Tiombe nodded. She dropped her cigarette to the pavement. She ground it out with the toe of her stiletto. She ducked back into the salon and returned to him with a scrap of paper. She’d scribbled a phone number upon it. “My mobile,” she said. “When you’re ready, you ring me and I’ll fetch her to my place. She like animals, does Simi?”
“Animals? Like dogs?”
“Like goats,” she said. “I got one as a pet.”
PART II
5 AUGUST
WESTMINSTER
CENTRAL LONDON
Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley sat in his car, staring at the unattractive concrete wall of the underground car park, its unimposing grey expanse begging in vain for a Banksy. He was completely exasperated. He wanted to be exasperated with Daidre Trahair, the woman with whom he’d been involved—if that’s what one could actually call it, which was something about which he had serious doubts—for more time than was reasonable considering how far along their relationship was. Or wasn’t, actually. But the truth of the matter was that, if he had to be completely honest, his exasperation was with himself. The conversation they’d had on the previous night had not even needed to happen. He had been its instigator. And the argument that had arisen from it—identical to the previous arguments they’d had on the very same topic or a variation thereof—had been completely unnecessary. But he appeared to be incapable of letting pass what looked to him like a viable opening merely posing as an inadvertent comment.
In this case, though, it wasn’t an inadvertent comment at all. It was part of a reasonable conversation, the topic of which had been introduced by Daidre herself. This involved her two younger siblings, twins Goron and Gwynder, whom Daidre had insisted take up residence in her holiday cottage in Polcare Cove on the west coast of Cornwall. They’d been living with their parents until then, with Goron helping their father futilely stream for tin and Gwynder helping nurse their mother in the final years of her life. Once she had passed after a long and—it had to be said—unrealistically hopeful battle with cancer that had included crystals, visits to Catholic and Celtic shrines, drinking water from holy wells, Eastern medicine, and two spiritualists, Daidre’s sole desire was to get her siblings out of the disreputable caravan that was the family home. She knew that her father would never leave the caravan himself. Although he might position it on another stream in Cornwall, he’d never abandon it. But she didn’t know about the twins. In their late twenties, it was time for them to have some positive life experiences, she thought. It was time for them to develop and achieve some goals. They needed this. But it couldn’t happen from an isolated caravan site, and although her holiday cottage was isolated as well, it was a brief drive from there to the hamlet of Morenstow and not much farther to the town of Casvelyn.
So she’d managed to get them to agree to the change of home—Goron being the more difficult of the two as he was generally fearful of any sort of change—but she didn’t have the funds to support them once she got them there, which meant they were going to have to find employment. In multiple trips to see them, Daidre had managed to secure both of them jobs on a local cider farm: Goron as a handyman, ciderman, and appleman, and Gwynder as one of the cooks in the farm’s jam kitchen.
But as the weeks went by, the twins decided that they wanted to return to their father. Goron did not like the work he was given, maintaining all the farm machinery, and a future watching over great vats of jam wasn’t what Gwynder had in mind for herself. Daidre, however, was clinging to the belief that all the twins needed was time: time to get used to their new accommodation, time to meet people in the larger community, time to recognise and acknowledge the severe limitations their previous life had placed them under.
“They’re just afraid,” Daidre had said to Lynley on the previous evening in her flat in Belsize Park. She’d only just returned from Cornwall and he’d come to her directly once he could get away from New Scotland Yard. He’d brought a takeaway curry with him, which they’d ignored. Instead, they had decamped to the bedroom.
They were sitting up in Daidre’s bed afterwards when she brought up Goron and Gwynder and their declaration of intent about returning to their father. “They don’t want to believe me when I tell them that they will adjust and that if they run back to that caravan, they’ll never know what kind of lives they could have had. Their father—my father, although I stopped thinking of him as that once we all were taken from him and my mum—is not going to live forever, and what will they do then, when he’s gone?”