Careless in Red

Chapter Twenty-nine

THE CRY OF THE GULLS SEEMED TO GROW LOUDER, AND FROM far below them the slamming of waves on rock indicated that the tide was in. Ben thought what this meant and the irony of it: excellent surfing conditions today.

The breathing that had been Jago Reeth’s stopped, drawn in and held as perhaps the old man decided whether to believe what Ben had told him. For Ben, it no longer mattered what anyone believed. Nor, finally, did it matter at all that Santo had not been his by blood. For he saw that they had been father and son in the only way that mattered between a man and a boy, which had everything to do with history and experience and nothing to do with a single blindly swimming cell that through sheerest chance makes piercing contact with an egg. Thus his failures were every bit as profound as a blood father’s would have been towards a son. For he’d made every paternal move out of fear and not love, always waiting for Santo to show the colours of his true origins. Since after their adolescence Ben had never known any one of his wife’s lovers, he had waited for Dellen’s least desirable characteristics to surface in her son, and when anything remotely Dellen-like had appeared, that had been Ben’s focus and passion. He as much as moulded Santo into his mother, so great was the emphasis he had placed upon anything in the boy that had seemed like her.

“He wasn’t,” Ben repeated, “my son.” How pathetically true, he realised now.

Jago Reeth said, “You’re a bloody liar. You always were.”

“I only wish that was the case.” Ben saw another detail now. It fell into place neatly and corrected his previous misunderstanding. He said to Reeth, “She talked to you, didn’t she? I thought she meant the police, but she didn’t. She talked to you.”

DI Hannaford said, “Mr. Kerne, you’ve no need to say anything.”

Ben said, “He needs to know the truth. I had nothing to do with what happened to Jamie. I wasn’t there.”

Jago Reeth said abruptly, “Liar. You’d say that, wouldn’t you.”

“Because it’s the truth. I’d had a scuffle with him. He tossed me out of his party. But I went for a wander and then I went home. What Dellen told you…” He wasn’t sure, then, that he could go on, but he knew that he had to, if only to do the only thing that could be done to avenge Santo’s death. “What Dellen told you, she told you out of jealousy. I’d been with your daughter. A snog. We’d got carried away. Dellen saw us, and she had to get even because that’s what she and I did to each other. Tit for tat, together and apart, in love and in hate, it never mattered. We were bound by something that we couldn’t break free of.”

“You’re a liar now. As you were then.”

“So she went to you and she told you I did…whatever she told you I did. But what I know about that night is what you know and that’s what I’ve always known: Jamie-your son-went down to that cave for some reason after that party and that’s where he died.”

“Don’t you bloody claim that,” Reeth said fiercely. “You ran off. You left Pengelly Cove and you never returned. You had a reason to leave and we both know what it was.”

“Yes. I had a reason. Because no matter what I told him, my own dad, like you, believed I was guilty.”

“With damn good cause.”

“What you will, Mr. Parsons. As you wish. Now and forever, if you like. But I wasn’t there, so I suppose your job isn’t done, is it. Because what she told you…and it was you she told, wasn’t it…? She lied.”

“Why would she ever…? Why would anyone…?”

Ben saw it. The reason, the cause. Beyond the tit for tat and the love and hate, beyond the parry and thrust of what had gone for their relationship for nearly thirty years, he saw. “Because that’s who she is,” he said. “Because that’s simply what she does.”

He left it at that. He got to his feet. At the hut’s doorway, he paused, one small matter left unclear to him. He said to Reeth, “Have you watched me all these years, Mr. Parsons? Has that really been the extent of your life? How you’ve defined yourself? Waiting till I had a boy the very same age as Jamie was when Jamie died and then moving in for the kill?”

“You don’t know what it’s like,” Reeth said. “But you will, man. You bloody sodding will.”

“Or did you find me because of…” Ben considered this. “Because of Adventures Unlimited? The purest chance, reading the newspaper somewhere-wherever you were-and seeing that story poor Alan worked so hard to arrange. Was that it? That story in the Mail on Sunday? Then dashing here and establishing yourself and waiting, because you’d got so bloody good at biding your time. Because you thought-you believed-that if you did to me what you were so sure I’d done to you, that would…what? Give you peace? Close the circle? Finish things properly? How can you believe that?”

“You’re going to know,” Reeth said. “You’re going to see. Because what I’ve said here-every word of it, man-is speculation. I know my rights. I made a study of my rights. So when I walk out of here-”

“Don’t you see? It doesn’t matter,” Ben replied. “Because I’m walking out of here first.”

He did so. He closed the door behind him and strode along the path towards the steps. His throat ached with the strain of holding back everything he’d been holding back-even without acknowledging that fact-for so many years. He heard his name called, and he turned.

DI Hannaford joined him. She said, “He’s made an error somewhere, Mr. Kerne. They always make an error. We’re going to find it. No one thinks of everything. I want you to hang on.”

Ben shook his head. “It doesn’t matter,” he said again. “Will it bring Santo back?”

“He’s got to pay. That’s how this works.”

“He’s already paying. And even if he isn’t, he’s going to see the only thing there is to see: There’s no peace for him in what he’s done. He can’t scrub it from his brain. None of us can do that.”

“Nonetheless,” Hannaford said. “We’ll be pursuing this.”

“If you must,” Ben said. “But not for my sake.”

“For Santo’s sake, then. He’s owed-”

“He is. God, how he is. He’s just not owed this.”

Ben walked from her, making his way along the path and up the stone steps to the top of the cliff. There, he followed the South-West Coast Path the short distance to the pastures they’d crossed, and he returned to his car. They could do with Jago Reeth or Jonathan Parsons what they wished to do or, indeed, what they were able to do within the confines of the law and the rights he said he knew so well. For whatever they did or did not do would not be sufficient to absolve Ben of the burden of responsibility that would always be his. This responsibility, he saw, went far beyond Santo’s death. It was described by the choices he’d made time and again and what those choices had done to mould the very people he’d claimed to love.

In days to come, he knew he would weep. He couldn’t now. He was numb. But the grief of loss was inescapable, and he accepted that for the first time in his life.

When he got home, he went in search of her. Alan was at work in his office, on the phone with someone and standing at a bulletin board on which he’d affixed two lines of index cards which Ben recognised as the plan for the video he wished to make about Adventures Unlimited. Kerra was talking to a tall blond youth, a prospective instructor no doubt. Ben didn’t bother either of them.

He climbed the stairs. She wasn’t in the family quarters, nor did she appear to be anywhere else in the building. He felt a fluttering in his chest at this, and he went to the wardrobe to check, but her clothing was still there and the rest of her belongings were in the chest of drawers. He finally saw her from the window, a figure in black on the beach whom he might have taken as a surfer in a wet suit had he not possessed a lifetime of knowledge about the shape of her and the texture of her hair. She was standing with her back to the hotel. As the tide was high, most of the beach was covered, and the water was lapping round her ankles. It would still be frigid this time of year, but she wore no protection against it.

