SHE EXCELLED AT DARTS. LYNLEY HAD LEARNED THAT QUICKLY enough on the previous evening, and he’d added the information to what little he knew about Daidre Trahair. She had a dartboard mounted on the back of the sitting room door, something he’d not noticed before because she kept the door open instead of closing it against the cold wind, which could sweep into the building from the tiny vestibule when someone entered the cottage.
He should have known he was in trouble when she used a tape measure to create a distance of exactly seven feet, nine and one-quarter inches from the back of the closed door. Here she placed the fireplace poker on a parallel, calling it their oche. When he said, “Okkey?” and she’d said, “The oche marks where the player has to stand, Thomas,” he’d had his first real clue that he was probably in over his head. But he’d thought, How difficult can it possibly be? and he’d gone like a lamb to the metaphorical slaughter, agreeing to a match called 501 about which he knew nothing at all.
He said, “Are there rules?”
She’d looked at him askance. “Of course there are rules. It’s a game, Thomas.” And she’d gone about explaining them to him. She began with the dartboard itself, losing him almost immediately when she referred to treble and double rings and what it meant to one’s score to land in one of them. He’d never thought of himself as an idiot-it had always seemed to him that knowing how to identify a bull’s-eye was the limit of what one needed to embrace when it came to darts-but within moments, he was entirely lost.
It was simple, she told him. “We each start with a score of 501, and the object is to reduce that to nought. We each throw three darts. A bull’s-eye scores fifty, the outer ring twenty-five and anything in the double or treble ring is double or treble the segment score. Yes?”
He nodded. He was almost altogether uncertain what she was talking about, but confidence, he reckoned, was the key to success.
“Good. Now, the caveat is that the last dart thrown has to land in a double or in the bull’s-eye. And additionally, if you reduce your score to one or it actually goes below nought, your turn ends immediately and the play is turned over to the other thrower. Follow?”
He nodded. He was even more uncertain at that point, but he decided it couldn’t be that difficult to hit a dartboard from less than eight feet away. Besides, it was only a game and his ego was strong enough to emerge undamaged should she win the match. For another could follow. Two out of three. Three out of five. It didn’t matter. It was all in an evening’s diversion, yes?
She won every match. They could have gone on all night and she probably would have continued to win. The vixen-for so he was thinking of her by then-turned out to be not only a tournament player but the sort of woman who did not believe a man’s ego had to be preserved by allowing him moments of specious supremacy over her.
She had the grace to be at least moderately embarrassed. She said, “Oh my. Oh dear. Well, it’s just that I never actually just let someone win. It’s never seemed right.”
“You’re…quite amazing,” he said. “My head is spinning.”
“It’s that I play a lot. I didn’t tell you that, did I, so I’ll pay the penalty for unspoken truths. I’ll help you with the washing up.”
She was as good as her word, and they saw to the kitchen in companionable fashion, with him doing the washing and her doing the drying. She made him clean the cooktop-“It’s only fair,” she told him-but she herself swept the floor and scoured the sink. He found himself enjoying her company and, as a result, felt ill at ease when it came to his appointed task.
He did it nonetheless. He was a cop when everything got reduced to essentials, and someone was dead through murder. She’d lied to an investigating officer and no matter his personal enjoyment of the evening, he had a job to do for DI Hannaford and he intended to do it.
He set about it the following morning, and he was able to get a fair distance right there from his room in the Salthouse Inn. He discovered through a few simple phone calls that someone called Daidre Trahair was indeed one of the veterinarians at Bristol Zoo Gardens. When he asked about speaking to Dr. Trahair, he was told that she was on emergency leave, dealing with a family matter in Cornwall.
This bit of news didn’t give him pause. People often claimed that family matters needed to be taken care of when what those family matters were was simply a need to get away for a few days of decompression from a stressful job. He decided that couldn’t be held against her.
Her claims about her adopted Chinese brother held up as well. Lok Trahair was indeed a student at Oxford University. Daidre herself had a first in biological science from the University of Glasgow, having gone on from there to the Royal Veterinary College for her advanced degree. Well and good, Lynley had thought. She might have had secrets that she wished to keep from DI Hannaford, but they weren’t secrets about her identity or that of her brother.
He delved back further into her schooling, but this was where he hit the first snag. Daidre Trahair had been a pupil in a secondary comprehensive in Falmouth, but before that there was no record of her. No school in Falmouth would claim her. State or public, day school, boarding school, convent school…There was nothing. She either had not lived in Falmouth for those years of her education, or she’d been sent far away for some reason, or she’d been schooled at home.
Yet surely she would have mentioned being schooled at home since, by her own admission, she’d been born at home. It was a logical follow-up, wasn’t it?
He wasn’t sure. He also wasn’t sure what more he could do. He was pondering his options when a knock at his bedroom door roused him from his thoughts. Siobhan Rourke presented him with a small package. It had just arrived in the post, she told him.
He thanked her, and when he was alone again, automatically opened it to find his wallet. This he opened as well. It was a knee-jerk reaction but it was more than that. He was-unprepared for the fact of it all-suddenly restored to who he was. Driving licence folded into a square, bank card, credit cards, picture of Helen.
He took this last in his fingers. It was of Helen at Christmas, less than two months away from dying. They’d had a hurried holiday, with no time to visit her family or his because he’d been in the midst of a case. “Not to worry, there’ll be other Christmases, darling,” she’d said.
Helen, he thought.
He had to force himself back to the present. He carefully placed the photo of his wife-cheek in her hand, smiling at him across the breakfast table, hair still uncombed, face without makeup, the way he loved her-back into its position in his wallet. He put the wallet onto the bedside table, next to the phone. He sat in silence, only hearing his own breathing. He thought of her name. He thought of her face. He thought of nothing.
