The Deep Dark Sleep

It was a sad little exchange. I was still mixed up about her and the sudden appearance of her dead husband’s brother, or substitute, or whatever the hell he was. She was trying to frame something that she had not fully thought through: some kind of reassurance, I guess, but we were both all at sea. After all, anything that there was between us had been, until then, unspoken – if you excluded my soliloquizing the year before. And that had done more to formalize whatever we had between us than anything else. She told me that James was just concerned, as the girls’ uncle, for their well-being and there was not much else to be said. I said that it really was none of my business and that, I could see, stung her.

It was thus that our little stairwell exchange ended and I headed out to the Atlantic, feeling like crap. Always a good way to start the day.

I got to the office in time to let the joiner and glaziers in. They took most of the morning to replace the window. I hadn’t been allowed to repair it until then, but once the coppers had all of the photographs and fingerprints they wanted, I had got the go-ahead to replace the temporary boarding with new glazing. For the rest of the day, my office stank of putty, resin and the strangely lingering odour of workman sweat.

I took out a note pad and did a quick calculation of where I was with the money I had earned; none of it likely to come to the taxman’s attention. It was a lot. A whole lot. The John Macready case had been ridiculously overpaid. It annoyed me that people giving me unreasonably large sums of tax-free cash brought out the suspicious side to my nature. It annoyed me intensely. But it did.

I was now officially off the Macready and Strachan cases. I had narrowly dodged taking a long sleep in a shallow grave in the forest and I had more than enough cash to do whatever I should be doing with my life. Now, Lennox, I kept telling myself, is the time to leave well alone.

It appeared I was as deaf to internal dialogue as I was to instinct.

I found out from Donald Fraser that Macready and entourage were leaving town and flying back to the US the next day. I ’phoned Leonora Bryson and asked if we could meet for a coffee.

‘I really don’t see the point,’ she said. ‘Whatever happened between us, I don’t want you to think that it means anything.’

‘Oh, believe me, sister, you’ve made that crystal clear. But this is business. A little epilogue to my investigation, you might say.’

I could tell from her tone that she was unsure what to do; she eventually agreed to meet me. But in my office.

She turned up quarter of an hour later. She was wearing a less formal outfit that hugged her figure. I guessed that every man she had passed on the short walk across from the Central Hotel was now wearing a neck brace. She wore a silk patterned headscarf instead of a hat.

‘So, Mr Lennox. What’s on your mind?’ She squeezed an impressive amount of boredom into the question. She should have looked at her watch to underline the point, but she didn’t.

‘It’s more what’s on my conscience, if I’m honest. I know this woman, Martha. She’s a nice girl but I haven’t treated her well.’

‘Am I supposed to be surprised? Or interested?’

‘Oh I think you should be interested. I’ve treated her badly because I’ve used her as a substitute for someone else. Someone I care about but, if I’m honest, I know I will never be able to be with. You said on the ’phone that what happened between us didn’t mean anything. It did. It meant a lot. I have to tell you, there was a lot of aggression in there, sweetheart.’

Leonora Bryson stood up. ‘I don’t have to listen to this. I knew all along you were no gentleman, but this …’

‘Save the outrage, Leonora and sit down. Or I might just suggest to the police that they stop you getting on that plane tomorrow.’

She said nothing. Still defiant, still standing.

‘The way I was with Martha … I realized it was the same way you were with me. I’m sorry, Leonora, I really am … I can’t imagine what it must be like to be so much in love with someone you are with every day in life, but with whom you can never have any kind of relationship.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ But she sat back down.

‘You are completely, totally, insanely in love with John Macready. God knows any man on the planet should get down on his knees in thanks to have a woman like you worship him. But, let’s face it, Mr Macready gets down on his knees for a whole different set of reasons. All that impressive equipment you’ve got there, completely wasted on him. He’s blind to you. And he’s blind to the fact that you would do anything to protect him.’

‘You really are a small man, Lennox. A sordid, poisonous little man.’