Careless in Red

Chapter Twenty-three

BEA HAD A NEW CHOCK STONE ON HER DESK WHEN SERGEANT Havers entered the incident room on the following morning. She’d got its stiff plastic sheathing off by using the blade of a new and consequently highly sharp X-Acto knife. She’d had to be careful about it, but the operation hadn’t taken either skill or much effort. She was in the process of comparing the unsheathed chock stone to the array of cutting tools she also had on her desk.

Havers said to her, “What’re you on to, then?” The DS had obviously made a stop at Casvelyn of Cornwall on her way to the station. Bea could smell the pasties from across the room, and she didn’t need to look for it to know that Sergeant Havers had a bag of them somewhere on her person.

“Second breakfast?” she asked the sergeant.

“I skipped the first,” Havers replied. “Just a cup of coffee and a glass of juice. I reckoned I owed myself a dip into the more substantial food groups.” She carried her capacious shoulder bag and from this she brought forth the incriminating Cornish delicacy, well wrapped but nonetheless emitting its telltale aroma.

“A few of those and you’ll blow up like a balloon,” Bea told her. “Go easy on them.”

“Will do. But I find it essential to sample the local cuisine, wherever I am.”

“Lucky for you it’s not goat’s head, then.”

Havers hooted, which Bea took as her version of a laugh. “Also felt the need to give a few words of encouragement to our Madlyn Angarrack,” Havers said. “You know the sort of thing: Don’t worry, lass, buck up, tut-tut, tallyho, and all that, keep your pecker pecking, and it’ll all come out in the wash at the end of the day. I found I’m a veritable fountain of clichés.”

“That was good of you. I’m sure she appreciated it.” Bea selected one of the heavier bolt cutters and applied it forcefully to the chock stone’s cable. Nothing but pain shooting up her arm. “That one’s a real nonstarter,” she said.

“Right. Well, she wasn’t overly friendly, but she did accept a wee pat on the shoulder, which was easy enough to give as she was loading up the front window at the time.”

“Hmm. And how did Miss Angarrack take your fond caress?”

“She didn’t debark from the tuna boat yesterday, I’ll give her that. She knew I was up to something.”

“Were you?” Bea suddenly took more notice of Havers.

The DS was smiling wickedly. She was also removing a paper napkin carefully from her shoulder bag. She brought it to Bea’s desk and laid it gently down. “Can’t use it in court, of course,” she said. “But there it is all the same for a comparison, if you’ve the mind for it. Not a regular DNA comparison cause there’s no skin attached. But one of those others. Mitochondrial. I expect we can use it for that if we need to.”

It, Bea saw, as she unfolded the napkin, was a single hair. Quite dark, with a slight curl to it. She looked up at Havers. “You wily thing. From her shoulder, I take it?”

“You’d think they’d have them wear caps or hairnets or something if they’re going to be around food, wouldn’t you?” Havers shuddered dramatically and took an enormous bite of the pasty. “I reckoned I needed to do my bit for hygiene in Casvelyn. And anyway, I thought you might like to have it.”

“No one has ever brought me such a thoughtful gift,” Bea told her. “I may be falling in love with you, Sergeant.”

“Please, Guv,” Havers said, holding up her hand. “You’ll have to get in the queue.”

Bea knew that, as Havers had said, the hair was useless in building a crown case against Madlyn Angarrack, considering how the sergeant had got her hands on it. They could do nothing with it save assure themselves through comparison that the hair they’d already found caught up in Santo Kerne’s equipment was one belonging to his former girlfriend. But it was something, a shot in the arm that they needed. Bea placed it in an envelope and labeled it carefully for Duke Clarence Washoe to peruse in Chepstow.

“I’m reckoning it’s all to do with sex and vengeance,” Bea said when the hair was taken care of. Havers pulled over a chair and joined her, munching the pasty with evident appreciation.

She shoved a wad of it to one side of her mouth and said, “Sex and vengeance? How’ve you got it playing out?”

“I was off and on thinking about it all night, and I kept coming back to the initial betrayal.”

“Santo Kerne taking up with Dr. Trahair?”

“For which Madlyn either seeks vengeance herself with this”-Bea held up the chock stone in one hand and a bolt cutter in the other-“and this. Or one of the men does it for her, after she’s supplied him with two of the chock stones, which she’s nicked out of the boot of Santo’s car. She’s already done the business on the sling. That was easy. But the chock stones require rather more strength than she has. So she needs a helper. She would have known where Santo was keeping his equipment. All she needed was someone willing to be her assistant.”

