Careless In Red (51 page)

“What the hell do you think—”

“It just seems to me that if he had a taste for older women, he’d want to go after one more readily available to him. Dr. Trahair, according to what she’s said, comes here only for holidays and occasional weekend breaks.”

“According to what she bloody says. My good man, she’s lied about nearly everything so far, so I think we’re God damn safe to assume that if Santo Kerne came to this cottage—”

“Could I have a word, Inspector Hannaford?” Havers broke in. “With the superintendent, I mean.”

Firmly Lynley said, “Barbara, I’m no longer—”

“With his lordship,” Havers corrected herself acidly. “With his earlishness…With Mister Lynley…with whatever he wishes to be called at this point…if you don’t mind, Guv.”

Hannaford threw up her hands. “Take him.” She began to walk towards the cottage, but she paused and pointed her finger at Lynley. “Detective, if I find you’re obstructing this investigation in any way…”

“You’ll have my job,” Lynley said wryly. “I know.”

He watched her stalk towards the cottage and knock on the door. When no one answered, she went round the side of the building, clearly intending to do what she thought Santo’s girlfriend ought to have done: peer through the windows. He turned to Havers.

“Thank you,” he said.

“I wasn’t rescuing you.”

“Not for that.” He indicated Hannaford with a nod towards the cottage. “For not giving her the information from Falmouth. You could have done. You ought to have done. Both of us know that. Thank you.”

“I like to stay consistent.” She drew in deeply on her cigarette before she tossed it to the ground. She removed a bit of tobacco from her tongue. “Why develop a respect for authority at the eleventh hour, if you know what I mean?”

He smiled. “So you see—”

“No,” she said. “I don’t see. At least I don’t see what you want me to see. She’s a liar, sir. That makes her dirty. We came here to take her in for questioning. More, if we need to.”

“More? An arrest? For what? It seems to me that if she was having an affair with this boy, the motive to kill him sits squarely on someone else.”

“Not necessarily. And please don’t tell me you don’t know that.” She glanced at the cottage. Hannaford was gone from view, now at the seaside windows on the west end of the building. Havers drew a deep breath. She coughed a smoker’s cough.

“You’ve got to give up tobacco,” he told her.

“Right. Tomorrow. In the meantime, we have a bit of a problem.”

“Come with me to Newquay.”

“What? Why?”

“Because I’ve got a lead on this case and that’s where it is. Santo Kerne’s father was involved in a death some thirty years ago. I think it needs to be checked into.”

“Santo Kerne’s father? Sir, you’re avoiding.”

“Avoiding what?”

“You know.” She cocked her head at the cottage.

“Havers, I’m not. Come with me to Newquay.” The plan sounded so sensible to him. It even had the flavour of old times: the two of them doing some digging around, talking about leads, tossing round possibilities. Suddenly, he wanted the sergeant with him.

“I can’t do that, sir,” Havers said.

“Why not?”

“First of all, because I’m here on loan to DI Hannaford. And second…” She drove her hand through her sandy hair, badly cut as always, and straight as the route of a martyr’s path to heaven. It was filled, as usual, with static electricity. Much of it stood on end. “Sir, how do I say this to you?”

“What?”

“This. You’ve been through the worst.”

“Barbara—”

“No. You’ve bloody well got to listen to me. You lost your wife to murder. You lost your child. For God’s sake, you had to shut off their life support.”

He closed his eyes. Her hand grabbed his arm and held it firmly.

“I know this is hard. I know it’s horrible.”

“No,” he murmured, “you don’t. You can’t.”

“All right. I don’t, and I can’t. But what happened to Helen ripped your world apart and no one—bloody no one, sir—walks away from something like that with his head on straight.”

He looked at her then. “You’re saying I’m mad? Have we come to that?”

She released his arm. “I’m saying you’re badly wounded. You’re not coming at this from a position of strength because you can’t and to expect anything else of yourself is just bloody wrong. I don’t know who this woman is or why she’s here or if she’s Daidre Trahair or someone who’s claiming to be Daidre Trahair. But the fact remains that when someone lies in the middle of a murder investigation, that’s what the cops look at. So the question is, Why don’t you want to? I think we both know the answer to that.”

