Careless In Red (40 page)

After making the imperative, Lynley waited. He hoped the old man’s sorrow—suppressed but so alive in him—would force him to speak.

Kerne finally did so, although it sounded as if he talked more to himself than to Lynley. “They’re all surfing, and someone gets hurt. Everyone points fingers at everyone else and no one takes the blame. But things get nasty, so me and his mum send him off to Truro till he isn’t likely to get no more squinty-eyed looks from people.”

“Who got hurt? How?”

Kerne slapped his palm on the bench. “I’m telling you it’s of no account. What’s it got to do with Santo? It’s Santo who’s dead, not his dad. Some bloody kid gets himself drunk one night and ends up sleeping it off in one of the sea caves down the cove. So what’s that got to do with Santo?”

“Were they surfing at night?” Lynley asked insistently. “What happened?”

“What d’you think bloody happened? They’re not surfing, they’re partying. And he’s partying like the rest of them. He mixes drugs of some sort with whatever else he’s swallowed and when the tide comes in, he’s done for. Tide sweeps into those caves more fast ’n a man can move cos they’re deep, aren’t they, and everyone knows if you go in, you best know where the sea is and what it’s doing cos if you don’t, you aren’t coming out. Oh you might think you are. You might think what the bloody hell does it matter cos I c’n swim, can’t I? But you get battered and turned about and it’s no one’s fault if you’re too bloody stupid to listen when you’re told not to go down to the cove when conditions are dicey.”

“But that’s what happened to someone,” Lynley said.

“That’s what happened.”

“To whom?”

“Lad come here for his summers. His family has money and they take the big cliff house. I don’t know them but Benesek does. All the young ones do cos they’re all down the beach in summers, aren’t they? This lad John or James…Yes, James…He’s the one.”

“The one who drowned?”

“Only his family don’t see it that way. They don’t want to see it’s his own damn fault. They want to blame and they choose our Benesek. Others as well, but Benesek’s at the bottom of what happened, so they say. They bring the cops from Newquay and they don’t let up, not the family and not the cops. You know something and you damn well will tell us, they say. But he don’t know a bleeding thing, does he, which is what he says over and over and the cops finally have to believe him, but at that point the kid’s dad’s built a bloody great stupid memorial to the boy and everyone’s looking at our Ben dead funny, so we send him to his uncle cos he’s got to have a chance in life, and he’s not bloody likely to have one here.”

Lynley said, “A memorial? Where?”

“Out on the coast somewheres. Up on the cliff. Likely they thought a memorial like that’d make people never forget what happened. I don’t walk the coast path, so I never saw it, but it’d be what they wanted so it’d stay fresh for people.” He laughed bleakly. “They’d spend a good sum, prob’ly hoping it’d haunt our Ben till the day he died, only they di’n’t know he’d never come home, so it went for nought.” He picked up another teacup, this one far more broken than its companions, with a large crack running from rim to bottom and a significant chip on each side, right where the drinker would place his lips. It seemed foolish to repair it, but it also seemed clear that Eddie Kerne was going to make the attempt anyway. He said quietly, “He was a good lad. I wanted the best for him. I tried to get the best for him. What dad doesn’t want the best for his lad?”

“No dad at all,” Lynley acknowledged.

AN EXPLORATION OF PENGELLY Cove didn’t take a great deal of time. After the shop and the two main streets, there was either the cove itself, an old church sitting just outside of town, or the Curlew Inn to occupy one’s time. Once she was left alone in the village, Daidre began with the church. She reckoned it might be locked up tight, as so many country churches were in these days of religious indifference and vandalism, but she was wrong. The place was called St. Sithy’s, and it was open, sitting in the middle of a graveyard where the remains of this year’s daffodils still lined the paths, giving way to columbine.

Within, the church smelled of stones and dust, and the air was cold. There was a switch for lights just inside the door, and Daidre used this to illuminate a single aisle, a nave, and a collection of multicoloured ropes that looped down from the bell tower. A roughly hewn granite baptismal font stood to her left, while to her right, an unevenly placed stone aisle led to pulpit and altar. It could have been any church in Cornwall save for one difference: an honesty stall. This comprised a table and shelves just beyond the baptismal font, and upon it used goods were for sale, with a locked wooden box serving as the till.

