Careless in Red

Chapter Three

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I rather thought I just had.”

“If you’d fallen-”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Daidre said, “No. It’s fine.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What d’you do in Bristol?”

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

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

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

“What? Off Polcare Cove?”

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

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

“From the south,” he said. And to Hannaford, “The weather didn’t seem right to me. For surfing. The tide was wrong as well. The reefs weren’t covered completely. If a surfer came too close to them…Someone could get hurt.”

“Someone did get hurt,” Hannaford pointed out. “Someone got killed.”

“But not surfing,” Daidre said. Then she wondered why she’d said it because it sounded to her as if she were interceding for Thomas when that hadn’t been her intention.

Hannaford said to both of them, “Like to play detectives, do you? Is it a hobby of yours?” She didn’t seem to expect a response to this. She went on to Thomas, saying, “Constable McNulty tells me you helped him move the body. I’ll want your clothes for forensics. Your outer clothes. Whatever you had on at the time, which I presume is what you have on now.” And to Daidre, “Did you touch the body?”

“I checked for a pulse.”

“Then I’ll want your outer clothing as well.”

“I’ve nothing to change into, I’m afraid,” Thomas said.

“Nothing?” Again, Hannaford looked from the man to Daidre. It came to Daidre that the detective had assumed that she and the stranger were a couple. She supposed there was some logic in this. They’d gone for help together. They were together still. And neither of them had said anything to dissuade her from this conclusion. Hannaford said, “Exactly who might you two be and what brings you to this corner of the world?”

Daidre said, “We’ve given our details to the sergeant.”

“Humour me.”

“I’ve told you. I’m a veterinarian.”

“Your practise?”

“At the zoo in Bristol. I’ve just come down this afternoon for a few days. Well, for a week this time.”

“Odd time of year for a holiday.”

“For some, I suppose. But I prefer my holidays when there are no crowds.”

“What time did you leave Bristol?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t actually look. It was morning. Perhaps nine. Ten. Half past.”

“Stop along the way?”

Daidre tried to work out how much the detective needed to know. She said, “Well…briefly, yes. But it hardly has to do with-”

“Where?”

“What?”

“Where did you stop?”

“For lunch. I’d had no breakfast. I don’t, usually. Eat breakfast, that is. I was hungry, so I stopped.”

“Where?”

“There was a pub. It’s not a place I usually stop. Not that I usually stop, but there was a pub and I was hungry and it said ‘pub meals’ out front, so I went in. This would be after I left the M5. I can’t remember its name. The pub’s. I’m sorry. I don’t think I even looked at the name. It was somewhere outside Crediton. I think.”

“You think. Interesting. What did you eat?”

“A ploughman’s.”

“What sort of cheese?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t pay attention. It was a ploughman’s. Cheese, bread, pickle, onion. I’m a vegetarian.”

“Of course you are.”

Daidre felt her temper flare. She hadn’t done anything, but the detective was making her feel as if she had. She said with some attempt at dignity, “I find that it’s rather difficult to care for animals on the one hand and eat them on the other, Inspector.”

“Of course you do,” DI Hannaford said thinly. “Do you know the dead boy?”

“I believe I already answered that question.”

“I seem to have lost the plot on that one. Tell me again.”

“I didn’t get a good look at him, I’m afraid.”

“And I’m afraid that isn’t what I asked you.”

“I’m not from around here. As I said, this is a getaway place for me. I come on the occasional weekend. Bank holidays. Longer holidays. I know a few people but mostly those who live close by.”

“This boy doesn’t live close by?”

“I don’t know him.” Daidre could feel the perspiration on her neck and she wondered if it was on her face as well. She wasn’t used to speaking to the police, and speaking to the police under these circumstances was especially unnerving.

A sharp double knock sounded on the front door then. But before anyone made a move to answer it, they heard it open. Two male voices-one of them the voice of Sergeant Collins-came from the entry, just ahead of the men themselves. Daidre was expecting the other to be the pathologist who Inspector Hannaford had indicated was on the way, but this was apparently not the case. Instead, the newcomer-tall, grey haired, and attractive-nodded to them and said to Hannaford, “Where’ve you got him stowed, then?” to which she answered, “He’s not in the car?”

