Careless in Red

Chapter Fourteen

THE IDENTIFICATION OF SANTO’S BODY WAS MERELY PART OF police routine. While Ben Kerne knew this, he still experienced a moment of ludicrous hope that a terrible mistake had somehow occurred, that despite the car later found by the police and the identification within the car, the dead boy at the bottom of the cliff in Polcare Cove was someone other than Alexander Kerne. All fancy of this died, however, when he gazed at Santo’s face.

Ben had gone to Truro alone. He’d taken the decision that there was no point to exposing Dellen to Santo’s autopsied body, especially when he himself had no idea what condition the corpse would be in. That Santo was dead was terrible enough. That Dellen might have to see anything that had reduced him to death was unthinkable.

When he looked upon Santo, though, Ben also saw that his protection of Dellen had been largely unnecessary. Santo’s face had been seen to with makeup. The rest of him, which undoubtedly had been most thoroughly dissected and explored, remained beneath an institutional bedsheet. Ben could have asked to see more, to see it all, to know every inch of Santo as he had not known him since early childhood, but he had not. It seemed an invasion, somehow.

Ben had given a nod in answer to the formal question, “Is this Alexander Kerne?” and then he’d signed the documents placed before him and listened to what various individuals had to say about police, inquests, funeral homes, burials, and the like. He was numb to everything during these proceedings, especially to expressions of sympathy. For they were sympathetic, all the people he had to deal with at the Royal Cornwall Hospital’s mortuary. They’d gone this route a thousand times before-more than that, probably-but the fact had not robbed them of their ability to express fellow feeling for someone’s grief.

When he got outside, Ben began to feel in earnest. Perhaps it was the light rain falling that melted away his meagre protection, because as he walked to his Austin in the car park, he was struck by sorrow at the thought of the immensity of their loss and he was ravaged by guilt at his part in having brought it about. And then there was the knowledge that he would live with forever: that his last words to Santo had been spoken in a disgust born of his own inability to accept the boy for who he was. And that inability came from suspicion, one that he would never voice.

Why can’t you see how others feel about what you do? Ben would say to him, the constant refrain of a song of relationship they’d sung with each other for years. For Christ’s sake, Santo, people are real.

You act like I’m a user or something. You act like I force my will on everyone, and that’s not how it is. Besides, you never say a word when-

Do not bloody try that with me, all right?

Look, Dad, if I could-

Yes, that’s it, isn’t it? I, I, and me, me. Well, let’s get something straight. Life is not all about you. What we’re doing here, for example, is not about you. What you think and want does not concern me. What you do does. Here and elsewhere. Are we clear on that?

So much had gone unspoken. Especially unsaid were Ben’s fears. Yet how could those fears be brought into the open, when everything that related to them was swept under the carpet?

Not today, though. Today the present moment demanded an acknowledgement of the past that had brought him here. Thus, when Ben climbed into his car and began the drive out of Truro, meaning to head north, in the direction of Casvelyn, he braked at the signpost indicating the route to St. Ives and while he waited for the shimmering in his vision to clear, he made his decision, and he turned for the west.

Ultimately, he coursed south on the A30, the north coast’s main artery. He had no clear intention in his mind, but as the signposts grew more and more familiar to him, he made the proper turns by rote, working his way over to the sea through an uneven landscape made externally inhospitable by granite intrusions but internally rich with mineral ore. In this part of the countryside, ruined engine houses stood in mute testimony to generations of Cornishmen working beneath the ground, digging tin and copper till the lodes gave out and the mines were abandoned to weather and time.

These mines had long been served by remote stone villages, which were forced to redefine themselves or die altogether when mining failed. The land was bad for farming, too stony and barren and so constantly windswept that only thickets of gorse and the hardiest, low-growing weeds and wildflowers managed to gain a foothold. So people turned to cattle and sheep if they could afford a herd, and they turned to smuggling when times were tough.

Cornwall’s myriad coves were the provenance of smuggling. Those who were successful in this line of work were those who knew the ways of the sea and the tide. But over time this, too, gave way to other means of support. Transportation to the southwest improved, and transportation brought tourists. Among them were summer people who sunned themselves on the beaches and crisscrossed the countryside on walking paths. Among them, ultimately, came the surfers.

In Pengelly Cove, Ben saw them from above, where the main part of the village stood, unpainted granite that was roofed in slate, looking bleak and deserted in the wet spring weather. Three streets only defined the place: two that were lined with shops, houses, two pubs, and an inn called the Curlew and a third marking a steep and twisting route down to a small car park, a lifeboat station, the cove, and the sea.

