“Don’t make fun,” she told him. “I’m trying to tell you…But there’s nothing and there’s no one that I can ask, you see. So I’m asking you, as it’s the only thing left that I can think to do. I s’pose I’m asking for help, Grandie.”
Now, he thought, they were down to it. This was the moment the girl’s parents had hoped for, time with her granddad paying off. He waited for more. He made a hmph noise to indicate his willingness to listen. The moments ticked by as they approached Casvelyn. She said nothing more till they were in town.
Then it was brief. He’d pulled to the kerb in front of Clean Barrel Surf Shop before she finally spoke. “If I know something,” she said to him, her eyes fixed on the shop’s front door, “and if what I know might cause someone trouble…What should I do, Grandie? That’s what I’ve been asking God, but he hasn’t answered. What should I do? I could keep asking because when something bad happens to someone you care about, it seems like-”
“The Kerne boy,” he interrupted. “D’you know something about the Kerne boy, Tammy? Look at me square, girl, not out of the window.”
She did. He could see she was troubled beyond what he had thought. So there was only one answer, and despite the irritations it might cause in his own life, he owed it to her to give it. “You know something, you tell the police,” he said. “Nothing else to it. You do it today.”
Chapter Twelve
SHE EXCELLED AT DARTS. LYNLEY HAD LEARNED THAT QUICKLY enough on the previous evening, and he’d added the information to what little he knew about Daidre Trahair. She had a dartboard mounted on the back of the sitting room door, something he’d not noticed before because she kept the door open instead of closing it against the cold wind, which could sweep into the building from the tiny vestibule when someone entered the cottage.
He should have known he was in trouble when she used a tape measure to create a distance of exactly seven feet, nine and one-quarter inches from the back of the closed door. Here she placed the fireplace poker on a parallel, calling it their oche. When he said, “Okkey?” and she’d said, “The oche marks where the player has to stand, Thomas,” he’d had his first real clue that he was probably in over his head. But he’d thought, How difficult can it possibly be? and he’d gone like a lamb to the metaphorical slaughter, agreeing to a match called 501 about which he knew nothing at all.
He said, “Are there rules?”
She’d looked at him askance. “Of course there are rules. It’s a game, Thomas.” And she’d gone about explaining them to him. She began with the dartboard itself, losing him almost immediately when she referred to treble and double rings and what it meant to one’s score to land in one of them. He’d never thought of himself as an idiot-it had always seemed to him that knowing how to identify a bull’s-eye was the limit of what one needed to embrace when it came to darts-but within moments, he was entirely lost.
It was simple, she told him. “We each start with a score of 501, and the object is to reduce that to nought. We each throw three darts. A bull’s-eye scores fifty, the outer ring twenty-five and anything in the double or treble ring is double or treble the segment score. Yes?”
He nodded. He was almost altogether uncertain what she was talking about, but confidence, he reckoned, was the key to success.
“Good. Now, the caveat is that the last dart thrown has to land in a double or in the bull’s-eye. And additionally, if you reduce your score to one or it actually goes below nought, your turn ends immediately and the play is turned over to the other thrower. Follow?”
He nodded. He was even more uncertain at that point, but he decided it couldn’t be that difficult to hit a dartboard from less than eight feet away. Besides, it was only a game and his ego was strong enough to emerge undamaged should she win the match. For another could follow. Two out of three. Three out of five. It didn’t matter. It was all in an evening’s diversion, yes?
She won every match. They could have gone on all night and she probably would have continued to win. The vixen-for so he was thinking of her by then-turned out to be not only a tournament player but the sort of woman who did not believe a man’s ego had to be preserved by allowing him moments of specious supremacy over her.
She had the grace to be at least moderately embarrassed. She said, “Oh my. Oh dear. Well, it’s just that I never actually just let someone win. It’s never seemed right.”
“You’re…quite amazing,” he said. “My head is spinning.”
“It’s that I play a lot. I didn’t tell you that, did I, so I’ll pay the penalty for unspoken truths. I’ll help you with the washing up.”
She was as good as her word, and they saw to the kitchen in companionable fashion, with him doing the washing and her doing the drying. She made him clean the cooktop-“It’s only fair,” she told him-but she herself swept the floor and scoured the sink. He found himself enjoying her company and, as a result, felt ill at ease when it came to his appointed task.
He did it nonetheless. He was a cop when everything got reduced to essentials, and someone was dead through murder. She’d lied to an investigating officer and no matter his personal enjoyment of the evening, he had a job to do for DI Hannaford and he intended to do it.
He set about it the following morning, and he was able to get a fair distance right there from his room in the Salthouse Inn. He discovered through a few simple phone calls that someone called Daidre Trahair was indeed one of the veterinarians at Bristol Zoo Gardens. When he asked about speaking to Dr. Trahair, he was told that she was on emergency leave, dealing with a family matter in Cornwall.
This bit of news didn’t give him pause. People often claimed that family matters needed to be taken care of when what those family matters were was simply a need to get away for a few days of decompression from a stressful job. He decided that couldn’t be held against her.
Her claims about her adopted Chinese brother held up as well. Lok Trahair was indeed a student at Oxford University. Daidre herself had a first in biological science from the University of Glasgow, having gone on from there to the Royal Veterinary College for her advanced degree. Well and good, Lynley had thought. She might have had secrets that she wished to keep from DI Hannaford, but they weren’t secrets about her identity or that of her brother.
He delved back further into her schooling, but this was where he hit the first snag. Daidre Trahair had been a pupil in a secondary comprehensive in Falmouth, but before that there was no record of her. No school in Falmouth would claim her. State or public, day school, boarding school, convent school…There was nothing. She either had not lived in Falmouth for those years of her education, or she’d been sent far away for some reason, or she’d been schooled at home.
Yet surely she would have mentioned being schooled at home since, by her own admission, she’d been born at home. It was a logical follow-up, wasn’t it?
He wasn’t sure. He also wasn’t sure what more he could do. He was pondering his options when a knock at his bedroom door roused him from his thoughts. Siobhan Rourke presented him with a small package. It had just arrived in the post, she told him.
He thanked her, and when he was alone again, automatically opened it to find his wallet. This he opened as well. It was a knee-jerk reaction but it was more than that. He was-unprepared for the fact of it all-suddenly restored to who he was. Driving licence folded into a square, bank card, credit cards, picture of Helen.
He took this last in his fingers. It was of Helen at Christmas, less than two months away from dying. They’d had a hurried holiday, with no time to visit her family or his because he’d been in the midst of a case. “Not to worry, there’ll be other Christmases, darling,” she’d said.