Careless In Red (15 page)

He’d read a few of the notations inside the boxed dates. She knew what he was seeing: “Motormouth Wanker,” “Big Trouble Wanker.” There were others as well, as he would note if he flipped back to the previous three months. Thirteen weeks of Internet dating: There might be millions of fish in the sea, but Bea Hannaford kept hooking crab pots and seaweed.

It was largely to forestall a conversation about her decision to reenter the world of dating yet another ludicrous time that prompted Bea to bring up having the incident room in Casvelyn. It should, of course, have been in Bodmin where the setup would be minimal, but Bodmin was miles and miles from Casvelyn, with only tediously slow-moving two-lane country roads between them. She wanted, she explained to him, an incident room that was nearer to the crime scene.

He made his point once again. “You don’t know it’s a crime scene. It might be the scene of a tragic accident. What makes you think it’s a crime? This isn’t one of your ‘feelings,’ is it?”

She wanted to say, I don’t have feelings, as you recall, but she didn’t. Over the years she’d become so much better at letting go of matters over which she had no control, one of which was her former husband’s assessment of her. She said, “The body’s a bit marked up. His eye was blackened—healing now, so I’d guess he got into it with someone last week or earlier. Then there was the sling, that webbing thing they use for slinging round a tree or some other stationary object.”

“Hence the name of it,” Ray murmured.

“Bear with me, Ray, as I know nothing about cliff climbing.” Bea kept her voice patient.

He said, “Sorry.”

“Anyway, the sling broke, which was how he fell, but I think it may have been nobbled. Constable McNulty—who, by the way, has absolutely no future in criminal investigations—pointed out that the sling was being held together with electrical tape over a tear and is it any wonder the poor lad took a fatal tumble as a result. But every single piece of the boy’s equipment had electrical tape wrapped round it at some point, and I think the tape’s used to identify the equipment for some reason. If that’s the case, how difficult would it have been for someone to remove the tape, weaken the sling however it was weakened, and then replace the tape without the boy ever knowing it?”

“Have you had a look at the rest of the equipment?”

“Every piece is with forensics, and I have a fairly good idea what they’re going to tell me. And what they tell me is why I’ll need an incident room.”

“But not why you need one in Casvelyn.”

Bea downed the rest of her coffee and placed the mug in the sink with the bowl. She neither rinsed nor washed it and she realised this was yet another benefit to life-without-husband. If she didn’t feel up to doing the washing up, she didn’t have to do the washing up just to soothe the savage breast of the compulsive personality.

She said, “The principals are there, Ray, in Casvelyn. Not in Bodmin, not even here in Holsworthy. They have a police station, small but adequate, and it’s got a conference room on the first floor that’s perfectly adequate as well.”

“You’ve done your homework.”

“I’m trying to make it easier for you. I’m giving you details to support the arrangement. I know you can do this.”

He studied her. She avoided studying him back. He was an attractive man—hair going a bit thin but that didn’t detract—and she didn’t need to compare him to Motormouth Wanker or any of the others. She just needed him to cooperate or leave. Or cooperate and leave, which would be even better.

He said, “And if I arrange this for you, Beatrice?”

“What?”

“What’s the quid pro quo?” He was standing by the coffeemaker and he gave another look to the calendar. “‘Big Trouble Wanker,’” he read. “‘Motormouth Wanker.’ Come on, Beatrice.”

She said, “Thanks for bringing Pete’s football shoes. Finished with your coffee?”

He let a moment go by. Then he took a final gulp and handed the mug over to her, saying, “There had to have been less expensive shoes.”

“He has expensive tastes. How’s the Porsche running, by the way?”

“The Porsche,” he said, “is a dream.”

“The Porsche,” she reminded him, “is a car.” She held up a finger to stop him from retorting. She said, “Which brings to mind…the victim’s car.”

“What about it?”

“What does an unopened package of condoms in the car of an eighteen-year-old boy suggest to you?”

“Is this rhetorical?”

“They were in his car. Along with a bluegrass CD, a blank invoice from something called LiquidEarth, and a rolled-up poster for a music festival last year in Cheltenham. And two dog-eared surfing magazines. I’ve got my fingers on everything but the condoms—”

“Well, thank God for that,” Ray said with a smile.

