Careless in Red (Inspector Lynley, #15)(167)

“Don’t be absurd, Barbara. He damn well knew we want to talk to her. He should have told you. He should have phoned me. He should have done almost anything but what he did. This man is walking on very thin ice.”

Havers nodded. “That’s why I’m telling you. I mean, not because I know he’s on thin ice with you but because I know it’s important. I mean, it’s important not because he didn’t tell you but because…Not that she came to see him. That’s not the important bit. What I mean is that it’s important that she’s resurfaced and I thought?”

“All right, all right! Jesus in a teaspoon. Stop. I see I can’t expect you to grass his mighty lordship, no matter the situation, so I’m going to have to find someone willing to grass you. And it’s not like we’ve the manpower for that, is it, Sergeant? What, God damn it?”

This last she said to Sergeant Collins, who’d come to the door of the incident room. He was manning the phones below, for what little good it was doing, while the rest of the team continued with actions she’d assigned them earlier, most of which had them going over old ground.

“Dr. Trahair is here to see you, Guv,” Sergeant Collins told her. “She said you wanted her to come by the station.”

Bea pushed her chair back and said, “Well, thank God. Let’s hope we’re about to get someplace.”

AN UNANTICIPATED HOUR OF research in Exeter provided Lynley with the name of the property management company that, he discovered, was no longer owned by Jonathan Parsons, father of the long ago cave-drowning victim in Pengelly Cove. Previously called Parsons, Larson, and Waterfield, it was now R. Larson Estate Management, Ltd., and it was located not far from the medieval cathedral in an area that looked desirable for doing business. Its director turned out to be a questionably tanned, grey-bearded individual somewhere in his sixties. He appeared to favour jeans, exceptionally good dentistry, and blindingly white dress shirts worn without a necktie. R, Lynley discovered, stood for the unusual non-British name of Rocco. Larson’s mother?long gone to her eternal reward?had possessed a devotion to the more obscure Catholic saints, the man explained. It was an equal rights sort of thing. His sister was called Perpetua. Personally, he didn’t use Rocco. He used Rock, which Lynley was free to call him.

Lynley thanked the man, said all things being equal he’d prefer Mr. Larson, and showed him his Scotland Yard identification, at which point Larson seemed happy enough that Lynley had decided on maintaining a sense of formality between them. Larson said, “Ah. I suppose you don’t have a property you wish to let out?”

“You’d suppose correctly,” Lynley told him, and he asked if Larson had a few minutes to spare him. “I’d like to talk to you about Jonathan Parsons,” he said. “I understand you were once his partner.”

Larson was perfectly willing to have a chat about “poor Jon,” as he called him, and he ushered Lynley into his office. This was spare and masculine: leather and metal with pictures of the family in stark black frames. The much younger blonde wife, two children turned out in neat school uniforms, the horse, the dog, the cat, and the duck. They all looked a bit too professionally polished. Lynley wondered if they were real or the sort of pictures one finds in frames for sale in shops.

Larson didn’t wait to be interrogated. He launched into his story, and he needed very little encouragement to carry on with it. He had been partners with Jonathan Parsons and a bloke called Henry Waterfield, now deceased. Both of them were older than Larson by ten years or so, and because of this, he’d started out as a junior manager in the firm. But he was a go-getter, if he did say so himself, and in no time, he’d purchased rights to a full partnership. From that point on, it was the three of them until Waterfield’s death, at which point it was Parsons and Larson, which was a bit of a tongue twister so they hung on to the original name.

Everything went smoothly until the Parsons boy died, Larson told him. At that point, things began to fall apart. “Poor Jon wasn’t able to hold up his end, and who can blame him? He began to spend more and more of his time over in Pengelly Cove. That’s where the accident…the death?”

“Yes,” Lynley said. “I know. He apparently believed he knew who’d left his son in the sea cave.”

“Right. But he couldn’t get the police to move on the killer. No evidence, they told him. No evidence, no witness, and no one talking no matter how much pressure was applied wherever…There was literally nothing they could do. So he hired his own team, and when they failed, he hired another, and when they failed, he hired another and then another. He finally moved to the cove permanently…” Larson considered a photo on the wall?an aerial view of Exeter?as if this would take him back in time. “I think it must have been two years after Jamie’s death. Perhaps three? He said he wanted to be there to remind people that the murder?he always called it a murder, no matter what?had gone unpunished. He accused the police of botching the matter from start to finish. He was…obsessed, frankly. But I can’t fault him for that. I didn’t then and I don’t now. Still, he wasn’t bringing in any money to the business and while I could have carried him for a time, he began to…Well, he called it ‘borrowing.’ He was maintaining a house and a family?there are three other children, all of them daughters?here in Exeter, he was maintaining a house in Pengelly Cove, and he was orchestrating a series of investigations with people wanting to be paid for their time and effort. Things got too much for him. He needed money and he took it.” Behind his desk, Larson steepled the fingers of his hands. “I felt awful,” he said, “but my choices were clear: to let Jon run us into the ground or to call him on what he was doing. I chose. It’s not pretty, but I didn’t see I had a choice.”