“EVO. Extra-virgin olive oil. The virginest one can find. If there are degrees of virginity in olives. To tell the truth, I’ve never been sure what it means when an olive oil is extra virgin. Are the olives virgins? Are they harvested by virgins? Are they pressed by virgins?” She brought the bowl of aioli to the kitchen table and returned to the cooker, where she began carefully depositing the crab cakes onto the kitchen towels that covered the plate. She took another set of kitchen towels and laid these on top of the cakes, pressing them gently into the concoction to remove as much of the residual oil as she could. From the oven, then, she brought forth three more plates, and Lynley was able to see what she had meant about failing to reduce her recipes so as to cook for one person only. Each plate was similarly dressed with kitchen towels and crab cakes. It looked as if she’d cooked more than a dozen.
“Fresh crab isn’t essential,” she told him. “You can use tinned. Frankly, I find you really can’t tell the difference if the crab is going to be used in a cooked dish. On the other hand, if it’s going to be eaten in something uncooked?salad? a dip for vegetable biscuits or the like?you’re best to go with fresh. But you have to make sure it’s fresh fresh. Trapped that day, I mean.” She deposited the plates on the table and told him to sit. He would, she hoped, indulge. Otherwise, she feared she herself might eat them all, as her neighbours weren’t as appreciative of her culinary efforts as she’d have liked them to be. “I’ve no family to cook for any longer,” she said. “The girls are scattered to the winds and my husband died last year.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“You’re very kind. He went quickly, so it was a terrible shock as he’d been perfectly well up till a day before. Something of an athlete, also. He complained of a headache that he couldn’t get rid of, and he died the next morning as he was putting on his socks. I heard a noise and went to see what had happened and there he was on the floor. Aneurysm.” She lowered her gaze, eyebrows drawn together. “It was difficult not to be able to say good-bye.”
Lynley felt the great stillness of memory settling round him. Perfectly fine in the morning and perfectly dead by the afternoon. He cleared his throat roughly. “Yes. I expect it is.”
She said, “Well, one recovers eventually from these things.” She shot him a tremulous smile. “At least, that’s what one hopes.” She went to a cupboard and brought out two plates; from a drawer she took cutlery. She laid the table. “Please do sit, Superintendent.”
She found him a linen napkin and used her own first to clean off her spectacles. Without them, she had the dazed look of the lifelong sufferer of myopia. “There,” she said when she’d polished them to her liking, “I can actually see you properly now. My goodness. What a handsome man you are. You’d leave me quite tonguetied if I were your age. How old are you, by the way?”
“Thirty-eight.”
“Well, what’s a thirty-year age difference among friends?” she asked. “Are you married, dear?”
“My wife…Yes. Yes, I am.”
“And is your wife very beautiful?”
“She is.”
“Blond, like you?”
“No. She’s quite dark.”
“Then you must be very handsome together. Francis and I?that’s my late husband?were so similar to each other that we were often taken for brother and sister when we were younger.”
“You were married to him for a number of years, then?”
“Twenty-two years nearly to the day. But I’d known him before my first marriage ended. We’d been in primary school together. Isn’t it odd how something as simple as that?being in school together?can forge a bond and make things easier between people if they see each other later in life, even if they haven’t spoken in years? There was no period of discomfort between us when we first began to see each other after Jon and I divorced.” She scooped some aioli out of the bowl and handed it to him to do the same. She tasted the crab cake and pronounced it, “Doable. What do you think of them?”
“I think they’re excellent.”
“Flatterer. Handsome and well-bred, I see. Is your wife a good cook?”
“She’s completely appalling.”
“She has other strengths, then.”
He thought of Helen: the laughter of her, that unrepressed gaiety, so much compassion. “I find she has hundreds of strengths.”
“Which makes indifferent kitchen skills?”
“Completely irrelevant. There’s always takeaway.”
“Isn’t there just.” She smiled at him and then went on with, “I’m avoiding, as you’ve probably guessed. Has something happened to Jon?”
“Do you know where he is?”
She shook her head. “I haven’t spoken to him in years. Our eldest child?”