They went a few more rounds on this general topic, and they did not part happily. He thought it best—and told her as much—that he not spend the night. She replied with, “You must do as you wish.”
As before, nothing was resolved. But unlike before when he left her, she did not see him to the door.
And now in the underground car park at New Scotland Yard, he stared at the wall, calling himself every which way a fool. He wished he had not given up smoking. He very much wanted to take it up again.
As if she were a genie who’d popped out of a nearby brass bottle having heard his wish, his long-time partner Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers appeared at the driver’s window of the Healey Elliott, sucking down the smoke from a nearly spent Player’s. He waited for her to stamp it out before he opened the car’s door. She stepped out of the way, and he got out. She was dressed with her usual flair: too-short trousers that she had to have found in Oxfam, her usual red high-top trainers, and a T-shirt reading “Being cremated is my last hope for a smoking hot body.” He sighed when he saw this. At least, he thought, she had some sort of jersey tied round her neck. She could put it on in a hurry should an officer more superior and less tolerant than he encounter her.
She peered at him shrewdly. “Knackered or cheesed off?”
“Neither.” He set off towards the lift, and she followed, hard on his heels.
She said, “No? So why d’you look like you just dropped beans and toast down the front of your shirt?” She stepped in front of him to examine this garment. “Did you, by the way?” she asked him.
“Metaphorically, I suppose the answer is yes.” He punched the button to summon the lift.
“Ah. That means Daidre,” Havers noted.
“She won’t appreciate being compared to beans on toast.”
“I’m not telling her. Are you?”
“When we begin speaking again, I might do. But probably not. And not to put too fine a point on it, Barbara, I generally don’t tuck in to beans on toast for breakfast.”
“Bloody hell!” she crowed. “I’ve converted you to Pop-Tarts!”
He shot her a look. The lift doors opened.
Up above, the first person they encountered was Dorothea Harriman, the department’s redoubtable civilian secretary. Unlike Havers, she was dressed to the nines as usual, although Lynley wondered how she managed to teeter round the building comfortably on high heels that looked like the tools of some mediaeval oppressor. She said upon seeing him and Havers, “Ah. Acting Detective Chief Superintendent Lynley, you’re wanted by his knighted nibs. Judi-with-an-i rang”—here she checked her wrist, upon which she was wearing one of those complicated watch-like affairs that apparently did everything but cook one’s meals—“about twenty minutes ago. Shall I give her a bell and tell her you’re on your way? Stephenson Deacon’s with him, she told me. A word to the wise, I expect.”
“Better you than me,” Havers muttered to Lynley. She loathed the head of the Press Office nearly as much as he did.
He said to Dorothea, “Do we know what this is about?”
“It’s all hush-hush and extremely sotto voce but the grapevine has it”—and Dorothea was born vintner—“that something dodgy’s gone on at Empress State Building.”
That didn’t sound good, Lynley thought. Empress State Building was one of the three large policing centres that were in charge of groups of boroughs as more and more cutbacks were making the London police consolidate by doing away with local stations. If New Scotland Yard was being called in on something, it was going to be serious. If the Press Office was involved in some way, it also wasn’t going to be pleasant.
Havers voiced what he was thinking. “Someone’s done something they’re about to regret. That is, if they don’t already.”
Lynley said, “I’ll put you in the picture as soon as I’m in it,” and he set off to the Assistant Commissioner’s office.
WESTMINSTER
CENTRAL LONDON
Lynley had not been out of their presence for ten seconds before Dorothea turned to Barbara, giving her T-shirt a critical eye and doing much the same to her trousers and her trainers. She shifted her weight from one hip to the other and said, “Barbara . . .” in a tone that Barbara knew presaged a lengthy sartorial conversation that she didn’t wish to have. She said hastily, “I know, I know. I’ve got a change of clothes in the car. I was out running earlier and this was what came to hand.”