Careless In Red (63 page)

“That was good of you. I’m sure she appreciated it.” Bea selected one of the heavier bolt cutters and applied it forcefully to the chock stone’s cable. Nothing but pain shooting up her arm. “That one’s a real nonstarter,” she said.

“Right. Well, she wasn’t overly friendly, but she did accept a wee pat on the shoulder, which was easy enough to give as she was loading up the front window at the time.”

“Hmm. And how did Miss Angarrack take your fond caress?”

“She didn’t debark from the tuna boat yesterday, I’ll give her that. She knew I was up to something.”

“Were you?” Bea suddenly took more notice of Havers.

The DS was smiling wickedly. She was also removing a paper napkin carefully from her shoulder bag. She brought it to Bea’s desk and laid it gently down. “Can’t use it in court, of course,” she said. “But there it is all the same for a comparison, if you’ve the mind for it. Not a regular DNA comparison cause there’s no skin attached. But one of those others. Mitochondrial. I expect we can use it for that if we need to.”

It, Bea saw, as she unfolded the napkin, was a single hair. Quite dark, with a slight curl to it. She looked up at Havers. “You wily thing. From her shoulder, I take it?”

“You’d think they’d have them wear caps or hairnets or something if they’re going to be around food, wouldn’t you?” Havers shuddered dramatically and took an enormous bite of the pasty. “I reckoned I needed to do my bit for hygiene in Casvelyn. And anyway, I thought you might like to have it.”

“No one has ever brought me such a thoughtful gift,” Bea told her. “I may be falling in love with you, Sergeant.”

“Please, Guv,” Havers said, holding up her hand. “You’ll have to get in the queue.”

Bea knew that, as Havers had said, the hair was useless in building a crown case against Madlyn Angarrack, considering how the sergeant had got her hands on it. They could do nothing with it save assure themselves through comparison that the hair they’d already found caught up in Santo Kerne’s equipment was one belonging to his former girlfriend. But it was something, a shot in the arm that they needed. Bea placed it in an envelope and labeled it carefully for Duke Clarence Washoe to peruse in Chepstow.

“I’m reckoning it’s all to do with sex and vengeance,” Bea said when the hair was taken care of. Havers pulled over a chair and joined her, munching the pasty with evident appreciation.

She shoved a wad of it to one side of her mouth and said, “Sex and vengeance? How’ve you got it playing out?”

“I was off and on thinking about it all night, and I kept coming back to the initial betrayal.”

“Santo Kerne taking up with Dr. Trahair?”

“For which Madlyn either seeks vengeance herself with this”—Bea held up the chock stone in one hand and a bolt cutter in the other—“and this. Or one of the men does it for her, after she’s supplied him with two of the chock stones, which she’s nicked out of the boot of Santo’s car. She’s already done the business on the sling. That was easy. But the chock stones require rather more strength than she has. So she needs a helper. She would have known where Santo was keeping his equipment. All she needed was someone willing to be her assistant.”

“That would be someone with a bone to pick with Santo anyway?”

“Or someone hoping to get himself into Madlyn’s good graces by helping her out.”

“Sounds like that bloke Will Mendick to me. Santo treats her badly and Will wants to sort him out for her sake; Will also wants into Madlyn’s knickers.”

“That’s how I see it.” Bea set the chock stone down. “Have you seen your Superintendent Lynley this morning, by the way?”

“He’s not my—”

“Yes. Yes. We’ve already been through it. He says the same thing about you.”

“Does he?” Havers chewed thoughtfully. “Not sure how I feel about that.”

“Mull it over later. As for now?”

“He’s off to Exeter. Second half of whatever he was up to yesterday, he said. But…”

Bea narrowed her eyes. “But…?”

Havers looked regretful about having to mention the next bit. “Dr. Trahair came to see him. This would be yesterday, late afternoon.”

“And you didn’t bring her—”

“I didn’t know, Guv. I didn’t see her. And since I haven’t yet seen her anyway, I wouldn’t know her if she flew in front of my car on a broomstick. He didn’t tell me until this morning.”

“Did you see him at dinner last night?”

Havers looked unhappy before she said, “Yeah. I s’pose I did.”

“And he said nothing to you then about her visit?”

“That would be the situation. But he’s got a lot on his mind. He might not have thought about telling me.”

