Lynley felt a large breath leave him. All he could say was, “Young. So young. Good Christ in heaven.”

“He’s twelve years old, sir.”

“Why.”

There was no answer and he knew she knew he did not expect one. He said, “What’s happened to us, Barbara? What in God’s name?” And he also knew she knew he wanted no reply.

Still, she said, “Will you let me take you home now?”

He said, “Yes. You can take me home.”

IT WAS LATE in the afternoon when he went to Cheyne Row. Deborah answered the door. Wordlessly, she held it open for him to enter. They stood facing each other-long-ago lovers that they were-and Deborah gazed as if to make a study of him before she straightened her shoulders in what seemed to be resolve and said, “In here, Tommy. Simon’s not home.”

He didn’t tell her he’d come to see her, not his friend, because she seemed to know this. She took him into the dining room where, in what seemed like another century, she’d been wrapping the baby gift for Helen. On the table, folded neatly upon the carrier bags which had held them, lay the christening outfits that Deborah and Helen had bought. Deborah said, “It seemed to me that you’d want to see them before I…well, before I took them back to the shops. I don’t know why I thought that. But as it was the last thing she did…I hope I was right.”

They were Helen, all of them: her whimsical statement about what was truly important and what was decidedly not. Here was the tiny dinner jacket she’d spoken of, there a miniature clown costume, next to it white velvet dungarees, an impossibly tiny three-piece suit, an equally tiny BabyGro fashioned into a bunny costume…The assortment was appropriate to anything but a christening, but that had been Helen’s point. We’ll start our own tradition, darling. Neither side of our subtly battling families can possibly be offended by that.

Lynley said, “I couldn’t let them do what they wanted to do. I couldn’t face it. She’d become a specimen to them. A few months on life support, sir, and we’ll see how everything turns out. Could be bad, could be worse, but in the meantime we’ll have pushed the envelope of medical science. One for the journals, this will be. One for the books.” He looked at Deborah. Her eyes were bright, but she gave him the gift of not weeping. He said, “I couldn’t do that to her, Deborah. I couldn’t. So I shut things down. I shut them down.”

“Last night?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, Tommy.”

“I don’t know how to live with myself.”

“Without blame,” she said. “That’s how you must do it.”

“You as well,” he told her. “Promise me that.”

“What?”

“That you won’t live a single moment thinking that this was your fault, that you could have done something to stop what happened, to prevent it, to anything. You were parking a car. That’s all you were doing. Parking a car. I want you to see it that way because it’s the truth. Will you do that for me?”

“I’ll try,” she said.

WHEN BARBARA HAVERS arrived home that evening, she spent thirty minutes cruising up and down streets, waiting for someone to vacate a parking space at a time of day when most people were at home for the duration of the night. She finally found a space in Winchester Road, nearly all the way to South Hampstead, and she took it gratefully despite the fact that a lengthy slog awaited her once she locked up and began plodding back to Eton Villas.

As she walked, she realised how much she ached. Her muscles were sore from her legs up to her neck, but particularly in her shoulders. The wrecking of the Bentley had had a greater impact than she’d felt in the immediate aftermath. Clubbing Robbie Kilfoyle with the frying pan hadn’t helped. Had she been a different sort of woman, she would have decided a nice massage was in order. Steam room, sauna, whirlpool, the whole experience. Throw in a manicure and pedicure as well. But she was not that sort of woman. She told herself that a shower would do. And a good night’s sleep, since she’d gone without for some thirty-seven hours and counting.

She kept her mind on that. Up to Fellows Road and along the way, she fixed her thoughts on showering and dropping into bed. She decided she wouldn’t even turn on the lights in her bungalow lest anything keep her from her appointed rounds, which were defined by a journey from front door to dining table (drop off one’s belongings), from dining table to bathroom (turn on the shower, shed clothes onto the floor, let water beat upon throbbing muscles), and from bathroom to bed (the embrace of Morpheus). This allowed her not to think of what she didn’t want to think about: that he hadn’t told her, that she’d had to learn it from DI Stewart.

She lectured herself about the way she felt, which was cut off and drifting into space. She told herself that his private life was none of her bloody business anyway. She pointed out to herself that his pain would have been intolerable, and to speak of it-to confide that he had ended things and with them his life as he’d known it and seen it weaving a future for him, for her, for them as a little family-would probably have finished him off. But all her self-talk did was provide a thin patina of guilt over her other feelings. And all the guilt did was momentarily silence the child within her who kept insisting they were supposed to be friends. Friends told each other things, important things. Friends leaned on each other because they were friends.

But the news had come to the incident room via Dorothea Harriman, who’d asked for the ear of DI Stewart, who’d then made a sombre general announcement. No one knew about funeral arrangements, he’d said in conclusion, but he’d keep them informed. In the meantime, though, carry on, you lot. There’re reports to be made to the CPS on more than one front, so let’s make them because I want this signed, sealed, and delivered in such a way that no doubt exists in anyone’s mind what kind of verdict the jury’s intended to hand down.

Barbara had sat there and listened. She’d been unable to prevent herself from thinking that they’d been together from Hillier’s office to Harrow Road and from Harrow Road to Eaton Terrace, and Lynley had never said he’d turned off his wife’s life support. She knew it was not what she ought to be thinking. She knew his decision to keep the information to himself was not about her. Yet still she felt a sorrow renewed rush over her. That child inside her kept insisting, We’re meant to be friends.

Why they were not, and could never be at the end of the day, was the fault not of who they were-man, woman, colleagues-but of who they were beneath all that. This had been both determined and defined before either one of them had seen the first light of day. She could rail against it till the end of time, but she could not change it. Certain strands of certain fabrics made the fabric itself too strong to be torn.

In Eton Villas at last, she turned up the drive and in through the gate. Hadiyyah, she saw, was heaving a rubbish sack along the path to the bins at the back of the building, and Barbara watched her struggling with it for a moment before she said, “Hey, kiddo. C’n I help?”

“Barbara!” Her voice was bright as ever. Her head lifted and her plaits swung round. “Dad and I have cleaned out the fridge. He says spring’s coming and this’s our first step to welcome it. Cleaning the fridge, that is. ’Course that means that we’re going to be cleaning the rest of the flat next, and I’m not much looking forward to that. He’s making a list of what we’re to do. A list, Barbara. And washing walls is at the top of it.”

“That sounds pretty bad.”

“Mummy used to wash them every year, so that’s why we’re doing it. So when she comes home, everything’ll be nice and sparkling for her.”

“Coming home, then, is she? Your mum?”