Careless In Red (18 page)

Indeed, he hadn’t been certain he was even supposed to come into work on this day, as he wasn’t sure that he had a job after what had happened to Santo. At first, he’d thought he simply wouldn’t show up. He thought he’d let a few days roll by and then he’d phone and express whatever condolences he could come up with and ask did they still want him to do maintenance work. But then he reckoned a phone call like that would give them a chance to sack him before he’d even had a chance to demonstrate how valuable he could be. So he’d decided to put in an appearance at the place and to look as doleful as possible round any Kerne he might run into.

Cadan hadn’t yet seen a hair of either Ben or Dellen—Santo Kerne’s parents—but his arrival had coincided with Alan Cheston’s and when Cadan brought Alan into the picture about his employment at Adventures Unlimited, Alan said he’d fetch someone at once to see what Cadan was meant to be doing. He’d strode off to do so, after unlocking the front door, letting them both in, and pocketing the keys with the air of a man who knew exactly where his place was in the scheme of things.

The old hotel was as silent as a graveyard. It was cold as well. Cadan shivered—he felt Pooh do likewise on his shoulder—and he waited in the new reception area, where a bulletin board displayed the words “Your Instructors,” along with head shots of the six staff members so far hired. These all pyramided down from a picture of Kerra Kerne, who was identified as “Director of Instruction.”

It was, Cadan thought, a decent picture of Kerra. She was no great beauty—ordinary brown hair, ordinary blue eyes, and stockier than Cadan fancied in a woman—but there was no doubt she was in the best physical condition of any female her age in Casvelyn. It was just unfortunate that her roll of the genetic dice had given Kerra her father’s looks instead of her mother’s. Santo had inherited every one of those, a fact which some might refer to as lucky. Cadan, however, reckoned most blokes didn’t fancy being pretty like Santo. Unless, naturally, one knew how to use it.

“Cade?”

He swung round. Pooh squawked and shifted position.

Kerra had materialized from somewhere. Alan was with her. Cadan knew they were a couple, but he couldn’t reconcile the matter. Kerra was sun and sinew with, unfortunately, tree-trunk ankles. Alan looked like someone who’d take exercise as a last resort and then only if threatened with disembowelment.

A few words among them had sorted things. Although Alan on the surface might have looked like small change, it turned out he was on top of almost all that was going on at the place. So before Cadan knew enough to make a spurious excuse about the delicate condition of his lungs should they ever be exposed to paint fumes, he found himself with drop cloths and a paintbrush in one hand and two gallons of glossy white in the other. Alan made an introduction between Cadan and the project, and that was that.

Four hours later saw Cadan deciding he was owed a break outdoors. Pooh, he noted, had grown ominously silent. Likely the parrot had a headache as well.

The ground was still sopping round the crazy golf course, but Cadan didn’t let that deter him. Guiding his bike, he climbed the slope to hole number one, where he quickly saw that doing a few tabletops just now in this location had been something of a pipe dream. He set his bike to one side, established Pooh on the handlebars, and gave the crazy golf course a closer look.

This wasn’t going to be a simple project. The course looked at least sixty years old. It also looked like something that hadn’t been maintained in the last thirty of those years. This was too bad because otherwise crazy golf could have been a little moneymaker for Adventures Unlimited. On the other hand, this was also a plus because an unmaintained course made it far likelier than otherwise that anyone in the position of making a decision about the future would climb onboard once Cadan laid out his plans. But the idea of laying out plans necessitated having plans, and Cadan wasn’t a having-plans sort of person. So he walked round the first five holes of the course and tried to reckon what needed to be done aside from ripping out miniature windmills, barns, and schoolhouses and filling in the holes.

He was still considering all this when he saw a panda car pulling from St. Mevan Crescent into the car park of the old hotel. The driver—a uniformed constable—got out and went inside. A few minutes later he departed.

Shortly thereafter, Kerra came out of the building. She stood in the car park, hands on hips, and she looked about. Cadan was squatting next to a tiny shipwrecked rowboat that acted as an obstacle on hole number six, and it came to him that she was searching for someone, possibly him. His modus operandi was generally to hide, since if someone was seeking him, it was usually because he’d bollocksed something up and was presently going to hear about it. But a quick evaluation of his performance in the painting department told him he’d been doing a class A job, so he rose and made his presence known.