Out among the waves, lifelong surfers braved the weather. For the swells were from the northwest, coming in even sets, and the grey faces of the waves were building to the barrels for which Pengelly Cove was known. Into these, the surfers dropped, carving across the face of a wave, rising to its shoulder, fading over the top to paddle out to the swell line and wait for another. No one wasted the energy riding a wave to shore, not in this weather and not with the waves breaking in mirror images of one another, over the reefs some one hundred yards out. The shore break was for rank beginners, a low wall of white water that gave the neophyte a semblance of success but no respectability.

Ben descended to the cove. He did so on foot rather than by car, leaving his vehicle in front of the Curlew Inn and walking back along the street to the junction. He wasn’t bothered by the weather. He was dressed for it, and he wanted to experience the cove as he’d experienced it in his youth: hiking down what had been only a path then, with no car park below and nothing else save the water, the sand, and the deep sea caves to greet him when he reached the bottom, his surfboard tucked under his arm.

He’d hoped to go to the sea caves now, but the tide was too high and he knew better than to risk it. So instead he considered all the ways that the place had altered in the years since he’d been here.

Money had come to the area. He could see that in the summer houses and the getaway cottages that overlooked the cove. Long ago there had been only one of them-far out on the end of the cliff, an impressive granite structure whose proud white paint and gleaming black gutters and trim spoke of more money than any local family had-but now there were at least a dozen, although Cliff House still stood, as proudly as ever. He’d been inside only once, at an adolescent party orchestrated by a family called Parsons who’d taken up residence for five summers in a row. A celebration before our Jamie heads off to university, they’d called the gathering.

None of the locals had liked Jamie Parsons, who’d spent his gap year traveling the globe and who hadn’t possessed the common sense to keep quiet about it. But all of them had been willing to pretend the kid was everything from best mate to the Second Coming for a night of carousing inside his home.

They’d had to look cool, though. Ben remembered that. They had to look like kids who experienced this sort of revelry all the time: end of summer, an invitation that had arrived for God’s sake by post, a rock band come down from Newquay to play, tables of food, a strobe above the dance area, and nighttime bolt holes all over the house where mischief of every imaginable kind could be got up to with no one the wiser. At least two of the Parsons kids were there-had there been four of them in all? perhaps five?-but no parents. Beer of every imaginable kind, as well as the contraband: whiskey, vodka, rum mixed with cola, tabs of something no one would identify, and cannabis. Cannabis by the crateful, it seemed. Cocaine as well? Ben couldn’t remember.

What he did remember was the talk, and he remembered that because of surfing that summer and what had come of surfing that summer.

The great divide: It existed any place invaded seasonally by people not born and bred to a spot. There were always the townies…and the interlopers. In Cornwall especially, there were those who toiled and scrabbled to make a modest living, and there was everyone who arrived to spend their holiday time and money enjoying the pleasures of the southwest. The main pleasure was the coast with its brilliant weather, crystalline sea, pristine coves, and soaring cliffs. The lure, however, was the water.

Longtime residents knew the rules. Anyone who surfed regularly knew the rules, for they were easy and basic. Take your turn, do not snake, do not drop in when someone else calls a wave, give way to the more experienced, respect the hierarchy. The shore break belongs to beginners with wide boards, to kids playing in the water, and sometimes to knee boarders and body boarders wanting a quick return for their efforts. Anyone surfing beyond the shore break rode in at the end of a session but otherwise remained outside, dropping off the board or cutting over the shoulder of the wave and down the backside of it to paddle out again long before reaching the area where the beginners were. It was simple. It was also unwritten, but ignorance was never an acceptable excuse.

No one knew whether Jamie Parsons operated in ignorance or indifference. What everyone did know was that Jamie Parsons somehow felt that he had certain rights, which he saw as rights and not as what they actually were: inexcusable blunders.

“This stuff ’s total shit compared to the North Shore, you know” might have been bearable, but declared after a shout of “Give way, mate” had acted as the harbinger of snaking one of the locals, it was not something destined to impress anyone. The lineup meant nothing to Jamie Parsons. “Hey. Cope with it” was his answer to being informed that he was out of order among the surfers. Those things didn’t matter to him because he wasn’t one of them. He was better than they because of money, life, circumstances, education, possibility, or whatever you wanted to call it. He knew this, and they knew this. He just lacked the common sense to keep the fact to himself.

