Careless in Red

Chapter Four

“FORMERLY.” DAIDRE CHOSE HER MOMENT WHEN SHE WAS alone with Thomas Lynley, when Sergeant Collins had ducked into the kitchen to brew himself yet another cup of tea. Collins had so far managed to swill down four of them. Daidre hoped he had no intention of sleeping that night because, if her nose was not mistaken, he’d been helping himself to her very best Russian Caravan tea.

Thomas Lynley roused himself. He’d been staring at the coal fire. He was seated near it, not comfortably with his long legs stretched out as one might expect of a man enjoying the warmth of a fire, but elbows on knees and hands dangling loosely in front of him. “What?” he said.

“When he asked you, you said formerly. He said New Scotland Yard and you said formerly.”

“Yes,” Lynley said. “Formerly.”

“Have you quit your job? Is that why you’re in Cornwall?”

He looked at her. Once again she saw the injury that she had seen before in his eyes. He said, “I don’t quite know. I suppose I have. Quit, that is.”

“What sort…If you don’t mind my asking, what sort of policeman were you?”

“A fairly good sort, I think.”

“Sorry. I meant…Well, there’re lots of different sorts, aren’t there? Special Branch, protecting the Royals, Vice, walking a patch…”

“Murder,” he said.

“You investigated murders?”

“Yes. That’s exactly what I did.” He looked back at the fire.

“That must have been…difficult. Disheartening.”

“Seeing man’s inhumanity? It is.”

“Is that why you quit? I’m sorry. I’m being intrusive. But…Had you had enough trials on your heart?”

He didn’t reply.

The front door opened with a thud, and Daidre felt the wind gust into the room. Collins came out of the kitchen with his cup of tea as Detective Inspector Hannaford returned to them. She carried a white boiler suit over her arm. This she thrust at Lynley.

“Trousers, boots, and jacket,” she said. It was clearly an order. And to Daidre, “Where’re yours, then?”

Daidre indicated the carrier bag into which she’d deposited her outer clothing when she’d changed into blue jeans and a yellow jumper. She said, “But he’ll have no shoes.”

“It’s all right,” Lynley said.

“It isn’t. You can’t go round-”

“I’ll get another pair.”

“He won’t need them just yet anyway,” Hannaford said. “Where can he change?”

“My bedroom. Or the bathroom.”

“See to it, then.”

Lynley had already risen when the DI joined them. Less anticipation, this seemed, than years of breeding and good manners. The DI was a woman. One rose politely when a woman came into the room.

“SOCO’s arrived?” Lynley said to her.

“And the pathologist. We’ve a photo of the dead boy as well. He’s called Alexander Kerne. A local boy from Casvelyn. D’you know him?” She was speaking to Daidre. Sergeant Collins hovered in the kitchen doorway as if not quite sure he was meant to be having tea while on duty.

“Kerne? The name’s familiar, but I can’t say why. I don’t think I know him.”

“Have a vast acquaintance round here, do you?”

“What d’you mean?” Daidre was pressing her fingernails into her palms, and she made herself stop. She knew the detective was attempting to read her.

“You say you don’t think you know him. It’s a strange way of putting it. Seems to me, you either know him or you don’t. Are you getting changed?” This last to Lynley, an abrupt shift that was as disconcerting as her steady and inquisitive gaze.

He cast a quick look at Daidre and then away. He said, “Yes. Of course,” and ducked through the low doorway that separated the sitting room from a passage created by the depth of the fireplace. Beyond it lay a tiny bathroom and a bedroom big enough for a bed and a wardrobe and nothing else. The cottage was small and safe and snug. It was exactly the way Daidre wanted it.

She said to the detective, “I believe one can know someone by sight-actually have a conversation with him, if it comes down to it-without ever knowing that person’s identity. Their name, their details, anything. I expect your sergeant here can say the same and he’s a local man.”

Collins was caught, teacup halfway to his mouth. He shrugged. Agreeing or discounting. It was impossible to tell.

“Takes a bit of exertion, that, wouldn’t you say?” Hannaford asked Daidre shrewdly.

“I’ve found the exertion worth it.”

“So you knew Alexander Kerne by sight?”

“I may have done. But as I said earlier and as I’ve told the other policeman, Sergeant Collins here, and you as well, I didn’t get a good look at the boy when I first saw the body.”

Thomas Lynley returned to them then, sparing Daidre any further questions as well as any further exposure to DI Hannaford’s penetrating stare. He handed over the clothing the DI had asked for. It was absurd, Dairdre thought. He was going to catch his death if he wandered round like that: no jacket, no shoes, and just a thin white boiler suit of the type worn at crime scenes to ensure that the official investigators did not leave trace evidence behind. It was ridiculous.

