Careless in Red

  “We phoned from the inn, so they’ll know up there.”

  “And everywhere else no doubt, by now. You know the dead boy?”

  Daidre had considered the possibility that she might be asked this question again. She decided to base her answer on her personal definition of the word know. “I don’t,” she said. “I don’t actually live here, you see. The cottage is mine, but it’s my getaway. I live in Bristol. I come here for breaks when I have time off.”

  “What d’you do in Bristol?”

  “I’m a doctor. Well, not actually a doctor. I mean, I am a doctor, but it’s…I’m a veterinarian.” Daidre felt Thomas’s eyes on her, and she grew hot. This had nothing to do with shame about being a vet, a fact about which she was inordinately proud, considering how difficult it had been to reach that goal. Rather, it was the fact that she’d led him to believe she was another sort of doctor when she’d first come upon him. She wasn’t quite sure why she had done it, although to tell someone she could help him with his supposed injuries because she was a vet had seemed ludicrous at the time. “I do larger animals mostly.”

  DI Hannaford had drawn her eyebrows together. She looked from Daidre to Thomas, and she seemed to be testing the waters between them. Or perhaps she was testing Daidre’s answer for its level of veracity. She looked like someone who was good at that, despite her incongruous hair.

  Thomas said, “There was a surfer. I couldn’t tell if it was male or female. I saw him—I’ll call him him—from the cliff top.”

  “What? Off Polcare Cove?”

  “In the cove before Polcare. Although he could have come from here, I suppose.”

  “There was no car, though,” Daidre pointed out. “Not in the car park. So he had to have gone into the water at Buck’s Haven. That’s what it’s called. The cove to the south. Unless you meant the north cove. I’ve not asked you what direction you were walking in.”

  “From the south,” he said. And to Hannaford, “The weather didn’t seem right to me. For surfing. The tide was wrong as well. The reefs weren’t covered completely. If a surfer came too close to them…Someone could get hurt.”

  “Someone did get hurt,” Hannaford pointed out. “Someone got killed.”

  “But not surfing,” Daidre said. Then she wondered why she’d said it because it sounded to her as if she were interceding for Thomas when that hadn’t been her intention.

  Hannaford said to both of them, “Like to play detectives, do you? Is it a hobby of yours?” She didn’t seem to expect a response to this. She went on to Thomas, saying, “Constable McNulty tells me you helped him move the body. I’ll want your clothes for forensics. Your outer clothes. Whatever you had on at the time, which I presume is what you have on now.” And to Daidre, “Did you touch the body?”

  “I checked for a pulse.”

  “Then I’ll want your outer clothing as well.”

  “I’ve nothing to change into, I’m afraid,” Thomas said.

  “Nothing?” Again, Hannaford looked from the man to Daidre. It came to Daidre that the detective had assumed that she and the stranger were a couple. She supposed there was some logic in this. They’d gone for help together. They were together still. And neither of them had said anything to dissuade her from this conclusion. Hannaford said, “Exactly who might you two be and what brings you to this corner of the world?”

  Daidre said, “We’ve given our details to the sergeant.”

  “Humour me.”

  “I’ve told you. I’m a veterinarian.”

  “Your practise?”

  “At the zoo in Bristol. I’ve just come down this afternoon for a few days. Well, for a week this time.”

  “Odd time of year for a holiday.”

  “For some, I suppose. But I prefer my holidays when there are no crowds.”

  “What time did you leave Bristol?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t actually look. It was morning. Perhaps nine. Ten. Half past.”

  “Stop along the way?”

  Daidre tried to work out how much the detective needed to know. She said, “Well…briefly, yes. But it hardly has to do with—”

  “Where?”

  “What?”

  “Where did you stop?”

  “For lunch. I’d had no breakfast. I don’t, usually. Eat breakfast, that is. I was hungry, so I stopped.”

  “Where?”