So a party at the Parsons home…? Of course they would go. They would dance to his music, eat up his food, drink down his drink, and smoke up his weed. They were owed because they’d put up with the sod. They’d had him round for five summers in a row, but this last one had been the worst.

Jamie Parsons, Ben thought now. He hadn’t considered the bloke in years. He’d been too consumed with Dellen Nankervis even though, as things turned out, it was Jamie Parsons and not Dellen Nankervis who had actually determined the course of his life.

It came to Ben as he stood at the edge of the car park and looked out at the surfers that everything he’d become was the result of decisions he’d made right here in Pengelly Cove. Not in Pengelly Cove the village, but in Pengelly Cove the geographical location: at high tide a horseshoe of water beating against slate and granite boulders; at low tide a vast sandy beach far beyond the cove itself, a beach that stretched in two directions, intruded upon by reefs and lava dykes and backed by sea caves that twisted into cliffs in which rich mineral veins could still be seen. Maws in the rock created by eons of geologic cataclysms and oceanic erosion, the sea caves had served as Ben Kerne’s destiny from the moment he’d seen them as a very young child. The dangers they presented made them utterly compelling. The privacy they offered made them utterly necessary.

His history was inextricably tied to Pengelly Cove’s two largest sea caves. They represented all the firsts he’d experienced: his first cigarette, his first spliff, his first drunk, his first kiss, his first sex. They also charted the storms that patterned the trajectory of his relationship with Dellen. For if his first kiss and first sex had been shared with Dellen Nankervis in one of the cove’s two great brooding sea caves, so also had those two caves borne witness to every betrayal they’d committed against each other.

Christ, can’t you escape the bloody cow? his father demanded. She’s making you into a madman, boy. Cut her loose, God damn it, before she chews you up and spits you into the dirt.

He’d wanted to, but he found that he couldn’t. The hold she had on him had been too profound. There were other girls, but they were simple creatures compared to Dellen: gigglers, teasers, superficial natterers, endlessly combing their sun-streaked hair and asking a bloke did he think they looked fat. They had no mystery, no complexity of character. Most important, not a single one of them needed Ben as Dellen did. She always came back to him, and he was always ready. And if two other blokes made her pregnant during those frenzied years of their adolescence, he’d done no worse to her by the time he was twenty, and he’d even managed to equal their score.

The third time it happened, he asked to marry her, for she’d proved the very nature of her love: She’d followed him to Truro with no money to speak of and only what she’d been able to fit in a canvas holdall. She’d said, It’s yours, Ben, and so am I, with the inchoate curve of her belly telling the tale.

It would be better now, he’d thought. They would marry, and marriage would put an end forever to the cycles of connection, betrayal, breakup, longing, and reconnection.

So the story was that he’d removed from Pengelly Cove to Truro for a fresh start that had not come about. He’d removed from Truro to Casvelyn for the very same reason with much the same result. Indeed, with a far worse result this time. For Santo was dead, and the insubstantial fabric of Ben’s own life was torn asunder.

It seemed to Ben now that the idea of lessons needing to be taught had started everything. What an excruciating realisation it was that lessons needing to be taught had ended everything as well. Only the student and the teacher were different. The crucial fact of acceptance remained the same.

LYNLEY SETTLED ON THE idea of a drive down the coast to Pengelly Cove once DI Hannaford had identified it as the village from which the Kerne family had originated. “It’s a two birds and one stone situation,” he explained, to which Hannaford had shrewdly replied, “You’re avoiding a bit of responsibility here, aren’t you? What is it about Dr. Trahair that you don’t want me to know, Detective Superintendent?”

He wasn’t avoiding at all, he told her blithely. But as the Kernes needed looking into and as he was intended to garner Daidre Trahair’s trust on DI Hannaford’s own instructions to him, it seemed that having a rational reason for suggesting a drive to Daidre-

“It doesn’t have to be a drive,” Hannaford protested. “It doesn’t have to be anything. You don’t even have to see her to sift through her details, and I expect you know that.”

Yes, of course, he said. But here was an opportunity-

“All right, all right. Just mind you bloody well stay in touch.”

So he took Daidre Trahair with him, an arrangement which was easy enough to effect because he began by keeping his word to her, and he went to her cottage to repair the window he’d broken. He’d decided that the replacement of such could hardly involve a serious mental workout, and as an Oxford graduate-albeit with a degree in history, which hardly applied to matters vitric-he certainly had the brainpower to sort out how the repair needed to be made. The fact that he’d never in his life engaged in a single instance of home improvement did not dissuade him. Surely he was a man to match the mountain of the job. There would be no problem involved.