The man shook his head. “As it happens, no.”

Hannaford said, “That bloody child. I swear. Thanks for coming at short notice, Ray.” Then she spoke to Daidre and Thomas. To Daidre she repeated, “I’ll want your clothes, Dr. Trahair. Sergeant Collins will bag them, so sort yourself out about that.” And to Thomas, “When SOCO arrives, we’ll get you a boiler suit to change into. In the meantime, Mr… I don’t know your name.”

“Thomas,” he said.

“Mr. Thomas, is it? Or is Thomas your Christian name?”

He hesitated. Daidre thought for a moment that he meant to lie, because that was what it looked like. And he could lie, couldn’t he, since he had no identification with him. He could say he was absolutely anyone. He looked at the coal fire as if meditating on all the possibilities. Then he looked back at the detective. “Lynley,” he said. “It’s Thomas Lynley.”

There was a silence. Daidre looked from Thomas to the detective, and she saw the expression alter on Hannaford’s face. The face of the man she’d called Ray altered as well, and oddly enough, he was the one to speak. What he said was completely baffling to Daidre:

“New Scotland Yard?”

Thomas Lynley hesitated once again. Then he swallowed. “Until recently,” he said. “Yes. New Scotland Yard.”

“OF COURSE I KNOW who he is,” Bea Hannaford said tersely to her former husband. “I don’t live under a stone.” It was just like Ray to make the pronouncement as if from on high. Impressed with himself, he was. Devon and Cornwall Constabulary. Middlemore. Mr. Assistant Chief Constable. A pencil pusher, really, as far as Bea was concerned. Never had a promotion affected anyone’s demeanour so maddeningly. “The only question is, what the hell is he doing here, of all places?” she went on. “Collins tells me he isn’t even carrying identification with him. So he could be anyone, couldn’t he?”

“Could be. But he isn’t.”

“How d’you know? Have you met him?”

“I don’t need to have met him.”

Another indication of self-satisfaction. Had he always been like this and had she never seen it? Had she been so blinded by love or whatever it had been that had propelled her into marriage with this man? She hadn’t been ageing and Ray her only chance at having a home and family. She’d been twenty-one. And they had been happy, hadn’t they? Until Pete, they’d had their lives in order: one child only-a daughter-and that had been something of a disappointment, but Ginny had given them a grandchild soon enough into her own marriage and she was at this moment on her way to giving them more. Retirement had been beckoning them from the future and all the things they planned to do with retirement had been beckoning as well… And then there was Pete, a complete surprise. Pleasant to her, unpleasant to Ray. The rest was history.

“Actually,” Ray said in that way he had of outing himself, which had always made her forgive him in the end for his worst displays of self-importance, “I saw in the paper that he comes from round here. His family are in Cornwall. The Penzance area.”

“So he’s come home.”

“Hmm. Yes. Well, after what happened, who can blame him for wanting to be done with London?”

“Bit far from Penzance, here, though.”

“Perhaps home and family didn’t give him what he needed. Poor sod.”

Bea glanced at Ray. They were walking from the cottage to the car park, skirting his Porsche, which he’d left-foolishly, she thought, but what did it matter since she wasn’t responsible for the vehicle-half on and half off the lane. His voice was moody and his face was moody. She could see that in the dying light of the day.

“It touched you, all that, didn’t it?” she said.

“I’m not made of stone, Beatrice.”

He wasn’t, that. The problem for her was that his all too compelling humanity made hating him an impossibility. And she would have vastly preferred to hate Ray Hannaford. Understanding him was far too painful.

“Ah,” Ray said. “I think we’ve located our missing child.” He indicated the cliff rising ahead of them to their right, beyond the Polcare Cove car park. The coastal path climbed in a narrow stripe sliced into the rising land, and descending from the top of the cliff were two figures. The one in front was lighting the way through the rain and the gloom with a torch. Behind him a smaller figure picked out a route among the rain-slicked stones that jutted from the ground where the path had been inadequately cleared.

