Harry awoke in the small hours, cold. It took her a moment or two to remember the events of the previous evening; when she did, the tension headache began again, gripping her skull tightly.
She shifted around in the bed and willed herself to fall back asleep but it was no good, the thoughts had started – crowding in like malevolent black winged creatures.
Now, the memory of her father's distress seemed even more terrible than it had done in actuality. The way his eyes had fixed on hers, uncomprehending… for the first time, she really understood how it felt to need to protect someone, to feel you would do anything in your power to make things right. Freddy didn't deserve to feel such anguish; he had been through enough in his life already and it wasn't clear to her how much more he could endure. Lying in the darkness, the weight of responsibility hung heavy over Harry. She was her father's only daughter, his single immediate relative.
What am I doing, she thought to herself, running around the city; putting myself in danger every day? But as she did, she experienced a feeling of dissonance that wasn't entirely new to her: police work was what she was supposed to do. She knew that if she tried to be anything else, she could probably make it work, but that a little part of her – okay, a big part – would wither and die. Her elevation to SI-10 had been the proudest achievement of her life, and for all his joking about 'this police business', her father too was ridiculously proud. She didn't think it would make him particularly happy to know that she had given up her career to pursue a safer one for his sake.
Besides, she had Dempsey. She turned over and looked at him. He lay beside her, flat on his back. In the crepuscular half-light, his face showed a vulnerability that would vanish completely before daybreak. The way his eye lashes lay softly against his cheek made him seem almost childlike, despite the dark stubble on his face.
She was glad he was sleeping peacefully. It pained her terribly to think that there had been an attempt to implicate him in the disappearance of the jewellery. Was it because he was an outsider, and therefore an easy target? Perhaps. But somehow, it had seemed more malicious than that, as if someone wanted to deliberately harm him. And why would anyone want to do that here, where he was all but a stranger?
Her mind was working. James suspected Giles, and she considered that. Giles had always been a queer fish; something of a loner ever since she could remember, certainly not a warm or outwardly caring man. His first wife had been enough of those things for both of them. Jennifer hadn't been particularly glamorous: a no-nonsense, hale and hearty countrywoman who said what she thought. But the frank exterior belied a kind heart and a sensible head, and she had worked to maintain family ties, rubbing off Giles's corners and making the effort to see Harry and Freddy regularly. When she died suddenly, Giles had floundered - until he met Esther.
Harry didn't know Esther very well, but, she reflected, that was surely due in part to the fact that the couple no longer made such an effort to visit or keep in touch. In recent years, Giles's old resentments had seemed to return, driven perhaps in part by the rivalry the two brothers had had, the competition for her mother's affections which Freddy of course, had duly won.
Was that enough to make him do something as extreme as this, she wondered? It wasn't as though Giles was badly off, relatively speaking – his property and assets, as far as she knew, were not inconsiderable. Nevertheless, jealousy could be irrational. Did her uncle hate her father, hate him enough to do this to him and then try to pin it on Dempsey? Perhaps he hated her too, just because she reminded him of her mother, the woman who had spurned him. It must rankle to be faced with that every time you visited your own family. If Giles felt he were second best, that he had been denied things that were rightfully his, a sure way to get revenge would be to hurt Harry by destroying the man she loved.
Turning these thoughts over in her head, they felt far-fetched. At the same time, the night had a funny way of making unlikely things seem suddenly possible. A second feeling of protectiveness came over her then, the need to protect James. He was always that way with her; it was one of the things she loved about him, despite her protestations to the contrary. She felt safe with him, which in itself was another reason for her father not to worry. When they were together, it was as though an invisible force field worked to encircle them, as long as they worked as a team. Their combined strength was so much more than what they had as individuals. She thought she would tell Freddy that, when she got the chance.
An attack on him was an attack on her, too. Harry's natural instinct was to distrust. She had grown up self-sufficient: without a mother from an early age and sent to a boarding school where it was sink or swim. She swam, but along the way she learned that it was wiser to be cautious. Not that she was cynical; she just generally had more confidence in herself than she did in others. Her ex-husband had been a disappointment. He had lied to her and cheated on her repeatedly, finally with one of her closest friends. At the end of the marriage she was bruised and battered, and more firm than ever in her conviction that most people were not to be trusted.
Then James had come along. It had taken her a long, long time to let down her guard, a lot of hours of working together. Slowly though, they had built a rapport. Respect had followed, and finally, painfully, so had trust – and love. So far, he hadn't disappointed her. Of course, their personalities sparked off each other like metal wheels colliding, each spinning on its own determined axis. Their arguments could be spectacular, but all that was sort of irrelevant, now she thought about it. Falling backwards off a cliff, she would trust him to be there to catch her. If she called him in the middle of the night to tell him she needed him, she would trust him to be there twenty minutes later. She knew who he was, and who he wasn't. And who he wasn't was a liar and a thief.
She tossed and turned. Dawn – a freezing, lack-lustre dawn – was beginning to break, creeping under the bedroom curtains and turning the darkness into dirty half-light. Finally, she slipped from under the covers and crept, barefoot to the window.
Harry found the gap in the curtains and peered out at the frozen grounds of Winfield Hall. The snow created an unending white blanket across the lawns, thickly coating low walls and covering the branches of each tree with a silver shroud. Then she looked again. There were footsteps in the snow below, and not footsteps from yesterday, half filled-in by the fresh fall. These were brand new tracks, bold across the dark lawn – leading away from the house towards the copse of trees.
Something fired off in her brain. They seemed to be leading to a place she hadn't thought about in a very long time, not since she was a child, to be exact. A place forgotten long ago, although perhaps not by everyone.
Quickly, she moved away from the window, and then she was opening the wardrobe, reaching for jeans and a thick sweater.