Careless In Red (45 page)

She gestured at the room with her teacup. “You invited me, didn’t you?”

“You know what I mean.”

She took a sip of tea. “You wanted information about Daidre Trahair.”

“Which you could easily have provided me on the phone.” He thought about this and recalled their conversation. “You were in your car when I phoned you on your mobile. Were you on your way down here?”

“I was.”

“Barbara…” He spoke in a fashion to warn her off: Stay out of my life.

She said, “Don’t flatter yourself, Superintendent.”

“Tommy. Or Thomas. Or whatever. But not superintendent.”

“‘Tommy’? ‘Thomas’? Not bloody likely. Are we fine with ‘sir’?” And when he shrugged, “Good. DI Hannaford has no MCIT blokes working the case for her. When she phoned the Met for your identification, she explained the situation. I got sent as a loan.”

“And that’s it?”

“That’s it.”

Lynley looked at her evenly. Her face was a blank, an admirable poker face that might have duped someone who knew her less well than he did. “Am I actually meant to believe that, Barbara?”

“Sir, there’s nothing else to believe.”

They engaged in a stare down. But ultimately there was nothing to be gained. She’d worked with him too long to be intimidated by any implications that might hang upon silence. She said, “By the way, no one ever put your resignation through channels. As far as anyone’s concerned, you’re on compassionate leave. Indefinitely, if that’s what it takes.” She sipped her tea again. “Is that what it takes?”

Lynley looked away from her. Outside, a grey day was framed by the window, and a sprig of the ivy that climbed on this side of the building was blowing against the glass. “I don’t know,” he said. “I think I’m finished with it, Barbara.”

“They’ve posted the job. Not your old one but the one you were in when…You know. Webberly’s job: the detective superintendent’s position. John Stewart’s applying. Others as well. Some from outside and some from within. Stewart’s obviously got the inside track on it, and between you and me, that would be a disaster for everyone if he gets it.”

“It could be worse.”

“No, it couldn’t.” She put her hand on his arm. So rare a gesture it was that he had to look at her. “Come back, sir.”

“I don’t think I can.” He rose then, to distance himself not from her but from the idea of returning to New Scotland Yard. He said, “But why here, in the middle of nowhere? You could be staying in town, which makes far more sense if you’re working with Bea Hannaford.”

“I could ask the same of you, sir.”

“I was brought here the first night. It seemed easiest to stay. It was the closest place.”

“To what?”

“To where the body was found. And why are we turning this into an examination of me? What’s going on?”

“I’ve told you.”

“Not everything.” He studied her evenly. If she’d come to keep a watch over him, which was likely the case, Havers being Havers, there could be only one reason. “What did you learn about Daidre Trahair?” he asked her.

She nodded. “You see? You haven’t lost your touch.” She downed the rest of her tea and held out her cup. He poured her another and put in a packet of sugar and two of the thimbles of milk. She said nothing else until he’d handed the cup back and she’d taken a swig. “A family called Trahair are longtime residents of Falmouth, so that part of her story’s on the up-and-up. The dad sells tyres; he’s got his own company. The mum does mortgages for homes. No primary school records for a kid called Daidre, though. You were right about that. In some cases that might suggest she was sent off to school in the old way: booted out the door when she was five or whatever, home for half terms and the holidays but otherwise unseen and unheard till emerging from the great machine of proper”—she rolled the r to indicate her scorn—“education at eighteen or whatever.”

“Spare me the social commentary,” Lynley said.

“I speak purely from jealous rage, of course,” Havers said. “Nothing I would have liked better than to be packed off to boarding school directly after I learned to blow my nose.”

“Havers…”

“You haven’t lost that tone of martyred patience,” she noted. “C’n I smoke in here, by the way?”

“Are you out of your mind?”

“Just enquiring, sir.” She curved her palm around her teacup. “So while I reckon she could have gone off to primary school, it doesn’t seem likely to me because there she is in the local secondary comprehensive from the time she’s thirteen. Playing field hockey. Excelling at fencing. Singing in the school choir. Mezzo-soprano if that’s of interest.”

“And you’re rejecting the idea of earlier boarding school for what reason?”

“First of all, because it doesn’t make sense. I can see it done the reverse way: primary day school and then boarding school when she was twelve or thirteen. But boarding out through primary school and then returning home for secondary? This is a middle-class family. What middle-class family sends its kids off at that age and then has them back home when they’re thirteen?”