“That bloody child,” Bea said. “He’s going to be the death of me.” She shouted, “Get the hell down from there, Peter Hannaford. I told you to stay in the car and I damn well meant it and you bloody well know it. And you, Constable. What the hell are you doing, letting a child-”

“They can’t hear you, love,” Ray said. “Let me.” He bellowed Pete’s name. He gave an order only a fool would have failed to obey. Pete scurried down the remainder of the path and had his excuse ready by the time he joined them.

“I didn’t go near the body,” he said. “You said I wasn’t meant to go near and I didn’t. Mick c’n tell you that. All I did was go up the path with him. He was-”

“Stop splitting hairs with your mother,” Ray told him.

Bea said, “You know how I feel when you do that, Pete. Now say hello to your father and get out of here before I wallop you the way you need to be walloped.”

“Hullo,” Pete said. He stuck out his hand for a shake. Ray accommodated him. Bea looked away. She wouldn’t have allowed a handshake. She would have grabbed the boy and kissed him.

Mick McNulty came up behind them. “Sorry, Guv,” he said. “I didn’t know-”

“No harm done.” Ray put his hands on Pete’s shoulders and firmly turned him in the direction of the Porsche. “I thought we’d do Thai food,” he said to his son.

Pete hated Thai food, but Bea left them to sort that out for themselves. She shot Pete a look that he could not fail to read: Not here, it said. He made a face.

Ray kissed Bea on the cheek and said, “Take care of yourself.”

She said, “Mind how you go, then. Roads’re slick.” And then because she couldn’t help herself, “I didn’t say before. You’re looking well, Ray.”

He replied, “Lot of good it’s doing me,” and walked off with their son. Pete stopped at Bea’s car. He brought forth his football shoes. Bea didn’t call out to tell him to let them be.

Instead she said to Constable McNulty, “So. What’ve we got?”

McNulty gestured towards the top of the cliff. “Rucksack up there for SOCO to bag. I expect it’s the kid’s.”

“Anything else?”

“Evidence of how the poor sod went down. I left it for SOCO as well.”

“What is it?”

“There’s a stile up top, some ten feet or so back from the edge of the cliff. Marks the far west end of a cow pasture up there. He’d put a sling round it, which was supposed to be what his carabiner and rope were fixed to for the abseil down the cliff.”

“What sort of sling?”

“Made of nylon webbing. Looks like fishing net if you don’t know what you’re looking at. It’s supposed to be a long loop. You drape it round a fixed object and each end is fastened with the carabiner, making the loop into a circle. You attach your rope to the carabiner and off you go.”

“Sounds straightforward.”

“Should have been. But the sling’s been taped together-presumably over a weak spot to strengthen it-and that’s exactly where it’s failed.” McNulty gazed back the way he’d come. “Bloody idiot. I can’t think why anyone’d just not get himself another sling.”

“What kind of tape was used for the repair?”

McNulty looked at her as if surprised by the question. “Electrical tape, this was.”

“Kept your digits off it?”

“’Course.”

“And the rucksack?”

“It was canvas.”

“I reckoned as much,” Bea said patiently. “Where was it? Why do you presume it was his? Did you have a look inside?”

“Next to the stile, so I reckon it was his all right. He probably carried his kit in it. Nothing in it now but a set of keys.”

“Car?”

“I reckon.”

“Did you have a look for it?”

“Thought it best to report back to you.”

“Think another time, Constable. Get back up there and find me the car.”

He looked towards the cliff. His expression told her how little he wanted to make a second climb up there in the rain. Well, that couldn’t be helped. “Up you go,” she told him pleasantly. “The exercise will do you a world of good.”

“Thought p’rhaps I ought to go by way of the road. It’s a few miles, but-”

“Up you go,” she repeated. “Keep an eye out along the trail as well. There may be footprints not already destroyed by the rain.” Or by you, she thought.

McNulty did not look happy, but he said, “Will do, Guv,” and set off back the way he’d come with Pete.

