Careless In Red (24 page)

Ben looked at the posters as he replied. “I expect he didn’t like to keep it here.”

“Why?” she repeated.

“He likely suspected I’d do something with it.”

“Ah. Constable…?” Bea was gratified to see that Mick McNulty took the hint and once more attended to his note taking, although Ben Kerne couldn’t say, when asked, where Santo had indeed kept his gear. Bea said to him, “Why would Santo think you might do something with his kit, Mr. Kerne? Or do you mean to his kit?” And she thought, If the surfing kit, why not the cliff-climbing kit?

“Because he knew I didn’t particularly want him to like surfing.”

“Really? It seems a harmless enough sport, compared to cliff climbing.”

“No sport is completely harmless, Inspector. But it wasn’t that.” Kerne seemed to be looking for a way to explain, and he came into the bedroom to do so. He observed the posters. His face was stony.

Bea said, “Do you surf, Mr. Kerne?”

“I wouldn’t prefer Santo not surf if I did it myself, now would I.”

“I don’t know. Would you? I still don’t see why you approved of one sport but not another.”

“It’s the type, all right?” Kerne gave an apologetic glance to Constable McNulty. “I didn’t like him mixing with surfers because for so many of them it’s their only world. I didn’t want him adopting it: the hanging about they do, waiting for the opportunity for a surf, their lives defined by isobar charts and tide tables, driving up and down the coast to find perfect waves. And when they’re not having a surf, they’re talking about it or smoking cannabis while they stand round in their wet suits afterwards, still talking about it. There’re blokes—and lasses as well, I admit it—whose entire worlds revolve round riding waves and traveling the globe to ride more waves. I didn’t want that for Santo. Would you want it for your son or daughter?”

“But if his world revolved round cliff climbing?”

“It didn’t. But at least it’s a sport where one depends upon others. It’s not solitary, the way surfing can be and generally is. A surfer alone on the waves: You see it all the time. I didn’t want him out there alone. I wanted him to be with people. So if something happened to him…” He moved his gaze back to the posters, and what they depicted was—even to an unschooled observer like Bea—absolute danger embodied in an unimaginable tonnage of water: exposure to everything from broken bones to certain drowning. She wondered how many people died each year, coursing a nearly vertical declivity that, unlike the earth with its knowable textures, changed within seconds to trap the unwary.

She said, “Yet Santo was climbing alone when he fell. Just as he might have been had he gone for a surf. And anyway, surfers don’t always do this alone, do they?”

“On the wave itself. The surfer and the wave, alone. There may be others out there, but it’s not about them.”

“With climbing it is, though?”

“You depend on the other climber, and he depends on you. You keep each other safe.” He cleared his throat roughly and added, “What father wouldn’t want safety for his son?”

“And when Santo didn’t agree with your assessment of surfing?”

“What about it?”

“What happened between you? Arguments? Punishment? Do you tend towards violence, Mr. Kerne?”

He faced her, but in doing so he put his back to the window, so she could no longer read his face. He said, “What the hell sort of question is that?”

“One that wants answering. Santo’s eye was blackened by someone recently. What d’you know about that?”

His shoulders dropped. He moved again, but this time out of the light of the window and towards the other side of the room, where a computer and its printer sat on a single plywood sheet across two sawhorses forming a primitive desk. There was a stack of papers facedown on this desk; Ben Kerne reached for them. Bea stopped him before his fingers made contact. She repeated her question.

“He wouldn’t tell me,” Kerne said. “Obviously, I could tell he’d been punched. It was a bad blow. But he wouldn’t explain it, so I was left to think…” He shook his head. He seemed to have information he was loath to part with.

Bea said, “If you know something…if you suspect something…”

“I don’t. It’s just that…the young women liked Santo, and Santo liked the young women. He didn’t discriminate.”

“Between what?”

“Between available and unavailable. Between attached and unattached. Santo was…He was like pure mating instinct given human form. Perhaps an angry father punched him out. Or a furious boyfriend. He wouldn’t say. But he liked the lasses and the lasses liked him. And truth of the matter is that he was easily led where a determined young woman wanted him to go. He was…I’m afraid he was always that way.”

“Anyone in particular?”

“His last was a girl called Madlyn Angarrack. They’d been…what do you call it…an item? For more than a year.”