Kerra headed in his direction. She’d changed from what she’d been wearing earlier. She was decked out in Lycra, and Cadan recognised the kit: She had on her long-distance cyclist’s gear. Odd time of day to be going for a ride, he thought, but when you were the boss’s daughter, you made your own rules.

Kerra spoke to him without preamble when she reached the ruins of the crazy golf course. Her voice was clipped. “I phoned the farm, but they told me she doesn’t work there any longer. I phoned your house, but she’s not there either. D’you know where she is? I want to speak with her.”

Cadan took a moment to think about the remarks, the question, and the implications of each. He bought time by going to his bike, removing Pooh from the handlebars, and settling the bird on his shoulder.

“Blow holes in the attic,” Pooh remarked.

“Cade.” Kerra’s voice was patient but with an edge. “Please answer me. Now would be preferable to sometime in the future.”

“It’s weird you want to know, is all,” Cadan told her. “I mean, it’s not like you’re friends with Madlyn any longer, so I was wondering…” He cocked his head so that his cheek touched Pooh’s side. He liked the feeling of the bird’s feathers against him.

Kerra’s eyes narrowed. “You were wondering what?”

“Santo. The cops showing up. You coming out here to talk to me. Asking me about Madlyn. Is all this related?”

Kerra had her hair in a ponytail and she unbanded it so that it fell to her shoulders. She shook it out, then tied it back up. It seemed as much a gesture to buy time for her as rescuing Pooh from the bike had been for Cadan. Then she looked at him and seemed to focus more clearly. “What happened to your face?”

“Plain old luck,” he said. “It’s the one I was born with.”

“Don’t joke, Cadan. You know what I mean. The bruises, the scratches.”

“I slipped. Occupational hazard. I was doing a no-footed cancan, and I hit the side of the pool the wrong way. Over at the leisure centre.”

“You did that swimming?” She sounded incredulous.

“Pool’s empty. I was practising there. On the bike.” He felt himself colour, and this irritated him. He made it a point never to be embarrassed about his passion, and he didn’t want to think why he was embarrassed now. “What’s going on?” he asked, with a nod at the hotel.

“It wasn’t an ordinary fall. He was murdered. That’s what the police came to tell us. They sent their…whatever he is…their liaison officer. I think he’s meant to hang about serving us tea and biscuits to keep us from…I don’t know…What do people generally do when a member of the family is murdered? Go mad to get vengeance? Shoot up the town? Gnash their teeth? And what the hell is that, gnashing the teeth? Where is she, Cade?”

“She already knows he died.”

“That he died or that he was murdered? Where is she? He was my brother, and as she was his…his girlfriend—”

“Your friend as well,” Cadan reminded her. “At least at one time.”

“Don’t,” she said. “Just don’t, all right?”

He shrugged. He directed his attention back to the crazy golf course and said, “This needs to go. It’s a wreck. You could repair it, but my guess is the cost would exceed the benefits. In the short term. In the long run…Who knows?”

“Alan knows the long run. Profit and loss, long-term projections. He knows it all. But none of that matters because just now there may not be a reason to worry.”

“About?”

“About anything related to Adventures Unlimited. I doubt my father will have the stomach to open after what’s happened to Santo.”

“What’s next, then, if you don’t open?”

“Alan would say we try to find a buyer and recoup our investment. But then, that’s Alan. A mind for the figures if nothing else.”

“Sounds like you’re cheesed off at him.”

She didn’t take up the remark. “Is she at home and just not answering the phone? I can go over there but I don’t want to take the trouble if she’s not there anyway. So d’you mind telling me that much?”

“I expect she’s still with Jago,” he said.

“Who’s Jago?”

“Jago Reeth. Bloke that works for my dad. She was with him all night. She’s still with him, for all I know.”

Kerra laughed shortly, without amusement. “Well, she’s moved on, hasn’t she? That was quick. Miraculous recovery from complete heartbreak. How very nice for her.”

Cadan wanted to ask what it was to her, whether his sister moved on to another man or not. But instead he said, “Jago Reeth’s like…I don’t know. Maybe he’s seventy or something. He’s like a granddad to her, okay?”

“What’s he do for your dad, then, some seventy-year-old?”

She was definitely annoying him. She was being the boss’s daughter and you-better-treat-me-as-I’m-meant-to-be-treated, and that rubbed Cadan wrong. He said, “Kerra, does that matter, exactly? Why the hell d’you want to know?”

