Careless in Red

Chapter Eighteen

HAD IT NOT BEEN FOR THE RAIN ON THE PREVIOUS AFTERNOON, Ben Kerne would likely not have seen his father when he went to Pengelly Cove. But because of the rain, he’d insisted upon driving his mother back to Eco-House from the Curlew Inn at the end of her workday. She’d had her large three-wheeler with her, upon which she daily pedaled to and from work without too much difficulty despite her stroke in earlier years, but he’d insisted. The tricycle would fit into the back of the Austin, he told her. He wouldn’t have her on the narrow lanes in bad weather. She shouldn’t be on them in good weather either, if it came down to it. She wasn’t of an age-let alone in the physical condition-where she should be out on a tricycle anyway. To her carefully enunciated, poststroke words, “Got three wheels, Ben,” he said it didn’t matter. He said his father should have the common sense to purchase a vehicle now that he and his wife were old.

Even as he said this, he wondered at the evolution of parent-child relationships in which the parent ultimately becomes the child. And he wondered without wanting to wonder if his own fragile connection with Santo would have mutated in a similar fashion. He doubted it. Santo seemed at the moment as he would be forever: frozen in an eternal youth with no chance to move on to things more important than the concerns of randy adolescence.

It was the thought of randy adolescence that plagued him throughout the long night that followed his visit to Eco-House. Yet when he drove down the deeply rutted lane towards the old farmhouse, that was the last subject upon which he would have thought his mind would lock. Instead, he followed the rises, falls, and curves of that unpaved lane, and he marveled that the passage of years had done nothing to release him from the fear he’d always harboured towards his father. Apart from Eddie Kerne, he did not have to consider fear. Nearing him, it was as if he’d never left Pengelly Cove.

His mother had sensed this. She’d said in that altered voice she had-God, did she actually sound Portuguese? he’d wondered-that he’d find his father very much changed in the years he’d been gone. To which he’d replied, “He didn’t sound any different on the phone, Mum.”

Physically, she’d said. Now there was a frailty about him. He tried to hide it but he was feeling his age. She didn’t add that he was feeling his failure as well. Eco-House had been the dream of his life: living off the land, in harmony with the elements. Indeed, he’d planned to master those elements so that they worked for him. It had been an admirable attempt at living green, but he’d bitten off too much and he hadn’t possessed the jaws to chew it all.

If Eddie Kerne heard the Austin drive up to Eco-House, he didn’t emerge. Nor did he emerge as Ben wrestled his mother’s tricycle from the back of the car. When they approached the wreck of the old front door, however, Eddie was waiting for them. He swung it open before they reached it, as if he’d been watching from one of the filthy and ill-hung windows.

Despite his mother’s warning, Ben felt the shock when he saw his father. Old, he thought, and looking older than he actually was. Eddie Kerne wore old man’s spectacles-with thick, black frames and thick, smeared lenses-and behind them his eyes had lost much of their colour. One of them was clouded by a cataract, which Ben knew he’d never have removed. The rest of him was old as well: from his badly matched and badly patched clothing, to the places on his face that his razor had missed, to the corkscrew of hairs springing out of his ears and his nose. His gait was slow, and his shoulders were round. He was the personification of End of Days.

Ben felt a sudden rush of dizziness when he saw him. He said, “Dad.”

Eddie Kerne looked him over, one of those abrupt head-to-toe movements that-to an offspring of the adult performing them-tend to signify assessment and judgement simultaneously. He stepped away from the door without comment. He disappeared into the bowels of the house.

Under other circumstances Ben would have departed then. But his mother murmured, “Shush, shush,” from which he took comfort, no matter where she was directing the sound. It came straight from his childhood, and he embraced its meaning. Mummy’s here, darling. No need to cry. He felt her hand on the small of his back, urging him forward.

Eddie was waiting for them in the kitchen, which seemed to be the only remaining usable room in the downstairs of the house. It was well lit and warm, while the rest of the place was shrouded in shadows, packed with bits and bobs and clobber, smelling of mildew, filled with the skittering of rodents in the walls.

He’d put on the kettle. Ann Kerne nodded towards this meaningfully, as if it gave evidence of something within Eddie that had altered along with his physical decay. He shuffled to the cupboard and brought out three mugs, along with a jar of coffee crystals and a raggedy box of sugar cubes. When he had this on the chipped yellow table along with a plastic jug of milk, a loaf of bread, and an unwrapped cube of margarine, he said to Ben, “Scotland Yard. Not the locals, mind you, but Scotland Yard. Not like you thought, eh? It’s bigger’n the locals. Didn’t ’spect that, did you? Question is, did she?”

Ben knew who she was. She was who she had always been.

Eddie went on. “Other question is, who phoned ’em. Who wants Scotland Yard on the case and why’d they come running like a fire’s lit under ’em?”

“I don’t know,” Ben said.

“Wager you don’t. If it’s bigger ’n the locals, it’s bad. If it’s bad, it’s her. Things is home to roost now, Benesek. Knew this would happen, didn’t I?”

“Dellen’s nothing to do with this, Dad.”

“Don’t say her name round me. It’s a curse, it is.”