“What would that be?”

“You’re using your lordship voice. I know what that means: You want distance, and you usually get it. Well, I’m not giving it to you, sir. I’m here, standing directly in your face, and you have to look at what you’re doing and why. And if you can’t cope with the thought of doing it, you have to look at that as well.”

He made no reply. He felt as if a wave were washing over him, breaking through everything he’d built to hold it temporarily at bay. He finally said, “Oh God,” but that was all he could say. He lifted his head and looked at the sky, where grey clouds were promising to transform the day.

When Havers spoke again, her voice was altered, from hard to soft. The change cut into him as much as her declarations had done. “Why did you come here? To her cottage? Have you found out anything else about her?”

“I thought…” He cleared his throat and looked from the sky to her. She was so solid and so unutterably real and he knew that she was on his side. But he couldn’t make that matter at the moment. If he told Havers the truth, she’d move upon it. The very fact of yet another lie from Daidre Trahair would tip the balance. “I thought she might want to go to Newquay with me,” he said. “It would give me a chance to talk to her another time, to try to sort out…” He didn’t complete the thought. It sounded now, even to his ears, so pathetically desperate. Which is what I am, he thought.

Havers nodded. Hannaford came round the far side of the cottage. She was tramping through the heavy growth of marram grass and cowslip beneath the windows. It was more than obvious that she fully intended Daidre Trahair to know that someone had been there.

Lynley told her his intention: Newquay, the police, the story of Ben Kerne and the death of a boy called Jamie Parsons.

Hannaford was not impressed. “Fool’s errand,” she declared. “What’re we supposed to make of all that?”

“I don’t know yet. But it seems to me—”

“I want you on her, Superintendent. Is she somehow involved in what happened during the Ice Age? She would have been…what? Four years old? Five?”

“I admit that there may be issues about her that need exploring.”

“Do you indeed? How good to hear. So explore them. Got that mobile with you? Yes? Keep it on, then.” She jerked her fuchsia-coloured head towards her car. “We’ll be off. Once you locate our Dr. Trahair, escort her to the station. Am I being clear on that?”

“You are,” Lynley said. “Completely clear.”

He watched as Hannaford headed to her car. He and Havers exchanged a look before she followed.

He decided on Newquay anyway, that being the beauty of his role in the investigation. And damn the consequences if he and Hannaford disagreed, he wasn’t obliged to discount his own inclinations in favour of hers.

He took the most direct route to Newquay once he made his way through the tangled skein of lanes that separated Polcare Cove from the A39. He hit a tailback caused by an overturned lorry some five miles out of Wadebridge, which slowed him considerably, and he ended up in Cornwall’s surfing capital shortly after two in the afternoon. He became immediately lost and cursed the obedient, parent-pleasing young adolescent he had been prior to his father’s death. Newquay, his father had more than once intoned, was a vulgar town, not the sort of place a “true” Lynley frequented. Consequently, he knew nothing of the town, while his younger brother—never burdened with the need to please—probably could have found his way round blindfolded.

Having suffered the frustrating one-way system twice and having nearly driven into the pedestrian precinct once, Lynley gave up the effort and followed the signs to the information office, where a kindly woman asked him if he was “looking for Fistral, love?” by which he took it that he was being mistaken for an ageing surfer. She was happy enough to give him directions to the police station, however, and they were of a detailed nature, so he managed to get there without further difficulty.

His police identification worked as he’d hoped it would, although it didn’t take him as far as he’d planned. The special constable on duty in reception handed him over to the head of the MCIT squad, a detective sergeant called Ferrell with a globelike head and eyebrows so thick and black that they looked artificial. He was aware of the investigation ongoing in the Casvelyn area. He wasn’t, however, aware that the Met had become involved. He said this last bit meaningfully. The Met presence suggested an investigation into the investigation, which in itself suggested gross incompetence on the part of the officer in charge.

In fairness to Hannaford, Lynley disabused DS Ferrell of whatever notion he was brewing about Hannaford’s capabilities. He’d been in the area on holiday, he explained. He’d been present when the body was found. The boy, he explained, was the son of a man who had himself been at least tangentially involved in a death a number of years ago, one that had been investigated by the Newquay police, and that was why Lynley had come to Newquay: for information relating to that situation.

