Free A Fatal Inversion by Ruth Rendell Page B

way to speak to your own father.
    Up in the short-term parking lot at Terminal Two, Lewis had to drive from floor to floor before he found a slot in which to put the car. He was back in the present now, having exhausted those resentful memories. Adam had gone to Greece the next day and not reappeared until September. Lewis and Beryl, of course, had never gone near Wyvis Hall; they would not have laid themselves open to such humiliation, to the possibility of their way being barred by some yokel, paid by Adam to keep an eye on the place. Where had Adam got the money to pay someone to look in at Wyvis Hall daily?
    Lewis asked himself this question as he went down in the lift and crossed the arrivals hall of Terminal Two to await the exodus from Customs. The flight from Tenerife was due in fifteen minutes and he saw that there was a screen on the wall that would show when it landed. People stood around, meeting planes, men who seemed to be the drivers of hired cars carrying placards with the names of people or companies printed on them, families waiting for a returning father, a strange old woman in a red cloak chewing gum. Lewis wondered what visitor from Rome or Amsterdam or the Canaries was going to have the misfortune to stay with her.
    Perhaps he should have told the police that there had been someone going into Wyvis Hall every day during those months of summer. Certainly it would not have been a respectable person, such as Hilbert’s gardener or cleaner, but most likely some unemployed derelict Adam had met in a pub. This person might easily be the perpetrator of the crime that led to that appalling interment. And by association Adam would be involved in it too.
    There did not appear to be any police in the crowd. No policemen had been sent to intercept Adam, unless of course they were in plainclothes—those two that looked like businessmen, for instance. They were probably detectives. Who else would be waiting at the arrivals barrier at Heathrow at this hour?
    Lewis began to feel excited. Suppose Adam were to be arrested before he even reached his father? He imagined himself driving a tearful Anne and Abigail back to Beryl, then finding Adam a good lawyer. Adam would have to admit he had been in the wrong, had been extremely negligent, criminally careless really, in allowing any Tom, Dick, and Harry access to Wyvis Hall. He might not wish to reveal names to the police but he would have to. Pressure would be put on him. Eventually, he would come to confess that if his father had inherited the Hall as he had rightfully expected to do, none of this would have happened.
    The arrival of Flight IB 640 from Tenerife came up on the screen. By this time Lewis was off into a fantasy in which a girl Adam had gotten pregnant had been abandoned by him with their child at Wyvis Hall, where she had later been murdered by a sinister caretaker. The first arrivals were coming out of Customs now: two middle-aged couples, a crowd of kids who looked like students, a family with four children and Grandma, a man who looked as if he had been drinking on the plane, his collar undone and his tie hanging. The detectives who were not detectives after all stepped forward to meet him, one of them shaking hands, the other slapping him on the back. A woman came out wheeling a big tartan suitcase, and behind her was Adam, pushing valises in a cart, Anne beside him looking brown and tired, pushing the empty stroller, Abigail asleep on her shoulder.
    Adam’s face, when he saw his father, was a study in some unpleasant emotion, not so much anxiety as exasperation.

6
    THE WONDERFUL THING about the human mind, Adam thought, is the way it copes when the worst happens. Beyond that worst happening you think there can be nothing, the unimaginable has taken place, and on the other side is death, destruction, the end. But the worst happens and you reel from it, you stagger, the shock is enormous, and then you begin to recover. You rally, you stand up and face