Careless in Red Read online

  “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?

  “What?”

  She cast about and came up with it, and what she said was the truth despite its being incomplete. “The body…Santo…Max, Santo was found by a man doing the coastal walk.”

  “We know that actually.”

  “All right. Yes. I suppose you do. But he’s also a detective from New Scotland Yard. Do you know that as well?”

  “Is he indeed?” Max sounded interested.

  “So he says. I want to find out if that’s true.”

  “Why?”

  “Why? Well, goodness, think of it. What better claim to make about yourself if you don’t want people looking at you too closely?”

  “Thinking of going into police work yourself? Thinking of coming to work for me? Because otherwise, Daidre, I don’t see what this has to do with you.”

  “I found the man inside my cottage. I’d like to know if he is who he says he is.” She explained how she’d come to be acquainted with Thomas Lynley. She made no mention, however, of how the man seemed: like someone carrying across his shoulders a yoke studded with protruding nails.

  Her explanation apparently seemed reasonable to the newsman. He tilted his head towards his computer terminal. “Have at it, then. Print up what you find, because we may well use it. I’ve work to do. Lily’ll keep you company.” He started to leave the room but paused at the door, one hand on the jamb. “You haven’t seen me,” he said.

  She’d moved to the terminal. She looked up, frowning. “What?”

  “You haven’t seen me, should anyone ask. Are we clear on that?”

  “You do know what that sounds like, don’t you?”

  “Frankly, I don’t care what it sounds like.”

  He left her, then, and she mulled over what he’d said. Only animals, she concluded, were safe for one’s devotion.

  She logged onto the Internet and then a search engine. She typed in Thomas Lynley’s name.

  DAIDRE FOUND HIM WAITING at the bottom of Belle Vue Lane. He looked completely different from the bearded stranger she’d driven into town, but she had no trouble recognising him since she’d spent over an hour gazing on a dozen or more news photos of him, generated by the investigation of a serial killing in London and by the tragedy that had supervened in his life. She now knew why she had seen him as an injured man carrying a tremendous burden. She merely didn’t know what to do with her knowledge. Nor with the rest of it: who he actually was, what comprised his background, the title, the money, the trappings of a world so far different from her own that they might have come from different planets and not merely from different circumstances in different parts of the very same county.

  He’d had his hair cut, and he’d had a shave. He wore a rain jacket over a collarless shirt and pullover. He’d bought sturdy shoes and corduroy trousers. He carried a waxed rain hat in his hand. Not, she thought grimly, exactly the getup one expected to see on a belted earl. But that’s what he was. Lord Whoever with a murdered wife, done in on the street by a twelve-year-old boy. She’d been pregnant as well. It was little wonder to Daidre that Lynley was among the injured. The real miracle was that the man was actually capable of functioning at all.

  When she pulled to the kerb, he got into the car. He’d bought a few items from the pharmacy as well, he told her, indicating a bag he brought forth from the capacious inner pocket of his jacket. Razor, toothbrush, toothpaste, shaving cream—

  “You’ve no need to account to me,” she told him. “I’m only glad you had enough funds.”

  He gestured to his clothes. “On sale. End of the season. A real bargain. I’ve even managed”—he reached into the pocket of his trousers and brought forth a few notes and a handful of coins—“to bring you change,” he said. “I never thought I’d…” He drifted off.

  “What?” She stuffed the notes and coins into the unused ashtray. “Shop for yourself?”

  He looked at her, clearly assessing her words. “No,” he said. “I never thought I’d enjoy it.”

  “Ah. Well. It’s retail therapy. Absolutely guaranteed to lift one’s spirits. Women know this at birth, somehow. Men have to learn it.”

  He was quiet for a moment, and she caught him doing it another time, looking out of the car, through the windscreen, at the street. In a different place and a different time. She heard her words again and bit the inside of her lip. She hastened to add, “Shall we top off your experience with a coffee somewhere?”

  He considered this. He answered slowly. “Yes. I think I’d like a coffee.”

  DETECTIVE INSPECTOR HANNAFORD WAS waiting for them at the Salthouse Inn when they returned. Lynley decided that the inspector had been watching for Daidre’s car, for as soon as they pulled into the inn’s lumpy car park, she came out of the building. It had begun to rain again, March’s ceaseless bad weather having segued into April and now May, and she pulled up the hood of her rain jacket and marched across to them, moving briskly.

  She knocked on Daidre’s window and, when it was lowered, said, “I’d like a word. Both of you, please.” And then directly to Lynley, “You’re looking more human today. It’s an improvement.” She turned and headed back into the inn.

  Lynley and Daidre followed. They found Hannaford in the public bar where she’d been—as Lynley suspected—occupying a window seat. She shed her rain jacket onto a bench and nodded for them to do the same. She led them to one of the larger tables on which a magazine-size A to Z was opened.