DI Hannaford spoke to him. “I’m going to want to see your identification as well, Mr. Lynley. It’s form, and I’m sorry, but there’s no way round it. Can you get your hands on it?”

He nodded. “I’ll phone-”

“Good. Have it sent. You’re not going anywhere for a few days, anyway. This looks like a straightforward accident, but till we know for certain…Well, I expect you know the drill. I’ll want you where I can find you.”

“Yes.”

“You’ll need clothing.”

“Yes.” He sounded as if he didn’t care one way or the other. He was something windblown, not flesh, bone, and determination, but rather an insubstantial substance, desiccated and helpless against the forces of nature.

The detective looked round the cottage sitting room, as if assessing its potential to produce a set of clothes for the man as well as to house him. Daidre said hastily, “He’ll be able to get clothing in Casvelyn. Not tonight, of course. Everything’ll be closed. But tomorrow. He can stay there as well. Or at the Salthouse Inn. They’ve rooms. Not many. Nothing special. But they’re adequate. And it’s closer than Casvelyn.”

“Good,” Hannaford said. And to Lynley, “I’ll want you there at the inn, then. I’ll have more questions. Sergeant Collins can drive you.”

“I’ll drive him,” Daidre said. “I expect you’ll want everyone you can get your hands on to do whatever it is you do at the scene when someone dies. I know where the Salthouse Inn is, and if they’ve no rooms, he’ll need to be taken to Casvelyn.”

“Don’t trouble-” Lynley began.

“It’s no trouble,” Daidre said. What it was was a need to get Sergeant Collins and DI Hannaford out of her cottage, something that she could effect only if she had a reason to get out of the cottage herself.

After a pause, DI Hannaford said, “Fine,” and handing over her card to Lynley, “Phone me when you’re established somewhere. I’ll want to know where to find you, and I’ll be along directly we have matters sorted out here. It’ll be some time.”

“I know,” he said.

“Yes. I expect you do.” She nodded and left them, taking with her their clothing stuffed into bags. Sergeant Collins followed her. Police cars were blocking Daidre’s access to her own Vauxhall. They would have to be moved if she was to be able to get Thomas Lynley to the Salthouse Inn.

Silence swept into the cottage with the departure of the police. Daidre could feel Thomas Lynley looking at her, but she was finished with being looked at. She went from the sitting room into the entry, saying over her shoulder, “You can’t go out in your stocking feet like that. I have wellies out here.”

“I doubt they’ll fit,” he said. “It doesn’t matter. I’ll take the socks off for now. Put them back on when I get to the inn.”

She stopped. “That’s sensible of you. I hadn’t thought of it. If you’re ready, then, we can go. Unless you’d like something…? A sandwich? Soup? Brian does meals at the inn, but if you’d rather not have to eat in the dining area…” She didn’t want to make the man a meal, but it seemed the proper thing to do. They were somehow bound together in this matter: partners in suspicion, perhaps. It felt that way to her, because she had secrets and he certainly seemed to have them, too.

“I expect I can have something sent up to my room,” Lynley said, “providing they have rooms available tonight.”

“Let’s be off then,” Daidre said.

They made their second drive to the Salthouse Inn more slowly as there was no rush, and they encountered two more police vehicles and an ambulance on the way. They didn’t speak and when Daidre glanced over at her companion, she saw that his eyes were closed and his hands rested easily on his thighs. He looked asleep, and she didn’t doubt that he was. He’d seemed exhausted. She wondered how long he’d been hiking along the coastal path.

At the Salthouse Inn, she stopped the Vauxhall in the car park, but Lynley didn’t move. She touched him gently on the shoulder.

He opened his eyes and blinked slowly, as if clearing his head of a dream. He said, “Thank you. It was kind-”

“I didn’t want to leave you in the clutches of the police,” she cut in. Then, “Sorry. I forget you’re one of them.”

“After a fashion, yes, I am.”

“Well, anyway…I thought you might like a respite from them. Although from what she said…the inspector…it doesn’t appear you’ve escaped them for long.”

“No. They’ll want to talk to me at length tonight. The first person on the scene is always suspect. They’ll be intent on gathering as much information as possible as quickly as possible. That’s the way it’s done.”

