Bea pushed her chair back and said, “Well, thank God. Let’s hope we’re about to get someplace.”
AN UNANTICIPATED HOUR OF research in Exeter provided Lynley with the name of the property management company that, he discovered, was no longer owned by Jonathan Parsons, father of the long ago cave-drowning victim in Pengelly Cove. Previously called Parsons, Larson, and Waterfield, it was now R. Larson Estate Management, Ltd., and it was located not far from the medieval cathedral in an area that looked desirable for doing business. Its director turned out to be a questionably tanned, grey-bearded individual somewhere in his sixties. He appeared to favour jeans, exceptionally good dentistry, and blindingly white dress shirts worn without a necktie. R, Lynley discovered, stood for the unusual non-British name of Rocco. Larson’s mother?long gone to her eternal reward?had possessed a devotion to the more obscure Catholic saints, the man explained. It was an equal rights sort of thing. His sister was called Perpetua. Personally, he didn’t use Rocco. He used Rock, which Lynley was free to call him.
Lynley thanked the man, said all things being equal he’d prefer Mr. Larson, and showed him his Scotland Yard identification, at which point Larson seemed happy enough that Lynley had decided on maintaining a sense of formality between them. Larson said, “Ah. I suppose you don’t have a property you wish to let out?”
“You’d suppose correctly,” Lynley told him, and he asked if Larson had a few minutes to spare him. “I’d like to talk to you about Jonathan Parsons,” he said. “I understand you were once his partner.”
Larson was perfectly willing to have a chat about “poor Jon,” as he called him, and he ushered Lynley into his office. This was spare and masculine: leather and metal with pictures of the family in stark black frames. The much younger blonde wife, two children turned out in neat school uniforms, the horse, the dog, the cat, and the duck. They all looked a bit too professionally polished. Lynley wondered if they were real or the sort of pictures one finds in frames for sale in shops.
Larson didn’t wait to be interrogated. He launched into his story, and he needed very little encouragement to carry on with it. He had been partners with Jonathan Parsons and a bloke called Henry Waterfield, now deceased. Both of them were older than Larson by ten years or so, and because of this, he’d started out as a junior manager in the firm. But he was a go-getter, if he did say so himself, and in no time, he’d purchased rights to a full partnership. From that point on, it was the three of them until Waterfield’s death, at which point it was Parsons and Larson, which was a bit of a tongue twister so they hung on to the original name.
Everything went smoothly until the Parsons boy died, Larson told him. At that point, things began to fall apart. “Poor Jon wasn’t able to hold up his end, and who can blame him? He began to spend more and more of his time over in Pengelly Cove. That’s where the accident…the death?”