There was a moral question involved in all this, Ben knew, but he found he lacked the courage to ask it.
DAIDRE TRAHAIR HAD BEEN waiting in the public bar of the Salthouse Inn the better part of an hour when Selevan Penrule came through the door. He looked round the room when he saw that his daily drinking companion was not nursing a Guinness in the inglenook, which Selevan and Jago Reeth regularly commandeered for themselves, and he ventured over to join Daidre at her table by the window.
“Thought he’d be here by now,” Selevan said without preamble as he pulled out a chair. “Rang me to say he’d be late, he did. Cops were there talking to him and Lew. Cops’re talking to everyone. Talk to you yet?” He gave a sailor’s salute to Brian, who’d ventured out of the kitchen upon Selevan’s entrance. Brian said, “The regular?” and Selevan said, “Aye,” and then back to Daidre, “Even talked to Tammy, they did, though that was cos the girl had something to tell them and not cos they had questions of her. Well, why should they? She knew the boy, but that was the extent of it. Wished it otherwise, and I don’t mind saying that, but she wasn’t interested. All for the best as things turned out, eh? Bloody hell, though, I wish they’d get to the bottom of this. Feel sorry for the family, I do.”
Daidre would have preferred it if the old man hadn’t decided to join her, but she couldn’t come up with an excuse that would politely communicate her desire to be left in peace. For she’d never come into the Salthouse Inn prior to this for the purpose of having a bit of peace, so why would he assume that now? No one would come to the Salthouse Inn for peace, as the inn was where denizens of the area gathered for gossip and conviviality, not for meditation.
She said, “They want to talk to me,” and she showed him the note she’d found at her cottage. It was written on the back of DI Hannaford’s card. “I’ve spoken to them already,” she said. “The day Santo died. I can’t think why they want to question me again.”
Selevan looked at the card, turning it over in his hands. “Looks serious,” he told her. “With them leaving their cards and the like.”
“I think it’s more that I don’t have a phone. But I’ll speak with them. Of course I will.”
“Mind you get yourself a solicitor. Tammy didn’t, but that’s cos Tammy had something to tell them and not the reverse, like I said. ’S not as if she was hiding something. She had information, so she handed it over.” He cocked his head at her. “You hiding something yourself, my girl?”
Daidre smiled and pocketed the card as the old man returned it to her. “We all have secrets, don’t we. Is that why you’re suggesting a solicitor?”
“Didn’t say that,” Selevan protested. “But you’re a deep one, Dr. Trahair. We’ve known that ’bout you from the first. No girl throws a dart like you without having something tricky in her background, you ask me.”
“I’m afraid that Roller Derby is as dark as my secrets get, Selevan.”
“What’s that, then?”
She tapped his hand with the tips of her fingers. “You’ll have to do your research and find out, my friend.”
Through the windows, then, she saw the Ford as it bumped into the inn’s uneven car park. Lynley got out of it and started to walk in the direction of the inn, but he turned as another car entered the car park behind him, this one a rather decrepit Mini whose driver honked the car’s horn at him as if he were in the way.
“That Jago, then?” Selevan was not in a position to see the car park from where he sat. He said, “Cheers, mate,” to Brian, who brought him his Glenmorangie, and he slurped down his first gulp with satisfaction.