His wife said, “Eddie…,” in a conciliatory tone, and she put her hand on Ben’s arm as if afraid he would bolt.

But the sight of his father had abruptly changed things for Ben. So old, he thought. So terribly old. Broken as well. He wondered how he had failed to understand till now that life had long ago defeated his father. He’d beaten his fists against it-had Eddie Kerne-and refused to submit to its demands. These demands were for compromise and change: to take life on life’s terms, which required the ability to switch courses when necessary, to modify behaviours, and to alter dreams so that they could meet the realities that they came up against. But he’d never been able to do any of that, so he’d been crushed, and life had rolled over his shattered body.

The kettle clicked off as the water came to a boil. When Eddie turned to fetch it to the table, Ben went to him. He heard his mother murmur shush and shush another time. But he found that comfort unnecessary now. He approached his father, one man to another. He said, “I wish things could have been different for all of us. I love you, Dad.”

Eddie’s shoulders bowed further. “Why couldn’t you shake her off?” His voice sounded as broken as his spirit.

“I don’t know,” Ben said. “I just couldn’t. But that’s down to me, not to Dellen. She can’t bear the blame for my weakness.”

“You wouldn’t see-”

“You’re right.”

“And now?”

“I don’t know.”

“Still?”

“Yes. That’s my personal hell. Do you understand? In all these years, never once did you have to make it yours.”

Eddie’s shoulders shook. He tried and failed to lift the kettle. Ben lifted it for him and carried it to the table where he poured the water into their mugs. He didn’t want the coffee; it would keep him awake that night when all he wanted was indefinite sleep. But he would drink it if that was what was required of him, if that was the communion his father wanted.

All of them sat. Eddie sat last. His head looked too heavy for his neck to bear, and it fell forward, his chin nearing his chest.

“What is it, then, Eddie?” Ann Kerne asked her husband.

“I told the cop,” he said. “I could’ve tossed him from the property, but I didn’t do that. I wanted…I don’t know what I wanted. Benesek, I told him everything I knew.”

The restless night that followed thus had a twofold source: the coffee he’d drunk and the knowledge he’d gained. For if his conversation with Eddie Kerne had at least gone some way towards burying some of the excruciating past between them, that same conversation had resurrected another part of it. For the remainder of the day and into the night, he’d had to look at that part squarely. He’d had to wonder about it. Neither was an activity in which he particularly wished to engage.

Set against the rest of his life, one night should have been insignificant. A party with his mates, and that was all. A gathering he wouldn’t even have gone to had he not just two days earlier had the courage to break off with Dellen Nankervis yet another time. He was thus morose, his life a thing that he believed was in tatters. “You want cheering up,” was his mates’ recommendation. “That wanker Parsons is having a party. Everyone’s invited, so come with us. Get your mind off the bloody cow for once.”

That had proved impossible, for Dellen had been there: in a crimson sundress and spiky sandals, smooth of leg and tan of shoulder, blonde hair soft and long and thick, eyes like bluebells. Seventeen years old and with the heart of a siren, she’d come alone but she hadn’t remained so. For she was dressed like a flame, and like a flame she drew them. His mates were not among them, for they knew the trap Dellen Nankervis presented: how she baited it, how she sprang it, and, in the end, what she did with her prey. So they kept their distance, but the others didn’t. Ben watched until he could bear no more.

Palm curved round a glass and he drank it. Pill pressed into his hand and he took it. Spliff placed between his fingers and he smoked it. The miracle was that he hadn’t died from everything he’d ingested that night. What he had done was welcome the ministrations of any girl willing to vanish into a darkened corner with him. He knew there had been three; there may have been more. It hadn’t mattered. What counted was only that Dellen see.

Take your fucking hands off my sister had brought a sudden end to the game. Jamie Parsons was the hot-voiced speaker, acting the part of outraged brother-not to mention gap-year brother, wealthy brother, traveling-the-earth-to-the-hot-spots-of-surfing-and-making-sure-everyone-knew-about-it brother-discovering a lowlife nonce with his fingers in his sister’s knickers and his sister shoved up against the wall with one leg lifted and loving it, loving it, which Ben had foolishly, loudly, and in the presence of everyone in hearing distance declared to be his real crime once Jamie Parsons had separated them.

He’d been summarily and with no delicacy tossed out, and his mates had followed, and as far as he had ever known or dared to ask, Dellen had remained behind.

“Christ, that bloody wanker needs sorting,” they all agreed, up to their eyeballs with drink, with drugs, and with resentment towards Jamie Parsons.

And after that? Ben simply didn’t know.

He ran the story through his head all night, after returning to Casvelyn from Eco-House and Pengelly Cove. He’d got back round ten, and he’d not done more than pace the hotel, pausing at windows to look out at the restless bay. The hotel was quiet, Kerra not there, Alan gone for the day, and Dellen…She was not in the sitting room or the kitchen of the family quarters and he looked no further. For he needed time to sift through what he remembered and to differentiate it from what he imagined.

He finally entered their bedroom at midmorning. Dellen lay diagonally across the bed. She breathed a heavy, drug-induced sleep, and the bottle of pills that had sent her there was uncapped on the bedside table, where the light still burned, as it had likely done all night, Dellen too incapacitated to turn it off.

