Careless in Red (Inspector Lynley, #15)(123)

“I blame the effing politicians,” Selevan said darkly. “They made the world in the state it’s in today and that’s why the girl’s working to get herself holy. Trying to prepare for the end of days, she is. And, there’s no one been able to talk her out of it.”

“That what she says?”

“Eh?” Selevan took the scapular and shoved it into the breast pocket of his shirt. “She says she wants a prayerful life. That’s her very words. ‘I want a prayerful life, Grandie. I believe it’s what everyone should aspire to.’ As if sitting alone in a cave somewhere and eating grass for your meals and drinking your own piss once a week is going to do one bleeding thing to solve the world’s problems.”

“That’s the plan, is it?”

“Oh I don’t know what the effing plan is. No one knows, and that includes the girl. You see how it is? She hears about a cult she can join and she means to join it because this cult?unlike the rest of the God damn cults out there?is the one that’s going to save the world.”

Jago looked thoughtful. Selevan hoped the other man was coming up with a solution to the problem of Tammy. But Jago said nothing, so Selevan had to speak again. He said, “I can’t get through to the girl. Can’t even begin to. Found a letter under her bed and they were telling her to come on by and check things out, have an interview here so’s we c’n take the measure of you and see if you’re suitable and if we like you and whatever else. I show her I found it and she goes off her chump ’cause I’m doing the snoop through her things.”

Jago looked thoughtful. He scratched his head. “Were, eh?” he said.

“What’s that?”

“You were doing the snoop. I’n’t that the case?”

“I got to. If I don’t, her mum’s all over me like melted cheese on the radiator. She says, ‘We need you to make her see the light. Someone’s got to make her see the light before it’s too late.’”

“That’s just the problem,” Jago pointed out. “That’s where the lot of you ’re going wrong.”

“Which’s where?” Selevan spoke to his friend without defence. If he was going at this problem of Tammy in the wrong way, he meant to learn the right way at once, and he’d come to Jago because of that.

“The devil of young people,” Jago said, “is that they got to be allowed to take their own decisions, mate.”

“But?”

“Hear me out. It’s part of making their way to being grown. They take a decision, they make a mistake, and if no one rushes like the fire brigade to save them from the outcome, they learn from the whole experience. ’Tisn’t the job of the dad?or the granddad or the mum or the gran?to keep them from learning what they got to learn, mate. What they got to do is help work out the end of the story.”

Selevan could see this. He could even run it through his mind and largely agree with it. But agreement was a process of intellect. It had nothing to do with heart. Jago’s position in life?having no children or grandkids of his own?made it simple for him to adhere to this admirable philosophy. It also explained why the young people felt able to talk to him. They talked; he listened. Likely, it was similar to sharing one’s secrets with a wall. But what was the point if the wall didn’t say, “Hang on a minute. You’re making a bloody fool of yourself”? Or, “You’re choosing wrong, damn it”? Or, “Listen to me cos I been alive about sixty years longer’n you and those years damn well ought to count for something or what’s the point in having lived them”? Beyond that, didn’t parents and grandparents have some right to sort out their offspring, not to mention to determine what the offspring would be doing with the rest of their lives? That was what had happened to him, wasn’t it? He may not have liked it, he may not have wanted it, he may not in a hundred years have chosen it for himself, but wasn’t he a better and stronger person for having rubbished his dreams of the Royal Navy in favour of a dutiful life on the farm?

Jago was watching him, one bushy eyebrow raised above the frame of his worn-out specs. His expression said that he knew what Selevan was thinking about Jago-as-listener and he didn’t disagree with Selevan’s assessment. He said, “There’s more to it than that, mate, despite what you’re thinking. If you get to know ’em, you end up caring and you end up hating to see ’em decide something that you know’s for the bad. But no one listens when they’re young. Did you?”

Selevan dropped his gaze. For that was the fly in the ointment of his life, when everything was laid out in front of him. He had listened. He had chosen as he’d been told to choose. And doing that hadn’t spared him a lifetime of regret. Indeed, it was the single cause of it.

“Bloody hell,” he sighed. He put his head in his hands.

“The very thing,” his friend Jago Reeth agreed.

BEA HANNAFORD HADN’T STARTED her day in the best of moods, and her outlook wasn’t improving during her meeting with New Scotland Yard’s detective sergeant Barbara Havers. Upon the sergeant’s arrival in Casvelyn, Bea had instructed her to check into the Salthouse Inn and to do some serious trolling through what Thomas Lynley had so far managed to discover about Dr. Trahair. She knew DS Havers had long worked with Lynley in London, and if anyone was going to be able to wring something out of the man, it had seemed to Hannaford that it was going to be Barbara Havers. But “apparently clean so far” was the extent of what Havers had to report about Lynley’s excursions into the mysterious Daidre Trahair’s background, which made Hannaford wonder about her own wisdom in the entire affair. She, after all, had accepted the offer of the Met’s assistant commissioner Sir David Hillier to send Lynley’s former partner on loan to work the murder enquiry. The response of “He says she’s clean so far but he’s carrying on” in answer to “What do we know from Superintendent Lynley about Dr. Trahair?” had not been what Hannaford wished to hear. It had made her wonder about loyalties and where they ought to be lying.