“That would be someone with a bone to pick with Santo anyway?”

“Or someone hoping to get himself into Madlyn’s good graces by helping her out.”

“Sounds like that bloke Will Mendick to me. Santo treats her badly and Will wants to sort him out for her sake; Will also wants into Madlyn’s knickers.”

“That’s how I see it.” Bea set the chock stone down. “Have you seen your Superintendent Lynley this morning, by the way?”

“He’s not my-”

“Yes. Yes. We’ve already been through it. He says the same thing about you.”

“Does he?” Havers chewed thoughtfully. “Not sure how I feel about that.”

“Mull it over later. As for now?”

“He’s off to Exeter. Second half of whatever he was up to yesterday, he said. But…”

Bea narrowed her eyes. “But…?”

Havers looked regretful about having to mention the next bit. “Dr. Trahair came to see him. This would be yesterday, late afternoon.”

“And you didn’t bring her-”

“I didn’t know, Guv. I didn’t see her. And since I haven’t yet seen her anyway, I wouldn’t know her if she flew in front of my car on a broomstick. He didn’t tell me until this morning.”

“Did you see him at dinner last night?”

Havers looked unhappy before she said, “Yeah. I s’pose I did.”

“And he said nothing to you then about her visit?”

“That would be the situation. But he’s got a lot on his mind. He might not have thought about telling me.”

“Don’t be absurd, Barbara. He damn well knew we want to talk to her. He should have told you. He should have phoned me. He should have done almost anything but what he did. This man is walking on very thin ice.”

Havers nodded. “That’s why I’m telling you. I mean, not because I know he’s on thin ice with you but because I know it’s important. I mean, it’s important not because he didn’t tell you but because…Not that she came to see him. That’s not the important bit. What I mean is that it’s important that she’s resurfaced and I thought-”

“All right, all right! Jesus in a teaspoon. Stop. I see I can’t expect you to grass his mighty lordship, no matter the situation, so I’m going to have to find someone willing to grass you. And it’s not like we’ve the manpower for that, is it, Sergeant? What, God damn it?”

This last she said to Sergeant Collins, who’d come to the door of the incident room. He was manning the phones below, for what little good it was doing, while the rest of the team continued with actions she’d assigned them earlier, most of which had them going over old ground.

“Dr. Trahair is here to see you, Guv,” Sergeant Collins told her. “She said you wanted her to come by the station.”

Bea pushed her chair back and said, “Well, thank God. Let’s hope we’re about to get someplace.”

AN UNANTICIPATED HOUR OF research in Exeter provided Lynley with the name of the property management company that, he discovered, was no longer owned by Jonathan Parsons, father of the long ago cave-drowning victim in Pengelly Cove. Previously called Parsons, Larson, and Waterfield, it was now R. Larson Estate Management, Ltd., and it was located not far from the medieval cathedral in an area that looked desirable for doing business. Its director turned out to be a questionably tanned, grey-bearded individual somewhere in his sixties. He appeared to favour jeans, exceptionally good dentistry, and blindingly white dress shirts worn without a necktie. R, Lynley discovered, stood for the unusual non-British name of Rocco. Larson’s mother-long gone to her eternal reward-had possessed a devotion to the more obscure Catholic saints, the man explained. It was an equal rights sort of thing. His sister was called Perpetua. Personally, he didn’t use Rocco. He used Rock, which Lynley was free to call him.

Lynley thanked the man, said all things being equal he’d prefer Mr. Larson, and showed him his Scotland Yard identification, at which point Larson seemed happy enough that Lynley had decided on maintaining a sense of formality between them. Larson said, “Ah. I suppose you don’t have a property you wish to let out?”

“You’d suppose correctly,” Lynley told him, and he asked if Larson had a few minutes to spare him. “I’d like to talk to you about Jonathan Parsons,” he said. “I understand you were once his partner.”

Larson was perfectly willing to have a chat about “poor Jon,” as he called him, and he ushered Lynley into his office. This was spare and masculine: leather and metal with pictures of the family in stark black frames. The much younger blonde wife, two children turned out in neat school uniforms, the horse, the dog, the cat, and the duck. They all looked a bit too professionally polished. Lynley wondered if they were real or the sort of pictures one finds in frames for sale in shops.

