“You don’t sound as if you’ve been successful.”
“I don’t want to hurt you by pretending, Tommy, by trying to be the Daidre you wish I was. That would reassure you for a time, but it wouldn’t be who I really am and eventually that person—that real Daidre—would emerge and break your heart. I don’t want that to happen. And if we carry on, I don’t know how to prevent it.”
“Are you saying we should end this, then?”
“I’m saying that I don’t feel as other people feel. I would like to, I want to, but I don’t. You call it fear, but I’m not afraid. I truly am not. Believe me, there are times when I would love to be merely afraid. Instead, I’m just . . . inside . . . I’m stone and you can’t want that, Tommy. You mustn’t allow yourself to want that.”
“Daidre.” He said her name on a breath.
“No. Please.”
“Do I actually appear so weak to you?”
“This isn’t about weakness.”
“But it is. It seems to me you’re thinking that heartbreak—my potential heartbreak, caused by you—is something that might well destroy me. But you and I met at the worst moment in my life, having lost Helen. My wife, pregnant with our child, murdered on the front steps of our home, shot in the chest, with shopping bags at her feet. She was just trying to unlock the bloody door. She had the key in her hand. In another ten seconds, everything would have been different for her. For me. For our child. But it happened and they were taken from me. And here I am.”
“You adored her.”
“I did. I would never say otherwise. She was completely maddening at times and utterly frivolous at other times. She wasn’t perfect. She wasn’t even the person I’d thought I would marry. But life doesn’t look at the plans we make or the intentions we have. Life just happens. I happened to you. You happened to me. And neither of us can possibly know how this life between us is going to end.”
She sat again. She still held the wineglass and she twirled its stem in her fingers and watched the liquid as the ceiling lights hit it. On the floor, Wally had finished his meal. He was engaged in the washing up ritual of every cat, at present attending to his face and his whiskers. He suddenly stopped, blinked, and looked from Daidre to Lynley. He jumped gracefully into Daidre’s lap. His purr was so loud that it easily could have been heard in the sitting room, in the entry, in the street. He was, Lynley saw, content. Food, water, a lap to sit in. That was all it took. Daidre was so correct in what she’d said: Animals did what their natures told them to do.
She bent and rested her cheek on Wally’s head. He accepted this, endured it as long as his cat nature would allow, then jumped off her lap and sashayed back to the doorway to be let out into the night. Lynley did the honours, then turned back to her.
“That’s something of a relief,” he told her.
“What is?”
“Wally’s departure.”
“Whyever?”
“He looks particularly possessive. I didn’t fancy our sharing the bed with him.”
“Are we sharing the bed, Tommy?”
“I hope so. You?”
“I too.”
8 AUGUST
STREATHAM
SOUTH LONDON
A phone call to him on the previous night had revealed to Barbara Havers that she would have to meet Ross Carver in Streatham in the early morning. He would be dropping off a few boxes at the flat on his way to a job site, a large project in Thornton Heath. She agreed to this. She even eschewed her normal breakfast, which on this particular morning was truly a sacrificial move on her part since her local shop had begun offering a new flavour of Pop-Tart—Wildlicious Wild Berry—and she’d bought half a dozen on the previous evening and was eager to tuck in. She could have consumed one as late dinner, but anticipation was half the fun of a prime culinary discovery, and it had to be said, she did know how and where to draw the line. Breakfast-for-dinner at any hour was where she drew it. It seemed the thing of ancient spinsters living in poorly heated accommodation, sitting in a threadbare chair in front of two bars of electric fire, dining on a single depressing soft-boiled egg and a slice of equally depressing unbuttered toast. Perhaps she indeed had that to look forward to, but Barbara reckoned that while she had her wits, her career, and sufficient means to keep herself rolling in takeaway dinners from the local chippy, the boiled-egg-and-toast route was one she did not immediately need to take.
She did make herself a morning coffee—from powder, alas, but at least topped up with real milk and sweetened with a heaped spoonful of equally real sugar—and she downed this as she drove, not an easy feat since her antique Mini did not possess an automatic transmission or—logically, considering its vintage—cup holders. But over time she’d become proficient at grasping a mug between her thighs, and in this particular instance she spilled on her T-shirt and not between her legs as she’d done occasionally in the past. Wisely, however, she’d worn black and its message—In my defence I was left unsupervised—seemed, if not inspired, then at least prophetic.