He sat on the edge of the bed. She did not awaken. She hadn’t changed out of her clothing on the previous night, and her red scarf formed a pool beneath her head, its fringe fanning out like petals with Dellen its centre, the heart of the flower.

His curse was that he still could love her. His curse was that he could look at her now and, despite everything and especially despite Santo’s murder, he could still want to claim her because she possessed and, he feared, would forever possess the ability to wipe from his heart and his mind everything else that was not Dellen. And he did not understand how this could be or what terrible twist of his psyche made it so.

Her eyes opened. In them and just for an instant, before awareness came to her completely, he saw the truth in the dullness of her expression: that what he needed from his wife she could not give him, though he would continue to try to take it from her again and again.

She turned her head away.

“Leave me,” she said. “Or kill me. Because I can’t-”

“I saw his body,” Ben told her. “Or rather, his face. They’d dissected him-that’s what they do except they use a different word for it-so they kept him covered up to his chin. I could have seen the rest but I didn’t want to. It was enough to see his face.”

“Oh God.”

“It was just a formality. They knew it was Santo. They have his car. They have his driving licence. So they didn’t need me to look at him. I expect I could have closed my eyes at the last moment and just said yes, that’s Santo, and not have looked at all.”

She raised her arm and pressed her fist against her mouth. He didn’t want to evaluate all the reasons why he was compelled to speak at this point. All he accepted about himself was that he felt it necessary to do more than relay antiseptic information to his wife. He felt it necessary to move her out of herself and into the core of her motherhood, even if that meant she would blame him as he deserved to be blamed. It would be better, he thought, than watching her go elsewhere.

She can’t help it. He’d reminded himself of that fact endlessly throughout the years. She is not responsible. She needs me to help her. He didn’t know if this was the truth any longer. But to believe something else at this late hour would make more than a quarter century of his life a lie.

“I bear the fault for everything that happened,” he went on. “I couldn’t cope. I needed more than anyone could ever give me and when they couldn’t give it, I tried to wring it from them. That’s how it was with you and me. That’s how it was with Santo.”

“You should have divorced me. Why in God’s name did you never divorce me?” She began to weep. She turned to lie on her side, facing the bedside table where her bottle of pills stood. She reached for them as if intending another dose. He took up the bottle and said, “Not now.”

“I need-”

“You need to stay here.”

“I can’t. Give them to me. Don’t leave me like this.”

It was the cause, the very root of the tree. Don’t leave me like this. I love you, I love you…I don’t know why…My head feels like something about to blow up, and I can’t help…Come here, my darling. Come here, come here.

“They’ve sent someone down from London.” He could see from her expression that she did not understand. She’d strayed from Santo’s death at this point, and she wanted to stray further, but he would not let her. “A detective,” he said. “Someone from Scotland Yard. He spoke to my father.”

“Why?”

“They check everything when someone’s been murdered. They look into every nook and cranny of everyone’s life. Do you understand what that means? He spoke to Dad and Dad told him everything he knew.”

“About what?”

“About why I left Pengelly Cove.”

“But that has nothing to do with-”

“It’s something to look at and that’s what they do. They look.”

“Give me the pills.”

“No.”

She made a grab for them anyway. He held the bottle out of her reach. He said, “I didn’t sleep last night. Being in Pengelly Cove, talking to Dad…It brought everything back. That party at Cliff House, the drink, the drugs, groping in the shadows and who the hell cared who saw if things went further? And things did go further. Didn’t they?”

“I don’t remember. It was a long time ago. Ben. Please. Give me the pills.”

“You’ll go away if I do, but I want you here. You need to feel something of what I feel. I want that from you because if I don’t have that much…” What? he wondered. If she couldn’t give him what he asked of her now, what would he do that he hadn’t already tried and failed to do in the past? His threats were empty, and both of them knew it.

“Death asks for death in the end, no matter what we do,” he told her. “I didn’t like Santo surfing. I believed that surfing could lead him to where surfing had led me and I told myself that was my reason. But the truth was that I wanted to take from him the core of who he was because I was afraid. It all came down to my believing he had to live the way I live. I as much as said, Live like a dead man and I’ll love you for it. And these-” He gestured with the pills. Dellen tried to snatch them, so he whipped them away and rose from the bed. “These make you dead as well, dead to the world. But in the world is where I want you to be.”

“You know what’ll happen. I can’t stop myself. I try and I feel like my skull is pounding.”

“And it’s always been that way.”

“You know that.”

“So you get relief. From pills and from drink. And if there are no pills and if drink doesn’t work-”

“Give them to me!” She, too, rose from the bed.

He was near the window, so it took no effort. He opened it and spilled sedatives down the side of the building, into the muddy border where springtime plants languished, waiting for sun that was long in coming.

Dellen wailed. She ran to Ben. She beat her fists against him. He caught them and held them.

“I want you seeing,” he said. “And hearing and feeling. And remembering. If I have to cope with all of this alone-”

“I hate you!” she screamed. “You want and you want. But you won’t find someone who’ll give you what you want. That person’s not me. It never has been and you won’t let me go. And I hate you. God, God how I hate you!”