Larson didn’t wait to be interrogated. He launched into his story, and he needed very little encouragement to carry on with it. He had been partners with Jonathan Parsons and a bloke called Henry Waterfield, now deceased. Both of them were older than Larson by ten years or so, and because of this, he’d started out as a junior manager in the firm. But he was a go-getter, if he did say so himself, and in no time, he’d purchased rights to a full partnership. From that point on, it was the three of them until Waterfield’s death, at which point it was Parsons and Larson, which was a bit of a tongue twister so they hung on to the original name.

Everything went smoothly until the Parsons boy died, Larson told him. At that point, things began to fall apart. “Poor Jon wasn’t able to hold up his end, and who can blame him? He began to spend more and more of his time over in Pengelly Cove. That’s where the accident…the death-”

“Yes,” Lynley said. “I know. He apparently believed he knew who’d left his son in the sea cave.”

“Right. But he couldn’t get the police to move on the killer. No evidence, they told him. No evidence, no witness, and no one talking no matter how much pressure was applied wherever…There was literally nothing they could do. So he hired his own team, and when they failed, he hired another, and when they failed, he hired another and then another. He finally moved to the cove permanently…” Larson considered a photo on the wall-an aerial view of Exeter-as if this would take him back in time. “I think it must have been two years after Jamie’s death. Perhaps three? He said he wanted to be there to remind people that the murder-he always called it a murder, no matter what-had gone unpunished. He accused the police of botching the matter from start to finish. He was…obsessed, frankly. But I can’t fault him for that. I didn’t then and I don’t now. Still, he wasn’t bringing in any money to the business and while I could have carried him for a time, he began to…Well, he called it ‘borrowing.’ He was maintaining a house and a family-there are three other children, all of them daughters-here in Exeter, he was maintaining a house in Pengelly Cove, and he was orchestrating a series of investigations with people wanting to be paid for their time and effort. Things got too much for him. He needed money and he took it.” Behind his desk, Larson steepled the fingers of his hands. “I felt awful,” he said, “but my choices were clear: to let Jon run us into the ground or to call him on what he was doing. I chose. It’s not pretty, but I didn’t see I had a choice.”

“Embezzlement.”

Larson held up a hand. “I couldn’t go that far. Couldn’t and wouldn’t, not after what had happened to the poor sod. But I told him he’d have to hand over the business, as it was the only way I could see to save it. He wasn’t going to stop.”

“Stop?”

“Trying to get the killer brought to justice.”

“The police thought it was a prank gone very bad, not a premeditated murder. Not a murder at all.”

“It certainly could have been, but Jon didn’t see it that way. He adored that boy. He was devoted enough to all the children, but he was particularly mad about Jamie. He was the sort of dad we all want to be and we all wish we had, if you know what I mean. They deep-sea-fished, they skied, they surfed, they backpacked in Asia. When Jon said the boy’s name, he just blazed with pride.”

“I’ve heard the boy was…” Lynley sought a word. “I’ve heard he was rather difficult for the local children in Pengelly Cove.”

Larson drew his eyebrows together. They were thin brows, rather womanly. Lynley wondered if the man had them waxed. “I don’t know about that. He was essentially a good kid. Oh, perhaps he was a bit full of himself, considering the family probably had a good deal more money than the village children’s families, and considering the preferential treatment he got from his dad. But what boy that age isn’t full of himself anyway?”

Larson went on to complete the story, one that took a turn that was sad but not unusual, given what Lynley knew about families who faced the anguish of a child’s untimely death. Not long after Parsons lost the business, his wife divorced him. She returned to university as a mature student, completed her education, and ultimately became head teacher at the local comprehensive. Larson thought she’d remarried as well, somewhere along the line, but he wasn’t certain. Someone at the comprehensive would likely be able to tell him.

“What became of Jonathan Parsons?” Lynley asked.

He was still in Pengelly Cove, as far as Larson knew.

“And the daughters?” Lynley asked.

Larson hadn’t a clue.

DAIDRE HAD SPENT PART of her early morning thinking about allegiance. She knew that some people firmly believed in the principle of every man for himself. Her problem had always been an inability to adhere to that principle.

She considered the idea of what she owed other people versus what she owed herself. She thought about duty, but she also thought about vengeance. She considered the ways in which “getting even” was merely a questionable euphemism for “learning nothing.” She tried to decide whether there actually were life lessons to be learned or whether life was all a mindless tumble through the years without rhyme or reason.