They were silent then. A gust of wind-stronger than any other so far-hit the car and rocked it. It stirred Daidre to words once more. She said, “I’ll come round for you tomorrow, then.” She made the declaration without thinking through all the ramifications of what it meant, what it could mean, and what it would look like. This wasn’t like her, and she shook herself mentally. But the words were out there, and she let them lie. “You’ll need to get things from Casvelyn, I mean. I don’t expect you want to walk round in that boiler suit for long. You’ll want shoes as well. And other things. Casvelyn’s the closest place to get them.”

“That’s good of you,” Lynley told her. “But I don’t want to trouble you.”

“You said that earlier. But it isn’t and you’re not. It’s very strange, but I feel that we’re in this together although I don’t quite know what this is.”

“I’ve caused you a problem,” he said. “More than one. The window in your cottage. Now the police. I’m sorry about it.”

“What else were you to do? You could hardly walk on once you’d found him.”

“No. I couldn’t walk on, could I?”

He sat for a moment. He seemed to be watching the wind play with the sign hanging above the inn’s front door.

He finally said, “May I ask you something?”

She said, “Certainly.”

“Why did you lie?”

She heard an unexpected buzzing in her ears. She repeated the last word, as if she’d misheard him when she’d heard him only too clearly.

He said, “The first time we came here, you told the publican that the boy in the cove was Santo Kerne. You said his name. Santo Kerne. But when the police asked you…” He gestured, a movement saying finish the rest for yourself.

The question reminded Daidre that this man, disheveled and filthy though he was, was himself a policeman, and a detective at that. From this moment, she needed to take extraordinary care.

She said, “Did I say that?”

“You did. Quietly, but not quietly enough. And now you’ve told the police at least twice that you didn’t recognise the boy. When they’ve said his name, you’ve said you don’t know him. I’m wondering why.”

He looked at her, and she instantly regretted her offer to take him into Casvelyn for clothing in the morning. He was more than the sum of his parts, and she hadn’t seen that in time.

She said, “I’ve come for a holiday. At the time it seemed-what I said to the police-the best way of ensuring I have one. A holiday. A rest.”

He said nothing.

She added, “Thank you for not betraying me to them. Of course, I can’t stop you from betraying me later when you speak to them again. But I’d appreciate it, if you’d consider…There’re things the police don’t need to know about me. That’s all, Mr. Lynley.”

He didn’t reply. But he didn’t look away from her and she felt the heat rising up her neck to her cheeks. The door of the inn banged open then. A man and a woman stumbled into the wind. The woman twisted her ankle, and the man put his arm round her waist and then kissed her. She shoved him away. The gesture was playful. He caught her up again and they staggered in the wind towards a line of cars.

Daidre watched them as Lynley watched her. She finally said, “I’ll come for you at ten, then. Will that do for you, Mr. Lynley?”

His response was a long time in coming. Daidre thought he must be a good policeman.

“Thomas,” he said to her. “Please call me Thomas.”

IT WAS LIKE AN old-time film about the American west, Lynley thought. He ducked into the inn’s public bar, where the local drinkers were gathered, and silence fell. This was a part of the world where you were a visitor until you had become a permanent resident and you were a newcomer until your family had lived in the place for two generations. So he went down as a stranger among them. But he was more than that. He was also a stranger dressed in a white boiler suit and wearing nothing but socks on his feet. He had no coat against the cold, the wind, and the rain, and if that were not enough to make him a novelty, had anyone other than a bride entered this establishment in the past wearing white from shoulder to ankle, it probably hadn’t happened in the living memory of anyone present.

The ceiling-stained with the soot of fires and the smoke of cigarettes and crossed with black oak beams from which horse brasses were nailed-hung less than twelve inches above Lynley’s head. The walls bore a display of ancient farm implements, given mostly to scythes and pitchforks, and the floor was stone. This last was uneven, pockmarked, scored and scoured. Thresholds made of the same material as the floor were cratered by hundreds of years of entrances and exits, and the room itself that defined the public bar was small and divided into two sections described by fireplaces, one large and one small, which seemed to be doing more to make the air unbreathable than to warm the place. The body heat of the crowd was seeing to that.

When he’d been at the Salthouse Inn earlier with Daidre Trahair, just a few late-afternoon drinkers had been present. Now, the place’s nighttime crowd had arrived, and Lynley had to work his way through them and through their silence to get to the bar. He knew it was more than his clothing that made him an object of interest. There was the not small matter of his smell: unwashed from head to toe for seven weeks now. Unshaven and unshorn as well.

The publican-Lynley recalled that Daidre Trahair had referred to him as Brian-apparently remembered him from his earlier visit because he said abruptly into the silence, “Was it Santo Kerne out there on the cliffs?”

“I’m afraid I don’t know who it was. But it was a young man. An adolescent or just older than that. That’s all I can tell you.”

