Careless in Red (Inspector Lynley, #15)(14)

“Where?”

“There was a pub. It’s not a place I usually stop. Not that I usually stop, but there was a pub and I was hungry and it said ‘pub meals’ out front, so I went in. This would be after I left the M5. I can’t remember its name. The pub’s. I’m sorry. I don’t think I even looked at the name. It was somewhere outside Crediton. I think.”

“You think. Interesting. What did you eat?”

“A ploughman’s.”

“What sort of cheese?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t pay attention. It was a ploughman’s. Cheese, bread, pickle, onion. I’m a vegetarian.”

“Of course you are.”

Daidre felt her temper flare. She hadn’t done anything, but the detective was making her feel as if she had. She said with some attempt at dignity, “I find that it’s rather difficult to care for animals on the one hand and eat them on the other, Inspector.”

“Of course you do,” DI Hannaford said thinly. “Do you know the dead boy?”

“I believe I already answered that question.”

“I seem to have lost the plot on that one. Tell me again.”

“I didn’t get a good look at him, I’m afraid.”

“And I’m afraid that isn’t what I asked you.”

“I’m not from around here. As I said, this is a getaway place for me. I come on the occasional weekend. Bank holidays. Longer holidays. I know a few people but mostly those who live close by.”

“This boy doesn’t live close by?”

“I don’t know him.” Daidre could feel the perspiration on her neck and she wondered if it was on her face as well. She wasn’t used to speaking to the police, and speaking to the police under these circumstances was especially unnerving.

A sharp double knock sounded on the front door then. But before anyone made a move to answer it, they heard it open. Two male voices?one of them the voice of Sergeant Collins?came from the entry, just ahead of the men themselves. Daidre was expecting the other to be the pathologist who Inspector Hannaford had indicated was on the way, but this was apparently not the case. Instead, the newcomer?tall, grey haired, and attractive?nodded to them and said to Hannaford, “Where’ve you got him stowed, then?” to which she answered, “He’s not in the car?”

The man shook his head. “As it happens, no.”

Hannaford said, “That bloody child. I swear. Thanks for coming at short notice, Ray.” Then she spoke to Daidre and Thomas. To Daidre she repeated, “I’ll want your clothes, Dr. Trahair. Sergeant Collins will bag them, so sort yourself out about that.” And to Thomas, “When SOCO arrives, we’ll get you a boiler suit to change into. In the meantime, Mr…. I don’t know your name.”

“Thomas,” he said.

“Mr. Thomas, is it? Or is Thomas your Christian name?”

He hesitated. Daidre thought for a moment that he meant to lie, because that was what it looked like. And he could lie, couldn’t he, since he had no identification with him. He could say he was absolutely anyone. He looked at the coal fire as if meditating on all the possibilities. Then he looked back at the detective. “Lynley,” he said. “It’s Thomas Lynley.”

There was a silence. Daidre looked from Thomas to the detective, and she saw the expression alter on Hannaford’s face. The face of the man she’d called Ray altered as well, and oddly enough, he was the one to speak. What he said was completely baffling to Daidre:

“New Scotland Yard?”

Thomas Lynley hesitated once again. Then he swallowed. “Until recently,” he said. “Yes. New Scotland Yard.”

“OF COURSE I KNOW who he is,” Bea Hannaford said tersely to her former husband. “I don’t live under a stone.” It was just like Ray to make the pronouncement as if from on high. Impressed with himself, he was. Devon and Cornwall Constabulary. Middlemore. Mr. Assistant Chief Constable. A pencil pusher, really, as far as Bea was concerned. Never had a promotion affected anyone’s demeanour so maddeningly. “The only question is, what the hell is he doing here, of all places?” she went on. “Collins tells me he isn’t even carrying identification with him. So he could be anyone, couldn’t he?”

“Could be. But he isn’t.”

“How d’you know? Have you met him?”

“I don’t need to have met him.”

Another indication of self-satisfaction. Had he always been like this and had she never seen it? Had she been so blinded by love or whatever it had been that had propelled her into marriage with this man? She hadn’t been ageing and Ray her only chance at having a home and family. She’d been twenty-one. And they had been happy, hadn’t they? Until Pete, they’d had their lives in order: one child only?a daughter?and that had been something of a disappointment, but Ginny had given them a grandchild soon enough into her own marriage and she was at this moment on her way to giving them more. Retirement had been beckoning them from the future and all the things they planned to do with retirement had been beckoning as well…. And then there was Pete, a complete surprise. Pleasant to her, unpleasant to Ray. The rest was history.

“Actually,” Ray said in that way he had of outing himself, which had always made her forgive him in the end for his worst displays of self-importance, “I saw in the paper that he comes from round here. His family are in Cornwall. The Penzance area.”