She ultimately faced the truth that she had no answer to any of the larger philosophical questions about life. So she decided to take the action that was directly in front of her, and she went into Casvelyn to fulfill DI Hannaford’s request for a conversation.

The inspector fetched her personally from reception. Hannaford was accompanied by another woman whom Daidre recognised as the ill-dressed driver of the Mini, who had spoken to Thomas Lynley in the car park of the Salthouse Inn. Hannaford introduced her as DS Barbara Havers. She added, “New Scotland Yard,” to this, and Daidre felt a chill come over her. She had no time to speculate on what this meant, however, for after a marginally hostile, “Come with us, then,” from Hannaford, she was being led into the bowels of the station, a brief journey of some fifteen paces that took them to what appeared to be the sole interview room.

It was clear that not a lot of interviewing went on in Casvelyn. Past a wall of what seemed to be boxes of toilet tissue and kitchen towels, a disabled card table of three straight legs and one with a bulbous elbow held a small cassette recorder that looked dusty enough to seed vegetables on. There were no chairs to speak of, just a three-step ladder, although an angry shout from Hannaford in the direction of the stairway obviated the necessity of their having to use the boxes of tissue and towels for that purpose. Sergeant Collins-as he was called-came on the run. He quickly provided them with uncomfortable plastic chairs, batteries for the tape player, and a cassette. This turned out to be an ancient Lulu’s Greatest Hits-vintage 1970-but, obviously, it was going to have to do.

Daidre wanted to ask the purpose of making a recording of their conversation, but she knew the question would be taken as disingenuous. So she sat and waited for what would happen next, which was DS Havers’s digging a small spiral notebook from the pocket of her donkey jacket, which, for some reason, she had not removed despite the uncomfortable tropical temperature in the building.

DI Hannaford asked Daidre if she wanted anything before they began. Coffee, tea, juice, water? Daidre demurred. She was fine, she replied, and then found herself wondering about that response. What she wasn’t at all was fine. She was uneasy in the head, weak in the palms, and determined not to appear that way.

There seemed only one manner in which to do that: by taking the offensive. She said, “You left me this note,” and produced the DI’s card with its scrawled message on the back. “What is it you want to talk to me about?”

“I’d think that was rather obvious,” Hannaford said, “as we’re in the middle of a murder enquiry.”

“Actually, it’s not obvious at all.”

“Then it will be, soon enough, my dear.” Hannaford was deft about putting the cassette into the tape player although she looked as if she had her doubts on the matter of its properly working. She punched a button, gazed at the turning wheel of the cassette, and recited the date, the time, and the individuals present. Then she said to Daidre, “Tell us about Santo Kerne, Dr. Trahair.”

“What about him?”

“Whatever you know.”

This was all routine: the first few moves in the cat-and-mouse of an interrogation. Daidre answered as simply as she could. “I know that he died in a fall from the north cliff at Polcare Cove.”

Hannaford didn’t look pleased with the response. “How good of you to make that clear to us. You knew who he was when you saw him, didn’t you.” She made it a statement, not a question. “So our first interaction was based on a lie. Yes?”

DS Havers wrote with a pencil, Daidre saw. It scritched against the notebook paper and the sound-normally innocuous-was fingernails on a blackboard in this situation.

Daidre said, “I hadn’t got a good look at him. There wasn’t time.”

“But you checked for vital signs, didn’t you? You were first on the scene. How could you check for signs of life without looking at him?”

“One doesn’t need to look at the victim’s face to check for signs of life, Inspector.”

“That’s a coy reply. How realistic is it to check for vital signs without looking at someone? As the first person on the scene and even in the fading daylight-”

“I was second on the scene,” Daidre interrupted. “Thomas Lynley was first.”

“But you wanted to see the body. You asked to see the body. You insisted. You didn’t take Superintendent Lynley’s word for it that the boy was dead.”

“I didn’t know he was Superintendent Lynley,” Daidre told her. “I arrived at the cottage and found him inside. He might have been a housebreaker for all I knew. He was a total stranger, completely unkempt, as you saw for yourself, looking rather wild and claiming there was a body in the cove and he needed to be taken somewhere to make a phone call about it. It hardly made sense to me to agree to drive him anywhere without checking first to make sure he was telling me the truth.”

