Free In Pursuit Of The Proper Sinner by Elizabeth George

let you think that they were.”
    So she'd jumped to a conclusion. She'd presumed their years of partnership meant that Lynley would automatically take her part. She said, “Are you with them, then?”
    “Them? Who?”
    “The half of the Yard that thinks I got what I deserve. I only ask because I s'pose we ought to know where we stand with each other. I mean, if we're going to work—” Her words were starting to tumble together, and she forced herself to slow down, to be deliberate. “So are you? With them? That half? Sir?”
    Lynley went back to his desk and sat. He regarded her. She could easily read the regret on his face. She just couldn't tell where it was directed. And that frightened her. Because he was her partner. He was her partner. She said again, “Sir?”
    He said, “I don't know if I'm with them.”
    She felt deflated. Just a shriveled bit of her skin remained, lying quietly on the office floor.
    Lynley must have read this because he continued, his voice not unkind. “I've looked at the situation from every angle. All summer long, I've examined it, Barbara.”
    “That's not part of your job,” she told him numbly. “You investigate murders, not … not what I did.”
    “I wanted to understand. I still want to understand. I thought if I went at it on my own, I could see how it happened, through your eyes.”
    “But you couldn't manage that.” Barbara tried to keep the desolation from her voice. “You couldn't see that a life was at stake. You couldn't get your mind round the fact that I wasn't able to let an eight-year-old drown.”
    “That's not the case,” Lynley told her. “I understood that much and I understand it now. What I couldn't get round was that you were out of your jurisdiction, and, given an order to—”
    “So was she,” Barbara broke in. “So was everyone. The Essex police don't patrol the North Sea. And that's where it happened. You know that. On the sea.”
    “I do know that. All of it. Believe me. I know. How you were chasing a suspect, how that suspect dropped a child from his boat, what you were ordered to do when he took that action, and how you reacted when you heard the order.”
    “I couldn't just toss her a life belt, Inspector. It wouldn't have reached her. She would have drowned.”
    “Barbara, please hear me out. It wasn't your place—or your responsibility—to make decisions or to reach conclusions. That's why we have a chain of command. Arguing about the order you'd been given would have been bad enough. But once you fired a weapon at a superior officer—”
    “I expect you're afraid I'll do that to you next, given half a chance,” she said bitterly.
    Lynley let the words hang there between them. In the silence, Barbara found herself wanting to reach into the air and unspeak them, so untrue did she know them to be. “Sorry,” she said, feeling that the huskiness in her voice was a worse betrayal than any action she herself had taken earlier that summer.
    “I know,” he said. “I do know you're sorry. I'm sorry as well.”
    “Detective Inspector Lynley?”
    The quiet interruption came from the door. Lynley and Barbara swung to the voice. Dorothea Harriman, secretary to their divisional superintendent, stood there: well-coifed with a helmet of honey-blonde hair, well-dressed in a pin-striped suit that would have done service in a fashion advert. Barbara all at once felt what she always was in the presence of Dorothea Harriman, a sartorial nightmare.
    “What is it, Dee?” Lynley asked the younger woman.
    “Superintendent Webberly,” Harriman replied. “He's asked for you. As soon as you can make it. He's had a call from Crime Operations. Something's come up.” And with a glance and a nod at Barbara, she was gone.
    Barbara waited. She found that her pulse had begun throbbing painfully. The request from Webberly couldn't have come at a more terrible time.
    Something's come up was Harriman shorthand for the fact that the game was afoot. And in