Well-Schooled in Murder Quotes

“People, give up on all sorts of things, Havers. But they rarely if ever give up on love.”
― Elizabeth George, Well-Schooled in Murder

“need say was I need some time off. But she couldn’t do it. “The St. James house at half-past seven,” she repeated. “Got it, sir.” He rang off. Barbara hung up. She tried to plumb the depths of her feelings, to put a name to what was slowly washing through her veins. She wanted to call it shame. She knew it was liberation. She went to tell her father that they would need to reschedule his doctor’s appointment for another day. Kevin Whateley had not gone to the Royal Plantagenet, which was the pub next door to his cottage. Rather, he had walked along the embankment, past the triangular green where he and Matthew had once learned to operate their pair of remote-control planes, and had instead entered an older pub that stood on a spit of land reaching like a curled finger into the Thames. He’d chosen the Blue Dove deliberately. In the Royal Plantagenet—despite its proximity to his house—he might have forgotten for five minutes or so. But the Blue Dove would not allow him to do so. He sat at a table that overlooked the water. In spite of the night’s falling temperature, someone was out, night fishing from a boat, and lights bobbed periodically with the river’s movement. Kevin watched this, allowing his memory to fill with the image of Matthew running along that same dock, falling, damaging a knee, righting himself but not crying at all, even when the blood began to seep from the cut, even when the stitches were later put in. He was a brave little bloke, always had been. Kevin forced his eyes from the dock and fastened them on the mahogany table. Beer mats covered it, advertising Watney’s, Guinness, and Smith’s. Carefully, Kevin stacked them, restacked them, spread them out like cards, restacked them again. He felt how shallow his breathing was and knew that he needed to take in more air. But to breathe deeply was to lose his grip for an instant. He wouldn’t do that. For if he lost control, he didn’t know how he would get it back. So he did without air. He waited. He didn’t know if the man he sought would come into the pub this late on a Sunday night, mere minutes before closing. In fact, he didn’t even know if the man came here at all any longer. But years ago he’d been a regular customer, when Patsy worked long hours behind the bar, before she’d got her job in a South Kensington hotel. For Matthew’s sake, she had said when she’d taken on the”
― Elizabeth George, Well-Schooled in Murder

“ineluctable”
― Elizabeth George, Well-Schooled in Murder

“Even if he had not been accustomed to operating perfectly well in a cloud of grit, he would not have noticed it while he laboured in the garden. This was his haven, a place of creative ecstasy in which convenience and cleanliness were not required. Mere discomfort meant nothing to Kevin once he gave himself over to the call of his art.”
― Elizabeth George, Well-Schooled in Murder

“She smiled with perfect insincerity.”
― Elizabeth George, Well-Schooled in Murder

“Kevin had heard himself asking the impossible, the ridiculous, the unutterably laughable. ‘The boy's dead? You're sure of it?’ The sergeant had lowered the cloth to cover Matthew's face. ‘Quite sure. I'm sorry.’ Sorry. What did he know of Matthew to be sorry at his death? What did he know of the railway they'd built together in the cellar, or the buildings they constructed to comprise the three villages through which their trains rolled? How could he know that Matthew had insisted each building be accurately designed to scale, be built of authentic materials, not of plastic? How could he know of the years it had taken them to complete it? Or the hours of pleasure they had got from the work? He didn't know. He couldn't know. All he could do was mutter”
― Elizabeth George, Well Schooled in Murder

“As Lynley watched her, he thought how ironic it was that he had come to depend upon having Havers as his partner. Initially he had believed that no one could possibly be less likely to suit him. She was prickly, argumentative, easily given to anger, and bitterly aware of the enormous gap that existed between them, an impassable chasm created by birth, by class, by money, by experience. They could not have been more antithetical, Havers struggling with a fierce determination to rise out of a working-class neighbourhood in a grimy suburb of London while he moved effortlessly from his home in Cornwall to his town house in Belgravia to his office in New Scotland Yard. But their differences went far beyond mere background. Their perceptions of life and humanity occupied two opposite ends of the spectrum as well. Hers was ruthless, without sympathy, suspicious of motives, and based on distrust of a world that had given her nothing. His was laced with compassion, rich with understanding, and based almost entirely upon a guilt that insisted he reach out, learn, expiate, rescue, make amends. He smiled at the thought that Superintendent Webberly had been absolutely right to put them together, to insist they remain in partnership even at moments when Lynley believed it was an impossible situation that could only grow worse.”
― Elizabeth George, Well-Schooled in Murder

“Crumbs and salt sequined the front of her pullover.”
― Elizabeth George, Well-Schooled in Murder

“We’re all of us part and parcel of another culture, aren’t we? Some are merely nearer to that other culture in time than you and I are. But all of us spring from another source. Accepting that is accepting life. It’s the people who can’t accept it that become the destroyers.”
― Elizabeth George, Well-Schooled in Murder