“At The Source,” Rodney intoned religiously, “we don’t need to make things up. We just need to find them in the first place.”
“And can I ask… How’d you know this? About the Met, I mean. How’d you find out if it’s all hush-hush?”
It was one of those moments when paternal superiority was called for, and Rodney loved those kinds of moments. He rose from behind his desk, went round to the front of it, and lifted a bulky thigh to rest it on the corner. It wasn’t the most comfortable position— considering the chafing of his skin against his trousers— but Rodney liked to think it communicated a degree of journalistic savoir faire that would underscore the importance of what he had to say next. “Zedekiah, I’ve been in this business since I was a kid. I’ve sat where you’re sitting and this is what I learned: We’re nothing without the snouts we cultivate, and I’ve cultivated them from Edinburgh to London and all points in between. Particularly in London, my friend. I’ve got snouts in places that other people don’t even recognise as being places. I scratch their backs with great regularity. They scratch mine whenever they can.”
Benjamin looked suitably impressed. Indeed, he looked humbled. He was in the presence of his journalistic better and it seemed that he finally knew it.
Rodney went on, enjoying his moment. “Nicholas Fairclough’s dad has a tie to the Met. He’s the one asking for an investigation. Can I reckon you know what that means, Zed?”
“He thinks it wasn’t an accident that Ian Cresswell drowned. And if it wasn’t an accident, we’ve got a story. Fact is, we’ve got a story either way because we’ve got the Met up there nosing round and that suggests something might have gone on and all we ever need for a story is a suggestion.”
“Amen to that,” Rodney said. “Get back to Cumbria, my good man. On the double.”
CHALK FARM
LONDON
Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers arrived home in an uneasy mood that she didn’t want to name. Having found a parking space not too far from Eton Villas, she should have been grateful, but she couldn’t summon up the appropriate feeling of joy attendant on not having to hike to her front door. As usual, the Mini coughed a few times after Barbara cut the ignition, but she barely took note. Through the windscreen a splattering of rain began to fall, but she hardly clocked that either. Instead, her thoughts remained where they’d been largely fixed— save for one brief distraction— during her long drive home from the Met. Those thoughts battled in her head with a voice that judged them childish, but that didn’t matter and it certainly wasn’t enough to quash them, although she would, at this point, have been grateful had that only been the case.
No one had noticed, Barbara thought. Not a single, sodding individual. Well, all right, Detective Superintendent Ardery had noticed, but she hardly counted as she’d given the initial order— although she’d claimed it was only a suggestion— and from Barbara’s nearly four months of experience with Isabelle Ardery, she knew the superintendent noticed everything. Ardery seemed to make noticing a habit. She seemed, in fact, to have raised it to a fine art. So whenever she took note of something, it mattered not, unless her taking note was connected intimately to one’s performance at work. If it was connected to anything else, one could say that Isabelle Ardery was merely engaging in her irritating habit of sitting in judgement upon the superficial, with the number one superficial within the superintendent’s gaze being Barbara Havers’s personal appearance. As to the rest of the team, when Barbara had arrived back at the Yard from her final appointment with the dentist, they’d gone about their business without a word, a raised eyebrow, or anything else.
Barbara had told herself she didn’t care, and there was truth in this since she really didn’t care about the notice of most of her colleagues. But the notice of one of them she cared about deeply, and it was this caring that sat uneasily upon her, asking to be acknowledged or at least dealt with by the downing of something of a pastry orientation. French would be nice, but it was too late in the day to score a chocolate croissant, although not too late in the day to snag an entire torte, which of course would have been Austrian, but at this hour who was quibbling about such minor details as country of origin? Yet Barbara knew that that direction would lead her straight into the evils of an extended carb wallow from which she might not emerge for weeks, so instead of pausing at a bakery en route to her home, she’d decided to engage in retail therapy in Camden High Street. There she’d made the purchase of a scarf and a blouse, whereupon she’d celebrated the fact that she’d just behaved in a manner entirely different from her usual mode of reacting to disappointment, stress, frustration, or anxiety, but this celebration lasted only till she parked the Mini. At that point, her final encounter with Thomas Lynley forced its way into her consciousness.
After their time at the Old Bailey that day, they’d parted: Lynley heading back to the Yard and Barbara heading to the dentist. They’d not seen each other again until the end of the day when they met in the ascending lift. Barbara was taking it from the underground car park and when it stopped at the lobby, Lynley got on. She could see that he was preoccupied. He’d been preoccupied outside Courtoom Number One earlier in the day, but she’d reckoned that had to do with having to testify to his near encounter with the Grim Reaper in the back of a Ford Transit kitted out as a mobile murder scene some months earlier. This preoccupation seemed different, though, and when he vanished into Superintendent Ardery’s office after the lift doors opened, Barbara reckoned she knew the reason why.
Lynley thought she didn’t know what was going on between Ardery and him. Barbara could understand the reason for this conclusion. No one else at the Met had a clue that he and the superintendent were dancing inside each other’s knickers two or sometimes three nights a week, but no one else at the Met knew Lynley as well as Barbara did. And while she couldn’t imagine anyone actually wanting to shag the superintendent— bloody hell, it had to be like going to bed with a cobra— she’d spent the last three months of their affair telling herself that, if nothing else, Lynley deserved it. He’d lost his wife to a street murder at the hands of a twelve-year-old, he’d spent five months afterwards wandering the coast of Cornwall in a sodding daze, he’d returned to London barely functioning … If he wanted the questionable diversion of plugging Isabelle Ardery’s drainpipes for a time, so be it. They could both be in big trouble if anyone found out about it, but no one was going to find out about it because they were discreet and Barbara wasn’t going to say a word. Besides, Lynley wasn’t going to hook himself up permanently to someone like Isabelle Ardery. The man had something like three hundred years of family history to contend with, and if nothing else, he knew his duty and it had very little to do with an interlude in which he bonked a woman on whom the title Countess of Asherton would hang like a hundredweight. His type was meant to reproduce obligingly and send the family name hurtling into the future. He knew this and he’d act accordingly.
Still, it did not sit easily with Barbara that Lynley and the superintendent were lovers. That relationship comprised the malodorous elephant present in every encounter Barbara had with him. She hated this. Not him, not the affair itself, but the fact that he wouldn’t talk to her about it. Not that she expected him to. Not that she really wanted him to. Not that she would actually be able to think of something reasonable to say should he turn to her and make a comment alluding to it. But they were partners— she and Lynley— or at least they had been and partners were meant to… What? she asked herself. But that was a question she preferred not to answer.