He went to join her. He saw when he reached her that she was carrying a bundle of photographs. She was hollow eyed. She looked nearly as numb as he himself felt.

He said her name. She said, “I hadn’t thought of him in years. But there he was in my mind today, like he’d been waiting to get in all this time.”

“Who?”

“Hugo.”

A name he’d never once heard before and not one he cared about hearing now. He said nothing. Far out in the waves, five surfers formed a lineup. A swell rose behind them and Ben watched to see who would be in position to drop in. None of them were. The wave broke too far ahead of them, leaving them waiting for the next one in the set and another attempt at a ride.

Dellen continued. “I was his special one. He made a fuss over me and he asked my parents could he take me to the cinema. To the seal sanctuary. To the Christmas panto. He bought me clothes he wanted to see me in because I was his favourite niece. We’ve got something special, he said. I wouldn’t buy you these things and take you to these places if you weren’t especially special to me.”

Out to sea, one of the surfers was successful, Ben saw. He dropped in and caught the wave and he carved, seeking what every surfer seeks, the racing green room whose shimmering walls rise and curve and endlessly shift, enclosing and then releasing. It was a beautiful ride and when it was over, the surfer dropped down onto the board and made his way out to the others again, accompanied by the yelps of his mates. Jokingly, they barked like dogs. When he reached them, one of them touched fists with him. Ben saw this and felt a sore place in his heart. He forced himself to attend to what Dellen was saying.

“It felt wrong,” she said, “but Uncle Hugo said it was love. The special part was being singled out. Not my brother, not my cousins, but me. So if he touched me here and asked me to touch him there, was that bad? Or was it just something that I didn’t understand?”

Ben felt her look at him and he knew he was meant to look at her as well. He was meant to look at her face and read the suffering there, and he was meant to meet her emotion with his own. But he couldn’t do it. For he found that a thousand Uncle Hugos couldn’t change a single one of the facts. If, indeed, there was an Uncle Hugo at all.

Next to him, he felt her move. He saw she was riffling through the pictures she had with her. He half-expected her to produce Uncle Hugo from within the stack, but she didn’t. Instead, she brought forth a photograph he recognised. Mum and Dad and two kids on summer holiday, a week on the Isle of Wight. Santo had been eight years old, Kerra twelve.

In the picture they were at a restaurant table, no meal in evidence, so they must have handed the camera to the waiter as they first sat, asking him to snap the happy family. All of them were smiling as required: Look at how we’re enjoying ourselves.

Pictures were the things of happy memories. They were also the instruments one used retrospectively to avoid the truth. For in Kerra’s small face, Ben could now read the anxiety, that desire to be just good enough to stop the wheel from turning another time. In Santo’s face, he could see the confusion, a child’s awareness of a present hypocrisy without the accompanying comprehension. In his own expression, he could see the gritty determination to make things right. And in Dellen’s face…what was always there: knowledge and anticipation. She was wearing a red scarf twined through her hair.

They gravitated towards her in the picture, all of them slightly leaning in her direction. His hand was over hers, as if he’d hold her there at the table instead of where she doubtless wished to be.

She can’t help herself, he’d said time and again. What he’d failed to see was that he could.

He took the picture from her and said to his wife, “It’s time for you to go.”

She said, “Where?”

“I’m not sure,” he said. “St. Ives. Plymouth. Back to Truro. Pengelly Cove perhaps. Your family’s there still. They’ll help you if you need help. If that’s what you want at this point.”

She was silent. He looked from the photo to her. Her eyes had darkened. She said, “Ben, how can you…? After what’s happened.”

“Don’t,” he said. “It’s time for you to go.”

“Please,” she said. “How will I survive?”

“You’ll survive,” he told her. “We both know that.”

“What about you? Kerra? What about the business?”

“Alan’s here. He’s a very good man. And otherwise, Kerra and I will cope. We’ve learned to do that very well.”

SELEVAN HAD FOUND THAT his plans altered once the police came to the Salthouse Inn. He told himself that he couldn’t just selfishly head out with Tammy for the Scottish border without knowing what was going on and, more important, without discovering if there was something he could do to assist Jago should assistance be required. He couldn’t imagine why such assistance might be necessary, but he thought it best to remain where he was-more or less-and wait for further information.

It wasn’t long in coming. He reckoned Jago wouldn’t return to the Salthouse Inn, so he himself didn’t wait there. Instead, he went back to Sea Dreams and paced in the caravan for a while, taking a nip now and then from a flask he’d filled to see him on the trip to the border, and finally he went outside and over to Jago’s caravan.

He didn’t go within. He had a duplicate key to the place, but it just didn’t feel right, although he reckoned Jago wouldn’t have minded had he entered. Instead he waited on the top of the metal steps, where a wider one played the role of porch and was suitable for his bum.

Jago rolled into Sea Dreams some ten minutes later. Selevan got creakily to his feet. He shoved his hands into the pockets of his jacket and walked over to Jago’s preferred spot to park the Defender. He said, “You all right, then, mate?” when Jago got out. “They didn’t give you aggro down the station, did they?”

“Not a bit,” Jago told him. “When it comes to the cops, a small measure of preparation is all that’s needed. Things go your way, then, instead of theirs. Surprises them a bit, but that’s what life is. One bloody surprise after another.”

“S’pose,” Selevan said. But he felt a twinge of uneasiness, and he couldn’t exactly say why. There was something about Jago’s way of talking, something in the tone, that wasn’t altogether the Jago he knew. He said warily, “They didn’t rough you up, mate?”

Jago barked a laugh. “Those two cows? Not likely. We just had a bit of a conversation and that was the end of it. Long time in coming, but it’s over now.”

“Wha’s going on, then?”

“Nothing, mate. Something went on long time ago, but that’s all finished. My work here is done.”

Jago passed Selevan and stepped up to the door of the caravan. He hadn’t locked it, Selevan saw, so there’d been no need for him to wait on the steps in the first place. Jago went inside and Selevan followed. He stood uncertainly just at the door, however, because he wasn’t sure what was going on.

He said, “You made redundant, Jago?”

Jago had gone into the bedroom at the end of the caravan. Selevan couldn’t see him, but he could hear the noise of a cupboard opening and of something being dragged from the shelf above the clothing rail. In a moment Jago appeared in the doorway, a large duffel bag drooping from his hand. “What?” he asked.

“I asked were you made redundant. You said your work was finished. You been sacked or something?”