“Or checking yourself to discover who the boy was. Did you think it might be Santo?”

“I had no idea who it was going to be. How would I have? I wanted to see if I could help in some way.”

“In what way?”

“If he was injured-”

“You’re a veterinarian, Dr. Trahair. You’re not an emergency physician. How did you expect to help him?”

“Injuries are injuries. Bones are bones. If I could help-”

“And when you saw him, you knew who he was. You were quite familiar with the boy, weren’t you.”

“I knew who Santo Kerne was, if that’s what you mean. This isn’t a heavily populated area. Most people know each other eventually, if only by sight.”

“But I expect you knew him a little bit more intimately than by sight.”

“Then you’d expect incorrectly.”

“That’s not what’s been reported, Dr. Trahair. Indeed, I have to tell you that’s not what’s been witnessed.”

Daidre swallowed. She realised that DS Havers had ceased writing, and she wasn’t sure when that had occurred. This told her she’d been less aware than she needed to be, and she wanted to get back on the footing she’d begun with. She said to DS Havers, past the heavy pounding of her own heart, “New Scotland Yard. Are you the only officer from London here to work on this case? Aside from Superintendent Lynley, I mean.”

Hannaford said, “Dr. Trahair, that’s nothing to do with-”

“New Scotland Yard. The Met. But you must be from the…What would they call it? The crime side? The murder side? CID? Or do they call it something else these days?”

Havers made no reply. She did, however, give a glance to Hannaford.

“I expect you know Thomas Lynley as well, then. If he’s from New Scotland Yard and you’re from New Scotland Yard and you both work in the same-the same field, shall I say?-then you must be acquainted. Would I be correct?”

“Whether Sergeant Havers and Superintendent Lynley are acquainted is none of your concern,” Hannaford said. “We’ve a witness putting Santo Kerne at your front door, Dr. Trahair. We’ve a witness putting him inside your cottage in times past. If you’d like to explain how someone you knew only by sight came knocking at your door and gaining admittance to your home, we’d very much like to listen.”

“I expect it’s you who went to Falmouth asking about me,” Daidre said to Havers.

Havers looked at her blankly, a good poker face. But Hannaford, surprisingly, gave away the game. She directed her attention suddenly, if briefly, to Havers, and there was something of speculation in her look. Daidre took this for surprise, and she drew a logical conclusion from it.

“And I expect Thomas Lynley-and not DI Hannaford-told you to do it.” She stated this flatly. She didn’t want to dwell on how she felt about the fact, and she had no need of a reply because she knew she was right.

What she did have a need for, on the other hand, was getting the police out of her life. Unfortunately, there was only one way to do this and it had to do with information: naming a name that would take them in a different direction. She found that she was willing to do that.

She turned to Hannaford. “You want Aldara Pappas,” she said. “You’ll find her at a place called Cornish Gold. It’s a cider farm.”

FINDING JONATHAN PARSONS’ FORMER wife ate up another ninety minutes of his time once Lynley left Rock Larson’s office. He began at the comprehensive, where he learned that Niamh Parsons had long ago become Niamh Triglia and had also, more recently, taken her pension. She’d lived for years not far from the school, but whether she was still at that location upon her retirement from education…Who could say? That was the limit to what they were able to tell him.

From there, he went to an address he unearthed through the simple means of browsing in the public library. As he’d suspected, the Triglias no longer resided in Exeter, but this was not a dead end. Showing his identification and questioning a few neighbours turned up their new place of abode. Like many others before them, they had headed for sunnier climes. Thankfully, this did not turn out to be the coast of Spain but rather the coast of Cornwall, which, while not atmospherically Mediterranean in climate, was the best the mainland of England had to offer in conditions that might be deemed temperate by those who were determinedly sanguine. The Triglias had been among these types. They lived in Boscastle.

This meant another long drive, but the day was pleasant and the time of year had not yet turned Cornwall into an elongated car park with occasional visual diversions. He made relatively good time to Boscastle, and soon enough he was hiking towards a steep lane of cottages which wound up from the ancient fishing harbour, an inlet protected by vast cliffs of slate and volcanic lava. What went for the high street came first in his climb-a few shops of unpainted stone that were dedicated to the tourist trade and a few more to meet the needs of the village residents-and after it came Old Street, the location of the Triglias’ home. This was nestled not far from an obelisk dedicated to the dead of two world wars. It was called Lark Cottage, and it was whitewashed like a Santorini hut, with thick mounds of heather growing in front and healthy-looking primroses planted in window boxes. Crisp white curtains hung at the windows, and green paint glimmered on the front door. He crossed a tiny bridge of slate that spanned a deep gutter in front of the building, and when he knocked, it was only a moment before an apron-wearing woman answered, her spectacles splattered with what seemed to be grease and her grey hair scraped back from her face and springing up from the crown of her head like a hirsute fountain.