  “There was a pub. It’s not a place I usually stop. Not that I usually stop, but there was a pub and I was hungry and it said ‘pub meals’ out front, so I went in. This would be after I left the M5. I can’t remember its name. The pub’s. I’m sorry. I don’t think I even looked at the name. It was somewhere outside Crediton. I think.”

  “You think. Interesting. What did you eat?”

  “A ploughman’s.”

  “What sort of cheese?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t pay attention. It was a ploughman’s. Cheese, bread, pickle, onion. I’m a vegetarian.”

  “Of course you are.”

  Daidre felt her temper flare. She hadn’t done anything, but the detective was making her feel as if she had. She said with some attempt at dignity, “I find that it’s rather difficult to care for animals on the one hand and eat them on the other, Inspector.”

  “Of course you do,” DI Hannaford said thinly. “Do you know the dead boy?”

  “I believe I already answered that question.”

  “I seem to have lost the plot on that one. Tell me again.”

  “I didn’t get a good look at him, I’m afraid.”

  “And I’m afraid that isn’t what I asked you.”

  “I’m not from around here. As I said, this is a getaway place for me. I come on the occasional weekend. Bank holidays. Longer holidays. I know a few people but mostly those who live close by.”

  “This boy doesn’t live close by?”

  “I don’t know him.” Daidre could feel the perspiration on her neck and she wondered if it was on her face as well. She wasn’t used to speaking to the police, and speaking to the police under these circumstances was especially unnerving.

  A sharp double knock sounded on the front door then. But before anyone made a move to answer it, they heard it open. Two male voices—one of them the voice of Sergeant Collins—came from the entry, just ahead of the men themselves. Daidre was expecting the other to be the pathologist who Inspector Hannaford had indicated was on the way, but this was apparently not the case. Instead, the newcomer—tall, grey haired, and attractive—nodded to them and said to Hannaford, “Where’ve you got him stowed, then?” to which she answered, “He’s not in the car?”

  The man shook his head. “As it happens, no.”

  Hannaford said, “That bloody child. I swear. Thanks for coming at short notice, Ray.” Then she spoke to Daidre and Thomas. To Daidre she repeated, “I’ll want your clothes, Dr. Trahair. Sergeant Collins will bag them, so sort yourself out about that.” And to Thomas, “When SOCO arrives, we’ll get you a boiler suit to change into. In the meantime, Mr…. I don’t know your name.”

  “Thomas,” he said.

  “Mr. Thomas, is it? Or is Thomas your Christian name?”

  He hesitated. Daidre thought for a moment that he meant to lie, because that was what it looked like. And he could lie, couldn’t he, since he had no identification with him. He could say he was absolutely anyone. He looked at the coal fire as if meditating on all the possibilities. Then he looked back at the detective. “Lynley,” he said. “It’s Thomas Lynley.”

  There was a silence. Daidre looked from Thomas to the detective, and she saw the expression alter on Hannaford’s face. The face of the man she’d called Ray altered as well, and oddly enough, he was the one to speak. What he said was completely baffling to Daidre:

  “New Scotland Yard?”

  Thomas Lynley hesitated once again. Then he swallowed. “Until recently,” he said. “Yes. New Scotland Yard.”

  “OF COURSE I KNOW who he is,” Bea Hannaford said tersely to her
former husband. “I don’t live under a stone.” It was just like Ray to make the pronouncement as if from on high. Impressed with himself, he was. Devon and Cornwall Constabulary. Middlemore. Mr. Assistant Chief Constable. A pencil pusher, really, as far as Bea was concerned. Never had a promotion affected anyone’s demeanour so maddeningly. “The only question is, what the hell is he doing here, of all places?” she went on. “Collins tells me he isn’t even carrying identification with him. So he could be anyone, couldn’t he?”

  “Could be. But he isn’t.”

  “How d’you know? Have you met him?”

  “I don’t need to have met him.”

