“I’ve had my tea. But thanks, yes. I think your room’s the best place.”
She followed him up the stairs. She’d never been above in the Salthouse Inn, and it felt odd to be there now, treading down the little corridor in the wake of a man, as if they had an assignation of some sort. She found herself hoping that no one would see and misinterpret, and then she asked herself why and what did it matter anyway?
The door wasn’t locked?“Didn’t seem to be a point, as I have nothing here for someone to steal,” he noted?and he ushered her within, politely stepping to one side to allow her to precede him into the room. He was right in calling it monastic, she saw. It was quite clean and brightly painted, but spare. There was only the bed to sit on unless one wished to perch on the small chest of drawers. The bed itself seemed vast although it was only a single. Daidre found herself getting hot in the face when she took it in, so she looked away.
A basin was fitted into the corner of the room, and Lynley went to this after setting his cardboard box on the floor, carefully, against the wall. He hung up the jacket he was wearing?she could see that he was a man who was diligent about his clothing?and he washed his hands.
Now that she was here, she wasn’t sure of anything. Instead of the anxiety she’d been feeling earlier when Cilla Cormack had brought her the news of Scotland Yard’s interest in her and her family in Falmouth, she now felt awkward and shy. She told herself it was because Thomas Lynley seemed to fill the room. He was a good-size man, several inches over six feet tall, and the result of being in such a confined space with him appeared to be having her ridiculously melting into Victorian-maiden-caught-in-a-compromising-situation. It was nothing he was doing, particularly. It was, rather, the simple fact of him and the tragic aura that seemed to surround him, despite his pleasant demeanour. But the fact that she was feeling other than she would have liked to be feeling made Daidre impatient, both with him and with herself.
She sat at the foot of the bed. Before she did so, she handed him the note she’d found from DI Hannaford. He told her that the inspector had arrived at her cottage shortly after his own arrival that morning. “I see you’re in demand,” he said.
“I’ve come for your advice.” This wasn’t altogether true, but it was a good place to begin, she decided. “What do you recommend?”
He went to the head of the bed and sat. “About this?” He gestured with the card. “I recommend that you talk to her.”
“Have you any idea what it’s about?”
He said, after a revealing moment of hesitation, that he had not. “But whatever it is,” he said, “I suggest you be completely truthful. I think it’s always best to tell investigators the truth. In general, I think it’s best to tell the truth full stop, one way or another.”
“And if the truth is that I killed Santo Kerne?”
He hesitated a moment before replying. “I don’t believe that is the truth, frankly.”
“Are you a truthful man yourself, Thomas?”
“I try to be.”
“Even in the middle of a case?”
“Especially then. When it’s appropriate. Sometimes, with a suspect, it’s not.”
“Am I a suspect?”
“Yes,” he told her. “Unfortunately, you are.”
“So that would be why you went to Falmouth to ask about me.”
“Falmouth? I didn’t go to Falmouth. For any reason.”
“Yet someone was there, talking to my parents’ neighbours, as things turned out. It was apparently someone from New Scotland Yard. Who would that be if it wasn’t you? And what is it you would need to know about me that you couldn’t ask me yourself?”
He rose. He came to her end of the bed and squatted before her. This gave her more proximity to him than she would have liked, and she made a move to rise. He stopped her: Just a gentle hand on her arm was enough. “I wasn’t in Falmouth, Daidre,” he said. “I swear to you.”