When she’d gazed upon the postcard as long as she could without taking action, she left the house. She got into her car, reversed it onto the narrow lane to Polcare Cove, and drove forward down to the beach itself. Proximity to the beach reminded her of the previous night, which she would have preferred not to think about but which she ended up thinking about anyway: her slow walk back to the car with Thomas Lynley; his quiet voice talking about his dead wife; the darkness nearly complete so that, aside from distant lights coming from the houses and cottages above them on the cliff, she could barely see anything save his rather disturbing patrician profile.
Helen was her name and she’d come from a family not unlike his own. Daughter of an earl who had married an earl, moving easily in the world into which she’d been born. Filled with self-doubts, evidently?although Daidre found this piece of information about Helen Lynley difficult to believe?because of how she’d been educated. But at the same time extraordinarily kind, witty, amusing, companionable, fun loving. Gifted with the most admirable and desirable of human qualities.
Daidre couldn’t imagine his surviving the loss of such a woman and she couldn’t see how anyone could ever come to terms with this loss being precipitated by murder.
“Twelve years old,” he’d said. “No one knows why he shot her.”
“I’m so sorry,” she’d said. “She sounds perfectly lovely.”
“She was.”
Now, Daidre made the turn she always made, using Polcare Cove’s small car park to point her car in the direction that would take her out of the area. Behind her, she heard the breakers collapsing onto the toothy slate reef. Before her, she saw the sweep of the ancient valley and Stowe Wood above it, where the trees were coming into leaf. Very soon beneath them, bluebells would bloom, carpeting the woods with a colour that tossed in rhythmic undulations in the springtime breeze, like sapphire linen.
She made her way up and out of the cove. She followed the lanes in the crisscrossing pattern dictated by the lay of the land and its ownership. In this way, she came to the A39 and there she headed south. The drive she intended was an extended one. At St. Columb Road, she stopped for a coffee and decided to have a pain au chocolat at a bakery café. She spoke at length about guiltless chocolate consumption to the young man behind the till, and she went so far as to ask that he give her a receipt for her food and her drink, which she tucked into her wallet. One never knew when the police were going to require an alibi of one, she decided wryly. Best to keep records of one’s every movement. Best to make certain people along the way have a vivid memory of one’s visit to their establishment. As far as the pain au chocolat was concerned, what were a few unnecessary calories in the cause of substantiating a claim of innocence?
When she set off again, she gained the roundabout that took her onto the A30. From there, the distance wasn’t great, and the route was familiar. She skirted Redruth, recovered quickly from one wrong turn, and at last ended up at the junction of B3297 and a numberless lane that was signposted for the village of Carnkie.