Careless in Red by Elizabeth George
What she did have a need for, on the other hand, was getting the police out of her life. Unfortunately, there was only one way to do this and it had to do with information: naming a name that would take them in a different direction. She found that she was willing to do that.
She turned to Hannaford. “You want Aldara Pappas,” she said. “You’ll find her at a place called Cornish Gold. It’s a cider farm.”
FINDING JONATHAN PARSONS’ FORMER wife ate up another ninety minutes of his time once Lynley left Rock Larson’s office. He began at the comprehensive, where he learned that Niamh Parsons had long ago become Niamh Triglia and had also, more recently, taken her pension. She’d lived for years not far from the school, but whether she was still at that location upon her retirement from education…Who could say? That was the limit to what they were able to tell him.
From there, he went to an address he unearthed through the simple means of browsing in the public library. As he’d suspected, the Triglias no longer resided in Exeter, but this was not a dead end. Showing his identification and questioning a few neighbours turned up their new place of abode. Like many others before them, they had headed for sunnier climes. Thankfully, this did not turn out to be the coast of Spain but rather the coast of Cornwall, which, while not atmospherically Mediterranean in climate, was the best the mainland of England had to offer in conditions that might be deemed temperate by those who were determinedly sanguine. The Triglias had been among these types. They lived in Boscastle.
This meant another long drive, but the day was pleasant and the time of year had not yet turned Cornwall into an elongated car park with occasional visual diversions. He made relatively good time to Boscastle, and soon enough he was hiking towards a steep lane of cottages which wound up from the ancient fishing harbour, an inlet protected by vast cliffs of slate and volcanic lava. What went for the high street came first in his climb—a few shops of unpainted stone that were dedicated to the tourist trade and a few more to meet the needs of the village residents—and after it came Old Street, the location of the Triglias’ home. This was nestled not far from an obelisk dedicated to the dead of two world wars. It was called Lark Cottage, and it was whitewashed like a Santorini hut, with thick mounds of heather growing in front and healthy-looking primroses planted in window boxes. Crisp white curtains hung at the windows, and green paint glimmered on the front door. He crossed a tiny bridge of slate that spanned a deep gutter in front of the building, and when he knocked, it was only a moment before an apron-wearing woman answered, her spectacles splattered with what seemed to be grease and her grey hair scraped back from her face and springing up from the crown of her head like a hirsute fountain.
“I’m doing crab cakes,” she said, seemingly apropos of her general appearance and her more specific harried demeanour. “Sorry, but I can’t be away from them for more than a moment.”
He said, “Mrs. Triglia?”
“Yes. Yes. Oh, do please be quick. I hate to be rude, but they absorb dreadfully if you leave them too long.”
“Thomas Lynley. New Scotland Yard.” As he spoke his full identification, he realised that it was the first time he’d done so since Helen’s death. He blinked at this knowledge and the quick but fleeting pain that it brought him. He showed his identification to the woman. He said, “Niamh Triglia? Formerly Parsons?”
She said, “Yes, that’s who I am.”
“I need to speak with you about your husband. Jonathan Parsons. May I come in?”
“Oh yes. Of course.” She stepped back from the door to admit him. She led him through a sitting room largely given to bookshelves, which were themselves heavily given to paperback books interspersed with family photographs and the occasional seashell, interesting stone, or piece of driftwood. Beyond this, the kitchen overlooked a small back garden with a patch of lawn, neat flower beds bordering it, and a leafing tree in its centre.
Here in the kitchen, the crab cakes were managing to produce an impressive disorder. Hot oil splattering onto the cooktop largely characterised the chaos, followed by a draining board covered with bowls, tins, wooden spoons, a carton of eggs, and a coffee press whose liquid was long since gone and whose remaining grounds looked as if they’d been forgotten ages ago. Niamh Triglia went to the cooker and flipped the crab cakes, which produced a new burst of splattering. She said, “The difficulty is managing to get the breadcrumbs to brown without dousing the entire mixture with so much oil that you feel as if you’re eating badly done chips. Do you cook, Mr…. It was Superintendent, though, wasn’t it?”
“Yes,” he said. “As to the superintendent part. As to the cooking, it’s not one of my strengths.”
