Bea tried to ignore all this. She said to her, “I’ve got the distinct impression Superintendent Lynley’s dragging his feet on the issue of Dr. Trahair. What do you think, Sergeant?” She then watched to gauge Havers’s answer.
“He might well be,” Havers replied easily enough. “Considering all that’s happened to him, he’s not exactly one hundred percent. But if she’s at the bottom of what happened to this kid and he susses it out, he’ll move on her. You can depend on him.”
“Are you saying I ought to allow him to pursue this in whatever way he sees fit?”
Havers didn’t reply at once. She looked at the china board. Careful thought could indicate her priorities, and Bea made this a mark in her favour.
“I think he’ll be okay,” Havers said. “The last thing he’s about to do is let anyone get away with murder, all things considered. If you know what I mean.”
Of course. There was that. What made him susceptible also made him a man who would never want another person to go through what he himself had gone through. Besides that, his very susceptibility could work in their favour since a vulnerable person was one in whose presence essential mistakes might be made by another person. These would be Dr. Trahair’s mistakes, naturally. Where she’d made one, she’d eventually make others.
Bea said, “All right. Come with me, then. We’ve a bloke in town who did a turn inside for doing the job on someone, down the south coast. This was a few years ago. He ended up crying ‘It’s the drink’ to the judge, but as the bloke on the receiving end of his attention came up a paraplegic?”
“Bloody hell,” DS Havers said.
“?the judge sent him away. He’s out now, but so’s his temper and his proclivity for the drink. He knew Santo Kerne, and someone blackened Santo Kerne’s eye shortly before his death. Given, it’s not the sort of beating put this bloke away, but he wants a thorough talking to.”
Will Mendick was at his place of employment, a modern brick supermarket looking wildly out of place as it stood at the junction of the top of Belle Vue and St. Mevan Crescent, which Bea pointed out to Havers as the route to Adventures Unlimited, a visible hulk out on the promontory. The market was also a very short distance from the baked delights of Casvelyn of Cornwall, and when they alighted from Bea’s Land Rover in the car park at the back of the grocery, the morning breeze was sending the fragrance of fresh pasties in their direction. Barbara Havers cut into this perfume by lighting a cigarette. She pulled at it hungrily as they walked along the side of the building to its front door, managing to smoke half of it before they entered.
In an extremely optimistic embracing of spring, the supermarket’s management had turned off the heating, so it was frigid within. Custom was sparse at this time of day, and only one of the six tills was open. A question at it led Bea and Sergeant Havers towards the back of the premises. There, two swinging doors closed off the warehouse where goods were stored. NO ADMITTANCE and STAFF ONLY were posted upon them.