“Don’t be absurd, Barbara. He damn well knew we want to talk to her. He should have told you. He should have phoned me. He should have done almost anything but what he did. This man is walking on very thin ice.”

Havers nodded. “That’s why I’m telling you. I mean, not because I know he’s on thin ice with you but because I know it’s important. I mean, it’s important not because he didn’t tell you but because…Not that she came to see him. That’s not the important bit. What I mean is that it’s important that she’s resurfaced and I thought—”

“All right, all right! Jesus in a teaspoon. Stop. I see I can’t expect you to grass his mighty lordship, no matter the situation, so I’m going to have to find someone willing to grass you. And it’s not like we’ve the manpower for that, is it, Sergeant? What, God damn it?”

This last she said to Sergeant Collins, who’d come to the door of the incident room. He was manning the phones below, for what little good it was doing, while the rest of the team continued with actions she’d assigned them earlier, most of which had them going over old ground.

“Dr. Trahair is here to see you, Guv,” Sergeant Collins told her. “She said you wanted her to come by the station.”

Bea pushed her chair back and said, “Well, thank God. Let’s hope we’re about to get someplace.”

AN UNANTICIPATED HOUR OF research in Exeter provided Lynley with the name of the property management company that, he discovered, was no longer owned by Jonathan Parsons, father of the long ago cave-drowning victim in Pengelly Cove. Previously called Parsons, Larson, and Waterfield, it was now R. Larson Estate Management, Ltd., and it was located not far from the medieval cathedral in an area that looked desirable for doing business. Its director turned out to be a questionably tanned, grey-bearded individual somewhere in his sixties. He appeared to favour jeans, exceptionally good dentistry, and blindingly white dress shirts worn without a necktie. R, Lynley discovered, stood for the unusual non-British name of Rocco. Larson’s mother—long gone to her eternal reward—had possessed a devotion to the more obscure Catholic saints, the man explained. It was an equal rights sort of thing. His sister was called Perpetua. Personally, he didn’t use Rocco. He used Rock, which Lynley was free to call him.

Lynley thanked the man, said all things being equal he’d prefer Mr. Larson, and showed him his Scotland Yard identification, at which point Larson seemed happy enough that Lynley had decided on maintaining a sense of formality between them. Larson said, “Ah. I suppose you don’t have a property you wish to let out?”

“You’d suppose correctly,” Lynley told him, and he asked if Larson had a few minutes to spare him. “I’d like to talk to you about Jonathan Parsons,” he said. “I understand you were once his partner.”

Larson was perfectly willing to have a chat about “poor Jon,” as he called him, and he ushered Lynley into his office. This was spare and masculine: leather and metal with pictures of the family in stark black frames. The much younger blonde wife, two children turned out in neat school uniforms, the horse, the dog, the cat, and the duck. They all looked a bit too professionally polished. Lynley wondered if they were real or the sort of pictures one finds in frames for sale in shops.

Larson didn’t wait to be interrogated. He launched into his story, and he needed very little encouragement to carry on with it. He had been partners with Jonathan Parsons and a bloke called Henry Waterfield, now deceased. Both of them were older than Larson by ten years or so, and because of this, he’d started out as a junior manager in the firm. But he was a go-getter, if he did say so himself, and in no time, he’d purchased rights to a full partnership. From that point on, it was the three of them until Waterfield’s death, at which point it was Parsons and Larson, which was a bit of a tongue twister so they hung on to the original name.

Everything went smoothly until the Parsons boy died, Larson told him. At that point, things began to fall apart. “Poor Jon wasn’t able to hold up his end, and who can blame him? He began to spend more and more of his time over in Pengelly Cove. That’s where the accident…the death—”

“Yes,” Lynley said. “I know. He apparently believed he knew who’d left his son in the sea cave.”

“Right. But he couldn’t get the police to move on the killer. No evidence, they told him. No evidence, no witness, and no one talking no matter how much pressure was applied wherever…There was literally nothing they could do. So he hired his own team, and when they failed, he hired another, and when they failed, he hired another and then another. He finally moved to the cove permanently…” Larson considered a photo on the wall—an aerial view of Exeter—as if this would take him back in time. “I think it must have been two years after Jamie’s death. Perhaps three? He said he wanted to be there to remind people that the murder—he always called it a murder, no matter what—had gone unpunished. He accused the police of botching the matter from start to finish. He was…obsessed, frankly. But I can’t fault him for that. I didn’t then and I don’t now. Still, he wasn’t bringing in any money to the business and while I could have carried him for a time, he began to…Well, he called it ‘borrowing.’ He was maintaining a house and a family—there are three other children, all of them daughters—here in Exeter, he was maintaining a house in Pengelly Cove, and he was orchestrating a series of investigations with people wanting to be paid for their time and effort. Things got too much for him. He needed money and he took it.” Behind his desk, Larson steepled the fingers of his hands. “I felt awful,” he said, “but my choices were clear: to let Jon run us into the ground or to call him on what he was doing. I chose. It’s not pretty, but I didn’t see I had a choice.”

