Careless In Red (64 page)

Daidre wanted to ask the purpose of making a recording of their conversation, but she knew the question would be taken as disingenuous. So she sat and waited for what would happen next, which was DS Havers’s digging a small spiral notebook from the pocket of her donkey jacket, which, for some reason, she had not removed despite the uncomfortable tropical temperature in the building.

DI Hannaford asked Daidre if she wanted anything before they began. Coffee, tea, juice, water? Daidre demurred. She was fine, she replied, and then found herself wondering about that response. What she wasn’t at all was fine. She was uneasy in the head, weak in the palms, and determined not to appear that way.

There seemed only one manner in which to do that: by taking the offensive. She said, “You left me this note,” and produced the DI’s card with its scrawled message on the back. “What is it you want to talk to me about?”

“I’d think that was rather obvious,” Hannaford said, “as we’re in the middle of a murder enquiry.”

“Actually, it’s not obvious at all.”

“Then it will be, soon enough, my dear.” Hannaford was deft about putting the cassette into the tape player although she looked as if she had her doubts on the matter of its properly working. She punched a button, gazed at the turning wheel of the cassette, and recited the date, the time, and the individuals present. Then she said to Daidre, “Tell us about Santo Kerne, Dr. Trahair.”

“What about him?”

“Whatever you know.”

This was all routine: the first few moves in the cat-and-mouse of an interrogation. Daidre answered as simply as she could. “I know that he died in a fall from the north cliff at Polcare Cove.”

Hannaford didn’t look pleased with the response. “How good of you to make that clear to us. You knew who he was when you saw him, didn’t you.” She made it a statement, not a question. “So our first interaction was based on a lie. Yes?”

DS Havers wrote with a pencil, Daidre saw. It scritched against the notebook paper and the sound—normally innocuous—was fingernails on a blackboard in this situation.

Daidre said, “I hadn’t got a good look at him. There wasn’t time.”

“But you checked for vital signs, didn’t you? You were first on the scene. How could you check for signs of life without looking at him?”

“One doesn’t need to look at the victim’s face to check for signs of life, Inspector.”

“That’s a coy reply. How realistic is it to check for vital signs without looking at someone? As the first person on the scene and even in the fading daylight—”

“I was second on the scene,” Daidre interrupted. “Thomas Lynley was first.”

“But you wanted to see the body. You asked to see the body. You insisted. You didn’t take Superintendent Lynley’s word for it that the boy was dead.”

“I didn’t know he was Superintendent Lynley,” Daidre told her. “I arrived at the cottage and found him inside. He might have been a housebreaker for all I knew. He was a total stranger, completely unkempt, as you saw for yourself, looking rather wild and claiming there was a body in the cove and he needed to be taken somewhere to make a phone call about it. It hardly made sense to me to agree to drive him anywhere without checking first to make sure he was telling me the truth.”

“Or checking yourself to discover who the boy was. Did you think it might be Santo?”

“I had no idea who it was going to be. How would I have? I wanted to see if I could help in some way.”

“In what way?”

“If he was injured—”

“You’re a veterinarian, Dr. Trahair. You’re not an emergency physician. How did you expect to help him?”

“Injuries are injuries. Bones are bones. If I could help—”

“And when you saw him, you knew who he was. You were quite familiar with the boy, weren’t you.”

“I knew who Santo Kerne was, if that’s what you mean. This isn’t a heavily populated area. Most people know each other eventually, if only by sight.”

“But I expect you knew him a little bit more intimately than by sight.”

“Then you’d expect incorrectly.”

“That’s not what’s been reported, Dr. Trahair. Indeed, I have to tell you that’s not what’s been witnessed.”

Daidre swallowed. She realised that DS Havers had ceased writing, and she wasn’t sure when that had occurred. This told her she’d been less aware than she needed to be, and she wanted to get back on the footing she’d begun with. She said to DS Havers, past the heavy pounding of her own heart, “New Scotland Yard. Are you the only officer from London here to work on this case? Aside from Superintendent Lynley, I mean.”

Hannaford said, “Dr. Trahair, that’s nothing to do with—”

“New Scotland Yard. The Met. But you must be from the…What would they call it? The crime side? The murder side? CID? Or do they call it something else these days?”

