Careless in Red (Inspector Lynley, #15)(12)

She looked up from her book and considered the two men in the sitting room with her. The policeman from Casvelyn had introduced himself as Sergeant Paddy Collins, and he had a Belfast accent to prove the name was genuine. He was sitting upright in a straight-back chair that he’d brought from the kitchen table, as if to take one of the armchairs in the sitting room would have indicated a dereliction of duty. He still had a notebook open on his knee and he was regarding the other man as he’d regarded him from the first: with undisguised suspicion.

Who could blame him, Daidre thought. The hiker was a questionable character. Aside from his appearance and his odour, which in and of themselves might not have raised doubts in the mind of a policeman querying his presence in this part of the world since the South-West Coast Path was a well-used trail, at least in fair-weather months, there was the not small detail of his voice. He was obviously well educated and probably well bred, and Paddy Collins had done more than raise an eyebrow when the man had told him he had no identification with him.

Collins had said incredulously, “What d’you mean, you’ve no identification? You got no driving licence, man? No bank cards? Nothing?”

“Nothing,” Thomas said. “I’m terribly sorry.”

“So you could be bloody anyone, that it?”

“I suppose I could be.” Thomas sounded as if he wished that were the case.

“And I’m meant to believe whatever you say about yourself?” Collins asked him.

Thomas appeared to take the question as rhetorical, as he’d given no answer. But he hadn’t seemed bothered by the threat implied in the sergeant’s tone. He’d merely gone to the small window and gazed out towards the beach although it couldn’t actually be seen from the cottage. There he’d remained, motionless and looking as if he were barely breathing.

Daidre wanted to ask him what his injuries were. When she’d first come upon him in her cottage, it hadn’t been blood on his face or his clothes nor had it been anything obvious about his body that had prompted her to offer him her aid as a doctor. It had been the expression in his eyes. He was in inconceivable agony: an internal injury but not a physical one. She could see that now. She knew the signs.

When Sergeant Collins stirred, rose, and made for the kitchen?probably for a cuppa, as Daidre had showed him where her supplies were kept?Daidre took the opportunity to speak to the hiker. She said, “Why were you walking along the coast alone and without identification, Thomas?”

Thomas didn’t turn from the window. He made no reply although his head moved marginally, which suggested that he was listening.

She said, “What if something happened to you? People fall from these cliffs. They put a foot wrong, they slip, they?”

“Yes,” he said. “I’ve seen the memorials, all along the way.”

They were up and down the coast, these memorials: sometimes as ephemeral as a bunch of dying flowers laid at the site of a fatal fall, sometimes a bench carved with a suitable phrase, sometimes something as lasting and permanent as a marker akin to a tombstone with the deceased’s name engraved upon it. Each was something to note the eternal passage of surfers, climbers, walkers, and suicides. It was impossible to be out hiking along the coastal path and not to come upon them.

“There was an elaborate one that I saw,” Thomas said, as if this were the one subject above all that she wished to discuss with him. “A table and a bench, this was, both done in granite. Granite’s what you want if standing the test of time is important, by the way.”

“You haven’t answered me,” she pointed out.

“I rather thought I just had.”

“If you’d fallen?”

“I still might do,” he said. “When I walk on. When this is over.”

“Wouldn’t you want your people to know? You have people, I daresay.” She didn’t add, Your sort usually do, but the remark was implied.

He didn’t respond. The kettle clicked off in the kitchen with a loud snap. The sound of pouring water came to them. She’d been correct: a cuppa for the sergeant.

She said, “What about your wife, Thomas?”

He remained completely motionless. He said, “My wife.”

She said, “You’re wearing a wedding ring, so I presume you have a wife. I presume she’d want to know if something happened to you. Wouldn’t she?”

Collins came out of the kitchen then. But Daidre had the impression that the other man wouldn’t have responded, even had the sergeant not returned to them.

Collins said with a gesture of his teacup that sloshed liquid into its saucer, “Hope you don’t mind.”

Daidre said, “No. It’s fine.”

From the window Thomas said, “Here’s the detective.” He sounded indifferent to the reprieve.

Collins went to the door. From the sitting room, Daidre heard him exchange a few words with a woman. She was, when she came into the room, an utterly unlikely sort.

Daidre had only ever seen detectives on the television on the rare occasions when she watched one of the police dramas that littered the airwaves. They were always coolly professional and dressed in a tediously similar manner that was supposed to reflect either their psyches or their personal lives. The women were compulsively perfect?tailored to within an inch of their lives and not a hair out of place?and the men were disheveled. One group had to make it in a man’s world. The other had to find a good woman to act the role of saviour.