-There were car tracks in your garage. More than one set."
-Santo's. Aldara's. Your sergeant would have told you about Aldara, I expect. Santo's lover. The fact that they used my cottage."
-Why didn't you just explain that from the first? Had you done so - "
-What? You would have stopped short of looking into my past, sending your sergeant to Falmouth to question the neighbours, phoning the zoo, doing...What else? Have you spoken to Lok as well? Did you track him down? Did you ask him if he's truly crippled or if I made that up? It does sound fantastic, doesn't it, a Chinese brother with spinal bifida. Brilliant but bent.
What an intriguing story."
-I know he's at Oxford." Lynley was regretful, but there was no help for what he'd done. It was part of the job. -That's the extent."
-And you discovered this...how?"
-It's a small matter, Daidre. There's cooperation between police agencies all over the world, let alone in our own country. It's easier now than it ever was."
-I see."
-You don't. You can't. You're not a cop."
-Neither were you. Neither are you. Or has all of that changed?"
He couldn't answer that question. He didn't know the answer. Perhaps some things were in the blood and could not be shaken off merely because one desired to do so.
They said nothing more. At one point, in his peripheral vision, he saw her raise a hand to her cheek and his fantasy had her weeping. But when he looked at her directly, he saw that she was merely seeing to the hair that had fallen over the frame of her glasses. She shoved it impatiently behind her ears.
At Wheal Kitty, they did not approach the engine house or the buildings that surrounded it.
These sat at a distance and cars were parked in front of some of them. Unlike nearly all of the old engine houses across the county, Wheal Kitty's had been restored. It was now in use as a place of business and other businesses had sprung up round it, these in long, low buildings looking nothing like the period from which Wheal Kitty had come but still built of the local stone.
Lynley was glad to see this. He always felt a twinge of sadness when he looked at the ghostly smokestacks and broken-down engine houses that marked the landscape. It was good to see them put to use again, for round St. Agnes was a veritable graveyard of mining shafts, particularly above Trevaunance Coombe, where a ghost town of engine houses and their accompanying smokestacks marked the landscape like silent witnesses to the land's recovery from man's assault upon it. And the land itself was a place of heather and gorse thriving amidst grey, granite outcroppings, providing nesting spots for herring gulls, jackdaws, and carrion crows. There were few trees. The windswept nature of the place did not encourage them.
To the north of Wheal Kitty, the road narrowed. It became a lane first and ultimately a track, coursing downward into a steeply sided gully. Barely the width of Daidre's Vauxhall, it descended in a series of switchbacks, guarded by boulders to their left and a fast-moving stream to their right. It finally ended at an engine house far more ruined than any they'd seen on the trip from Redruth. It was wildly overgrown with vegetation; just beyond it, a smokestack shot skyward in a similar state.
-Here we are," Daidre said. But she didn't get out of the car. Instead, she turned to him and she spoke quietly. -Imagine this," she said. -A traveller decides he wants to stop travelling because unlike his parents and their parents and the parents before them, he wants something different out of life. He has an idea that's not very practical because nothing much he's done has ever been practical, frankly, but he wants to try it. So he comes to this place, convinced, of all things, that there's a living to be had from mining tin. He reads very poorly, but he's done what homework he can on the subject, and he knows about streaming. D'you know what tin streaming is, Thomas?"
-Yes." Lynley looked beyond her, over her shoulder. Some seventy yards from where they were parked, an old caravan stood. Once white, now it was mostly laced the colour of rust, which streaked from its roof and from its windows at which yellow curtains printed with flowers drooped. Accompanying this impermanent structure were a tumbledown shed and a tarpaper-roofed cupboard that looked like