  Another indication of self-satisfaction. Had he always been like this and had she never seen it? Had she been so blinded by love or whatever it had been that had propelled her into marriage with this man? She hadn’t been ageing and Ray her only chance at having a home and family. She’d been twenty-one. And they had been happy, hadn’t they? Until Pete, they’d had their lives in order: one child only—a daughter—and that had been something of a disappointment, but Ginny had given them a grandchild soon enough into her own marriage and she was at this moment on her way to giving them more. Retirement had been beckoning them from the future and all the things they planned to do with retirement had been beckoning as well…. And then there was Pete, a complete surprise. Pleasant to her, unpleasant to Ray. The rest was history.

  “Actually,” Ray said in that way he had of outing himself, which had always made her forgive him in the end for his worst displays of self-importance, “I saw in the paper that he comes from round here. His family are in Cornwall. The Penzance area.”

  “So he’s come home.”

  “Hmm. Yes. Well, after what happened, who can blame him for wanting to be done with London?”

  “Bit far from Penzance, here, though.”

  “Perhaps home and family didn’t give him what he needed. Poor sod.”

  Bea glanced at Ray. They were walking from the cottage to the car park, skirting his Porsche, which he’d left—foolishly, she thought, but what did it matter since she wasn’t responsible for the vehicle—half on and half off the lane. His voice was moody and his face was moody. She could see that in the dying light of the day.

  “It touched you, all that, didn’t it?” she said.

  “I’m not made of stone, Beatrice.”

  He wasn’t, that. The problem for her was that his all too compelling humanity made hating him an impossibility. And she would have vastly preferred to hate Ray Hannaford. Understanding him was far too painful.

  “Ah,” Ray said. “I think we’ve located our missing child.” He indicated the cliff rising ahead of them to their right, beyond the Polcare Cove car park. The coastal path climbed in a narrow stripe sliced into the rising land, and descending from the top of the cliff were two figures. The one in front was lighting the way through the rain and the gloom with a torch. Behind him a smaller figure picked out a route among the rain-slicked stones that jutted from the ground where the path had been inadequately cleared.

  “That bloody child,” Bea said. “He’s going to be the death of me.” She shouted, “Get the hell down from there, Peter Hannaford. I told you to stay in the car and I damn well meant it and you bloody well know it. And you, Constable. What the hell are you doing, letting a child—”

  “They can’t hear you, love,” Ray said. “Let me.” He bellowed Pete’s name. He gave an order only a fool would have failed to obey. Pete scurried down the remainder of the path and had his excuse ready by the time he joined them.

  “I didn’t go near the body,” he said. “You said I wasn’t meant to go near and I didn’t. Mick c’n tell you that. All I did was go up the path with him. He was—”

  “Stop splitting hairs with your mother,” Ray told him.

  Bea said, “You know how I feel when you do that, Pete. Now say hello to your father and get out of here before I wallop you the way you need to be walloped.”

  “Hullo,” Pete said. He stuck out his hand for a shake. Ray accommodated him. Bea looked away. She wouldn’t have allowed a handshake. She would have grabbed the boy and kissed him.

  Mick McNulty came up behind them. “Sorry, Guv,” he said. “I didn’t know—”

  “No harm done.” Ray put his hands on Pete’s shoulders and firmly turned him in the direction of the Porsche. “I thought we’d do Thai food,” he said to his son.

  Pete hated Thai food, but Bea left them to sort that out for themselves. She shot Pete a look that he could not fail to read: Not here, it said. He made a face.

  Ray kissed Bea on the cheek and said, “Take care of yourself.”

  She said, “Mind how you go, then. Roads’re slick.” And then because she couldn’t help herself, “I didn’t say before. You’re looking well, Ray.”

  He replied, “Lot of good it’s doing me,” and walked off with their son. Pete stopped at Bea’s car. He brought forth his football shoes. Bea didn’t call out to tell him to let them be.

  Instead she said to Constable McNulty, “So. What’ve we got?”

  McNulty gestured towards the top of the cliff. “Rucksack up there for SOCO to bag. I expect it’s the kid’s.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Evidence of how the poor sod went down. I left it for SOCO as well.”

  “What is it?”

