Careless In Red (5 page)

Pete reached for the handle of his door. She said, “Wait here.”

“But I want to see—”

“Pete, you heard me. Wait here. Your father’s on his way. If he shows up and you’re not in the car…Do I need to say more?”

Pete threw himself back against the seat, looking sulky. “It wouldn’t hurt if I looked. And it’s not my night to stay at Dad’s anyway.”

Ah. They were at it. He knew how to choose his moment, so like his father. She said, “Flexibility, Pete. As you well know, it’s the key to every game, including the game of life. Now wait here.”

“But, Mum—”

She pulled him towards her. She kissed him roughly against the side of the head. “Wait,” she told him.

A knock on her window drew her attention. A constable stood there in rain gear, his eyelashes spiked by water, a torch in his hand. It wasn’t switched on, but they would need it soon. She got out into the gusting wind and the rain, zipped her jacket, pulled up her hood, and said, “DI Hannaford. What’ve we got?”

“Kid. Dead.”

“Jumper?”

“No. There’s rope attached to the body. I expect he fell during an abseil down the cliff. He’s got a belay device still on the rope.”

“Who’s up at that cottage? There’s another panda car.”

“Duty sergeant from Casvelyn. He’s with the two who found the body.”

“Show me what we’ve got. Who are you, by the way?”

He introduced himself as Mick McNulty, constable from the Casvelyn station. There were only two of them manning the place: himself and a sergeant. It was a typical setup for the countryside.

McNulty led the way. The body lay some thirty yards from the breaking waves, but a good distance from the cliff itself from which it must have fallen. The constable had had the presence of mind to cover the corpse with a sheet of bright blue plastic, and he’d been prescient enough to arrange it so that—with the aid of rocks—the sheet didn’t touch the body.

Bea nodded and McNulty lifted the sheet to expose the corpse while protecting it from the rain. The plastic crackled and snapped like a blue sail in the wind. Bea squatted, raised her hand for the torch, and shone its light onto the young man, who lay on his back. He was blond, with sun-streaked hair that curled cherubically round his face. His eyes were blue and sightless, and his flesh was excoriated from hitting the rocks as he fell. He was bruised as well—an eye was blackened—but this looked like an older injury. The colour had yellowed as the skin healed. He was dressed for climbing: He still had his step-in harness fastened round his waist with at least two dozen metal bits and bobs hanging from it, and a rope was coiled on his chest. This remained knotted to a carabiner. But what the carabiner had been attached to…That was the question.

“Who is this?” Bea asked. “Do we have an ID?”

“Nothing on him.”

She looked towards the cliff. “Who moved the body?”

“Me and the bloke who found it.” He went on quickly lest she reprimand him, “It was that or drag it, Guv. I couldn’t’ve moved it on my own.”

“We’ll want your clothes, then. His as well. He’s up at the cottage, you say?”

“My clothes?”

“What did you expect, Constable?” She pulled out her mobile and flipped it open. She looked at the screen and sighed. No signal.

Constable McNulty, at least, wore a radio on his shoulder, and she told him to make the arrangements for a Home Office pathologist to get down here as soon as possible. This, she knew, wasn’t going to be soon at all as the pathologist would have to come from Exeter. And that would be only if he or she was actually in Exeter and not involved in something somewhere else. It was going to be a long evening and a longer night.

While McNulty radioed as ordered, she gazed once more at the body. He was a teenager. He was very good looking. He was fit, muscular. He was kitted out to climb, but like so many climbers his age, he wore no headgear. That might have saved him, but it might have been superfluous. Only a postmortem would be able to tell.

Her gaze went from the body to the cliff. She could see that the coastal path—a walking trail in Cornwall that began in Marsland Mouth and ended in Cremyll—marked a twisting passage up from the car park to the top of this rise, just as it did along much of the Cornish coast. The sea-cliff climber who lay at her feet had to have left something up there. His identification, one hoped. A car, a motocycle, a bike. They were out in the middle of nowhere, and it was impossible to believe he’d come here on foot. They’d know who he was soon enough. But one of them was going to have to go up there to see.

She said to Constable McNulty, “You’ll need to climb up and see what he’s left on the cliff top. Have a care, though. That path’s going to be murder in the rain.”

