Careless in Red (Inspector Lynley, #15)(69)

Jago answered as if the questions had been asked aloud, saying, “’S more about listening than anything else, not speechifying when all you itch to do is make a speech. Or give a lecture. Bloody hell, how I want to give a lecture. But I wait till they finally say to me, ‘So what d’you think?’ and there’s the opening. Simple as that.” He winked. “But not easy, mind you. Quarter hour with them and the last thing you want is having your youth back. Trauma and tears.”

“That’d be the girl,” Selevan said wisely.

“Oh, aye. That’d be the girl. She fell and fell hard. Didn’t ask for my advice in the befores. Didn’t ask for my advice in the afters. But”?here he took a hefty swig of his stout and sloshed it round his mouth which was, Selevan thought, probably his only bow to oral hygiene?“I broke my own rule at the end of the day.”

“Speechifying?”

“Telling her what I’d do in her place.”

“Which was?”

“Kill the bastard.” Jago spoke casually, as if Santo Kerne were not as dead as a Christmas goose on the table. Selevan raised both eyebrows at this. Jago went on. “That not being possible, ’course, I told her to do it like a symbol. Kill off the past. Wave it good-bye. Make a bonfire of it. Toss in everything that bore on the two of them together. Diaries. Journals. Letters. Cards. Photos. Valentines. Paddington bears. Used-up condoms from their very first shag if she’d been feeling sentimental at that juncture. Everything. Just get rid of it all and move along.”

“Easy enough to say,” Selevan noted.

“Truth there. But when it’s a lass’s first and they’ve gone the full mile, it’s the only way when things go bad. Clean house of the bloke, you ask me. Which she was finally on her way to doing when…well…when it happened.”

“Bad, that.”

Jago nodded. “Makes it worse for the girl. How’s she supposed to see Santo Kerne in a real light now? No. She’s got her work cut out, getting over this. Wish it hadn’t happened, none of it. He wasn’t a bad lad, but he had his ways, and she didn’t see that till too bleeding late. By that time the locomotive was steaming out of the station, and all that was left to do was step out of the way.”

“Love’s a bitch of a thing,” Selevan said.

“It’s a killer, that,” Jago agreed.





Chapter Ten


LYNLEY LOOKED THROUGH THE GERTRUDE JEKYLL BOOK, AT the photos and drawings OF gardens that were vibrant with English springtime colours. Their palettes were soft and soothing, and gazing at them he could almost feel what it would be like to sit on one of the weathered benches and let the pastel blanket of petals wash over him. Gardens, he thought, were meant to be like these. Not the formal parterres of the Elizabethans, planted with careful displays of constipated shrubbery and clipped vegetation, but rather the exuberant mimicry of what might occur in a nature from which weeds were banished but other plant life was allowed to flourish: banks of colour tumbling unrestrained onto lawns and herbaceous borders bowing onto paths that themselves wandered, as a path would in nature. Yes, Gertrude Jekyll had known what she was about.

“Lovely, aren’t they?”

Lynley looked up. Daidre Trahair stood before him, a small stemmed glass in her extended hand. She made a moue of apology as she gave a glance in its direction, saying, “I’ve only sherry for an aperitif. I think it’s been here since I got the cottage, which would be…Four years ago?” She smiled. “I’m not much of a drinker, so I don’t actually know…Does sherry go bad? I can’t tell you if this is dry or sweet, to be honest. I suspect sweet, though. It said cream on the bottle.”

“That would be sweet,” Lynley said. “Thank you.” He took the glass. “You’re not drinking?”

“I’ve a small one in the kitchen.”

“You won’t allow me to help you?” He nodded in the direction from which domestic sounds had been coming. “I’m not very good at it. Truthfully, I’m fairly wretched at it. But I’m sure I could chop something if something needs to be chopped. And measuring also. I can tell you unblushingly that I’m a genius with measuring cups and spoons.”

“That’s comforting,” she replied. “Are you capable of a salad if all the ingredients are set out on the work top and you’ve no critical decisions to make?”

“As long as I don’t have to dress it. You wouldn’t want me wielding…whatever it is one wields to dress a salad.”

“You can’t be that hopeless,” she told him with a laugh. “Surely your wife?” She stopped herself. Her expression altered, probably because his own had altered, she thought. She cocked her head ruefully. “I’m sorry, Thomas. It’s difficult not to refer to her.”

Lynley rose from his chair, the Jekyll book still in hand. “Helen would have loved a Gertrude Jekyll garden,” he said. “She used to deadhead our roses in London because, she said, it encouraged more blooms.”

“It does. She was right. Did she like to garden?”

“She liked to be in gardens. I think she liked the effect of having gardened.”

“But you don’t know for sure?”

“I don’t know for sure.” He’d never asked her. He’d have just come home from work to find her with secateurs in hand and a pail of clipped and spent roses at her feet. She’d look at him and toss her dark hair off her cheek and say something about roses, about gardens in general, and what she’d say would force him to smile. And the smile would force him to forget the world outside the brick walls of their garden, a world that needed to be forgotten and locked away so it didn’t intrude on the life he shared with her. “She couldn’t cook, by the way,” he told Daidre. “She was dreadful at it. Completely appalling.”