“This is so good of you, Thomas, but perhaps I ought to arrange for a glazier?” Daidre had said. She sounded doubtful about his intentions of wielding glass and putty.

“Nonsense. It’s all very straightforward,” he told her.

“Have you…I mean, before this?”

“Many times. Other projects, I mean. As far as windows are concerned, I admit to being something of a virgin. Now…Let’s see what we have.”

What they had was a cottage of two hundred years, possibly older, because Daidre wasn’t sure. She kept meaning to do a history of the place, she told him, but so far she’d not got round to it. She did know it had begun its life as a fishing hut used by a great house near Alsperyl. That house was vanished-its interior long ago destroyed by fire and its stones eventually carted away by locals who used them for everything from building cottages to defining property lines-but as it had dated to 1723, there was every chance that this little building was of a similar age.

This meant, of course, that nothing was straight, including the windows whose frames had been precisely constructed to fit apertures that were themselves without precision. Lynley discovered this to his dismay when he held the glass up to the frame once the debris of the broken window was cleared away. A slight horizontal drop existed, he saw, just enough to make the placement of the glass…something of a challenge.

He should have measured both ends, he realised. He felt his neck grow hot with embarrassment.

“Oh dear,” Daidre said. And then quickly, as if she believed her remark spoke of a lack of confidence, “Well, I’m sure it’s only a matter of-”

“Putty,” he said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“This merely calls for a greater amount of putty at one end. There’s no real problem.”

“Oh that’s lovely,” she said. “That’s good. That’s excellent.” She took herself off to the kitchen at once, murmuring obscurely about brewing tea.

He struggled with the project: the putty, the putty knife, the glass, the placement of the glass, the falling rain that he should have damn well known was going to make the entire enterprise impossible. She stayed in the kitchen. She remained there so long that he drew the conclusion she was not only laughing at his ineptitude but also hiding the fact that she herself could have repaired the window with one hand tied behind her back. After all, she was the woman who’d used him as a mop when it came to darts.

When at last she emerged, he’d managed to get the glass in, but it was obvious that someone with more skill than he was going to have to repair his repair. He admitted as much and apologised. He had to go down to Pengelly Cove, he told her, and if she had the time to accompany him there, he’d make everything up to her with dinner.

“Pengelly Cove? Why?” she asked.

“Police business,” he replied.

“Does DI Hannaford think there are answers in Pengelly Cove? And she’s setting you after them? Why not one of her own policemen?” Daidre asked. When he hesitated about giving her an answer, it took her only a moment to understand. She said, “Ah. So you’re not a suspect any longer. Is that wise of DI Hannaford?”

“What?”

“To dismiss you from suspicion because you’re a cop? Fairly shortsighted, isn’t it?”

“I think she’s had trouble coming up with a motive.”

“I see.” Her voice had altered, and he knew she’d put the rest of it together. If he was no longer a suspect, she still was. She would know that there was a reason for this, and she would probably know why.

He thought she might refuse to go with him, but she didn’t, and he was glad. He was seeking a way to get to the truth of who she was and what she was hiding, and with no easy resources at hand to do this, gaining her trust through companionship did seem the best way.

Miracles proved to be his means of access. They’d driven up from the cove and they were winding through Stowe Wood on their way to the A39 when he asked her if she believed in miracles. At first she frowned at the question. Then she said, “Oh. The Internet paperwork you saw. No, I don’t, actually. But a friend of mine-a colleague at the zoo, the primate keeper, as a matter of fact-is planning a trip for his parents because they believe in miracles and they’re in rather bad need of one at the moment. A miracle, that is, not a trip.”

“That’s very good of you to help him out.” He glanced over at her. Her skin was blotchy. “Your…” What was the colleague to her? he wondered. Your lover, your boyfriend, your erstwhile partner? Why this reaction?

“It’s an act of friendship,” she said, as if he’d asked those questions. “Pancreatic cancer. There’s no real coming back from that diagnosis, but he’s not an old man-Paul says his dad’s only fifty-four-and they want to try everything. I think it’s futile, but who am I to say? So I told him I’d…well, I’d look for the place with the best statistics. Rather silly, isn’t it?”

“Not necessarily.”

