“Yes.” Lynley looked beyond her, over her shoulder. Some seventy yards from where they were parked, an old caravan stood. Once white, now it was mostly laced the colour of rust, which streaked from its roof and from its windows at which yellow curtains printed with flowers drooped. Accompanying this impermanent structure were a tumbledown shed and a tarpaper-roofed cupboard that looked like an outdoor loo. “It’s drawing tin from small stones in a stream and following that stream to larger stones.”
“Shode stones, yes,” Daidre said. “And then following them to the lode itself but if you can’t find the lode, it’s a small matter really because you still have the tin in the smaller stones and that can be made into…whatever you wish to make it into. Or you can sell it to metalworkers or jewellers, but the point is, you can support yourself-barely-if you work hard enough and you get lucky. So that’s what this traveller decides to do. Of course, it takes a lot more work than he anticipated and it’s not a particularly wholesome kind of life and there are interruptions: town councils, the government, assorted do-gooders coming round to inspect the premises. This causes something of a distraction, so the traveller ends up travelling anyway, in order to find a proper stream in a proper location somewhat hidden away where he can be allowed to look for his tin in peace. But no matter where he goes, there are still problems because he’s got three children and a wife to provide for and since he alone can’t provide what needs to be provided, they all must help. He’s decided he will give the children lessons at home to save time from their having to be gone for hours to school every day. His wife will be their teacher. But life is hard and the instruction doesn’t actually happen and neither does much else in the way of nurturing. Like decent food. Or proper clothing. Jabs for this or that disease. Dentistry. Anything, really. The sorts of things typical children take for granted. When social workers come round, the children hide, and finally, because the family keeps moving, they slip through the cracks, all three of them. For years, actually. When they finally come to light, the eldest girl is thirteen years old and the younger two-the twins, a boy and a girl-are ten. They can’t read, they can’t write, they’re covered in sores, their teeth are quite bad, they’ve never seen a doctor, and the girl-by this I mean the thirteen-year-old-actually has no hair. It hasn’t been shaved. It’s fallen out. They’re removed at once. Large hue and cry. Local newspapers covering the story, complete with pictures. The twins are placed with a family in Plymouth. The thirteen-year-old is sent to Falmouth. There she’s ultimately adopted by the couple who begin as her foster parents. She is so…so filled up by their love for her that she puts her past behind her, completely. She changes her name to something she thinks of as pretty. Of course, she has no idea how to spell it, so she misspells it and her new parents are charmed. Daidre it is, they say. Welcome to your new life, Daidre. And she never goes back to visit who she was. Never. She puts it behind her and she never speaks of it and no one-no one-in her present life knows a thing about it because it is her deepest shame. Can you understand this? No, how could you. But that’s how it is and that’s how it remains until her sister tracks her down and insists-begs-that she come to this place, the very last place on earth that she can bear to come, the one place she has promised herself that no one from her present life will ever learn of.”
“Is that why you lied to DI Hannaford about your route to Cornwall?” Lynley asked her.
Daidre didn’t reply. She opened her door, and Lynley did likewise. They stood for a moment surveying the home she’d left eighteen years earlier. Aside from the caravan-unimaginably once the domicile of five people-there was little else. A ramshackle building seemed to hold the equipment for extracting tin from the stones in which it was found, and leaning up against this were three wheelbarrows of ancient vintage along with two bicycles with rusty panniers hanging from their sides. At one time, someone had planted a few terra-cotta pots with geraniums, but these were languishing, two of them on their sides and cracked, with the plants sprawled out like supplicants begging for a merciful end.
“My name,” Daidre said, “was Edrek Udy. Do you know the meaning of Edrek, Thomas?”
He said that he didn’t. He found that he didn’t want her to go further. He was filled with sadness that he’d unthinkingly invaded a life she’d worked so hard to forget.
“Edrek,” she said, “means regret in Cornish. Come along and meet my family.”
JAGO REETH DIDN’T LOOK the least bit surprised. He also didn’t look worried. He looked as he’d looked the first time Bea had come upon him at LiquidEarth: willing to be helpful. She wondered if they were wrong about him.
He said that they could indeed have a word with him. They could join him and his mate Selevan Penrule there in the inglenook or they could ask for a more private location.
Bea said she reckoned they’d have their conversation at the station in Casvelyn if he didn’t mind.
He said politely, “’Fraid I do mind. ’M I under arrest, madam?”
It was the madam that gave her pause. It was the way he said it: with the tone of someone who believes he’s sitting in the catbird seat.
He went on with, “Because ’less I’m mistaken, I don’t need to accept your hospitality, if you know what I mean.”
“Is there some reason you’d prefer not to talk to us, Mr. Reeth?”
“Not a bit ’f that,” he said. “But if we’re to talk we’ll need to do it where I feel a comfort I’m not likely to feel in a police station, if you know what I mean.” He smiled affably, showing teeth long stained by tea and coffee. “Get all tightened up if I’m indoors too long. Tightened up, I can’t speak much at all. And I know this: Inside a station, I’m likely to be tightened permanently. If you know what I mean.”
Bea narrowed her eyes. “Is that so?”
“Bit of a claustrophobe, I am.”
Reeth’s companion was listening to all this agog, his gaze going from Bea to Jago to Bea. He said, “Wha’s this about then, Jago?”
To which Bea replied, “Would you like to bring your friend into the picture?”
Reeth said, “They want a word about Santo Kerne. ’Nother word. I’ve spoke to them already.” Then to Bea, “And I’m dead chuffed to do it again, eh. Often as you like. Let’s just take ourselves out of the bar…We c’n decide where and when we’ll do our speaking.”
DS Havers was about to say something. She’d opened her mouth when Bea gave her the look. Hold off, it said. They would see what Jago Reeth was up to.
They followed him into the inn’s entry, the bar door closing behind them. They left the barman wiping out glasses and watching curiously. They left Selevan Penrule saying to Jago Reeth, “Have a care, mate.”
When they were alone, Jago Reeth said in a voice altogether different from the one they’d heard him use not only a moment ago but also in their earlier conversations with him, “I’m afraid you didn’t answer my question. Am I under arrest, Inspector?”
“Should you be?” Bea asked. “And thank you for discarding the persona.”