Careless in Red (Inspector Lynley, #15)(59)

He raised an arm to wave. She waved in turn. They walked towards each other across the top of the cliff. The path here was narrow and uneven?with shards of carboniferous stone tipping up from the soil?and along its east side gorse rustled thickly, a yellow intrusion standing hardily against the wind. Beyond the gorse, grass grew abundantly although it was closely cropped by the sheep that grazed freely upon it.

When they were close enough to be heard by each other, Daidre said to Thomas Lynley, “So. You’re on your way, then?” But as soon as she spoke, she realised this was not the case, and she went on to add, “Except you’ve not got your rucksack with you, so you aren’t on your way at all.”

He nodded solemnly. “You’d make a good detective.”

“A decidedly elementary deduction, I’m afraid. Anything more would escape my notice. Are you out for a walk?”

“I was looking for you.” As it had done to hers, the wind tossed his hair and he brushed it away from his forehead. Again, she thought how like hers it was. She assumed that he went quite blond in summer.

“For me?” she asked. “How did you know where to find me? Beyond knocking at the door of the cottage, I mean. Because I hope I can presume you did knock this time. I don’t have many more windows to offer up to you.”

“I knocked,” he said. “When no one answered, I had a look round and saw the fresh footprints. I followed them. It was simple enough.”

“And here I am,” she said.

“And here you are.”

He smiled and seemed to hesitate for some reason, which surprised Daidre as he didn’t seem the type of man who’d hesitate at anything. She said, “And?” and cocked her head. He had, she noted, a scar on his upper lip that relieved his otherwise off-putting appearance, which was handsome in that classical sense: He had strong features that were well defined. No indication of inbreeding here.

“I’ve come to ask you to dinner,” he said. “I’m afraid I can only offer you the Salthouse Inn as I’ve no funds of my own yet, and I can hardly invite you for a meal and ask you to pay for it, can I. But at the inn, they’ll put our meal on the books, and as breakfast was excellent?well, at least it was filling?I suspect dinner will be adequate as well.”

“What a dubious invitation,” she said.

He seemed to think about it. “D’you mean the ‘adequate’ part?”

“Yes. ‘Join me for an adequate albeit far-from-sumptuous meal.’ It’s one of those gallant post-Victorian requests one can only respond to with ‘Thank you, I think.’”

He laughed. “Sorry. My mother would roll in her grave, were she dead, which she isn’t. Let me say, then, that I’ve had a look at tonight’s menu, and it appears…if not brilliant, then at least swell.”

She laughed in turn. “Swell? Where on earth did that come from? Never mind. Don’t tell me. Have a meal here instead. I’ve something already prepared and there’s enough for two. It only wants baking.”

“But then I’ll be doubly in your debt.”

“Which is exactly where I want you, my lord.”

His face altered, all amusement drained away by her slip of the tongue. She cursed herself for her lapse in circumspection and what it presaged about her ability to keep other things to herself in his presence.

He said, “Ah. So you know.”

She sought an explanation and decided one existed that would be reasonable, even to him. “When you said last night that you were Scotland Yard, I wanted to know if that was the case. So I set about finding out.” She looked away from him for a moment. She saw that the herring gulls were settling in on the nearby cliff face for the night, pairing off onto ledges and into crevices, ruffling their wings, huddling against the wind. “I’m terribly sorry, Thomas,” she said.

After a moment during which more gulls landed and others soared and cawed, he said, “You’ve no need to apologise. I would have done the same in your situation. A stranger in your house claiming to be a policeman. Someone dead outside. What are you to believe?”

“That’s not what I meant.” She looked back at him. He was into the wind; she was against it. It played havoc with her hair, whipping it into her face despite the slide.

“Then what?” he said.

“Your wife,” she told him. “I’m so terribly sorry about what happened to her. What a wrenching thing for you to have to go through.”

“Ah,” he said. “Yes.” He moved his gaze to the seabirds. He would see them, Daidre knew, as she saw them, pairing off not because there was safety in numbers but because there was safety in just one other gull. “It was far more wrenching for her than for me,” he said.

“No,” Daidre said. “I don’t believe that.”

“Don’t you? Well, there’s little more wrenching than death by gunshot, I daresay. Especially when death is not immediate. I didn’t have to go through that. Helen did. She was there one moment, just trying to get her shopping in the front door. She was shot the next. That would be rather wrenching, wouldn’t you say?” He sounded bleak, and he didn’t look at her as he spoke. But he’d misunderstood her meaning, and Daidre sought to clarify it.

“I believe that death is the end of this part of our existence, Thomas: the spiritual being’s human experience. The spirit leaves the body and then goes on to what’s next. And what’s next has to be better than what’s here or what’s the point, really?”