Upon rising from her chair, however, the vet had said something that Bea had found telling. She’d directed a question to Sergeant Havers. “What was his wife like? He’s spoken to me about her, but he’s actually said very little.”
Until that moment, the Scotland Yard detective had said nothing during their interview with Dr. Trahair. The only sound she’d emitted was that which came from her steadily writing pencil. At the vet’s query, she rapidly tapped that pencil against her tattered notebook, as if considering the ramifications of the question.
Havers finally said evenly, “She was bloody brilliant.”
“It must be a terrible loss for him.”
“For a time,” Havers said, “we thought it might kill him.”
Daidre had nodded. “Yes, I can see that when I look at him.”
Bea had wanted to ask, “Do that often, Dr. Trahair?” but she hadn’t. She’d had enough of the vet, and she had larger concerns at the moment beyond what it meant?beyond the obvious?that Daidre Trahair was curious about Thomas Lynley’s murdered wife.
One of those concerns was Lynley himself. After the vet had left them and once Bea had sussed out the location of the cider farm, she placed a call to Lynley as she and Havers headed out to her car. What the hell had he dug up in Exeter? she wanted to know. And where else were his dubious wanderings taking him?
He was in Boscastle, he told her. He spun a lengthy tale about death, parenthood, divorce, and the estrangement that can occur between parents and children. He ended with, “I’ve a photo I’d like you to have a look at as well.”
“As a point of interest or a piece to the puzzle?”
“I’m not quite sure,” he said.
She would see him upon his return, she told him. In the meantime, Dr. Trahair had surfaced and, backed into a wall, had produced a new name for them as well as a new place.
“Aldara Pappas,” he repeated thoughtfully. “A Greek cider maker?”
“We’re seeing everything, aren’t we,” Bea said. “I fully expect dancing bears next.”
She rang off as she and Havers reached her car. A football, three newspapers, a rain jacket, one doggie chew toy, and a bouquet of wrappers from energy bars having been removed from the passenger seat and tossed into the back, they were on their way. Cornish Gold was near the village of Brandis Corner, a bit of a drive from Casvelyn. They reached it by means of secondary and tertiary roads that became progressively narrower in the way of all Cornish thoroughfares. They also became progressively less passable. Ultimately, the farm presented itself by means of a large sign painted with red letters on a field of brown, heavily laden apple trees serving as the sign’s decoration and an arrow indicating entrance for anyone too limited to understand what was meant by the two strips of stony ground divided by a mustache of grass and weeds, which veered off to the right. They jolted over this for some two hundred yards, finally coming to a surprisingly and decently paved car park. Optimistically, part of it was set aside for tour coaches while the rest was given to bays for cars. More than a dozen were scattered along a split-rail fence. Seven more stood in the farthest corner.