Deception on His Mind (2 page)
Read Deception on His Mind Online
Authors: Elizabeth George
Tags: #Mystery, #Thriller, #Suspense, #Contemporary, #Writing
Ian saw that other gulls were already doing their web-footed tap dance on the pillbox's roof. From a hexagonal opening on this same roof, where a machine gun placement once would have stood, more birds entered and exited the structure. They gabbled and cawed as if in communication, and their message seemed to pass telepathically to the birds off shore, for these began to leave the fishing boat and to head towards land.
Their decisive flight reminded Ian of a scene on the beach near Dover that he'd witnessed as a child. A big barking brute of a dog had been lured out to sea by a flock of similar birds. The dog had been playing at catching them from the water, but they had been deadly serious, and they'd circled farther and farther out into the sea until the poor animal was a quarter mile from the shore. No one's shouting or imprecations had brought the dog back. And no one had been able to control the birds. Had he not seen the gulls toying with the dog's ebbing strength—circling above him just out of his reach, cawing, approaching, then darting away—Ian would never have thought it reasonable to conclude that birds were creatures with murderous intentions. But he saw it that day, and he'd believed it ever since. And he always kept a respectful distance from them.
Now, however, he thought of that poor dog. It was obvious that the gulls were toying with something, and whatever that desolate something was, it was inside the old pillbox. Action was called for.
Ian descended the stairs. He said, “Hey, there! I say!” and he waved his arms. This did little to deter the gulls that bobbed on the guano-streaked concrete rooftop and flapped their wings minaciously. But Ian wasn't about to be put off. The long ago gulls in Dover had got the better of their canine pursuer, but these Balford gulls weren't about to get the better of Ian Armstrong.
He jogged in their direction. The pillbox was some twenty-five yards from the foot of the steps, and he was able to build up a fair amount of speed in that distance. Arms waving, he descended on the birds with a yowl, and he was pleased to see his efforts at intimidation bear fruit. The gulls took to the air, leaving Ian alone with the pillbox, and whatever it was that they had been investigating within it.
The entrance was a crawlhole less than three feet from the sand, the perfect height for a small seal to wriggle through, seeking shelter. And a seal was what Ian expected to find when he himself duck-walked through the short tunnel and emerged in the gloom of the pillbox's interior.
Cautiously, he stood. His head brushed the damp ceiling. A pervasive odour of seaweed and dying crustaceans seemed to rise from the ground and to seep from the walls. These were heavily embellished with graffiti, which at a glance appeared to be solely sexual in nature.
Light filtered in from embrasures, allowing Ian to note that the pillbox—which he'd never explored before this moment, despite his many trips to the Nez—was actually two concentric structures. It was like a doughnut, and an opening in its internal wall acted as access to its centre. This was what had attracted the gulls, and finding nothing of substance on the rubbish-strewn ground, it was towards this aperture that Ian moved, calling out, “Hello there? Anyone here?” without realising that an animal—wounded or otherwise—would hardly be likely to answer.
The air felt close. Outside, the cries of the birds rose and fell. As he reached the opening, Ian could hear wings flapping and webbed feet scuttling as the more intrepid gulls descended once again. This would not do, Ian thought grimly. He was the human, after all, master of the planet and king of all that he surveyed. It wasn't thinkable that a gang of hooligan birds could presume a dominance over him.
He said, “Shoo! Off with you! Get out of it! Get!” and burst into the open air of the pillbox's centre. Birds rocketed skyward. Ian's gaze followed their flight. He said, “That's better,” and pushed his coat sleeves towards his elbows to ready himself to deal with whatever the gulls had been tormenting.
It wasn't a seal and they weren't through with their tormenting, though. He saw this at the same moment his stomach lurched upward and his sphincter quivered.
A thin-haired young man sat upright with his back against the old concrete machine-gun placement. The fact that he was dead was demonstrated by the two remaining sea gulls who picked at his eyes.
Ian Armstrong took one step towards the body, his own body feeling like ice. When he could breathe again and believe what he saw, he uttered only four words. “Well, Jesus be praised.”
HOEVER SAID APRIL IS THE CRUELLEST MONTH HAD
never been in London in the midst of a summer heat wave. With air pollution dressing the sky in designer brown, diesel lorries draping the buildings—and the inside of noses—in basic black, and tree leaves wearing the very latest in dust and grit, London in late June was the cruellest month. Indeed, it was a veritable hellhole. This was Barbara Havers's unsentimental evaluation of her nation's capital as she drove through it on Sunday afternoon, heading homeward in her rattling Mini.
She was ever so slightly—but nonetheless pleasantly—tanked up. Not enough to be a danger to herself or to anyone else on the streets, but enough to review the events of the day in the pleasant afterglow produced by expensive French champagne.
She was returning home from a wedding. It hadn't been the social event of the decade, which she'd long expected that the marriage of an earl to his longtime beloved was supposed to be. Rather, it had been a quiet affair in a tiny church close to said earl's home in Belgravia. And instead of bluebloods dressed to the nines, its guests had been only the earl's closest friends as well as a few of his fellow police officers from New Scotland Yard. Barbara Havers was one of this latter group. At times, she liked to think that she was also one of the former.
