It seemed to Ben now that the idea of lessons needing to be taught had started everything. What an excruciating realisation it was that lessons needing to be taught had ended everything as well. Only the student and the teacher were different. The crucial fact of acceptance remained the same.
LYNLEY SETTLED ON THE idea of a drive down the coast to Pengelly Cove once DI Hannaford had identified it as the village from which the Kerne family had originated. “It’s a two birds and one stone situation,” he explained, to which Hannaford had shrewdly replied, “You’re avoiding a bit of responsibility here, aren’t you? What is it about Dr. Trahair that you don’t want me to know, Detective Superintendent?”
He wasn’t avoiding at all, he told her blithely. But as the Kernes needed looking into and as he was intended to garner Daidre Trahair’s trust on DI Hannaford’s own instructions to him, it seemed that having a rational reason for suggesting a drive to Daidre?
“It doesn’t have to be a drive,” Hannaford protested. “It doesn’t have to be anything. You don’t even have to see her to sift through her details, and I expect you know that.”
Yes, of course, he said. But here was an opportunity?
“All right, all right. Just mind you bloody well stay in touch.”
So he took Daidre Trahair with him, an arrangement which was easy enough to effect because he began by keeping his word to her, and he went to her cottage to repair the window he’d broken. He’d decided that the replacement of such could hardly involve a serious mental workout, and as an Oxford graduate?albeit with a degree in history, which hardly applied to matters vitric?he certainly had the brainpower to sort out how the repair needed to be made. The fact that he’d never in his life engaged in a single instance of home improvement did not dissuade him. Surely he was a man to match the mountain of the job. There would be no problem involved.
“This is so good of you, Thomas, but perhaps I ought to arrange for a glazier?” Daidre had said. She sounded doubtful about his intentions of wielding glass and putty.
“Nonsense. It’s all very straightforward,” he told her.
“Have you…I mean, before this?”
“Many times. Other projects, I mean. As far as windows are concerned, I admit to being something of a virgin. Now…Let’s see what we have.”
What they had was a cottage of two hundred years, possibly older, because Daidre wasn’t sure. She kept meaning to do a history of the place, she told him, but so far she’d not got round to it. She did know it had begun its life as a fishing hut used by a great house near Alsperyl. That house was vanished?its interior long ago destroyed by fire and its stones eventually carted away by locals who used them for everything from building cottages to defining property lines?but as it had dated to 1723, there was every chance that this little building was of a similar age.
This meant, of course, that nothing was straight, including the windows whose frames had been precisely constructed to fit apertures that were themselves without precision. Lynley discovered this to his dismay when he held the glass up to the frame once the debris of the broken window was cleared away. A slight horizontal drop existed, he saw, just enough to make the placement of the glass…something of a challenge.
He should have measured both ends, he realised. He felt his neck grow hot with embarrassment.
“Oh dear,” Daidre said. And then quickly, as if she believed her remark spoke of a lack of confidence, “Well, I’m sure it’s only a matter of?”
“Putty,” he said.
“I beg your pardon?”
“This merely calls for a greater amount of putty at one end. There’s no real problem.”