And just like that, she altered. She gave a weird little cough and he saw the glitter of tears in her eyes. That glitter reminded him that her brother was dead, that he’d died only on the previous day, and that she’d just learned he’d been murdered.

He said, “A glasser.” When she looked at him in confusion, he added, “Jago Reeth. He does the fiberglass on the boards. He’s an old surfer my dad picked up…I don’t know…six months ago maybe? He’s a detail man like Dad. And, what’s important, not like me.”

“She spent the night with a seventy-year-old bloke?”

“Jago phoned and said she was there.”

“What time?”

“Kerra…”

“This is important, Cadan.”

“Why? D’you think she gave your brother the bump? How was she supposed to do that? Shove him over the cliff?”

“His equipment was messed with. That’s what the cop told us.”

Cadan widened his eyes. “Hang on, Kerra. No way…And I mean no way. She may have been off her nut with everything that happened between them, but my sister is not—” He stopped himself. Not because of what he’d intended to say about Madlyn but because as he’d been speaking, his gaze had moved from Kerra to the beach below them and across that beach a surfer was jogging, his board under his arm and its leash trailing behind him in the sand. He was fully garbed, as he would be at this time of year, for the water was still quite cold. Head to toe in neoprene. Head to toe in black. You couldn’t, in fact, actually tell if the surfer was male or female from this distance.

“What?” Kerra said.

Cadan shuddered. He said quietly, “Madlyn may have been all over the map with how she reacted after what happened between her and Santo. I give you that.”

“That and then some,” Kerra remarked.

“But killing off her ex-boyfriend wouldn’t be part of her repertoire, okay? Jesus, Kerra, she kept thinking he was just going through a stage, you know.”

“At first,” Kerra clarified.

“Okay. Maybe only at first she thought that. But it doesn’t mean she’d finally get to the point of understanding how things really were and deciding the only reasonable thing to do was to kill him. Does that make sense to you?”

“Love,” Kerra said, “never makes sense to me. People do all sorts of mad things when they’re in love with someone.”

“Yeah?” Cadan said. “Is that the truth? So, what about you?”

She made no reply.

“I rest my case,” he told her. And then he added, “Sea Dreams, if you have to know.”

“What’s that?”

“Where she is. Jago’s got a caravan at that holiday park where the dairy used to be. Out beyond Sawsneck Down. If you want to grill her, grill her there. For what it’s worth, though, you’ll be wasting your time.”

“What makes you think I want to grill her?”

“You sure as hell want something,” Cadan told her.

ONCE BEA HANNAFORD HAD him in possession of a hired car, she told Lynley to follow her. She said to him, “I expect this isn’t your typical heap,” in reference to the Ford, “but at least you’ll fit it. Or it’ll fit you.”

Under other circumstances, Lynley might have told her that she was being more than generous. Indeed, his breeding generally made that sort of remark second nature to him. But under the present circumstances, he merely told her that his usual mode of transportation had been totaled in February and he hadn’t yet replaced it with something else, so the Ford was fine.

She said, “Good,” and advised him to mind his driving since he would be doing so without a licence until his wallet arrived. “It’ll be our little secret,” she said. She told him to follow her. She had something to show him.

What she had to show him was in Casvelyn, and he obediently trailed her there. He drove trying to keep his mind on that—simply on the driving—but he found the strength draining out of him with the sheer effort he made to hold his thoughts in check.

He’d told himself he was finished with murder. One did not watch a beloved wife die—the victim of an utterly senseless street killing—and walk away from that to think that tomorrow was simply another day. Tomorrow was, instead, something to be endured. So far he’d endured the endless succession of tomorrows he’d been living through by doing what was set in front of him and nothing more.

At first it had been Howenstow: seeing to matters on and around the land that was his legacy and the great house sitting upon that land. No matter that his mother, his brother, and an estate manager had been handling Howenstow matters for ages. He’d thrown himself into them to keep from throwing himself elsewhere, until half of what he’d taken on was a muddle and the other half was a wreck. His mother’s gentle admonition of “Darling, let me handle this,” or “John Penellin’s been working on this situation for weeks, Tommy,” or anything of a similar persuasion was something he brushed aside with a remark so terse that the dowager countess had sighed, pressed his shoulder, and left him to it.