He looked immediately suspicious. “What would that be?”
“Your computer. The Internet actually. I’ve no other access, and I’d rather not use the library. I need to look up…” She hesitated. How much to say?
“What?”
She cast about and came up with it, and what she said was the truth despite its being incomplete. “The body…Santo…Max, Santo was found by a man doing the coastal walk.”
“We know that actually.”
“All right. Yes. I suppose you do. But he’s also a detective from New Scotland Yard. Do you know that as well?”
“Is he indeed?” Max sounded interested.
“So he says. I want to find out if that’s true.”
“Why?”
“Why? Well, goodness, think of it. What better claim to make about yourself if you don’t want people looking at you too closely?”
“Thinking of going into police work yourself? Thinking of coming to work for me? Because otherwise, Daidre, I don’t see what this has to do with you.”
“I found the man inside my cottage. I’d like to know if he is who he says he is.” She explained how she’d come to be acquainted with Thomas Lynley. She made no mention, however, of how the man seemed: like someone carrying across his shoulders a yoke studded with protruding nails.
Her explanation apparently seemed reasonable to the newsman. He tilted his head towards his computer terminal. “Have at it, then. Print up what you find, because we may well use it. I’ve work to do. Lily’ll keep you company.” He started to leave the room but paused at the door, one hand on the jamb. “You haven’t seen me,” he said.
She’d moved to the terminal. She looked up, frowning. “What?”
“You haven’t seen me, should anyone ask. Are we clear on that?”
“You do know what that sounds like, don’t you?”
“Frankly, I don’t care what it sounds like.”
He left her, then, and she mulled over what he’d said. Only animals, she concluded, were safe for one’s devotion.
She logged onto the Internet and then a search engine. She typed in Thomas Lynley’s name.
DAIDRE FOUND HIM WAITING at the bottom of Belle Vue Lane. He looked completely different from the bearded stranger she’d driven into town, but she had no trouble recognising him since she’d spent over an hour gazing on a dozen or more news photos of him, generated by the investigation of a serial killing in London and by the tragedy that had supervened in his life. She now knew why she had seen him as an injured man carrying a tremendous burden. She merely didn’t know what to do with her knowledge. Nor with the rest of it: who he actually was, what comprised his background, the title, the money, the trappings of a world so far different from her own that they might have come from different planets and not merely from different circumstances in different parts of the very same county.
He’d had his hair cut, and he’d had a shave. He wore a rain jacket over a collarless shirt and pullover. He’d bought sturdy shoes and corduroy trousers. He carried a waxed rain hat in his hand. Not, she thought grimly, exactly the getup one expected to see on a belted earl. But that’s what he was. Lord Whoever with a murdered wife, done in on the street by a twelve-year-old boy. She’d been pregnant as well. It was little wonder to Daidre that Lynley was among the injured. The real miracle was that the man was actually capable of functioning at all.
When she pulled to the kerb, he got into the car. He’d bought a few items from the pharmacy as well, he told her, indicating a bag he brought forth from the capacious inner pocket of his jacket. Razor, toothbrush, toothpaste, shaving cream?
“You’ve no need to account to me,” she told him. “I’m only glad you had enough funds.”