Daidre went to inspect all this and found no organisation to it but rather a quirky charm. Old lace mats mingled with the odd bit of porcelain; glass beads hung from the necks of well-used stuffed animals. Books eased away from their spines; cake plates and pie tins offered garden tools instead of sweets. There was even a shoe box of historic postcards, which she flipped through to see that most of them were already written upon, stamped, and received long ago. Among them was a depiction of a gipsy caravan, of the sort she hadn’t seen in years: rounded on the top and gaily painted, celebrating a peripatetic life. Unexpectedly, her vision blurred when she picked up this card. Unlike so many of the others, nothing had been written upon it.

She wouldn’t have done so at another time, but she bought the card. Then she bought two others with messages on them: one from an Auntie Hazel and Uncle Dan that depicted fishing boats in Padstow Harbour and another from Binkie and Earl showing a line of surfers standing in front of long Malibu boards that were upright in the Newquay sand. Fistral Beach scrolled across their feet, and this was apparently the location where—according to either Binkie or Earl—It happened here!!!! Wedding’s next December!

With these in her possession, Daidre left the church. But not before she looked at the prayer board, where members of the congregation posted their requests for collective appeals to their mutual deity. Most of these had to do with health, and it came to Daidre how seldom people seemed to consider their God unless physical illness descended upon them or upon someone they loved.

She was not religious, but here was an opportunity, she realised, to step up to the spiritual cricket pitch. The God of chance was bowling and she stood in front of the wicket with the bat in her hands. To swing or not and what did it matter? were the issues before her. She’d been searching the Internet for miracles, hadn’t she? What was this but another arena in which a miracle might be found?

She picked up the biro provided and a slip of paper, which turned out to be part of the back of an old handout on which a bake sale was being advertised. She flipped this to the blank side and she started to write. She got as far as Please pray for, but she found that she could advance no further. She couldn’t find the words to shape her request because she wasn’t even sure it was her request. So to write it and then to post it on a board for prayers proved too monumental a task, one that was coloured by a hypocrisy that she could not bear to live with. She replaced the pen, balled up the slip of paper and shoved it into her pocket. She left the church.

She refused to feel guilt. Anger was easier. It might have been the last refuge of the fearful, but she didn’t care. She used terms like I don’t need, I don’t care, and I certainly don’t owe and these carried her from the church through the graveyard, from the graveyard to the road, and from there along Pengelly Cove’s main street. By the time she reached the Curlew Inn, she’d dismissed all matters relating to prayer boards, and she was helped in her efforts by the sight of Ben Kerne entering the Curlew Inn before her.

She’d never met him. She knew of him, of course, and she’d heard him mentioned in the midst of more than one conversation in the last two years. But she might not have recognised him so readily had she not just that morning been looking at his picture in the Watchman’s article about his enterprise involving the Promontory King George Hotel.

She’d been heading for the Curlew Inn anyway, so she followed Ben Kerne inside. She had the advantage, as they’d never been introduced. Consequently, it was an easy matter to be his distant shadow. She reckoned he was seeking his mother, as she’d overheard the postmistress’s conversation with Thomas Lynley about Ann Kerne’s employment. It was either that, she decided, or he wanted a meal, but she thought that was unlikely although it was indeed nearing time for dinner.

Once within, Ben Kerne didn’t walk in the direction of the inn’s restaurant, and as he moved, it was obvious to Daidre that he was quite familiar with this place. He bypassed a reception desk, and he walked down a gloomy corridor towards a square of light that fell from the window of what seemed to be an illuminated office at the back of the building. He entered without knocking on the door, which suggested that either he was expected or he wished his appearance to come as a surprise and hence to disarm whoever was inside.

Daidre moved quickly to observe, and she was in time to see an older woman rising awkwardly from behind a desk. She was grey of hair and colourless of face, and part of her dragged a bit, and Daidre recalled she’d suffered a stroke. But she’d recovered well enough to be able to hold out one arm to her son. When he strode to her, she embraced him in a grip so fierce that Daidre could see its power to crush his body to hers. They said nothing to each other. Instead they merely expressed and rested within the bond of mother and child.

