Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers sat at one of the green computers in the Information Room on the ground floor of New Scotland Yard. She stared at the screen. She was supposed to be scanning the PNC for information on missing persons—at least five years missing, if the forensic anthropologist was to be believed—in an attempt to narrow down the possibilities on a set of bones found beneath the basement foundation of a building being torn down on the Isle of Dogs. It was a favour for a mate at the Manchester Road police station, but her mind wasn’t up to assimilating the facts on the screen, let alone comparing them to a list of dimensions of radius, ulna, femur, tibia, and fibula. Roughly, she rubbed her index finger and thumb through both eyebrows and glanced at the telephone on a nearby desk.
She ought to phone home. She needed to get her mother on the line or at least to speak with Mrs. Gustafson and see if everything was under control in Acton. But punching in those seven numbers and waiting with mounting anxiety for the phone to be answered and then facing the possible knowledge that things weren’t working out any better than they had been for the last week…She couldn’t do it.
Barbara told herself that there was no point to phoning Acton anyway. Mrs. Gustafson was nearly deaf. Her mother existed in her own cloudy world of long-term dementia. The chance of Mrs. Gustafson hearing the phone was as remote as her mother’s ability to understand that the shrill double ringing coming from the kitchen meant that someone somewhere wanted to speak through that peculiar black instrument that hung from the wall. Hearing the noise, she was as likely to open the oven or go to the front door as she was to pick up the telephone receiver. And even if she managed that much, it was doubtful she’d recognise Barbara’s voice or even remember who she was without endless, frustrating, hair-pulling prodding.
Her mother was sixty-three years old. Her health was excellent. It was only her mind that was dying.
Employing Mrs. Gustafson to stay with Mrs. Havers during the day was, Barbara knew, only at best a temporary and unsatisfactory measure. Seventy-two years old herself, Mrs. Gustafson had neither the energy nor the resources to care for a woman whose day had to be programmed and monitored as carefully as a toddler’s. Three times already Barbara had come face-to-face with the impediments inherent to giving Mrs. Gustafson even limited guardianship over her mother. Twice she had arrived home later than usual to find Mrs. Gustafson sound asleep in the sitting room. While the television shrieked out a programme’s laugh track, her mother floated in a mental fugue, once wandering at the bottom of the back garden, once swaying aimlessly outside on the front steps.
But the third incident, just two days ago, had rocked Barbara severely. An interview connected to the Maida Vale rent boy case had brought her close to her own neighbourhood, and she had gone home unexpectedly to see how things were going. The house was empty. At first she felt no panic, assuming Mrs. Gustafson had taken her mother for a walk and, in fact, feeling quite grateful that the older woman was even up to the challenge of controlling Mrs. Havers in the street.
Gratitude disintegrated with Mrs. Gustafson’s appearance on the front steps less than five minutes later. She’d just popped home to feed her fish, she said, and added, “Mum’s all right, i’nt she?”
For a moment, Barbara refused to believe what Mrs. Gustafson’s question implied. “She isn’t with you?” she asked.
Mrs. Gustafson raised one liver-spotted hand to her throat. A tremor shook the grey curls of her wig. “Just popped home to feed the fish,” she said. “No more’n a minute or two, Barbie.”
Barbara’s eyes flew to the clock. She felt panic sweeping over her and with it came the wild scattering of a dozen different scenarios comprising her mother lying dead in the Uxbridge Road, her mother floundering through the crowds on the Tube, her mother trying to find her way to South Ealing Cemetery where both her son and her husband were buried, her mother thinking she were twenty years younger with an appointment at the beauty parlour to keep, her mother being assaulted, being robbed, being raped.
Barbara rushed from the house, leaving Mrs. Gustafson wringing her hands and wailing “It was just the fish” as if that could somehow excuse her negligence. She gunned her Mini and roared in the direction of the Uxbridge Road. She tore down streets and crisscrossed alleys. She stopped people. She ran into local stores. And she finally found her on the grounds of the local primary school where both Barbara and her long-dead younger brother had once been pupils.
The Headmaster had already phoned the police. Two uniformed constables—one male and one female—were talking with her mother when Barbara arrived. Against the windows of the school building itself, Barbara could see curious faces pressed. And why not, she thought. Her mother certainly presented a spectacle, wearing a thin summer house dress and slippers and nothing else at all save her spectacles, which were not on her nose but for some reason perched on the top of her head. Her hair was uncombed, her body smelled unwashed. She babbled, protested, and argued like a madwoman. When the female constable reached out for her, she dodged away adroitly and began running towards the school, calling for her children.