KERRA KERNE WAS EXHAUSTED and soaked to the skin because she’d broken her primary rule: Head into the wind on the first half of the ride; have the wind at your back on your route home. But she’d been in a hurry to be gone from Casvelyn, so for the first time in longer than she could remember, she hadn’t checked the Internet before donning her cycling kit and pedaling out of town. She’d just set off in her Lycra and her helmet. She’d clicked into the pedals and pumped so furiously that she was ten miles out of Casvelyn before she actually clocked her location. Then it was the location alone that she took into consideration and not the wind, which had been her error. She’d just kept riding vaguely east. When the weather rolled in, she was too far away to do anything to escape it other than seek shelter, which she did not want to do. Hence, muscle weary and bone wet, she struggled with the last of the thirty-five miles she needed to cover on her return.

She blamed Alan, blind and foolish Alan Cheston, who was supposed to be her life partner, with all that being a life partner implied, but who’d decided to go his own bloody-minded way in the one situation that she couldn’t countenance. And she blamed her father who was also blind and foolish-as well as stupid-but in a completely different manner and for a completely different set of reasons.

At least ten months earlier, she’d said to Alan, “Please don’t do this. It won’t work out. It’ll be-”

And he’d cut into her words, which he rarely did, which should have told her something about him that she hadn’t yet learned, but which did not. “Why won’t it work out? We won’t even see each other much, if that’s what worries you.”

It wasn’t what worried her. She knew what he was saying was true. He’d be doing whatever one did in the marketing department-which was less a department and more an old conference room located behind what used to be the reception desk in the mouldy hotel-and she’d be doing her thing with the trainee instructors. He’d be sorting out the chaos that her mother had wrought as the nominal director of the nonexistent marketing department while she-Kerra-tried to hire suitable employees. They might see each other at morning coffee or at lunch, but they might well not. So rubbing elbows with him at work and then rubbing other body parts later in the day was not what concerned her.

He’d said, “Don’t you see, Kerra, that I’ve got to get some solid employment in Casvelyn? And this is it. Jobs aren’t dangling from trees round here, and it was decent of your dad to offer it to me. I’m not about to look a gift horse.”

Her father was hardly a gift horse, Kerra thought, and decency had nothing to do with why he’d offered the marketing job to Alan. He’d made the offer because they needed someone to promote Adventures Unlimited to the masses but they also needed a certain kind of someone to do that marketing, and Alan Cheston appeared to be the kind of someone Kerra’s father had been looking for.

Her father was deciding based on appearance. To him, Alan was a type. Or perhaps better said, Alan was not a type. Her father thought the type to be avoided at Adventures Unlimited was a manly sort: grit under the fingernails, throw a woman across the bed, and have her till she saw stars. What he didn’t understand-and had never understood-was that there actually was no type. There was just maleness. And despite the rounding of his shoulders, the spectacles, the bobbling Adam’s apple, the delicate hands with those long, probing spatulate fingers, Alan Cheston was male. He thought like a male, he acted like a male, and most important, he reacted like a male. That was why Kerra had put her foot down, which had ultimately done no good because she wouldn’t say more than, “It won’t work out.” That proving useless, she’d done the only thing she could do in the situation, which was to tell him they’d likely have to end their relationship. To this, he’d calmly replied without the slightest tinge of panic to his words, “So that’s what you do when you don’t get what you want? You just cut people off?”

“Yes,” she’d declared, “that’s what I do. And it’s not when I don’t get what I want. It’s when they won’t listen to what I’m saying for their own good.”

“How can it be for my own good not to take the job? It’s money. It’s a future. Isn’t that what you want?”

“Apparently not,” she’d told him.

Still, she hadn’t quite been able to make good on her threat because in part she couldn’t imagine what it would be like to have to work with Alan daily but not see him nightly. She was weak in this and she despised her weakness, especially when she’d chosen him primarily because he’d seemed like the weak one: considerate, which she’d taken for malleable, and gentle, which she’d taken for diffident. That he’d proved himself exactly the opposite since coming to work at Adventures Unlimited scared the hell out of her.

One way to terminate her fear was to confront it, which meant confronting Alan himself. But really, how could she? So at first she’d fumed, and then she’d waited, watched, and listened. The inevitable was just that-inevitable-and since it had always been that way, she spent the time attempting to harden herself, becoming remote within while playing the part of certain without.

