Something to hide a lynl.., p.7
Something to Hide: A Lynley Novel, page 7
part #21 of Inspector Lynley Series
“It is five hundred pounds in total,” Easter said. She snatched the envelope. She shoved it into the pocket of the white lab coat she was wearing, and said, “Two hundred more if you want to proceed.”
“And if I do not wish that?”
“Are you asking if your money is then returned? No. It isn’t. Not once you’ve stepped inside. So what’s it to be? In or out?” She opened the door wider. With a curse beneath her breath about money she would lose if things went wonky, Adaku entered.
The foyer wasn’t a great deal larger than a draughts board, with lino in a draughts-board pattern. It bore at least a week’s worth of post lying round. Most of it appeared to be rubbish adverts.
Easter led Adaku towards the back of the building, where stairs were covered by dusty, threadbare carpet worn completely through in places. The handrail was sticky here and there and marked up by past encounters with furniture. Adaku touched it only briefly.
The first floor revealed one door, presumably to a flat. It wore a steel plate and had three deadbolt locks, although from the street the place had looked uninhabited. Easter led her past this and up another flight of stairs. Here a newish-looking door also possessed a steel plate and two deadbolts, along with a sign reading private. Up the final flight of stairs, they came to a door standing open to a reception area furnished with a desk, its chair, two filing cabinets, and two additional plastic chairs against one of the walls, with a small table between them. This held a lamp, a woven grass basket containing miniature chocolate bars, and two dog-eared home decorating magazines. On the desk stood a computer’s monitor along with two stacked in-and-out trays. Nothing was in them, and aside from Easter, there seemed to be no one present.
Adaku said, “I would like to speak to the doctor.”
“You’re speaking to the doctor,” Easter told her.
“If that’s the case, why is no one else here?”
“Procedures occur only as requested. Is that somehow important to you?”
Adaku frowned. This wasn’t what she had expected. She said, “How do I know you are a doctor, then? How do I know you’re qualified?”
“Because I’ve just told you. You can choose to believe me or you can go. It’s all the same to me. Now, do you want to see the establishment for your three hundred pounds or was the climb up the stairs enough for you?”
Adaku considered her options, which appeared to be limited to losing her money or at least being shown the premises. She chose the second option. Easter led her to a room that opened off the waiting area.
To Adaku, it looked like every examination room in the country: exam table, scales, small credenza, the top of which held cotton wool, swabs, thermometer, rolls of gauze, a stethoscope, a sphygmomanometer, a speculum. Everything was pristine, not a smudge or a fingerprint anywhere. There was nothing on the walls save a chart that indicated the optimum weight for a particular height. In one corner was a chair upon which, Adaku assumed, the patient—or client, she supposed—left her clothing. In another corner a wheeled stool made it easier for the doctor to conduct examinations.
It was all very orderly, Adaku thought. Indeed, the room was considerably more orderly than her own GP’s office. That told her a great deal.
Easter opened a second door, and this gave onto a small operating theatre, with lights, the necessary table, several large canisters—presumably for the purposes of anaesthesia—two monitors, and a credenza holding sterile gloves, instruments in cases, and everything else to suggest that medical procedures were conducted therein.
Adaku asked Easter who administered the anaesthetic. Easter said a nurse anaesthetist joined her as needed. “Do you want to see below?” Easter asked her. She didn’t sound enthusiastic about showing Adaku anything else.
“What’s below?”
“A recovery room. The patients remain overnight.”
“Who stays with them?”
“Their mothers or another female relative. I check on them as well.”
Adaku wondered at this. Easter appeared to be a woman-for-all-medical-seasons. Why, then, wasn’t she working at a hospital instead of here, hidden away in a decrepit building in north London? She asked the question.
Easter said, “Because I believe in the work of this clinic.”
But anyone could make that claim, Adaku thought. “Have you lost any patients?” she asked.
“Of course not.”
“But that’s what you would say, eh? You’re hardly going to tell me otherwise.”
