Careless In Red (65 page)

She said, “Well, one recovers eventually from these things.” She shot him a tremulous smile. “At least, that’s what one hopes.” She went to a cupboard and brought out two plates; from a drawer she took cutlery. She laid the table. “Please do sit, Superintendent.”

She found him a linen napkin and used her own first to clean off her spectacles. Without them, she had the dazed look of the lifelong sufferer of myopia. “There,” she said when she’d polished them to her liking, “I can actually see you properly now. My goodness. What a handsome man you are. You’d leave me quite tonguetied if I were your age. How old are you, by the way?”

“Thirty-eight.”

“Well, what’s a thirty-year age difference among friends?” she asked. “Are you married, dear?”

“My wife…Yes. Yes, I am.”

“And is your wife very beautiful?”

“She is.”

“Blond, like you?”

“No. She’s quite dark.”

“Then you must be very handsome together. Francis and I—that’s my late husband—were so similar to each other that we were often taken for brother and sister when we were younger.”

“You were married to him for a number of years, then?”

“Twenty-two years nearly to the day. But I’d known him before my first marriage ended. We’d been in primary school together. Isn’t it odd how something as simple as that—being in school together—can forge a bond and make things easier between people if they see each other later in life, even if they haven’t spoken in years? There was no period of discomfort between us when we first began to see each other after Jon and I divorced.” She scooped some aioli out of the bowl and handed it to him to do the same. She tasted the crab cake and pronounced it, “Doable. What do you think of them?”

“I think they’re excellent.”

“Flatterer. Handsome and well-bred, I see. Is your wife a good cook?”

“She’s completely appalling.”

“She has other strengths, then.”

He thought of Helen: the laughter of her, that unrepressed gaiety, so much compassion. “I find she has hundreds of strengths.”

“Which makes indifferent kitchen skills—”

“Completely irrelevant. There’s always takeaway.”

“Isn’t there just.” She smiled at him and then went on with, “I’m avoiding, as you’ve probably guessed. Has something happened to Jon?”

“Do you know where he is?”

She shook her head. “I haven’t spoken to him in years. Our eldest child—”

“Jamie.”

“Ah. So you know about Jamie?” And when Lynley nodded, she continued by saying thoughtfully, “I suppose we all carry some sort of scars from our childhood for this and that reason, and Jon had his share. His father was a hard man with set ideas about what his boys should do with their lives, and he’d decided that what they should do was science. Very stupid to decide your children’s lives for them, to my way of thinking, but there you have it. That’s what he did. Unfortunately, neither boy was the least interested in science, so they both disappointed him and he never let them forget it. Jon was determined not to be that kind of father to our children, especially to Jamie, and I have to say he made a success of it. We both made a success of parenthood. I stayed home with the children because he insisted and I agreed with him, and I think that made a difference. We were close to the children. The children were close to each other although strung along quite a bit in age. At any rate, we were a very tight and very happy little unit.”

“And then your son died.”

“And then Jamie died.” She set her knife and fork down and folded her hands in her lap. “Jamie was a lovely boy. Oh, he had his quirks—what boy his age doesn’t—but at heart he was lovely. Lovely and loving. And very very good to his little sisters. We were all devastated by his death, but Jon couldn’t come to grips with it. I thought he would, eventually. Give it time, I told myself. But when a person’s life becomes all about the death of another and about nothing else…I had the girls to think of, you see. I had myself to think of. I couldn’t live like that.”

“Like what?”

“It was all he talked about and, as far as I could tell, it was all he thought about. It was as if Jamie’s death had invaded his brain and eaten away everything that wasn’t Jamie’s death.”

“I’ve learned he wasn’t satisfied with the investigation, so he mounted his own.”

“He must have mounted half a dozen. But it made no difference. And each time that it made no difference, he went just a bit more mad. Of course, he’d lost the business by then and we’d gone through our savings and had lost our home, and that made things worse for him because he knew he was responsible for it happening, but he couldn’t get himself to stop. I tried to tell him it would make no difference to his grief and his loss to bring someone to justice, but he thought it would. He was sure it would. Just the way people think that if the killer of their loved one is put to death, that’s somehow going to assuage their own desolation. But how can it, really? The death of a killer doesn’t bring anyone else back to life, and that’s what we want and can never have.”

