Careless in Red (Inspector Lynley, #15)(164)

“That’s where you’ve been today?”

“There and Newquay. Pengelly Cove as well. I stopped by your cottage this morning to invite you along, but you were nowhere to be found. Did you go off for the day?”

“I like driving in the countryside,” Daidre said. “It’s one of the reasons I come down here when I can.”

“Understandable. I like it as well.” He shifted the box, held it at an angle against his hip in that way men have, so different to the way women hold something bulky, she thought. He regarded her. He looked healthier than he had four days ago. There was a small spark of life about him that had not been present then. She wondered if it had to do with being caught up in police work again. Perhaps it was something that got into one’s blood: the intellectual excitement of the puzzle of the crime and the physical excitement of the chase.

“You’ve work to do.” She indicated the box. “I was hoping for a word, if you had the time.”

“Were you?” He lifted an eyebrow. The smile again. “I’m happy to give it to you?the word, the time, whatever. Let me put this in my room and I can meet you…in the bar? Five minutes?”

She didn’t want it to be the bar, now that Jago Reeth and Selevan Penrule were within. More of the regulars would be arriving as the time wore on, and she wasn’t enthusiastic about the prospect of gossip developing over Dr. Trahair’s intimate conversation with the Scotland Yard detective.

She said, “I’d prefer some place a bit more private. Is there…?” Aside from the restaurant, whose doors were closed and would be for another hour at least, there was really no other spot where they could meet aside from his room.

He seemed to conclude this at the same moment she did. He said, “Come up, then. The accommodations are monastic, but I’ve tea if you’re not averse to PG tips and those grim little containers of milk. I believe there’re ginger biscuits as well.”

“I’ve had my tea. But thanks, yes. I think your room’s the best place.”

She followed him up the stairs. She’d never been above in the Salthouse Inn, and it felt odd to be there now, treading down the little corridor in the wake of a man, as if they had an assignation of some sort. She found herself hoping that no one would see and misinterpret, and then she asked herself why and what did it matter anyway?

The door wasn’t locked?“Didn’t seem to be a point, as I have nothing here for someone to steal,” he noted?and he ushered her within, politely stepping to one side to allow her to precede him into the room. He was right in calling it monastic, she saw. It was quite clean and brightly painted, but spare. There was only the bed to sit on unless one wished to perch on the small chest of drawers. The bed itself seemed vast although it was only a single. Daidre found herself getting hot in the face when she took it in, so she looked away.

A basin was fitted into the corner of the room, and Lynley went to this after setting his cardboard box on the floor, carefully, against the wall. He hung up the jacket he was wearing?she could see that he was a man who was diligent about his clothing?and he washed his hands.

Now that she was here, she wasn’t sure of anything. Instead of the anxiety she’d been feeling earlier when Cilla Cormack had brought her the news of Scotland Yard’s interest in her and her family in Falmouth, she now felt awkward and shy. She told herself it was because Thomas Lynley seemed to fill the room. He was a good-size man, several inches over six feet tall, and the result of being in such a confined space with him appeared to be having her ridiculously melting into Victorian-maiden-caught-in-a-compromising-situation. It was nothing he was doing, particularly. It was, rather, the simple fact of him and the tragic aura that seemed to surround him, despite his pleasant demeanour. But the fact that she was feeling other than she would have liked to be feeling made Daidre impatient, both with him and with herself.

She sat at the foot of the bed. Before she did so, she handed him the note she’d found from DI Hannaford. He told her that the inspector had arrived at her cottage shortly after his own arrival that morning. “I see you’re in demand,” he said.

“I’ve come for your advice.” This wasn’t altogether true, but it was a good place to begin, she decided. “What do you recommend?”

He went to the head of the bed and sat. “About this?” He gestured with the card. “I recommend that you talk to her.”

“Have you any idea what it’s about?”

He said, after a revealing moment of hesitation, that he had not. “But whatever it is,” he said, “I suggest you be completely truthful. I think it’s always best to tell investigators the truth. In general, I think it’s best to tell the truth full stop, one way or another.”

“And if the truth is that I killed Santo Kerne?”

He hesitated a moment before replying. “I don’t believe that is the truth, frankly.”

“Are you a truthful man yourself, Thomas?”

“I try to be.”

“Even in the middle of a case?”

“Especially then. When it’s appropriate. Sometimes, with a suspect, it’s not.”

“Am I a suspect?”

“Yes,” he told her. “Unfortunately, you are.”

“So that would be why you went to Falmouth to ask about me.”