A murmur rose and fell at this. Lynley heard the name Santo repeated several times. He glanced over his shoulder. Dozens of eyes-young and old and in between-were fixed on him.

He said to Brian, “The boy-Santo-he was well known?”

“He lives hereabouts,” was the unhelpful reply. That was the limit of what Brian appeared to be willing to reveal to a stranger. He said, “Are you after a drink, then?”

When Lynley asked for a room instead, he recognised in Brian a marked reluctance to accommodate him. He put this down to what it likely was: a logical unwillingness to allow an unsavoury stranger such as himself access to the inn’s sheets and pillows. God only knew what vermin might be crawling upon him. But the novelty he represented at the Salthouse Inn was in his favour. His appearance was in direct conflict with his accent and his manner of speaking, and if that were not enough to make him an object of fascination, there was the intriguing matter of his finding the body, which had likely been the subject of conversation inside the inn before he entered.

“A small room only,” was the publican’s reply. “But that’s the case with all of ’em. Small. Wasn’t like people needed much when the place was built, did they.”

Lynley said that the size didn’t matter and he’d be happy with whatever the inn could give him. He didn’t know how long he’d actually need the room, he added. It seemed that the police were going to require his presence until matters about the young man in the cove had been decided.

A murmur rose at this. It was the word decided and everything that the word implied.

Brian used the toe of his shoe to ease open a door at the far end of the bar, and he spoke a few words into whatever room existed behind it. From this a middle-aged woman emerged, the inn’s cook by her garb of stained white apron, which she was hastily removing. Beneath it she wore a black skirt and white blouse. Sensible shoes as well.

She would take him up to a room, she said. She was all business, as if there was nothing strange about him. This room, she went on, was above the restaurant, not the bar. He’d find it quiet there. It was a good place to sleep.

She didn’t wait for his reply. His thoughts likely didn’t interest her anyway. His presence meant custom, which was hard to come by until late spring and summer. When beggars went begging, they couldn’t exactly choose their benefactors, could they?

She headed for another door at the far side of the public bar. This gave onto an icy stone passage. The inn’s restaurant operated in a room off this passage, although no one was seated within it, while at the far end a stairway the approximate width of a suitcase made the climb to the floor above. It was difficult to imagine how furniture had been worked up the stairs.

There were three rooms only on the first floor, and Lynley had his choice, although his guide-her name was Siobhan Rourke, she’d told him, and she was Brian’s longtime and apparently long-suffering partner-recommended the smallest of them as it was the one she’d mentioned earlier as being above the restaurant and quiet at this time of year. They all shared the same bathroom, she informed him, but that ought to be of no account as no one else was staying.

Lynley wasn’t particular about which room he was given so he took the first one whose door Siobhan opened. This would do, he told her. It suited him. Not much larger than a cell, it was furnished with a single bed, a wardrobe, and a dressing table tucked under a tiny casement window with leaded panes. Its only bow to mod cons were a washbowl in a corner and a telephone on the dressing table. This last was a jarring note in a room that could have done for a serving maid two hundred years earlier.

Only in the centre of the room could Lynley actually stand upright. Seeing this, Siobhan said, “They were shorter in those days, weren’t they? P’rhaps this isn’t the best choice, Mr…?”

“Lynley,” he said. “This is fine. Does that phone work?”

Indeed, it did. Could she bring him anything? There were towels in the wardrobe and soap as well as shampoo in the bathroom-she sounded encouraging as she said this last bit-and if he wanted a meal, that could be arranged. Up here. Or in the dining room below, naturally, if that was what he wanted. She added this last as a hasty afterthought although it was fairly clear that the more he kept to his room, the happier everyone would be.

He said he wasn’t hungry, which was more or less the truth. She left him then. When the door closed behind her, he gazed at the bed. It was nearly two months since he’d slept in one, and even then he’d not done much sleeping anyway. When he slept, he dreamed, and he dreaded his dreams. Not because they were disturbing but because they ended. It was, he’d found, more bearable not to sleep at all.

Because there was no point in putting it off, he went to the phone and punched in the numbers. He was hoping that there would be no answer, just a machine picking up so that he could leave a brief message without the human contact. But after five double rings, he heard her voice. There was nothing for it but to speak.

He said, “Mother. Hullo.”

At first she said nothing and he knew what she was doing: standing next to the phone in the drawing room or perhaps her morning room or elsewhere in the grand sprawling house that was his birthright and even more his curse, raising one hand to her lips, looking towards whoever else was in the room and that would likely be his younger brother or perhaps the manager of the estate or even his sister in the unlikely event that she was still down from Yorkshire. And her eyes-his mother’s eyes-would communicate the information before she said his name. It’s Tommy. He’s phoned. Thank God. He’s all right.

