Careless in Red (Inspector Lynley, #15)(37)

“I saw you with your arms linked, girl.”

She cocked her head as she looked at him. She studied his face and then she smiled. She removed her hands from the water and, dripping as they were, she put her arms around him. She kissed him even as he stiffened and tried to resist her. She said, “Dear Grandie. Linking arms doesn’t mean what it might have meant once. It means friendship. And that’s the honest truth.”

“Honest,” he said. “Bah.”

“It is. I always try to be honest.”

“With yourself as well?”

“Especially with myself.” She went back to the washing up and cleaned her gruel bowl carefully, and then she began on the cutlery. She’d done it all before she spoke again. And then she spoke in a very low voice, which Selevan might have missed altogether had he not been straining to hear something quite different from what she next said.

“I told him to be honest as well,” she murmured. “If I hadn’t, Grandie…I’m rather worried about that.”





Chapter Six


“YOU AND I BOTH KNOW THAT YOU CAN ARRANGE THIS IF YOU want to, Ray. That’s all I’m asking you to do.” Bea Hannaford raised her mug of morning coffee and watched her ex-husband over the rim of it, trying to determine how much further she could push him. Ray felt guilty for a number of things, and Bea was never beyond a session of button pressing in what she considered a good cause.

“It’s just not on,” he said. “And even if it was done, I don’t have those kinds of strings to pull.”

“Assistant chief constable? Oh please.” She refrained from rolling her eyes. She knew he hated that, and he’d score a point if she did it. There were times when having experienced nearly twenty years of marriage with someone came in very handy, and this was one of those times. “You can’t intend me to take that onboard.”

“You can do with it what you will,” Ray said. “Anyway, you don’t know what you’ve got yet, and you won’t know till you hear from forensics, so you’re jumping the gun. Which, by the way, you’re very good at doing if it comes down to it.”

That, she thought, was below the belt. It was one of those ex-husband kinds of remarks, the sort that lead to a row in which comments are made with the intention of drawing blood. She wasn’t about to participate. She went to the coffeemaker and topped up her mug. She held out the glass carafe in his direction. Did he want more? He did. He drank it as she did?black?which made things as simple as they ever could be between a man and a woman divorced for nearly fifteen years.

He’d shown up at her door at 8:20. She’d gone to answer it, assuming the courier from London had arrived far earlier than expected, but she’d opened it to find her former husband on the step. He was frowning in the direction of her front window, where a three-tiered plant stand displayed a collection of pot plants going through the death throes of the sadly neglected. A sign above them was printed with the words: “Fund-raiser for Home Nurses/Leave Money in Box.” Clearly, the poor home nurses were not going to benefit from Bea’s attempt to add to their coffers.

Ray said, “Your black thumb, I see, has not become greener recently.”

She said, “Ray. What’re you doing here? Where’s Pete?”

“At school. Where else would he be? And deeply unhappy at having been forced to eat two eggs this morning instead of his regular. Since when is he allowed cold pizza for breakfast?”

“He’s lying to you. Well…essentially. It was only once. The problem is, he has an unfailing memory.”

“He comes by that honestly.”

She returned to the kitchen rather than reply. He followed her there. He had a carrier bag in his hand, and he placed this on the table. It comprised the reason for his call upon her: Pete’s football shoes. She didn’t want him leaving the shoes at his dad’s house, did she? Nor did she want him to take them to school, yes? So his father had brought them by.

She’d sipped her coffee and offered him one if he wanted. He knew where the mugs were, she told him.

But she’d made the offer before she thought about it. The coffeemaker squatted next to her calendar and what was on this calendar was not only Pete’s schedule, but also her own. Given, her own was cryptic enough, but Ray was no fool.

He’d read a few of the notations inside the boxed dates. She knew what he was seeing: “Motormouth Wanker,” “Big Trouble Wanker.” There were others as well, as he would note if he flipped back to the previous three months. Thirteen weeks of Internet dating: There might be millions of fish in the sea, but Bea Hannaford kept hooking crab pots and seaweed.

It was largely to forestall a conversation about her decision to reenter the world of dating yet another ludicrous time that prompted Bea to bring up having the incident room in Casvelyn. It should, of course, have been in Bodmin where the setup would be minimal, but Bodmin was miles and miles from Casvelyn, with only tediously slow-moving two-lane country roads between them. She wanted, she explained to him, an incident room that was nearer to the crime scene.

He made his point once again. “You don’t know it’s a crime scene. It might be the scene of a tragic accident. What makes you think it’s a crime? This isn’t one of your ‘feelings,’ is it?”

She wanted to say, I don’t have feelings, as you recall, but she didn’t. Over the years she’d become so much better at letting go of matters over which she had no control, one of which was her former husband’s assessment of her. She said, “The body’s a bit marked up. His eye was blackened?healing now, so I’d guess he got into it with someone last week or earlier. Then there was the sling, that webbing thing they use for slinging round a tree or some other stationary object.”