“Well, of course it is, Thomas. How does one apply statistics to a place dominated by mysticism and earnest if misplaced belief? If I bathe in these waters, are my chances for a cure better than if I scribbled my request on a scrap of paper and left it at the foot of a marble statue of a saint? What if I kiss the ground in Medjugorje? Or is the best course to stay home and pray to someone on the fast track for a halo? They need miracles to get their sainthood, don’t they? What about that route? It would at least save money that we can’t afford to spend anyway.” She drew a breath and he glanced her way again. She was leaning against the car door, and her face looked rather pinched. “Sorry,” she said. “I do go on. But one so hates to see people divorce themselves from their own common sense because a crisis has arisen. If you know what I mean.”

“Yes,” he said evenly. “As it happens, I do know what you mean.”

She raised her hand to her lips. She had strong-looking hands, sensible hands, a doctor’s hands, with clipped, clean nails. “Oh my God. I am so bloody sorry. I’ve done it again. Sometimes, my mouth goes off.”

“It’s all right.”

“It isn’t. You would have done anything to save her. I’m terribly sorry.”

“No. What you said is perfectly true. In crisis people thrash about, looking for answers, trying to get to a solution. And to them the solution is always what they want and not necessarily what’s actually best for anyone else.”

“Still, I didn’t mean to cause you pain. I don’t ever mean that for anyone, for that matter.”

“Thank you.”

From there he couldn’t see how to get to her lies except to tell a few of his own, which he preferred not to do. Surely, it was up to Bea Hannaford to question Daidre Trahair about her alleged route from Bristol to Polcare Cove. It was up to Bea Hannaford to reveal to Daidre exactly what the police knew about her putative lunch at a pub, and it was up to Bea Hannaford to decide how to utilise that knowledge to force the vet into an admission of whatever it was that she needed to admit.

He used the pause in their conversation to head in another direction. He said lightly, “We started with a governess. Have I told you that? Completely nineteenth century. It only lasted till my sister and I rebelled and put frogs into her bed on Guy Fawkes night. And at that time of year, believe me, frogs weren’t easy to find.”

“Are you saying you actually had a governess as a child? Poor Jane Eyre with no Mr. Rochester to rescue her from a life of servitude, dining in her bedroom alone because she wasn’t upstairs or downstairs either?”

“It wasn’t as bad as that. She dined with us. With the family. We’d begun with a nanny but when it was time for school, the governess came onboard. This was for my older sister and me. By the time my brother was born-he’s ten years younger than I, have I told you?-that had all been put to rest.”

“But it’s so…so charmingly antique.” Lynley could hear the laughter in Daidre’s voice.

“Yes, isn’t it? But it was that, boarding school, or the village school where we would mix with the local children.”

“With their ghastly Cornish accents,” Daidre noted.

“The very thing. My father was determined that we would follow in his educational footsteps, which did not lead to the village school. My mother was equally determined we wouldn’t be packed off to boarding school at seven years of age-”

“Wise woman.”

“-so their compromise was a governess until we drove her off with her sanity barely intact. At which point, we did go to the local school, which was what we both wanted anyway. My father must have tested our accents every day, however. It seemed so. God forbid that we should ever sound common.”

“He’s dead now?”

“Years and years.” Lynley ventured a look. She was studying him and he wondered if she was considering the topic of schooling and wondering why they were talking about it. He said, “What about you?” and tried to make it casual, noting his discomfort as he did so. In the past, attempting to work a suspect round to a trap had presented no problem for him.

“Both of my parents are hale and hearty.”

“I meant school,” he said.

“Oh. It was all tediously normal, I’m afraid.”

“In Falmouth, then?”

“Yes. I’m not of the sort of family that packs its children off to boarding school. I went to school in town, with all the riffraff.”

She was caught. It was the moment at which Lynley would have ordinarily sprung the trap, but he knew he could have missed a school somewhere. She could have attended an institution now closed. He found that he wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt. He let matters go. They made the rest of the journey to Pengelly Cove in a companionable fashion. He spoke of how a privileged life had led to police work; she spoke of a passion for animals and how that passion had taken her from rescuing hedgehogs, seabirds, songbirds, and ducks to veterinary school and ultimately to the zoo. The only creature from the animal world that she didn’t like, she confessed, was the Canada goose. “They’re taking over the planet,” she declared. “Well, at least they seem to be taking over England.” Her favourite animal she declared to be the otter: freshwater or sea. She wasn’t particular when it came to otters.

In the village of Pengelly Cove, it was a matter of a few minutes in the post office-a single counter in the village’s all-purpose shop-to discover that more than one Kerne lived in the vicinity. They were all the progeny of one Eddie Kerne and his wife, Ann. Kerne maintained a curiosity that he called Eco-House some five miles out of town. Ann worked at the Curlew Inn although the job appeared to be a sinecure at this point since she was aging badly after a stroke some years ago.

