Careless in Red (Inspector Lynley, #15)(39)

He’d protested this idea initially, when she’d first fetched him from the Salthouse Inn. Although he was considerably more fragrant than on the previous day, he was still wearing the ghastly white boiler suit, still with nothing but socks on his feet. He’d carefully removed these to cross the muddy path to her car and he’d tried to insist that buying new clothing could wait when she’d pressed two hundred pounds upon him.

She said, “Please. Don’t be ridiculous, Thomas. You can’t continue to walk round the area like…well, like someone from a hazardous-chemicals squad, or whatever they call it. You can repay me the money. Besides,” and here she smiled, “I hate to be the one to inform you, but white doesn’t suit you in the least.”

“It doesn’t?” He’d smiled in turn. He had a quite pleasant smile, and it came to her that she’d not seen him smile until that moment. Not that there had been anything in particular to grin about on the previous day, but still…Smiling was virtually an automatic response in most people, a reaction indicative of nothing other than passing courtesy, so it was unusual to find someone so grave.

“Not in the least,” she told him. “So buy something suitable for yourself.”

“Thank you,” he’d said. “You’re very kind.”

“I’m only kind to the wounded,” she told him.

He’d nodded thoughtfully and looked out of the windscreen for a moment, perhaps meditating on the way Belle Vue Lane climbed in a narrow passage to the upper reaches of the town. He’d finally said, “Two hours then,” and got out, leaving her wondering what else he had on his mind.

She’d driven off as he’d walked barefoot on a route towards the outdoor-outfitter’s shop. She’d passed him with a wave and had seen from her rearview mirror that he’d watched from the pavement as she made her way up the hill to where the street curved out of sight and split off, in one direction to the car park and in the other towards St. Mevan Down.

This was the highest point in Casvelyn. From here, one could take in the charmless nature of the little town. It had seen its heyday more than seventy years earlier when holidaying at the sea had been the height of fashion. Now it existed largely at the pleasure of surfers and other outdoor enthusiasts, with tea shops long ago morphed into T-shirt boutiques, souvenir shops, and surfing academies, and post-Edwardian homes serving as doss houses for a peripatetic population who followed the seasons and the swells.

Across Belle Vue Lane from the car park, Toes on the Nose Café was doing a good morning’s business off the local surfers, two of whom had left their cars parked illegally along the kerb, as if with the intention of tearing out of the establishment at the first sign of a change in conditions. The place was crowded with them: They were a close community. Daidre felt the prick of absence?how different it was from the sorrow of loss, she realised?as she passed by and saw them huddled round tables and no doubt telling tales of derring-do in the waves.

She headed for the offices of the Watchman, which hunkered down in an unattractive cube of blue stucco at the junction of Princes Street and Queen Street, in an area of Casvelyn that the locals jokingly called the Royal T. Princes Street served as the cross piece of the T, with Queen Street the trunk. Below Queen was King Street and nearby were Duke Street and Duchy Row. In Victorian times and earlier, Casvelyn had longed to append Regis to its name, and its streets’ appellations bore historical testimony to this fact.

When she’d told Thomas Lynley that she had things to do in town, she hadn’t been lying…exactly. There were arrangements to be made eventually about the broken window at the cottage, but beyond that there was the not insignificant matter of Santo Kerne’s death. The Watchman would be covering the teenager’s fall in Polcare Cove, and as she did not take a newspaper in Cornwall, it would be perfectly logical that she might stop by the offices of the paper to see if an issue with this story in it was soon going to be available.

When she entered, she saw Max Priestley at once. The place was quite small?consisting of Max’s own office, the layout room, a tiny newsroom, and a reception area that conveniently doubled as the newspaper’s morgue?so this was no surprise. He was in the layout room in the company of one of the paper’s two reporters, and they were bent over what appeared to be a mock-up of a front page, which Max seemed to want changed and which the reporter?who looked like nothing so much as a twelve-year-old girl in flip-flops?apparently wanted to remain the same.

“People’ll expect it,” she was insisting. “This’s a community paper, and he was a member of the community.”

“The queen dies and we go three inches,” Max replied. “Otherwise we don’t get carried away.” He looked up then and fixed on Daidre.

She raised a hand hesitantly and studied him as closely as she could without being obvious about it. He was an outdoorsman, and he looked it: weathered skin making him seem older than his forty years, thick hair permanently bleached from the sun, trim from regular coastal walking. He seemed normal today. She wondered about that.

The receptionist?who tripled as copy editor and secretary to the publisher?was in the process of politely enquiring after Daidre’s business when Max came out to join them, polishing his gold-rimmed spectacles on his shirt. He said to Daidre, “I just sent Steve Teller to interview you not five minutes ago. It’s time you had a phone like the rest of the world.”