After a moment, he continued his work. He considered his options. Further investigation into Daidre Trahair was needed, but he didn’t want to be the one who did it, loyalty to a fellow cop or not. For he wasn’t a cop, not here and not now. But there were others.
Before he could stop himself, because it would be so easy to do so, he picked up the phone and punched in a number more familiar to him than was his own. And a voice as familiar as a family member’s answered on the other end of the line. Dorothea Harriman, departmental secretary at New Scotland Yard.
At first he wasn’t sure he could speak, but he finally managed to say, “Dee.”
She knew at once. In a hushed voice she said, “Detective Super-intendent…Detective Inspector…Sir?”
“Just Thomas,” he said. “Just Thomas, Dee.”
“Oh goodness no, sir,” was her reply. Dee Harriman, who had never called anyone by anything less than his or her full title. “How are you, Detective Superintendent Lynley?”
“I’m fine, Dee. Is Barbara available?”
“Detective Sergeant Havers?” she asked. Stupid question, which wasn’t like Dee. Lynley wondered why she had asked it. “No. No, she isn’t, Detective Superintendent. She isn’t here. But Detective Sergeant Nkata is around. And Detective Inspector Stewart. And Detective Inspec-”
Lynley spared her the endless recitation. “I’ll try Barbara on her mobile,” he said. “And, Dee…?”
“Detective Superintendent?”
“Don’t tell anyone I’ve phoned. All right?”
“But are you-”
“Please.”
“Yes. Yes. Of course. But we hope…not just me…I speak for everyone, I know I do, when I say…”
“Thank you,” he said.
He rang off. He thought about making the call to Barbara Havers, longtime partner and fractious friend. He knew that she would offer her help gladly, but it would be too gladly and if she was in the middle of a case, she’d offer her help to him anyway and then suffer the result of that offering without mentioning it to him.
He didn’t know if he could do it for other reasons that he’d felt the moment he’d heard Dorothea Harriman’s voice. It was obviously far too soon, perhaps a wound too deep to heal.
Yet a boy was dead, and Lynley was who he was. He picked up the phone again.
“Yeah?” The answer was vintage Havers. She shouted it as well, for she was obviously rattling along somewhere in her death trap of a car if the background noise was anything to go by.
He drew a breath, still unsure.
She said, “Hey. Someone there? I can’t hear you. C’n you hear me?”
He said, “Yes. I can hear you, Barbara. The game’s afoot. Can you help me out?”
There was a long pause. He could hear noise from her radio, the distant sound of traffic passing. Wisely, it seemed, she’d pulled to the side of the road to talk. But still she said nothing.
“Barbara?” he said.
“Tell me, sir,” was her reply.
LIQUIDEARTH STOOD ON BINNER Down, among a collection of other small-manufacturing businesses on the grounds of a long-decommissioned royal air station. This was a relic of World War II, reduced all these decades later to a combination of crumbling buildings, rutted lanes, and masses of brambles. Between the abandoned buildings and along the lanes, the area resembled nothing so much as a rubbish tip. Disused lobster traps and fishing nets formed piles next to lumps of broken concrete; discarded tyres and moulding furniture languished against propane tanks; stained toilets and chipped basins became contrasting elements that fought with wild ivy. There were mattresses, black garbage sacks stuffed with who-knew-what, three-legged chairs, splintered doors, ruined casings from windows. It was a perfect spot to toss a body, Bea Hannaford concluded. No one would find it for a generation.
Even from inside the car, she could smell the place. The damp air offered fires and cow manure from a working dairy farm at the edge of the down. Added to the general unpleasantness of the environment, pooled rainwater that was skimmed by oil slicks sat in craters along the tarmac.
She’d brought Constable McNulty with her, both as navigator and note taker. Based on his comments in Santo Kerne’s bedroom on the previous day, she decided he might prove useful with matters related to surfing, and as a longtime resident of Casvelyn, at least he knew the town.
They’d come at LiquidEarth on a circuitous route that had taken them by the town wharf, which formed the northeast edge of the disused Casvelyn Canal. They gained Binner Down from a street called Arundel, off which a lumpy track led past a grime-streaked farmhouse. Behind this, the decommissioned air station lay, and far beyond it in the distance a tumbledown house stood, a mess of a place taken over by a succession of surfers and brought to wrack as a result of their habitation. McNulty seemed philosophical about this. What else could one expect? he seemed to say.
Bea saw soon enough that she was lucky to have him with her, for the businesses on the erstwhile airfield had no addresses affixed to them. They were nearly windowless cinder-block buildings with roofs of galvanised metal overhung with ivy. Cracked concrete ramps led up to heavy steel vehicle doors at the front of each, and the occasional passageway door had been cut into these.
McNulty directed Bea along a track on the far north edge of the airfield. After a spine-damaging jounce for some three hundred yards, he mercifully said, “Here you go, Guv,” and indicated one hut of three that he claimed had once been housing for Wrens. She found that difficult enough to believe, but times had been tough. Compared to eking out an existence on a bomb site in London or Coventry, this had probably seemed like paradise.
When they alighted and did a little chiropractic manoeuvring of their spinal cords, McNulty pointed out how much closer they were at this point to the habitation of the surfers. He called it Binner Down House, and it stood in the distance directly across the down from them. Convenient for the surfers when you thought about it, he noted. If their boards needed repairing, they could just nip across the down and leave them here with Lew Angarrack.
They entered LiquidEarth by means of a door fortified with no less than four locks. Immediately, they were within a small showroom where in racks along two walls long boards and short boards leaned nose up and finless. On a third wall surfing posters hung, featuring waves the size of ocean liners, while along the fourth wall stood a business counter. Within and behind this a display of surfing accouterments were laid out: board bags, leashes, fins. There were no wet suits. Nor were there any T-shirts designed by Santo Kerne.