“I’m doing crab cakes,” she said, seemingly apropos of her general appearance and her more specific harried demeanour. “Sorry, but I can’t be away from them for more than a moment.”

He said, “Mrs. Triglia?”

“Yes. Yes. Oh, do please be quick. I hate to be rude, but they absorb dreadfully if you leave them too long.”

“Thomas Lynley. New Scotland Yard.” As he spoke his full identification, he realised that it was the first time he’d done so since Helen’s death. He blinked at this knowledge and the quick but fleeting pain that it brought him. He showed his identification to the woman. He said, “Niamh Triglia? Formerly Parsons?”

She said, “Yes, that’s who I am.”

“I need to speak with you about your husband. Jonathan Parsons. May I come in?”

“Oh yes. Of course.” She stepped back from the door to admit him. She led him through a sitting room largely given to bookshelves, which were themselves heavily given to paperback books interspersed with family photographs and the occasional seashell, interesting stone, or piece of driftwood. Beyond this, the kitchen overlooked a small back garden with a patch of lawn, neat flower beds bordering it, and a leafing tree in its centre.

Here in the kitchen, the crab cakes were managing to produce an impressive disorder. Hot oil splattering onto the cooktop largely characterised the chaos, followed by a draining board covered with bowls, tins, wooden spoons, a carton of eggs, and a coffee press whose liquid was long since gone and whose remaining grounds looked as if they’d been forgotten ages ago. Niamh Triglia went to the cooker and flipped the crab cakes, which produced a new burst of splattering. She said, “The difficulty is managing to get the breadcrumbs to brown without dousing the entire mixture with so much oil that you feel as if you’re eating badly done chips. Do you cook, Mr… It was Superintendent, though, wasn’t it?”

“Yes,” he said. “As to the superintendent part. As to the cooking, it’s not one of my strengths.”

“It’s my passion,” she confessed. “I had so little time to do it properly when I was teaching, and once I took my pension, I threw myself into it. Cookery courses at the community centre, programmes on the telly, that sort of thing. Problem is the eating bit.”

“Your efforts don’t please you?”

“On the contrary, they please me far too much.” She indicated her body, which was fairly shrouded by her apron. “I try to cut the recipes down for one person, but maths was never my strong suit and most of the time I make enough for at least four.”

“Are you alone here, then?”

“Mmm. Yes.” She used the corner of the egg turner to lift one of the crab cakes and examine its degree of brownness. “Lovely,” she murmured. From a nearby cupboard, she took a plate, which she covered with several layers of kitchen towel. From the fridge, she took a small mixing bowl. “Aioli,” she said, dipping her chin towards the mixture. “Red pepper, garlic, lemon, et cetera. Getting the balance of tastes just right is the issue with a good aioli. That and the olive oil, naturally. Very good e.v.o. is essential.”

“I’m sorry? Evio?” Lynley wondered if this was a style of cooking.

“EVO. Extra-virgin olive oil. The virginest one can find. If there are degrees of virginity in olives. To tell the truth, I’ve never been sure what it means when an olive oil is extra virgin. Are the olives virgins? Are they harvested by virgins? Are they pressed by virgins?” She brought the bowl of aioli to the kitchen table and returned to the cooker, where she began carefully depositing the crab cakes onto the kitchen towels that covered the plate. She took another set of kitchen towels and laid these on top of the cakes, pressing them gently into the concoction to remove as much of the residual oil as she could. From the oven, then, she brought forth three more plates, and Lynley was able to see what she had meant about failing to reduce her recipes so as to cook for one person only. Each plate was similarly dressed with kitchen towels and crab cakes. It looked as if she’d cooked more than a dozen.