“There’s Kernes crawling all over the landscape,” the postmistress told them. She was the lone labourer in the shop, a grey-haired woman of uncertain but clearly advanced years whom they’d come upon in the midst of sewing a tiny button onto a child-size white shirt. She poked her finger with the needle as she worked. She said bloody hell, damn and pardon and then wiped a spot of blood onto her navy cardigan before going on with, “You go outside and shout the name Kerne, ten people on the street’ll look up and say, ‘What?’” She examined the strength of her repair and bit off the thread.

“I’d no idea,” Lynley said. While Daidre looked at a dismal arrangement of fruit just inside the shop door, he was making a purchase of postcards that he would never use, along with stamps, a local newspaper, and a roll of breath mints, which he would. “The original Kernes had quite a brood, then?”

The postmistress rang up his selections. “Seven in all, Ann and Eddie produced. And all of them still round save the oldest. That would be Benesek. He’s been gone for donkey’s years. Are you friends of the Kernes?” The woman looked from Lynley to Daidre. She sounded doubtful.

Lynley said that he wasn’t a friend. He produced his police identification. The postmistress’s expression altered. Cops and Caution could not have been written more plainly on her face.

“Ben Kerne’s son has been killed,” Lynley told her.

“Has he?” she said, a hand moving to her heart. Unconsciously, she cupped her left breast. “Oh Lord. Now that’s a very sad bit of news. What happened to him?”

“Did you know Santo Kerne?”

“Wouldn’t be anyone round here who doesn’t know Santo. They stayed with Eddie and Ann on occasion when he and his sister-that would be Kerra-were little ’uns. Ann’d bring ’em in for sweets or ices. Not Eddie, though. Never Eddie. He doesn’t come to the village if he can help it. Hasn’t for years.”

“Why?”

“Some’d say too proud. Some’d say too shamed. But not his Ann. Besides, she had to work, hadn’t she, so Eddie could have his dream of living green.”

“Shamed about what?” Lynley asked.

She gave a brief smile, but Lynley knew it had nothing to do with friendliness or humour. Rather, it had to do with acknowledging the position each of them was in at the moment: he the professional interlocutor and she the source of information. “Small village,” she said. “When things go bad for someone, they c’n stay bad. If you know what I mean.”

It might have been a statement about the Kernes, but it also could have been a statement about her own position, and Lynley understood this. Postmistress and shopkeeper, she’d know a great deal about what was going on in Pengelly Cove. Citizen of the village, she would also know the course of wisdom was to keep her mouth closed about things that did not matter to an outsider.

“You’ll have to speak to Ann or Eddie,” she said. “Ann’s got a bit of a language problem from the stroke she had, but Eddie’ll bend your ear, I expect. You speak to Eddie. He’ll be at home.”

She gave them directions to the Kerne property, which proved to be a number of acres northeast of Pengelly Cove, a former sheep farm that had been transformed by one family’s attempt to live green.

Lynley accessed the land alone, Daidre having decided to remain in the village until his business with the Kernes was completed. He entered the property by means of a disintegrating rusty gate, which stretched across a stony lane but was unlocked. He rattled along for three-quarters of a mile before seeing a habitation, midway down the hillside. It was a mishmash of architecture characterised by wattle and daub, stone, tiles, timbers, scaffolding, and sheets of heavy plastic. The house could have been from any century. The fact that it was standing at all made it something of a marvel.

Not far beyond it, a waterwheel turned at the base of a sluice, both of them roughly constructed. The former appeared to be a source of electricity, if its connection to a hulking but rusty generator was any indication. The latter appeared to be redirecting a woodland stream so that it provided water to the wheel, to a pond, and then to a series of channels, which served an enormous garden. This was newly planted by the look of it, waiting for the sun of late spring and summer. A huge compost pile made an amorphous lump nearby.

Lynley parked near a stand of old bicycles. Only one of them had inflated tyres, and all of them were rusting to the point of disintegration. There appeared to be no direct route to the front or back door of the house. A path meandered from the bicycles in the vague direction of the scaffolding, but once in its near presence, it transformed to the occasional brick or two lying together amidst trampled weeds. By stepping from one set of bricks to the other, Lynley finally reached what seemed to be the entrance to the house: a door so pitted by weather, rot, and insect life that it seemed hardly credible to assume it was in working order.