The place had an eye-stinging smell about it. This turned out to be coming from a dusty room beyond the showroom where a boiler-suited man with a long grey ponytail and large-framed spectacles was carefully pouring a substance from a plastic pail onto the top of a surfboard. This lay across two sawhorses.
The gent was slow about what he was doing, perhaps because of the nature of the work, perhaps because of the nature of his disability, his habits, or his age. He was a shaker, Bea saw. Parkinson’s, the drink, whatever.
She said, “Excuse me. Mr. Angarrack?” just as the sound of an electrical tool powered up from behind a closed door to the side.
“Not him,” McNulty said sotto voce behind her. “That’ll be Lew shaping a board in the other room.”
By this, Bea took it to mean that Angarrack was operating whatever tool was making the noise. As she reached her conclusion, the older gentleman turned. He had an antique face, and his specs were held together with wire.
He said, “Sorry. Can’t stop just now,” with a nod at what he was doing. “Come in, though. You the cops?”
That was obvious enough, as McNulty was in uniform. But Bea stepped forward, leaving tracks along a floor powdered with polystyrene dust, and offered her identification. He gave it a cursory glance and a nod and said he was Jago Reeth. The glasser, he added. He was putting the final coat of resin on a board, and he had to smooth it before it began to set or he’d have a sanding problem on his hands. But he’d be free to talk to them when he was finished if they wanted him. If they wanted Lew, he was doing the initial shaping of the rails on a board and he wouldn’t want to be disturbed, as he liked to do it in one go.
“We’ll be sure to make our apologies,” Bea told Jago Reeth. “Can you fetch him for us. Or shall we…?” She indicated the door behind which the shrieking of a tool told the tale of some serious rail shaping.
“Hang on, then,” Jago said. “Let me get this on. Won’t take five minutes and it’s got to be done all at once.”
They watched as he finished with the plastic pail. The resin formed a shallow pool defined by the curve of the surfboard, and he used a paintbrush to spread it evenly. Once again Bea noted the degree to which his hand shook as he wielded the paintbrush. He seemed to read her mind in her glance.
He said, “Not too many good years left. Should have taken on the big waves when I had the chance.”
“You surf yourself?” Bea asked Jago Reeth.
“Not these days. Not if I want to see tomorrow.” He peered up at her from his position bent over the board. His eyes behind his spectacles-the glass of which was flecked with white residue-were clear and sharp despite his age. “You’re here about Santo Kerne, I expect. Was a murder, eh?”
“You know that, do you?” Bea asked Jago Reeth.
“Didn’t know,” he said. “Just reckoned.”
“Why?”
“You’re here. Why else if not a murder? Or are you lot going round offering condolences to everyone who knew the lad?”
“You’re among those?”
“Am,” he said. “Not long, but I knew him. Six months or so, since I worked for Lew.”
“So you’re not an old-timer here in town?”
He made a long sweep with his paintbrush, the length of the board. “Me? No. I come up from Australia this time round. Been following the season long as I can tell you.”
“Summer or surfing?”
“Same thing in some places. Others, it’s winter. They always need blokes who can do boards. I’m their man.”
“Isn’t it a bit early for the season here?”
“Not hardly, eh? Just a few more weeks. And now’s when I’m needed most cos before the season starts is when the orders come in. Then in the season boards get dinged and repairs are needed. Newquay, North Shore, Queensland, California. I’m there to do them. Use to work first and surf later. Sometimes the reverse.”
“But not now.”
“Hell no. It’d kill me for sure. His dad thought it’d kill Santo, you know. Idjit, he was. Safer than crossing the street. And it gets a lad out in the air and sunlight.”
“So does sea cliff climbing,” Bea pointed out.
Jago eyed her. “And look what happened there.”
“D’you know the Kernes, then?”
“Santo. Like I said. And the rest of them from what Santo said. And that would be the limit of what I know.” He set his paintbrush in the pail, which he’d put on the floor beneath the board, and he scrutinised his work, squatting at the end of the board to study it from tail to nose. Then he rose and went to the door behind which the rails of a board were being shaped. He closed it behind him. In a moment, the tool was shut off.
Constable McNulty, Bea saw, was looking about, a line forming between his eyebrows, as if he was considering what he was observing. She knew nothing about the making of surfboards, so she said, “What?” and he roused himself from his thoughts.
“Something,” he said. “Don’t quite know yet.”
“About the place? About Reeth? About Santo? His family? What?”
“Not sure.”
She blew out a breath. The man would probably need a bloody Ouija board.
Lew Angarrak joined them. He was outfitted like Jago Reeth, in a white boiler suit fashioned from heavy paper, the perfect accompaniment to the rest of him, which was also white. His thick hair could have been any colour-probably salt and pepper, considering his age, which appeared to be somewhere past forty-five-but now it looked like a barrister’s wig, so thoroughly covered as it was by polystyrene dust. This same dust formed a fine patina on his forehead and cheeks. Round his mouth and eyes there was none, its absence explained by the air filter that dangled round his neck along with a pair of protective glasses.
Behind him, Bea could see the board he was working on. Like the board being finished by the glasser, it lay on two tall sawhorses: shaped from its earlier form of a blank oblong of polystyrene that was marked in halves by a wooden stringer. More of these blanks lined a wall to one side of the shaping room. The other side, Bea saw, bore a rack of tools: planers, sanders, and Surforms, by the look of them.
Angarrack wasn’t a big man, not much taller than Bea herself. But he appeared quite powerful in the upper body, and Bea reckoned he had a great deal of strength. Jago Reeth had apparently put him in the picture about the facts of Santo’s death, but he didn’t seem wary about seeing the police. Nor did he seem surprised. Or shocked or sorrowful, for that matter.
