He said, “Mother. Hullo.”
At first she said nothing and he knew what she was doing: standing next to the phone in the drawing room or perhaps her morning room or elsewhere in the grand sprawling house that was his birthright and even more his curse, raising one hand to her lips, looking towards whoever else was in the room and that would likely be his younger brother or perhaps the manager of the estate or even his sister in the unlikely event that she was still down from Yorkshire. And her eyes?his mother’s eyes?would communicate the information before she said his name. It’s Tommy. He’s phoned. Thank God. He’s all right.
She said, “Darling. Where are you? How are you?”
He said, “I’ve run into something…It’s a situation up in Casvelyn.”
“My God, Tommy. Have you walked that far? Do you know how?” But she didn’t say the rest. She meant to ask whether he knew how worried they were. But she loved him and she wouldn’t burden him further.
As he loved her, he answered her anyway. “I know. I do. Please understand that. It’s just that I can’t seem to find my way.”
She knew, of course, that he wasn’t referring to his sense of direction. “My dear, if I could do anything to remove this from your shoulders…”
He could hardly bear the warmth of her voice, her unending compassion, especially when she herself had borne so many of her own tragedies throughout the years. He said to her, “Yes. Well,” and he cleared his throat roughly.
“People have phoned,” she told him. “I’ve kept a list. And they’ve not stopped phoning, the way you think people might. You know what I mean: One phone call and there, I’ve done my duty. It hasn’t been like that. There has been such concern for you. You are so deeply loved, my dear.”
He didn’t want to hear it, and he had to make her understand that. It wasn’t that he didn’t value the concern of his friends and associates. It was that their concern?and what was worse, their expression of it?rubbed a place in him already so raw that having it touched by anything was akin to torture. He’d left his home because of this, because on the coast path there was no one in March and few enough people in April and even if he ran across someone in his walk, that person would know nothing of him, of what he was doing trudging steadily forward day after day, or of what had led up to his decision to do so.
He said, “Mother…”
She heard it in his voice, as she would do. She said, “Dearest, I’m sorry. No more of it.” Her voice altered, becoming more businesslike, for which he was grateful. “What’s happened? You’re all right, aren’t you? You’ve not been injured?”
No, he told her. He wasn’t injured. But he’d come upon someone who had been. He was the first to come upon him, it seemed. A boy. He’d been killed in a fall from one of the cliffs. Now the police were involved. As he’d left at home everything that would identify him…Could she send him his wallet? “It’s form, I daresay. They’re just in the process of sorting everything out. It looks like an accident but, obviously, until they know, they won’t want me going off. And they do want me to prove I am who I say I am.”
“Do they know you’re a policeman, Tommy?”
“One of them, apparently. Otherwise, I’ve told them only my name.”
“Nothing else?”
“No.” It would have turned things into a Victorian melodrama: My good man?or in this case woman?do you know who you’re talking to? He’d go for the police rank first and if that didn’t impress, he’d try the title next. That should produce some serious forelock pulling, if nothing else. Only, DI Hannaford didn’t appear to be the sort who pulled on forelocks, at least not her own. He said, “So they’re not willing to take me at my word and who can blame them. I wouldn’t take me at my word. Will you send the wallet?”