Jago looked as if he was thinking about this, which was strange as far as Selevan was concerned. One was made redundant or not. One was sacked or not. Surely the question didn’t need consideration. Finally Jago smiled quite a slow smile that wasn’t much like him. He said, “That’s exactly it, mate. Redundant. I was made redundant…long time ago.” He paused and looked thoughtful and next spoke to himself, “More than a quarter of a century,” he said. “A long time in coming.”

“What?” Selevan felt a restless urgency to get to the root of the matter because this Jago was different to the Jago he’d been sitting in the inglenook with for the last six or seven months, and he vastly preferred that other Jago, who spoke directly and not in…well, in parables or the like.

He said, “Mate, has something happened with them cops? Did they do something to…? You don’t sound like yourself.” Selevan could imagine what the cops might do. True, they’d been women, but fact was that Jago was an old codger round the same age as Selevan, and he was in poor condition for his years. Besides that, had they taken him to the station, there’d be blokes there-other cops-who could rough him up. And cops could rough one up in places where no evidence was left. Selevan knew that. He watched telly, especially American films on Sky. He’d seen how it was done. Bit of pressure on the thumbnails. Couple of sewing needles screwed into the skin. It wouldn’t take much on a bloke like Jago. Only…he wasn’t acting like a man who’d suffered some sort of humiliation at the hands of the cops, was he.

Jago put the duffel on his bed-Selevan could see this much from where he still stood, unsure whether to sit or stand, to go or remain-and he began opening the drawers of the built-in chest. And what came to Selevan then was what should have come the moment he saw the duffel in Jago’s hands: His friend was leaving.

He said, “Where you off to, Jago?”

“What I said.” Jago came to the door again, this time a small stack of neatly folded shorts and vests in his hands. “Things’re finished here. It’s time for me to shove off. Never stay in one place long, anyway. Follow the sun, the surf, the seasons…”

“But the season’s here. It’s just coming on. It’s round the corner. Where you going to find a better season than what you’d get here?”

Jago hesitated, half turned towards the bed. It seemed that this was something he’d not considered: the where of his journey. Selevan saw his shoulders alter. There was something less definite about his posture. Selevan pressed the point.

“And anyways, you got friends here. That counts for something. Let’s face it, you see a doctor yet for those shakes of yours? I reckon they’re going to get worse, and then where’ll you be if you set off on your own?”

Jago seemed to think about this. “Doesn’t much matter, like I said. My work is finished. All’s left is the waiting.”

“For what?”

“For…you know. Neither one of us is a hatchling, mate.”

“For dying, you mean? Tha’s rubbish. You got years. What the bloody hell did those coppers do to you?”

“Not a sodding thing.”

“Can’t believe you, Jago. If you’re talking of dying-”

“Dying’s got to be faced. So’s living, for that matter. They’re part of each other. And they’re meant to be natural.”

Selevan felt a margin of relief when he heard this. He didn’t like to think of Jago pondering the idea of dying because he didn’t like to think what this suggested about his friend’s intentions. He said, “Glad to hear that, at least. The natural bit.”

“Because…?” Jago smiled slowly as comprehension dawned. He shook his head in the way a fond grandparent might react to a beloved child’s mischief. “Oh. That. Well, I could end it easy enough, couldn’t I, since I’ve finished up here and there’s not much point in carrying on. There’s lots of places to do it in these parts cause it’d look like an accident and no one’d know the difference, eh. But if I did that, might end it for him as well and we can’t have that. No. There’s no end to something like this, mate. Not if I can help it.”

CADAN HAD JUST ARRIVED at LiquidEarth when the phone call came. He could hear that his father was in the shaping room and Jago was nowhere to be found, so he answered it himself. A bloke said, “That Lewis Angarrack?” and when Cadan said no, he said, “Fetch him, eh. Got to talk to him.”

Cadan knew better than to bother Lew in the middle of shaping a board. But the bloke insisted that this couldn’t wait and no, he didn’t want to leave a message.

So Cadan went to fetch his father, not opening the door but pounding on it to be heard over the tools. The power planer switched off. Lew himself appeared, his mask lowered and his eye gear around his neck.

When Cadan told him there was a phone call for him, Lew looked into the glassing area and said, “Jago not back?”

“Didn’t see his car outside.”

“What’re you doing here, then?”

Cadan felt that old plummeting of his spirits. He stifled a sigh. “Phone,” he reminded Lew.

Lew took off the latex gloves he wore for work, and he strode to the reception area. Cadan followed for want of anything better to do, although he peeked into the spraying room and considered the lineup of shaped boards to be painted as well as the kaleidoscope of bright colours that had been tested against the walls. In reception he could hear his father saying, “What’s that you say?…No, of course not…Where the hell is he? C’n you put him on the phone?”

Cadan wandered back out. Lew was behind the counter where the phone sat amid the mounds of paperwork on the card table that served as his desk. He glanced at Cadan and then away.

“No,” Lew said to the bloke on the other end of the line. “I didn’t know…I damn well would have appreciated it if he’d told me…I know he’s not well. But all I can tell you is what he told me. Had to step out to speak to a mate in a bit of bother up at the Salthouse…You? Then you know more than I do…”

Cadan clocked that they were talking about Jago, and he did question where the old man was. Jago had been nothing if not a model employee for his dad during the time he’d worked at LiquidEarth. Indeed, Cadan often felt that Jago’s performance as a stellar worker bee was one of the reasons he himself looked so bad. At work on time, never out for illness, not a complaint about anything, nose to the grindstone, perfectionist in what he had to do. For Jago not to be here now brought up the subject of why and made Cadan listen more closely to the conversation his dad was having.

“Redundant? God, no. No reason for that. I’ve a pile of work and the last thing on my mind is making anyone…Well, then, what did he say?…Finished? Finished?” Lew looked round the reception area, particularly at the clipboard on which the orders for boards were attached. There was a thick stack of them, the mark of longtime surfers’ respect for Lew Angarrack’s work. No computer design and computer shaping here, but the real thing, all of it done by hand. So few craftsmen could do what Lew did. They were a dying breed, their work an art form that would pass into surfing lore like the earliest long boards fashioned of wood. In their place would come the hollow-core boards, the computerised designs, everything programmed into a machine that would belch out a product no longer lovingly shaped by a master who rode waves himself and consequently knew what an extra channel or the degree of tilt of a fin would truly do to a board’s performance. It was a pity, really.

“Gone altogether?” Lew was saying. “Damn…No. There’s nothing more I can tell you. You seem to know more than I do anyway…I couldn’t say…I’ve been busy myself. He didn’t seem any different…I can’t say that I did.”

Shortly thereafter, he rang off and he spent a moment staring at the clipboard. “Jago’s gone, then,” he finally said.