She tore herself from him and for a moment he thought she meant to dash from the room and scrabble in the mud below them in order to rescue her fast-dissolving pills. But instead she went to the cupboard, where she began yanking clothing from within. It was red upon red, crimson, magenta, and every point in between, and all of it she threw in a heap on the floor. She was looking for the one that said the most, he thought, like the crimson sundress on that long-ago evening.

He said, “Tell me what happened. I was with Parsons’s sister. I was doing what I could do to her, what she’d let me get away with, and that was a lot. He found us together and he threw me out. Not because he cared that his sister was about to get stuffed in the corridor of her parents’ house in the midst of a party but because he liked feeling superior to everyone, and this was another way to do it. It wasn’t a class thing. Or even a money thing. It was a Jamie thing. Tell me what happened between you once I left.”

She continued throwing her clothes on the floor. When she’d finished with the cupboard, she went to the chest. Here she did the same. Knickers and bras, petticoats, jerseys, scarves. Just the red of it all until the clothing was pooled round her feet like the pulp of fruit.

“Did you fuck him, Dellen? I’ve never asked about any of them specifically, but this is the one I want to know. Did you say to him, ‘There’s a sea cave on the beach where Ben and I go for sex and I’ll meet you there.’ And he wouldn’t have known we were finished, you and I. He would have thought it a good way to sort me. So he’d meet you there and-”

“No!”

“-he’d fuck you like you wanted. But he’d taken some of the drugs on offer-weed, coke, whatever else was there…LSD…Ecstasy-and he’d mixed them with whatever he was drinking and once he’d done what you wanted him to do, you just left him, passed out cold, and deep in the cave, and when the tide came in the way it always comes in-”

“No!”

“-you were long gone. You’d got what you wanted, and what you wanted had nothing to do with getting stuffed and everything to do with getting revenge. And what you reckoned was that-Jamie being Jamie-he’d be the one to make certain I knew he’d had you the very next time he saw me. But what you hadn’t reckoned was the tide would get the better of your plan and-”

“I told!” she screamed. She had nothing more belonging to her to throw onto the floor, so she reached for the bedside table’s lamp and she brandished it. “I talked and I told everything I knew. Are you happy now? Is that what you’ve wanted to hear from me?”

Ben was rendered speechless. He wouldn’t have thought anything could have robbed him of words at this point, but he had none. He wouldn’t have thought there were any surprises left from his past, but that was clearly not going to be the case.

BEA AND DS HAVERS walked from Blue Star Grocery to Casvelyn of Cornwall. The bakery was in full production, preparing for the delivery of goods to the area’s pubs, hotels, cafés, and restaurants. Hence, the heady fragrance of flaky, succulent pastry formed a hypnotic miasma in the air. It became more powerful as they drew closer to the shop, and Bea heard Barbara Havers murmur fervently, “Bloody blooming hell.”

Bea glanced at her. The sergeant was gazing longingly in the direction of Casvelyn of Cornwall’s front window, where the trays of newly baked pasties lay in seductive, eye-popping, and utterly diet-busting ranks of cholesterol, carbohydrates, and calories. “Pleasant, isn’t it?” Bea said to the sergeant.

“It’s got Pop-Tarts beat. I’ll give you that.”

“You must have a pasty while you’re in Cornwall. And if you’re going to do so, these are the best.”

“I’ll make a note of it.” Havers gave a lingering look to them as she followed Bea into the shop.

Madlyn Angarrack was serving a line of customers while Shar heaved trays of the bakery’s products out of the enormous kitchen and into the display cases. It seemed they had more than pasties going on this day, since Shar was currently bringing out loaves of artisan bread, thick of crust and topped with rosemary.

Although Madlyn was busy, Bea had no intention of standing at the end of a queue. She excused herself to the waiting customers by ostentatiously showing her identification and murmuring, “Pardon. Police business,” as she passed them by. At the till, she said at some considerable volume, “A word, Miss Angarrack. Here or in the station, but in either case, now.”

Madlyn didn’t attempt to temporize. She said to her co-worker, “Shar, will you take the till?” although she did add meaningfully, “I won’t be a moment,” to indicate either her cooperation with the police or her intention of immediately demanding a solicitor. She then fetched a jacket and went outside.

“This is DS Havers,” Bea said by way of introduction. “She’s come down from New Scotland Yard to assist in the investigation.”

Madlyn’s eyes flicked to Havers and then back to Bea. In a voice that sounded something between wary and confused she said, “Why’s Scotland Yard-”

“Think about it.” Bea saw that being able to bandy about the term New Scotland Yard was going to have one or two unanticipated uses. It consisted of three words that asked people to sit up and take notice, no matter what they knew or did not know about the Metropolitan police.

Madlyn was silent. She regarded Havers, and if she wondered what a representative from New Scotland Yard was doing dressed like a survivor of Hurricane Katrina, she did not say it. Havers took out a tattered notebook as Madlyn watched her, and she jotted down a note. It was likely a reminder to buy a pasty before leaving Casvelyn for the Salthouse Inn that evening, but that didn’t matter to Bea. It looked official and that was what counted.