She’d carried the act off until today, when his announcement of “I’ll be gone a few hours down the coast” sent the sirens off in her brain. At that point her only choice was to ride fast and far, to exhaust herself beyond thinking so that she exhausted herself beyond caring as well. Thus, despite her other responsibilities that day, she’d gone on her way: along St. Mevan Crescent and over to Burn View, down the slope of Lansdown Road and the Strand, and from there out of town.

She’d kept riding eastward, long after she should have turned back for home. For this reason, darkness had fallen by the time she’d geared down to make the final climb up the Strand. Shops were closed; restaurants were open although meagerly peopled at this time of year. A dispirited line of bunting crisscrossed the street, dripping water, and the lone traffic light at the crest of the hill cast a streak of red in her direction. No one was out on the soaked pavement, but in another two months that would all change when summer visitors filled Casvelyn to take advantage of its two broad beaches, of its surf, of its sea pool, of its fun fair, and-one hoped-of the experiences offered by Adventures Unlimited.

This holiday business was her father’s dream: taking the abandoned hotel-a 1933 derelict structure sitting on a promontory above St. Mevan Beach-and turning it into an activities-oriented destination. It was an enormous risk for the Kernes, and if it didn’t work out, they’d be destitute. But her father was a man who’d taken risks in the past and had seen them bear fruit because the one thing he wasn’t afraid of in life was hard work. As to other things in her father’s life…Kerra had spent too many years asking why and receiving no answers.

At the top of the hill, she turned into St. Mevan Crescent. From there, along a line of old B and Bs, older hotels, a Chinese takeaway, and a newsagent’s shop, she reached the driveway to what had once been the Promontory King George Hotel and what was now Adventures Unlimited. The old hotel stood, barely illuminated, with scaffolding fronting it. Lights were on in the ground floor, but not at the top where the family quarters were.

In front of the entry, a police car was parked. Kerra drew her eyebrows together when she saw it. At once she thought of Alan. She didn’t consider her brother at all.

BEN KERNE’S OFFICE AT Adventures Unlimited was on the first floor of the old hotel. He’d fashioned it out of a single that had once undoubtedly been used by a lady’s maid, since directly next door to it-and formerly with an adjoining door-was a suite. That he’d had converted to a unit suitable for one of the holidaying families upon whom he’d bet his economic future.

The time had seemed right to Ben for this, his biggest venture ever. His children were older and at least one of them-Kerra-was self-sufficient and completely capable of obtaining gainful employment elsewhere should this venture go under. Santo was a different matter, for more than one reason that Ben preferred not to consider, but he had become more dependable of late, thank God, as if he finally understood the weighty nature of their undertaking. So Ben had felt the family was with him. It wouldn’t be just himself upon whose shoulders the responsibility rested. They were fully two years into it now: the conversion complete save for the exterior painting and a few final interior details. By the middle of June, they would be up and running. The bookings had been coming in for several months.

Ben was looking through these when the police arrived. Although the bookings represented the fruits of his family’s labours, he hadn’t been thinking of this or really even thinking of them at all: the bookings. Instead he’d been thinking of red. Not red as being in the red, which he certainly was and would be for any number of years until the business earned back what he’d spent upon it, but red as in the colour of nail varnish or lipstick, of a scarf or a blouse, of a dress that hugged the body.

Dellen had been wearing red for five days. First had come the nail varnish. Lipstick had followed. Then a jaunty beret over her blond hair when she went out. Soon, he expected a red sweater would top snug black trousers as it also revealed just a bit of cleavage. Ultimately, she would wear the dress, which would show more cleavage as well as her thighs, and by that time, she’d be in full sail and his children would be looking at him as they had looked at him forever: waiting for him to do something in a situation in which he could do nothing at all. Despite their ages-eighteen and twenty-two-Santo and Kerra still persisted in thinking that he was capable of changing their mother. When he did not do so, having failed at the effort when he was even younger than they were now, he saw the why in their eyes, or at least in Kerra’s eyes. Why do you put up with her?