“What happened to Jonathan when you divorced?”

“The first three years or so, he phoned me occasionally. To give me ‘updates,’ he said. Of course, there never were any viable updates to give me, but he needed to believe he was making progress instead of doing what he was really doing.”

“Which was?”

“Making it less and less likely that anyone involved in Jamie’s death would…would crack, I suppose the word is. He saw in this an enormous conspiracy involving everyone in Pengelly Cove, with himself the outsider and them the close-mouthed community determined to protect its own.”

“But you didn’t see it that way?”

“I didn’t know how to see it. I wanted to be supportive of Jon and I tried to be at first, but for me the real point was that Jamie was dead. We’d lost him—all of us had lost him—and nothing Jon could do was going to alter that. My…I suppose you might call it my focus…was on that one fact, and it seemed to me—rightly or wrongly—that the result of what Jon was doing was to keep Jamie’s death fresh, like a sore that one rubs and causes to bleed instead of allowing it to heal. And I believed that healing was what we all needed.”

“Did you see him again? Did your girls see him again?”

She shook her head. “And doesn’t that compile tragedy upon tragedy? One child died terribly, but Jon lost all four upon his own choice because he chose the dead over the living. To me, that’s a greater tragedy than the loss of our son.”

“Some people,” Lynley said quietly, “have no other way to react to a sudden, inexplicable loss.”

“I daresay you’re right. But in Jon’s case, I think it was a deliberate choice. In making it, he was living the way he’d always lived, which was to put Jamie first. Here. Let me show you what I mean.”

She rose from the table and, wiping her hands down the front of her apron, she went into the sitting room. Lynley could see her walk over to the crowded bookshelves where she extricated a picture from among the large group on display. She brought it to the kitchen and handed it over, saying, “Sometimes photographs say things that words can’t convey.”

Lynley saw that she’d given him a family portrait. In it, a version of herself perhaps thirty years younger posed with husband and four winsome children. The scene was wintry, deep snow with a lodge and a ski lift in the background. In the foreground, suited up for sport with skis leaning up against their shoulders, the family stood happily ready for action, Niamh with a toddler in her arms and two other laughing daughters hanging on to her and perhaps a yard from them, Jamie and his father. Jonathan Parsons had his arm affectionately slung round Jamie’s neck, and he was pulling his son close to him. They both were grinning.

“That’s how it was,” Niamh said. “It didn’t seem to matter so very much because, after all, the girls had me. I told myself it was a man-man and woman-woman thing, and I ought to be pleased that Jon and Jamie were so close and the girls and I were as thick as thieves. But, of course, when Jamie died Jon saw himself as having lost it all. Three-quarters of his life was standing right in front of him, but he couldn’t see that. That was his tragedy. I didn’t want to make it mine.”

Lynley looked up from his study of the photo. “May I keep this for a time? I’ll return it to you, of course.”

She seemed surprised by the request. “Keep it? Whatever for?”

“I’d like to show it to someone. I’ll return it within a few days. By post. Or in person if you prefer. I’ll keep it quite safe.”

“Take it by all means,” she said. “But…I haven’t asked and I ought to have. Why have you come to talk about Jon?”

“A boy died north of here. Just beyond Casvelyn.”

“In a sea cave? Like Jamie?”

“In a fall from a cliff.”

“And you think this has something to do with Jamie’s death?”

“I’m not sure.” Lynley looked at the picture again. He said, “Where are your daughters now, Mrs. Triglia?”

BEA HANNAFORD DIDN’T LIKE THE FACT THAT DAIDRE TRAHAIR had managed to take control of the interrogation several times during their interview. In Bea’s opinion the veterinarian was too clever by half, which made the DI even more determined to pin something on the wily wench. What they ended up with, however, was not what Bea had expected and hoped to get from her.

Once she’d given the piece of potentially useless information about Aldara Pappas and the Cornish Gold, Dr. Trahair had politely informed them that unless they had something to charge her with, she’d be off, thank you very much. The damn woman knew her rights, and the fact that she’d decided to exercise them at that particular moment was maddening, but there was nothing for it but to bid her an extremely less-than-fond farewell.