“I don’t appreciate being lied to,” Bea told Madlyn. “It wastes my time, it forces me to go over old ground, and it throws me off my stride.”

“I didn’t-”

“Save us all some time during this second round of the boxing match, all right?”

“I don’t see why you think-”

“Need a refresher? Seven and a half weeks ago, Santo Kerne ended your relationship and, according to you, that was that: It was all you knew, full stop, no window dressing included. But as it turns out, you knew a bit more than that, didn’t you? You knew he was seeing someone else and something about that made you sick. Does any of this sound familiar to you, Miss Angarrack?”

Madlyn’s gaze shifted. Her brain was clearly engaged in calculations, and her expression said that the calculations were of the Who’s the bloody grass? variety. The suspects were probably not innumerable, and when Madlyn’s glance took in the Blue Star Grocery, satisfaction played her face like a keyboard. Resolution followed. Will Mendick, Bea Hannaford decided, was likely burnt toast.

“What would you like to tell us?” Bea asked. Sergeant Havers tapped her pencil against her notebook with great meaning. It was a chewed-up pencil, but that was no surprise, as possessing a writing utensil in any other condition would have been wildly out of character in the woman.

Madlyn’s gaze came back to Bea. She didn’t look resigned. She looked avenged, which, to Bea’s way of thinking, was not the way a suspect ought to be looking when it came to murder.

“He broke up with me. I told you that and it was the truth. I didn’t lie, and you can’t make it out that I did. And I wasn’t under oath anyway, so-”

“Save the legal wrangling,” Havers spoke up. “Far as I know, this isn’t an episode of The Bill. You lied, you cheated, or you danced the polka. We don’t much care. Let’s get to the facts. I’ll be happy, the DI’ll be happy, and-trust me-you’ll be happy as well.”

Madlyn didn’t look appreciative of this advice. She made a moue of distaste, but it seemed to be an expression that served the purpose of jockeying for position because when she next spoke, she told a completely different tale from the one she’d told earlier. She said, “All right. I broke up with him. I thought he was cheating, so I followed him. It’s not something I’m proud of, but I had to know. When I knew, I ended it. It hurt to do it because I was stupid and I still loved him, but I ended it anyway. That’s the story. And it’s the truth.”

“So far,” Bea said.

“I just told you-”

“Followed him where?” Havers asked, her pencil poised. “Followed him when? And how? On foot, by car, on bicycle, on a pogo stick?”

“What about his cheating on you made you sick?” Bea asked. “Just the fact of it, or was there something else? I think ‘off ’ was your choice of description.”

“I never said-”

“Not to us, no. You never said. That’s part of the current problem. Your problem, that is. When you say one thing to one person and another thing to the coppers, it all comes back to bite you in the end. So I suggest you consider yourself bitten and do something to get the teeth out of your bum, in a matter of speaking.”

“Rabies being rabies and all,” DS Havers murmured. Bea stifled a smile. She was starting to like the disheveled woman.

Madlyn’s jaw tightened. It seemed that the full reality of her situation was beginning to dawn upon her. She could remain obdurate and accept the threats and the ridicule of the other two women, or she could talk. She chose the option that seemed likeliest to effect their imminent departure.

“I think people should stick to their own,” she said.

“And Santo didn’t stick to his own?” Bea asked. “What’s that mean, exactly?”

“Just what I said.”

“What?” Havers asked impatiently. “He was doing altar boys on the side? Goats? Sheep? The occasional vegetable marrow? What?”

“Stop it!” Madlyn cried. “He was doing other women, all right? Older women. I confronted him when I knew about it. And I knew because I followed him.”

“We’re back to that,” Bea said. “You followed him where?”

“To Polcare Cottage.” Her eyes were bright. “He went to Polcare Cove and I followed him. He went inside and…I waited and waited because I was stupid and I wanted to think that…But no. No. So I went to the door after a bit and I banged upon it and…You can work out the bloody rest, can’t you? And that’s all I have to say to you two, so leave me alone. Leave me bloody well alone.”

That said, she pushed between them and stalked back towards the bakery’s door. She rubbed at her cheeks furiously as she walked.

“What’s Polcare Cottage?” DS Havers asked.

“A very nice place to pay a call on,” Bea said.

LYNLEY DIDN’T APPROACH THE cottage at once because he saw immediately that there was probably going to be no point. She didn’t appear to be at home. Either that or she’d parked her Vauxhall in the larger of the two outbuildings that stood on her property in Polcare Cove. He tapped his fingers against the steering wheel of his hired Ford, and he considered what his next move ought to be. Reporting what he knew to DI Hannaford seemed to top the list, but he didn’t feel settled with that decision. Instead, he wanted to give Daidre Trahair an opportunity to explain herself.

Despite what Barbara Havers might have thought once they parted at the Salthouse Inn, Lynley had taken her comments to heart. He was in a precarious position, and he knew it although he hated to admit or even think about it. He wanted desperately to escape the black pit in which he’d been floundering for weeks upon weeks, and he felt inclined to clutch just about any life rope that would get him out of there. The long walk along the South-West Coastal Path hadn’t provided that escape as he’d hoped it would. So he had to admit that perhaps Daidre Trahair’s company in conjunction with the kindness in her eyes had beguiled him into overlooking details that would otherwise have demanded acknowledgement.

