Believing the Lie - Elizabeth George [41]
She drew in a sharp breath. She chuckled. “You’re an evil man, Inspector. But I’m fully able to match evil for evil. Rather, as you say, like this.” She lowered his trousers. She made him as naked as she was herself. She used her nakedness to force action from him.
She was, he found, as slick and as ready as he was. He said, “The bedroom?”
She said, “Not tonight, Tommy.”
“Here, then?”
“Oh yes. Right here.”
2 NOVEMBER
BRYANBARROW
CUMBRIA
Because of the hour of the day, Zed Benjamin had been able to score a good table at the Willow and Well, and he’d been sitting there for fifty minutes, waiting for something to happen on the other side of a window whose lead mullions were in need of replacement. The cold seeped past them like a visitation of the angel of death, but the benefit of this discomfort was the fact that no one would question the knitted ski cap that Zed was thus able to keep planted on his head. The cap was his bow to making himself less memorable since it fully covered his flame-coloured hair. There was nothing he could do about his extreme height save slouching whenever he remembered to do so.
He was managing just that at his table in the pub. He’d been going from hunching over his pint of lager to slumping in his chair with his legs stretched out till his arse was as numb as the heart of a pimp, but in all the time he’d maintained one posture or another, nothing suggesting that illumination was in the offing had occurred in what he could see of the village of Bryanbarrow just outside of the window.
This was his third day in Cumbria, his third day of searching for the sex that would keep his story on Nicholas Fairclough from being binned by Rodney Aronson, but so far he’d come up with nothing except fifteen lines of a new poem, which, God knew, he wasn’t about to mention to Aronson when the odious editor of The Source made his daily phone call to ask meaningfully how things were going and to remind Zed that whatever costs he was incurring would be his own. As if he didn’t know that already, Zed thought. As if he were not staying in the most modest room in the most modest bed-and-breakfast he could find in the entire region: an attic bedroom in one of the multitudinous Victorian terraces that lined virtually every street in Windermere, this one on Broad Street within walking distance of the public library. He had to duck to get through the door of the room and practically do the limbo if he wanted to walk to the single window. The loo was on the floor below and the heat was by means of whatever came up from the rest of the house. But all of this made the price extremely right, so he’d snapped it up upon a single glance once he learned how little it was going to cost him. In recompense, it seemed, for the myriad inconveniences of the room, the landlady provided sumptuous breakfasts involving everything from porridge to prunes, so Zed hadn’t had to eat lunch since he’d arrived, which was just as well since he used the time he would have otherwise spent in a café trying to suss out who— besides himself— was prowling round the death of Ian Cresswell. But if Scotland Yard was indeed here in Cumbria in the person of a detective on the scent of the unfortunate drowning of Nicholas Fairclough’s cousin, Zed had not been able to locate that person, and until he saw him, he wasn’t going to be able to mould The Ninth Life into the Nine Lives and a Death that Rodney Aronson apparently wanted.
Naturally, Aronson knew who the Scotland Yard detective was. Zed would have put a week’s meagre wages on that. He would have put a further week’s wages on Aronson’s having a master plan to give Zed the sack upon his failure to unearth said detective, which would equate to his failure to sex up his story. That was what this was all about because Rodney couldn’t cope with the combination of Zed’s education and his aspirations.
Not that he was getting far with his aspirations and not that he would get far with them. Oh, one might survive artistically