Careless In Red by Elizabeth George Read Free Book Online

form, colour, and design, and as such, was Daidre’s goddess. The Idea—and Daidre always thought of it in upper case—was to turn the area round Polcare Cottage into a garden that Gertrude Jekyll might have fashioned. This would be a challenge because of the wind and the weather, and it might all come down to succulents in the end, but Daidre wanted to have a go. She had no garden at her home in Bristol, and she loved gardens. She loved the work of them: hands in the soil and something growing as a result. Gardening was to be her outlet. Staying busy at work wasn’t enough.
    She looked up from her book and considered the two men in the sitting room with her. The policeman from Casvelyn had introduced himself as Sergeant Paddy Collins, and he had a Belfast accent to prove the name was genuine. He was sitting upright in a straight-back chair that he’d brought from the kitchen table, as if to take one of the armchairs in the sitting room would have indicated a dereliction of duty. He still had a notebook open on his knee and he was regarding the other man as he’d regarded him from the first: with undisguised suspicion.
    Who could blame him, Daidre thought. The hiker was a questionable character. Aside from his appearance and his odour, which in and of themselves might not have raised doubts in the mind of a policeman querying his presence in this part of the world since the South-West Coast Path was a well-used trail, at least in fair-weather months, there was the not small detail of his voice. He was obviously well educated and probably well bred, and Paddy Collins had done more than raise an eyebrow when the man had told him he had no identification with him.
    Collins had said incredulously, “What d’you mean, you’ve no identification? You got no driving licence, man? No bank cards? Nothing?”
    “Nothing,” Thomas said. “I’m terribly sorry.”
    “So you could be bloody anyone, that it?”
    “I suppose I could be.” Thomas sounded as if he wished that were the case.
    “And I’m meant to believe whatever you say about yourself?” Collins asked him.
    Thomas appeared to take the question as rhetorical, as he’d given no answer. But he hadn’t seemed bothered by the threat implied in the sergeant’s tone. He’d merely gone to the small window and gazed out towards the beach although it couldn’t actually be seen from the cottage. There he’d remained, motionless and looking as if he were barely breathing.
    Daidre wanted to ask him what his injuries were. When she’d first come upon him in her cottage, it hadn’t been blood on his face or his clothes nor had it been anything obvious about his body that had prompted her to offer him her aid as a doctor. It had been the expression in his eyes. He was in inconceivable agony: an internal injury but not a physical one. She could see that now. She knew the signs.
    When Sergeant Collins stirred, rose, and made for the kitchen—probably for a cuppa, as Daidre had showed him where her supplies were kept—Daidre took the opportunity to speak to the hiker. She said, “Why were you walking along the coast alone and without identification, Thomas?”
    Thomas didn’t turn from the window. He made no reply although his head moved marginally, which suggested that he was listening.
    She said, “What if something happened to you? People fall from these cliffs. They put a foot wrong, they slip, they—”
    “Yes,” he said. “I’ve seen the memorials, all along the way.”
    They were up and down the coast, these memorials: sometimes as ephemeral as a bunch of dying flowers laid at the site of a fatal fall, sometimes a bench carved with a suitable phrase, sometimes something as lasting and permanent as a marker akin to a tombstone with the deceased’s name engraved upon it. Each was something to note the eternal passage of surfers, climbers, walkers, and suicides. It was impossible to be out hiking along the coastal path and not to come upon them.
    “There was an