Ellis Peters - George Felse 02 - Death and the Joyful Woman by Ellis Peters

did choose to see him it certainly wouldn’t be to greet him with backslapping heartiness, champagne and a preview of his appalling ballroom. But maybe, after all, that was exactly the way he might receive him, rubbing salt into the wounds, goading him with the shoddy miracles money could perform. On a night when triumph and success were in the air maybe this was much more his mark, not direct anger but this oblique and barbaric cruelty. “He’ll be interested to see what can be done with a place like that, given plenty of money and enterprise—” “He was fair hugging himself.”
    “Miss Hamilton, have you got a reasonably recent photograph of Leslie?”
    She gave him a long, thoughtful look, as though she was considering whether he could need such a thing for any good purpose, and whether, in any case, denial could serve to do anything but delay the inevitable. Then she got up without a word, and went behind the desk, and brought out from one of the drawers a half-plate portrait, which she held out to him with a slight, grim smile shadowing the corners of her mouth. It had at some time been framed, for George saw how the light had darkened the pale ground slightly, and left untouched a half-inch border round the edges. More recently it had been torn across into two ragged pieces, and then carefully mended again with gum and Sellotape. The torn edges had been matched as tenderly as possible, but the slash still made a savage scar across the young, alert, fastidious face.
    George looked from the photograph to the woman behind the desk.
    “Yes,” she said. “I fished it out of his wastepaper basket and mended it and kept it. I don’t quite know why. Leslie has never been particularly close to me, but I did see him grow up, and I didn’t like to see the last traces of him just wiped out, like that. That may help you to understand what had happened between them.” She added: “It’s two years old, but it’s the only one he happened to have here in the office. I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t be any use looking for any of those he had at home.”
    George could imagine it. A much-photographed boy, too, most likely. He saw bonfires of cherubic babies, big-eyed toddlers, serious schoolboys, earnest athletes, self-conscious young men-about-town, Armiger’s furnace fed for hours, like a Moloch, on images of his son.
    “Thank you, Miss Hamilton. I’ll see that you have it back,” was all he said.
    The face was still before his eyes as he went out to his car. Leslie Armiger was not visibly his father’s son. Taller, with long, fine bones and not much flesh. Brown hair lighter than his father’s curled pleasantly above a large forehead, and the eyes were straight and bright, with that slight wary wildness of young and high-mettled creatures. The same wonder and insecurity was in the long curves of his mouth, not so much irresolute as hypersensitive. No match for his father, you’d say on sight, if it came to a head-on clash either of wills or heads. But in spite of the ceremonial destruction of his image, young Leslie was still alive; the bull had pawed the ground and charged for the last time.
    It was just four o’clock, and Dominic was walking up Hill Street on his way to the bus stop. Since he had to pass the main police station it was his habit to call in, on days when he hadn’t biked to school, on the off-chance that George might be there with the car, and ready to go off duty; and sometimes he was lucky. To-day George picked him up at the corner and took him to the office with him while he filed his latest report; then they drove home together.
    “One little call to make,” said George, “and then we’ll head for our tea. You won’t mind waiting a minute for me? It won’t take long.”
    “And then you’ve finished for the day?” Dominic’s anxious eyes were searching his face surreptitiously, and trying to read the mind behind it. He would have liked to ask right out if anything positive had turned