Careless In Red (9 page)

“No. I couldn’t walk on, could I?”

He sat for a moment. He seemed to be watching the wind play with the sign hanging above the inn’s front door.

He finally said, “May I ask you something?”

She said, “Certainly.”

“Why did you lie?”

She heard an unexpected buzzing in her ears. She repeated the last word, as if she’d misheard him when she’d heard him only too clearly.

He said, “The first time we came here, you told the publican that the boy in the cove was Santo Kerne. You said his name. Santo Kerne. But when the police asked you…” He gestured, a movement saying finish the rest for yourself.

The question reminded Daidre that this man, disheveled and filthy though he was, was himself a policeman, and a detective at that. From this moment, she needed to take extraordinary care.

She said, “Did I say that?”

“You did. Quietly, but not quietly enough. And now you’ve told the police at least twice that you didn’t recognise the boy. When they’ve said his name, you’ve said you don’t know him. I’m wondering why.”

He looked at her, and she instantly regretted her offer to take him into Casvelyn for clothing in the morning. He was more than the sum of his parts, and she hadn’t seen that in time.

She said, “I’ve come for a holiday. At the time it seemed—what I said to the police—the best way of ensuring I have one. A holiday. A rest.”

He said nothing.

She added, “Thank you for not betraying me to them. Of course, I can’t stop you from betraying me later when you speak to them again. But I’d appreciate it, if you’d consider…There’re things the police don’t need to know about me. That’s all, Mr. Lynley.”

He didn’t reply. But he didn’t look away from her and she felt the heat rising up her neck to her cheeks. The door of the inn banged open then. A man and a woman stumbled into the wind. The woman twisted her ankle, and the man put his arm round her waist and then kissed her. She shoved him away. The gesture was playful. He caught her up again and they staggered in the wind towards a line of cars.

Daidre watched them as Lynley watched her. She finally said, “I’ll come for you at ten, then. Will that do for you, Mr. Lynley?”

His response was a long time in coming. Daidre thought he must be a good policeman.

“Thomas,” he said to her. “Please call me Thomas.”

IT WAS LIKE AN old-time film about the American west, Lynley thought. He ducked into the inn’s public bar, where the local drinkers were gathered, and silence fell. This was a part of the world where you were a visitor until you had become a permanent resident and you were a newcomer until your family had lived in the place for two generations. So he went down as a stranger among them. But he was more than that. He was also a stranger dressed in a white boiler suit and wearing nothing but socks on his feet. He had no coat against the cold, the wind, and the rain, and if that were not enough to make him a novelty, had anyone other than a bride entered this establishment in the past wearing white from shoulder to ankle, it probably hadn’t happened in the living memory of anyone present.

The ceiling—stained with the soot of fires and the smoke of cigarettes and crossed with black oak beams from which horse brasses were nailed—hung less than twelve inches above Lynley’s head. The walls bore a display of ancient farm implements, given mostly to scythes and pitchforks, and the floor was stone. This last was uneven, pockmarked, scored and scoured. Thresholds made of the same material as the floor were cratered by hundreds of years of entrances and exits, and the room itself that defined the public bar was small and divided into two sections described by fireplaces, one large and one small, which seemed to be doing more to make the air unbreathable than to warm the place. The body heat of the crowd was seeing to that.

When he’d been at the Salthouse Inn earlier with Daidre Trahair, just a few late-afternoon drinkers had been present. Now, the place’s nighttime crowd had arrived, and Lynley had to work his way through them and through their silence to get to the bar. He knew it was more than his clothing that made him an object of interest. There was the not small matter of his smell: unwashed from head to toe for seven weeks now. Unshaven and unshorn as well.

The publican—Lynley recalled that Daidre Trahair had referred to him as Brian—apparently remembered him from his earlier visit because he said abruptly into the silence, “Was it Santo Kerne out there on the cliffs?”

“I’m afraid I don’t know who it was. But it was a young man. An adolescent or just older than that. That’s all I can tell you.”

