knotted her unplucked eyebrows, clearly wondering about the line of questioning upon which Isabelle had now embarked. She said, "Like you'd expect someone to seem when he's had to pull the plug on his wife's life support. I wouldn't call him chipper. He was coping, guv. That's about all."
"Will he be returning to us?"
"Here? London? The Met?" Havers considered this. She considered Isabelle as well, obviously her mind clicking away with all the possibilities that might explain why the new acting detective superintendent wanted to know about the former acting detective superintendent.
Havers said, "He didn't want the job. He was just doing it temporarily. He's not into promoting or anything. It's not who he is."
Isabelle didn't like being read. Least of all did she like being read by another woman.
Thomas Lynley was indeed one of her worries. She wasn't averse to having him back on the team, but if that was going to happen, she wanted it to be with her prior knowledge and on her terms. The last thing she desired was his sudden appearance and everyone welcoming him with religious fervor.
She said to Havers, "I'm concerned about his well-being, Sergeant. If you hear from him, I'd like to know it. Just how he is. Not what he says. May I rely on you for that?"
"I suppose," Havers said. "But I won't be hearing from him, guv."
Isabelle reckoned she was lying on both accounts.
MUSIC MADE THE ride bearable. The heat was intense because, while windows nearly the size of cinema screens lined both sides of the vehicle, they did not open. Each of them had a narrow, tilt-out pane of glass at the top, and all of these were open, but that did nothing to relieve what sunlight, weather, and restless human bodies effected within the rolling tube of steel.
At least it was a bendy bus and not one of the double-deckers. Whenever it stopped, both its front door and its back door opened and a gust of air - hot and nasty but still, new air - allowed him to breathe deeply and believe he could survive the ride. The voices in his head kept declaring otherwise, telling him that he needed to get out and get out soon because there was work to do and it was God's mighty work. But he couldn't get out, so he was using the music. When he had it coming through his earphones loud enough, it drowned out everything else, voices included.
He would have closed his eyes to lose himself in it: the sweep of the cello and its mournful tone. But he had to watch her and he had to be ready. When she made a move to debark, so would he.
They'd been riding for over an hour. Neither of them should have been there. He had his work, as did she, and when people didn't do what they were meant to do, the world went amiss and he had to heal it. He was told to heal it, in fact. So he'd followed her, careful not to be seen.
She'd got onto one bus and then onto another and now he could see she was using an A-Z
in order to follow the route. This told him that she was unfamiliar with the area through which they were riding, an area that looked to him like much of the rest of London. Terraces of houses, shops with grimy plastic signs above their front windows, graffiti looping letters into meaningless words like killdick boyz, chackers, and porp.
As they wound through town, on the pavements tourists morphed into students with backpacks who themselves became women in black from head to toe, slits for their eyes, in the company of men comfortably dressed in jeans and white T-shirts. And these became African children at play, running in circles beneath the trees in a park. And then for a time, blocks of flats blended into a school, and this in turn dissolved to a collection of institutional-looking buildings from which he turned his gaze. Finally, a narrowing of the street occurred and it then curved and they came into what looked like a village, although he knew it was not a village at all but rather a place that had been a village once. It was another of the multitude of communities consumed over time by the creeping mass of London.
The street climbed a modest hill and then they were among the shops. Mothers pushed prams here, and people mixed. Africans talked to whites. Asians