He’d come upon another of those details upon Havers’ departure earlier that morning. Neither pigheaded nor blind when it came down to it, he’d placed another phone call to the zoo in Bristol. This time, however, instead of enquiring about Dr. Trahair, he enquired about the primate keepers. By the time he wended his way through what seemed like half a dozen employees and departments, he was fairly certain what the news would be. There was no Paul the primate keeper at the zoo. Indeed, the primates were kept by a team of women, headed by someone called Mimsie Vance, to whom Lynley did not need to speak.

Another lie chalked up against her, another black mark that needed confrontation.

What he reckoned he ought to do was lay his cards on the table for the vet. He, after all, was the person to whom Daidre Trahair had spoken about Paul the primate keeper and his terminally ill father. Perhaps, he thought, he had misinterpreted or misunderstood what Daidre had said. Certainly, she deserved the chance to clarify. Didn’t anyone in her position deserve as much?

He got out of the Ford and approached Daidre’s cottage. He knocked on the blue front door and waited. As he expected, the vet was not at home. But he went to the outbuildings just to make sure.

The larger one was empty of everything, as it would have to be for a car to be accommodated within its narrow confines. It was also largely unfinished inside and the presence of cobwebs and a thick coating of dust indicated that no one used it often. There were tyre tracks across the floor of the building, though. Lynley squatted and examined these. Several cars, he saw, had parked here. It was something to note, although he wasn’t sure what he ought to make of the information.

The smaller building was a garden shed. There were tools within it, all of them well used, testifying to Daidre’s attempts to create something gardenlike out of her little plot of land, no matter its proximity to the sea.

He was studying these for want of studying something when he heard the sound of a car driving up, its tyres crunching on the pebbles along the verge. He was blocking her driveway, so he left the garden shed to move his vehicle out of her way. But he saw it wasn’t Daidre Trahair who’d arrived. Rather it was DI Hannaford. Barbara Havers was with her.

Lynley felt dispirited at the sight of them. He had rather hoped Havers would have said nothing to Bea Hannaford about what she’d uncovered in Falmouth although he’d known how unlikely that was. Barbara was nothing if not a pit bull when it came to an investigation. She’d run over her grandmother with an articulated lorry if she was on the trail of something relevant. The fact that Daidre Trahair’s past wasn’t relevant would not occur to her because anything odd, contradictory, quirky, or suspicious needed to be tracked down and examined from every angle, and Barbara Havers was just the cop to do it.

Their eyes met as she got out of the car, and he tried to keep the disappointment from his face. She paused to shake a cigarette out of a packet of Players. She turned her back to the breeze, sheltering a plastic lighter from the wind.

Bea Hannaford approached him. “She’s not here?”

He shook his head.

“Sure about that, are you?” Hannaford peered at him intently.

“I didn’t look in through the windows,” he replied. “But I can’t imagine why she wouldn’t answer the door if she were at home.”

“I can. And how’re we coming along with our investigation into the good doctor? You’ve spent enough time with her so far. I expect you’ve something to report.”

Lynley looked to Havers, feeling a curious rush of gratitude towards his former partner. He also felt the shame of having misjudged her, and he saw how much the last months had altered him. Havers remained largely expressionless, but she lifted one eyebrow. She was, he saw, putting the ball squarely into his court and he could do with it what he would. For now.

“I don’t know why she lied to you about the route she took from Bristol,” he told Hannaford. “I’ve not got much further than that. She’s very careful with what she reveals about herself.”

“Not careful enough,” the DI said. “She lied about knowing Santo Kerne, as things turn out. The kid was her lover. She was sharing him with his girlfriend without his girlfriend knowing. At first, that is. She-the girlfriend-had some suspicions on that front so she followed Santo and he led her straight here. He seems to have been a bloke who liked them any way he could get them. Older, younger, and in between.”

Although he found that his heart had begun beating quickly as the DI was speaking, Lynley said in an even tone, “I’m not quite tracking this.”

“Not tracking what?”

“His girlfriend following him and the conclusion you’ve drawn: that he and Dr. Trahair were lovers.”

“Sir…” It was Havers’ monitory tone.

“Are you mad?” Hannaford said to Lynley. “The girlfriend confronted him, Thomas.”

“Confronted him or confronted them?”

“Him or them? What difference does it make?”

“All the difference in the world if she didn’t actually see anything.”

“Really? And what’d you expect the girl to do? Jump through the window with a camera while they were doing the deed? So she would have evidence to back herself up if she ever had to talk to the coppers? She saw enough to have words with him and he told her what was going on.”

“He said that Dr. Trahair was his lover?”

“What the hell do you think-”

“It just seems to me that if he had a taste for older women, he’d want to go after one more readily available to him. Dr. Trahair, according to what she’s said, comes here only for holidays and occasional weekend breaks.”

