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Other than that, he spoke nothing about Lynley and what had happened in his office. He merely nodded at Nkata and said, “Get on with it,” and went on his way. Solitary, this time. No minion accompanied him.
Nkata returned to the incident room. He saw he had a message to phone Barb Havers on her mobile, and he made a mental note to do it. But first he tried to remember what he’d been engaged in so much earlier when Dorothea Harriman had given him the word about Lynley’s possible arrival in Victoria Street.
The profile, he thought. He’d intended to have another look at the profile of the killer in the hope that something therein would relate to one of the suspects…if they were indeed suspects at all because the only thing that appeared to co
He took himself to Lynley’s office. On the superintendent’s desk, there stood a photograph of his wife, Lynley at her side. They were both perched on a sun-drenched balustrade somewhere. His arm was round her, her head rested on his shoulder, they both were laughing into the camera while in the background a blue sea glittered. Honeymoon, Nkata thought. He realised they’d been married less than a year.
He averted his eyes. He made himself look through the stack of paperwork on Lynley’s desk. He read Lynley’s notes. He read a recent report by Havers. And at last he found it, identifiable by the cover-sheet stationery from Fischer Psychiatric Hospital for the Criminally Insane. He slid the report out from the stack in which Lynley had placed it. He carried it to the conference table, sat, and tried to clear his mind.
“Superintendent,” a neat sample of cursive on the covering stationery said, “while you may not be a believer, I hope you’ll find this information helpful.” No signature, but the profiler himself must have written it. No other person would have a reason to.
Before he turned to the report beneath the stationery, Nkata gave thought to where the hospital was located. He admitted to himself that he was thinking of Stoney, even now. It always came down to his brother in the end. He wondered if a place like Fischer could have helped his brother, eased his anger, cured his madness, removed the urge to strike out and even to kill…
Nkata realised he was reading the heading on the creamy paper over and over. He frowned. He focussed. He read again. He’d been taught that there were no coincidences at the end of the day and he’d just, after all, seen Lynley’s notes and Havers’ report. He reached for the phone.
Barbara Havers burst into the office. She said, “Didn’t you get my message? Bloody hell, Wi
Nkata handed the report to her. “Read this,” he said. “Take your time.”
WITH REASON, everyone not only wanted a part of him but also needed a part of him. Lynley accepted this even as he knew he could do next to nothing to accommodate anyone. He could barely accommodate himself.
When he returned to the hospital, he was aware of virtually nothing. He found his family and hers where he’d left them, along with Deborah and St. James. Holding the fort came ridiculously into his mind. There was no fort to hold and nothing to hold it for.
Helen’s sister Daphne had arrived from Italy. Her sister Iris was due from America, anticipated at any moment, although no one knew when that moment might be. Cybil and Pen were tending to their parents, while his own siblings sat with their mother, no stranger to hospitals, certainly no stranger to sudden and violent death.
The room they’d been allotted was small, and they crowded it, perched uncomfortably on whatever chairs and settees had been scavenged, sent to this particular place to shield them from the other families of other patients because of their numbers, because of the sensitivity of the situation, and because of who they were. Not who they were by class but who they were by occupation: the family of a cop whose wife had been shot in the street. Lynley was aware of the irony of it all: being granted this privacy because of his career and not because of his birth. It seemed to him that this was the only moment in his life that was honestly defined by his chosen occupation. The rest of the time, he’d always been the earl, that odd bloke who’d eschewed life in the country and mingling among his own kind for work of the commonest sort. Tell us why, Superintendent Lynley. He couldn’t have done so, especially now.
Daphne, the latest arrival, came to him. Gianfranco, she told him, had wanted to be there as well. But that would have meant leaving the children with-
“Daph, it’s fine,” Lynley said. “Helen wouldn’t have wanted…thank you for coming.”
Her eyes-dark like Helen’s, and it came to him how much Helen looked like her eldest sister-grew bright, but she did not weep. She said, “They’ve told me about…”
“Yes,” he replied.
“What’re you…?”
He shook his head. She touched his arm. “Dear heart,” she said.
He went to his mother. His sister, Judith, made a spot for him on the settee. He said, “Go to the house, if you’d like. There’s no need for you to stay here hour after hour, Mother. The spare room’s available. Denton’s in New York, so he won’t be there to do a meal for you, but you can…in the kitchen…I know there’s something. We’ve been fending for ourselves, so in the fridge there’re cartons-”
“I’m fine,” Lady Asherton murmured. “We’re all fine, Tommy. We don’t need a thing. We’ve been to the café. And Peter’s been fetching coffee for everyone.”
Lynley glanced at his younger brother. He saw that Peter still could not look at him for longer than a second. He understood. Eyes upon eyes. Seeing and acknowledging. He himself could barely stand the contact.
“When does Iris get here?” Lynley asked. “Does anyone know?”
His mother shook her head. “She’s in the middle of nowhere over there. I don’t know how many flights she’s had to take or even if she’s taken them yet. All she said to Penelope was that she was on her way and she’d be here as soon as possible. But how does one get here from Montana? I’m not even sure where Montana is.”
“North,” Lynley said.
“It’s going to take her forever.”
“Well. It doesn’t matter, does it?”
His mother reached for his hand. Hers was warm but quite dry, which seemed to him an unlikely combination. And it was soft as well, which was also strange because she loved to garden and she played te
St. James came over to him while Deborah watched from across the room. Lynley’s old friend said, “The police have been, Tommy.” He glanced at Lynley’s mother and then said, “Do you want to…?”
Lynley rose. He led the way out of the room to the corridor. “By the worst means the worst” came to him from somewhere. A song? he wondered. No, it couldn’t be that.
“What is it?” he asked.
“They’ve determined where he went after he shot her. Not where he came from, although they’re working on that, but where he went. Where they went, Tommy.”
“They?”
“It appears there may have been two. Males, they think. An elderly woman was walking her dog along the north end of West Eaton Place. She’d just come round the corner from Chesham Street. Do you know where I mean?”
“What did she see?”
“From a distance. Two individuals were ru