Havers made no reply. She did, however, give a glance to Hannaford.

“I expect you know Thomas Lynley as well, then. If he’s from New Scotland Yard and you’re from New Scotland Yard and you both work in the same—the same field, shall I say?—then you must be acquainted. Would I be correct?”

“Whether Sergeant Havers and Superintendent Lynley are acquainted is none of your concern,” Hannaford said. “We’ve a witness putting Santo Kerne at your front door, Dr. Trahair. We’ve a witness putting him inside your cottage in times past. If you’d like to explain how someone you knew only by sight came knocking at your door and gaining admittance to your home, we’d very much like to listen.”

“I expect it’s you who went to Falmouth asking about me,” Daidre said to Havers.

Havers looked at her blankly, a good poker face. But Hannaford, surprisingly, gave away the game. She directed her attention suddenly, if briefly, to Havers, and there was something of speculation in her look. Daidre took this for surprise, and she drew a logical conclusion from it.

“And I expect Thomas Lynley—and not DI Hannaford—told you to do it.” She stated this flatly. She didn’t want to dwell on how she felt about the fact, and she had no need of a reply because she knew she was right.

What she did have a need for, on the other hand, was getting the police out of her life. Unfortunately, there was only one way to do this and it had to do with information: naming a name that would take them in a different direction. She found that she was willing to do that.

She turned to Hannaford. “You want Aldara Pappas,” she said. “You’ll find her at a place called Cornish Gold. It’s a cider farm.”

FINDING JONATHAN PARSONS’ FORMER wife ate up another ninety minutes of his time once Lynley left Rock Larson’s office. He began at the comprehensive, where he learned that Niamh Parsons had long ago become Niamh Triglia and had also, more recently, taken her pension. She’d lived for years not far from the school, but whether she was still at that location upon her retirement from education…Who could say? That was the limit to what they were able to tell him.

From there, he went to an address he unearthed through the simple means of browsing in the public library. As he’d suspected, the Triglias no longer resided in Exeter, but this was not a dead end. Showing his identification and questioning a few neighbours turned up their new place of abode. Like many others before them, they had headed for sunnier climes. Thankfully, this did not turn out to be the coast of Spain but rather the coast of Cornwall, which, while not atmospherically Mediterranean in climate, was the best the mainland of England had to offer in conditions that might be deemed temperate by those who were determinedly sanguine. The Triglias had been among these types. They lived in Boscastle.

This meant another long drive, but the day was pleasant and the time of year had not yet turned Cornwall into an elongated car park with occasional visual diversions. He made relatively good time to Boscastle, and soon enough he was hiking towards a steep lane of cottages which wound up from the ancient fishing harbour, an inlet protected by vast cliffs of slate and volcanic lava. What went for the high street came first in his climb—a few shops of unpainted stone that were dedicated to the tourist trade and a few more to meet the needs of the village residents—and after it came Old Street, the location of the Triglias’ home. This was nestled not far from an obelisk dedicated to the dead of two world wars. It was called Lark Cottage, and it was whitewashed like a Santorini hut, with thick mounds of heather growing in front and healthy-looking primroses planted in window boxes. Crisp white curtains hung at the windows, and green paint glimmered on the front door. He crossed a tiny bridge of slate that spanned a deep gutter in front of the building, and when he knocked, it was only a moment before an apron-wearing woman answered, her spectacles splattered with what seemed to be grease and her grey hair scraped back from her face and springing up from the crown of her head like a hirsute fountain.

“I’m doing crab cakes,” she said, seemingly apropos of her general appearance and her more specific harried demeanour. “Sorry, but I can’t be away from them for more than a moment.”

He said, “Mrs. Triglia?”

“Yes. Yes. Oh, do please be quick. I hate to be rude, but they absorb dreadfully if you leave them too long.”

“Thomas Lynley. New Scotland Yard.” As he spoke his full identification, he realised that it was the first time he’d done so since Helen’s death. He blinked at this knowledge and the quick but fleeting pain that it brought him. He showed his identification to the woman. He said, “Niamh Triglia? Formerly Parsons?”

She said, “Yes, that’s who I am.”