“Fresh crab isn’t essential,” she told him. “You can use tinned. Frankly, I find you really can’t tell the difference if the crab is going to be used in a cooked dish. On the other hand, if it’s going to be eaten in something uncooked-salad? a dip for vegetable biscuits or the like-you’re best to go with fresh. But you have to make sure it’s fresh fresh. Trapped that day, I mean.” She deposited the plates on the table and told him to sit. He would, she hoped, indulge. Otherwise, she feared she herself might eat them all, as her neighbours weren’t as appreciative of her culinary efforts as she’d have liked them to be. “I’ve no family to cook for any longer,” she said. “The girls are scattered to the winds and my husband died last year.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“You’re very kind. He went quickly, so it was a terrible shock as he’d been perfectly well up till a day before. Something of an athlete, also. He complained of a headache that he couldn’t get rid of, and he died the next morning as he was putting on his socks. I heard a noise and went to see what had happened and there he was on the floor. Aneurysm.” She lowered her gaze, eyebrows drawn together. “It was difficult not to be able to say good-bye.”

Lynley felt the great stillness of memory settling round him. Perfectly fine in the morning and perfectly dead by the afternoon. He cleared his throat roughly. “Yes. I expect it is.”

She said, “Well, one recovers eventually from these things.” She shot him a tremulous smile. “At least, that’s what one hopes.” She went to a cupboard and brought out two plates; from a drawer she took cutlery. She laid the table. “Please do sit, Superintendent.”

She found him a linen napkin and used her own first to clean off her spectacles. Without them, she had the dazed look of the lifelong sufferer of myopia. “There,” she said when she’d polished them to her liking, “I can actually see you properly now. My goodness. What a handsome man you are. You’d leave me quite tonguetied if I were your age. How old are you, by the way?”

“Thirty-eight.”

“Well, what’s a thirty-year age difference among friends?” she asked. “Are you married, dear?”

“My wife…Yes. Yes, I am.”

“And is your wife very beautiful?”

“She is.”

“Blond, like you?”

“No. She’s quite dark.”

“Then you must be very handsome together. Francis and I-that’s my late husband-were so similar to each other that we were often taken for brother and sister when we were younger.”

“You were married to him for a number of years, then?”

“Twenty-two years nearly to the day. But I’d known him before my first marriage ended. We’d been in primary school together. Isn’t it odd how something as simple as that-being in school together-can forge a bond and make things easier between people if they see each other later in life, even if they haven’t spoken in years? There was no period of discomfort between us when we first began to see each other after Jon and I divorced.” She scooped some aioli out of the bowl and handed it to him to do the same. She tasted the crab cake and pronounced it, “Doable. What do you think of them?”

“I think they’re excellent.”

“Flatterer. Handsome and well-bred, I see. Is your wife a good cook?”

“She’s completely appalling.”

“She has other strengths, then.”

He thought of Helen: the laughter of her, that unrepressed gaiety, so much compassion. “I find she has hundreds of strengths.”

“Which makes indifferent kitchen skills-”

“Completely irrelevant. There’s always takeaway.”

“Isn’t there just.” She smiled at him and then went on with, “I’m avoiding, as you’ve probably guessed. Has something happened to Jon?”

“Do you know where he is?”

She shook her head. “I haven’t spoken to him in years. Our eldest child-”

“Jamie.”

“Ah. So you know about Jamie?” And when Lynley nodded, she continued by saying thoughtfully, “I suppose we all carry some sort of scars from our childhood for this and that reason, and Jon had his share. His father was a hard man with set ideas about what his boys should do with their lives, and he’d decided that what they should do was science. Very stupid to decide your children’s lives for them, to my way of thinking, but there you have it. That’s what he did. Unfortunately, neither boy was the least interested in science, so they both disappointed him and he never let them forget it. Jon was determined not to be that kind of father to our children, especially to Jamie, and I have to say he made a success of it. We both made a success of parenthood. I stayed home with the children because he insisted and I agreed with him, and I think that made a difference. We were close to the children. The children were close to each other although strung along quite a bit in age. At any rate, we were a very tight and very happy little unit.”

“And then your son died.”

“And then Jamie died.” She set her knife and fork down and folded her hands in her lap. “Jamie was a lovely boy. Oh, he had his quirks-what boy his age doesn’t-but at heart he was lovely. Lovely and loving. And very very good to his little sisters. We were all devastated by his death, but Jon couldn’t come to grips with it. I thought he would, eventually. Give it time, I told myself. But when a person’s life becomes all about the death of another and about nothing else…I had the girls to think of, you see. I had myself to think of. I couldn’t live like that.”