She said, “Darling. Where are you? How are you?”

He said, “I’ve run into something…It’s a situation up in Casvelyn.”

“My God, Tommy. Have you walked that far? Do you know how-” But she didn’t say the rest. She meant to ask whether he knew how worried they were. But she loved him and she wouldn’t burden him further.

As he loved her, he answered her anyway. “I know. I do. Please understand that. It’s just that I can’t seem to find my way.”

She knew, of course, that he wasn’t referring to his sense of direction. “My dear, if I could do anything to remove this from your shoulders…”

He could hardly bear the warmth of her voice, her unending compassion, especially when she herself had borne so many of her own tragedies throughout the years. He said to her, “Yes. Well,” and he cleared his throat roughly.

“People have phoned,” she told him. “I’ve kept a list. And they’ve not stopped phoning, the way you think people might. You know what I mean: One phone call and there, I’ve done my duty. It hasn’t been like that. There has been such concern for you. You are so deeply loved, my dear.”

He didn’t want to hear it, and he had to make her understand that. It wasn’t that he didn’t value the concern of his friends and associates. It was that their concern-and what was worse, their expression of it-rubbed a place in him already so raw that having it touched by anything was akin to torture. He’d left his home because of this, because on the coast path there was no one in March and few enough people in April and even if he ran across someone in his walk, that person would know nothing of him, of what he was doing trudging steadily forward day after day, or of what had led up to his decision to do so.

He said, “Mother…”

She heard it in his voice, as she would do. She said, “Dearest, I’m sorry. No more of it.” Her voice altered, becoming more businesslike, for which he was grateful. “What’s happened? You’re all right, aren’t you? You’ve not been injured?”

No, he told her. He wasn’t injured. But he’d come upon someone who had been. He was the first to come upon him, it seemed. A boy. He’d been killed in a fall from one of the cliffs. Now the police were involved. As he’d left at home everything that would identify him…Could she send him his wallet? “It’s form, I daresay. They’re just in the process of sorting everything out. It looks like an accident but, obviously, until they know, they won’t want me going off. And they do want me to prove I am who I say I am.”

“Do they know you’re a policeman, Tommy?”

“One of them, apparently. Otherwise, I’ve told them only my name.”

“Nothing else?”

“No.” It would have turned things into a Victorian melodrama: My good man-or in this case woman-do you know who you’re talking to? He’d go for the police rank first and if that didn’t impress, he’d try the title next. That should produce some serious forelock pulling, if nothing else. Only, DI Hannaford didn’t appear to be the sort who pulled on forelocks, at least not her own. He said, “So they’re not willing to take me at my word and who can blame them. I wouldn’t take me at my word. Will you send the wallet?”

“Of course. At once. Shall I have Peter drive it up to you in the morning?”

He didn’t think he could bear his brother’s anxious concern. He said, “Don’t trouble him with that. Just put it in the post.”

He told her where he was and she asked-as she would-if the inn was pleasant, at least, if his room was comfortable, if the bed would suit him. He told her everything was fine. He said that he was, in fact, looking forward to bathing.

His mother was reassured by that, if not entirely satisfied. While the desire for a bath did not necessarily indicate a desire to continue living, it at least declared a willingness to muddle forward for a while. That would do. She rang off after telling him to have a good, long, luxurious soak and hearing him say that a good, long, luxurious soak was exactly his intention.

He replaced the phone on the dressing table. He turned from the table and, because there was no help for it, he looked at the room, the bed, the tiny washbasin in the corner. He found that his defences had fallen-his mother’s conversation had done it to him-and there was her voice, with him suddenly. Not his mother’s voice this time, but Helen’s voice. It is a bit monastic in here, isn’t it, Tommy? I feel absolutely nunlike. Determined to be chaste but faced with such horrific temptation to be very very naughty indeed.

He heard her so clearly. The Helen-ness of her. The nonsense that drew him out of himself when he most needed to be drawn. She’d been intuitive that way. One look at his face in the evening and she’d known exactly what was required. It had been her gift: a talent for observation and insight. Sometimes it was the touch of her hand on his cheek and the three words Tell me, darling. Other times it was the superficial frivolity that dissipated his tension and brought forth his laughter.

He said into the silence, “Helen,” but that was all that he said, and certainly the extent to which he could-at the moment-acknowledge what he’d lost.

