"Yeah. Well." Barbara shrugged. Heading part of a murder investigation for the first time, she'd been injured in the line of duty. It wasn't something she wanted to talk about.
Her pride had taken as serious a blow as had her body.
"So what will you do?" St. James asked.
"Escape the heat," Deborah advised her. "Go to the Highlands. Go to the lakes. Go to the sea.
I wish we could."
Barbara tossed Deborah's suggestions round in her mind as she drove up Sloane Street.
Inspector Lynley's final order to her at the conclusion of the investigation had directed her to take a holiday, and he'd repeated that order in a private moment between the two of them after his wedding.
"I meant what I said, Sergeant Havers," he'd told her. "You're due some time off, and I want you to take it. Are we clear on the subject?"
"We're clear, Inspector."
But what they weren't clear on was what she was supposed to do with her enforced leisure.
She'd greeted the idea of a period away from work with the horror of a woman who kept her private life, her wounded psyche, and her raw emotions in order by not having time to attend to them. In the past she'd used her holidays from the Yard to deal with her father's failing health. After his death she'd used her free hours to confront her mother's mental infirmities, the family home's renovation and sale, and her own move to her current digs.
She didn't like to have time on her hands. The very suggestion of a stretch of minutes dissolving into hours leaking into days extending into one week and maybe even two . . .
Her palms began to sweat at the very thought. Pains shot into her elbows. Every fibre of her short, stout being began to shriek, "Anxiety attack."
So as she veered through traffic and blinked against a particle of soot that floated in her window on the blistering air, she felt like a woman on the edge of an abyss. It dropped down and away and into forever. It was signposted with the dread words free time. What would she do? Where would she go? How would she fill the endless hours? Reading romances? Washing the only three windows she possessed? Learning how to iron, to bake, to sew? How about melting away in the heat? This bloody heat, this miserable heat, this flaming, flipping, sodding heat, this Get a grip, Barbara told herself. It's a holiday you're doomed to, not solitary confinement.
At the top of Sloane Street, she waited patiently to make the turn into Knightsbridge.
She'd listened to the television news in her hospital room day after day, so she knew that the exceptional weather had brought an even greater than normal influx of foreign tourists into London. But here she saw them. Hordes of shoppers wielding bottles of mineral water shoved their way along the pavement. Hordes more poured out of the Knightsbridge tube station, bee-lining in every direction towards the trendy shops. And five minutes later when Barbara had managed to negotiate her way up Park Lane, she could see even more of them - along with her countrymen - baring their lily-skinned bodies to Apollo on the thirsty lawns of Hyde Park. Under the scorching sun, double decker open-topped buses trundled along, carrying a full load of passengers who listened with rapt attention to tour guides speaking into microphones. And tour coaches disgorged Germans, Koreans, Japanese, and Americans at every hotel she saw.
All of us breathing the same air, she thought.
The same torrid, noxious, used-up air. Perhaps a holiday was called for after all.
She bypassed the mad congestion of Oxford Street and instead headed northwest on the Edgare Road. The masses of tourists thinned out here, to be replaced by masses of immigrants: dark women in sans, chadors, and hijabs; dark men in everything from blue jeans to robes. As she crawled along in the flow of traffic, Barbara watched these one-time foreigners moving purposefully in and out of shops. She reflected on the changes that had come upon London in her thirty-three years. The food had undergone a distinct improvement, she concluded. But as a member of the police force, she knew that this polyglot society had engendered a score of polyglot problems.
She detoured to avoid the crush of humanity that always gathered round Camden Lock.
Ten minutes more and she was finally cruising up Eton Villas, where she prayed to the Great Angel of Transport to grant her a