Bea introduced herself and Constable McNulty. Could they speak with Mr. Angarrack?
“That bit’s a formality, isn’t it?” he replied shortly. “You’re here, and I assume that means we’re going to be speaking.”
“Perhaps you can show us round as we do so,” Bea said. “I know nothing of making surfboards.”
“Called shaping,” Jago Reeth told her. He stood nearby.
“Little enough to see,” Angarrack said. “Shaping, spraying, glassing, finishing. There’s a room for each.” He used his thumb to indicate them as he spoke. The door to the spraying room was open but unlit, and he flipped a switch on the wall. Bright colours leapt out at them, sprayed onto the walls, the floors, and the ceiling. Another sawhorse stood in the middle of the room, but no board waited upon it, although five stood against the wall, shaped and ready for someone’s artistry.
“You decorate them as well?” Bea asked.
“Not me. An old-timer did the designs for a time till he moved on. Then Santo did them, as a way of paying for a board he wanted. I’m looking for someone else now.”
“Because of Santo’s death?”
“No. I’d already sacked him.”
“Why?”
“I’d guess you’d say loyalty.”
“To?”
“My daughter.”
“Santo’s girlfriend.”
“For a time, but that time was past.” He moved by them and out into the showroom, where an electric kettle stood-along with brochures, a clipboard thick with paperwork, and board designs-on a card table behind the counter. He plugged this in and said, “You want something?” and when they demurred, he called out, “Jago?”
“Black and nasty,” Jago returned.
“Tell us about Santo Kerne,” Bea said as Lew went about his business with coffee crystals, which he loaded up into one mug cup and used more sparingly in another.
“He bought a board from me. Couple years ago. He’d been watching the surfers round the Promontory, and he said he wanted to learn. He’d started out down at Clean Barrel-”
“Surf shop,” McNulty murmured, as if believing Bea would need a translator.
“-and Will Mendick, bloke who used to work there, recommended he get a board from me. I place some boards in Clean Barrel, but not a lot.”
“No money in retail,” Jago called from the other room.
“Too right, that,” Angarrack said. “Santo had liked the look of one at Clean Barrel, but it was too advanced for him, although he wouldn’t have known that at the time. It was a short board. A three-fin thruster. He asked about it, but Will knew he’d not learn well with that-if he learned at all-so he sent him to me. I made him a board he could learn on, something wider, longer, with a single fin. And Madlyn-that’s my daughter-gave him lessons.”
“That’s how they became involved, then.”
“Essentially.”
The kettle clicked off. Angarrack poured the water into the mugs, stirred the liquid, and said, “Here it is, mate,” which brought Jago Reeth to join them. He drank noisily.
“How did you feel about that?” Bea asked Angarrack. “About their involvement.” She noted that Jago was watching Lew intently. Interesting, she thought, and she made a mental tick against both of their names.
“Truth? I didn’t like it. She lost her focus. Before, she had a goal. The nationals. International competitions. After she met Santo, all of that was gone. She could still see beyond the nose on her face, but she couldn’t see an inch beyond Santo Kerne.”
“First love,” Jago commented. “It’s brutal.”
“They were both too young,” Angarrack said. “Not even seventeen when they met, and I don’t know how old when they began…” He made a gesture with his hand to indicate they were to complete the sentence.
“Became lovers,” Bea said.
“It’s not love at that age,” Angarrack told her. “Not for boys. But for her? Stars in the eyes and cotton wool in the head. Santo this and Santo that. I wish I could have done something to prevent it.”
“Way of the world, Lew.” Jago leaned against the doorway to the glassing room, mug in his hand.
“I didn’t forbid her seeing him,” Angarrack went on. “What would have been the point? But I told her to have a care.”
“As to what?”
“The obvious. Bad enough she wasn’t competing any longer. Even worse if she came up pregnant. Or worse than that.”
“Worse?”
“Diseased.”
“Ah. Sounds as if you thought the boy was promiscuous.”
“I didn’t know what the hell he was. And I didn’t want to find out by means of Madlyn being in some sort of trouble. Any sort of trouble. So I warned her and then I let it be.” Angarrack had not yet taken up his mug, but he did so now and he took a gulp. “That was probably my mistake,” he said.
“Why? Did she-”
“She would’ve got over him faster when things ended. As it is, she hasn’t.”
“I daresay she will now,” Bea said.
The two men exchanged looks. Quick, nearly furtive. Bea noted this and made two more mental ticks against them. She said, “We found a T-shirt design for LiquidEarth on Santo’s computer.” Constable McNulty brought the drawing forth and passed it over to the surfboard shaper. “Was that at your request?” Bea asked.
Angarrack shook his head. “When Madlyn finished with Santo, I finished with Santo as well. He might have been doing a design to pay for the new board-”
“Another board?”
“He’d got way beyond the first. He needed another, beyond the learning board, if he was going to improve. But once I sacked him, he had no way to pay me back for the board. This might have been it.” He handed the design back to McNulty.
Bea said to the constable, “Show him the other,” and McNulty brought forth the design for Commit an Act of Subversion and handed it over. Lew looked at it and shook his head. He passed it on to Jago who knuckled his spectacles into place, read the logo, and said, “Will Mendick. This was for him.”
“The bloke from Clean Barrel Surf Shop,” Bea said.
“Used to be. He works at Blue Star Grocery now.”
“What’s the significance of the design?”
“He’s freegan. Least that’s what Santo said he calls himself.”
“Freegan? I’ve not heard that term.”
“Only eats what’s free. Clobber he grows’s well as muck from wheelie bins behind the market and in back of restaurants.”
“How appealing. Is this a movement or something like?”
Jago shrugged. “Don’t know, do I. But he and Santo were mates, more or less, so it might’ve been a favour. The T-shirt, that is.”
