It was simple, she told him. “We each start with a score of 501, and the object is to reduce that to nought. We each throw three darts. A bull’s-eye scores fifty, the outer ring twenty-five and anything in the double or treble ring is double or treble the segment score. Yes?”
He nodded. He was almost altogether uncertain what she was talking about, but confidence, he reckoned, was the key to success.
“Good. Now, the caveat is that the last dart thrown has to land in a double or in the bull’s-eye. And additionally, if you reduce your score to one or it actually goes below nought, your turn ends immediately and the play is turned over to the other thrower. Follow?”
He nodded. He was even more uncertain at that point, but he decided it couldn’t be that difficult to hit a dartboard from less than eight feet away. Besides, it was only a game and his ego was strong enough to emerge undamaged should she win the match. For another could follow. Two out of three. Three out of five. It didn’t matter. It was all in an evening’s diversion, yes?
She won every match. They could have gone on all night and she probably would have continued to win. The vixen-for so he was thinking of her by then-turned out to be not only a tournament player but the sort of woman who did not believe a man’s ego had to be preserved by allowing him moments of specious supremacy over her.
She had the grace to be at least moderately embarrassed. She said, “Oh my. Oh dear. Well, it’s just that I never actually just let someone win. It’s never seemed right.”
“You’re…quite amazing,” he said. “My head is spinning.”
“It’s that I play a lot. I didn’t tell you that, did I, so I’ll pay the penalty for unspoken truths. I’ll help you with the washing up.”
She was as good as her word, and they saw to the kitchen in companionable fashion, with him doing the washing and her doing the drying. She made him clean the cooktop-“It’s only fair,” she told him-but she herself swept the floor and scoured the sink. He found himself enjoying her company and, as a result, felt ill at ease when it came to his appointed task.
He did it nonetheless. He was a cop when everything got reduced to essentials, and someone was dead through murder. She’d lied to an investigating officer and no matter his personal enjoyment of the evening, he had a job to do for DI Hannaford and he intended to do it.
He set about it the following morning, and he was able to get a fair distance right there from his room in the Salthouse Inn. He discovered through a few simple phone calls that someone called Daidre Trahair was indeed one of the veterinarians at Bristol Zoo Gardens. When he asked about speaking to Dr. Trahair, he was told that she was on emergency leave, dealing with a family matter in Cornwall.
This bit of news didn’t give him pause. People often claimed that family matters needed to be taken care of when what those family matters were was simply a need to get away for a few days of decompression from a stressful job. He decided that couldn’t be held against her.
Her claims about her adopted Chinese brother held up as well. Lok Trahair was indeed a student at Oxford University. Daidre herself had a first in biological science from the University of Glasgow, having gone on from there to the Royal Veterinary College for her advanced degree. Well and good, Lynley had thought. She might have had secrets that she wished to keep from DI Hannaford, but they weren’t secrets about her identity or that of her brother.
He delved back further into her schooling, but this was where he hit the first snag. Daidre Trahair had been a pupil in a secondary comprehensive in Falmouth, but before that there was no record of her. No school in Falmouth would claim her. State or public, day school, boarding school, convent school…There was nothing. She either had not lived in Falmouth for those years of her education, or she’d been sent far away for some reason, or she’d been schooled at home.
Yet surely she would have mentioned being schooled at home since, by her own admission, she’d been born at home. It was a logical follow-up, wasn’t it?
He wasn’t sure. He also wasn’t sure what more he could do. He was pondering his options when a knock at his bedroom door roused him from his thoughts. Siobhan Rourke presented him with a small package. It had just arrived in the post, she told him.
He thanked her, and when he was alone again, automatically opened it to find his wallet. This he opened as well. It was a knee-jerk reaction but it was more than that. He was-unprepared for the fact of it all-suddenly restored to who he was. Driving licence folded into a square, bank card, credit cards, picture of Helen.
He took this last in his fingers. It was of Helen at Christmas, less than two months away from dying. They’d had a hurried holiday, with no time to visit her family or his because he’d been in the midst of a case. “Not to worry, there’ll be other Christmases, darling,” she’d said.
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.