They exchanged looks at her choice of words: murder. It was too early to tell. But they would know eventually.

SINCE DAIDRE TRAHAIR LIVED BY HERSELF, SHE WAS USED TO silence, and because at work she was most often surrounded by noise, when she had the opportunity to exist for a while where the only sound was that which was ambient, she experienced no anxiety even when she found herself in a group of people with nothing to say to one another. In the evenings, she rarely turned on a radio or the television. When the phone rang at her home, she often didn’t bother to answer it. So the fact that at least an hour had passed in which not a word had been spoken by either of her companions did not trouble her.

She sat near the fire with a book of Gertrude Jekyll’s garden plans. She marveled at them. The plans themselves were done in watercolours, and where there were gardens available to photograph, those accompanied the plans. The woman had understood much about form, colour, and design, and as such, was Daidre’s goddess. The Idea—and Daidre always thought of it in upper case—was to turn the area round Polcare Cottage into a garden that Gertrude Jekyll might have fashioned. This would be a challenge because of the wind and the weather, and it might all come down to succulents in the end, but Daidre wanted to have a go. She had no garden at her home in Bristol, and she loved gardens. She loved the work of them: hands in the soil and something growing as a result. Gardening was to be her outlet. Staying busy at work wasn’t enough.

She looked up from her book and considered the two men in the sitting room with her. The policeman from Casvelyn had introduced himself as Sergeant Paddy Collins, and he had a Belfast accent to prove the name was genuine. He was sitting upright in a straight-back chair that he’d brought from the kitchen table, as if to take one of the armchairs in the sitting room would have indicated a dereliction of duty. He still had a notebook open on his knee and he was regarding the other man as he’d regarded him from the first: with undisguised suspicion.

Who could blame him, Daidre thought. The hiker was a questionable character. Aside from his appearance and his odour, which in and of themselves might not have raised doubts in the mind of a policeman querying his presence in this part of the world since the South-West Coast Path was a well-used trail, at least in fair-weather months, there was the not small detail of his voice. He was obviously well educated and probably well bred, and Paddy Collins had done more than raise an eyebrow when the man had told him he had no identification with him.

Collins had said incredulously, “What d’you mean, you’ve no identification? You got no driving licence, man? No bank cards? Nothing?”

“Nothing,” Thomas said. “I’m terribly sorry.”

“So you could be bloody anyone, that it?”

“I suppose I could be.” Thomas sounded as if he wished that were the case.

“And I’m meant to believe whatever you say about yourself?” Collins asked him.

Thomas appeared to take the question as rhetorical, as he’d given no answer. But he hadn’t seemed bothered by the threat implied in the sergeant’s tone. He’d merely gone to the small window and gazed out towards the beach although it couldn’t actually be seen from the cottage. There he’d remained, motionless and looking as if he were barely breathing.

Daidre wanted to ask him what his injuries were. When she’d first come upon him in her cottage, it hadn’t been blood on his face or his clothes nor had it been anything obvious about his body that had prompted her to offer him her aid as a doctor. It had been the expression in his eyes. He was in inconceivable agony: an internal injury but not a physical one. She could see that now. She knew the signs.

When Sergeant Collins stirred, rose, and made for the kitchen—probably for a cuppa, as Daidre had showed him where her supplies were kept—Daidre took the opportunity to speak to the hiker. She said, “Why were you walking along the coast alone and without identification, Thomas?”

Thomas didn’t turn from the window. He made no reply although his head moved marginally, which suggested that he was listening.

She said, “What if something happened to you? People fall from these cliffs. They put a foot wrong, they slip, they—”

“Yes,” he said. “I’ve seen the memorials, all along the way.”

They were up and down the coast, these memorials: sometimes as ephemeral as a bunch of dying flowers laid at the site of a fatal fall, sometimes a bench carved with a suitable phrase, sometimes something as lasting and permanent as a marker akin to a tombstone with the deceased’s name engraved upon it. Each was something to note the eternal passage of surfers, climbers, walkers, and suicides. It was impossible to be out hiking along the coastal path and not to come upon them.