“What d’you mean, gone?” Cadan asked. “For the day? Forever? Something happen to him?”

Lew shook his head. “He just left.”

“What? Casvelyn?”

“That’s it.”

“Who was that?” Cadan nodded at the phone although his father hadn’t looked at him to see the nod.

“Bloke Jago lives by in the caravan park. Talked to him as he was packing up but couldn’t get much sense out of him.” Lew took off his headphones and dropped them onto the table. He leaned against the counter with its display of fins, wax, and other paraphernalia, his hands supporting him and his head lowered as if he were studying what was inside the case. “Well, that buggers us,” he said.

A moment passed during which Cadan saw Lew reach up and rub his neck where it was no doubt sore from shaping the surfboard blanks. He said, “Good thing I came by, then.”

“Why’s that?”

“I c’n help you out.”

Lew raised his head. He said, “Cade, I’m far too tired to argue with you just now.”

“No. I don’t mean what you think,” Cadan told him. “I c’n see how you’d reckon I was seizing my moment: Now he’ll have to let me spray the boards. But that’s not what this is.”

“What is it, then?”

“Just…me helping you. I c’n shape if you like. Not as good as you but you can show me. Or I c’n glass. Or spray. Or do the hand sanding. Doesn’t matter to me.”

“And why would you want to do that, Cadan?”

Cadan shrugged. “You’re my dad,” he said. “Blood’s thicker than…well, you know.”

“What about Adventures Unlimited?”

“That didn’t work out.” Cadan saw his father’s expression alter to one of resignation. He hastened to add, “I know what you’re thinking but they didn’t sack me. It’s just that I’d rather work for you. We’ve got something here and we shouldn’t let it…die.”

Die. There was the frightening word. Cadan hadn’t realised just how frightening die actually was until this moment because he’d spent his life so focused on another word entirely and that word was leave. Yet trying to stay one step ahead of loss didn’t prevent loss from happening, did it? The Bounder still bounded and other people still walked away. As Cadan himself had done time and again before it could be done to him, as Cadan’s father had done for much the same reasons.

But some things endured in spite of one’s dread, and one of them was the blessing of blood.

“I want to help you,” Cadan said. “I’ve been playing it stupid. You’re the expert, after all, and I reckon you know how I can learn this business.”

“And that’s what you want to do? Learn this business?”

“Right,” Cadan said.

“What about the bike? The X Games or whatever they are?”

“At the moment, this is more important. I’ll do what I can to keep it important.” Cadan peered at his father closely then. “That good enough for you, Dad?”

“I don’t understand. Why would you want to do it, Cade?”

“Because of what I just called you, you nutter.”

“What was that?”

“Dad,” Cadan said.

SELEVAN HAD WATCHED JAGO drive off, and he wondered about all the time he’d spent with the bloke. He could come up with no answers to the questions that were filling his head. No matter how he looked at things, he couldn’t suss out what the other man had meant and something told him that the entire subject didn’t bear too much consideration anyway. He’d phoned LiquidEarth nonetheless in the hope that Jago’s employer might shed some light on the situation. But what he’d learned told him that whatever Jago had meant by finished, it wasn’t connected to surfboards. Beyond that, he realised he didn’t want to know. Perhaps he was being an out-and-out coward, but some things, he decided, were none of his business.

Tammy wasn’t one of them. He got into the car with all her possessions packed, and he drove to Clean Barrel Surf Shop. He didn’t go in at once to fetch her as there was time to dispense with before she closed the shop for the day. So he parked down on the wharf and he walked from there to Jill’s Juices where he purchased a takeaway coffee-extra strong.

Then he returned to the wharf where he walked the length of it on its north side, edging along the canal. Several fishing boats nudged the dock here, barely bobbing in the water. Mallards floated placidly near them-an entire family of them with mum and dad and, unbelievably, a dozen babies-and a kayaker paddled silently in the direction of Launceston, taking exercise in the late afternoon.

Selevan realised that it felt like spring. It had been spring for more than six weeks now, of course, but that had been a spring of the calendar until this point. This was a spring of weather. True, there was brisk wind off the sea, but it felt different, as the wind does when the weather shifts. On it the scent of newly turned earth came to him from someone’s garden, and he saw that in the window boxes of the town’s library, winter pansies had been replaced with petunias.

He walked to the end of the wharf, where the old canal lock was closed, holding back the water till someone wanted to go out to sea in one of the fishing boats. From this vantage point, he could see the town rising above him to the north, with the old Promontory King George Hotel-a place for adventurous tourists now-acting as doorman to a different world.

Things change, Selevan thought. That had proved the case in his life, even when it had seemed to him that nothing was ever going to change at all. He’d wanted a career in the Royal Navy to escape what he’d seen as a life of unfaltering drudgery, but the fact of the matter was that the details of that life had altered in minute ways, which led to big ways, which led to life not being drudgery at all if one just paid attention. His kids grew; he and the wife turned older; a bull was brought by to service the cows; calves were born; the sky was bright one day and threatening the next; David moved off to join the army; Nan ran off to marry…One could call it good or bad or one could just call it life. And life continued. A bloke didn’t get what he wanted all the time, and that’s just how it was. One could thrash about and hate that fact or one could cope. He’d seen that daft poster in the library one time and he’d scoffed at it: When life gives you lemons, make lemonade. Bloody stupid, he’d thought. But not really, he saw now. Not altogether.

He took a deep breath. One could taste the salt air in this spot. More than at Sea Dreams because Sea Dreams was way up on the cliff and here the sea was close, yards away, and it beat against the reefs and wore them down, patiently, drawn by the course of nature and physics or magnetic forces or whatever it was because he didn’t know and it didn’t matter.

He finished his takeaway coffee and crushed the cup in his hand. He carried this back to a bin and paused there to light a fag, which he smoked on the way to Clean Barrel. There, Tammy was working at the till. The cash drawer was open and she was counting up the day’s take, alone in the shop. She hadn’t heard him come in.

He observed her in silence. He saw Dot in her, which was odd, as he’d never seen the similarity before. But there it was, in the way she cocked her head and exposed an ear. And the shape of that ear…that little dip in the earlobe…it was Dot all right and he remembered that because…oh this was the worst of it, but he’d seen that earlobe time and again as he’d mounted her and done his loveless business on her and there couldn’t have been a scrap of pleasure in it for the poor woman, which he regretted now. He hadn’t loved her, but that hadn’t been a fault of hers, had it, although he’d blamed her for not being whatever it was he’d thought she should be in order for him to love her.

He harrumphed because things were dead tight inside him and a good harrumph had always loosened them up a bit. The noise made Tammy raise her head, and when she saw him, she looked a bit wary and who could blame her. They’d been having rather a dicey time of it. She’d not spoken to him other than in polite response to what he said to her since he’d found that letter under her mattress and waved it in her face.