“—and I’m wondering if he was about to get lucky, getting lucky, or hopeful of getting lucky.”

“Or just eighteen,” Ray said. “All boys that age should be so adequately prepared. What about Lynley?”

“Condoms. Lynley. Where’re we going with this?”

“What was your interview like?”

“He’s hardly going to be intimidated by being in the presence of a cop, so I’d have to say the interview was fine. No matter which way I flipped the questions, his answers were consistent. I think he’s playing it straight.”

“But…?” Ray prompted.

He knew her too well: her tone of voice, the expression that she tried and obviously failed to control on her face. “The other one concerns me,” she said.

“The other…Ah. The woman at the cottage. What was her name?”

“Daidre Trahair. She’s a vet from Bristol.”

“And what concerns you about the vet from Bristol?”

“I’ve a sense about things.”

“I know that well enough. And what’s the sense about things telling you this time?”

“That she’s lying about something. I want to know what.”

DAIDRE NEATLY SITUATED HER Vauxhall in the car park at the town end of St. Mevan Crescent, which made a slow curve towards St. Mevan Beach and the old Promontory King George Hotel sitting well above the sand, a line of decrepit blue beach huts below it. When she’d dropped him at the bottom of Belle Vue Lane and pointed him in the direction of the shops, she and Thomas Lynley had agreed on two hours.

He’d said politely, “I’m not inconveniencing you, I hope.”

He was not, she assured him. She had several things to do in town anyway. He was to take his time and purchase what he needed.

He’d protested this idea initially, when she’d first fetched him from the Salthouse Inn. Although he was considerably more fragrant than on the previous day, he was still wearing the ghastly white boiler suit, still with nothing but socks on his feet. He’d carefully removed these to cross the muddy path to her car and he’d tried to insist that buying new clothing could wait when she’d pressed two hundred pounds upon him.

She said, “Please. Don’t be ridiculous, Thomas. You can’t continue to walk round the area like…well, like someone from a hazardous-chemicals squad, or whatever they call it. You can repay me the money. Besides,” and here she smiled, “I hate to be the one to inform you, but white doesn’t suit you in the least.”

“It doesn’t?” He’d smiled in turn. He had a quite pleasant smile, and it came to her that she’d not seen him smile until that moment. Not that there had been anything in particular to grin about on the previous day, but still…Smiling was virtually an automatic response in most people, a reaction indicative of nothing other than passing courtesy, so it was unusual to find someone so grave.

“Not in the least,” she told him. “So buy something suitable for yourself.”

“Thank you,” he’d said. “You’re very kind.”

“I’m only kind to the wounded,” she told him.

He’d nodded thoughtfully and looked out of the windscreen for a moment, perhaps meditating on the way Belle Vue Lane climbed in a narrow passage to the upper reaches of the town. He’d finally said, “Two hours then,” and got out, leaving her wondering what else he had on his mind.

She’d driven off as he’d walked barefoot on a route towards the outdoor-outfitter’s shop. She’d passed him with a wave and had seen from her rearview mirror that he’d watched from the pavement as she made her way up the hill to where the street curved out of sight and split off, in one direction to the car park and in the other towards St. Mevan Down.

This was the highest point in Casvelyn. From here, one could take in the charmless nature of the little town. It had seen its heyday more than seventy years earlier when holidaying at the sea had been the height of fashion. Now it existed largely at the pleasure of surfers and other outdoor enthusiasts, with tea shops long ago morphed into T-shirt boutiques, souvenir shops, and surfing academies, and post-Edwardian homes serving as doss houses for a peripatetic population who followed the seasons and the swells.

Across Belle Vue Lane from the car park, Toes on the Nose Café was doing a good morning’s business off the local surfers, two of whom had left their cars parked illegally along the kerb, as if with the intention of tearing out of the establishment at the first sign of a change in conditions. The place was crowded with them: They were a close community. Daidre felt the prick of absence—how different it was from the sorrow of loss, she realised—as she passed by and saw them huddled round tables and no doubt telling tales of derring-do in the waves.

