“That's not what she's doing!”
“No?”
“She came to see Simon, not me. She didn't even know I was there. When she saw me, she wanted to turn tail and run. And she would have done had I not stopped her. She needed someone to talk to. She felt terrible, and she needed a friend, which is what you always used to be in her life. What I want to know is why you're not being a friend to her now.”
“Helen, this isn't about friendship. There's no place for friendship in a situation in which everything depends on an officer obeying an order. Barbara didn't do that. And what's worse, she nearly killed someone in the process.”
“But you know what happened. How can you not see—”
“What I see is that there's a purpose to a chain of command.”
“She saved a life.”
“And it wasn't her place to determine that life was in danger.”
His wife had moved towards him then, coming to grasp one of the posts at the end of their bed. She said, “I don't understand this. How can you be so unforgiving? She'd be the first person to forgive you anything.”
“In the same circumstances, I wouldn't expect it. She shouldn't have expected as much of me.”
“You've bent the rules before. You've told me so.”
“You can't think attempted murder is bending the rules, Helen. It's a criminal act. For which, by the way, most people go to prison.”
“And for which, in this case, you've decided to be the judge, the jury, and the executioner. I see.”
“Do you?” He was beginning to get angry and he should have held his tongue. Why was it, he wondered, that Helen could push his buttons in ways no one else ever could? “Then I'll ask you to see this as well. Barbara Havers doesn't concern you. Her behaviour in Essex, the subsequent investigation, and whatever medicine she's asked to swallow as a result of that behaviour and investigation are none of your business. If you're finding your life so circumscribed these days that you need to champion a cause to keep yourself busy, you might consider aligning yourself with me. To be honest, I'd appreciate coming home to support and not to subversion.”
She was as quick to anger as was he and just as capable of expressing it. “I'm not that sort of woman. I'm not that sort of wife. If you wanted an obsequious sycophant to marry—”
“That's tautology,” he said.
And that terse statement finished their argument. Helen had snapped, “You swine,” and left him to gather the rest of his belongings. When he had done so and had gone in search of her to say goodbye, she was nowhere to be found. He'd cursed: her, himself, and Barbara Havers for being the source of a disagreement with Helen. But the drive to Derbyshire had given him time to cool off as well as time to reflect upon how often he hit below the belt. This contretemps with Helen was one of those times, and he had to admit it.
Now, standing on the pavement in front of Buxton police station with Winston Nkata, Lynley saw that there was a way to make amends to his wife. Nkata would be waiting for him to assign another officer to accompany him on any rounds he might have to make in London, and both of them knew who the logical selection was. Yet Lynley found himself temporising by turning the Bentley over to his subordinate officer. He couldn't commandeer a car from the Buxton police for his DC to drive all the way to London, he explained to Nkata, and the only alternative to having him take the Bentley was directing him to return to London by plane from Manchester or by train. But by the time he got himself to the airport and caught a flight or waited for a train and changed from one line to another in God only knew how many towns between Buxton and London, he could have driven the distance.
Lynley hoped Nkata had more finesse behind the wheel than Barbara Havers had employed the last time she happily ran over an old milestone and threw out the car's front suspension. He informed the younger man that he was to drive the Bentley as if he had a litre of ni-troglycerin in the boot.
Nkata grinned. “Don't think I know how to treat a motor this fine?”
“I'd just prefer it to survive its adventure with you unscathed.” Lynley disarmed the car's security system and handed over his keys.
Nkata cocked his head at the front of the station. “Think he'll play our game? Or're we playing his?”
“It's too soon to tell. He's unhappy about our begin here, but I would be as well, in his position. We'll need to tread softly.” Lynley glanced at his watch. It was nearly five. The post-mortems had been scheduled for early that afternoon. With any luck, they would be completed by now and the pathologist would be available to share his preliminary findings.