Bea was gratified to hear the sound of Constable McNulty jotting all of this down instead of studying the nearby surfing posters. She was less gratified when he suddenly said to Jago, “Ever see the big waves?” He’d coloured as he spoke, as if he knew he was out of order but could no longer contain himself.
“Oh, aye. Ke Iki. Waimea. Jaws. Teahupoo.”
“Big as they say?”
“Depends on the weather,” Jago said. “Big as office blocks sometimes. Bigger.”
“Where? When?” And then apologetically to Bea, “I mean to go, you see. The wife and I and the kids…It’s a dream…And when we go, I want to be sure of the place and the waves…you know.”
“Surf then, do you?” Jago asked.
“Bit. Not like you lot. But I-”
“That’ll do, Constable,” Bea told McNulty.
He looked anguished, an opportunity ripped from his hands. “I just wanted to know-”
“Where might we find your daughter?” she asked Lew Angarrack, waving McNulty impatiently to silence.
Lew finished his coffee and placed his mug on the card table. He said, “Why do you want Madlyn?”
“I should think that’s rather obvious.”
“As it happens, it’s not.”
“Former and potentially discarded lover of Santo Kerne, Mr. Angarrack? She’s got to be interviewed like everyone else.”
It was clear that Angarrack didn’t like the direction in which Bea intended to head, but he told her where she could find his daughter at her place of employment. Bea gave him her card, circling her mobile number. If he thought of anything else…
He nodded and returned to his work, shutting the door to the shaping room behind him. A moment later, the sound of an electric tool shrieked in the building again.
Jago Reeth remained with Bea and the constable. He said, casting a look over his shoulder, “One more thing…I got a conscious on this, so if you have a moment for ’nother word…” And when Bea nodded, he said, “I’d be chuffed if Lew didn’t know this, got me? The way things turned out, he’ll be dead cheesed off if he knows.”
“What?”
Jago shifted his weight. “Was me giving them the place. I know I prob’ly shouldn’t’ve. I saw that afterwards, but by then the bloody milk was spilt. Couldn’t exactly pour it back into the bottle when it was spread all over the floor, could I?”
“While I admire your adherence to your metaphor,” Bea told him, “perhaps you could make it more clear?”
“Santo and Madlyn. I go to the Salthouse Inn regular, in the afternoons. Have a mate I meet over there most days. Santo and Madlyn, they used my place then.”
“For sex?”
He didn’t look happy about making the admission. “Could have left them to sort things out on their own, but it seemed…I wanted them to be safe, see. Not in the backseat of a car somewhere. Not in…I don’t know.”
“Yet as his father owns a hotel…,” Bea pointed out.
Jago wiped his mouth on the back of his wrist. “All right. Yeah. There’s the rooms at the old Promontory King George, for what they’re worth. But that didn’t mean…the two of them there…I just…Oh hell. I couldn’t be sure he’d use what he needed to use to keep her safe, so I left them for him. Right by the bed.”
“Condoms.”
He looked moderately embarrassed, an old bloke unused to having such a frank conversation with someone he might otherwise have deemed a lady. One of the fairer sex, Bea thought. She could see this thought playing across his face. “He used ’em, but not every time, see.”
“And you know he used them because…?” Bea prompted.
He looked horrified. “Good God, woman.”
“I’m not sure God had much to do with this, Mr. Reeth. If you’d answer the question. Did you count them up before and after? Search them out in the rubbish? What?”
He looked miserable. “Both,” he said. “Bloody hell. I care about that girl. She’s got a good heart. Bit of a temper but a good heart. Way I saw it, it was going to happen between them anyways, so I might as well make certain it happened right.”
“Where would this be? Your house, I mean.”
“I’ve a caravan over in Sea Dreams.”
Bea glanced at Constable McNulty and he nodded. He knew the place. That was good. She said, “We may want to see it.”
“Reckoned as much.” He shook his head. “Young people. What’s consequences to them when they’re young?”
“Yes. Well. In the heat of the moment, who thinks of consequences?” Bea asked.
“But it’s more than consequences, isn’t it?” Jago said. “Just like this.” He was now, apparently, referring to one of the posters on the wall. It depicted a surfboard shooting into the air, its rider in the middle of a massive and memorable wipeout that had him looking crucified against a background of water that was a monstrous wave. “They don’t think of the moment itself, let alone beyond the moment. And look what happens.”
“Who’s that?” McNulty asked, approaching the poster.
“Bloke called Mark Foo. Minute or two before the poor bastard died.”
McNulty’s mouth formed a respectful o and he began to respond. Bea saw him settling in for a proper surfing natter and she could only imagine where a trip down this watery and mournful memory lane was going to lead them.
She said, “That looks a bit more dangerous than sea cliff climbing, doesn’t it? Perhaps Santo’s father had the right idea, discouraging surfing.”
“Trying to keep the boy from what he loved? What kind of idea’s that?”
“Perhaps one that was intended to keep him alive.”
“But it didn’t keep him alive, did it?” Jago Reeth said. “End of the day, that’s not always something we can do for others.”
DAIDRE TRAHAIR USED THE Internet once again in Max Priestley’s office in the Watchman, but she had to pay this time round. Max didn’t ask for money, however. The price was an interview with one of his two reporters. Steve Teller, he said, just happened to be in the office working on the story of the murder of Santo Kerne. She was the missing piece. The crime asked for an eyewitness account.
Daidre said, “Murder?” because, she decided, the response was expected. She’d seen the body and she’d seen the sling, but Max didn’t know that although he might suppose it.
“Cops gave us the word this morning,” Max told her. “Steve’s working in the layout room. As I’m using the computer just now, you’ll have time to have a word with him.”
