Inspector Lynley 18 - Just One Evil Act

to get Carina out of the sunken garden, up to the rooms above the barn, and into dry clothes before his arrival, somehow she couldn’t make herself move.
    So it was that she saw it all when it happened. He missed a sudden hairpin turn in the road. Engine roaring and gears changing frantically, he shot through the insubstantial crash barrier. He hung there in the sky for a moment. Then the car disappeared as it dropped and dropped down the side of a cliff into whatever lay below: boulders, gnarled trees, a dried riverbed, another villa tucked away from sight. She did not know. She only saw that he was there one moment, charging into the hills, and then in the next moment he was gone.
    She stood there unmoving, waiting for what would come next: perhaps the sound of impact or a fireball shooting into the sky. But nothing happened. It was as if the hand of God had struck her cousin down in an instant, his soul being called into the presence of the Almighty to account, finally, for his sin.
    She returned to the sunken garden, standing above it and watching the child below. The sunlight glinted off her lovely hair, and through the spray from the fountain, she looked like someone behind a veil. Seeing her thus, joyful and open and trusting, it was difficult to believe that she, too, bore the stain of sin. But so she did and so that sin had to be dealt with.

27 April
    VICTORIA
    LONDON
    W hen Barbara walked into Detective Superintendent Isabelle Ardery’s office, she knew something had gone wrong with the master plan of lies that she’d come up with to get away from the Met’s offices five days earlier in order to attempt to deal with the Sayyid crisis. She reckoned that at the eleventh hour, Mrs. Flo had developed feet of ice in the matter of confirming the “fall” taken by one of the residents of her care home in Greenford. But as it turned out, that good woman had taken the decision that only an elaboration of the story of the fall would do to persuade Barbara’s superior officers that everything was on the complete up-and-up regarding Barbara’s absence from beneath DI John Stewart’s spatulate thumb.
    Stewart was in the super’s office as well. He sat on one of the two chairs in front of Ardery’s desk, and he turned to give Barbara a barely disguised contemptuous once-over when she joined them. The superintendent herself was standing, looking trim, fit, and well turned out as always. Beyond her shoulders, the windows offered a grey day promising more rain to confirm what that poet had said about the month of April.
    Isabelle Ardery nodded as Barbara entered. She said, “Sit,” and Barbara gave idle thought to barking doglike in response. But she did as she was told. Ardery then said, “Tell her, John,” and she placed both manicured hands on the windowsill, leaning against it and listening as Stewart recited what Barbara quickly saw was her likely professional epitaph.
    “My flowers for your mother were undeliverable, as it happens,” Stewart said. And didn’t the bloody bastard look pleased about this, Barbara thought. “The hospital in question had no record of a patient with her name. I’m wondering, Sergeant . . . Has she an alias, perhaps?”
    “What’re you yapping on about?” Barbara asked him tiredly, although her mind started energetically darting round possibilities like a pinball scoring a multitude of points.
    For the purposes of dramatic effect, Stewart had brought a notebook along, and he flipped it open in his palm. “Mrs. Florence Magentry,” he announced. “An ambulance company called St. John’s, she
thinks
, although it could have been St. Julian’s, St. James’s, St. Judith’s, or any number of sanctified names beginning with J. At any rate, it was
Saint
Somebody, or so she claims despite the fact that, as it happens, there is no such creature. Next: Accident and Emergency at the local hospital and a broken hip that wasn’t a broken hip at all but seemed to be so, so she was only in for an hour or a day or two or three but who really knows because the fact of the bloody matter is that she never had a sodding fall at all.” He snapped the notebook closed. “Do you want to explain what the hell you’re up to when no one’s given you leave to—?”
    “That’ll do, John,” Ardery said.
    Taking the offensive was her only option. Barbara said to Stewart “What
is
it with you? You’ve got a robbery and murder case on, and you’re using your time to decide whether