“The very thing,” his friend Jago Reeth agreed.
BEA HANNAFORD HADN’T STARTED her day in the best of moods, and her outlook wasn’t improving during her meeting with New Scotland Yard’s detective sergeant Barbara Havers. Upon the sergeant’s arrival in Casvelyn, Bea had instructed her to check into the Salthouse Inn and to do some serious trolling through what Thomas Lynley had so far managed to discover about Dr. Trahair. She knew DS Havers had long worked with Lynley in London, and if anyone was going to be able to wring something out of the man, it had seemed to Hannaford that it was going to be Barbara Havers. But “apparently clean so far” was the extent of what Havers had to report about Lynley’s excursions into the mysterious Daidre Trahair’s background, which made Hannaford wonder about her own wisdom in the entire affair. She, after all, had accepted the offer of the Met’s assistant commissioner Sir David Hillier to send Lynley’s former partner on loan to work the murder enquiry. The response of “He says she’s clean so far but he’s carrying on” in answer to “What do we know from Superintendent Lynley about Dr. Trahair?” had not been what Hannaford wished to hear. It had made her wonder about loyalties and where they ought to be lying.
She herself had spoken to Lynley. He’d reported on his excursion to Pengelly Cove on the previous afternoon, and she could tell his interest was now decidedly caught up in the Kernes. This was all well and good since everything had to be looked into eventually, but digging into the Kernes’ background was not going to keep Lynley interested in Daidre Trahair, and interested in Daidre Trahair was exactly where Bea Hannaford wanted him to be. The vet was a liar, no question about it. Based upon the way she had looked at Lynley when Bea had seen them together?a bit of a mix among compassion, admiration, and lust?Lynley had appeared to be the best road to drive along if the destination was sorting the doctor’s truths from the doctor’s lies. Now Bea wasn’t so sure.
So in speaking to Barbara Havers, Bea’s mood was blacker than it had been upon waking, and she wouldn’t have thought that possible. For she’d awakened with Pete’s questions and Pete’s comments of the previous day on her mind, which meant she’d awakened in exactly the same manner as she’d fallen asleep. Why do you hate him so much?…He loves you.
Clearly, it was time for another round of Internet dating, if only she could have spared the hours it would take to troll, to select, to contact, to try to discern if the individual was worth an evening, and then somehow to find that evening. And then…What would be the point, really? How many more toads was she going to have to dine with, drink with, or coffee with before one of them showed colours more princely than amphibious? Hundreds, it seemed. Thousands. All that and she wasn’t even sure she wanted another relationship anyway. She, Pete, and the dogs were doing fine on their own.
Thus, when Bea faced Barbara Havers in the vicinity of the china board as they looked over the day’s activities, she examined the Met sergeant with a critical eye having more to do with an assessment of her professional commitment than it had to do with an evaluation of her fashion sense, which was more deplorable than Bea would have thought possible in a female adult. Today DS Havers was wearing a lumpy fisherman’s sweater over a high-necked T-shirt with what looked like a coffee stain on its collar. She had on figure-reducing olive tweed trousers?easily an inch too short and possibly twelve years too old?and the same red high-top trainers on her feet. She looked like a cross between a street vagrant and a refugee fleeing from a war zone, with clothing provided from castoffs of Oxfam castoffs.