“Is she also a surfer by any chance?” Bea asked.

“A brilliant one, if Santo was to be believed. National champion in the making. He was quite taken with her.”

“And she with him?”

“It wasn’t a one-way street.”

“How was it for you, watching your son become involved with a surfer, then?”

Ben Kerne answered steadily. “Santo was always involved somewhere, Inspector. I knew it would pass, whatever it was. As I said, he liked the ladies. He wasn’t ready to settle. Not with Madlyn, not with anyone. No matter what.”

Bea thought that last was a strange expression. She said, “You wanted him to settle, though?”

“Like any father, I wanted him to keep his nose clean and stay out of trouble.”

“Not overly ambitious for him, then? Those are fairly limited as expectations go.”

Ben Kerne said nothing. Bea had the impression he was keeping something to himself, and it was her experience that in a murder enquiry, when someone did that, it was generally out of self-interest.

She said, “Did you ever beat Santo, Mr. Kerne?”

His gaze on her didn’t waver. “I’ve answered that question already.”

She let a silence hang there, but this one lacked fecundity. She was forced to move on. She did so by giving her attention to Santo’s computer. They would have to take it with them, she told Kerne. Constable McNulty would unhook it all and carry the components out to their car. Having said this, she reached for the stack of papers that Kerne had been going for on the desk. She flipped them over and spread them out.

They were, she saw, a variation of designs that incorporated the words Adventures Unlimited into each of them. In one the two words themselves formed into a curling wave. In another they made a circular logo in which the Promontory King George Hotel stood centrally. In a third they became the base upon which a variety of athletic feats were being accomplished by buffed-out silhouettes both masculine and feminine. In another they made a climbing apparatus.

“He…Oh God.”

Bea looked up from the designs to see Kerne’s stricken face. “What is it?” she asked.

“He designed T-shirts. On his computer. He was…Obviously, he was working on something for the business. I’d not asked him to do it. Oh God, Santo.”

He said the last like an apology. In reaction, Bea asked him about his son’s climbing equipment. Kerne told her that all of it was missing, every belay device, every chock stone, every rope, every item he would need for any climb he might make.

“Would he have needed all of it to make that climb yesterday?”

No, Kerne told her. He either began keeping it elsewhere without his father’s knowledge or he’d taken it all on the previous day when he set off to make his fatal climb.

“Why?” Bea asked.

“We’d had harsh words. He’d have reacted to them. It would have been an ‘I’ll show you’ sort of statement.”

“One that led to his death? Too much in a state to examine his kit closely? Was he the type to do that?”

“Impulsive, you mean? Impulsive enough to climb without looking over his equipment? Yes,” Kerne said, “he was exactly the type to do that.”

IT WAS, PRAISE GOD or praise whomever one felt like praising when praise was called for, the last radiator. Not the last radiator as in the last radiator of all radiators in the hotel, but the last radiator as in the last radiator he would have to paint for the day. Given a half hour to clean the brushes and seal the paint tins—after years of practise while working for his father, Cadan knew he could stretch out any activity as long as was necessary—it would be time to leave for the day. Halle-fucking-lujah. His lower back was throbbing and his head was reacting to the fumes once again. Clearly, he wasn’t meant for this type of labour. Well, that was hardly a surprise.

Cadan squatted back on his heels and admired his handiwork. It was dead stupid of them to put down the fitted carpet before they had someone paint the radiators, he thought. But he’d managed to get the most recent spill cleaned up with a bit of industrious rubbing, and what he’d not got up he reckoned the curtains would hide. Besides, it had been his only serious spill of the day, and that was saying something.

He declared, “We are out of here, Poohster.”

The parrot adjusted his balance on Cadan’s shoulder and replied with a squawk followed by, “Loose bolts on the fridge! Call the cops! Call the cops!” yet another of his curious remarks.

The door to the room swung open as Pooh flapped his wings, preparatory either to making a descent to the floor or to performing a less than welcome bodily function on Cadan’s shoulder. Cadan said, “Don’t you bloody dare, mate,” and a female voice said in concerned reply, “Who are you, please? What’re you doing here?”