A murmur rose and fell at this. Lynley heard the name Santo repeated several times. He glanced over his shoulder. Dozens of eyes—young and old and in between—were fixed on him.

He said to Brian, “The boy—Santo—he was well known?”

“He lives hereabouts,” was the unhelpful reply. That was the limit of what Brian appeared to be willing to reveal to a stranger. He said, “Are you after a drink, then?”

When Lynley asked for a room instead, he recognised in Brian a marked reluctance to accommodate him. He put this down to what it likely was: a logical unwillingness to allow an unsavoury stranger such as himself access to the inn’s sheets and pillows. God only knew what vermin might be crawling upon him. But the novelty he represented at the Salthouse Inn was in his favour. His appearance was in direct conflict with his accent and his manner of speaking, and if that were not enough to make him an object of fascination, there was the intriguing matter of his finding the body, which had likely been the subject of conversation inside the inn before he entered.

“A small room only,” was the publican’s reply. “But that’s the case with all of ’em. Small. Wasn’t like people needed much when the place was built, did they.”

Lynley said that the size didn’t matter and he’d be happy with whatever the inn could give him. He didn’t know how long he’d actually need the room, he added. It seemed that the police were going to require his presence until matters about the young man in the cove had been decided.

A murmur rose at this. It was the word decided and everything that the word implied.

Brian used the toe of his shoe to ease open a door at the far end of the bar, and he spoke a few words into whatever room existed behind it. From this a middle-aged woman emerged, the inn’s cook by her garb of stained white apron, which she was hastily removing. Beneath it she wore a black skirt and white blouse. Sensible shoes as well.

She would take him up to a room, she said. She was all business, as if there was nothing strange about him. This room, she went on, was above the restaurant, not the bar. He’d find it quiet there. It was a good place to sleep.

She didn’t wait for his reply. His thoughts likely didn’t interest her anyway. His presence meant custom, which was hard to come by until late spring and summer. When beggars went begging, they couldn’t exactly choose their benefactors, could they?

She headed for another door at the far side of the public bar. This gave onto an icy stone passage. The inn’s restaurant operated in a room off this passage, although no one was seated within it, while at the far end a stairway the approximate width of a suitcase made the climb to the floor above. It was difficult to imagine how furniture had been worked up the stairs.

There were three rooms only on the first floor, and Lynley had his choice, although his guide—her name was Siobhan Rourke, she’d told him, and she was Brian’s longtime and apparently long-suffering partner—recommended the smallest of them as it was the one she’d mentioned earlier as being above the restaurant and quiet at this time of year. They all shared the same bathroom, she informed him, but that ought to be of no account as no one else was staying.

Lynley wasn’t particular about which room he was given so he took the first one whose door Siobhan opened. This would do, he told her. It suited him. Not much larger than a cell, it was furnished with a single bed, a wardrobe, and a dressing table tucked under a tiny casement window with leaded panes. Its only bow to mod cons were a washbowl in a corner and a telephone on the dressing table. This last was a jarring note in a room that could have done for a serving maid two hundred years earlier.

Only in the centre of the room could Lynley actually stand upright. Seeing this, Siobhan said, “They were shorter in those days, weren’t they? P’rhaps this isn’t the best choice, Mr….?”

“Lynley,” he said. “This is fine. Does that phone work?”

Indeed, it did. Could she bring him anything? There were towels in the wardrobe and soap as well as shampoo in the bathroom—she sounded encouraging as she said this last bit—and if he wanted a meal, that could be arranged. Up here. Or in the dining room below, naturally, if that was what he wanted. She added this last as a hasty afterthought although it was fairly clear that the more he kept to his room, the happier everyone would be.

He said he wasn’t hungry, which was more or less the truth. She left him then. When the door closed behind her, he gazed at the bed. It was nearly two months since he’d slept in one, and even then he’d not done much sleeping anyway. When he slept, he dreamed, and he dreaded his dreams. Not because they were disturbing but because they ended. It was, he’d found, more bearable not to sleep at all.