Easter opened her hands and moved her shoulders in a way that said, Believe what you wish.
“Where do we go from here? I mean, after I see the recovery room.”
“After that, you make your decision.” Easter led the way out of the operating theatre and opened a drawer of the desk. From this she took a card, identical to the one she’d supplied earlier. Printed on it was only a telephone number. No name, no employment, just a phone number. She handed it to Adaku. “If you decide to go ahead, you phone that number for an appointment.”
“Then?”
“You’re given a date for the procedure. Two weeks after, there’s another exam.”
“It sounds very thorough,” Adaku noted.
“It is. What is done here is always swift, hygienic, and without any danger of post-surgery infection.”
“And if that happens? Some kind of infection?”
“Then you’re better off having come here in the first place. I expect you’re not looking for a butcher.”
STREATHAM
SOUTH LONDON
She’d designated the Rookery for their meeting that evening. Part of Streatham Common, it was all that remained of a once-flourishing estate: a large house, and its gardens that had stood on a slope overlooking much of London. Part of the place was walled and formal: neat paths laid out, beds delineated, flowers and shrubbery thriving. Part of it was wild and wooded.
She’d told him she would meet him among a grove of juvenile chestnuts. They were easy enough to find, she said, as they stood on the north side of the Rookery at the end of a wide paved path that bisected the entire area. This path was sided by a long row of wooden benches set against each other cheek by jowl and facing a sloping lawn upon which an enormous cedar of Lebanon stood. There were steps down this slope, she’d told him, but don’t use them. There will be no need. The chestnut grove is above.
Mark Phinney had waited ten hours to see her. When she hadn’t been there as he’d ducked into the grove of chestnuts, the panic he’d felt had nearly—and stupidly—done him in. Foolishly then, he’d phoned her. Foolishly then, he’d texted her. Then, he’d cursed her. Then he’d cursed himself, his life, his desire, and everything that could be cursed save Lilybet. Lilybet, he told himself, did not deserve as a father the kind of man he was fast becoming. No. That last bit wasn’t true, was it? She did not deserve the kind of man he was. He wanted to leap into his own head and scour his brain of every thought that did not have to do with his daughter. That, he decided, was the only solution to what was happening to him.
And then she was there. She came through the trees quietly, and as quickly as an act of magic, everything else was forgotten because she was his anchor and the better part of his soul. He began to kiss her. His abject hunger humiliated him.
But her need seemed to meet his. She removed her blouse and her bra and her breasts were what she offered. He squeezed her nipples till she moaned and then he took one into his mouth as her hands found his waist and his buckle and the zipper and God God God he shoved her against one of the tree trunks and freed his cock and grabbed her again and felt for her skirt and raised it raised it raised it but no she said no Mark no not yet let me and she knelt and took him into her mouth then she rubbed him between her breasts then into her mouth again then her breasts and he wanted to weep and he wanted to hurt her and he wanted to make her want him as much as he wanted her and she couldn’t stop she must not stop she must never stop because for this entire day for every moment when he couldn’t think because of this this she was what was waiting for him.
He gasped as the pleasure surged through him. He wanted to own her the way a man wants to own a woman in a moment like this.
She murmured against his cock. Was it good?
He was drained of tension. He was full of nothing, just the fact of her in his life.
She rose. She cradled his cheek. He kissed her palm and said, “Let me. I want to—”
She placed her slender index finger against his mouth. “Was it good?” she asked again.
He laughed softly. “What do you think?”
“I’m glad of it.” Both her blouse and her bra lay discarded on the ground, and she picked them up. When he said, “No, don’t,” she shook her head. When he said, “Please. I just . . . All right. I’ll only look. I swear. If you won’t allow me . . . I’ve got to see you, at least.”
“I can’t,” she told him. “The park will close soon. Someone will be along in a moment to make sure no one’s locked inside.”