  She spoke expansively to Lynley, which made him immediately suspicious about her motives. When cops were friendly, as he well knew, they were friendly for a reason and it wasn’t necessarily a good one. Where, she asked him, had he begun his coastal walk on the previous day? Would he show her on the map? See, the path’s well marked with a green dotted line, and if he’d be so kind as to point out the spot…It was all a matter of tying up the loose ends of his story, she said. He would know the dance, of course.

  Lynl
ey brought out his reading spectacles and leaned over the road atlas. The truth of the matter was that he hadn’t the slightest idea where he’d begun his walk on the South-West Coast Path on the previous day. If there had been a landmark, he hadn’t taken note of it. He remembered the names of several villages and hamlets he’d come upon along the coast, but as to when on his walk he’d passed through them, he couldn’t say. He also didn’t see that it mattered, although DI Hannaford cleared the air on that concern in a moment. He took a stab at placing himself some twelve miles southwest of Polcare Cove. He had no idea if this was accurate.

  Hannaford said, “Right,” although she made no note about the location. She went on pleasantly with, “And what about you, Dr. Trahair?”

  The vet stirred next to Lynley. “I did tell you I came down from Bristol.”

  “You did indeed. Mind showing me the route? C’n I assume you follow the same route each time, by the way? Straightforward matter and all that?”

  “Not necessarily.”

  Lynley noted how Daidre drew out the final word, and he knew that Hannaford would not miss it either. Drawing a reply out like that generally meant certain mental hoops were being jumped through. What those hoops were and why they existed at all…Hannaford would be fishing for the reason.

  Lynley took a moment to evaluate the two women. From head to toe, they couldn’t have been more dissimilar: Hannaford’s flaming mop done up in wild spikes, Daidre’s sandy hair drawn back from her face and held at the crown of her head with a tortoiseshell slide; Hannaford dressed to mean business in a suit and court shoes, Daidre wearing jeans, pullover, and boots. Daidre was lithe, like a woman who took regular exercise and watched what she ate. Hannaford looked like someone whose busy life precluded both regular meals and regular workouts. There were also several decades between them. The detective could have been Daidre’s mother.

  She wasn’t acting motherly now. She was waiting for an answer to her question as Daidre looked at the atlas to explain the route she’d followed from Bristol to Polcare Cove. Lynley knew why the cop was asking. He wondered if Daidre was working that out as well before she replied.

  The M5 down to Exeter, she said. Over to Okehampton and northwest from there. There was no completely easy way to get to Polcare Cove, she pointed out. Sometimes she did the Exeter route, but other times she worked her way over from Tiverton.

  Hannaford made much of studying the map before she said, “And from Okehampton?”

  “What d’you mean?” Daidre asked.

  “One can’t leap from Okehampton to Polcare Cove, Dr. Trahair. You didn’t come by helicopter from there, did you? What was the route you took? The exact route, please.”

  Lynley saw a flush rise up the vet’s neck. She was lucky that her skin was lightly freckled. Had it not been, she would have coloured to puce.

  She said, “Are you asking me this because you think I had something to do with that boy’s death?”

  “Did you?”

  “I did not.”

  “Then you won’t mind showing me your route, will you.”

  Daidre pressed her lips together. She pushed an errant lock of hair behind her left ear. Her lobe, Lynley saw, was pierced three times. She wore a hoop, a stud, but nothing else.

  She traced the route: A3079, A3072, A39, and then a series of smaller roads until she reached Polcare Cove, which earned barely a speck in the A to Z. As she pointed out the journey she’d made, Hannaford took notes. She nodded thoughtfully and thanked the other woman when Daidre had completed her answer.

  Daidre didn’t look pleased to have the detective’s thanks. She looked, if anything, angry and trying to master her anger. This told Lynley that Daidre knew what the detective was up to. What it didn’t tell him was where her anger was being directed, though: at DI Hannaford or herself.

  “Are we released now?” Daidre asked.

  “You are, Dr. Trahair,” Hannaford said. “But Mr. Lynley and I have further business.”

  “You can’t think he—” She stopped. The flush was there again. She looked at Lynley and then away.

  “He what?” Hannaford asked politely.

  “He’s a stranger round here. How would he have known that boy?”

  “Are you saying you yourself knew him, Dr. Trahair? Did you know that boy? He might have been a stranger here as well. Our Mr. Lynley—for all we know—may have come along precisely to toss Santo Kerne—that’s his name, by the way—right down the face of that cliff.”

  “That’s ridiculous. He’s said he’s a policeman.”

  “He’s said. But I’ve no actual proof of that. Have you?”

  “I…Never mind.” She’d placed her shoulder bag on a chair, and she scooped it up. “I’m leaving now, as you said you were finished with me, Inspector.”