Thirty years ago had obviously seen Ferrell not long out of nappies, so the DS knew nothing about anyone called Parsons, about Benesek Kerne, or about a sea cave mishap in Pengelly Cove. On the other hand, it wouldn’t be tough for him to suss out who did know what in relation to that death. If the superintendent didn’t mind a bit of a wait…?

Lynley chose to do his waiting in the canteen, the better to be a hovering presence that might spur things on. He bought himself an apple because he knew he ought to eat despite not having felt hungry since his conversation with Havers that morning. He bit into it, was gratified to find it mealy, and tossed it into the rubbish bin. He followed up with a cup of coffee and wished vaguely that he was still a smoker. There was, of course, no smoking in the canteen these days, but having something to do with his hands would have been gratifying, even if what he was doing was only rolling an unsmoked cigarette in his fingers. At least he wouldn’t feel as if he needed to tear packets of sugar into shreds, which was what he did as he waited for DS Ferrell to return. He opened one and dumped it into his coffee. The others he dumped into a neat pile on the table, where he then ran a plastic stir stick through the mess, creating designs as he tried not to think.

There was no Paul the primate keeper, but what did that mean, really? A private person who’d been caught looking at sites for miracles, she’d want to make an excuse for that. It was human nature. Embarrassment led to prevarication. This was not a crime. But that, of course, was not the only instance of prevarication on the vet’s part, and this was the problem he faced: what to do about Daidre Trahair’s lies and, even more, what to think about them.

DS Ferrell did not return for a very long twenty-six minutes. When he did come into the canteen, however, he had nothing with him but a slip of paper. Lynley had been hoping for boxes of files he might look through, so he felt deflated. But there was moderate cheer in what Ferrell had to say.

“DI running that case retired long before my time,” he told Lynley. “Must be over eighty by now. He lives in Zennor. Across from the church and next to the pub. He says he’ll meet you by the mermaid’s chair if you want to talk.”

“The mermaid’s chair?”

“That’s what he said. Said if you’re a proper detective, you should be able to find it.” Ferrell shrugged and looked a bit embarrassed. “Funny bloke, you ask me. Fair warning and all that. I think he may be a bit gaga.”

DAIDRE TRAHAIR NOT BEING AT HOME, THERE WAS NOTHING for it but to return to the police station in Casvelyn, which was what Bea and DS Havers did. Bea wedged her card into the cottage doorway in Polcare Cove before they left, with a note scribbled upon it, asking the vet to phone or to come to the station, but she didn’t have much faith in that producing any positive results. Dr. Trahair was, after all, without a telephone or a mobile and, considering her dealings with the truth so far—which could best be described as either fast and loose or nonexistent—she wouldn’t be entirely motivated to get in touch with them anyway. She was a liar. They now knew she was a liar. She now knew they knew she was a liar. With that combination of rather compelling details as the background of Bea’s request that she get in touch, why would Daidre Trahair want to place herself in a position where a nasty confrontation with the cops was likely?

“He’s not looking at things the way he ought,” Bea said to DS Havers abruptly as they headed upwards and out of Polcare Cove. Her thoughts had made a natural segue. Daidre Trahair and Polcare Cottage led inevitably to Thomas Lynley and Daidre Trahair and Polcare Cottage. Bea didn’t like the fact that Lynley had been there, acting the part of informal greeting party to her and DS Havers. Even less did she like the fact that Lynley had protested a bit too much when it came to Daidre Trahair’s innocence in all matters pertaining to Santo Kerne.

“He’s got a thing about keeping all the possible options in place as possible options,” Havers said. The way she sounded was something Bea thought of as cautiously casual, and the DI narrowed her eyes suspiciously. The sergeant, she saw, was looking steadily forward, as if, as she spoke, a study of the lane were imperative for some reason. “That’s all that was, that business at the cottage. He looks at situations and sees them the way the CPS would see them. Forget an arrest for the moment, he thinks. The real question is: Is this good enough to take into court? Yes or no? If it’s a no, he makes everyone keep digging. Gives you aggro-and-a-half sometimes, but it all comes right in the end.”