Careless in Red (Inspector Lynley, #15)(169)

“Then it will be, soon enough, my dear.” Hannaford was deft about putting the cassette into the tape player although she looked as if she had her doubts on the matter of its properly working. She punched a button, gazed at the turning wheel of the cassette, and recited the date, the time, and the individuals present. Then she said to Daidre, “Tell us about Santo Kerne, Dr. Trahair.”

“What about him?”

“Whatever you know.”

This was all routine: the first few moves in the cat-and-mouse of an interrogation. Daidre answered as simply as she could. “I know that he died in a fall from the north cliff at Polcare Cove.”

Hannaford didn’t look pleased with the response. “How good of you to make that clear to us. You knew who he was when you saw him, didn’t you.” She made it a statement, not a question. “So our first interaction was based on a lie. Yes?”

DS Havers wrote with a pencil, Daidre saw. It scritched against the notebook paper and the sound?normally innocuous?was fingernails on a blackboard in this situation.

Daidre said, “I hadn’t got a good look at him. There wasn’t time.”

“But you checked for vital signs, didn’t you? You were first on the scene. How could you check for signs of life without looking at him?”

“One doesn’t need to look at the victim’s face to check for signs of life, Inspector.”

“That’s a coy reply. How realistic is it to check for vital signs without looking at someone? As the first person on the scene and even in the fading daylight?”

“I was second on the scene,” Daidre interrupted. “Thomas Lynley was first.”

“But you wanted to see the body. You asked to see the body. You insisted. You didn’t take Superintendent Lynley’s word for it that the boy was dead.”

“I didn’t know he was Superintendent Lynley,” Daidre told her. “I arrived at the cottage and found him inside. He might have been a housebreaker for all I knew. He was a total stranger, completely unkempt, as you saw for yourself, looking rather wild and claiming there was a body in the cove and he needed to be taken somewhere to make a phone call about it. It hardly made sense to me to agree to drive him anywhere without checking first to make sure he was telling me the truth.”

“Or checking yourself to discover who the boy was. Did you think it might be Santo?”

“I had no idea who it was going to be. How would I have? I wanted to see if I could help in some way.”

“In what way?”

“If he was injured?”

“You’re a veterinarian, Dr. Trahair. You’re not an emergency physician. How did you expect to help him?”

“Injuries are injuries. Bones are bones. If I could help?”

“And when you saw him, you knew who he was. You were quite familiar with the boy, weren’t you.”

“I knew who Santo Kerne was, if that’s what you mean. This isn’t a heavily populated area. Most people know each other eventually, if only by sight.”

“But I expect you knew him a little bit more intimately than by sight.”

“Then you’d expect incorrectly.”

“That’s not what’s been reported, Dr. Trahair. Indeed, I have to tell you that’s not what’s been witnessed.”

Daidre swallowed. She realised that DS Havers had ceased writing, and she wasn’t sure when that had occurred. This told her she’d been less aware than she needed to be, and she wanted to get back on the footing she’d begun with. She said to DS Havers, past the heavy pounding of her own heart, “New Scotland Yard. Are you the only officer from London here to work on this case? Aside from Superintendent Lynley, I mean.”

Hannaford said, “Dr. Trahair, that’s nothing to do with?”

“New Scotland Yard. The Met. But you must be from the…What would they call it? The crime side? The murder side? CID? Or do they call it something else these days?”

Havers made no reply. She did, however, give a glance to Hannaford.

“I expect you know Thomas Lynley as well, then. If he’s from New Scotland Yard and you’re from New Scotland Yard and you both work in the same?the same field, shall I say??then you must be acquainted. Would I be correct?”

“Whether Sergeant Havers and Superintendent Lynley are acquainted is none of your concern,” Hannaford said. “We’ve a witness putting Santo Kerne at your front door, Dr. Trahair. We’ve a witness putting him inside your cottage in times past. If you’d like to explain how someone you knew only by sight came knocking at your door and gaining admittance to your home, we’d very much like to listen.”

“I expect it’s you who went to Falmouth asking about me,” Daidre said to Havers.

Havers looked at her blankly, a good poker face. But Hannaford, surprisingly, gave away the game. She directed her attention suddenly, if briefly, to Havers, and there was something of speculation in her look. Daidre took this for surprise, and she drew a logical conclusion from it.

“And I expect Thomas Lynley?and not DI Hannaford?told you to do it.” She stated this flatly. She didn’t want to dwell on how she felt about the fact, and she had no need of a reply because she knew she was right.

What she did have a need for, on the other hand, was getting the police out of her life. Unfortunately, there was only one way to do this and it had to do with information: naming a name that would take them in a different direction. She found that she was willing to do that.