He wondered if she’d set things up that way. This was the part of town where she lived. She would know where and at what time they could meet, the sort of place where the hour of the day allowed only what had just occurred between them. He said, “I’ve gone straight round the bend. You’re all I think about. I can’t do my job properly any longer. And I’m not going to be able to do it properly if we go on like this.”
She was buttoning her blouse. The light was nearly gone. He couldn’t see her face as well as he wished. She said, “Are you saying you won’t be able to do your job unless you’ve had your penis inside my vagina?” She laughed sharply.
“This isn’t a game,” he said, and when she didn’t reply, he added, “D’you know that I could have you right here if I chose to? Or I could show up one night at your flat. But I don’t do that, do I? I let you set the rules.”
“Do you mean you’re owed something because of that?”
“You know that’s not what I believe.”
“Then what do you believe? What do you imagine? You come to my flat, force your way inside, I submit and we fuck—”
“Don’t say it like that.”
“—and then you go home to your wife and child and I’m left with what? Watering my plants? Is that how you see it?”
“Is this how you see it?” He gestured round the grove. “This feels . . . filthy is what it feels.”
“And in my flat—perhaps in my bed?—it would feel less so? With your wife and your daughter at home while you and I are naked in a bed together?”
“Not a bed. Your bed.”
“Which makes it less tawdry? My bed where at least we can control the freshness of the sheets?”
“I love you,” he said. “It’s killing me. There’s nothing for me there. Pietra and I . . . there’s nothing. Just Lilybet and even she . . . without you . . . Christ, I think I’m going mad. And with you not letting me be with you the way I want to be with you . . . ? That makes it all worse. Not better. Worse.”
“Then we should end it.”
“Is that what you want?”
She moved to him. She kissed him deeply, pressing against him. “I don’t want either of us to make this into something we both end up regretting,” she said.
“I won’t regret anything. There is no regret for me. There’s just this. Us. But I can’t cope any longer with the way it’s going.”
He strode away from her, ducking beneath the chestnut branches to come out on the path above the slope of lawn. She was right about so many things, he thought. She was wrong about so many others. But they were caught, the two of them. They had been caught the very moment he found himself looking at her long, crossed legs—so smooth, they were—and then allowed himself to look at the rest of her, quite slowly, taking her in and wondering and imagining. Had there ever been a bigger fool? he wondered. Paulie’s recommended way was also the way of wisdom: massage with benefits administered by a woman whose full name he would never know, let alone pronounce correctly. It was a business deal with nothing attached to it save money, while this was like a structure on fire, doing what unmanaged fires do: consuming everything in its vicinity.
He heard her emerge from the trees behind him. She took his hand. He raised hers to his face and pressed it to his cheek. They walked in silence, out of the Rookery and in the direction of Streatham Common. He said, “I don’t know how to continue as we are because I can’t see a life without you in it. I can’t even imagine a life without you in it. What I have now is a life by halves, by quarters, even.”
“Our life together—yours and mine—can only go so far,” she said. “If it goes farther, we both face ruin. We have other people we must protect. Or at least you do. And I must also protect myself.”
Of course she was saying only what both of them already knew. He could no more desert Pete and Lilybet than could he cut off his right arm without pain. Through no fault of their own, they needed him, and though he needed this woman standing next to him, his hands were as tied as his future was set.
They were halfway across the common when she said, “Over there,” and indicated lights in the distance, across the wide and open space. “The Mere Scribbler,” she said. “Let’s end this evening with a drink at the pub and say goodnight. Just goodnight and nothing more.”
He nodded agreement. No matter his wishes—and they were plenty—it was, in truth, the only plan that could be acted upon.
28 JULY
MAYVILLE ESTATE
DALSTON
NORTH-EAST LONDON
Wetin dey happen, Monifa, that you not do what you are meant to do?”
Over the phone the voice came at her, as clearly as if her mother were standing in the very next room. Indeed, it came to her as clearly as it had done for months on end.
“How you expect her to marry, Nifa? You got no wish for it there, you send her to me. Abi?”