Upon rising from her chair, however, the vet had said something that Bea had found telling. She’d directed a question to Sergeant Havers. “What was his wife like? He’s spoken to me about her, but he’s actually said very little.”

Until that moment, the Scotland Yard detective had said nothing during their interview with Dr. Trahair. The only sound she’d emitted was that which came from her steadily writing pencil. At the vet’s query, she rapidly tapped that pencil against her tattered notebook, as if considering the ramifications of the question.

Havers finally said evenly, “She was bloody brilliant.”

“It must be a terrible loss for him.”

“For a time,” Havers said, “we thought it might kill him.”

Daidre had nodded. “Yes, I can see that when I look at him.”

Bea had wanted to ask, “Do that often, Dr. Trahair?” but she hadn’t. She’d had enough of the vet, and she had larger concerns at the moment beyond what it meant—beyond the obvious—that Daidre Trahair was curious about Thomas Lynley’s murdered wife.

One of those concerns was Lynley himself. After the vet had left them and once Bea had sussed out the location of the cider farm, she placed a call to Lynley as she and Havers headed out to her car. What the hell had he dug up in Exeter? she wanted to know. And where else were his dubious wanderings taking him?

He was in Boscastle, he told her. He spun a lengthy tale about death, parenthood, divorce, and the estrangement that can occur between parents and children. He ended with, “I’ve a photo I’d like you to have a look at as well.”

“As a point of interest or a piece to the puzzle?”

“I’m not quite sure,” he said.

She would see him upon his return, she told him. In the meantime, Dr. Trahair had surfaced and, backed into a wall, had produced a new name for them as well as a new place.

“Aldara Pappas,” he repeated thoughtfully. “A Greek cider maker?”

“We’re seeing everything, aren’t we,” Bea said. “I fully expect dancing bears next.”

She rang off as she and Havers reached her car. A football, three newspapers, a rain jacket, one doggie chew toy, and a bouquet of wrappers from energy bars having been removed from the passenger seat and tossed into the back, they were on their way. Cornish Gold was near the village of Brandis Corner, a bit of a drive from Casvelyn. They reached it by means of secondary and tertiary roads that became progressively narrower in the way of all Cornish thoroughfares. They also became progressively less passable. Ultimately, the farm presented itself by means of a large sign painted with red letters on a field of brown, heavily laden apple trees serving as the sign’s decoration and an arrow indicating entrance for anyone too limited to understand what was meant by the two strips of stony ground divided by a mustache of grass and weeds, which veered off to the right. They jolted over this for some two hundred yards, finally coming to a surprisingly and decently paved car park. Optimistically, part of it was set aside for tour coaches while the rest was given to bays for cars. More than a dozen were scattered along a split-rail fence. Seven more stood in the farthest corner.

Bea pulled into a space that was near a large timber barn, which opened into the car park. Within, two tractors—hardly in use, considering their pristine condition—were serving as perches for three stately looking peacocks, their sumptuous tail feathers cascading in a colourful effluence across the tops of cabs and down the sides of engines. Beyond the barn, another structure—this one combining both granite and timber—displayed huge oaken barrels, presumably aging the farm’s product. Rising behind this building the apple orchard grew, and it climbed the slope of a hill, row after row of trees pruned to grow like inverted pyramids, a proud display of delicate blossoms. A furrowed lane bisected the orchard. In the distance, some sort of tour seemed to be bumping along it: an open wagon pulled by a plodding draft horse.

Across the lane, a gate gave entrance into the attractions of the cider farm. These comprised a gift shop and café along with yet another gate that appeared to lead to the cider-production area, the perusal of which demanded a ticket.

Or police identification, as things turned out. Bea showed hers to a young woman behind the till in the gift shop and asked to speak to Aldara Pappas on a matter of some urgency. The girl’s silver lip ring quivered as she directed Bea to the inner workings of the farm. She said, “Watching over the mill,” by which Bea took it that the woman they were looking for could be found at…perhaps a grinding mill? What did one do with apples, anyway? And was this the time of year to be doing it?