swore he'd not taken a thing. If she had a bag with her, he knew nothing of it. It might've been right there next to her, he avowed, and he wouldn't've even known it was there cos all he saw was her, he said. An' all that blood.
"But you didn't report this," Isabelle said. "The only report we had was from the young couple who saw you, Marlon. Why didn't you report it?"
"Them carvings," he said. "An' the magazine."
"Ah." Defacing public property, buying pornographic magazines, masturbating - or at least intending to do so - in public: These had been his considerations, as had no doubt been the displeasure of his father, and the fact that his father seemed to express that displeasure by means of a cricket bat. "I see. Well, we're going to need a few things from you. Will you cooperate with us?"
He nodded vigorously. Cooperation? No problem. Anything at all.
They would need a sample of his DNA, which a swab from his mouth would happily provide. They would also require his shoes, and his fingerprints, which would be easy enough to obtain. And his carving tools were going to have to be handed over for inspection by forensics.
"I expect," Isabelle said, "you've got any number of sharp objects among them? Yes? Well, we need to test them all, Marlon."
The welling of eyes, the whimper, the father's impatient and bull-like breath.
"It's all to prove you're telling the truth," she assured the boy. "Are you, Marlon? Are you telling the truth?"
"Swear," he said. "Swear, swear, swear."
Isabelle wanted to tell him that one swearing was enough, but she reckoned she'd be wasting her time.
AS THEY WALKED back to the car, the superintendent asked Lynley what he was thinking. She said to him, "It's not entirely necessary for you to keep silent in that sort of situation, you know."
He glanced at her. Considering the heat of the day and their encounter with the Kays, she was managing to look remarkably collected, unruffled, professional, even cool in the blasting sun. Wisely - if unusually - she wore not a summer suit but a sleeveless dress, and Lynley realised it served more than one purpose in that it likely made her more comfortable at the same time as it made her less intimidating when she questioned people. People like Marlon, he thought, an adolescent boy whose trust she needed to garner.
He said, "I didn't think you needed my - "
"Help?" she cut in sharply. "That's not what I was implying, Thomas."
Lynley looked at her again. "Actually, I was going to say my participation," he told her.
"Ah. Sorry."
"You're prickly about it, then."
"Not at all." She fished in her bag and brought out a pair of dark glasses. Then she sighed and said, "Well, that's not true. I am prickly. But one has to be, in our line of work. It's not easy for a woman."
"Which part isn't easy? The investigation? Promoting? Navigating the corridors of power in Victoria Street, dubious though they may be?"
"Oh, it's easy for you to have the odd chuckle at my expense," she noted. "But I don't expect any man comes up against the kinds of things a woman has to cope with. Especially a man ..." She seemed unwilling to finish her thought.
He did it for her. "A man like me?"
"Well, really, Thomas. You can hardly argue that a life of privilege - the family pile in Cornwall, Eton, Oxford ...remember I do know a bit about you - has made it difficult for you to succeed in your line of work. And why do you do it, anyway? Certainly you don't need to be a policeman. Doesn't your sort of man generally do something less - " She seemed to be searching for the right term and she settled on, "Less elbow rubbing with the great unwashed?"
"Such as?"
"I don't know. Sit on boards of hospitals and universities? Breed thoroughbred horses?
Manage property - his own, naturally - and collect rent from farmers wearing flat caps and Wellingtons?"
"Those would be the ones who come to the kitchen door and keep their eyes cast downward? The ones who hastily remove those flat caps in my presence? Pulling on their forelocks and all the rest?"
"What in God's name is a forelock?" she asked. "I've always wondered. I mean, it's clear that it's hair and it's in the front but how much of it constitutes a „fore' of it and why on earth would someone pull it?"