“Shouldn’t be in here alone,” he told her.

“Why not?” She put her hands on either side of the cash drawer, and for a moment Selevan thought she was doing it because she expected him to leap on the funds and shove them down the front of his flannel shirt. But then she pulled it out altogether and carried it to the back room, where extra inventory and cleaning supplies and the like were kept along with an overlarge antique safe. She stowed the cash drawer inside this safe, slammed its door home, and twirled the combination lock. Then she shut the back room door, locked this as well, and put the key in a hidey spot that had been created for it on the underside of the telephone.

Selevan said to her, “Best ring up your guv, girl.” He was aware that his voice was gruff, but it was always gruff when he spoke to her, and he couldn’t make it any different.

She said, “Why?”

“Time to leave here.”

Her expression didn’t change, but her eyes did. The shape of them. Just like her auntie Nan, Selevan thought. Just like the time he’d told Nan that she could sodding shove off if she didn’t like the house rules, one of which was her dad deciding bloody who his daughter would see and when she would see him and believe you me, lass, it’s not going to be that yob with the motorbikes over my dead body. Five of them, mind you. Five bleeding motorbikes and every time he’d roar up on a new one with his fingernails all gone to grease and his knuckles blacked and who the bloody hell would have thought he’d make a go of it and create those…what did they call them? Choppings? Chopped? No, choppers. That was it. Choppers. Just like in America, where everyone was bloody crazy and rich enough to buy just about anything, weren’t they. This is what you want? he’d bellowed at Nan. This? This?

Tammy didn’t argue as Nan might have done. She didn’t storm round the shop and slam things about to make a scene. She said, “All right, then, Grandie,” and she sounded resigned. She added, “But I don’t take it back.”

“What’s that?”

“What I said before.”

Selevan frowned and tried to recall their last conversation which had been a conversation and not merely a request to pass the salt or the mustard or the bottle of brown sauce. He recalled her reaction when he’d waved the letter in her face. He said, “That. Well. Can’t be helped, can it.”

“Can be helped. But it doesn’t matter now. This doesn’t change anything, you know, no matter what you think.”

“What’s that?”

“This. Sending me off. Mum and Dad thought it would change things as well, when they made me leave Africa. But it won’t change a thing.”

“Think that, do you?”

“I know it.”

“I don’t mean the bit about leaving and the things changing in your head. I mean the bit about what I think.”

She looked confused. But then her expression altered in that quicksilver way of hers. Did every adolescent do that? he wondered.

“S’pose,” he said, “your grandie’s more’n he seems to be. Ever reckon that? I wager not. So collect your belongings and make that phone call to your guv. Tell him where you’ll leave the key and let’s shove off.”

Having said that, he left the shop. He watched the traffic coming up the Strand as townsfolk returned from their jobs in the industrial estate at the edge of town and farther away, as far as Okehampton, some of them. In time, Tammy joined him and he set off back towards the wharf with her trailing at a slower pace that he took as she likely meant it: reluctant cooperation with her grandfather’s plans for her.

He said to her, “Got your passport with you, I take it. How long’ve you had it out of its hidey place?”

She said, “A while.”

“What’d you mean to do with it?”

“Didn’t know at first.”

“But you do now, do you?”

“I was saving up.”

“For what?”

“To go to France.”

“France, is it? You heading for gay Paree?”

“Lisieux,” she said.

“Leer-what?”

“Lisieux. That’s where…you know…”

“Oh. A pilgrimage, is it? Or something more.”

“It doesn’t matter. I don’t have enough money yet anyway. But if I had it, I’d be gone from here.” She came up to his side then and walked along with him. She said as if finally relenting, “It’s nothing personal, Grandie.”

“Didn’t take it that way. But I’m glad you didn’t do a runner. Would’ve been a rough one to explain to your mum and dad. Off to France, she is, praying at the shrine of some saint that she read about in one of her sainty books that’s she’s not supposed to be reading anyways but I let her read cos I reckoned words’s not going to do much to her head one way or ’nother.”

“That’s not precisely true, you know.”

“Anyways, I’m glad you didn’t scarper cos they’d have my skin for that one, your mum and dad. You know that, don’t you?”

“Yes, but, Grandie, some things can’t be helped.”

“And this is one of them, is it?”

“That’s how it is.”

“Sure of it, are you? Because that’s what they all say when the cults get hold of them and send them out on the streets to beg money. Which they then take off them, by the way. So they’re trapped like rats on a sinking ship. You know that, don’t you? Some big guru with an eye for girls-just like you-who’re meant to have his babies like a sheik in a tent with two dozen wives. Or one of them, you know, polygammers.”

“Polygamists,” she said. “Oh, you really can’t think this is like that, Grandie. You’re joking about it. Only I don’t think it’s funny, see?”

They’d reached his car. She looked in the back as she got in, and she saw her old duffel bag. Her lip jutted out, but she drew it back in. Home to Africa, her expression said, which meant home to Mum and Dad until they thought of another plan to shake her resolve. They’d tick Send Her to Her Grandfather off their list and come up with the next idea. Something like Send Her to Siberia. Or Send Her to the Australian Bush.

She got into the car. She fastened her seat belt and crossed her arms. She looked stonily forward at the canal, and her expression didn’t soften even when she took in the ducklings and how their little webbed feet raised them above the water when they hastened to follow their mother, making them look like tiny runners on the surface of the canal, just the sort of harkening back to a miracle that Selevan reckoned she’d appreciate. She didn’t, however. She was concentrating on what she thought she knew: how long a drive it was to Heathrow or Gatwick and whether her plane left for Africa tonight or tomorrow. Likely tomorrow, which would mean a long night in a hotel somewhere. Perhaps even now she was making her plan to escape. Out of the hotel window or down the stairs and then to France by hook or by crook.

He wondered if he should let her think that was where he was taking her. But it seemed cruel to let the poor lass suffer. Truth of the matter was that she’d suffered enough. She’d held firm through everything that had been thrown at her and that had to mean something even if it meant what none of the rest of them could bear considering.

He said as he started up the car, “I made a phone call, I did. Day or two ago.”

She said dully, “Well, you’d have to, wouldn’t you.”

“Truth in that. They said come along. Wanted to talk to you as well, but I told ’em you were unavailable at present-”

“Ta for that, at least.” Tammy turned her head and examined the scenery. They were passing through Stratton, heading north on A39. There was no easy way to get out of Cornwall, but that had long been part of its draw. “I don’t much want to talk to them, Grandie. We’ve already said all there is to say.”

“Think that, do you?”