“According to what she bloody says. My good man, she’s lied about nearly everything so far, so I think we’re God damn safe to assume that if Santo Kerne came to this cottage-”

“Could I have a word, Inspector Hannaford?” Havers broke in. “With the superintendent, I mean.”

Firmly Lynley said, “Barbara, I’m no longer-”

“With his lordship,” Havers corrected herself acidly. “With his earlishness…With Mister Lynley…with whatever he wishes to be called at this point…if you don’t mind, Guv.”

Hannaford threw up her hands. “Take him.” She began to walk towards the cottage, but she paused and pointed her finger at Lynley. “Detective, if I find you’re obstructing this investigation in any way…”

“You’ll have my job,” Lynley said wryly. “I know.”

He watched her stalk towards the cottage and knock on the door. When no one answered, she went round the side of the building, clearly intending to do what she thought Santo’s girlfriend ought to have done: peer through the windows. He turned to Havers.

“Thank you,” he said.

“I wasn’t rescuing you.”

“Not for that.” He indicated Hannaford with a nod towards the cottage. “For not giving her the information from Falmouth. You could have done. You ought to have done. Both of us know that. Thank you.”

“I like to stay consistent.” She drew in deeply on her cigarette before she tossed it to the ground. She removed a bit of tobacco from her tongue. “Why develop a respect for authority at the eleventh hour, if you know what I mean?”

He smiled. “So you see-”

“No,” she said. “I don’t see. At least I don’t see what you want me to see. She’s a liar, sir. That makes her dirty. We came here to take her in for questioning. More, if we need to.”

“More? An arrest? For what? It seems to me that if she was having an affair with this boy, the motive to kill him sits squarely on someone else.”

“Not necessarily. And please don’t tell me you don’t know that.” She glanced at the cottage. Hannaford was gone from view, now at the seaside windows on the west end of the building. Havers drew a deep breath. She coughed a smoker’s cough.

“You’ve got to give up tobacco,” he told her.

“Right. Tomorrow. In the meantime, we have a bit of a problem.”

“Come with me to Newquay.”

“What? Why?”

“Because I’ve got a lead on this case and that’s where it is. Santo Kerne’s father was involved in a death some thirty years ago. I think it needs to be checked into.”

“Santo Kerne’s father? Sir, you’re avoiding.”

“Avoiding what?”

“You know.” She cocked her head at the cottage.

“Havers, I’m not. Come with me to Newquay.” The plan sounded so sensible to him. It even had the flavour of old times: the two of them doing some digging around, talking about leads, tossing round possibilities. Suddenly, he wanted the sergeant with him.

“I can’t do that, sir,” Havers said.

“Why not?”

“First of all, because I’m here on loan to DI Hannaford. And second…” She drove her hand through her sandy hair, badly cut as always, and straight as the route of a martyr’s path to heaven. It was filled, as usual, with static electricity. Much of it stood on end. “Sir, how do I say this to you?”

“What?”

“This. You’ve been through the worst.”

“Barbara-”

“No. You’ve bloody well got to listen to me. You lost your wife to murder. You lost your child. For God’s sake, you had to shut off their life support.”

He closed his eyes. Her hand grabbed his arm and held it firmly.

“I know this is hard. I know it’s horrible.”

“No,” he murmured, “you don’t. You can’t.”

“All right. I don’t, and I can’t. But what happened to Helen ripped your world apart and no one-bloody no one, sir-walks away from something like that with his head on straight.”

He looked at her then. “You’re saying I’m mad? Have we come to that?”

She released his arm. “I’m saying you’re badly wounded. You’re not coming at this from a position of strength because you can’t and to expect anything else of yourself is just bloody wrong. I don’t know who this woman is or why she’s here or if she’s Daidre Trahair or someone who’s claiming to be Daidre Trahair. But the fact remains that when someone lies in the middle of a murder investigation, that’s what the cops look at. So the question is, Why don’t you want to? I think we both know the answer to that.”

“What would that be?”

“You’re using your lordship voice. I know what that means: You want distance, and you usually get it. Well, I’m not giving it to you, sir. I’m here, standing directly in your face, and you have to look at what you’re doing and why. And if you can’t cope with the thought of doing it, you have to look at that as well.”

He made no reply. He felt as if a wave were washing over him, breaking through everything he’d built to hold it temporarily at bay. He finally said, “Oh God,” but that was all he could say. He lifted his head and looked at the sky, where grey clouds were promising to transform the day.

When Havers spoke again, her voice was altered, from hard to soft. The change cut into him as much as her declarations had done. “Why did you come here? To her cottage? Have you found out anything else about her?”

“I thought…” He cleared his throat and looked from the sky to her. She was so solid and so unutterably real and he knew that she was on his side. But he couldn’t make that matter at the moment. If he told Havers the truth, she’d move upon it. The very fact of yet another lie from Daidre Trahair would tip the balance. “I thought she might want to go to Newquay with me,” he said. “It would give me a chance to talk to her another time, to try to sort out…” He didn’t complete the thought. It sounded now, even to his ears, so pathetically desperate. Which is what I am, he thought.

