Helen, he thought.

He had to force himself back to the present. He carefully placed the photo of his wife-cheek in her hand, smiling at him across the breakfast table, hair still uncombed, face without makeup, the way he loved her-back into its position in his wallet. He put the wallet onto the bedside table, next to the phone. He sat in silence, only hearing his own breathing. He thought of her name. He thought of her face. He thought of nothing.

After a moment, he continued his work. He considered his options. Further investigation into Daidre Trahair was needed, but he didn’t want to be the one who did it, loyalty to a fellow cop or not. For he wasn’t a cop, not here and not now. But there were others.

Before he could stop himself, because it would be so easy to do so, he picked up the phone and punched in a number more familiar to him than was his own. And a voice as familiar as a family member’s answered on the other end of the line. Dorothea Harriman, departmental secretary at New Scotland Yard.

At first he wasn’t sure he could speak, but he finally managed to say, “Dee.”

She knew at once. In a hushed voice she said, “Detective Super-intendent…Detective Inspector…Sir?”

“Just Thomas,” he said. “Just Thomas, Dee.”

“Oh goodness no, sir,” was her reply. Dee Harriman, who had never called anyone by anything less than his or her full title. “How are you, Detective Superintendent Lynley?”

“I’m fine, Dee. Is Barbara available?”

“Detective Sergeant Havers?” she asked. Stupid question, which wasn’t like Dee. Lynley wondered why she had asked it. “No. No, she isn’t, Detective Superintendent. She isn’t here. But Detective Sergeant Nkata is around. And Detective Inspector Stewart. And Detective Inspec-”

Lynley spared her the endless recitation. “I’ll try Barbara on her mobile,” he said. “And, Dee…?”

“Detective Superintendent?”

“Don’t tell anyone I’ve phoned. All right?”

“But are you-”

“Please.”

“Yes. Yes. Of course. But we hope…not just me…I speak for everyone, I know I do, when I say…”

“Thank you,” he said.

He rang off. He thought about making the call to Barbara Havers, longtime partner and fractious friend. He knew that she would offer her help gladly, but it would be too gladly and if she was in the middle of a case, she’d offer her help to him anyway and then suffer the result of that offering without mentioning it to him.

He didn’t know if he could do it for other reasons that he’d felt the moment he’d heard Dorothea Harriman’s voice. It was obviously far too soon, perhaps a wound too deep to heal.

Yet a boy was dead, and Lynley was who he was. He picked up the phone again.

“Yeah?” The answer was vintage Havers. She shouted it as well, for she was obviously rattling along somewhere in her death trap of a car if the background noise was anything to go by.

He drew a breath, still unsure.

She said, “Hey. Someone there? I can’t hear you. C’n you hear me?”

He said, “Yes. I can hear you, Barbara. The game’s afoot. Can you help me out?”

There was a long pause. He could hear noise from her radio, the distant sound of traffic passing. Wisely, it seemed, she’d pulled to the side of the road to talk. But still she said nothing.

“Barbara?” he said.

“Tell me, sir,” was her reply.

LIQUIDEARTH STOOD ON BINNER Down, among a collection of other small-manufacturing businesses on the grounds of a long-decommissioned royal air station. This was a relic of World War II, reduced all these decades later to a combination of crumbling buildings, rutted lanes, and masses of brambles. Between the abandoned buildings and along the lanes, the area resembled nothing so much as a rubbish tip. Disused lobster traps and fishing nets formed piles next to lumps of broken concrete; discarded tyres and moulding furniture languished against propane tanks; stained toilets and chipped basins became contrasting elements that fought with wild ivy. There were mattresses, black garbage sacks stuffed with who-knew-what, three-legged chairs, splintered doors, ruined casings from windows. It was a perfect spot to toss a body, Bea Hannaford concluded. No one would find it for a generation.

Even from inside the car, she could smell the place. The damp air offered fires and cow manure from a working dairy farm at the edge of the down. Added to the general unpleasantness of the environment, pooled rainwater that was skimmed by oil slicks sat in craters along the tarmac.

She’d brought Constable McNulty with her, both as navigator and note taker. Based on his comments in Santo Kerne’s bedroom on the previous day, she decided he might prove useful with matters related to surfing, and as a longtime resident of Casvelyn, at least he knew the town.

They’d come at LiquidEarth on a circuitous route that had taken them by the town wharf, which formed the northeast edge of the disused Casvelyn Canal. They gained Binner Down from a street called Arundel, off which a lumpy track led past a grime-streaked farmhouse. Behind this, the decommissioned air station lay, and far beyond it in the distance a tumbledown house stood, a mess of a place taken over by a succession of surfers and brought to wrack as a result of their habitation. McNulty seemed philosophical about this. What else could one expect? he seemed to say.

Bea saw soon enough that she was lucky to have him with her, for the businesses on the erstwhile airfield had no addresses affixed to them. They were nearly windowless cinder-block buildings with roofs of galvanised metal overhung with ivy. Cracked concrete ramps led up to heavy steel vehicle doors at the front of each, and the occasional passageway door had been cut into these.

McNulty directed Bea along a track on the far north edge of the airfield. After a spine-damaging jounce for some three hundred yards, he mercifully said, “Here you go, Guv,” and indicated one hut of three that he claimed had once been housing for Wrens. She found that difficult enough to believe, but times had been tough. Compared to eking out an existence on a bomb site in London or Coventry, this had probably seemed like paradise.

When they alighted and did a little chiropractic manoeuvring of their spinal cords, McNulty pointed out how much closer they were at this point to the habitation of the surfers. He called it Binner Down House, and it stood in the distance directly across the down from them. Convenient for the surfers when you thought about it, he noted. If their boards needed repairing, they could just nip across the down and leave them here with Lew Angarrack.

They entered LiquidEarth by means of a door fortified with no less than four locks. Immediately, they were within a small showroom where in racks along two walls long boards and short boards leaned nose up and finless. On a third wall surfing posters hung, featuring waves the size of ocean liners, while along the fourth wall stood a business counter. Within and behind this a display of surfing accouterments were laid out: board bags, leashes, fins. There were no wet suits. Nor were there any T-shirts designed by Santo Kerne.

The place had an eye-stinging smell about it. This turned out to be coming from a dusty room beyond the showroom where a boiler-suited man with a long grey ponytail and large-framed spectacles was carefully pouring a substance from a plastic pail onto the top of a surfboard. This lay across two sawhorses.

The gent was slow about what he was doing, perhaps because of the nature of the work, perhaps because of the nature of his disability, his habits, or his age. He was a shaker, Bea saw. Parkinson’s, the drink, whatever.

She said, “Excuse me. Mr. Angarrack?” just as the sound of an electrical tool powered up from behind a closed door to the side.

“Not him,” McNulty said sotto voce behind her. “That’ll be Lew shaping a board in the other room.”