DAIDRE DIDN’T RETURN TO the cottage when she left Thomas Lynley at the Salthouse Inn. Instead, she drove east. The route she took twisted like a discarded spool of ribbon through the misty countryside. It passed through several hamlets where lamps shone at windows in the dusk, then dipped through two woodlands. It divided one farmhouse from its outbuildings, and ultimately it came out on the A388. She took this road south and veered off on a secondary road that tracked east through pastureland where sheep and dairy cows grazed. She turned off where a sign pointed to CORNISH GOLD with VISITORS WELCOME printed beneath the name of the place.

Cornish Gold was half a mile down a very narrow lane, a farm comprising vast apple orchards circumscribed by stands of plum trees, these last planted years ago as a windbreak. The orchards began at the crest of a hill and spread down the other side in an impressive fan of acreage. Before them, in stair-step fashion, stood two old stone barns, and across from these, a cider factory formed one side of a cobbled courtyard. In the centre of this, an animal pen traced a perfect square and within that square, snuffled and snorted the ostensible reason for Daidre’s visit to this place, should anyone other than the farm’s owner ask her. This reason was an orchard pig, a huge and decidedly unfriendly Gloucester Old Spot that had been instrumental in Daidre’s meeting the owner of the cider farm soon after the woman’s arrival in this part of the world, a journey she’d made over thirty years from Greece to London to St. Ives to the farm.

At the side of the pen, Daidre found the pig waiting. He was named Stamos, after his owner’s former husband. The porcine Stamos, never a fool and always an optimist, had anticipated the reason for Daidre’s visit and had lumbered to the rail fence cooperatively once Daidre came into the courtyard. She had nothing for him this time, however. Packing peeled oranges into her bag while still at her cottage had seemed a questionable activity while the police were hanging about, intent upon watching and noting everyone’s movements.

She said, “Sorry, Stamos. But let’s have a look at the ear all the same. Yes, yes. It’s all form. You’re quite recovered, and you know it. You’re too clever for your own good, aren’t you?”

The pig was known to bite, so she took care. She also looked round the courtyard to see who might be watching because, if nothing else, one had to be diligent. But no one was there, and that was reasonable. For it was late in the day, and all employees of the farm would have long gone home.

She said, “Looking perfect now,” to the pig and then she crossed the remainder of the courtyard where an arch led to a small rain-sodden vegetable garden. Here she followed a brick path-uneven, overgrown, and pooled with rainwater-to a neat white cottage from which the sound of classical guitar came in fits and starts. Aldara would be practising. That was good, as it likely meant she was alone.

The playing stopped instantly when Daidre knocked on the door. Steps hurriedly approached across the hardwood floor inside.

“Daidre! What on earth…?” Aldara Pappas was backlit from within the cottage, so Daidre couldn’t see her face. But she knew the great dark eyes would hold speculation and not surprise, despite her tone of voice. Aldara stepped back from the door, saying, “Come in. You are so very welcome. What a lovely surprise that you should come to break the tedium of my evening. Why didn’t you phone me from Bristol? Are you down for long?”

“It was a sudden decision.”

Inside the cottage it was quite warm, the way Aldara liked it. Every wall was washed in white, and each one of them displayed highly-coloured paintings of rugged landscapes, arid and possessing habitations of white-small buildings with tile on their roofs and their window boxes bursting with flowers, with donkeys standing placidly against their walls and dark-haired children playing in the dirt before their front doors. Aldara’s furniture was simple and sparse. The pieces were brightly upholstered in blue and yellow, however, and a red rug covered part of the floor. Only the geckos were missing, their little bodies curving against the surface of whatever their tiny suctioned feet could cling to.

A coffee table in front of the sofa held a bowl of fruit and a plate of roasted peppers, Greek olives, and cheese: feta, undoubtedly. A bottle of red wine was still to be opened. Two wineglasses, two napkins, two plates, and two forks were neatly positioned. These gave the lie to Aldara’s words. Daidre looked at her. She raised an eyebrow.

“It was a small social lie only.” Aldara was, as ever, completely unembarrassed to have been caught out. “Had you walked in and seen this, you would have felt less than welcome, no? And you are always welcome in my home.”

“As is someone else, apparently, tonight.”

“You are far more important than someone else.” As if to emphasise this, Aldara went to the fireplace, where a fire was laid and matches remained only to be used. She struck one on the underside of the mantel and put it to the crumpled paper beneath the wood. Apple wood, this was, dried and kept for burning when the orchard trees were pruned.

