Appointed to Die (23 page)

In his haste, Rupert had knocked a cushion on to the floor. Judith Greenwood retrieved it, plumped it up, and sighed.

CHAPTER 21

    
Their throat is an open sepulchre: they flatter with their tongue.

Psalm 5.10

The long train journey to London gave Jeremy plenty of time to plan his strategy. He would have to stay over for at least two nights, so on the day he arrived he'd just check into his club and get acclimatised to being back in the city. Perhaps he'd ring up one or two of his old friends and suggest meeting for a drink that evening, or maybe there would be an unmissable concert on at St John's Smith Square or the Royal Festival Hall – he should have checked the papers before he left, he realised belatedly. The next morning he would go to his old office and do some work on the Dean's project; he no longer owned the practice, but he could brainstorm with some of his old colleagues, and perhaps begin to come up with some realistic costings.

And then . . . he would try to see Lucy. The fact that she was reluctant to spend time with him – her quality of elusiveness – made her all the more attractive to him, and made him determined to somehow break through the barriers that she had erected between them. If he rang her up and said that he was in town on business, would she agree to see him? Would she perhaps meet him for lunch, or for tea? On the whole he rather doubted it. Dinner, with or without a concert or something in the evening, was almost definitely out, he realised. Even if she were willing, David would certainly not approve of that, and Jeremy had no intention of including David in his plans.

What exactly, he wondered, was her relationship with David? He had never really inquired. They weren't married, or even engaged – he knew that much. Lucy had admitted it. She'd said she was ‘attached', but if it were a serious relationship, wouldn't there be some effort to make it permanent? In his day, thought Jeremy, conscious of his age, there would have been: if you loved a woman, and were free to do so, you married her. Were they living together? There was only the one time that David had answered the phone at Lucy's, but there had been several occasions lately when Jeremy had had the definite impression that Lucy hadn't been alone when he'd rung.

Those phone calls, once or twice a week, were his link with her. He would have liked to ring her more often, but he strictly rationed himself to no more than two calls a week. She didn't seem to mind his calls – in fact she rather seemed to enjoy his gossipy chatter about their mutual acquaintances in Malbury. It was only when he saw her in person, on her occasional visits to the cathedral city, that she kept him so firmly at arm's length.

That must be the difference, Jeremy reasoned now, watching the crisply furrowed fields of the heart of England as they rushed past the window. On the phone his manner was light, humorous, non-threatening, but when he was with her he seemed, increasingly, to have a compulsion to come on too strong. That was obviously not the right approach. If he saw her in London – or rather
when
he saw her in London, for surely if he rang her and told her he was in town she would not refuse to see him – he would consciously adopt his telephone persona. He would be the amusing, clever Jeremy Bartlett rather than the heavy-handedly seductive one. Slow and steady wins the race, old boy, he told himself. I
will
have her, no matter how long it takes.

He frowned to himself, then, as he remembered the other cloud in his sky: the problem of Canon Brydges-ffrench and the music festival accounts. The Subdean had spoken to him after Evensong on the Sunday afternoon, just long enough to tell him that the Dean had once again asked for the accounts. Brydges-ffrench had managed to put him off, he'd explained to Jeremy, but he wasn't sure how long he could stall.

Jeremy grimaced. The hopeless old fool! How had he ever managed to get himself involved with such a loser? He must have been out of his mind. Now he must dissociate himself from the Subdean and his coterie of bunglers before the Dean could begin to suspect what had happened. The accounts hadn't even been done yet, so surely Jeremy would be able to cover his tracks adequately. He'd told Brydges-ffrench to keep putting the Dean off – surely he'd be able to manage that.

It was all going very well, Jeremy told himself the next day as he left his old office, laden down with rough drawings and scribbled figures. This would give him a good starting point. Tomorrow he could return to Malbury and get started on preparing some things for the Dean to look at. But first, this afternoon . . . he must try to see Lucy. If she couldn't see him today, he could always postpone his departure for one more day – he just couldn't bear the thought of going home without seeing her. He'd go back to his club and get rid of all these papers, then he'd ring her and suggest . . . what? Or perhaps he should even just turn up on her doorstep, and then she wouldn't be able to refuse him. He tried to imagine what her reaction would be, the expression on her face, if she opened her door and found him standing there.

