Careless in Red (Inspector Lynley, #15)(88)

“Am I a suspect?”

“We all are, myself included.”

“And did you tell her…?”

“What?”

“That I knew?or at least recognised?Santo Kerne?”

He took his time about answering and she wondered why. “No,” he said at last. “I didn’t tell her.”

“Why?”

He didn’t reply to this. Instead he said, “Ah. Your car,” as they reached it.

She wanted to press him for an answer, but she also didn’t much want the answer because she wasn’t sure what she’d do with it when she got it. She fumbled in her bag for her keys. The paperwork she was carrying from the Watchman slipped from her grasp and slid onto the tarmac. She said, “Damn,” as it soaked up rainwater. She started to squat to gather it up.

Lynley said, “Let me,” and ever the gentleman, he set down his package and bent to retrieve it.

Ever the cop as well, he glanced at it and then at her. She felt herself colouring.

He said, “Hoping for a miracle, are you?”

“My social life has been rather bleak for the past few years. Everything helps, I find. May I ask why you didn’t tell me, Thomas?”

“Tell you what?”

“That Santo Kerne had been murdered. It can’t have been privileged information. Max Priestley knew it.”

He handed her the printouts she’d made from the Internet and picked up his own package as she unlocked the Vauxhall’s boot. “And Max Priestley is?”

“The publisher and editor of the Watchman. I spoke to him earlier.”

“As a journalist, he would have been given the word from DI Hannaford, I expect. She’d be the officer determining when information gets disseminated, as I doubt there’s a press officer here in town unless she’s directed someone to act as one. It wouldn’t be up to me to tell anyone until Hannaford was ready for the word to go out.”

“I see.” She couldn’t say to him, “But I thought we were friends” because that was hardly the case. There seemed no point to carrying the matter further, so she said, “Are you coming out to the cottage now, then? To repair the window?”

He told her he had a few things more to do in town but that afterwards, if she didn’t mind, he would drive out to Polcare Cove and make the repair. She asked him if he actually knew how to repair a window. Somehow one didn’t expect an earl?gainfully employed as a cop or not?to know what to do with glass and putty. He told her he was certain he could muddle through it somewhat proficiently.

Then he said, for reasons she couldn’t sort out, “D’you generally do your research at the newspaper office?”

“I generally don’t do research at all,” she told him. “Especially when I’m in Cornwall. But if there’s something I need to look up, yes. I use the Watchman. Max Priestley’s got a retriever I’ve doctored, so he gives me access.”

“That can’t be the only Internet site.”

“Consider where we are, Thomas. I’m lucky there’s access in Casvelyn at all.” She gestured south, in the direction of the wharf. “I could use the library’s access, I suppose, but they dole out time. Fifteen minutes and the next person gets a whack. It’s maddening if you’re trying to do something more meaningful than answer your e-mail.”

“More private, as well, I suppose,” Lynley said.

“There’s that,” she admitted.

“And we know you like privacy.”

She smiled, but she knew the effort showed. It was time for an exit, graceful or otherwise. She told him she would, perhaps, see him when he came to repair her window. Then she took herself off.

She could feel his steady gaze on her as she left the car park.

LYNLEY WATCHED HER GO. She was a cipher in more ways than one, holding much to herself. Some of it had to do with Santo Kerne, he reckoned. He wanted to believe that not all of it did. He wasn’t sure why this was the case but he did admit to himself that he liked the woman. He admired her independence and what appeared to be a lifestyle of going against the common grain. She was unlike anyone else he knew.

But that in itself raised questions. Who was she, exactly, and why did she seem to have sprung into existence as an adolescent, fully formed, like Athena from the head of Zeus? The questions about her were deeply disturbing. He had to acknowledge the fact that a hundred red flags surrounded this woman, only some of them having to do with a dead boy at the foot of a cliff nearby her cottage.

He walked from the car park to the police station at the end of Lansdown Road. This was a narrow cobbled lane of white terrace houses, ill roofed and largely stained by rainwater from rusty gutters. Most of them had fallen into the disrepair prevalent in the poorer sections of Cornwall, where gentrification had not yet extended its greedy fingers. One of them was undergoing refurbishment, however, its scaffolding suggesting that better times for someone had come to the neighbourhood.

The police station was an eyesore, even here, a grey stucco building with nothing of architectural interest to recommend itself. It was flat in front and flat on top, a shoe box with occasional windows and a notice board near its door.

Inside, a small vestibule offered a line of three institutional plastic chairs and a reception counter. Bea Hannaford sat behind this, the telephone receiver pressed to her ear. She raised a finger in greeting to Lynley and said to whoever was on the other end of the line, “Got it. Well, there’s no surprise in that, is there?…We’ll want to have another little chat with her, won’t we, then.”