Because there was no point in putting it off, he went to the phone and punched in the numbers. He was hoping that there would be no answer, just a machine picking up so that he could leave a brief message without the human contact. But after five double rings, he heard her voice. There was nothing for it but to speak.

He said, “Mother. Hullo.”

At first she said nothing and he knew what she was doing: standing next to the phone in the drawing room or perhaps her morning room or elsewhere in the grand sprawling house that was his birthright and even more his curse, raising one hand to her lips, looking towards whoever else was in the room and that would likely be his younger brother or perhaps the manager of the estate or even his sister in the unlikely event that she was still down from Yorkshire. And her eyes—his mother’s eyes—would communicate the information before she said his name. It’s Tommy. He’s phoned. Thank God. He’s all right.

She said, “Darling. Where are you? How are you?”

He said, “I’ve run into something…It’s a situation up in Casvelyn.”

“My God, Tommy. Have you walked that far? Do you know how—” But she didn’t say the rest. She meant to ask whether he knew how worried they were. But she loved him and she wouldn’t burden him further.

As he loved her, he answered her anyway. “I know. I do. Please understand that. It’s just that I can’t seem to find my way.”

She knew, of course, that he wasn’t referring to his sense of direction. “My dear, if I could do anything to remove this from your shoulders…”

He could hardly bear the warmth of her voice, her unending compassion, especially when she herself had borne so many of her own tragedies throughout the years. He said to her, “Yes. Well,” and he cleared his throat roughly.

“People have phoned,” she told him. “I’ve kept a list. And they’ve not stopped phoning, the way you think people might. You know what I mean: One phone call and there, I’ve done my duty. It hasn’t been like that. There has been such concern for you. You are so deeply loved, my dear.”

He didn’t want to hear it, and he had to make her understand that. It wasn’t that he didn’t value the concern of his friends and associates. It was that their concern—and what was worse, their expression of it—rubbed a place in him already so raw that having it touched by anything was akin to torture. He’d left his home because of this, because on the coast path there was no one in March and few enough people in April and even if he ran across someone in his walk, that person would know nothing of him, of what he was doing trudging steadily forward day after day, or of what had led up to his decision to do so.

He said, “Mother…”

She heard it in his voice, as she would do. She said, “Dearest, I’m sorry. No more of it.” Her voice altered, becoming more businesslike, for which he was grateful. “What’s happened? You’re all right, aren’t you? You’ve not been injured?”

No, he told her. He wasn’t injured. But he’d come upon someone who had been. He was the first to come upon him, it seemed. A boy. He’d been killed in a fall from one of the cliffs. Now the police were involved. As he’d left at home everything that would identify him…Could she send him his wallet? “It’s form, I daresay. They’re just in the process of sorting everything out. It looks like an accident but, obviously, until they know, they won’t want me going off. And they do want me to prove I am who I say I am.”

“Do they know you’re a policeman, Tommy?”

“One of them, apparently. Otherwise, I’ve told them only my name.”

“Nothing else?”

“No.” It would have turned things into a Victorian melodrama: My good man—or in this case woman—do you know who you’re talking to? He’d go for the police rank first and if that didn’t impress, he’d try the title next. That should produce some serious forelock pulling, if nothing else. Only, DI Hannaford didn’t appear to be the sort who pulled on forelocks, at least not her own. He said, “So they’re not willing to take me at my word and who can blame them. I wouldn’t take me at my word. Will you send the wallet?”

“Of course. At once. Shall I have Peter drive it up to you in the morning?”

He didn’t think he could bear his brother’s anxious concern. He said, “Don’t trouble him with that. Just put it in the post.”

He told her where he was and she asked—as she would—if the inn was pleasant, at least, if his room was comfortable, if the bed would suit him. He told her everything was fine. He said that he was, in fact, looking forward to bathing.

His mother was reassured by that, if not entirely satisfied. While the desire for a bath did not necessarily indicate a desire to continue living, it at least declared a willingness to muddle forward for a while. That would do. She rang off after telling him to have a good, long, luxurious soak and hearing him say that a good, long, luxurious soak was exactly his intention.