Aldara’s movements were sensuous, but they were not studied. In the time Daidre had known the other woman, she’d come to realise that Aldara was sensual as a result of simply being Aldara. She would laugh and say, “It’s in my blood,” as if being Greek meant being seductive. But it was more than blood that made her compelling. It was confidence, intelligence, and complete lack of fear. Daidre admired this final quality most in the other woman, aside from her beauty. For she was forty-five and looked ten years younger. Daidre was thirty-one and, without the olive skin of the other woman, knew she would not be so lucky in fourteen years’ time.

Having lit the fire, Aldara went to the wine and uncorked it, as if underscoring her declaration that Daidre was as valued and important a guest as whomever Aldara was actually expecting. She poured, saying, “It’s going to have a bite. None of that smooth French business. As you know, I like wine that challenges the palate. So have some cheese with it, or it’s likely to take the enamel from your teeth.”

She handed over a glass and scooped up a chunk of cheese, which she popped into her mouth. She licked her fingers slowly, then she winked at Daidre, mocking herself. “Delicious,” she said. “Mama sent it from London.”

“How is she?”

“Still looking for someone to kill Stamos, of course. Sixty-seven years old and no one holds a grudge like Mama. She says to me, ‘Figs. I shall send that devil figs. Will he eat them, Aldara? I’ll stuff them with arsenic. What d’you think?’ I tell her to dismiss him from her thoughts. I have, I tell her. ‘Do not waste energy on that man,’ I tell her. ‘It’s been nine years, Mama, and that is sufficient time to wish someone ill.’ She says, as if I had not spoken, ‘I’ll send your brothers to kill him.’ And then she curses him in Greek at some length, all of which I’m paying for, naturally, as I’m the one who makes the phone calls, four times a week, like the dutiful daughter I have always been. When she’s finished, I tell her at least to send Nikko if she truly intends to kill Stamos because Nikko’s the only one of my brothers who’s actually good with a knife and a decent shot with a gun. And then she laughs. She launches into a story about one of Nikko’s children and that is that.”

Daidre smiled. Aldara dropped onto the sofa, kicking off her shoes and tucking her legs beneath her. She was wearing a dress the colour of mahogany, its hem like a handkerchief, its neckline V-ing towards her breasts. It had no sleeves and was fashioned from material more suitable to summer on Crete than spring in Cornwall. Little wonder that the room was so warm.

Daidre took some cheese and wine as instructed. Aldara was right. The wine was rough.

“I think they aged it fifteen minutes,” Aldara told her. “You know the Greeks.”

“You’re the only Greek I do know,” Daidre said.

“This is sad. But Greek women are much more interesting than Greek men, so you have the best of the lot with me. You’ve not come about Stamos, have you? I mean Stamos the lowercase pig, of course. Not Stamos the uppercase Pig.”

“I stopped to look at him. His ears are clear.”

“They would be. I did follow your instructions. He’s right as rain. He’s asking for a girlfriend as well, although the last thing I want is a dozen orchard piglets round my ankles. You didn’t answer me, by the way.”

“Did I not?”

“You did not. I’m delighted to see you, as always, but there’s something in your face that tells me you’ve come for a reason.” She took another piece of cheese.

“Who’re you expecting?” Daidre asked her.

Aldara’s hand, lifting the cheese to her mouth, paused. She cocked her head and regarded Daidre. “That sort of question is completely unlike you,” she pointed out.

“Sorry. But…”

“What?”

Daidre felt flustered, and she hated that feeling. Her life experience-not to mention her sexual and emotional experience-placed in opposition to Aldara’s experience left her seriously wanting and even more seriously out of her depth. She shifted gears. She did it baldly, as baldness was the only weapon she possessed. “Aldara, Santo Kerne’s been killed.”

Aldara said, “What did you say?”

“Are you asking that because you didn’t hear me or because you want to think you didn’t hear me?”

“What happened to him?” Aldara said, and Daidre was gratified to watch her replace her bit of cheese on the plate, uneaten.

“He was apparently climbing.”

“Where?”

“The cliff in Polcare Cove. He fell and was killed. A man out walking the coastal path was the one to find him. He came to the cottage.”

“You were there when this happened?”

“No. I drove down from Bristol this afternoon. When I got to the cottage, the man was inside. He was looking for a phone. I came in on him.”

“You came in on a man inside your cottage? My God. How frightening. How did he…? Did he find the extra key?”

“He broke a window to get in. He told me there was a body on the rocks and I went down to it with him. I said I was a doctor-”

“Well, you are a doctor. You might have been able to-”

“No. It’s not that. Well, it is in a way because I could have done something, I suppose.”

“You must more than suppose, Daidre. You’ve been educated well. You’ve qualified. You’ve managed to acquire a job of enormous responsibility and you cannot say-”

“Aldara. Yes. All right. I know. But it was more than wanting to help. I wanted to see. I had a feeling.”