It was, however. A few knocks forcefully applied to wood brought him face-to-face with an old and badly shaven gentleman, one eye clouded by a cataract. He was roughly and somewhat colourfully dressed in old khaki trousers and a lime green cardigan that was drooping round the elbows. He had sandals and orange-and-brown Argyll socks on his feet. Lynley decided he had to be Eddie Kerne. He produced his identification for the man as he introduced himself.

Kerne looked from it to him. He turned and walked away from the door, heading wordlessly back into the bowels of the house. The door hung open, so Lynley assumed he was meant to follow, which he did.

The interior of the house wasn’t a great improvement over the exterior. It appeared to be a work long in progress, if the age of the exposed timbers was anything to go by. Walls along the central passage into the place had long ago been taken down to their framing, but there was no scent of freshly replaced wood here. Instead there was a fur of dust upon the timbers, suggesting that a job had been begun years in the past without ever reaching completion.

A workshop was Kerne’s destination, and to get to it he led Lynley through a kitchen and a laundry room that featured a washing machine with an old-fashioned wringer and thick cords crisscrossing the ceiling where clothing was hung to dry in inclement weather. This room emanated the heavy scent of mildew, a sensory ambience only moderately improved upon when they got to the workshop beyond it. They reached this spot by means of a doorless opening in the far wall of the laundry room, separated from the rest of the house by a thick sheet of plastic that Kerne shoved to one side. This same sort of plastic covered what went for windows in the workshop, a room that had been fashioned more recently than the rest of the house: It was made of unadorned concrete blocks. It was frigid within, like an old-time larder without the marble shelves.

Lynley thought of the term man-cave when he stepped into the workshop. A workbench, haphazardly hung cupboards, one tall stool, and myriad tools were crammed within, and the overall impression was one of sawdust, oil leakage, paint spills, and general filth. It comprised a somewhat dubious spot for a bloke to escape the wife and children, with his excuse the crucial tinkering on this or that project.

There appeared to be plenty of them on Eddie Kerne’s workbench: part of a hoover, two broken lamps, a hair dryer missing its flex, five teacups wanting handles, a small footstool belching its stuffing. Kerne seemed to be at work on the teacups, for an uncapped tube of glue was adding to the other scents in the room, most of which were associated with the damp. Tuberculosis seemed the likely outcome of an extended stay in such a place, and Kerne had a heavy cough that made Lynley think of poor Keats writing anguished letters to his beloved Fanny.

“Can’t tell you nothing,” was Kerne’s opening remark. He made it over his shoulder as he picked up one of the teacups and squinted at it, comparing a dismembered handle to the spot at which one had been shattered from the cup. “Know why you’re here, don’t I, but I can’t tell you nothing.”

“You’ve been informed about your grandson’s death.”

“Phoned, didn’t he.” Kerne hawked but mercifully did not spit. “Gave me the word. That’s it.”

“Your son? Ben Kerne? He phoned?”

“The same. Good for that, he was.” The emphasis on that indicated what else Kerne deemed his son good for, which was nothing.

“I understand Ben hasn’t lived in Pengelly Cove for a number of years,” Lynley said.

“Wouldn’t have him round.” Kerne grabbed up the tube of glue and applied a good-size dollop to both ends of the handle he’d chosen for the teacup. He had a steady hand, which was good for such employment. He had an unfortunate eye, which was bad. The handle clearly belonged to a different cup, as the colour wasn’t right and the shape was even less so. Nonetheless, Kerne held it in place, waiting for some acceptable form of agglutination to occur. “Sent him off to his uncle in Truro and there he stayed. Had to, didn’t he, once she followed him there.”

“She?”

Kerne shot him a look, one eyebrow raised. It was the sort of look that said You don’t know yet? “The wife,” he said shortly.

“Ben’s wife. The present Mrs. Kerne?”

“That’d be her. He went off to escape, and she was hot on his tail. Just like he was hot on hers and into hers, if you’ll pardon the expression. She’s a piece of work and I want no part of her and no part of him whilst he stays with the scrubber. Source of everything went wrong with him from day one till now, that Dellen Nankervis. And you c’n note that down in your whatever if you want. And note who said it. I’m not shamed of my feelings, as every one of them’s proved right over the years.” He sounded angry, but the anger seemed to be hiding what had been broken within him.

“They’ve been together a long time,” Lynley noted.

