The police station was an eyesore, even here, a grey stucco building with nothing of architectural interest to recommend itself. It was flat in front and flat on top, a shoe box with occasional windows and a notice board near its door.
Inside, a small vestibule offered a line of three institutional plastic chairs and a reception counter. Bea Hannaford sat behind this, the telephone receiver pressed to her ear. She raised a finger in greeting to Lynley and said to whoever was on the other end of the line, “Got it. Well, there’s no surprise in that, is there?…We’ll want to have another little chat with her, won’t we, then.”
She rang off and took Lynley up to the incident room, which was set up on the first floor of the building in what seemed to be otherwise a conference room, coffee room, locker room, and meal room. Up here they were making do with a few china boards and computers set up with HOLMES but clearly an insufficiency of manpower. The constable and the sergeant were hard at it, Lynley saw, and two other officers were huddled together exchanging either information on the case or background on the horses currently running at Newmarket. It was difficult to tell. Actions were listed on the china board, some completed and others pending.
DI Hannaford said to Sergeant Collins, “Man reception, Sergeant,” and then to Lynley when Collins left the room to do so, “She was lying, as it turns out.”
He said, “Who?” although there was only one she they’d been looking at, as far as he knew.
“Pro forma question, isn’t that?” the DI said meaningfully. “Our Dr. Trahair, that’s who. Not a pub remembers her on the route she claimed she took from Bristol. And she’d be remembered this time of year, considering how few people are out and about in this part of the country.”
“Perhaps,” he said. “But there must be a hundred pubs involved.”
“Not the way she came. Claiming that was the route may have been her first mistake. And where there’s one, there are others, trust me. What’ve you got on her?”
Lynley related what he’d gleaned from Falmouth about Daidre Trahair. He added what he knew about her brother, her work, and her education. Everything she’d said about herself checked out, he told her. So far, so good.
“Why is it I think you’re not telling me everything there is to tell?” was Bea Hannaford’s reply after a moment of observing him. “Are you holding back something, Superintendent Lynley?”
He wanted to say that he wasn’t Superintendent Lynley any longer. He wasn’t anything related to police work, which was why he also wasn’t required to tell her every fact he had acquired. But he said, “She’s doing some curious research on the Internet just now. There’s that, although I can’t see how it relates to murder.”
“What sort of research?”
“Miracles,” he said. “Or rather, places associated with miracles. Lourdes, for one. A church in New Mexico. There were others as well, but I didn’t have time to look through all the paperwork and I wasn’t wearing my reading glasses anyway. She’s been on the Internet at the Watchman. That’s the local paper. She knows the publisher, evidently.”
“That’d be Max Priestley.” It was Constable McNulty speaking up from a computer in one corner of the room. “He’s been in touch with the dead boy, by the way.”
“Has he indeed?” Bea Hannaford said. “Now that’s an interesting twist.” She told Lynley that the constable was digging through Santo Kerne’s old e-mails, looking for nuggets of information. “What’s he saying?”
“‘No skin off my back. Just watch your own.’ I reckon it’s Priestley ’cause it’s come from MEP at Watchman.co, et cetera. Although it could have come from anyone who knows his password and has access to a computer at the paper, I s’pose.”
“That’s it?” Hannaford asked the constable.