“It’s been known to happen. What’s the second of all?”

“The second of…? Oh. Second of all, there’s no record of her birth. Not a cracker, not a hint. Not in Falmouth, that is.”

Lynley considered the implications of this. He said, “She told me she was born at home.”

“The birth would still have to be registered within forty-two days. And if she was born at home, the midwife would have been there, yes?”

“If her father delivered her…?”

“Did she tell you that? If you and she were exchanging intimate details—”

He glanced at her sharply, but her face betrayed nothing.

“—then wouldn’t that have been an intriguing one to share? Mum doesn’t make it to the hospital for some reason: like it’s a dark and stormy night. Or the car breaks down. The electricity goes out. There’s a maniac loose in the streets. There’s been a military coup that history failed to record. There’s a curfew due to racial rioting. The Vikings, having missed the east coast entirely because you know how Vikings are when it comes to having a decent sense of direction, have emerged from a time warp to invade the south coast of England. Or maybe aliens. They might have landed. But whatever the reason, there they are at home with Mum in labour and Dad boiling water without knowing what he’s supposed to do with it but nature takes its course anyway and out pops a baby girl they call Daidre.” She placed her teacup on the narrow nightstand next to the bed. “Which still doesn’t explain why they wouldn’t have registered the birth.”

He said nothing.

“So there’s something she’s not telling you, sir. I’m wondering why.”

“Her story about the zoo checks out,” Lynley told her. “She is a large animal veterinarian. She does work for the Bristol Zoo.”

“I’ll give you that,” Havers said. “I went to the Trahairs’ house once I had a look through the birth registry. No one was at home, so I spoke to a neighbour. There’s a Daidre Trahair, definitely. She lives in Bristol and works at the zoo. But when I pressed a bit further for more information, the woman dummied up. It was just, ‘Dr. Trahair is a credit to her parents and a credit to herself and you write that down in that notebook of yours. And if you want to know more, I’ll need to speak to my solicitor first,’ before the door was shut in my face. Too many sodding cop dramas on telly,” she concluded darkly. “It’s killing our ability to intimidate.”

Lynley found he was struggling with a fact that disturbed him, and it was not a fact about Daidre Trahair. He said, “You went to the house? You spoke to a neighbour? Havers, this was supposed to be confidential. Did you not understand that?”

She frowned, drawing her eyebrows together. She used her teeth to pull on the inside of her lip and she observed him. He said nothing. Neither did she. From below them came the distant sound of pots and pans clanging as breakfast began to be sorted out at the Salthouse Inn.

Havers finally said, with some evident care, “These are background checks, sir. When it comes to murder, everyone involved has a background check. There’s nothing secret about that.”

“But not every background check is done by New Scotland Yard. And you identified yourself when you spoke to the neighbour. You showed your warrant card. You told her where you were from. Yes?”

“’Course.” Havers spoke carefully and this agitated Lynley: the idea that his former partner would use care with him, whatever her reason. “But I don’t see what that has to do with anything, sir. If you hadn’t come upon the body the way you did, have you thought of—”

Lynley cut in with, “It has everything to do with everything. She knows I work—once worked—for the Met. If the Met’s now investigating her…the Met and not the local police…Don’t you see what that will mean to her?”

“That p’rhaps you’re behind the investigation,” Havers said. “Well, you are behind it and with damn good reason. Sir, let me finish what I was saying. You know how this works. If you hadn’t come upon Santo Kerne’s body, the first person at the scene would have been Daidre Trahair. And you know the game on that one. I don’t have to tell you.”

“For God’s sake, she didn’t kill Santo Kerne. She didn’t show up to pretend she found the body. She came into her cottage and discovered me there and I took her to the body because she asked to see it. She said she was a doctor. She wanted to see if she could help him.”

“She could have done that for a dozen reasons and heading the list is the fact that it might have looked damn odd if she hadn’t done it.”

“She has absolutely no motive—”

“Okay. What if everything you’re claiming is true? What if she is who she says she is and it all checks out? What does it matter that she knows we’re looking into her story? That I’m looking into it? That you’re looking into it? That Father effing Christmas is looking into it? What does it matter?”

