Inspector Lynley 18 - Just One Evil Act

been up to. He found that he wished to let that sleeping dog lie, if only for the hours he had to spend with Daidre. So instead he asked her about the job she’d been offered at London Zoo. Had she reached a decision about transplanting herself, uprooting her life, and abandoning Boadicea’s Broads for the Electric Magic?
    She said, “A lot depends on what Mark says about the contract. I’ve not heard from him yet.”
    “How might Mark feel about your leaving Bristol if you’re leaning in that direction?”
    “Well, obviously, there are thousands of solicitors in London waiting for someone like me to come along and hire them for the messy bits of life.”
    “Yes. But that’s not what I meant.”
    Their sparkling water arrived at the table, along with a bottle of wine. The ceremony of opening this, presenting the cork, tasting, and nodding approval was gone through. The wine was poured for both of them before Daidre replied.
    “What’re you asking, Thomas?”
    He rolled the stem of his wineglass in his fingers. “I suppose I’m asking if there’s any point to my seeing you . . . aside from our conversations which I do enjoy.”
    She looked at her wine as she began her answer. It took a moment as she was not glib and did not pretend to be. “When it comes to you, I’m at war with my better judgement.”
    “Meaning what?”
    “That my better judgement has been insisting that my life is better kept in order through devotion to mammals who can’t speak. I became a veterinarian for a reason, you see.”
    He took this in and evaluated it, turning it this way and that for every meaning he could wrest from it. He settled on saying, “But you can’t expect to go through life untouched by your fellow man, can you? You can’t want that.”
    Their starters arrived: freshly smoked Irish salmon for her, a Caprese salad for him. It was far too large. What had he been thinking in ordering it?
    She said, “Well, that’s just it, isn’t it? I can want that. Anyone can want it. There’s part of me, Tommy—”
    “You’ve just called me Tommy.”
    “Thomas.”
    “I prefer the other.”
    “I know. And please, it was inadvertent. You’re not meant to think—”
    “Daidre, nothing is inadvertent.”
    Her head lowered as, perhaps, she took this in. She seemed to be gathering her thoughts. She finally looked up, and her eyes were bright. Candlelight, he thought. It was only the candles. She said, “Let’s leave that for another discussion. What I was intending to say is that there’s a part of me that always fails within a relationship. Failure myself to thrive, failure to provide what the other person needs to thrive as well. It’s always come down to that in the end for me, and it probably always will, if my personal history is anything to go by. There’s a part of me that can’t be touched, you see, and that means defeat for anyone who tries to get at the heart of who I am.”
    “Can’t or won’t?” he asked her.
    “What?”
    “Be touched. Can’t or won’t be touched?”
    “Can’t, I’m afraid. I’m an independent sort. Well, I’ve had to be, coming into the middle-class world as I did.”
    She didn’t amplify, but she didn’t need to. He knew her background because she’d shown it to him: the decrepit caravan from which she and her siblings had been removed by the government from the care of their parents, the fostering system into which they’d been placed, her own adoption and her change of identity. He knew it all, and it didn’t matter a whit to him. But that was hardly the point.
    She said, “I’ll always have that part of me, and that’s what keeps me . . .
untouchable
, I suppose, is the word.”
    “Because your family were travellers?”
    “If they’d only
been
travellers, Tommy.”
    He let the name go.
    “At least there’s a culture involved with travellers. There’s a tradition, a history, families, whatever. We didn’t have that. All we had was my father’s . . . What do we want to call it? His compulsion? His mad insistence on what he was going to do with his life? That led us to where we ended up. That led us to why we were taken from him and from my mother and from that terrible place . . .” Her eyes grew brighter. She looked away from him at the empty fireplace.
    Lynley said quickly, “Daidre. It’s perfectly—”
    “No, it isn’t. It can never be. It’s part of who I am and this . . . this untouchable part of me seeks to honour it, I suppose. But