Careless in Red

by Elizabeth George

  “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, th
ey 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.

  Daidre wanted to ask the purpose of making a recording of their conversation, but she knew the question would be taken as disingenuous. So she sat and waited for what would happen next, which was DS Havers’s digging a small spiral notebook from the pocket of her donkey jacket, which, for some reason, she had not removed despite the uncomfortable tropical temperature in the building.

  DI Hannaford asked Daidre if she wanted anything before they began. Coffee, tea, juice, water? Daidre demurred. She was fine, she replied, and then found herself wondering about that response. What she wasn’t at all was fine. She was uneasy in the head, weak in the palms, and determined not to appear that way.

  There seemed only one manner in which to do that: by taking the offensive. She said, “You left me this note,” and produced the DI’s card with its scrawled message on the back. “What is it you want to talk to me about?”

  “I’d think that was rather obvious,” Hannaford said, “as we’re in the middle of a murder enquiry.”

  “Actually, it’s not obvious at all.”

  “Then it will be, soon enough, my dear.” Hannaford was deft about putting the cassette into the tape player although she looked as if she had her doubts on the matter of its properly working. She punched a button, gazed at the turning wheel of the cassette, and recited the date, the time, and the individuals present. Then she said to Daidre, “Tell us about Santo Kerne, Dr. Trahair.”

  “What about him?”

  “Whatever you know.”

  This was all routine: the first few moves in the cat-and-mouse of an interrogation. Daidre answered as simply as she could. “I know that he died in a fall from the north cliff at Polcare Cove.”

  Hannaford didn’t look pleased with the response. “How good of you to make that clear to us. You knew who he was when you saw him, didn’t you.” She made it a statement, not a question. “So our first interaction was based on a lie. Yes?”

  DS Havers wrote with a pencil, Daidre saw. It scritched against the notebook paper and the sound—normally innocuous—was fingernails on a blackboard in this situation.

  Daidre said, “I hadn’t got a good look at him. There wasn’t time.”

  “But you checked for vital signs, didn’t you? You were first on the scene. How could you check for signs of life without looking at him?”

  “One doesn’t need to look at the victim’s face to check for signs of life, Inspector.”

  “That’s a coy reply. How realistic is it to check for vital signs without looking at someone? As the first person on the scene and even in the fading daylight—”

  “I was second on the scene,” Daidre interrupted. “Thomas Lynley was first.”

  “But you wanted to see the body. You asked to see the body. You insisted. You didn’t take Superintendent Lynley’s word for it that the boy was dead.”

  “I didn’t know he was Superintendent Lynley,” Daidre told her. “I arrived at the cottage and found him inside. He might have been a housebreaker for all I knew. He was a total stranger, completely unkempt, as you saw for yourself, looking rather wild and claiming there was a body in the cove and he needed to be taken somewhere to make a phone call about it. It hardly made sense to me to agree to drive him anywhere without checking first to make sure he was telling me the truth.”

  “Or checking yourself to discover who the boy was. Did you think it might be Santo?”

  “I had no idea who it was going to be. How would I have? I wanted to see if I could help in some way.”

  “In what way?”

  “If he was injured—”

  “You’re a veterinarian, Dr. Trahair. You’re not an emergency physician. How did you expect to help him?”

  “Injuries are injuries. Bones are bones. If I could help—”

  “And when you saw him, you knew who he was. You were quite familiar with the boy, weren’t you.”

  “I knew who Santo Kerne was, if that’s what you mean. This isn’t a heavily populated area. Most people know each other eventually, if only by sight.”

  “But I expect you knew him a little bit more intimately than by sight.”

  “Then you’d expect incorrectly.”

  “That’s not what’s been reported, Dr. Trahair. Indeed, I have to tell you that’s not what’s been witnessed.”

  Daidre swallowed. She realised that DS Havers had ceased writing, and she wasn’t sure when that had occurred. This told her she’d been less aware than she needed to be, and she wanted
to get back on the footing she’d begun with. She said to DS Havers, past the heavy pounding of her own heart, “New Scotland Yard. Are you the only officer from London here to work on this case? Aside from Superintendent Lynley, I mean.”

  Hannaford said, “Dr. Trahair, that’s nothing to do with—”

  “New Scotland Yard. The Met. But you must be from the…What would they call it? The crime side? The murder side? CID? Or do they call it something else these days?”

  Havers made no reply. She did, however, give a glance to Hannaford.

  “I expect you know Thomas Lynley as well, then. If he’s from New Scotland Yard and you’re from New Scotland Yard and you both work in the same—the same field, shall I say?—then you must be acquainted. Would I be correct?”

  “Whether Sergeant Havers and Superintendent Lynley are acquainted is none of your concern,” Hannaford said. “We’ve a witness putting Santo Kerne at your front door, Dr. Trahair. We’ve a witness putting him inside your cottage in times past. If you’d like to explain how someone you knew only by sight came knocking at your door and gaining admittance to your home, we’d very much like to listen.”

  “I expect it’s you who went to Falmouth asking about me,” Daidre said to Havers.

  Havers looked at her blankly, a good poker face. But Hannaford, surprisingly, gave away the game. She directed her attention suddenly, if briefly, to Havers, and there was something of speculation in her look. Daidre took this for surprise, and she drew a logical conclusion from it.

  “And I expect Thomas Lynley—and not DI Hannaford—told you to do it.” She stated this flatly. She didn’t want to dwell on how she felt about the fact, and she had no need of a reply because she knew she was right.