Upon reflection, Barbara realised that she should have expected of Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley just the sort of quiet wedding that he and Lady Helen Clyde had produced. He'd been downplaying the Lord Asherton side of his life for as long as she'd known him, and the last thing he would have wanted in the way of nuptials was an ostentatious ceremony attended by a well-heeled crowd of Hooray Henrys. So instead of that, sixteen decidedly unHenrylike guests had assembled to watch Lynley and Helen take the marital plunge, after which they'd all repaired to
La Tante Claire
in Chelsea, where they'd tucked into six kinds of
hors d'oeuvre,
champagne, late lunch, and more champagne.
Once the toasts were made and the couple seen off to a honeymoon destination which they had both laughingly refused to disclose, the rest of the wedding party disbanded. Barbara stood on the frying-pan pavement of Royal Hospital Road and exchanged a few words with the other guests, among them Lynley's best man, a forensic specialist called Simon St. James. In best English fashion, they'd commented upon the weather first. Depending upon the speaker's level of toleration for heat, humidity, smog, fumes, dust, and glare, the atmosphere was deemed wonderful, hideous, blessed, bloody awful, delightful, delectable, insufferable, heavenly, or plain effing hell. The bride was pronounced beautiful. The groom was handsome. The food was delicious. After this, there was a general pause in which the company decided upon two courses of action: talk that ventured beyond banalities or friendly farewells.
The group parted ways. Barbara was left with St. James and his wife, Deborah. Both were wilting in the merciless sun, St. James dabbing a white handkerchief to his brow and Deborah fanning herself enthusiastically with an old theatre programme which she'd fished from her capacious straw bag.
“Will you come home with us, Barbara?” she asked. “We're going to sit in the garden for the rest of the day, and I plan to ask Dad to turn the hose pipe on us.”
“That sounds like the ticket,” Barbara said. She rubbed her neck where sweat had soaked her collar.
“Good.”
“But I can't. To tell you the truth, I'm whacked.”
“Understandable,” St. James said. “How long has it been?”
Deborah added quickly, “How stupid of me. I'm sorry, Barbara. I'd completely forgotten.”
Barbara doubted this. The bandages across her nose and the bruises on her face—not to mention her chipped front tooth—made it unlikely that anyone who saw her would miss the fact that she'd recently served sentence in a hospital. Deborah was merely too polite to notice this. “Two weeks,” Barbara replied to St. James's question.
“How's the lung?”
“Functioning.”
“And the ribs?”
“Only when I laugh.”
St. James smiled. “Are you taking time off?”
“Under orders, yes. I can't go back till I've got clearance from the doctor.”
“I'm sorry about it all,” St. James said. “It was a rotten piece of luck.”
“Yeah. Well.” Barbara shrugged. Heading part of a murder investigation for the first time, she'd been injured in the line of duty. It wasn't something she wanted to talk about. Her pride had taken as serious a blow as had her body.
“So what will you do?” St. James asked.
“Escape the heat,” Deborah advised her. “Go to the Highlands. Go to the lakes. Go to the sea. I wish we could.”
Barbara tossed Deborah's suggestions round in her mind as she drove up Sloane Street. Inspector Lynley's final order to her at the conclusion of the investigation had directed her to take a holiday, and he'd repeated that order in a private moment between the two of them after his wedding.
“I meant what I said, Sergeant Havers,” he'd told her. “You're due some time off, and I want you to take it. Are we clear on the subject?”
“We're clear, Inspector.”
But what they weren't clear on was what she was supposed to do with her enforced leisure. She'd greeted the idea of a period away from work with the horror of a woman who kept her private life, her wounded psyche, and her raw emotions in order by not having time to attend to them. In the past she'd used her holidays from the Yard to deal with her father's failing health. After his death she'd used her free hours to confront her mother's mental infirmities, the family home's renovation and sale, and her own move to her current digs. She didn't like to have time on her hands. The very suggestion of a stretch of minutes dissolving into hours leaking into days extending into one week and maybe even two … Her palms began to sweat at the very thought. Pains shot into her elbows. Every fibre of her short, stout being began to shriek, “Anxiety attack.”
So as she veered through traffic and blinked against a particle of soot that floated in her window on the blistering air, she felt like a woman on the edge of an abyss. It dropped down and away and into forever. It was signposted with the dread words
free time.
What would she do? Where would she go? How would she fill the endless hours? Reading romances? Washing the only three windows she possessed? Learning how to iron, to bake, to sew? How about melting away in the heat? This bloody heat, this miserable heat, this flaming, flipping, sodding heat, this—
Get a grip, Barbara told herself. It's a
holiday
you're doomed to, not solitary confinement.
At the top of Sloane Street, she waited patiently to make the turn into Knightsbridge. She'd listened to the television news in her hospital room day after day, so she knew that the exceptional weather had brought an even greater than normal influx of foreign tourists into London. But here she saw them. Hordes of shoppers wielding bottles of mineral water shoved their way along the pavement. Hordes more poured out of the Knightsbridge tube station, bee-lining in every direction towards the trendy shops. And five minutes later when Barbara had managed to negotiate her way up Park Lane, she could see even more of them—along with her countrymen—baring their lily-skinned bodies to Apollo on the thirsty lawns of Hyde Park. Under the scorching sun, double decker open-topped buses trundled along, carrying a full load of passengers who listened with rapt attention to tour guides speaking into microphones. And tour coaches disgorged Germans, Koreans, Japanese, and Americans at every hotel she saw.
All of us breathing the same air, she thought. The same torrid, noxious, used-up air. Perhaps a holiday was called for after all.