Careless In Red (33 page)

“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.