“We’ve talked and talked. We’ve rowed. I’ve tried to explain, but they don’t understand. They don’t want to understand. They’ve got their plans and I’ve got mine and that’s how it is.”

“Didn’t know you’d talked to them at all.” Selevan made his voice deliberately thoughtful, a man considering the ramifications of what his granddaughter was telling him.

“What d’you mean you didn’t know I’d talked to them?” Tammy demanded. “That’s all we did before I got here. I talked, Mum cried. I talked, Dad shouted. I talked, they argued with me. Only I didn’t want to argue because far as I can tell there’s nothing to argue about. You understand or you don’t, and they don’t. Well, how could they? I mean, Mum’s whole way of living should’ve told me she’d never be able to come onboard. A life of contemplation? Not very likely when your real interest is looking at fashion magazines and gossip magazines and wondering how you can make yourself into Posh Spice while you’re living in a place where, frankly, there’s not a whole lot of designer shops. And you weigh about fifteen stone more ’n she does anyway. Or whatever she’s called these days.”

“Who?”

“What d’you mean who? Posh Spice. Posh whoever. Mum has Hello! and OK! sent over by the lorry load, not to mention Vogue and Tatler and whatever else, and that’s her ambition. To look like all of them and to live like all of them and it’s not mine, Grandie, and it never will be, so you can send me home and nothing’ll be different. I don’t want what they want. I never have, and I never will.”

“I didn’t know you talked to them,” he repeated. “They said they’d not talked to you.”

“What do you mean?” She flung herself round in the seat so that she faced him.

“The Mother Whatever-she-is,” he said. “The abbot lady. What d’they call her?”

Tammy hesitated then. Her tongue came out and licked her lips and then her teeth caught the lower one and she sucked on it in a childlike reaction. Selevan felt his heart twist at the sight of this. So much of who she was was still a little girl. He could see how her parents couldn’t bear the thought of watching her disappear behind convent doors. Not this sort of convent at least, where no one emerged till they emerged in a coffin. It didn’t make sense to them. It was so…so un-girl-like, wasn’t it? She was supposed to care about pointy shoes with tall heels, about lipstick and hair thin-gummy dandershoots, about short skirts, long skirts, or in-between skirts, about jackets or not, waistcoats or not, about music and boys and film stars and when in her life she should lower her knickers for a bloke. But what she was not supposed to think about at the age of seventeen was the state of the world, war and peace, hunger and disease, poverty and ignorance. And what she definitely was never supposed to think about was sackcloth and ashes or whatever it was they wore, a small cell with a bed and a prayer stand and a cross, a set of rosary beads, and getting up at dawn and then praying and praying and praying and all the time locked away from the world.

Tammy said, “Grandie…” But she didn’t seem to trust herself to finish the sentence.

He said, “Tha’s who I am, girl. The granddad who loves you.”

“You phoned…?”

“Well, that’s what the letter said, didn’t it? Phone the Mother Whosis to arrange for a visit. Girls sometimes find they can’t cope, she said. They think there’s a romance to this kind of life, and I assure you there isn’t, Mr. Penrule. But we offer retreats to individuals and to groups and if she’d like to take part in one, we’d welcome her.”

Tammy’s eyes were Nan’s eyes once again, but Nan’s eyes as they should have been when she looked on her dad, not as they’d become as she’d listened to him rage. She said, “Grandie, you’re not taking me to the airport?”

“’Course not,” he said, as if it were the most reasonable thing in the world for him to fly in the face of her parents’ wishes and drive his granddaughter to the Scottish border to spend a week in a Carmelite convent. “They don’t know and they aren’t going to know.”

“But if I decide to stay…If I want to stay…If I find it’s what I think it is and what I need…You’ll have to tell them. And then what?”

“You let me worry about your parents,” he said.

“But they’ll never forgive you. If I decide…If I think it’s best, they’ll never agree. They’ll never think…”

“Girl,” Selevan said to his granddaughter, “they’ll think what they think.” He reached in the side compartment of his door and brought out an A to Z for the UK. He handed it over to her. He said, “Open that up. If we’re going to be driving all the way to Scotland, I’m going to need a bloody good navigator. Think you’re up for the job?”

Her smile was blinding. It crushed his heart. “I am,” she told him.

“Then let’s carry on.”

THE REACTION TO THE day’s events that stayed with Bea Hannaford the longest was the one that led her towards looking for someone to blame. She began with Ray. He seemed the most logical source of the difficulties that had resulted in a killer’s being able to walk blithely away from a murder charge. She told herself that had Ray only sent her the MCIT blokes she’d needed from the very beginning, she would not have had to rely on the TAG team he had sent her, men whose expertise was limited to heavy lifting and not to the finer points of a homicide investigation. She also would not have had to rely on Constable McNulty as part of that team, a man whose mad release of critical information to the dead boy’s family had put the police in a position of having virtually nothing that was known only to the killer and to themselves. Sergeant Collins, at least, she could live with, as he’d never left the station long enough to cause trouble. And as for DS Havers and Thomas Lynley…Bea wanted to blame them for something as well, if only for their infuriating loyalty to each other, but she didn’t have the heart to do so. Aside from withholding information about Daidre Trahair, which hadn’t turned out to be germane to the case anyway despite her own stubborn beliefs in the matter, they’d only done as she’d requested, more or less.

What she didn’t really want to consider was how everything came down to her in the end because she was, after all, in charge of the investigation and she had maintained a pigheaded position on more than one topic, from Daidre Trahair’s culpability to her own insistence upon an incident room here in the town and not where Ray had told her it should be, which was where incident rooms generally were, which was also where more adequate personnel were stationed. And she’d held firm to that desire to work in Casvelyn and not elsewhere simply because Ray had told her she was wrong to do so.

So while it all came down to Ray in the end, it also came down to her. This sort of thing put her future on the line.

No case to present. Were there four worse words? Oh, perhaps, our marriage is over were equally bad and God knew enough coppers heard those words spoken by a spouse who couldn’t take the life of a cop’s partner any longer. But no case to present meant leaving a bereaved family in the lurch, with no one brought to justice. It meant despite the long hours, the slog, the sifting through data, the forensics reports, the interviews, the discussions, the arranging of this piece that way and that piece this way, there was nothing left to do save begin the entire process again and hope for a different result or to leave the case open and declare it cold. Only how could it be cold, really, when they knew very well who the killer was and he was going to walk away? That was hardly a cold case. A cold case still shone with a glimmer of hope should something more turn up, whereas this case shone not in the slightest. The regional force might well ask her what she needed to make things right in Casvelyn, but that was more or less in her dreams because what the regional force were far more likely to ask was how she’d cocked this up so badly.