“What d'you think of his thinking?” Nkata reached into his jacket pocket and brought out two Opal Fruits, his vice of choice. He examined their wrappers, made his flavour selection, and passed the other over to Lynley.
“How Hanken sees the case?” Lynley unwrapped the sweet. “He's willing to talk. That's a good sign. He seems able to shift gears. That's good too.”
“Something edgy about him though,” Nkata said. “Makes me wonder what's eating at him.”
“We all have private concerns, Winnie. It's our job not to let them get in the way.”
Nkata adroitly tagged a final question onto Lynley's thought. “D'you want me working with someone back in town?”
Still, Lynley avoided. “You can call in help if you think you need it.”
“Sh'll I make the choice, or d'you want to do it yourself?”
Lynley regarded the other man. Nkata had made the queries so casually that it was impossible to read into them anything other than a request for direction. And the request was perfectly reasonable considering the fact that Nkata might well have to return to Derbyshire shortly after his arrival in London, bringing someone North with the purpose of identifying the second body. If that happened, someone else in London would be needed to look into Terence Cole's background and business in town.
Here was the moment, then. In front of Lynley was the opportunity to take the decision that Helen would approve of. But he didn't take it. Instead, he said, “I'm not up to date on who's available. I'll leave it up to you.”
Samantha McCallin had learned early into her extended stay at Broughton Manor that her uncle Jeremy didn't discriminate when it came to drink. He imbibed anything with the potential to obliterate his sensibilities quickly. He seemed to like Bombay gin the best, but at a pinch, when the nearest off-licence was closed, he wasn't finicky.
As far as Samantha knew, her uncle had been drinking steadily since adolescence, having taken a brief few years away from booze during his twenties to do drugs instead. Jeremy Britton had been—according to family legend—the once shining star of the Britton clan. But his marriage to a fellow flower-child, who had what Samantha's mother euphemistically and archaically called A Past, had caused him to fall into disfavour with his father. Nonetheless, the laws of primogeniture couldn't prevent Jeremy's inheriting Broughton Manor and all its contents upon his father's death, and the realisation that she'd lived her life as the “good child” for naught—while Jeremy had the time of his life among fellow ingesters of hallucinogenic substances—had planted in the breast of Samantha's mother more seeds of disharmony between her and her brother. That disharmony had only grown throughout the years as Jeremy and his wife produced three children in rapid succession and drank and drugged Broughton Manor into the ground, while in Winchester Jeremy's only sister, Sophie, hired investigators to provide her with periodic reports on her brother's dissolute life and wept, wailed, and gnashed her teeth when she received them.
“Someone's got to do something about him,” she cried, “before he destroys our family's entire history. The way he's carrying on, there'll be nothing left to pass on to anyone.”
Not that Sophie Britton McCallin needed her brother Jeremy's money, which he'd long ago run through anyway. She herself was rolling in it, since her own husband was working himself into an early grave to keep her supply line running.
During that period when Samantha's fath
er had been healthy enough to adhere to a schedule at the family factory that would have felled an ordinary mortal, Samantha herself had ignored her mother's soliloquies on the topic of her brother Jeremy. Those soliloquies changed in both tone and content, however, when Douglas McCallin was felled by prostate cancer. Faced with the grim reality of earthly mortality, his wife had been reborn to a fervent belief in the importance of family ties.
“I want my brother here,” she'd wept in her widow's weeds at the wake. “My only living blood relative. My brother. I want him.”
It was so like Sophie to forget that she had two children herself—not to mention those belonging to her brother—who served as blood relatives. Instead, she seized on a rapprochment with Jeremy as the only solace in her present grief.
Indeed, her grief became so present that it soon was apparent that Sophie had set herself up to outdo Victoria's mourning for Albert. And when she finally saw this, Samantha decided that the only road to peace in Winchester was decisive action. So she'd come to Derbyshire to collect her uncle once she deduced from incoherent phone conversations with the man that he was in no condition to get himself south unaided. And once she'd arrived and had seen his condition for herself, Samantha knew that carting him down to his sister in his present state would probably send Sophie to her grave.