‘Jeremy?' he heard. So intent was he on the Lucy of his imagination that he actually failed to see the flesh-and-blood Lucy who stood before him on the pavement, and when he finally registered her presence, it took an instant for him to realise that she wasn't an apparition.

‘Jeremy?' She looked at him closely. ‘It is you, isn't it? You look like you've seen a ghost!'

‘Lucy! I just . . . wasn't expecting to see you, that's all.'

She laughed. ‘But
I
live in London! It's me that should be surprised –
you're
not supposed to be here. You're supposed to be in Malbury. You never told me that you were coming up to town!'

‘I didn't really know myself until a day or two ago,' Jeremy heard himself saying. He still couldn't believe that she was standing in front of him, laughing up at him, her hands jammed in the pockets of her trench coat. The spell was broken as an angry-faced woman, bristling with shopping bags, pushed past her on the pavement. ‘We're holding up the traffic,' he said, laughing, consciously assuming his charming and witty persona. ‘Where are you heading?'

‘To Piccadilly Circus to catch the tube, and then home.'

‘No, you're not. You're having lunch with me. At a very nice restaurant just round the corner where I used to go for long and expensive business lunches. That is if they're still in business – you never know these days, do you? A year or two can make a great deal of difference.'

‘Yes, all right.' She hesitated for only an instant before allowing herself to be swept along.

‘And you still haven't told me what you're doing in this part of town. Rather far from home, aren't you?'

‘I've been to a gallery that's just hung a few of my paintings. I wanted to see how they looked.'

‘And which gallery is that, pray tell? I used to know quite a few of them round here.' Turning to look at her as they walked along, he added, ‘Never mind. After lunch you shall take me there, and I'll see for myself.' And later, he said to himself, I shall go back and buy one.

They reached the restaurant. It was still there: a small, intimate and very expensive cave, so discreet that you'd pass right by if you didn't know it was there. Gratifyingly, the
maître d'
remembered him, and showed him to his old table at the back, a table where many clients, over the years, had agreed to part with very large sums of money. He deposited his armload of papers on a chair, helped Lucy out of her coat, gave it to the hovering
maître d'
, and pulled out a chair for her. ‘A bottle of champagne,' he said to the waiter who had silently materialised by the table. ‘Your best. And you
do
serve vegetarian meals, don't you?'

‘The finest in London, sir,' he was assured.

Jeremy turned back to Lucy, raising an eyebrow. ‘There you are, Lucy. You heard what he said. Nothing but the best.'

‘I'm very gratified.' Smiling, she picked up her napkin, glacially white and starched stiff as cardboard. ‘I've come clean with you, Jeremy, and told you what I was doing this morning. But you
still
haven't told me why you're in London. And what are all those mysterious bits of paper? I confess that I'm quite curious.'

Be witty and amusing, he cautioned himself. ‘Oh, I've been sent,' he said with a mysterious smile. ‘But lest you think it was some heavenly visitation – the Archangel Gabriel, or one of his brethren – that ordered me hence, I must tell you that it was none other than our august Dean.'

‘The Dean?'

‘Yes, the Very Reverend Stuart Latimer. Or His Tiny Majesty, as he is affectionately known to his close friends. Whomever they might be. You remember the Dean, don't you? From the installation ceremony? The little chap in the hideous new cope – the one with the machine embroidery and the bugle beads?'

‘Oh, Jeremy!' Lucy, on the brink of giggles, raised her napkin to cover her mouth.

Grandly he uncorked the champagne bottle and poured a stream of golden bubbles into her glass. ‘As to the reason he sent me here – it may surprise you to hear that our beloved Dean, who, if he can't claim the title of the Biggest Shit in Christendom, may be in the running for the Smallest, has an Edifice Complex!' And without a thought for the Dean's injunction to secrecy, through the layered vegetable terrine and the tagliatelle with wild mushrooms and the rum and chocolate roulade and even the coffee, he entertained Lucy with tales of Malbury in which the plans for the new building loomed large.

