Angels in the Gloom_ A Novel - Anne Perry [42]
Now she had something to do, tea to make for a visitor. Her hands were shaking slightly but she managed, and he allowed her to do it without interfering. She offered him biscuits and he accepted. All the time he talked, just trivia, letting the conversation wander wherever she wished it to, half sentences, irrelevances.
“We came here because of Theo’s work at the Establishment,” she said as she sat down at the wooden kitchen table opposite him. “He’s brilliant. Mr. Corcoran isn’t going to know how to replace him. Of course he won’t be able to. Theo was unique. He seemed to be able to get ideas out of the air, to think sideways.” She looked at him questioningly to see if he understood what she meant. It seemed to matter to her that he believed her. Small pieces of sense seem to, absurdly, at such times. He knew that.
He nodded. In a while he would ask her about letters, people to tell, anything that needed canceling. The practical things could be very hard to do alone. Even sorting through a dead person’s clothes was desperately painful. The very familiarity of it was overwhelming, the smell, the remembered touch of someone you loved. With only one useful arm he would be little physical help, but he would at least be there.
They were discussing such things, when to do it, which charity to give them to, when they were interrupted by another knock at the front door. Lizzie Blaine answered it and returned to the kitchen followed by a very ordinary looking man of barely average height. He was wearing a suit of indeterminate brownish gray and brown leather shoes scuffed at the toes. His hair was sprinkled with gray and definitely receding. When he spoke, one could see that his teeth were crooked, and two were missing.
“Morning, Captain Reavley,” he said with slight surprise. “Home on sick leave, are you? Hope it’s not too bad. That your driver outside, reading his Bible?”
A tide of memory washed over Joseph. It was as if for a moment he were back in Cambridge before the war, and it was Sebastian who was dead, not some brilliant young scientist full of promise whom he had never met, never taught or cared about, or whose work he had loved and believed in so fiercely. All the ugliness of suspicions came back to him, the angers, the jealousies uncovered, the hate where he thought there had been friendship, the shabby deeds that life could have left covered, and death had exposed.
“Good morning, Inspector Perth,” he replied, his voice suddenly scratchy. “It’s the vicar. Yes, I suppose you could say he is my driver. How are you?” He had found Perth intrusive then, worrying at injuries and hidden pain like an animal with an old bone. He had returned to the vulnerabilities again and again, but in the end he had not been without compassion. Now he looked tired and anxious. Probably the police were short-handed, as all the fit young men had gone to France. “I expect you are here to see Mrs. Blaine,” he concluded. “Am I in the way?”
“Please stay!” Lizzie Blaine said quickly. “I . . . I’d like you to, if you don’t mind?” She looked frightened and on the edge of losing the fragile control she had managed to cling to so far.
Joseph did not move. He met Perth’s eyes.
“If you don’t interrupt, Captain,” Perth warned. He nodded his head fractionally. There was a respect in his eyes as if Joseph were in uniform. He was a man from the trenches, the front line of battle, and in a country at war that meant he was a hero. He could ask for and receive almost anything. It was an artificial role, and he disliked it. The heroes were the men who went willingly to the front, to live and all too often to die on the line, the ones who went over the top into no-man’s-land and faced the bullets, the shells, and the gas. A lot of the time they did it with a joke, and so often when they were injured appallingly, if asked if it hurt, they would say, “Yes, sir, but not too much.” By the next day they might be dead. Many