When Ben heard the slam of a car door, then, he thought of Dellen. When he went to the window and saw it was a police car below and not his wife’s old BMW, he still thought of Dellen. Later, he realised that thinking of Kerra would have been more logical since she’d been gone for hours on her bicycle in weather that had been growing ever worse since two o’clock. But Dellen had been the centre of his thoughts for twenty-eight years and since Dellen had gone off at noon and had not yet returned, he assumed she’d got herself into trouble.

He left his office and went to the ground floor. When he got to reception, a uniformed constable was standing there, looking about for someone and no doubt surprised to find the front door unlocked and the place virtually deserted. The constable was male, young, and vaguely familiar. He’d be from the town, then. Ben was getting to know who lived in Casvelyn and who was from the outlying area.

The constable introduced himself: Mick McNulty, he said. And you are, sir…?

Benesek Kerne, Ben told him. Was something wrong? Ben switched on more lights. The automatic ones had come on with the end of daylight, but they cast shadows everywhere, and Ben found he wanted to dispel those shadows.

Ah, McNulty said. Could he speak to Mr. Kerne, then?

Ben realised the constable meant could they go somewhere that was not the reception area, so he took him one floor above, to the lounge. This overlooked St. Mevan Beach, where the swells were of a decent size and the waves were breaking on the sand bars in rapid sets. They were coming in from the southwest, but the wind made them rubbish. No one was out there, not even the most desperate of the local surfers.

Between the beach and the hotel, the landscape was much changed from what it had been during the heyday of the Promontory King George. The pool was still there, but in place of the bar and the outdoor restaurant, a rock-climbing wall now stood. As did the rope wall; the swinging bridges; and the pulleys, gears, cords, and cables of the Canopy Experience. A neat cabin housed the sea kayaks and another contained the diving equipment. Constable McNulty took all of this in, or at least he appeared to be doing so, which gave Ben Kerne time to prepare himself to hear what the policeman had come to say. He thought about Dellen in bits of red, about the slickness of the roads and Dellen’s intentions, which likely had been to get out of town entirely, to go along the coast, and perhaps to end up at one of the coves or bays. But getting there in this weather, especially if she hadn’t stuck to the main road, would have exposed her to danger. Of course danger was what she loved and wanted, but not the sort that led to cars skidding off roads and down the sides of cliffs.

When the question came, it was not what Ben expected. McNulty said, “Is Alexander Kerne your son?”

Ben said “Santo?” and he thought, Thank God. It was Santo who had got himself into trouble, no doubt arrested for trespassing, which Ben had warned him about time and again. He said, “What’s he done, then?”

“He’s had an accident,” the constable said. “I’m sorry to tell you that a body’s been found that appears to be Alexander’s. If you have a photo of him…”

Ben heard the word body but did not allow it to penetrate. He said, “Is he in hospital, then? Which one? What happened?” He thought of how he would have to tell Dellen, of what route the news would send her down.

“…awfully sorry,” the constable was saying. “If you’ve a photo, we-”

“What did you say?”

Constable McNulty looked flustered. He said, “He’s dead, I’m afraid. The body. The one we found.”

“Santo? Dead? But where? How?” Ben looked out at the roiling sea just as a gust of wind hit the windows and rattled them against their sills. He said, “Good Christ, he went out in this. He was surfing.”

“Not surfing,” McNulty said.

“Then what happened?” Ben asked. “Please. What happened to Santo?”

“He’s had a cliff-climbing accident. Equipment failure. On the cliffs at Polcare Cove.”

“He was climbing?” Ben said stupidly. “Santo was climbing? Who was with him? Where-”

“No one, as it seems at the moment.”

“No one? He was climbing alone? At Polcare Cove? In this weather?” It seemed to Ben that all he could do was repeat the information like an automaton being programmed to speak. To do more than that meant he would have to embrace it, and he couldn’t bear that because he knew what embracing it was going to mean. “Answer me,” he said to the constable. “Bloody answer me, man.”

“Have you a picture of Alexander?”

“I want to see him. I must. It might not be-”

“That’s not possible just now. That’s why I need the photo. The body…He’s been taken to hospital in Truro.”