Daidre didn’t believe that Max was using the computer, but she didn’t argue. She didn’t want to be involved, didn’t want her name, her photo, the location of her cottage or anything else related to her put into the paper, but she saw no way to avoid it that wouldn’t arouse the newsman’s suspicion. So she agreed. She needed the computer and this spot afforded her more time and privacy than the sole computer in the library did. She was being paranoid-and she damn well knew it-but embracing paranoia seemed the course of wisdom.
So she went with Max to the layout room, taking a moment to cast a surreptitious look at him in order to ascertain whatever might lie beneath the surface of his composure. Like her, he walked the coastal path. She’d come across him more than once at the top of one sea cliff or another, his dog his only companion. The fourth or fifth time, they’d joked with each other, saying, “We’ve got to stop meeting like this,” and she’d asked him why he walked the path so much. He’d said Lily liked it and, as for him, he liked to be alone. “An only child,” he’d said. “I’m used to solitude.” But she’d never thought that was the truth of the matter.
He wasn’t readable on this day. Not that he ever was, particularly. He was, as ever, put together like a man stepping out of a Country Life fantasy pictorial on daily doings in Cornwall: The collar of a crisp blue shirt rose above a cream-coloured fisherman’s sweater; he was cleanly shaven and his spectacles glinted in the overhead lights, as spotless as the rest of him. A fortysomething man without sin.
“Here’s our quarry, Steve,” he said as they entered the layout room, where the reporter was working at a PC in the corner. “She’s agreed to an interview. Show her no mercy.”
Daidre cast him a look. “You make it sound as if I’m involved somehow.”
“You didn’t appear surprised, not to mention horrified, to hear it was murder,” Max said.
They locked eyes. She weighed potential answers and settled on, “I’d seen the body. You forget.”
“That obvious, was it? Initial knowledge given out was that he’d fallen.”
“I think it was meant to look that way.” She heard Teller typing away at his PC, and she said rather too sharply, “I hadn’t indicated that the interview was beginning.”
Max chuckled. “You’re with a journalist, my dear. Everything is meat, with due respect. Forewarned, et cetera.”
“I see.” She sat and knew she did so primly, perched on the edge of a ladder-back chair that would have had to work hard to be more uncomfortable. She kept her shoulder bag on her knees, her hands folded over the top of it. She knew she looked like a school-marm or a hopeful interviewee. That couldn’t be helped and she didn’t try to help it. She said, “I’m not entirely happy about this.”
“No one ever is, save B-list celebrities.” Max left them then, calling out, “Janna, have we heard about the inquest time, yet?”
Janna made some reply from the other room as Steve Teller asked Daidre his first question. He wanted the facts first and then her impressions second, he told her. The latter, she decided, was the last thing she’d give anyone, least of all a journalist. But like a policeman, he was doubtless trained to sniff out falsehoods and note diversions. So she would have a care with how she said what she said. She didn’t like leaving things to chance.
The entire Watchman experience ate up two hours and was evenly divided between the conversation with Teller and her investigation on the Internet. When she had what she needed in print for her later perusal, she concluded her research with the words Adventures Unlimited. She paused before she clicked the search engine into action. It was a case of wondering how far she really wanted to go. Was it better to know or not to know and if she knew could she keep the knowledge from her face? She wasn’t sure.
The list of references to the neophyte business wasn’t long. The Mail on Sunday had featured it in a lengthy piece, she saw, as had several small journals in Cornwall. The Watchman was among them.
And why not? she asked herself. Adventures Unlimited was a Casvelyn story. The Watchman was the Casvelyn newspaper. The Promontory King George Hotel had been saved from destruction-well, come along, Daidre, it’s a listed building, so it was hardly going under the wrecking ball, was it-so there was that as well…
She read the story and looked at the photos. It was all standard stuff: the architectural interest, the plan, the family. And there they were in pictures, Santo among them. There was background on them all, with no one emphasised in particular because it was, of course, a family affair. Last of all she looked at the byline. She saw that Max had done the story himself. This was not unusual because the newspaper was tiny and, consequently, work was shared. But it was potentially damning all the same.
She asked herself what this was to her: Max, Santo Kerne, the sea cliffs, and Adventures Unlimited. She thought of Donne and then dismissed the thought of Donne. Unlike the poet, there were too many times when she didn’t feel part of mankind at all.
She left the newspaper office. She was thinking about Max Priestley and about what she’d read when she heard her name called. She turned round to see Thomas Lynley coming along Princes Street, a large piece of cardboard under his arm and a small bag dangling from his fingers.
Once again she thought how different he looked without the growth of beard, newly dressed, and at least partially refreshed. She said, “You’re not looking too chastened by the trouncing you took at the dartboard last night. May I assume your ego’s intact, Thomas?”
“Marginally,” he said. “I was up all night practicing in the bar at the inn. Where, by the way, I learned that you regularly thrash all comers. Practically blindfolded, the way they tell it.”
“They exaggerate, I’m afraid.”
“Do they? What other secrets are you keeping?”
“Roller Derby,” she told him. “Are you familiar with that? It’s an American sport featuring frightening women bashing one another about on in-line skates.”
“Good Lord.”
“We’ve a fledging team in Bristol and I’m absolute hell on wheels as a jammer. Far more ruthless on my blades than I am with my darts. We’re Boudica’s Broads, by the way, and I’m Kick-arse Electra. We all have suitably threatening monikers.”
“You never cease to surprise, Dr. Trahair.”
“I like to consider that part of my charm. What have you got, then?” with a nod at his package.
“Ah. You’re very well met as things turn out. May I stow this in your car? It’s the replacement glass for the window I broke at your cottage. And the tools to fix it as well.”
“However did you know the size?”
“I’ve been out there to measure.” He cocked his head in the vague direction of her cottage, far north of the town. “I had to go inside again, finding you gone,” he admitted. “I hope you don’t mind.”
