“Not pay, not hire. But I thought there could be someone for him. Perhaps someone in a marriage gone bad or gone dead, someone who had a physical need that her partner couldn’t fulfil, a young widow who didn’t want to remarry. I didn’t care who the person was or how he found her or even if there were two or three or a dozen of them. I just didn’t want him to fall in love. With her, though, with Teo, I saw it happening and I didn’t know what to do.” She put her forehead on her left hand, which was resting on the wheelchair handles. She murmured, “I’m so sorry,” and “Nothing’s ever been the way it should be.”
Lynley thought about what she had said. He thought about her relationship with her husband. He thought about the secrets people keep behind the closed doors of their homes. He thought about the various destinations to which those secrets could lead.
He said, “Mrs. Phinney, I must ask you where you were on the thirty-first of July. This would be from midafternoon onward.”
She didn’t reply.
He said, “Mrs. Phinney?”
Still nothing.
Lynley waited. He couldn’t think he might have to arrest her, to take her into an interview room and thus compel her into speaking. She was broken in so many ways. It seemed inhuman to break her even further.
“I know this is difficult for you,” he told her quietly. “I also know that you see the reality: Everyone connected to Teo Bontempi’s death—even remotely—is suffering now, and my responsibility is to uncover what happened to her and through that means bring some wretched form of peace to her family and to those others who loved her.”
“Like Mark,” she cried.
“Like everyone whose life she touched.”
“I didn’t hate her.” She finally raised her head. Lilybet had coughed and the sound was startling, coming as it did from deep in her chest but strangled at the end with a gasp. Pietra was at once altered. She was on her feet, turning a dial on the canister that hung from the back of Lilybet’s wheelchair and fitting a nosepiece into place, holding it there, saying, “Breathe deeply, Lily. Breathe deeply for Mummy.”
A man came out of their flat near the entrance to The Mothers Square. He looked round. Lynley recognised him as Lilybet’s attendant. He began to walk along the crescent as if looking for Pietra, probably assuming she was having some sort of difficulty with the little girl’s chair. It would be only a moment before he saw them.
Lynley said to Pietra, “Whatever you intended towards Teo went in the wrong direction at some point. I believe it was a direction that you never intended. You’re frightened now, and rightfully so. But hoping to hide—”
“I didn’t,” she said. “I wasn’t there. I didn’t. I saw her once. That was the only time.”
“Were you here, then? At home? That late afternoon and early evening?”
In her silence, he had his answer.
“Were you with someone?” and when she didn’t reply, “Mrs. Phinney, if someone can verify—”
“There you are!” It was the attendant. He stepped off the pavement’s kerb and was coming in their direction. “I thought aliens might’ve taken the two of you.” His gaze went to Lynley, and he added, “Ah. Sh’ll I take our Lily off your hands, then, Pete?”
She stood. “No, no. We’re coming along, Robertson. I promised Lilybet Le Merlin and we’re about to set off. Will you come with us?”
“I’d do myself in if you went without me,” Robertson said affably. He reached them, nodded at Lynley, and squatted in front of Lilybet’s chair. “Le Merlin! What d’you think of that?” Then to Pietra, “We’ll set off, shall we? Me and the princess? If you need the time?”
“We’re finished here,” she said to him.
Robertson took up position behind the chair and began to push it along the pergola, chatting to the little girl about crêpes and nuts and chocolate. Pietra Phinney blotted her face. For a moment during which seconds ticked by like hours, she looked at her feet.
Lynley waited until she looked up again. He said, “Was it another man, Mrs. Phinney?”
“Have you ever known shame, Inspector Lynley?” she asked him.
“I have,” he told her.
“I don’t believe you.”
“The truth,” he said, “is often as inconvenient to one as it is unpalatable to another.”
“That,” she replied, “I do believe.” She began to follow Robertson and her daughter, and he watched her, which she seemed to feel. She turned again and said to him quietly, “Please don’t blame Mark for anything. None of this is his fault. It never was.”