Believing the Lie - Elizabeth George [29]
No one had noticed, Barbara thought. Not a single, sodding individual. Well, all right, Detective Superintendent Ardery had noticed, but she hardly counted as she’d given the initial order— although she’d claimed it was only a suggestion— and from Barbara’s nearly four months of experience with Isabelle Ardery, she knew the superintendent noticed everything. Ardery seemed to make noticing a habit. She seemed, in fact, to have raised it to a fine art. So whenever she took note of something, it mattered not, unless her taking note was connected intimately to one’s performance at work. If it was connected to anything else, one could say that Isabelle Ardery was merely engaging in her irritating habit of sitting in judgement upon the superficial, with the number one superficial within the superintendent’s gaze being Barbara Havers’s personal appearance. As to the rest of the team, when Barbara had arrived back at the Yard from her final appointment with the dentist, they’d gone about their business without a word, a raised eyebrow, or anything else.
Barbara had told herself she didn’t care, and there was truth in this since she really didn’t care about the notice of most of her colleagues. But the notice of one of them she cared about deeply, and it was this caring that sat uneasily upon her, asking to be acknowledged or at least dealt with by the downing of something of a pastry orientation. French would be nice, but it was too late in the day to score a chocolate croissant, although not too late in the day to snag an entire torte, which of course would have been Austrian, but at this hour who was quibbling about such minor details as country of origin? Yet Barbara knew that that direction would lead her straight into the evils of an extended carb wallow from which she might not emerge for weeks, so instead of pausing at a bakery en route to her home, she’d decided to engage in retail therapy in Camden High Street. There she’d made the purchase of a scarf and a blouse, whereupon she’d celebrated the fact that she’d just behaved in a manner entirely different from her usual mode of reacting to disappointment, stress, frustration, or anxiety, but this celebration lasted only till she parked the Mini. At that point, her final encounter with Thomas Lynley forced its way into her consciousness.
After their time at the Old Bailey that day, they’d parted: Lynley heading back to the Yard and Barbara heading to the dentist. They’d not seen each other again until the end of the day when they met in the ascending lift. Barbara was taking it from the underground car park and when it stopped at the lobby, Lynley got on. She could see that he was preoccupied. He’d been preoccupied outside Courtoom Number One earlier in the day, but she’d reckoned that had to do with having to testify to his near encounter with the Grim Reaper in the back of a Ford Transit kitted out as a mobile murder scene some months earlier. This preoccupation seemed different, though, and when he vanished into Superintendent Ardery’s office after the lift doors opened, Barbara reckoned she knew the reason why.
Lynley thought she didn’t know what was going on between Ardery and him. Barbara could understand the reason for this conclusion. No one else at the Met had a clue that he and the superintendent were dancing inside each other’s knickers two or sometimes three nights a week, but no one else at the Met knew Lynley as well as Barbara did. And while she couldn’t imagine anyone actually wanting to shag the superintendent— bloody hell, it had to be like going to bed with a cobra— she’d spent the last three months of their affair telling herself that, if nothing else, Lynley deserved it. He’d lost his wife to a street murder at the hands of a twelve-year-old, he’d spent five months afterwards wandering the coast