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?”