Ben leapt at the word. “So he’s not dead, then.”

“Mr. Kerne, I’m sorry. He’s dead. The body-”

“You said hospital.”

“To the mortuary, for the postmortem,” McNulty said. “I’m very sorry.”

“Oh my God.”

The front door opened below. Ben went to the lounge doorway and called out, “Dellen?” Footsteps came in the direction of the stairs. But then it was Kerra and not Ben’s wife who appeared in the doorway. She dripped rainwater onto the floor, and she’d removed her bicycle helmet. The very top of her head was the only part of her that appeared to be dry.

She looked at the constable, then said to Ben, “Has something happened?”

“Santo.” Ben’s voice was hoarse. “Santo’s been killed.”

“Santo.” Then, “Santo?” Kerra looked round the room in a kind of panic. “Where’s Alan? Where’s Mum?”

Ben found he couldn’t meet her eyes. “Your mother’s not here.”

“What’s happened, then?”

Ben told her what little he knew.

She said, as he had, “Santo was climbing?” and she looked at him with an expression that said what he himself was thinking: If Santo had gone climbing, he’d likely done so because of his father.

“Yes,” Ben said. “I know. I know. You don’t need to tell me.”

“Know what, sir?” It was the constable speaking.

It came to Ben that these initial moments were critical ones in the eyes of the police. They would always be critical because the police didn’t yet know what they were dealing with. They had a body and they reckoned having a body equated an accident, but on the chance that it wasn’t an accident, they had to be ready to point the finger and ask relevant questions and for the love of God, where was Dellen?

Ben rubbed his forehead. He thought, uselessly, that all of this was down to the sea, coming back to the sea, never feeling completely at ease unless the sound of the sea was not far off and yet being forced into feeling at ease for years and years while all the time longing for it and the great open heaving mass of it and the noise of it and the excitement of it and now this. It was down to him that Santo was dead.

No surfing, he’d said. I do not want you surfing. D’you know how many blokes throw their lives away just hanging about, waiting for waves? It’s mad. It’s a waste.

“…act as liaison,” Constable McNulty was saying.

Ben said, “What? What’s that? Liaison?”

Kerra was watching him, her blue eyes narrowed. She looked speculative, which was the last way he wanted his daughter to look at him just now. She said carefully, “The constable was telling us they’ll send a liaison officer round. Once they have the picture of Santo and they know for certain.” And then to McNulty, “Why d’you need a picture?”

“He had no identification on him.”

“Then how-”

“We found the car. A lay-by near Stowe Wood. His driving licence was in the glove box, and the keys in his rucksack fitted the door lock.”

“So this is just form,” Kerra pointed out.

“Essentially, yes. But it has to be done.”

“I’ll fetch a photo then.” She went off to do so.

Ben marveled at her. All business, Kerra. She wore her competence like a suit of armour. It broke his heart.

He said, “When can I see him?”

“Not until after the postmortem, I’m afraid.”

“Why?”

“It’s regulation, Mr. Kerne. They don’t like anyone near the…near him…till afterwards. Forensics, you see.”

“They’ll cut him up.”

“You won’t see. It won’t be like that. They’ll fix him up after. They’re good at what they do. You won’t see.”

“He’s not a God damn piece of meat.”

“’Course he’s not. I’m sorry, Mr. Kerne.”

“Are you? Have you children of your own?”

“A boy, yes. I’ve got a boy, sir. Your loss is the worst a man can experience. I know that, Mr. Kerne.”

Ben stared at him, hot eyed. The constable was young, probably less than twenty-five. He thought he knew the ways of the world, but he had no clue, absolutely not the slightest idea, what was out there and what could happen. He didn’t know that there was no way to prepare and no way to control. At a gallop, life came at you on horseback and there you were with two options only. You either climbed up or you were mowed down. Try to find the middle ground and you failed.

Kerra returned, a snapshot in hand. She gave it to Constable McNulty, saying, “This is Santo. This is my brother.”

McNulty looked at it. “Handsome lad,” he said.

“Yes,” Ben said heavily. “He favours his mother.”