Careless in Red

by Elizabeth George

  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 o
f 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.

  He walked from the car park to the police station at the end of Lansdown Road. This was a narrow cobbled lane of white terrace houses, ill roofed and largely stained by rainwater from rusty gutters. Most of them had fallen into the disrepair prevalent in the poorer sections of Cornwall, where gentrification had not yet extended its greedy fingers. One of them was undergoing refurbishment, however, its scaffolding suggesting that better times for someone had come to the neighbourhood.

  The police station was an eyesore, even here, a grey stucco building with nothing of architectural interest to recommend itself. It was flat in front and flat on top, a shoe box with occasional windows and a notice board near its door.

  Inside, a small vestibule offered a line of three institutional plastic chairs and a reception counter. Bea Hannaford sat behind this, the telephone receiver pressed to her ear. She raised a finger in greeting to Lynley and said to whoever was on the other end of the line, “Got it. Well, there’s no surprise in that, is there?…We’ll want to have another little chat with her, won’t we, then.”

  She rang off and took Lynley up to the incident room, which was set up on the first floor of the building in what seemed to be otherwise a conference room, coffee room, locker room, and meal room. Up here they were making do with a few china boards and computers set up with HOLMES but clearly an insufficiency of manpower. The constable and the sergeant were hard at it, Lynley saw, and two other officers were huddled together exchanging either information on the case or background on the horses currently running at Newmarket. It was difficult to tell. Actions were listed on the china board, some completed and others pending.

  DI Hannaford said to Sergeant Collins, “Man reception, Sergeant,” and then to Lynley when Collins left the room to do so, “She was lying, as it turns out.”

  He said, “Who?” although there was only one she they’d been looking at, as far as he knew.

  “Pro forma question, isn’t that?” the DI said meaningfully. “Our Dr. Trahair, that’s who. Not a pub remembers her on the route she claimed she took from Bristol. And she’d be remembered this time of year, considering how few people are out and about in this part of the country.”

  “Perhaps,” he said. “But there must be a hundred pubs involved.”

  “Not the way she came. Claiming that was the route may have been her first mistake. And where there’s one, there are others, trust me. What’ve you got on her?”

  Lynley related what he’d gleaned from Falmouth about Daidre Trahair. He added what he knew about her brother, her work, and her education. Everything she’d said about herself checked out, he told her. So far, so good.

  “Why is it I think you’re not telling me everything there is to tell?” was Bea Hannaford’s reply after a moment of observing him. “Are you holding back something, Superintendent Lynley?”

  He wanted to say that he wasn’t Superintendent Lynley any longer. He wasn’t anything related to police work, which was why he also wasn’t required to tell her every fact he had acquired. But he said, “She’s doing some curious research on the Internet just now. There’s that, although I can’t see how it relates to murder.”

  “What sort of research?”

  “Miracles,” he said. “Or rather, places associated with miracles. Lourdes, for one. A church in New Mexico. There were others as well, but I didn’t have time to look through all the paperwork and I wasn’t wearing my reading glasses anyway. She’s been on the Internet at the Watchman. That’s the local paper. She knows the publisher, evidently.”

  “That’d be Max Priestley.” It was Constable McNulty speaking up from a computer in one corner of the room. “He’s been in touch with the dead boy, by the way.”

  “Has he indeed?” Bea Hannaford said. “Now that’s an interesting twist.” She told Lynley that the constable was digging through Santo Kerne’s old e-mails, looking for nuggets of information. “What’s he saying?”

  “‘No skin off my back. Just watch your own.’ I reckon it’s Priestley ’cause it’s come from MEP at Watchman.co, et cetera. Although it could have come from anyone who knows his password and has access to a computer at the paper, I s’pose.”

  “That’s it?” Hannaford asked the constable.

  “That’s it from Priestley. But there’s a whole collection from the Angarrack girl, coming straight out of LiquidEarth. The course of most of the relationship being charted. Casual, closer, intimate, hot, graphic, and then nothing else. Like once they started doing the nasty, she didn’t want to commit it to writing.”

  “Interesting, that,” Bea noted.

  “S’what I thought as well. But ‘wild for him’ doesn’t even touch how she felt about the boy. You ask me, I’ll wager she wouldn’t’ve said no to the idea of someone chopping off his bollocks when they got to the endgame, her and Santo. What d’they say about a woman’s scorn?”

  “‘A woman scorned,’” Lynley murmured.

  “Right. Well. I’d say we give her a closer look. She’d’ve likely had access to his climbing kit at some point. Or she’d’ve known where he kept it.”

  �
�She’s on our list,” Hannaford said. “Is that it, then?”

  “I’ve got e-mails from someone calling himself Freeganman as well, and I’d say that’s Mendick ’cause I doubt the town’s crawling with people of his ilk.”

  Hannaford explained the moniker to Lynley: how they’d come to know it and with whom it was associated. She said to the constable, “And what’s Mr. Mendick got to say for himself?”

  “‘Can we keep it between us?’ Not exactly illuminating, I’ll give you that, but still…”

  “A reason to talk to him, then. Let’s put Blue Star Grocery on the schedule.”

  “Right.” McNulty went back to the computer.

  Hannaford strode over to a desk where she dug in a heavy-looking shoulder bag. She brought forth a mobile phone. This she tossed to Lynley. She said, “Reception’s the devil round here, I’ve found, but I want you carrying this and I want it turned on.”

  “Your reason?” Lynley asked.

  “I need a stated reason, do I, Superintendent?”

  “If nothing else, because I outrank you” would have been his answer in other circumstances, but not in these. He said, “I’m curious. It suggests my usefulness to you hasn’t come to an end.”

  “That would be correct. I’m undermanned and I want you available to me.”

  “I’m not—”

  “Bollocks. Once a cop, always a cop. There’s a need here, and you and I know you’re not about to walk away from a situation where your help is required. Beyond that, you’re a principal figure and you’re not going anywhere without me coming after you until you have my blessing to leave, so you may as well make yourself useful to me.”

  “You’ve something in mind?”

  “Dr. Trahair. Details. Everything. From her shoe size to her blood type and all points in between.”

  “How am I supposed to—”

  “Oh please, Detective. Don’t take me for a fool. You’ve sources and you’ve charm. Use them both. Dig into her background. Take her on a picnic. Wine her. Dine her. Read her poetry. Caress her palm. Gain her trust. I don’t bloody care how you do it. Just do it. And when you’ve done it, I want it all. Are we clear on that?”