The speaker turned out to be a woman in black, and Cadan reckoned that she was Santo Kerne’s mother, Dellen. He scrambled to his feet. Pooh said, “Polly wants a shag. Polly wants a shag,” displaying, not for the first time, the level of inapposition to which he was capable of sinking at a moment’s notice.

“What is that?” Dellen Kerne asked, clearly in reference to the bird.

“A parrot.”

She looked annoyed. “I can see it’s a parrot,” she told him. “I’m not stupid or blind. What sort of parrot and what’s he doing here and what’re you doing here, if it comes to that?”

“He’s a Mexican parrot.” Cadan could feel himself getting hot, but he knew the woman wouldn’t twig his discomfiture as his olive skin didn’t blush when blood suffused it. “His name is Pooh.”

“As in Winnie-the?”

“As in what he does best.”

A smile flickered round her lips. “Why don’t I know you? Why’ve I not seen you here before?”

Cadan introduced himself. “Ben…Mr. Kerne hired me yesterday. He probably forgot to tell you about me because of…” He saw the way he was headed too late to avoid heading there. He quirked his mouth and wanted to disappear, since—aside from painting radiators and dreaming about what could be done to the crazy golf course—his day had been spent in avoiding a run-in precisely like this: face-to-face with one of Santo Kerne’s parents in a moment when the magnitude of their loss was going to have to be acknowledged with an appropriate expression of sympathy. He said, “Sorry about Santo.”

She looked at him evenly. “Of course you are.”

Whatever that was supposed to mean. Cadan shifted on his feet. He had a paintbrush still in his hand and he wondered suddenly and idiotically what he was meant to do with it. Or with the tin of paint. They’d been brought to him and no one had said where to put them at the end of the workday. He’d not thought to ask.

“Did you know him?” Dellen Kerne said abruptly. “Did you know Santo?”

“A bit. Yeah.”

“And what did you think of him?”

This was rocky ground. Cadan didn’t know how to reply other than to say, “He bought a surfboard from my dad.” He didn’t mention Madlyn, didn’t want to mention Madlyn, and didn’t want to think why he didn’t want to mention Madlyn.

“I see. Yes. But that doesn’t actually answer the question, does it?” Dellen came farther into the room. She went to the fitted clothes cupboard for some reason. She opened it. She looked inside. She spoke, oddly, into the cupboard’s interior. She said, “Santo was a great deal like me. You wouldn’t know that if you didn’t know him. And you didn’t know him, did you? Not actually.”

“Like I said. A bit. I saw him round. More when he was first learning to surf than later on.”

“Because you surf as well?”

“Me? No. Well, I mean I’ve been, of course. But it’s not like it’s the only…I mean, I’ve got other interests.”

She turned from the cupboard. “Do you? What are they? Sport, I expect. You look quite fit. And women as well. Young men your age generally have women as one of their main interests. Are you like other young men?” She frowned. “Can we open that window, Cadan? The smell of paint…”

Cadan wanted to say it was her hotel so she could do whatever she wanted to do, but he set down his paintbrush carefully, went to the window, and wrestled it open, which wasn’t easy. It needed adjusting or greasing or something. Whatever one did to rejuvenate windows.

She said, “Thank you. I’m going to have a cigarette now. Do you smoke? No? That’s a surprise. You have the look of a smoker.”

Cadan knew he was meant to ask what the look of a smoker was, and had she been somewhere between twenty and thirty years old, he would have done so. His attitude would have been that questions like that one, of a potentially metaphoric nature, could lead to interesting answers, which in turn could lead to interesting developments. But in this case, he kept his mouth shut and when she said, “You won’t be bothered if I smoke, will you?” he shook his head. He hoped she didn’t expect him to light her cigarette for her—because she did seem the sort of woman round whom men leapt like jackrabbits—since he had neither matches nor lighter with him. She was correct in her assessment of him, though. He was a smoker but he’d been cutting back recently, inanely telling himself it was tobacco and not drink that was the real root of his problems.

He saw that she’d brought a packet of cigarettes with her and she had matches as well, tucked into the packet. She lit up, drew in, and let smoke drift from her nostrils.

“Whose shit’s on fire?” Pooh remarked.

Cadan winced. “Sorry. He’s heard that from my sister a million times. He mimics her. He mimics everyone. Anyway, she hates smoking.” And then again, “Sorry,” because he didn’t want her to think he was being critical of her.