Ray was how, she told herself. Ray had no interest in her success. He was out to get her for almost fifteen years of estrangement, no matter that he’d brought them about himself.

For want of another direction, she told the team to start sifting through the data again, to see what they could come up with to pin Jago Reeth, aka Jonathan Parsons, to the wall of murder charge. What, she asked them, did they have that could be handed to the CPS, that could light the fire beneath those Crown prosecutors and set them off? There had to be something. So they’d begin this process on the following day and in the meantime they should all go home and get a decent night’s rest because they’d not be sleeping much till they had this matter sorted. Then she followed her own prescription.

When she got to Holsworthy, she opened the cupboard in which she kept her brooms, her mops, and also her wines. She chose a bottle at random and carried it to the kitchen. Red, she discovered. Shiraz. Something from South Africa called Old Goats Roam in Villages. That sounded interesting. She couldn’t recall when or where she’d bought it, but she was fairly certain she’d made the purchase solely because of the name and the label.

She opened it, poured herself a brimming mug, and she sat at the table where her position forced her to contemplate her calendar. This proved to be as depressing as thinking about the last six days, once she considered her most recent Internet date, which had occurred nearly four weeks previously. An architect. He’d looked good on the screen and he’d sounded good on the phone. A bit of chit and a bit of chat and nervous laughter and all that rubbish but that was to be expected, right? After all, this wasn’t the normal way men and women met, whatever went for normal these days, because she didn’t know any longer. A cup of coffee, perhaps? they’d asked each other. A drink somewhere? Certainly, fine. He’d showed up with photos of his holiday home, more photos of his holiday boat, extra photos of his holiday on skis, and additional photos of his car, which may or may not have been a vintage Mercedes, because by the time they’d got to it, Bea hadn’t cared. Me, me, me, his conversation had declared. All me, baby, and all the time. She’d wanted either to weep or to sleep. By the end of the evening, she’d had two martinis and she shouldn’t have driven herself anywhere, but the desire to flee had overcome her sense, so she’d puttered carefully along the road and prayed she’d not get stopped. He’d said to her with an affable smile, “Hell. Talked only about myself, didn’t I? Well, next time…,” and she’d thought, Won’t be a next time, darling. Which was what she’d thought of all of them.

God, how wretched. This couldn’t be how life was meant to be lived. And now…she couldn’t even dredge up his name, just the moniker she’d given him, Boat Wanker, which distinguished him from all the other wankers. Was there a way, she wondered, to find a man in her age group without baggage, or a man who might be a person first and a profession leading up to the acquisition of countless possessions second? She was beginning to think not, unless that man was one of a score of divorcés she’d also met, blokes with nothing to their names but a heap of a car, a bed-sit, and a mountain of credit card bills. Yet there had to be something in between those two extremes of male availability. Or was this how one’s remaining years were intended to go when an unmarried woman reached what had once been coyly referred to as “a certain age”?

Bea downed her wine. She ought to eat, she thought. She wasn’t sure if there was anything in the fridge, but certainly she could rustle up a tin of soup. Or perhaps a few of those beef sticks Pete liked for snacks? An apple? Perhaps. A jar of peanut butter? Well, certainly there was Marmite to spread on mouldy bread. This was England, after all.

She dragged herself to her feet. She opened the fridge. She stared into its cold and heartless depths. There was sticky toffee sponge, she discovered, so she could check pudding off her menu list. And far in the back was an old minced beef and onion roll. This could do as a main course. Now for the starter…? Perhaps Pot Noodle? In the veg department, there had to be a tin of something…Chickpeas? Carrots and turnips? Bea wondered what she’d been thinking when she’d last done the shopping. Probably nothing, she decided. She’d likely been pushing the trolley along the aisles without an idea in her head as to what she might cook. The thought of proper nutrition for Pete had probably prompted a spontaneous visit to the market, but once there, she’d got distracted by something like a call on her mobile and the end result was…this.

She took out the sticky toffee sponge and decided to skip the starter, the entrée, and the veg altogether, getting right down to the pudding, which, after all, everyone knew was the best part of the meal and why should she deny herself that when she wanted cheering up and this had the best potential to do the job?

She was about to tuck into it when bim bim BIM boom BOOM sounded on her front door, followed by the scrape of Ray’s key in the lock. He came in talking. He was saying, “…spirit of compromise, mate,” to which Pete replied, “Pizza is a compromise, Dad, when one’s set on McDonald’s.”

“Don’t you dare buy him a Big Mac,” Bea called.

“You see?” Ray said. “Mum quite agrees.”

They came into the kitchen. They were wearing matching baseball caps, and Pete had his Arsenal sweatshirt on. Ray was in jeans and a paint-stained windcheater. Pete’s jeans had a great hole in the knee.

“Where’re the dogs?” Bea asked them.

“Back at home,” Ray said. “We’ve been-”

“Mum, Dad found this wicked paintball place,” Pete announced. “It was fantastic. Kapowee!” He mimicked shooting his father. “Blim! Blam! Bash! You put on these boiler suits and they load you up and off you go. I got him so good, didn’t I, Dad? I snuck round-”

“Sneaked,” Bea corrected patiently. She watched their son, and she didn’t resist the smile that came to her as he demonstrated the stealth whereby he’d managed to obliterate his father with paint. It was just the sort of game she’d always sworn to herself that her son wouldn’t play: a mimicry of war. And yet, in the end, wouldn’t boys always be just that?

“You didn’t think I’d be that good, did you?” Pete asked his father, playfully punching him in the arm.

Ray reached out, hooked his arm round Pete’s neck, and pulled him over. He planted a loud kiss on his son’s head and rubbed his knuckles through Pete’s thick hair. “Go get what you came for, Paintball Wizard,” he told him. “We’ve got dinner to attend to.”

“Pizza!”

“Curry or Chinese. That’s the best I’ll offer. Or we can have calves’ liver and onions at home. Served with sprouts and broad beans on the side.”

Pete laughed. He darted out of the room and they heard him dash up the stairs.

“He wanted his CD player,” Ray told Bea. He smiled as they listened to Pete crashing about his room. “Truth is, he wants an iPod and he thinks if he demonstrates how many CDs he’s got to carry round with him when he could be carrying this device the size of…what size are they? I can’t keep up with technology.”

“These days that’s what kids are for. When it comes to technology, I’m utterly out of the loop without Pete.”

Ray watched her for a moment as she spooned up a portion of sticky toffee sponge. She saluted him with it. He said, “Why do I think that’s your dinner, Beatrice?”

“Because you’re a cop.”

“So it is?”

“Hmm.”

“Are you on the fly?”

“Wish,” she said. “But that’s not the word I’d choose to describe where I am or where the case is.”

