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?”