Elizabeth George
Careless in Red
Book 15 in the Inspector Lynley series, 2008
To the memory of Stephen Lawrence
and 22 April 1993, when he was murdered
in Eltham, Southeast London,
by five men who have gone unpunished
by the British judicial system to this day
If thou art indeed my father,
then thou hast stained thy sword
in the lifeblood of thy son.
And thou didst it of thine own obstinacy.
For I sought to turn thee into love…
– from the Shahnameh
Chapter One
HE FOUND THE BODY ON THE FORTY-THIRD DAY OF HIS WALK. By then, the end of April had arrived, although he had only the vaguest idea of that. Had he been capable of noticing his surroundings, the condition of the flora along the coast might have given him a broad hint as to the time of year. He’d started out when the only sign of life renewed was the promise of yellow buds on the gorse that grew sporadically along the cliff tops, but by April, the gorse was wild with color, and yellow archangel climbed in tight whorls along upright stems in hedgerows on the rare occasions when he wandered into a village. Soon foxglove would be nodding on roadside verges, and lamb’s foot would expose fiery heads from the hedgerows and the drystone walls that defined individual fields in this part of the world. But those bits of burgeoning life were in the future, and he’d been walking these days that had blended into weeks in an effort to avoid both the thought of the future and the memory of the past.
He carried virtually nothing with him. An ancient sleeping bag. A rucksack with a bit of food that he replenished when the thought occurred to him.