Careless in Red (Inspector Lynley, #15)(124)
She herself had spoken to Lynley. He’d reported on his excursion to Pengelly Cove on the previous afternoon, and she could tell his interest was now decidedly caught up in the Kernes. This was all well and good since everything had to be looked into eventually, but digging into the Kernes’ background was not going to keep Lynley interested in Daidre Trahair, and interested in Daidre Trahair was exactly where Bea Hannaford wanted him to be. The vet was a liar, no question about it. Based upon the way she had looked at Lynley when Bea had seen them together?a bit of a mix among compassion, admiration, and lust?Lynley had appeared to be the best road to drive along if the destination was sorting the doctor’s truths from the doctor’s lies. Now Bea wasn’t so sure.
So in speaking to Barbara Havers, Bea’s mood was blacker than it had been upon waking, and she wouldn’t have thought that possible. For she’d awakened with Pete’s questions and Pete’s comments of the previous day on her mind, which meant she’d awakened in exactly the same manner as she’d fallen asleep. Why do you hate him so much?…He loves you.
Clearly, it was time for another round of Internet dating, if only she could have spared the hours it would take to troll, to select, to contact, to try to discern if the individual was worth an evening, and then somehow to find that evening. And then…What would be the point, really? How many more toads was she going to have to dine with, drink with, or coffee with before one of them showed colours more princely than amphibious? Hundreds, it seemed. Thousands. All that and she wasn’t even sure she wanted another relationship anyway. She, Pete, and the dogs were doing fine on their own.
Thus, when Bea faced Barbara Havers in the vicinity of the china board as they looked over the day’s activities, she examined the Met sergeant with a critical eye having more to do with an assessment of her professional commitment than it had to do with an evaluation of her fashion sense, which was more deplorable than Bea would have thought possible in a female adult. Today DS Havers was wearing a lumpy fisherman’s sweater over a high-necked T-shirt with what looked like a coffee stain on its collar. She had on figure-reducing olive tweed trousers?easily an inch too short and possibly twelve years too old?and the same red high-top trainers on her feet. She looked like a cross between a street vagrant and a refugee fleeing from a war zone, with clothing provided from castoffs of Oxfam castoffs.
Bea tried to ignore all this. She said to her, “I’ve got the distinct impression Superintendent Lynley’s dragging his feet on the issue of Dr. Trahair. What do you think, Sergeant?” She then watched to gauge Havers’s answer.
“He might well be,” Havers replied easily enough. “Considering all that’s happened to him, he’s not exactly one hundred percent. But if she’s at the bottom of what happened to this kid and he susses it out, he’ll move on her. You can depend on him.”
“Are you saying I ought to allow him to pursue this in whatever way he sees fit?”
Havers didn’t reply at once. She looked at the china board. Careful thought could indicate her priorities, and Bea made this a mark in her favour.
“I think he’ll be okay,” Havers said. “The last thing he’s about to do is let anyone get away with murder, all things considered. If you know what I mean.”
Of course. There was that. What made him susceptible also made him a man who would never want another person to go through what he himself had gone through. Besides that, his very susceptibility could work in their favour since a vulnerable person was one in whose presence essential mistakes might be made by another person. These would be Dr. Trahair’s mistakes, naturally. Where she’d made one, she’d eventually make others.
Bea said, “All right. Come with me, then. We’ve a bloke in town who did a turn inside for doing the job on someone, down the south coast. This was a few years ago. He ended up crying ‘It’s the drink’ to the judge, but as the bloke on the receiving end of his attention came up a paraplegic?”
“Bloody hell,” DS Havers said.
“?the judge sent him away. He’s out now, but so’s his temper and his proclivity for the drink. He knew Santo Kerne, and someone blackened Santo Kerne’s eye shortly before his death. Given, it’s not the sort of beating put this bloke away, but he wants a thorough talking to.”
Will Mendick was at his place of employment, a modern brick supermarket looking wildly out of place as it stood at the junction of the top of Belle Vue and St. Mevan Crescent, which Bea pointed out to Havers as the route to Adventures Unlimited, a visible hulk out on the promontory. The market was also a very short distance from the baked delights of Casvelyn of Cornwall, and when they alighted from Bea’s Land Rover in the car park at the back of the grocery, the morning breeze was sending the fragrance of fresh pasties in their direction. Barbara Havers cut into this perfume by lighting a cigarette. She pulled at it hungrily as they walked along the side of the building to its front door, managing to smoke half of it before they entered.
In an extremely optimistic embracing of spring, the supermarket’s management had turned off the heating, so it was frigid within. Custom was sparse at this time of day, and only one of the six tills was open. A question at it led Bea and Sergeant Havers towards the back of the premises. There, two swinging doors closed off the warehouse where goods were stored. NO ADMITTANCE and STAFF ONLY were posted upon them.