Aldara said nothing. Sap crackled in one of the logs and the sound of it drew her attention to the fire. She looked at it long, as if checking to see that the logs remained where she had originally placed them. She finally said, “You thought it might be Santo Kerne? Why?”

“It’s obvious, isn’t it?”

“Why is it obvious?”

“Aldara. You know.”

“I don’t. You must tell me.”

“Must I?”

“Please.”

“You’re being-”

“I’m being nothing. Tell me what you want to tell me about why things are so obvious to you, Daidre.”

“Because even when one thinks everything has been seen to, even when one thinks every i has been dotted, every t has been crossed, even when one thinks every sentence has a full stop at the end-”

“You’re becoming tedious,” Aldara pointed out.

Daidre took a sharp breath. “Someone is dead. How can you talk like that?”

“All right. Tedious was a poor choice of words. Hysterical would have been better.”

“This is a human being we’re talking about. This is a teenage boy. Not nineteen years old. Dead on the rocks.”

“Now you are hysterical.”

“How can you be like this? Santo Kerne is dead.”

“And I’m sorry about that. I don’t want to think of a boy that young falling from a cliff and-”

“If he fell, Aldara.”

Aldara reached for her wineglass. Daidre noted-as she sometimes did-that the Greek woman’s hands were the only part of her that was not lovely. Aldara herself called them a peasant’s hands, made for pounding clothes against rocks in a stream, for kneading bread, for working the soil. With strong, thick fingers and wide palms, they were not hands made for delicate employment. “Why ‘if he fell’?” she asked.

“You know the answer to that.”

“But you said he was climbing. You can’t think someone…”

“Not someone, Aldara. Santo Kerne? Polcare Cove? It’s not difficult to work out who might have harmed him.”

“You’re talking nonsense. You go to the cinema far too often. Films make one start believing that people act like they’re playing parts devised in Hollywood. The fact that Santo fell while he was climbing-”

“And isn’t that a bit odd? Whyever would he climb in this weather?”

“You ask the question as if you expect me to know the answer.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Aldara-”

“Enough.” Aldara firmly set her wineglass down. “I am not you, Daidre. I’ve never had this…this…oh, what shall I call it…this awe of men that you have, this feeling that they are somehow more significant than they actually are, that they are necessary in life, essential to a woman’s completion. I’m terribly sorry that the boy is dead, but it’s nothing to do with me.”

“No? And this…?” Daidre indicated the two wineglasses, the two plates, the two forks, the endless repetition of what should have been but never quite was the number two. And there was the additional matter of Aldara’s clothing: the filmy dress that embraced and released her hips when she moved, the choice of shoes with toes too open and heels too high to be practical on a farm, the earrings that illustrated the length of her neck. There was little doubt in Daidre’s mind that the sheets on Aldara’s bed were fresh and scented with lavender and that there were candles ready to be lit in her bedroom.

A man was at this moment on his way to her. He was even now pondering the removal of her clothes. He was wondering how quickly upon his arrival he could get down to business with her. He was thinking of how he was going to take her-rough or tender, up against the wall, on the floor, in a bed-and in what position, of whether he’d be up for the job of doing it more than twice because he knew merely twice would not be enough, not for a woman like Aldara Pappas. Earthy, sensual, ready. He damn well had to give her what she was looking for because if he didn’t, he’d be tossed aside and he didn’t want that.

Daidre said, “I think you’re going to find otherwise, Aldara. I think you’re going to see that this…what happened to Santo…whatever it is-”

“That’s nonsense,” Aldara cut in.

“Is it?” Daidre put her palm on the table between them. She repeated her earlier question. “Who’re you expecting tonight?”

“That doesn’t concern you.”

“Are you completely mad? I had the police in my cottage.”

“And that worries you. Why?”

“Because I feel responsible. Don’t you?”

Aldara seemed to consider the question, because it was a moment before she replied. “Not at all.”

“And that’s that, then?”

“I suppose it is.”

“Because of this? The wine, the cheese, the lovely fire? The two of you? Whoever he is?”

Aldara rose. She said, “You must leave. I’ve tried to explain myself to you time and again. But you see how I am as a moral question and not what it is, which is just a manifestation of the only way I can function. So yes, someone is on his way and, no, I’m not going to tell you who it is, and I’d vastly prefer it if you were not here when he arrives.”

“You refuse to be touched by anything, don’t you?” Daidre asked her.

“My dear, that is definitely the pot and the kettle,” was Aldara’s reply.