Besides that, Samantha found it a relief to be away from Sophie for a time. The drama of her husband's death had provided her with more fodder than she usually had, and she'd been using it with a gusto that had long left Samantha too exhausted to deal with her.
Not that Samantha didn't mourn her father's passing herself. She did. But she'd long ago seen that Douglas McCallin's first love was the family biscuit factory—not the family itself—and consequently his death seemed more like an extension of his normal working hours than a permanent parting. His life had always been his work. And he'd given it the dedication of a man who'd had the luck to meet his one true love at the age of twenty.
Jeremy, on the other hand, had chosen drink as his bride. On this particular day, he'd started with dry sherry at ten in the morning. During lunch, he'd worked his way through a bottle of something called the Blood of Jupiter, which Samantha assumed from its colour was red wine. And throughout the afternoon, he'd plied himself with one gin and tonic after another. The fact that he was still ambulatory was, to Samantha, remarkable.
He usually spent his days in the parlour, where he shut the curtains and used the ancient eight-millimeter projector to entertain himself with endless meanderings down memory lane. In the months that Samantha had been at Broughton Manor, he'd gone through the Brit-ton family's entire cinematic history at least three times. He always did it the same way: beginning with the earliest films that one Britton or another had shot in 1924 and watching them in chronological order to the point at which there was no Britton with sufficient interest in the family to record their doings. So the pictorial record of fox hunts, fishing expeditions, holidays, pheasant shoots, birthdays, and weddings ended round the time of Julian's fifteenth birthday. Which, according to Samantha's calculations, would have been just the time that Jeremy Britton had fallen from his horse and compressed three vertebrae, for which long-ago injury he religiously plied himself with pain-killers as well as intoxicants.
“He's going to kill himself mixing pills with booze if we don't watch him,” Julian had told her soon after her arrival. “Sam, will you help me? With you here to keep an eye on him, I can get more work done on the estate. I might even be able to put some plans in motion … if you'll help me, that is.”
And within days of meeting him, Samantha had known that she would do anything to help her cousin Julian. Anything at all.
Which was something that Jeremy Britton obviously knew as well. Because hearing her return from the vegetable garden in the late afternoon and clomp across the courtyard ridding her boots of soil, he'd actually emerged from the parlour and sought her out in the kitchen, where she was beginning to prepare their dinner.
“Ah. Here you are, my flower.” He leaned forward in that gravity-defying posture that seemed second nature to drunks. He had a tumbler in his hand: Two small pieces of ice and a slice of lemon were all that remained of his latest gin and tonic. As usual, he was dressed up to the nines, every inch of him the country squire. Despite the late summer weather, he was wearing a tweed jacket, a tie, and heavy wool plus fours that he must have resurrected from a predecessor's wardrobe. He might have passed for an eccentric albeit well-to-do landowner in his cups.
He placed himself at the old wooden work top, precisely where Samantha wished to be. He jiggled the ice in his tumbler and drained what little liquid he was able to coax from the melting cubes. That done, he set the glass next to the large chef's knife that she'd removed from its stand. He looked from her to the knife to her once again. And he smiled a slow, happy inebriate's smile.
“Where's our boy?” he inquired pleasantly, although it came out as whairshare boy? His eyes were so light a grey that their irises might not even have existed, and the whites of them had long since gone yellow, a colour that was beginning to suffuse most of his skin. “Haven't noticed Julie skulking about today, don't you know. Fac’ tis, I don't believe he was home last night at all, our little Julie, because I don't recall seeing his mug at breakfast.” Except it was hishmug-gabrekkest, and having said this much, Jeremy waited for her reaction to his remarks.
Samantha began emptying the vegetable trug of its contents. She placed lettuce, a cucumber, two green peppers, and a cauliflower into the nearby sink. She began to wash them free of soil. To the lettuce she gave particular attention, bending over it like a mother examining her infant child.
