“They’re age progressions. From that photograph Thomas handed over. I think you’re going to find them of interest.”
DAIDRE TRAHAIR HESITATED JUST outside his door. She could hear the sound of the hair dryer from within, so she knew that Sergeant Havers had been telling her the truth. It hadn’t seemed so. Indeed, when Daidre had confronted the sergeant in the car park of the Salthouse Inn, asking for Thomas Lynley, the idea that he might not be present because he was actually drying his socks had sounded like the lamest sort of excuse for his absence from Sergeant Havers’s side. On the other hand, the DS from London hardly had a reason to invent an activity for Lynley to be engaging in in order to hide the fact that he might instead be spending yet another day scouring through the detritus of Daidre’s past. For it seemed to Daidre at this point that he’d done as much scouring as he’d be able to do without her own participation.
She knocked on his door sharply. The dryer switched off. The door swung open. “Sorry, Barbara. I’m afraid they’re still not?” He saw it was Daidre. “Hullo,” he said with a smile. “You’re out and about early, aren’t you?”
“The sergeant told me…I saw her in the car park. She said you were drying your socks.”
He had a sock in one hand and the dryer in the other, proof of the matter. He said, “I did try to wear them at breakfast, but I found there’s something particularly disturbing about damp socks. Shades of World War I and life in the trenches, I suppose. Would you like to come in?” He stepped back and she passed him, into the room. The bed was unmade. A towel lay in a heap on the floor. A notebook had scribbles of pencil in it, with car keys sitting on its open pages. “I thought they’d dry by morning,” he said. “Foolishly, I washed both pairs. I hung them by the window all night. I even cracked it open for air. It was all for nothing. According to Sergeant Havers, I should have shown some common sense and considered the radiator. You don’t mind…?”
She shook her head. He began his work with the hair dryer again. She watched him. He’d nicked himself shaving, and he’d apparently not noticed: A thin line of blood traced along his jaw. It was the sort of thing his wife would have seen and told him about as he left the house in the morning.
She said, “This isn’t the sort of thing I’d expect the lord of the manor to be doing.”
“What? Drying his own socks?”
“Doesn’t someone like you have…What do you call them? People?”
“Well, I can’t see my sister drying my socks. My brother would be as useless as I am, and my mother would likely throw them at me.”
“I don’t mean family people. I mean people people. Servants. You know.”
“I suppose it depends on what you think of as servants. We have staff at Howenstow?that’s the family pile, if I’ve not mentioned its name?and I’ve a man who oversees the house in London. But I’d hardly call him a servant and can a single employee actually be called staff? Besides that, Charlie Denton comes and goes fairly at will. He’s a theatre lover with personal aspirations.”
“Of what sort?”
“Of the sort involving greasepaint and the crowd. He longs to be onstage but the truth of the matter is that he stands little chance of being discovered as long as he limits his range to what it currently is. He vacillates between Algernon Moncrieff and the porter in Macbeth.”
Daidre smiled in spite of herself. She wanted to be angry with him and part of her remained so. But he made it difficult.
She said, “Why did you lie to me, Thomas?”
“Lie to you?”
“You said you hadn’t gone to Falmouth asking questions about me.”
He clicked off the hair dryer. He set it on the edge of the basin and considered it. “Ah,” he said.