The sheer force of the moment reached through the office window to Daidre and embraced her as well. But she felt no succour rushing through her. Instead, she felt a grief she could not bear to experience. She turned away.

DI BEA HANNAFORD INTERRUPTED HER WORKDAY BECAUSE OF the dogs. She knew this was a feeble excuse that would have proved embarrassing had someone pointed it out to her, but that fact did not lessen its efficacy. Dogs One, Two, and Three needed to be fed, walked, and otherwise attended to, and Bea told herself that only an inexperienced companion to canines actually believed that dogs were sufficient company for each other during the long hours when their humans had to be away. So not too long after her conversation with Tammy Penrule, she checked on the progress among the officers in the incident room—there was little enough of this and damn if Constable McNulty wasn’t studying large surfing waves on the screen of Santo Kerne’s computer monitor and doing everything but drooling over them—and afterwards she climbed into her car and drove to Holsworthy.

As she suspected would be the case, Dogs One, Two, and Three were delighted to see her, and they expressed their enthusiasm with a series of leaps and yelps as they dashed about the back garden seeking something with which they might present her: a plastic garden troll from One, a half-masticated rawhide bone from Two, the tooth-marked handle of a trowel from Three. Bea accepted these offerings with suitable oohs and ahhs, unearthed the dogs’ leads from within a pile of boots, gloves, anoraks, and pullovers on a stool just inside the kitchen door, and hooked up the Labradors without further ado. Rather than take them on walkies, however, she led them to the Land Rover. She said, “In you go,” as she opened the rear of it and when they cooperatively leapt inside, she knew they thought it was—oh frabjous day!—countryside time.

Unfortunately, they were mistaken. It was Raytime. If he wanted Pete, Bea reckoned, Ray should also be willing to take on Pete’s animals. True, they were equally her dogs—they were, actually, even more her dogs than they were Pete’s dogs—but her hours on this case were going to be long, as Ray himself had pointed out, and the dogs needed watching over as much as did Pete. She grabbed the animals’ enormous bag of food along with their dishes and other items guaranteed to lead to doggie pleasure, and off they went, with dog tails wagging and dog noses pressed messily to the windows.

When she arrived at Ray’s house, Bea had two intentions. The first was to deliver One, Two, and Three into the back garden, where Ray’s limited time, lack of skill, and general indifference had never produced anything more than a square of cement for a patio and a rectangle of lawn for visual relief. There were no herbaceous borders for the dogs to rip into and nothing else for them to chew up. It was perfect for housing three rambunctious black Labs, and she’d brought fresh rawhide bones, a bag of toys, and an old soccer ball to make sure the hours spent here did not result in canine boredom. This left her free to pursue her second intention, which was to get inside Ray’s house. She had to deliver the dog food and the dishes, and since she would be inside, she would just make certain Ray was caring for Pete properly. Ray was a man, after all, and what did a man know about nurturing a fourteen-year-old boy? Nothing, yes? Only a mother knew what was best for her son.

All of this was part of the general excuse, but Bea didn’t allow her thoughts to travel there. She told herself she was acting in Pete’s best interests, and since she had a key to Ray’s house—as he had a key to hers—it was a small matter to insert it in the lock once she had the dogs happily snuffling the lawn in the garden. She could see what she needed to see without anyone being the wiser, she told herself. Ray was at work; Pete was at school. She’d leave the food, the dishes, and a note about the dogs, and she’d be gone after a quick peek at the fridge and through the rubbish to make sure there were no takeaway pizza boxes or Chinese or curry containers among the other debris. And while she was there, she’d have a quick look through Ray’s videos to make certain he had nothing questionable that Pete might get into, and if evidence of what she knew was Ray’s predilection for curvy blond females under thirty was anywhere about, she’d get rid of that as well.

She’d got only a step inside the door when it became clear that her plan was not going to be carried out without some fancy footwork, however. For someone came clattering down the stairs—undoubtedly alerted by the happy barking of dogs in the garden—and in a moment she was face-to-face with her son.