“And now Santo.” Kerne grabbed another teacup and handle. “You don’t think she’s at bottom of that? You do some sniffing. Sniff here, sniff Truro, sniff there. You’ll catch the smell of something nasty and the trail of it’s leading directly to her.” He used the glue again, with much the same result: a teacup and handle like distant relatives unacquainted with each other. “You tell me how,” he said.

“He was abseiling, Mr. Kerne. There’s a cliff in Polcare Cove-”

“Don’t know the spot.”

“-north of Casvelyn, where the family live. It’s perhaps a two-hundred-foot drop. He had a sling fixed on the top of the cliff-we think it was attached to the pillar of a drystone wall-and the sling failed when he began his descent. But it had been tampered with.”

Kerne didn’t look at Lynley, but he stopped his work for a moment. His shoulders heaved, then he shook his head forcefully.

“I’m sorry,” Lynley said. “I understand Santo and his sister spent a great deal of time with you when they were younger.”

“Cos of her.” He spat out the words. “She’d get a new man and bring him home and have him there in her husband’s own bed. D’he tell you that? Anyone tell you that? No, I expect not. Did that to him when she was a girl and did that to him when she was a woman grown. Up the chute, as well. More ’n once, she was.”

“Made pregnant by someone else?” Lynley asked.

“Doesn’t know that I know, does he,” Kerne said. “But she told me. Kerra, that is. Mum’s got pregnant off someone and she’s got to get rid of it, she tells us. Matter of fact, she tells me, just like that, and her nothing but ten years old. Ten bloody years and what sort of woman lets her little girl know the filthy business she’s making of her life? Dad says she’s having a bad patch, she tells us, but I saw her with the estate agent, Grandpa…Or the dance instructor, or the science teacher from the secondary school. What did it matter to her? When she got the itch, it had to be scratched and if Ben didn’t scratch it the way she liked and when she wanted, she’d damn well see to it someone else would. So don’t tell me she’s not at the bottom of this when she’s at the bottom of everything ever happened to that boy.”

Not to Santo, Lynley thought. Kerne was speaking of his son, from a well of bitterness and regret and a father’s knowledge that nothing he says or does can change the course of a son who’s made the wrong decision. In this, Kerne reminded Lynley of his own father and the admonitions he’d given throughout Lynley’s childhood about mixing too closely with anyone the elder man deemed common. It had done no good, and Lynley had always considered himself richer for the experience.

“I’d no idea,” he said.

“Well, you wouldn’t, would you, cos he’s not likely to tell anyone. But she gets her claws into him when he’s a lad, and from that point on, he doesn’t see straight. It’s off and on with them for years, and every time me and his mum start thinking he’s rid himself of the cow at last and he sees the light and she’s out of his hair and out of our hair and he can start to live normal like the rest of us, there she is again, filling his head with rubbish ’bout how she needs him and he’s the only one for her and she’s sorry so sorry that she had a shag with someone else but it wasn’t her fault was it cos he wasn’t there to take care of her was he, he wasn’t paying her proper attention…and there she is flashing her knickers at him and he can’t think things through, can’t see what she’s like or what she’s doing or how he’s caught. It leads to ruin, so we send him off. And doesn’t she follow…doesn’t the trollop just pack her bags and follow our Ben…” He set the second badly repaired cup to one side. He was breathing jerkily, a liquid sound in his chest. Lynley wondered if the man ever saw a doctor. “So what we think-me and his mum-is if we say to him, You’re no son of ours if you don’t rid yourself of this bloody cow, he’ll do it. He’s our boy, he’s our oldest, and he’s got his brothers and sisters to think about, and they love him, they do, and they all get on. We reckon he only needs to be gone a few years anyway, till it all blows over, and then he c’n return to where he belongs, which is with us. Only it doesn’t work, does it, because he will not shake himself of her. She’s under his skin and in his blood and there’s an end to the matter.”

“Until what blows over?” Lynley asked.

“Eh?” Kerne turned his head from the workbench to look at Lynley.

“You said your son needed to be gone a few years only, ‘till it all blows over.’ I was wondering what.”

Kerne’s good eye narrowed. He said, “You don’t talk like a cop. Cops talk like the rest of us, but you got a voice that…Where you from?”

Lynley wasn’t about to be diverted with a discussion of his roots. “Mr. Kerne, if you know something-and you obviously do-that might be related to the death of your grandson, I need to know what it is.”

He turned back to his bench. He said, “What happened happened years ago. Benesek’s…what? Seventeen? Eighteen? It’s nothing to do with Santo.”

“Please let me decide that. Tell me what you know.”

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.