A Question of Guilt by Janet Tanner Page B

take it? Would he be relieved, or would he be upset? If he promised to change and pay me more attention, should I give it another chance? I honestly didn’t know.
    I wasn’t looking forward to tomorrow.

Five
    Typically, Tim was dead on time. He would have allowed for rush-hour jams getting out of town, factored in unexpected delays such as temporary traffic lights that might have sprung up since he last came to see me, and then, if it didn’t happen, he’d slow down on the last stretch so as to pull into the farmyard exactly when he’d said he would. I suppose such precision would be reassuring if you were a passenger on his plane, but as a blueprint for normal everyday life it could be a tad irritating.
    By contrast, I was running late. Everything still took a little longer than it used to – getting in and out of the bath being a case in point. Mum and Dad didn’t have a walk-in shower, just a sort of hose attachment that sprouted from the tap, which was less than ideal for me in my current state. I’d been a bit late getting up, too – I hadn’t slept well, I’d had too much on my mind, but I’d fallen into a heavy doze around dawn. I was still in my room drying my hair when I heard the doorbell, and by the time I’d stuck on a bit of make-up and headed downstairs, Mum had made Tim a coffee. He was sitting at the kitchen table drinking it, and making what sounded like rather stilted conversation.
    Mum was right, I thought – he did speak to her in a patronizing way, as if he was talking to someone less bright, less informed, than he was. And it struck me, too, how incongruous he looked sitting there at the gnarled and marked old table in his perfectly ironed black denims, pristine open-necked shirt, leather jacket and shoes polished to a blindingly bright shine. He got up as I came in, and greeted me with a chaste kiss of the sort he deemed suitable with Mum hovering. He smelled of the expensive duty-free aftershave he always used; once that scent had made me go soft inside but now it left me cold.
    â€˜Sorry I wasn’t ready,’ I said.
    â€˜It wouldn’t be you if you had been, Sally,’ Tim said. Though he was smiling, pretending to tease, I sensed that the underlying criticism was real enough.
    â€˜So, are you going to go out somewhere?’ Mum asked – hopefully, I thought. ‘It’s a nice day. It would be a shame to waste it.’
    She was right – it
was
a nice day, the sun shining, the sky a clean-washed blue that had the promise of spring. But I still couldn’t manage to walk very far, and even had I been able to, Tim’s highly polished shoes were not really suited for trekking along the muddy lane.
    â€˜Suppose we drive up to Deer Leap?’ I suggested. Tim cracked a questioning eyebrow, and I explained. ‘It’s only about half an hour from here, and there are some fantastic views. It gets quite busy in the summer, but on a Friday at this time of year I wouldn’t imagine there would be too many other people about.’
    The sort of place where we can talk undisturbed . . .
    â€˜And there are plenty of nice country pubs where we can get a drink and a spot of lunch if we feel like it.’
    If we feel like it being the operative phrase . . .
    â€˜Good idea,’ Mum said, and I guessed she was relieved she wouldn’t have Tim turning up his nose at her scratch lunch of hearty soup or the remains of the weekend roast.
    While Tim was finishing his coffee, I got my coat. My heart had come into my mouth at the prospect of saying what I’d more or less decided needed to be said and my nerves were twanging. We set out in his Audi with Classic FM playing on the radio, and when Tim asked me what I’d been up to I told him a little about my investigations, but my voice didn’t sound entirely natural and it was difficult to summon any enthusiasm for the subject that had been consuming me