That had been just two days ago, yet another indication that Mrs. Gustafson was not the answer.
In the eight months since her father’s death, Barbara had tried a variety of solutions to the problem of her mother. At first, she’d taken her to an adult day care centre, the very latest thing in dealing with the aged. But the centre couldn’t keep their “clients” after seven at night, and the calls of policework made her hours irregular. Had he known of her need to fetch her mother by seven, Barbara’s superior officer would have insisted that she take the time to do so. But that would have placed an unfair burden upon his shoulders, and Barbara valued her job and her partnership with Thomas Lynley too highly to jeopardise either by giving her personal problems priority.
She’d tried a variety of paid companions after that, four in succession who lasted a total of twelve weeks. She’d worked with a church group. She’d employed a series of visiting social workers. She’d contacted Social Services and arranged for home help. And at the last, she’d fallen back upon Mrs. Gustafson, their neighbour. Against the monitory recommendation of her own daughter, Mrs. Gustafson had stepped in as a temporary measure. But the fuse on Mrs. Gustafson’s ability to deal with Mrs. Havers was a short one. And the fuse on Barbara’s willingness to put up with Mrs. Gustafson’s lapses was even shorter. It was only a matter of days before something blew.
Barbara knew the answer was an institution. But she couldn’t live with the thought of placing her mother in a public hospital rife with inadequacies associated with the National Health. At the same time, she couldn’t afford a private hospital, unless she won the football pools like a female Freddie Clegg.
She felt in her jacket pocket for the business card she’d placed there this morning. Hawthorn Lodge, it said. Uneeda Drive, Greenford. A single call to Florence Magentry and her problems would be solved.
“Mrs. Flo,” Mrs. Magentry had said when she answered the door to Barbara’s knock at half past nine that morning. “That’s what my dears call me. Mrs. Flo.”
She lived in a two-storey semi-detached piece of uninspired postwar housing which she optimistically called Hawthorn Lodge. Grey stucco relieved by a brick facade on the ground floor, the house featured woodwork the colour of oxblood and a five-paned bow window looking out on a front garden filled with trolls. The front door opened directly into a stairway. To the right of this a door revealed a sitting room into which Mrs. Flo led Barbara, chatting continually about the “amenables” which the house offered the dears who came to visit.
“I call it a visit,” Mrs. Flo said, patting Barbara’s arm with a hand that was soft and white and surprisingly warm. “Seems less permanent that way, doesn’t it? Let me show you round.”
Barbara knew she was looking for features that she could proclaim ideal. She ticked the items off in her mind. Comfortable furniture in the sitting room—worn but well-made—along with a television, a stereo, two shelves of books, and a collection of large and colourful magazines; fresh paint and wallpaper and gay prints on the walls; tidy kitchen and a dinette whose windows overlooked the back garden; four bedrooms upstairs, one for Mrs. Flo and the other three for the dears. Two loos, one up and one down, both glistening white with fixtures shining like silver. And Mrs. Flo herself, with her large-framed spectacles and her modern wedge-cut hair and her neat shirtwaister with a pansy brooch pinned at its throat. She looked like a smart matron, and she smelled of lemons.
“You’ve phoned up at just the right time,” Mrs. Flo said. “We lost our dear Mrs. Tilbird last week. Ninety-three she was. Sharp as a pin. Went off in her sleep, bless her. Just as peaceful as ever you’d want someone’s passing to be. She’d been with me a month short of ten years.” Mrs. Flo’s eyes became misty in her plump-cheeked face. “Well, no one lives forever, and that’s a fact, isn’t it? Would you like to meet the dears?”
The residents of Hawthorn Lodge were taking a bit of morning sun in the back garden. There were only two of them, one an eighty-four-year-old blind woman who smiled and nodded at Barbara’s greeting after which she immediately fell asleep and the other a frightened-looking woman somewhere in her fifties, who clutched Mrs. Flo’s hands and cowered back in her chair. Barbara recognised the symptoms.
“Can you cope with two?” she asked frankly.
Mrs. Flo smoothed down the hair of the hand clutcher. “They’re no trouble to me, dear. God gives everyone a burden, doesn’t He? But no one’s burden is more than he can bear.”
Barbara thought of that now with her fingers still touching the card in her jacket pocket. Is that what she was trying to do, to slough off a burden that, from laziness or perverse selfishness, she didn’t want to bear?