Havers nodded. Hannaford came round the far side of the cottage. She was tramping through the heavy growth of marram grass and cowslip beneath the windows. It was more than obvious that she fully intended Daidre Trahair to know that someone had been there.

Lynley told her his intention: Newquay, the police, the story of Ben Kerne and the death of a boy called Jamie Parsons.

Hannaford was not impressed. “Fool’s errand,” she declared. “What’re we supposed to make of all that?”

“I don’t know yet. But it seems to me-”

“I want you on her, Superintendent. Is she somehow involved in what happened during the Ice Age? She would have been…what? Four years old? Five?”

“I admit that there may be issues about her that need exploring.”

“Do you indeed? How good to hear. So explore them. Got that mobile with you? Yes? Keep it on, then.” She jerked her fuchsia-coloured head towards her car. “We’ll be off. Once you locate our Dr. Trahair, escort her to the station. Am I being clear on that?”

“You are,” Lynley said. “Completely clear.”

He watched as Hannaford headed to her car. He and Havers exchanged a look before she followed.

He decided on Newquay anyway, that being the beauty of his role in the investigation. And damn the consequences if he and Hannaford disagreed, he wasn’t obliged to discount his own inclinations in favour of hers.

He took the most direct route to Newquay once he made his way through the tangled skein of lanes that separated Polcare Cove from the A39. He hit a tailback caused by an overturned lorry some five miles out of Wadebridge, which slowed him considerably, and he ended up in Cornwall’s surfing capital shortly after two in the afternoon. He became immediately lost and cursed the obedient, parent-pleasing young adolescent he had been prior to his father’s death. Newquay, his father had more than once intoned, was a vulgar town, not the sort of place a “true” Lynley frequented. Consequently, he knew nothing of the town, while his younger brother-never burdened with the need to please-probably could have found his way round blindfolded.

Having suffered the frustrating one-way system twice and having nearly driven into the pedestrian precinct once, Lynley gave up the effort and followed the signs to the information office, where a kindly woman asked him if he was “looking for Fistral, love?” by which he took it that he was being mistaken for an ageing surfer. She was happy enough to give him directions to the police station, however, and they were of a detailed nature, so he managed to get there without further difficulty.

His police identification worked as he’d hoped it would, although it didn’t take him as far as he’d planned. The special constable on duty in reception handed him over to the head of the MCIT squad, a detective sergeant called Ferrell with a globelike head and eyebrows so thick and black that they looked artificial. He was aware of the investigation ongoing in the Casvelyn area. He wasn’t, however, aware that the Met had become involved. He said this last bit meaningfully. The Met presence suggested an investigation into the investigation, which in itself suggested gross incompetence on the part of the officer in charge.

In fairness to Hannaford, Lynley disabused DS Ferrell of whatever notion he was brewing about Hannaford’s capabilities. He’d been in the area on holiday, he explained. He’d been present when the body was found. The boy, he explained, was the son of a man who had himself been at least tangentially involved in a death a number of years ago, one that had been investigated by the Newquay police, and that was why Lynley had come to Newquay: for information relating to that situation.

Thirty years ago had obviously seen Ferrell not long out of nappies, so the DS knew nothing about anyone called Parsons, about Benesek Kerne, or about a sea cave mishap in Pengelly Cove. On the other hand, it wouldn’t be tough for him to suss out who did know what in relation to that death. If the superintendent didn’t mind a bit of a wait…?

Lynley chose to do his waiting in the canteen, the better to be a hovering presence that might spur things on. He bought himself an apple because he knew he ought to eat despite not having felt hungry since his conversation with Havers that morning. He bit into it, was gratified to find it mealy, and tossed it into the rubbish bin. He followed up with a cup of coffee and wished vaguely that he was still a smoker. There was, of course, no smoking in the canteen these days, but having something to do with his hands would have been gratifying, even if what he was doing was only rolling an unsmoked cigarette in his fingers. At least he wouldn’t feel as if he needed to tear packets of sugar into shreds, which was what he did as he waited for DS Ferrell to return. He opened one and dumped it into his coffee. The others he dumped into a neat pile on the table, where he then ran a plastic stir stick through the mess, creating designs as he tried not to think.

There was no Paul the primate keeper, but what did that mean, really? A private person who’d been caught looking at sites for miracles, she’d want to make an excuse for that. It was human nature. Embarrassment led to prevarication. This was not a crime. But that, of course, was not the only instance of prevarication on the vet’s part, and this was the problem he faced: what to do about Daidre Trahair’s lies and, even more, what to think about them.

DS Ferrell did not return for a very long twenty-six minutes. When he did come into the canteen, however, he had nothing with him but a slip of paper. Lynley had been hoping for boxes of files he might look through, so he felt deflated. But there was moderate cheer in what Ferrell had to say.

“DI running that case retired long before my time,” he told Lynley. “Must be over eighty by now. He lives in Zennor. Across from the church and next to the pub. He says he’ll meet you by the mermaid’s chair if you want to talk.”

“The mermaid’s chair?”

“That’s what he said. Said if you’re a proper detective, you should be able to find it.” Ferrell shrugged and looked a bit embarrassed. “Funny bloke, you ask me. Fair warning and all that. I think he may be a bit gaga.”