“Embezzlement.”

Larson held up a hand. “I couldn’t go that far. Couldn’t and wouldn’t, not after what had happened to the poor sod. But I told him he’d have to hand over the business, as it was the only way I could see to save it. He wasn’t going to stop.”

“Stop?”

“Trying to get the killer brought to justice.”

“The police thought it was a prank gone very bad, not a premeditated murder. Not a murder at all.”

“It certainly could have been, but Jon didn’t see it that way. He adored that boy. He was devoted enough to all the children, but he was particularly mad about Jamie. He was the sort of dad we all want to be and we all wish we had, if you know what I mean. They deep-sea-fished, they skied, they surfed, they backpacked in Asia. When Jon said the boy’s name, he just blazed with pride.”

“I’ve heard the boy was…” Lynley sought a word. “I’ve heard he was rather difficult for the local children in Pengelly Cove.”

Larson drew his eyebrows together. They were thin brows, rather womanly. Lynley wondered if the man had them waxed. “I don’t know about that. He was essentially a good kid. Oh, perhaps he was a bit full of himself, considering the family probably had a good deal more money than the village children’s families, and considering the preferential treatment he got from his dad. But what boy that age isn’t full of himself anyway?”

Larson went on to complete the story, one that took a turn that was sad but not unusual, given what Lynley knew about families who faced the anguish of a child’s untimely death. Not long after Parsons lost the business, his wife divorced him. She returned to university as a mature student, completed her education, and ultimately became head teacher at the local comprehensive. Larson thought she’d remarried as well, somewhere along the line, but he wasn’t certain. Someone at the comprehensive would likely be able to tell him.

“What became of Jonathan Parsons?” Lynley asked.

He was still in Pengelly Cove, as far as Larson knew.

“And the daughters?” Lynley asked.

Larson hadn’t a clue.

DAIDRE HAD SPENT PART of her early morning thinking about allegiance. She knew that some people firmly believed in the principle of every man for himself. Her problem had always been an inability to adhere to that principle.

She considered the idea of what she owed other people versus what she owed herself. She thought about duty, but she also thought about vengeance. She considered the ways in which “getting even” was merely a questionable euphemism for “learning nothing.” She tried to decide whether there actually were life lessons to be learned or whether life was all a mindless tumble through the years without rhyme or reason.

She ultimately faced the truth that she had no answer to any of the larger philosophical questions about life. So she decided to take the action that was directly in front of her, and she went into Casvelyn to fulfill DI Hannaford’s request for a conversation.

The inspector fetched her personally from reception. Hannaford was accompanied by another woman whom Daidre recognised as the ill-dressed driver of the Mini, who had spoken to Thomas Lynley in the car park of the Salthouse Inn. Hannaford introduced her as DS Barbara Havers. She added, “New Scotland Yard,” to this, and Daidre felt a chill come over her. She had no time to speculate on what this meant, however, for after a marginally hostile, “Come with us, then,” from Hannaford, she was being led into the bowels of the station, a brief journey of some fifteen paces that took them to what appeared to be the sole interview room.

It was clear that not a lot of interviewing went on in Casvelyn. Past a wall of what seemed to be boxes of toilet tissue and kitchen towels, a disabled card table of three straight legs and one with a bulbous elbow held a small cassette recorder that looked dusty enough to seed vegetables on. There were no chairs to speak of, just a three-step ladder, although an angry shout from Hannaford in the direction of the stairway obviated the necessity of their having to use the boxes of tissue and towels for that purpose. Sergeant Collins—as he was called—came on the run. He quickly provided them with uncomfortable plastic chairs, batteries for the tape player, and a cassette. This turned out to be an ancient Lulu’s Greatest Hits—vintage 1970—but, obviously, it was going to have to do.