“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.”