The words continued to ring in her ear long after Monifa ended the call. Her mother had phoned from her home in Nigeria, and while one would think that after twenty years of marriage and two children, one simply could not be pressured by one’s mother into any kind of action, Monifa had been finding herself on the receiving end of such pressure from Ifede via phone at least once a week, sometimes twice for the last seven months. The subject matter was invariably the same: no matter she was only eight years old, Simisola had to be marriageable. And Monifa’s mother wasn’t the only woman saying this.
While she might have successfully fought off Ifede’s oft-voiced concerns, Monifa was finding it difficult to do anything at all about the concerns of her mother-in-law. For Abeo’s mother included Abeo himself in her harangues about Simisola, and “You want him to leave you, Monifa?” was generally where every conversation between Monifa and Folade both began and ended.
Easter Lange was the answer, but Monifa had not yet heard from her. She’d hoped for a cancellation in her upcoming schedule of appointments, but when she explained this first to her own mother and then to Abeo’s, neither woman was mollified. From Ifede had come growing concern that began to border on tearful anxiety. “Simisola will be shunned. She will have no friends. You know tha’, yes? She will never have a home of her own. She will get no ozzband to protect her, no chil’ren to care for her in her old age.”
From Folade had come, “Women they bleed, they serve, they produce chil’ren, and then they die. That is what God intended, Monifa. That is why woman was created out of Adam, not Adam from Eve. Man came first. Man still come first. Woman’s wants and needs get met through ozzband. Your mother she would have taught you this. If you not been pure, you think Abeo would pay the bride price your father ask?”
So Monifa had rung Easter Lange. Had there been a cancellation? she asked. If not, was there anyone on the schedule who might be willing to give up her place to Simisola? Surely there must be someone among everyone scheduled who would understand that Monifa Bankole had a critical need.
After speaking with her mother and her mother-in-law, Monifa rang Easter Lange yet again. She’d lost count of how many times she’d tried to reach the other woman. This time, she finally met with success, and when Easter answered, Monifa offered her a compromise. If Easter would give her—Monifa—the details of each client who had a future appointment at the clinic, she herself would ring every one of them and beg each one’s willingness to allow Simisola to take the place of whomever they’d made the appointment for.
Easter said in a quiet, calm voice, “That in’t possible, Mrs. Bankole. You’re asking for confidential information, you are.”
“Their numbers alone, then. Do not give me any names. Just the phone numbers. I will introduce myself to them. I will tell them that I do not know their identity. I will explain why my Simi must have an appointment. I will tell them to ring you if they are willing to give up their space for me.”
Easter sighed. “Mrs. Bankole, this’s something I can’t do. It’s a betrayal, it is. I wouldn’t do it to you and no way can I do it to them.”
“But you are the only one who can help me. Please, you must listen. Let me tell you why this is important.”
“You got to try to understand . . .” Easter Lange’s voice drifted off. She paused. This was followed by a long sigh. Then she said, “Right. Let me ring a couple ’f people, Mrs. Bankole. Not promising, mind you, but I’ll try my best. Keep your phone nearby today.”
“Oh thank you, thank you,” Monifa said. “You do not know how important—”
“Right. I’ll ring you.”
CHELSEA
SOUTH-WEST LONDON
It was during a morning stroll with Peach that Deborah picked up a copy of The Source. Someone had left the tabloid lying on the bottom step of the stairs leading up to the blue double doors of what once had been Chelsea Town Hall. This was a distinguished place of Corinthian columns, dog-toothed cornices, double-hung windows, and a shallow balcony that would have done excellent service for the wily Duke of Gloucester waiting for the citizens’ appeal to his royal blood. But it was now, dismally, what was referred to as an “event space,” that event generally being an amateur art show, a jumble sale, or a fair offering either vintage clothing or dubious antiques. She’d left her father seeing to Simon’s bad leg and Alaska seeing to his post-breakfast bath atop one of the window sills in the kitchen. With a good amount of time before she intended to leave for Whitechapel, she decided that walkies were in order.