She avoided the question by evaluating everything that made the placement of her mother at Hawthorn Lodge right. She enumerated the positives: the proximity to Greenford Station and the fact that she would only have to change trains once—at Tottenham Court Road—if she placed her mother in this situation and herself took the small studio she’d managed to find in Chalk Farm; the greengrocer’s stand right inside Greenford Station where she could buy her mother fresh fruit on the way to a visit; the common just a street away with its central walk lined with hawthorns which led to a play area of swings, see-saw, round-about, and benches where they could sit and watch the neighbourhood children romp; the string of businesses nearby—a chemist, a supermarket, a wine shop, a bakery, and even a Chinese take-away, her mother’s favourite food.
Yet even as she listed every feature that encouraged her to phone Mrs. Flo while she still had a vacancy, Barbara knew she was deliberately avoiding a few of the qualities of Hawthorn Lodge which she hadn’t been able to ignore. She told herself that nothing could be done about the unremitting noise from the A40, or about the fact that Greenford itself was a sandwich of a community squeezed between the railway and a motorway. Then there were the three broken trolls in the front garden. Why on earth should she even think of them, except that there was something so pathetic about the chipped nose on one, the broken hat on another, the armlessness of a third. And there was something chilling about the shiny patches on the sofa where oily, old heads had pressed against its back for too long. And the crumbs in the corner of the blind woman’s mouth..
Minor things, she told herself, little hooks digging into the skin of her guilt. One couldn’t expect perfection anywhere. Besides, all of these minor points of discomfiture were inconsequential when one compared them with the circumstances of their lives in Acton and the condition of the house in which they now lived.
The reality, however, was that this decision went far beyond Acton versus Greenford and far beyond keeping her mother at home or sending her away. The entire decision went right to the core of what Barbara herself wanted, which was simple enough: a life away from Acton, away from her mother, away from the burdens which, unlike Mrs. Flo, she did not believe she was equipped to bear.
Selling the house in Acton would give her the money to support her mother in Mrs. Flo’s house. She would have the funds to set herself up in Chalk Farm as well. No matter that the Chalk Farm studio was little more than twenty-five feet long and twelve feet wide, little more than a converted potting shed with a terra cotta chimney and missing slates on the roof. It had possibilities. And that’s all Barbara asked of life any longer, just the promise of possibility.
Behind her, the door opened as someone slipped an identification card through its locking device. She glanced over her shoulder as Lynley entered, looking quite rested despite their late night with the Maida Vale killer.
“Any luck?” he asked her.
“Next time I offer to do a bloke a favour, punch my lights, will you? This screen makes me blind.”
“Nothing then, I take it?”
“Nothing. But I haven’t exactly been giving it my all.” She sighed, made a note of the last entry she’d read, and exited the programme. She rubbed her neck.
“How was Hawthorn Lodge?” Lynley asked her. He swung a chair over and joined her at the terminal.
She did her best to avoid his eyes. “Nice enough, I suppose. But Greenford’s a bit out on the central line. I don’t know how Mum would make the adjustment. She’s used to Acton. The house. You know what I mean. She likes having her things about her.”
She felt him watching her, but knew that he would not offer advice. Their positions in life were far too different for him to presume to make a suggestion. Still, Barbara knew he was only too aware of her mother’s condition and the decisions she herself now faced because of it.
“I feel like a criminal,” she said hollowly. “Why?”
“She gave you life.”
“I didn’t ask for it.”
“No. But one always feels a responsibility to the giver. What’s the best course to take? we ask. And is the best course the right one, or is it just a convenient escape?”
“God doesn’t give burdens we cannot bear,” Barbara heard herself mouth.
“That’s a particularly ridiculous platitude, Havers. It’s worse than saying things always work out for the best. What nonsense. Things work out for the worst more often than not, and God—if He exists—distributes unbearable burdens all the time. You of all people ought to know that.”
“Why?”
“You’re a cop.” He pushed himself to his feet. “We’ve a job out of town. It’ll be a few days. I’ll go on ahead. You come when you can.”
His offer irked her, filled as it was with the implicit understanding of her situation. She knew he wouldn’t take another officer. He’d do his work and her own until she could join him. How utterly like him. She hated his easy generosity. It made her his debtor, and she did not possess—would never possess—the coin with which he might be repaid.
“No,” she said. “I’ll get things set up at home. I’ll be ready in…How much time do I have? An hour? Two?”
“Havers…”
“I’ll go.”
“Havers, it’s Cambridge.”
She jerked her head up, saw the undisguised satisfaction in his warm brown eyes. She shook her head darkly. “You’re a real fool, Inspector.”
He nodded, grinned. “But only for love.”