“I need to speak with you about your husband. Jonathan Parsons. May I come in?”

“Oh yes. Of course.” She stepped back from the door to admit him. She led him through a sitting room largely given to bookshelves, which were themselves heavily given to paperback books interspersed with family photographs and the occasional seashell, interesting stone, or piece of driftwood. Beyond this, the kitchen overlooked a small back garden with a patch of lawn, neat flower beds bordering it, and a leafing tree in its centre.

Here in the kitchen, the crab cakes were managing to produce an impressive disorder. Hot oil splattering onto the cooktop largely characterised the chaos, followed by a draining board covered with bowls, tins, wooden spoons, a carton of eggs, and a coffee press whose liquid was long since gone and whose remaining grounds looked as if they’d been forgotten ages ago. Niamh Triglia went to the cooker and flipped the crab cakes, which produced a new burst of splattering. She said, “The difficulty is managing to get the breadcrumbs to brown without dousing the entire mixture with so much oil that you feel as if you’re eating badly done chips. Do you cook, Mr…. It was Superintendent, though, wasn’t it?”

“Yes,” he said. “As to the superintendent part. As to the cooking, it’s not one of my strengths.”

“It’s my passion,” she confessed. “I had so little time to do it properly when I was teaching, and once I took my pension, I threw myself into it. Cookery courses at the community centre, programmes on the telly, that sort of thing. Problem is the eating bit.”

“Your efforts don’t please you?”

“On the contrary, they please me far too much.” She indicated her body, which was fairly shrouded by her apron. “I try to cut the recipes down for one person, but maths was never my strong suit and most of the time I make enough for at least four.”

“Are you alone here, then?”

“Mmm. Yes.” She used the corner of the egg turner to lift one of the crab cakes and examine its degree of brownness. “Lovely,” she murmured. From a nearby cupboard, she took a plate, which she covered with several layers of kitchen towel. From the fridge, she took a small mixing bowl. “Aioli,” she said, dipping her chin towards the mixture. “Red pepper, garlic, lemon, et cetera. Getting the balance of tastes just right is the issue with a good aioli. That and the olive oil, naturally. Very good e.v.o. is essential.”

“I’m sorry? Evio?” Lynley wondered if this was a style of cooking.

“EVO. Extra-virgin olive oil. The virginest one can find. If there are degrees of virginity in olives. To tell the truth, I’ve never been sure what it means when an olive oil is extra virgin. Are the olives virgins? Are they harvested by virgins? Are they pressed by virgins?” She brought the bowl of aioli to the kitchen table and returned to the cooker, where she began carefully depositing the crab cakes onto the kitchen towels that covered the plate. She took another set of kitchen towels and laid these on top of the cakes, pressing them gently into the concoction to remove as much of the residual oil as she could. From the oven, then, she brought forth three more plates, and Lynley was able to see what she had meant about failing to reduce her recipes so as to cook for one person only. Each plate was similarly dressed with kitchen towels and crab cakes. It looked as if she’d cooked more than a dozen.

“Fresh crab isn’t essential,” she told him. “You can use tinned. Frankly, I find you really can’t tell the difference if the crab is going to be used in a cooked dish. On the other hand, if it’s going to be eaten in something uncooked—salad? a dip for vegetable biscuits or the like—you’re best to go with fresh. But you have to make sure it’s fresh fresh. Trapped that day, I mean.” She deposited the plates on the table and told him to sit. He would, she hoped, indulge. Otherwise, she feared she herself might eat them all, as her neighbours weren’t as appreciative of her culinary efforts as she’d have liked them to be. “I’ve no family to cook for any longer,” she said. “The girls are scattered to the winds and my husband died last year.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“You’re very kind. He went quickly, so it was a terrible shock as he’d been perfectly well up till a day before. Something of an athlete, also. He complained of a headache that he couldn’t get rid of, and he died the next morning as he was putting on his socks. I heard a noise and went to see what had happened and there he was on the floor. Aneurysm.” She lowered her gaze, eyebrows drawn together. “It was difficult not to be able to say good-bye.”

Lynley felt the great stillness of memory settling round him. Perfectly fine in the morning and perfectly dead by the afternoon. He cleared his throat roughly. “Yes. I expect it is.”