“Yes,” he said. “I’ve seen the memorials, all along the way.”
They were up and down the coast, these memorials: sometimes as ephemeral as a bunch of dying flowers laid at the site of a fatal fall, sometimes a bench carved with a suitable phrase, sometimes something as lasting and permanent as a marker akin to a tombstone with the deceased’s name engraved upon it. Each was something to note the eternal passage of surfers, climbers, walkers, and suicides. It was impossible to be out hiking along the coastal path and not to come upon them.
“There was an elaborate one that I saw,” Thomas said, as if this were the one subject above all that she wished to discuss with him. “A table and a bench, this was, both done in granite. Granite’s what you want if standing the test of time is important, by the way.”
“You haven’t answered me,” she pointed out.
“I rather thought I just had.”
“If you’d fallen?”
“I still might do,” he said. “When I walk on. When this is over.”
“Wouldn’t you want your people to know? You have people, I daresay.” She didn’t add, Your sort usually do, but the remark was implied.
He didn’t respond. The kettle clicked off in the kitchen with a loud snap. The sound of pouring water came to them. She’d been correct: a cuppa for the sergeant.
She said, “What about your wife, Thomas?”
He remained completely motionless. He said, “My wife.”
She said, “You’re wearing a wedding ring, so I presume you have a wife. I presume she’d want to know if something happened to you. Wouldn’t she?”
Collins came out of the kitchen then. But Daidre had the impression that the other man wouldn’t have responded, even had the sergeant not returned to them.
Collins said with a gesture of his teacup that sloshed liquid into its saucer, “Hope you don’t mind.”
Daidre said, “No. It’s fine.”
From the window Thomas said, “Here’s the detective.” He sounded indifferent to the reprieve.
Collins went to the door. From the sitting room, Daidre heard him exchange a few words with a woman. She was, when she came into the room, an utterly unlikely sort.
Daidre had only ever seen detectives on the television on the rare occasions when she watched one of the police dramas that littered the airwaves. They were always coolly professional and dressed in a tediously similar manner that was supposed to reflect either their psyches or their personal lives. The women were compulsively perfect?tailored to within an inch of their lives and not a hair out of place?and the men were disheveled. One group had to make it in a man’s world. The other had to find a good woman to act the role of saviour.
This woman, who introduced herself as DI Beatrice Hannaford, didn’t fit that mould. She wore an anorak, muddy trainers, and jeans, and her hair?a red so flaming that it very nearly preceded her into the room and shouted, “Dyed and what do you have to say about it?”?stood up in spikes that were second cousins to a mohawk, despite the rain. She saw Daidre examining her and she said, “As soon as someone refers to you as Gran, you rethink the whole growing old gracefully thing.”
Daidre nodded thoughtfully. There was sense to this. “And are you a gran?”
“I am.” The detective made her next remark to Collins. “Get outside and knock me up when the pathologist gets here. Keep everyone else away, not that anyone’s likely to show up in this weather, but you never know. I take it the word’s gone out?” This last she said to Daidre as Collins left them.
“We phoned from the inn, so they’ll know up there.”
“And everywhere else no doubt, by now. You know the dead boy?”
Daidre had considered the possibility that she might be asked this question again. She decided to base her answer on her personal definition of the word know. “I don’t,” she said. “I don’t actually live here, you see. The cottage is mine, but it’s my getaway. I live in Bristol. I come here for breaks when I have time off.”