She headed for the offices of the Watchman, which hunkered down in an unattractive cube of blue stucco at the junction of Princes Street and Queen Street, in an area of Casvelyn that the locals jokingly called the Royal T. Princes Street served as the cross piece of the T, with Queen Street the trunk. Below Queen was King Street and nearby were Duke Street and Duchy Row. In Victorian times and earlier, Casvelyn had longed to append Regis to its name, and its streets’ appellations bore historical testimony to this fact.

When she’d told Thomas Lynley that she had things to do in town, she hadn’t been lying…exactly. There were arrangements to be made eventually about the broken window at the cottage, but beyond that there was the not insignificant matter of Santo Kerne’s death. The Watchman would be covering the teenager’s fall in Polcare Cove, and as she did not take a newspaper in Cornwall, it would be perfectly logical that she might stop by the offices of the paper to see if an issue with this story in it was soon going to be available.

When she entered, she saw Max Priestley at once. The place was quite small—consisting of Max’s own office, the layout room, a tiny newsroom, and a reception area that conveniently doubled as the newspaper’s morgue—so this was no surprise. He was in the layout room in the company of one of the paper’s two reporters, and they were bent over what appeared to be a mock-up of a front page, which Max seemed to want changed and which the reporter—who looked like nothing so much as a twelve-year-old girl in flip-flops—apparently wanted to remain the same.

“People’ll expect it,” she was insisting. “This’s a community paper, and he was a member of the community.”

“The queen dies and we go three inches,” Max replied. “Otherwise we don’t get carried away.” He looked up then and fixed on Daidre.

She raised a hand hesitantly and studied him as closely as she could without being obvious about it. He was an outdoorsman, and he looked it: weathered skin making him seem older than his forty years, thick hair permanently bleached from the sun, trim from regular coastal walking. He seemed normal today. She wondered about that.

The receptionist—who tripled as copy editor and secretary to the publisher—was in the process of politely enquiring after Daidre’s business when Max came out to join them, polishing his gold-rimmed spectacles on his shirt. He said to Daidre, “I just sent Steve Teller to interview you not five minutes ago. It’s time you had a phone like the rest of the world.”

“I do have a phone,” she told him. “It’s just not in Cornwall.”

“That’s hardly convenient to our purpose, Daidre.”

“So you’re working on the story about Santo Kerne?”

“I can’t exactly avoid it and still call myself a newsman, can I.” He tilted his head towards his office, saying to the receptionist, “Bring up Steve on his mobile if you can, Janna. Tell him Dr. Trahair’s come into town and if he manages to get back quick enough, she might consent to an interview.”

“I’ve nothing to tell him,” Daidre told Max Priestley.

“‘Nothing’ is our business,” he replied affably. He held out his hand, a gesture telling Daidre to go into his office.

She cooperated. Beneath his desk, his golden retriever snoozed. Daidre squatted by the dog and caressed her silky head. “Looking well,” she said. “The medication’s working?”

He grunted in the affirmative and said, “But you aren’t making a house call, are you.”

Daidre made a cursory exam of the dog’s belly, more a matter of form than from any real need. All signs of the skin infection were gone. She rose and said, “Don’t let it go on so long next time. Lily could lose her fur in gobs. You don’t want that.”

“Won’t be a next time. I’m actually a fast learner, despite what my history suggests. Why’re you here?”

“You know how Santo Kerne died, don’t you?”

“Daidre, you know that I know. So I suppose the real question is why’re you asking. Or stating. Or whatever you’re doing. What do you want? How can I help you this morning?”

She could hear the irritation in his voice. She knew what it meant. She was merely an occasional holiday maker in Casvelyn. She had entrée to some places and not to others. She shifted gears. “I saw Aldara last night. She was waiting for someone.”

“Was she indeed?”

“I thought it might have been you.”

“That’s not very likely.” He looked round the office as if for employment. “And is that why you’ve come? Checking up on Aldara? Checking up on me? Neither seems like you, but I’m not much good at reading women, as you know.”

“No. That’s not it.”

“Then…? Is there more? Because, as we want to get the paper out earlier today…”

“I’ve actually come to ask a favour.”

He looked immediately suspicious. “What would that be?”

“Your computer. The Internet actually. I’ve no other access, and I’d rather not use the library. I need to look up…” She hesitated. How much to say?