  “As indeed I am,” Bea Hannaford said pleasantly. “For now.”

  THEY EXCHANGED ONLY A brief few remarks in the car afterwards. Lynley asked Hannaford where she was taking him, and she replied that she was taking him with her to Truro, to Royal Cornwall Hospital, to be exact. He then said, “You’re going to check all the pubs on the route, aren’t you?” To which she archly replied, “All the pubs on the route to Truro? Not very likely, my good man.”

  He said, “I’m not talking about the route to Truro, Inspector.”

  She said, “I knew that. And do you really expect me to answer that question? You found the body. You know the game if you’re who you say you are.” She glanced his way. She’d put on sunglasses although there was no sun and, indeed, it was still raining. He wondered about this and she answered his wonder. “Corrective,” she told him. “For my driving. My others are at home. Or possibly in my son’s rucksack at school. Or one of the dogs could have eaten them, for all I know.”

  “You have dogs?”

  “Three black Labs. Dogs One, Two, and Three.”

  “Interesting names.”

  “I like to keep things simple at home. To balance all the ways things are never simple at work.”

  That was the extent of what they said. The rest of the drive they made in silence broken by radio chatter and two calls Hannaford took on her mobile phone. One of them apparently asked for her approximate time of arrival in Truro, barring traffic problems, and the other was a brief message from someone to whom she responded with a terse, “I told them to get it to me. What the hell’s it doing with you in bloody Exeter?…And how’m I supposed to…That is not necessary and yes you’re right before you say it: I don’t want to owe you…Oh, grand. Do what you like, Ray.”

  At the hospital in Truro, Hannaford guided Lynley to the mortuary, where the air smelled headily of disinfectant and an assistant was hosing off the trolley on which a body had been cut open for inspection. Nearby, the forensic pathologist—thin as an ageing spinster’s marital hopes—was downing a large tomato juice over a stainless sink. The man, Lynley thought, had to have a stomach of iron and the sensitivity of a stone.

  “This is Gordie Lisle,” Hannaford said to Lynley. “Fastest Y incision on the planet and you don’t want to know how quick he can shear ribs.”

  “You do me too much honour,” Lisle said.

  “I know. This is Thomas Lynley,” she told him. “What’ve we got?”

  Finishing his juice, Lisle went to a desk and scooped up a document to which he referred as he began his report. This he prefaced with the information that the injuries were consistent with a fall. He went about relating them. Pelvis broken, he said, and right medial malleolus shattered. He added, “That’s ankle to the layman.”

  Hannaford nodded sagely.

  Right tibia and right fibula fractured, Lisle continued. Compound fractures of the ulna and radius, also on the right, six ribs broken, left greater tubercle crushed, both lungs pierced, spleen ruptured.

  “What the hell is a tubercle?” Hannaford asked.

  “Shoulder,” he explained.

  “Nasty business, but is all that enough to kill him? What sent him to the other side,
then? Shock?”

  “I was saving the best for last. Enormous fracture of the temporal bone. His skull broke like an eggshell. See here.” Lisle set his document on a work top and strolled over to a wall on which the human skeletal system was displayed on a large chart. “When he fell, I reckon he hit an outcrop on the way down the cliff. He flipped at least once, picked up speed with the rest of the descent, landed heavy on the right side and crushed his skull on the slate. When the bone fractured, it sliced into the middle meningeal artery. That produced an acute epidural haematoma. Pressure on the brain and no place for it to go that’s not lethal. He’d have died in about fifteen minutes although he would have been unconscious throughout. I take it there was no helmet nearby? No other headgear?”

  “Kids,” Hannaford said. “They think they’re invincible.”

  “This one wasn’t. Anyway, the extent of the injuries suggests he fell the moment he began the abseil.”

  “Which itself suggests the sling broke the instant it took his full weight.”

  “I’d agree with that.”

  “What about the black eye? It was healing, yes? What’s it consistent with?”

  “A bloody good punch. Someone gave him a decent one that likely floored him. You can still see the impression of the knuckles.”

  Hannaford nodded. She gave a glance at Lynley, who’d been listening and simultaneously wondering why Hannaford was making him part of this. It was more than irregular. It was foolhardy of her, considering his position in the case, and she didn’t seem like a foolhardy woman. She had a plan of some sort. He would have laid a wager on that.

  “When?” Hannaford asked.

  “The punch?” Lisle said. “I’d say a week ago.”

  “Does it look like he was in a fight?”

  Lisle shook his head.

  “Why not?”

  “No other marks on him of a similar age,” Lynley put in. “Someone got one good blow in and that was that.”

  Hannaford looked at him, quite as if she’d forgotten she’d brought him. Lisle said, “I’d agree. Someone snapped or someone was giving him discipline of some sort. It either resolved things, knocked him flat, or he wasn’t the type to be provoked, even by a punch in the face.”