Careless in Red

by Elizabeth George

  “Don’t make fun,” she told him. “I’m trying to tell you…But there’s nothing and there’s no one that I can ask, you see. So I’m asking you, as it’s the only thing left that I can think to do. I s’pose I’m asking for help, Grandie.”

  Now, he thought, they were down to it. This was the moment the girl’s parents had hoped for, time with her granddad paying off. He waited for more. He made a hmph noise to indicate his willingness to listen. The moments ticked by as they approached Casvelyn. She said nothing more till they were in town.

  Then it was brief. He’d pulled to the kerb in front of Clean Barrel Surf Shop before she finally spoke. “If I know something,” she said to him, her eyes fixed on the shop’s front door, “and if what I know might cause someone trouble…What should I do, Grandie? That’s what I’ve been asking God, but he hasn’t answered. What should I do? I could keep asking because when something bad happens to someone you care about, it seems like—”

  “The Kerne boy,” he interrupted. “D’you know something about the Kerne boy, Tammy? Look at me square, girl, not out of the window.”

  She did. He could see she was troubled beyond what he had thought. So there was only one answer, and despite the irritations it might cause in his own life, he owed it to her to give it. “You know something, you tell the police,” he said. “Nothing else to it. You do it today.”

  Chapter Twelve

  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 w
allet 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?”