He blew out a breath. He knew part of the answer, but only part. He wasn’t willing to give it.

He drank down his tea. He longed for simplicity where there was none. He longed for answers that were yes or no instead of an infinite string of maybe.

The bed creaked as Havers rose. The floor creaked as she walked across it to stand behind him. She said, “If she knows we’re investigating her, she’s going to get nervous and that’s where we want her. That’s where we want them all, isn’t it? Nervous people betray themselves. Betrayal like that works in our favour.”

“I can’t see how openly investigating this woman—”

“Yes, you can. I know you can. You can and you do.” She touched him lightly, briefly, on the shoulder. Her voice was cautious but it was also gentle. “You’re…you’re in something of a state, sir, and that’s normal after what you’ve been through. Now, I wish this wasn’t a world where people took advantage of others when they’re susceptible, but you and I know what kind of world this is.”

The kindness in her voice shook him. It was the primary reason he’d avoided everyone since Helen’s burial. His friends, his associates, his colleagues, and finally his very family. He couldn’t bear their kindness and their unbounded compassion because it kept reminding him endlessly of the very thing he so desperately wanted to forget.

Havers said, “You’ve got to have a care. That’s all I’m saying. That and this: We have to look at her exactly like we’re looking at everyone else.”

“I know that,” he said.

“Knowing is one thing, Superintendent. Believing will always be something else.”

DAIDRE SAT ON A stool at the corner of the kitchen work top. Against a tin canister of lentils, she propped the postcard she’d bought in the honesty stall of St. Smithy’s Church on the previous afternoon. She studied the gipsy caravan and the countryside in which it sat, with a tired-looking horse munching grass nearby. Picturesque, she thought, a charming image of a time long gone. On occasion, one still saw these sorts of conveyances on a country lane in this part of the world. But now—with their pleasing curved roofs and gaily painted exteriors—they mainly served tourists who wanted to play briefly at Romany travelers.

When she’d gazed upon the postcard as long as she could without taking action, she left the house. She got into her car, reversed it onto the narrow lane to Polcare Cove, and drove forward down to the beach itself. Proximity to the beach reminded her of the previous night, which she would have preferred not to think about but which she ended up thinking about anyway: her slow walk back to the car with Thomas Lynley; his quiet voice talking about his dead wife; the darkness nearly complete so that, aside from distant lights coming from the houses and cottages above them on the cliff, she could barely see anything save his rather disturbing patrician profile.

Helen was her name and she’d come from a family not unlike his own. Daughter of an earl who had married an earl, moving easily in the world into which she’d been born. Filled with self-doubts, evidently—although Daidre found this piece of information about Helen Lynley difficult to believe—because of how she’d been educated. But at the same time extraordinarily kind, witty, amusing, companionable, fun loving. Gifted with the most admirable and desirable of human qualities.

Daidre couldn’t imagine his surviving the loss of such a woman and she couldn’t see how anyone could ever come to terms with this loss being precipitated by murder.

“Twelve years old,” he’d said. “No one knows why he shot her.”

“I’m so sorry,” she’d said. “She sounds perfectly lovely.”

“She was.”

Now, Daidre made the turn she always made, using Polcare Cove’s small car park to point her car in the direction that would take her out of the area. Behind her, she heard the breakers collapsing onto the toothy slate reef. Before her, she saw the sweep of the ancient valley and Stowe Wood above it, where the trees were coming into leaf. Very soon beneath them, bluebells would bloom, carpeting the woods with a colour that tossed in rhythmic undulations in the springtime breeze, like sapphire linen.

She made her way up and out of the cove. She followed the lanes in the crisscrossing pattern dictated by the lay of the land and its ownership. In this way, she came to the A39 and there she headed south. The drive she intended was an extended one. At St. Columb Road, she stopped for a coffee and decided to have a pain au chocolat at a bakery café. She spoke at length about guiltless chocolate consumption to the young man behind the till, and she went so far as to ask that he give her a receipt for her food and her drink, which she tucked into her wallet. One never knew when the police were going to require an alibi of one, she decided wryly. Best to keep records of one’s every movement. Best to make certain people along the way have a vivid memory of one’s visit to their establishment. As far as the pain au chocolat was concerned, what were a few unnecessary calories in the cause of substantiating a claim of innocence?