“There was an elaborate one that I saw,” Thomas said, as if this were the one subject above all that she wished to discuss with him. “A table and a bench, this was, both done in granite. Granite’s what you want if standing the test of time is important, by the way.”

“You haven’t answered me,” she pointed out.

“I rather thought I just had.”

“If you’d fallen—”

“I still might do,” he said. “When I walk on. When this is over.”

“Wouldn’t you want your people to know? You have people, I daresay.” She didn’t add, Your sort usually do, but the remark was implied.

He didn’t respond. The kettle clicked off in the kitchen with a loud snap. The sound of pouring water came to them. She’d been correct: a cuppa for the sergeant.

She said, “What about your wife, Thomas?”

He remained completely motionless. He said, “My wife.”

She said, “You’re wearing a wedding ring, so I presume you have a wife. I presume she’d want to know if something happened to you. Wouldn’t she?”

Collins came out of the kitchen then. But Daidre had the impression that the other man wouldn’t have responded, even had the sergeant not returned to them.

Collins said with a gesture of his teacup that sloshed liquid into its saucer, “Hope you don’t mind.”

Daidre said, “No. It’s fine.”

From the window Thomas said, “Here’s the detective.” He sounded indifferent to the reprieve.

Collins went to the door. From the sitting room, Daidre heard him exchange a few words with a woman. She was, when she came into the room, an utterly unlikely sort.

Daidre had only ever seen detectives on the television on the rare occasions when she watched one of the police dramas that littered the airwaves. They were always coolly professional and dressed in a tediously similar manner that was supposed to reflect either their psyches or their personal lives. The women were compulsively perfect—tailored to within an inch of their lives and not a hair out of place—and the men were disheveled. One group had to make it in a man’s world. The other had to find a good woman to act the role of saviour.

This woman, who introduced herself as DI Beatrice Hannaford, didn’t fit that mould. She wore an anorak, muddy trainers, and jeans, and her hair—a red so flaming that it very nearly preceded her into the room and shouted, “Dyed and what do you have to say about it?”—stood up in spikes that were second cousins to a mohawk, despite the rain. She saw Daidre examining her and she said, “As soon as someone refers to you as Gran, you rethink the whole growing old gracefully thing.”

Daidre nodded thoughtfully. There was sense to this. “And are you a gran?”

“I am.” The detective made her next remark to Collins. “Get outside and knock me up when the pathologist gets here. Keep everyone else away, not that anyone’s likely to show up in this weather, but you never know. I take it the word’s gone out?” This last she said to Daidre as Collins left them.

“We phoned from the inn, so they’ll know up there.”

“And everywhere else no doubt, by now. You know the dead boy?”

Daidre had considered the possibility that she might be asked this question again. She decided to base her answer on her personal definition of the word know. “I don’t,” she said. “I don’t actually live here, you see. The cottage is mine, but it’s my getaway. I live in Bristol. I come here for breaks when I have time off.”

“What d’you do in Bristol?”

“I’m a doctor. Well, not actually a doctor. I mean, I am a doctor, but it’s…I’m a veterinarian.” Daidre felt Thomas’s eyes on her, and she grew hot. This had nothing to do with shame about being a vet, a fact about which she was inordinately proud, considering how difficult it had been to reach that goal. Rather, it was the fact that she’d led him to believe she was another sort of doctor when she’d first come upon him. She wasn’t quite sure why she had done it, although to tell someone she could help him with his supposed injuries because she was a vet had seemed ludicrous at the time. “I do larger animals mostly.”

DI Hannaford had drawn her eyebrows together. She looked from Daidre to Thomas, and she seemed to be testing the waters between them. Or perhaps she was testing Daidre’s answer for its level of veracity. She looked like someone who was good at that, despite her incongruous hair.

Thomas said, “There was a surfer. I couldn’t tell if it was male or female. I saw him—I’ll call him him—from the cliff top.”

“What? Off Polcare Cove?”

“In the cove before Polcare. Although he could have come from here, I suppose.”

“There was no car, though,” Daidre pointed out. “Not in the car park. So he had to have gone into the water at Buck’s Haven. That’s what it’s called. The cove to the south. Unless you meant the north cove. I’ve not asked you what direction you were walking in.”