“Like what?”

“It was all he talked about and, as far as I could tell, it was all he thought about. It was as if Jamie’s death had invaded his brain and eaten away everything that wasn’t Jamie’s death.”

“I’ve learned he wasn’t satisfied with the investigation, so he mounted his own.”

“He must have mounted half a dozen. But it made no difference. And each time that it made no difference, he went just a bit more mad. Of course, he’d lost the business by then and we’d gone through our savings and had lost our home, and that made things worse for him because he knew he was responsible for it happening, but he couldn’t get himself to stop. I tried to tell him it would make no difference to his grief and his loss to bring someone to justice, but he thought it would. He was sure it would. Just the way people think that if the killer of their loved one is put to death, that’s somehow going to assuage their own desolation. But how can it, really? The death of a killer doesn’t bring anyone else back to life, and that’s what we want and can never have.”

“What happened to Jonathan when you divorced?”

“The first three years or so, he phoned me occasionally. To give me ‘updates,’ he said. Of course, there never were any viable updates to give me, but he needed to believe he was making progress instead of doing what he was really doing.”

“Which was?”

“Making it less and less likely that anyone involved in Jamie’s death would…would crack, I suppose the word is. He saw in this an enormous conspiracy involving everyone in Pengelly Cove, with himself the outsider and them the close-mouthed community determined to protect its own.”

“But you didn’t see it that way?”

“I didn’t know how to see it. I wanted to be supportive of Jon and I tried to be at first, but for me the real point was that Jamie was dead. We’d lost him-all of us had lost him-and nothing Jon could do was going to alter that. My…I suppose you might call it my focus…was on that one fact, and it seemed to me-rightly or wrongly-that the result of what Jon was doing was to keep Jamie’s death fresh, like a sore that one rubs and causes to bleed instead of allowing it to heal. And I believed that healing was what we all needed.”

“Did you see him again? Did your girls see him again?”

She shook her head. “And doesn’t that compile tragedy upon tragedy? One child died terribly, but Jon lost all four upon his own choice because he chose the dead over the living. To me, that’s a greater tragedy than the loss of our son.”

“Some people,” Lynley said quietly, “have no other way to react to a sudden, inexplicable loss.”

“I daresay you’re right. But in Jon’s case, I think it was a deliberate choice. In making it, he was living the way he’d always lived, which was to put Jamie first. Here. Let me show you what I mean.”

She rose from the table and, wiping her hands down the front of her apron, she went into the sitting room. Lynley could see her walk over to the crowded bookshelves where she extricated a picture from among the large group on display. She brought it to the kitchen and handed it over, saying, “Sometimes photographs say things that words can’t convey.”

Lynley saw that she’d given him a family portrait. In it, a version of herself perhaps thirty years younger posed with husband and four winsome children. The scene was wintry, deep snow with a lodge and a ski lift in the background. In the foreground, suited up for sport with skis leaning up against their shoulders, the family stood happily ready for action, Niamh with a toddler in her arms and two other laughing daughters hanging on to her and perhaps a yard from them, Jamie and his father. Jonathan Parsons had his arm affectionately slung round Jamie’s neck, and he was pulling his son close to him. They both were grinning.

“That’s how it was,” Niamh said. “It didn’t seem to matter so very much because, after all, the girls had me. I told myself it was a man-man and woman-woman thing, and I ought to be pleased that Jon and Jamie were so close and the girls and I were as thick as thieves. But, of course, when Jamie died Jon saw himself as having lost it all. Three-quarters of his life was standing right in front of him, but he couldn’t see that. That was his tragedy. I didn’t want to make it mine.”

Lynley looked up from his study of the photo. “May I keep this for a time? I’ll return it to you, of course.”

She seemed surprised by the request. “Keep it? Whatever for?”

“I’d like to show it to someone. I’ll return it within a few days. By post. Or in person if you prefer. I’ll keep it quite safe.”

“Take it by all means,” she said. “But…I haven’t asked and I ought to have. Why have you come to talk about Jon?”

“A boy died north of here. Just beyond Casvelyn.”

“In a sea cave? Like Jamie?”

“In a fall from a cliff.”

“And you think this has something to do with Jamie’s death?”

“I’m not sure.” Lynley looked at the picture again. He said, “Where are your daughters now, Mrs. Triglia?”