“I trust you didn’t break another window to do so.”
“Didn’t have to with the first one broken. Best to get it repaired before someone else discovers the damage and avails himself of…whatever you’ve got cached away within.”
“Little enough,” she said, “unless someone wants to nick my dartboard.”
“Would they only,” he replied, fervently, at which she chuckled. He said, “So now that we’ve met, may I stow this in your car?”
She led him to it. She’d left the Vauxhall in the same spot where she’d left it on the previous day, in the car park across from Toes on the Nose, which was hosting another gathering of surfers, although this time they stood about outside, gazing vaguely towards St. Mevan Beach. From the vantage point of the car park, the Promontory King George Hotel squared off some three hundred yards away. She pointed the structure out to Lynley. That was where Santo Kerne came from, she told him. Then she said, “You didn’t mention murder, Thomas. You must have known last night, but you said nothing.”
“Why do you assume I knew?”
“You went off with that detective in the afternoon. You’re one yourself. A detective, that is. I can’t think she didn’t tell you. Brotherhood of police and all that.”
“She told me,” he admitted.
“Am I a suspect?”
“We all are, myself included.”
“And did you tell her…?”
“What?”
“That I knew-or at least recognised-Santo Kerne?”
He took his time about answering and she wondered why. “No,” he said at last. “I didn’t tell her.”
“Why?”
He didn’t reply to this. Instead he said, “Ah. Your car,” as they reached it.
She wanted to press him for an answer, but she also didn’t much want the answer because she wasn’t sure what she’d do with it when she got it. She fumbled in her bag for her keys. The paperwork she was carrying from the Watchman slipped from her grasp and slid onto the tarmac. She said, “Damn,” as it soaked up rainwater. She started to squat to gather it up.
Lynley said, “Let me,” and ever the gentleman, he set down his package and bent to retrieve it.
Ever the cop as well, he glanced at it and then at her. She felt herself colouring.
He said, “Hoping for a miracle, are you?”
“My social life has been rather bleak for the past few years. Everything helps, I find. May I ask why you didn’t tell me, Thomas?”
“Tell you what?”
“That Santo Kerne had been murdered. It can’t have been privileged information. Max Priestley knew it.”
He handed her the printouts she’d made from the Internet and picked up his own package as she unlocked the Vauxhall’s boot. “And Max Priestley is?”
“The publisher and editor of the Watchman. I spoke to him earlier.”
“As a journalist, he would have been given the word from DI Hannaford, I expect. She’d be the officer determining when information gets disseminated, as I doubt there’s a press officer here in town unless she’s directed someone to act as one. It wouldn’t be up to me to tell anyone until Hannaford was ready for the word to go out.”
“I see.” She couldn’t say to him, “But I thought we were friends” because that was hardly the case. There seemed no point to carrying the matter further, so she said, “Are you coming out to the cottage now, then? To repair the window?”
He told her he had a few things more to do in town but that afterwards, if she didn’t mind, he would drive out to Polcare Cove and make the repair. She asked him if he actually knew how to repair a window. Somehow one didn’t expect an earl-gainfully employed as a cop or not-to know what to do with glass and putty. He told her he was certain he could muddle through it somewhat proficiently.
Then he said, for reasons she couldn’t sort out, “D’you generally do your research at the newspaper office?”
“I generally don’t do research at all,” she told him. “Especially when I’m in Cornwall. But if there’s something I need to look up, yes. I use the Watchman. Max Priestley’s got a retriever I’ve doctored, so he gives me access.”
“That can’t be the only Internet site.”
“Consider where we are, Thomas. I’m lucky there’s access in Casvelyn at all.” She gestured south, in the direction of the wharf. “I could use the library’s access, I suppose, but they dole out time. Fifteen minutes and the next person gets a whack. It’s maddening if you’re trying to do something more meaningful than answer your e-mail.”
“More private, as well, I suppose,” Lynley said.
“There’s that,” she admitted.
“And we know you like privacy.”
She smiled, but she knew the effort showed. It was time for an exit, graceful or otherwise. She told him she would, perhaps, see him when he came to repair her window. Then she took herself off.
She could feel his steady gaze on her as she left the car park.
LYNLEY WATCHED HER GO. She was a cipher in more ways than one, holding much to herself. Some of it had to do with Santo Kerne, he reckoned. He wanted to believe that not all of it did. He wasn’t sure why this was the case but he did admit to himself that he liked the woman. He admired her independence and what appeared to be a lifestyle of going against the common grain. She was unlike anyone else he knew.
But that in itself raised questions. Who was she, exactly, and why did she seem to have sprung into existence as an adolescent, fully formed, like Athena from the head of Zeus? The questions about her were deeply disturbing. He had to acknowledge the fact that a hundred red flags surrounded this woman, only some of them having to do with a dead boy at the foot of a cliff nearby her cottage.
He walked from the car park to the police station at the end of Lansdown Road. This was a narrow cobbled lane of white terrace houses, ill roofed and largely stained by rainwater from rusty gutters. Most of them had fallen into the disrepair prevalent in the poorer sections of Cornwall, where gentrification had not yet extended its greedy fingers. One of them was undergoing refurbishment, however, its scaffolding suggesting that better times for someone had come to the neighbourhood.
The police station was an eyesore, even here, a grey stucco building with nothing of architectural interest to recommend itself. It was flat in front and flat on top, a shoe box with occasional windows and a notice board near its door.
Inside, a small vestibule offered a line of three institutional plastic chairs and a reception counter. Bea Hannaford sat behind this, the telephone receiver pressed to her ear. She raised a finger in greeting to Lynley and said to whoever was on the other end of the line, “Got it. Well, there’s no surprise in that, is there?…We’ll want to have another little chat with her, won’t we, then.”