She decided to tell him. He was going to learn it all sooner or later, so it might as well be sooner and from her. She gave him all the details and waited for his reaction. “Damn,” he said. “That’s a real…” He seemed to look for a word.

“Cock-up?” she offered. “Generated by yours truly?”

“I wasn’t going to say that, exactly.”

“But you were thinking it.”

“The cock-up part, yes. Not the part about you.”

Bea turned away from the expression of friendly compassion on his face. She stared at the window that in daylight would have looked upon a bit of her garden, or what went for her garden, which, she knew, should have been mulched by this time of the year but was instead offering itself to whatever stray seeds were dropped by skylarks and linnets in flight. Those seeds were germinating into weeds, and in another month or two she’d have a right royal mess of work on her hands. Good thing all she saw in the window was her reflection and Ray’s behind her, she thought. They provided a bit of distraction from the work she’d created for herself through lack of attention to her garden.

She said, “I was set to blame you.”

“For?”

“The cock-up. Inadequate incident room. No MCIT blokes for love or money. There I am, hanging out to dry with Constable McNulty and Sergeant Collins and whomever you deign to send me-”

“That’s not how it was.”

“Oh, I know that.” Her voice was weary because she was weary. She felt as if she’d been swimming upstream for far too long. “And I’m the one who sent Constable McNulty to tell the Kernes the death was murder. I thought he’d use sense but of course I was wrong. And then when I’d learned what he’d told them, I thought we’d surely uncover something more, some scrap, some detail…It didn’t matter what it was. Just something useful as a trip wire for the moment the killer came sauntering by. But we didn’t.”

“You may still.”

“I doubt it. Unless you count a remark made about a surfing poster, which isn’t likely to amount to anything in the eyes of the CPS.” She set down the container of sponge. “I’ve told myself for years there’s no perfect murder. Forensic science is too advanced. As long as there’s a body to be found, there are too many tests, too many experts. No one can kill and leave not a single trace of himself behind. It’s impossible. Simply can’t be done.”

“There’s truth in that, Beatrice.”

“But what I failed to see is the loopholes. All the ways a killer could plan and organise and commit this…this ultimate crime…and do it in such a way that every bit of it could be explained. Even the most minute forensic bits could be deemed a rational part of one’s daily life. I didn’t see that. Why didn’t I see that?”

“Perhaps you had other things on your mind. Distractions.”

“Such as?”

“Other parts of your own life. You do have other parts to your life, no matter your attempts to deny that.”

She wanted to avoid. “Ray…”

Clearly, he didn’t intend to let her. “You’re not a cop to the exclusion of everything else,” he said. “Good God, Beatrice, you’re not a machine.”

“I wonder about that sometimes.”

“Well, I don’t.”

A blast of music came from upstairs: Pete deciding among his CDs. They listened for a moment to the shriek of an electric guitar. Pete liked his music historical. Jimi Hendrix was his favourite, although in a pinch Duane Allman and his medicine bottle would do just fine.

“God,” Ray said. “Get that lad an iPod.”

She smiled, then chuckled. “He’s something, that child.”

“Our child, Beatrice,” Ray declared quietly.

She didn’t reply. Instead, she took the sticky toffee sponge and tossed it in the rubbish. She washed the spoon she’d been using and set it on the draining board.

Ray said, “Can we talk about it now?”

“You do choose your moments, don’t you?”

“Beatrice, I’ve wanted to talk about it for ages. You know that.”

“I do. But at the present time…You’re a cop and a good one. You can see how I am. Get the suspect in a weak moment. Create the weak moment if you can. It’s elementary stuff, Ray.”

“This isn’t.”

“What?”

“Elementary. Beatrice, how many ways can a man say to you that he was wrong? And how many ways can you say to a man that forgiveness isn’t part of your…what? Your repertoire? When I thought that Pete shouldn’t be-”

“Don’t say it.”

“I have to say it and you have to listen. When I thought that Pete shouldn’t be born…When I said you should abort-”

“You said that’s what you wanted.”

“I said lots of things. I say lots of things. And some of them I say without thinking. Especially when I’m…”

“What?”

“I don’t know. Frightened, I suppose.”

“Of a baby? We’d already had one.”

“Not of that. But of change. The difference it would make in our lives as we had them arranged.”

“Things happen.”

“I understand. And I would have come to understand that then if you’d allowed me the time to-”

“It wasn’t only a single discussion, Ray.”

“Yes. All right. I won’t claim it was. But I will say that I was wrong. In every discussion we had, I was wrong, and I’ve grieved over that…that wrongness, if you will, for years. Fourteen of them, to be exact. More if you include the pregnancy itself. I didn’t want it this way. I don’t want it this way.”

“And…them?” she asked. “You had your diversions.”

“What? Women? For God’s sake, Beatrice, I’m not a monk. Yes, there were women over the years. A whole bloody succession of them. Janice and Sheri and Sharon and Linda and whoever else, because I don’t remember them all. And I don’t remember them because I didn’t want them. I wanted to blot out…this.” He indicated the kitchen, the house, the people within it. “So what I’m asking you is to let me back in because this is where I belong and both of us know it.”

“Do we?”

“We do. Pete knows it as well. So do the bloody dogs.”

She swallowed. It would be so easy…But then again, it wouldn’t. The stuff of men and women together was never easy.

“Mum!” Pete was shouting from upstairs. “Where’d you put my Led Zepppelin CD?”

“Lord,” Bea murmured with a shudder. “Someone, please, get that lad an iPod at once.”

“Mum! Mummy!”

She said to Ray, “I love it when he still calls me that. He doesn’t, often. He’s becoming so grown-up.” She called back, “Don’t know, darling. Check under your bed. And while you’re at it, put any clothes you find there in the laundry. And bring old cheese sandwiches down to the rubbish. Detach the mice from them, first.”

“Very funny,” he shouted and continued to bang about. He said, “Dad! Make her tell me. Make her. She knows where it is. She hates it and she’s hidden it somewhere.”

Ray called to him, “Son, I learned long ago that I can’t make this madwoman do anything.” Then he said to her quietly, “Can I, my dear. Because if I could, you know what it would be.”

She said, “That you can’t.”

“To my eternal regret.”

She thought about his words, those he’d just said and those he’d said before. She said to him, “Not really eternal. Not exactly that.”

She heard him swallow. “Do you mean it, Beatrice?”

“I suppose I do.”

They looked at each other, the window behind them doubling the image of man and woman and the hesitant step each of them took towards the other at precisely the same moment. Pete came pounding down the stairs. He shouted, “Found it! Ready to go, Dad.”

“Are you as well?” Ray asked Bea quietly.

“For dinner?”

“And for what follows dinner.”

She drew a long breath that matched his own. “I think I am,” she told him.