“Well,” Jeremy went on with a sigh, “I s'pose we know what Julie was up to, don't we, Sam?” Doe-we-Sham? “That boy won't see what's before his face. I don't know what we're going to do with him.”
“You haven't taken any of your pills, have you, Uncle Jeremy?” Samantha asked. “If you mix them with spirits, you could be in trouble.”
“I was born for trouble,” Jeremy said—I-sh born f'trouble—and Samantha tried to discern if his slurring was any worse than usual, an indication of an assault on his consciousness. It was just past five o'clock, so he'd be slurring anyway, but the last thing Julian needed to contend with was his father's usual drunken slumber working its way into a coma. Jeremy sidled along the work top till he was standing next to Samantha at the sink. “You're a good-looking woman, Sammy,” he said. His breath was a study in mixing his beverages. “Don't you think I'm ever so many sheets to the storm that I don't notice what a looker you are. Thing is, we've got to make our little Julie see that. No point showing off those legs of yours if the only one looking is this old sod. Not that I don't appreciate the sight, mind you. Having a nice young thing like you running about the house in those tight little shorts is just the very thing that—”
“These are hiking shorts,” Samantha interrupted. “I wear them because it's been warm, Uncle Jeremy. Which you'd know if you ever left the house during the day. And they aren't tight.”
“Jus’ a compliment, girl,” Jeremy protested. “Got to learn to accept a compliment. And who better to learn from than your own blood uncle? Christ, it's good to know you, girl. 'Ve I mentioned that?” He didn't bother to wait for a response. He leaned even closer for a confidential whisper—“Now let's figure what to do about Julie.” Less figger whatta do bow Julie.
“What about Julian?” Samantha asked.
“We know what we're dealing with, don't we? He's been mounting the Maiden girl like a randy donkey since he was twenty years old—”
“Please, Uncle Jeremy.” Samantha could feel her neck getting prickly.
“Please Uncle Jeremy what? We got to look at the facts so we know what to do with them. And fact number one is that Julie's been tupping the Padley Gorge ewe every chance he's had. Or, better said, every chance she's given him.”
For a drunk, he was remarkably observant, Samantha thought.
But she said, rather more primly than she intended, “I really don't want to talk about Julian's sex life, Uncle Jeremy. It's his business, not ours.”
“Ah,” her uncle said. “Too nasty a topic for Sammy McCallin? Why's it I don't think that's the case, Sam?” ThassacaseSam.
“I didn't say it was nasty,” she replied. “I said it wasn't our business. And it isn't. So I won't discuss it.” It wasn't that she felt odd about sex—embarrassed, shy, or anything like that. Far from it. She'd had sex when it was available to her ever since getting past the awkward inconvenience of virginity by pressing one of her brother's friends into service when she was a teenager. But this … talking about her cousin's sex life … She couldn't afford to discuss it and run the risk of giving herself away.
“Girly girl, listen,” Jeremy said. “I see how you look at him, and I know what you want. I'm on your side. Hell, keep the family for the family in the family's my motto. You think I want him chained to the Maiden tart when there's a woman like you hanging round, waiting for the day when her man'll wise up?”
“You're mistaken,” she said, although the pounding just beneath her skin told her how her blood was giving the lie to her words. “I'm fond of Julian. Who wouldn't be? He's a wonderful man—”
“Right. He is. And d'you actually”—ackshully—“think the Maiden sees that in our Julie? Not on your life. She sees a bit of fun when she's hereabouts, a bit of tumble-in-the-heather-and-poke-me-if-you-can.”
“But,” Samantha went on firmly as if he hadn't spoken, “I'm not in love with him and I can't imagine ever being in love with him. Good grief, Uncle Jeremy. We're first cousins. I think of Julian the way I think of my brother.”
In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner Page 10