“Easy enough to say,” Selevan noted.
“Truth there. But when it’s a lass’s first and they’ve gone the full mile, it’s the only way when things go bad. Clean house of the bloke, you ask me. Which she was finally on her way to doing when…well…when it happened.”
“Bad, that.”
Jago nodded. “Makes it worse for the girl. How’s she supposed to see Santo Kerne in a real light now? No. She’s got her work cut out, getting over this. Wish it hadn’t happened, none of it. He wasn’t a bad lad, but he had his ways, and she didn’t see that till too bleeding late. By that time the locomotive was steaming out of the station, and all that was left to do was step out of the way.”
“Love’s a bitch of a thing,” Selevan said.
“It’s a killer, that,” Jago agreed.
Chapter Ten
LYNLEY LOOKED THROUGH THE GERTRUDE JEKYLL BOOK, AT the photos and drawings OF gardens that were vibrant with English springtime colours. Their palettes were soft and soothing, and gazing at them he could almost feel what it would be like to sit on one of the weathered benches and let the pastel blanket of petals wash over him. Gardens, he thought, were meant to be like these. Not the formal parterres of the Elizabethans, planted with careful displays of constipated shrubbery and clipped vegetation, but rather the exuberant mimicry of what might occur in a nature from which weeds were banished but other plant life was allowed to flourish: banks of colour tumbling unrestrained onto lawns and herbaceous borders bowing onto paths that themselves wandered, as a path would in nature. Yes, Gertrude Jekyll had known what she was about.
“Lovely, aren’t they?”
Lynley looked up. Daidre Trahair stood before him, a small stemmed glass in her extended hand. She made a moue of apology as she gave a glance in its direction, saying, “I’ve only sherry for an aperitif. I think it’s been here since I got the cottage, which would be…Four years ago?” She smiled. “I’m not much of a drinker, so I don’t actually know…Does sherry go bad? I can’t tell you if this is dry or sweet, to be honest. I suspect sweet, though. It said cream on the bottle.”
“That would be sweet,” Lynley said. “Thank you.” He took the glass. “You’re not drinking?”
“I’ve a small one in the kitchen.”
“You won’t allow me to help you?” He nodded in the direction from which domestic sounds had been coming. “I’m not very good at it. Truthfully, I’m fairly wretched at it. But I’m sure I could chop something if something needs to be chopped. And measuring also. I can tell you unblushingly that I’m a genius with measuring cups and spoons.”
“That’s comforting,” she replied. “Are you capable of a salad if all the ingredients are set out on the work top and you’ve no critical decisions to make?”
“As long as I don’t have to dress it. You wouldn’t want me wielding…whatever it is one wields to dress a salad.”
“You can’t be that hopeless,” she told him with a laugh. “Surely your wife-” She stopped herself. Her expression altered, probably because his own had altered, she thought. She cocked her head ruefully. “I’m sorry, Thomas. It’s difficult not to refer to her.”
Lynley rose from his chair, the Jekyll book still in hand. “Helen would have loved a Gertrude Jekyll garden,” he said. “She used to deadhead our roses in London because, she said, it encouraged more blooms.”
“It does. She was right. Did she like to garden?”
“She liked to be in gardens. I think she liked the effect of having gardened.”
“But you don’t know for sure?”
“I don’t know for sure.” He’d never asked her. He’d have just come home from work to find her with secateurs in hand and a pail of clipped and spent roses at her feet. She’d look at him and toss her dark hair off her cheek and say something about roses, about gardens in general, and what she’d say would force him to smile. And the smile would force him to forget the world outside the brick walls of their garden, a world that needed to be forgotten and locked away so it didn’t intrude on the life he shared with her. “She couldn’t cook, by the way,” he told Daidre. “She was dreadful at it. Completely appalling.”
“Neither of you cooked, then?”
“Neither of us cooked. I could do eggs and toast, of course, and Helen was brilliant at opening tins of soup, beans, and smoked salmon although she could easily be expected to pop a tin in the microwave and possibly blow the entire electrical system in the house. We employed someone to cook for us. It was that, takeaway curry, or starvation. And one can eat only so much takeaway curry.”
“You poor things,” Daidre said. “Come along, then. I expect you can learn at least something.”
She returned to the kitchen and he followed her. From a cupboard, she took a wooden bowl-carved with primitive dancing figures round its rim-and she rustled up a cutting board and a number of, thankfully, recognisable foodstuffs meant to be combined into a salad. She set him to his task with a knife, saying, “Throw in anything. That’s the beauty of a salad. When you’ve got enough in the bowl, I’ll show you a simple dressing that won’t tax your sadly meagre talents. Any questions, then?”
“I’m sure I’ll have them as I go along.”
They worked in companionable silence, Lynley upon the salad and Daidre Trahair upon a dish with string beans and mint. Something was baking away in the oven-emitting the fragrance of pastry-while something else simmered in a pan. In time, they had a meal assembled, and Daidre instructed him in the art of laying a table, which he did, at least, know how to do but which he allowed her to demonstrate for him because allowing her that allowed him to watch and evaluate her.
He was acutely aware of DI Hannaford’s instructions to him, and while he didn’t like the idea of using Daidre Trahair’s hospitality as a device of investigation instead of a means of friendly entrée into her world, the part of him that was a policeman trumped the part of him that was a social creature in need of communing with other like creatures. So he watched and waited and he remained alert for what crumbs he could gather about her.
There were few enough. She was very careful. Which was, in itself, a valuable crumb.
They tucked into their meal in her tiny dining room, where a piece of cardboard fixed over a window reminded him of his duty to repair it for her. They ate something she called Portobello Wellington, along with a side dish of couscous with sun-dried tomatoes, green beans done up with garlic and mint, and his salad dressed with oil, vinegar, mustard, and Italian seasoning. They had no wine to drink, merely water with lemon. She apologized for this, much as she had over the sherry.
She said she hoped he didn’t mind a vegetarian meal. She wasn’t vegan, she explained, for she saw no sin in consuming animal products like eggs and such. But when it came to the flesh of her fellow creatures on the planet, it seemed too…well, too cannibalistic.
“Whatever happens to the beasts, happens to man,” she said. “All things are connected.” It sounded to him like a quote, and even as he thought as much, she unblushingly told him it was. She said, appealingly, “Those aren’t my words, actually. I can’t remember who said them or wrote them, but when I first came across them years ago, they had the ring of truth.”
“Isn’t there an application to zoos?”
“Imprisoning beasts leading to man’s imprisonment, you mean?”
“Something like that. I-forgive me-I don’t much care for zoos.”