. She leaned forward. “About her?” he said blankly.

“Nothing,” she repeated. “And if a chat with Constable Shepherd on the footpath makes you think Mr. Sage told me something

I could use to—”

“Kill him,” Brendan said.

“What?”

“He thinks you’re responsible. For the vicar’s death. He’s looking for evidence Shepherd is.”

She sat back on her stool. Her mouth opened and closed, opened again. She said, “Evidence.”

“Yes. So watch where you’re stepping. And if he questions you, Polly, you phone me at once. You’ve got the number of my office, don’t you? Don’t talk to him alone. Don’t be with him alone. Do you understand?”

“Evidence.” She said it as if to convince herself, as if to try out the word for size. The menace behind it didn’t seem to reach her.

“Polly, answer me. Do you understand? The constable’s looking for evidence to establish the fact that you’re responsible for the vicar’s death. He was heading out towards Cotes Hall when I saw him.”

She stared at him without appearing to see him. “But Col was only angry,” she said. “He didn’t mean it. I pushed him too far — I do that sometimes — and he said something he didn’t really mean. I knew that. He knew it as well.”

She was speaking Greek as far as Brendan was concerned. She was drifting in space. He needed to bring her back to earth, and more importantly, back to him. He took her hand. Eyes still unfocussed, she didn’t withdraw it. He twined his fingers with hers.

“Polly, you’ve got to listen.”

“No, it’s nothing. He didn’t mean a thing.”

“He asked me about keys,” Brendan said. “Whether I’d given a set of keys to you, whether you’d asked for them.”

She frowned, said nothing.

“I didn’t answer him, Polly. I told him that line of enquiry wasn’t on. I told him to bugger off as well. So if he comes to see you—”

“He can’t think that.” She spoke so low that Brendan had to lean forward to hear her. “He knows me, does Colin. He knows me, Brendan.”

Her hand tightened round his, pulled his towards her breast. He was startled, delighted, and more than ready to be of whatever assistance he could.

“How can he think I would ever, ever…No matter what…Brendan!” She fl ung his hand to one side. She backed her stool into the corner. She said, “Now it’s worse,” and just as Brendan was about to question her, seeking to understand how anything could possibly be worse if she’d finally started to accept him, a heavy hand descended on his shoulder.

Brendan looked up into the face of his father-in-law. “Flaming bloody hell,” St. John Andrew Townley-Young said concisely. “Get outside before I thrash you to pieces, you miserable worm.”

Lynley shut the door of his room and stood with his back to it, his eyes on the telephone next to the bed. On the wall above it, the Wraggs continued to display their love affair with the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists: Monet’s tender Madame Monet and Child made an odd companion piece to ToulouseLautrec’s At the Moulin Rouge , both of them mounted and framed with more enthusiasm than care, the latter hanging at an angle that suggested all of Montmartre had been hit by an earthquake just as the artist was rendering immortal its most famous nightclub. Lynley straightened the Toulouse-Lautrec. He pinched a cobweb that seemed to be dangling from Madame Monet’s hair. But neither a contemplation of the prints nor a few minutes’ consideration of their quixotic pairing was sufficient to prevent his reaching for the telephone and punching in her number.

He dug in his pocket for his watch. It was just after nine. She wouldn’t be in bed. He couldn’t even use the hour as a plausible reason for avoidance. He had no excuse for not placing the call.

Except cowardice, which he had in spades whenever it came to dealing with Helen. Did I really want love, he wondered wryly, and if so when did I want it? And wouldn’t an affair — a dozen affairs — be less diffi cult and more convenient than this? He sighed. What a monstrosity love was; it was nothing so simple as the beast with two backs.

The sex part had been effortless between them from the first. He’d driven her home from Cambridge on a Friday in November. They’d not stirred from her flat until Sunday morning. They didn’t even have a meal until Saturday night. He could close his eyes — even now as he thought of it — and still look up into her face, see the way her hair framed it in a colour not so different from the brandy he’d just drunk, feel her moving against him, sense the warmth beneath his palms as he ran them from her breasts to her waist to her thighs, and hear the way her breathing caught then changed altogether as it rose with her climax and she cried out his name. He’d touched his fingers beneath her breast and felt her heart pounding. She laughed, a little embarrassed at the ease of it all between them.

She was what he wanted. Together, they were what he wanted. But life never took a permanent definition from the hours they spent with each other in bed.

Because one could love a woman, make love to her, and have her make love completely in return and, with considerable care and a refusal to reveal, still never be touched at the core of one’s being. For that was a fi nal breaking of barriers from which one never walked away the same. And both of them knew it, because both of them had crossed all conceivable boundaries with other people before.

How do we learn to trust, he wondered. How do we ever develop the courage to make the heart vulnerable a second or third time, exposing it to yet another chance of breaking? Helen didn’t want to do that, and he couldn’t blame her. He wasn’t always certain that he could risk it himself.

He thought with chagrin about his behaviour that day. He’d been eager enough to take the first opportunity to dash out of London this morning. He knew his motivations well enough to admit that, in part, he’d snatched at the promise of distance from Helen as well as the chance to punish her. Her doubts and fears exasperated him, perhaps because they so accurately mirrored his own.

Wearily, he sank onto the edge of the bed and listened to the steady plink…plink of water dripping from the tap in the bath. In the way of all night noises, it dominated as it could never do at any other time, and he knew that if he didn’t do something to stop it, he would toss, turn, and fight with the pillow once he put out the light and attempted to sleep. He decided it probably wanted a washer, if bath taps had washers the way basin taps did. Ben Wragg could no doubt provide him with one. All he needed to do was pick up the phone and ask. What would it take to repair the thing, anyway? Five minutes? Four? And he could think while he did it, taking the time to engage his hands with an odd job so that his mind was free to make a decision regarding Helen. He couldn’t, after all, telephone her without knowing what his objective was in doing so. Five minutes would prevent him from rushing in thoughtlessly and just as thoughtlessly taking the risk of exposing him-self — not to mention Helen who was far more sensitive than he — to…He paused in the mental colloquy with himself. To what? What? Love? Commitment? Honesty? Trust? God alone knew how either one of them might survive the challenges of that.

He laughed sourly at his own capacity for self-deception and reached for the telephone just as it rang.

“Denton told me where to find you,” was the first thing she said.

The first thing he said was, “Helen. Hullo, darling. I was just about to phone you,” realising that she probably wouldn’t believe him and that he couldn’t blame her if that was the case.