She rang off and took Lynley up to the incident room, which was set up on the first floor of the building in what seemed to be otherwise a conference room, coffee room, locker room, and meal room. Up here they were making do with a few china boards and computers set up with HOLMES but clearly an insufficiency of manpower. The constable and the sergeant were hard at it, Lynley saw, and two other officers were huddled together exchanging either information on the case or background on the horses currently running at Newmarket. It was difficult to tell. Actions were listed on the china board, some completed and others pending.
DI Hannaford said to Sergeant Collins, “Man reception, Sergeant,” and then to Lynley when Collins left the room to do so, “She was lying, as it turns out.”
He said, “Who?” although there was only one she they’d been looking at, as far as he knew.
“Pro forma question, isn’t that?” the DI said meaningfully. “Our Dr. Trahair, that’s who. Not a pub remembers her on the route she claimed she took from Bristol. And she’d be remembered this time of year, considering how few people are out and about in this part of the country.”
“Perhaps,” he said. “But there must be a hundred pubs involved.”
“Not the way she came. Claiming that was the route may have been her first mistake. And where there’s one, there are others, trust me. What’ve you got on her?”
Lynley related what he’d gleaned from Falmouth about Daidre Trahair. He added what he knew about her brother, her work, and her education. Everything she’d said about herself checked out, he told her. So far, so good.
“Why is it I think you’re not telling me everything there is to tell?” was Bea Hannaford’s reply after a moment of observing him. “Are you holding back something, Superintendent Lynley?”
He wanted to say that he wasn’t Superintendent Lynley any longer. He wasn’t anything related to police work, which was why he also wasn’t required to tell her every fact he had acquired. But he said, “She’s doing some curious research on the Internet just now. There’s that, although I can’t see how it relates to murder.”
“What sort of research?”
“Miracles,” he said. “Or rather, places associated with miracles. Lourdes, for one. A church in New Mexico. There were others as well, but I didn’t have time to look through all the paperwork and I wasn’t wearing my reading glasses anyway. She’s been on the Internet at the Watchman. That’s the local paper. She knows the publisher, evidently.”
“That’d be Max Priestley.” It was Constable McNulty speaking up from a computer in one corner of the room. “He’s been in touch with the dead boy, by the way.”
“Has he indeed?” Bea Hannaford said. “Now that’s an interesting twist.” She told Lynley that the constable was digging through Santo Kerne’s old e-mails, looking for nuggets of information. “What’s he saying?”
“‘No skin off my back. Just watch your own.’ I reckon it’s Priestley ’cause it’s come from MEP at Watchman.co, et cetera. Although it could have come from anyone who knows his password and has access to a computer at the paper, I s’pose.”
“That’s it?” Hannaford asked the constable.
“That’s it from Priestley. But there’s a whole collection from the Angarrack girl, coming straight out of LiquidEarth. The course of most of the relationship being charted. Casual, closer, intimate, hot, graphic, and then nothing else. Like once they started doing the nasty, she didn’t want to commit it to writing.”
“Interesting, that,” Bea noted.
“S’what I thought as well. But ‘wild for him’ doesn’t even touch how she felt about the boy. You ask me, I’ll wager she wouldn’t’ve said no to the idea of someone chopping off his bollocks when they got to the endgame, her and Santo. What d’they say about a woman’s scorn?”
“‘A woman scorned,’” Lynley murmured.
“Right. Well. I’d say we give her a closer look. She’d’ve likely had access to his climbing kit at some point. Or she’d’ve known where he kept it.”
“She’s on our list,” Hannaford said. “Is that it, then?”
“I’ve got e-mails from someone calling himself Freeganman as well, and I’d say that’s Mendick ’cause I doubt the town’s crawling with people of his ilk.”
Hannaford explained the moniker to Lynley: how they’d come to know it and with whom it was associated. She said to the constable, “And what’s Mr. Mendick got to say for himself?”
“‘Can we keep it between us?’ Not exactly illuminating, I’ll give you that, but still…”
“A reason to talk to him, then. Let’s put Blue Star Grocery on the schedule.”
“Right.” McNulty went back to the computer.
Hannaford strode over to a desk where she dug in a heavy-looking shoulder bag. She brought forth a mobile phone. This she tossed to Lynley. She said, “Reception’s the devil round here, I’ve found, but I want you carrying this and I want it turned on.”
“Your reason?” Lynley asked.
“I need a stated reason, do I, Superintendent?”
“If nothing else, because I outrank you” would have been his answer in other circumstances, but not in these. He said, “I’m curious. It suggests my usefulness to you hasn’t come to an end.”
“That would be correct. I’m undermanned and I want you available to me.”
“I’m not-”
“Bollocks. Once a cop, always a cop. There’s a need here, and you and I know you’re not about to walk away from a situation where your help is required. Beyond that, you’re a principal figure and you’re not going anywhere without me coming after you until you have my blessing to leave, so you may as well make yourself useful to me.”
“You’ve something in mind?”
“Dr. Trahair. Details. Everything. From her shoe size to her blood type and all points in between.”
“How am I supposed to-”
“Oh please, Detective. Don’t take me for a fool. You’ve sources and you’ve charm. Use them both. Dig into her background. Take her on a picnic. Wine her. Dine her. Read her poetry. Caress her palm. Gain her trust. I don’t bloody care how you do it. Just do it. And when you’ve done it, I want it all. Are we clear on that?”
Sergeant Collins had appeared in the doorway as Hannaford was speaking. He said, “Guv? Someone to see you. Queer bird called Tammy Penrule down below. Says she’s got information for you.”
The DI said to Lynley, “Keep that phone charged. Take your spade and use it. Do whatever you have to do.”
“I’m not comfortable with-”
“That’s not my concern. Murder’s not comfortable either.”