“It’s my passion,” she confessed. “I had so little time to do it properly when I was teaching, and once I took my pension, I threw myself into it. Cookery courses at the community centre, programmes on the telly, that sort of thing. Problem is the eating bit.”
“Your efforts don’t please you?”
“On the contrary, they please me far too much.” She indicated her body, which was fairly shrouded by her apron. “I try to cut the recipes down for one person, but maths was never my strong suit and most of the time I make enough for at least four.”
“Are you alone here, then?”
“Mmm. Yes.” She used the corner of the egg turner to lift one of the crab cakes and examine its degree of brownness. “Lovely,” she murmured. From a nearby cupboard, she took a plate, which she covered with several layers of kitchen towel. From the fridge, she took a small mixing bowl. “Aioli,” she said, dipping her chin towards the mixture. “Red pepper, garlic, lemon, et cetera. Getting the balance of tastes just right is the issue with a good aioli. That and the olive oil, naturally. Very good e.v.o. is essential.”
“I’m sorry? Evio?” Lynley wondered if this was a style of cooking.
“EVO. Extra-virgin olive oil. The virginest one can find. If there are degrees of virginity in olives. To tell the truth, I’ve never been sure what it means when an olive oil is extra virgin. Are the olives virgins? Are they harvested by virgins? Are they pressed by virgins?” She brought the bowl of aioli to the kitchen table and returned to the cooker, where she began carefully depositing the crab cakes onto the kitchen towels that covered the plate. She took another set of kitchen towels and laid these on top of the cakes, pressing them gently into the concoction to remove as much of the residual oil as she could. From the oven, then, she brought forth three more plates, and Lynley was able to see what she had meant about failing to reduce her recipes so as to cook for one person only. Each plate was similarly dressed with kitchen towels and crab cakes. It looked as if she’d cooked more than a dozen.
“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
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.”
“Some people,” Lynley said quietly, “have no other way to react to a sudden, inexplicable loss.”
“I daresay you’re right. But in Jon’s case, I think it was a deliberate choice. In making it, he was living the way he’d always lived, which was to put Jamie first. Here. Let me show you what I mean.”
She rose from the table and, wiping her hands down the front of her apron, she went into the sitting room. Lynley could see her walk over to the crowded bookshelves where she extricated a picture from among the large group on display. She brought it to the kitchen and handed it over, saying, “Sometimes photographs say things that words can’t convey.”
Lynley saw that she’d given him a family portrait. In it, a version of herself perhaps thirty years younger posed with husband and four winsome children. The scene was wintry, deep snow with a lodge and a ski lift in the background. In the foreground, suited up for sport with skis leaning up against their shoulders, the family stood happily ready for action, Niamh with a toddler in her arms and two other laughing daughters hanging on to her and perhaps a yard from them, Jamie and his father. Jonathan Parsons had his arm affectionately slung round Jamie’s neck, and he was pulling his son close to him. They both were grinning.
“That’s how it was,” Niamh said. “It didn?
Lynley looked up from his study of the photo. “May I keep this for a time? I’ll return it to you, of course.”
She seemed surprised by the request. “Keep it? Whatever for?”
“I’d like to show it to someone. I’ll return it within a few days. By post. Or in person if you prefer. I’ll keep it quite safe.”
“Take it by all means,” she said. “But…I haven’t asked and I ought to have. Why have you come to talk about Jon?”
“A boy died north of here. Just beyond Casvelyn.”
“In a sea cave? Like Jamie?”
“In a fall from a cliff.”
“And you think this has something to do with Jamie’s death?”
“I’m not sure.” Lynley looked at the picture again. He said, “Where are your daughters now, Mrs. Triglia?”
Chapter Twenty-four
BEA HANNAFORD DIDN’T LIKE THE FACT THAT DAIDRE TRAHAIR had managed to take control of the interrogation several times during their interview. In Bea’s opinion the veterinarian was too clever by half, which made the DI even more determined to pin something on the wily wench. What they ended up with, however, was not what Bea had expected and hoped to get from her.
Once she’d given the piece of potentially useless information about Aldara Pappas and the Cornish Gold, Dr. Trahair had politely informed them that unless they had something to charge her with, she’d be off, thank you very much. The damn woman knew her rights, and the fact that she’d decided to exercise them at that particular moment was maddening, but there was nothing for it but to bid her an extremely less-than-fond farewell.