  “There’s a stile up top, some ten feet or so back from the edge of the cliff. Marks the far west end of a cow pasture up there. He’d put a sling round it, which was supposed to be what his carabiner and rope were fixed to for the abseil down the cliff.”

  “What sort of sling?”

  “Made of nylon webbing. Looks like fishing net if you don’t know what you’re looking at. It’s supposed to be a long loop. You drape it round a fixed object and each end is fastened with the carabiner, making the loop into a circle. You attach your rope to the carabiner and off you go.”

  “Sounds straightforward.”

  “Should have been. But the sling’s been taped together—presumably over a weak spot to strengthen it—and that’s exactly where it’s failed.” McNulty gazed back the way he’d come. “Bloody idiot. I can’t think why anyone’d just not get himself another sling.”

  “What kind of tape was used for the repair?”

  McNulty looked at her as if surprised by the question. “Electrical tape, this was.”

  “Kept your digits off it?”

  “’Course.”

  “And the rucksack?”

  “It was canvas.”

  “I reckoned as much,” Bea said patiently. “Where was it? Why do you presume it was his? Did you have a look inside?”

  “Next to the stile, so I reckon it was his all right. He probably carried his kit in it. Nothing in it now but a set of keys.”

  “Car?”

  “I reckon.”

  “Did you have a look for it?”

  “Thought it best to report back to you.”

  “Think another time, Constable. Get back up there and find me the car.”

  He looked towards the cliff. His expression told her how little he wanted to make a second climb up there in the rain. Well, that couldn’t be helped. “Up you go,” she told him pleasantly. “The exercise will do you a world of good.”

  “Thought p’rhaps I ought to go by way of the road. It’s a few miles, but—”

  “Up you go,” she repeated. “Keep an eye out along the trail as well. There may be footprints not already destroyed by the rain.” Or by you, she thought.

  McNulty did not look happy, but he said, “Will do, Guv,” and set off back the way he’d come with Pete.

  KERRA KERNE WAS EXHAUSTED and soaked to the skin because she’d broken her primary rule: Head into the wind on the first half of the ride; have the wind at your back on your route home. But she’d been in a hurry to be gone from Casvelyn, so for the first time in longer than she could remember, she hadn’t checked the Internet before donning her cycling kit and pedaling out
of town. She’d just set off in her Lycra and her helmet. She’d clicked into the pedals and pumped so furiously that she was ten miles out of Casvelyn before she actually clocked her location. Then it was the location alone that she took into consideration and not the wind, which had been her error. She’d just kept riding vaguely east. When the weather rolled in, she was too far away to do anything to escape it other than seek shelter, which she did not want to do. Hence, muscle weary and bone wet, she struggled with the last of the thirty-five miles she needed to cover on her return.

  She blamed Alan, blind and foolish Alan Cheston, who was supposed to be her life partner, with all that being a life partner implied, but who’d decided to go his own bloody-minded way in the one situation that she couldn’t countenance. And she blamed her father who was also blind and foolish—as well as stupid—but in a completely different manner and for a completely different set of reasons.

  At least ten months earlier, she’d said to Alan, “Please don’t do this. It won’t work out. It’ll be—”

  And he’d cut into her words, which he rarely did, which should have told her something about him that she hadn’t yet learned, but which did not. “Why won’t it work out? We won’t even see each other much, if that’s what worries you.”

  It wasn’t what worried her. She knew what he was saying was true. He’d be doing whatever one did in the marketing department—which was less a department and more an old conference room located behind what used to be the reception desk in the mouldy hotel—and she’d be doing her thing with the trainee instructors. He’d be sorting out the chaos that her mother had wrought as the nominal director of the nonexistent marketing department while she—Kerra—tried to hire suitable employees. They might see each other at morning coffee or at lunch, but they might well not. So rubbing elbows with him at work and then rubbing other body parts later in the day was not what concerned her.

  He’d said, “Don’t you see, Kerra, that I’ve got to get some solid employment in Casvelyn? And this is it. Jobs aren’t dangling from trees round here, and it was decent of your dad to offer it to me. I’m not about to look a gift horse.”