Careless in Red (Inspector Lynley, #15)(194)

“Sergeant? Less smoke and more mirrors, please. Something tells me that if anyone on earth knows exactly where Thomas Lynley is and what he’s doing, you’re going to be that person. Where is he?”

Havers ran a hand through her hair. The gesture did nothing at all to improve its state. She said, “All right. This is stupid and I’ll wager he’d rather you didn’t know.”

“What?”

“His socks were wet.”

“I beg your pardon? Sergeant, if this is some kind of joke…”

“It’s not. He hasn’t enough clothes with him. He washed both pairs of his socks last night and they didn’t dry. Probably,” she added with a roll of her eyes, “because he’s never had to personally wash his socks in his life.”

“And are you telling me…?”

“That he’s at the hotel drying his socks. Yes. That’s what I’m telling you. He’s using a hair dryer and, knowing him, he’s probably set the building on fire by now. We’re talking about a bloke who doesn’t even make his own toast in the morning, Guv. Like I said, he washed them last night and he didn’t put them on the radiator or wherever. He just left them…wherever he left them. As far as the rest of his kit goes?”

Bea raised her hand. “Enough information. Believe me. Whatever he may have done with his pantaloons is between him and his God. When can we expect him?”

Havers’s teeth pulled at the inside of her lower lip in a fashion that suggested discomfort. There was something more going on.

Bea said, “What is it?” as, from below, a courier’s envelope was brought up the stairs in the hands of one of the team members already heading out on his assignment. It had just come, the constable told her, two blokes having been working with the relevant software for hours. Bea opened the envelope. The contents comprised six pages, not fixed together. She flipped through them as she said, “Where is he, Sergeant, and when can we expect him?”

Havers said, “Dr. Trahair.”

“What about her?”

“She was in the car park when I left this morning. I think she was waiting for him.”

“Was she indeed?” Bea looked up from the paperwork. “That’s an interesting wrinkle.” She handed the sheets to Havers. “Have a look at these,” she told her.

“What are they, then?”

“They’re age progressions. From that photograph Thomas handed over. I think you’re going to find them of interest.”

DAIDRE TRAHAIR HESITATED JUST outside his door. She could hear the sound of the hair dryer from within, so she knew that Sergeant Havers had been telling her the truth. It hadn’t seemed so. Indeed, when Daidre had confronted the sergeant in the car park of the Salthouse Inn, asking for Thomas Lynley, the idea that he might not be present because he was actually drying his socks had sounded like the lamest sort of excuse for his absence from Sergeant Havers’s side. On the other hand, the DS from London hardly had a reason to invent an activity for Lynley to be engaging in in order to hide the fact that he might instead be spending yet another day scouring through the detritus of Daidre’s past. For it seemed to Daidre at this point that he’d done as much scouring as he’d be able to do without her own participation.

She knocked on his door sharply. The dryer switched off. The door swung open. “Sorry, Barbara. I’m afraid they’re still not?” He saw it was Daidre. “Hullo,” he said with a smile. “You’re out and about early, aren’t you?”

“The sergeant told me…I saw her in the car park. She said you were drying your socks.”

He had a sock in one hand and the dryer in the other, proof of the matter. He said, “I did try to wear them at breakfast, but I found there’s something particularly disturbing about damp socks. Shades of World War I and life in the trenches, I suppose. Would you like to come in?” He stepped back and she passed him, into the room. The bed was unmade. A towel lay in a heap on the floor. A notebook had scribbles of pencil in it, with car keys sitting on its open pages. “I thought they’d dry by morning,” he said. “Foolishly, I washed both pairs. I hung them by the window all night. I even cracked it open for air. It was all for nothing. According to Sergeant Havers, I should have shown some common sense and considered the radiator. You don’t mind…?”

She shook her head. He began his work with the hair dryer again. She watched him. He’d nicked himself shaving, and he’d apparently not noticed: A thin line of blood traced along his jaw. It was the sort of thing his wife would have seen and told him about as he left the house in the morning.

She said, “This isn’t the sort of thing I’d expect the lord of the manor to be doing.”

“What? Drying his own socks?”

“Doesn’t someone like you have…What do you call them? People?”

“Well, I can’t see my sister drying my socks. My brother would be as useless as I am, and my mother would likely throw them at me.”

“I don’t mean family people. I mean people people. Servants. You know.”

“I suppose it depends on what you think of as servants. We have staff at Howenstow?that’s the family pile, if I’ve not mentioned its name?and I’ve a man who oversees the house in London. But I’d hardly call him a servant and can a single employee actually be called staff? Besides that, Charlie Denton comes and goes fairly at will. He’s a theatre lover with personal aspirations.”