* * *

Travelling on the Piccadilly Line from Holborn to South Kensington during the rush hour that evening, David Middleton-Brown was not fortunate enough to have a seat. Or rather, he had a seat, but relinquished it at Covent Garden to a young woman, heavily pregnant, her hair in hundreds of tiny plaits each tipped with a shiny silver bead. She smiled at him with impersonal gratitude, and he rode the rest of the way quite happily hanging on to one of the dangling grey balls. In the second week of his new job, commuting by tube was still enough of a novelty that its inconveniences didn't bother him.

The job, at a venerable old firm of solicitors in Lincoln's Inn, was proving quite interesting. Naturally enough, he'd been apprehensive about making such a major change in his life: change had never come easily to David, who was very much a man for familiarity and routine. But his new colleagues had proved to be welcoming, and the work, while very different from the sort of run-of-the mill country practice matters he'd handled in Norwich – wills, divorces, magistrates' courts – was varied, rewarding, and well within his capabilities. Not to mention well paid – fees were considerably higher than the going rate in Norfolk.

But the best thing about it, he thought, was that it enabled him to be with Lucy. As he left the South Kensington tube station, his steps quickened involuntarily. He was going home.

It was almost as good as being married. Almost. If only she would marry him: it was the one niggling thought which blighted his happiness. Try as he might – and he
had
tried, over the six months that they'd been lovers – he couldn't understand her reluctance to legalise their union, to have it blessed in the sight of God. It would make everything so much easier; conventional as he was, he always worried about what other people might think – his new work colleagues, for instance, and not least of all Lucy's father, whom David had come to love and greatly respect in their short acquaintance. And it would give him the security and permanence that he craved. As things stood, she could change her mind tomorrow, and where would that leave him?

Always lurking in the back of his mind, as well, was the worry about what would happen when the house he would soon inherit – as soon as a complex estate was settled – was ready for him to take possession. It was a matter that he and Lucy never discussed: her invitation to move in with her had been on the understanding that it was a temporary arrangement only, and he had to assume that she still regarded it in that light. He didn't even want to think about the problems inherent in the situation, so the back of his mind was where he resolutely pushed all thoughts of that house.

David turned into the mews, smiling as he always did at the sight of Lucy's tiny, immaculate house. Putting his own key in its lock still gave him an undiminished shock of pleasure: now it was his home too.

To his surprise, Lucy was waiting by the door for him; usually she was in her studio or in the kitchen when he arrived home. She kissed him with unexpected enthusiasm. ‘Mmm. I'm glad you're home, David darling,' she said. ‘How was your day?'

‘Oh, fine. I'll tell you about it later. How about you?'

The hesitation, if there was one, was too brief to be noticed. ‘Nothing special. I went to the gallery this morning and saw how they'd hung the paintings.'

David sniffed the cooking fumes that wafted from the back of the house. ‘Something smells marvellous. Were you planning on eating soon?'

‘Are you awfully hungry?' Lucy fiddled with his tie and twisted one of his shirt buttons. ‘The casserole is in the oven, but it can wait. I thought we might . . . Oh, David,' she said in a strangely small voice, ‘Wouldn't you like to take me upstairs to bed?'

‘I thought,' he replied, ‘that you'd never ask.'

CHAPTER 22

    
They hold all together, and keep themselves close: and mark my steps, when they lay wait for my soul.

Psalm 56.6

Just before Evensong one night the following week, Canon Brydges-ffrench had a quick, quiet word with two of his colleagues. To the Precentor and the Canon Missioner he said merely, ‘Would you mind coming round to my place? After Evensong. It's important.' Rupert Greenwood nodded, incurious, but Philip Thetford looked rebellious. ‘It's important,' the Subdean repeated urgently, drawing his great tufted eyebrows together in emphasis, so at last the man agreed.