Page 45 of Ghost in the Garden
Constance stared at her. “Don’t you think you should simply ask your husband? Before you start making up fantasies to excuse him? Since you got rid of the body and the weapon, we now have no evidence to help us find out the truth. I should turn you over to them right now.”
A faint smile curved Angela’s severe lips. “But you won’t, will you? I doubt your own past will bear much scrutiny. Or carry much weight with the law.”
“I might surprise you there, so please don’t wager your life on the possibility.”
Angela rubbed her forehead tiredly. “Look, I’ll see—” She broke off, her gaze flying to the dressing room door. Sure enough, Constance heard the faint footsteps in the passage and the soft opening and closing of a nearby door.
“Unhook me and go to bed,” Angela said, turning her back.
Constance walked over to her. Her fingers felt too large and too clumsy for the job. At any moment, she expected Lambert to walk in.
“Goodnight,” Angela said.
“Goodnight, ma’am,” Constance replied, and retreated to her own chamber.
She turned the key in the lock. The lamp was not lit, so she just lay down on the narrow bed as she was. After all, she would be going out again in a couple of hours to look around the cellar. On her own. Without Solomon. Providing Lambert did not sleep in his wife’s bed.
She meant to listen out for that. But, somehow, she fell asleep.
*
Solomon waited forrather more than five minutes in the lane behind Lambert’s garden, even though he knew she would not let him in.
He had achieved the exact opposite of what he had intended—Constance safely away from that house. Instead, fear for her seemed to have drowned his wits and made him say things guaranteed to drive her back in there and away from him. Shutting the door in his face had been an unmistakable message, yet still he hoped she would see the danger for herself and come out…
While he waited, their words echoed around his mind, bitter and agonizing.
“She betrayed you,”he’d told her.
“Everyone does, in the end.”
Everyone.As though she had just been waiting for his betrayal. Even after all they had shared together. She had slept in his arms the night they solved the Maule case. He had thought it was trust. But she had never trusted him not to betray her, and this, this argument tonight that should have been a discussion, must feel to her like his betrayal—of her and of the partnership they had formed.
Would she walk away from it now? Was that it ended?
They had each put money into the venture, but that was the least of what he would lose if she ended it. A life without Constance in it, without the hope of seeing her…
A void was opening up before him, black and gaping. He remembered that void. It had been there, vast and terrifying, when he lost David, his brother, at the age of ten. But he was no longer a child to panic and disintegrate. He was a man with responsibilities to his staff and his workers, and everyone else who depended on his being there at least somewhere in the background.
Constance was not dependent on him, though it seemed he wanted her to be. That it was the other way around, that he was dependent onher, was another shock.
A life without Constance…
She wasn’t coming.
And he could not go in there to fetch her, alone or with several policemen, without risking her life. Instead—a novel idea was forming—shouldhenot trusther? Trust her opinion, her ability to take care of herself? This was her world far more than his, the world she had sprung from and never quite left behind. He was the alien, not just in terms of country and race, but in the privilege he had been born into.
He had never struggled for food or shelter. If he had walked into dangerous situations—which he had, deliberately and otherwise—he always knew that safety lay on the other side, not more of the same struggle to exist. Constance’s strength had brought her through that old life to what she was now. Clever, perceptive, compassionate…and still strong.
His admiration for her, like his feeling, had crept up on him. He didn’t seem to know how to deal with it except by protecting her. But she was right: they were partners.
Beyond the garden wall, he heard the faint sounds of footsteps. He couldn’t fool himself that they were hers. Someone tried the door. Solomon flattened himself into the shadows, but the door never opened. It was just Lambert’s men patrolling the premises before bed. There was no sign of panic or trouble among them, no screaming or shooting from the house.
Constance was not stupid enough to walk into danger she could not deal with in her own way. She knew these people. He did not.
Faintly, through the fog, he heard the sound of the kitchen door opening, closing, and locking. The night was quiet, shrouded. Solomon waited another quarter of an hour, just to be sure. And then he walked away—from Lambert’s house, but not from the inquiry, and certainly not from his partnership.
Chapter Ten
