Careless in Red

Chapter Nine

BEA HANNAFORD SAW MUCH THAT SEEMED TYPICAL IN SANTO Kerne’s bedroom, and for the first time she was glad to have Constable McNulty doing penance as her dogsbody. For the walls of Santo’s bedroom bore a plethora of surfing posters and, from what Bea could tell, what McNulty didn’t know about surfing, the locations of the photos, and the surfers themselves didn’t actually bear knowing. She couldn’t conclude that his knowledge was in any way relevant to anything, however. She was merely relieved that, at the end of the day, McNulty did know something about something.

“Jaws,” he murmured obscurely, gazing awestruck at a liquid mountain down which a thumb-size madman rushed. “Bloody hell, look at that bloke. That’s Hamilton, off Maui. He’s dead mad. He’ll do anything. Christ, this looks like a tsunami, doesn’t it?” He whistled low and shook his head.

Ben Kerne was with them, but he didn’t venture into the room. His wife had remained below, in the lounge. It had been obvious that Kerne hadn’t wanted to leave her on her own, but he’d been caught between the police and his spouse. He couldn’t accommodate one while attempting to monitor the other. He’d had little choice in the matter, then. They would either wander the hotel till they found Santo’s bedroom as he saw to his wife, or he would have to take them there. He’d chosen the latter, but it was fairly clear that his mind was elsewhere.

“So far we’ve heard nothing about Santo and surfing,” Bea said to Ben Kerne, who stood in the doorway.

Kerne said, “He started surfing when we first came to Casvelyn.”

“Is his surfing kit here? Board, wet suit, whatever else…”

“Hood,” McNulty murmured. “Gloves, boots, extra fins-”

“That’ll do, Constable,” Bea told him sharply. “Mr. Kerne probably gets the point.”

“No,” Ben Kerne said. “He kept his kit elsewhere.”

“Did he? Why?” Bea said. “Not exactly convenient, is it?”

Ben looked at the posters as he replied. “I expect he didn’t like to keep it here.”

“Why?” she repeated.

“He likely suspected I’d do something with it.”

“Ah. Constable…?” Bea was gratified to see that Mick McNulty took the hint and once more attended to his note taking, although Ben Kerne couldn’t say, when asked, where Santo had indeed kept his gear. Bea said to him, “Why would Santo think you might do something with his kit, Mr. Kerne? Or do you mean to his kit?” And she thought, If the surfing kit, why not the cliff-climbing kit?

“Because he knew I didn’t particularly want him to like surfing.”

“Really? It seems a harmless enough sport, compared to cliff climbing.”

“No sport is completely harmless, Inspector. But it wasn’t that.” Kerne seemed to be looking for a way to explain, and he came into the bedroom to do so. He observed the posters. His face was stony.

Bea said, “Do you surf, Mr. Kerne?”

“I wouldn’t prefer Santo not surf if I did it myself, now would I.”

“I don’t know. Would you? I still don’t see why you approved of one sport but not another.”

“It’s the type, all right?” Kerne gave an apologetic glance to Constable McNulty. “I didn’t like him mixing with surfers because for so many of them it’s their only world. I didn’t want him adopting it: the hanging about they do, waiting for the opportunity for a surf, their lives defined by isobar charts and tide tables, driving up and down the coast to find perfect waves. And when they’re not having a surf, they’re talking about it or smoking cannabis while they stand round in their wet suits afterwards, still talking about it. There’re blokes-and lasses as well, I admit it-whose entire worlds revolve round riding waves and traveling the globe to ride more waves. I didn’t want that for Santo. Would you want it for your son or daughter?”

“But if his world revolved round cliff climbing?”

“It didn’t. But at least it’s a sport where one depends upon others. It’s not solitary, the way surfing can be and generally is. A surfer alone on the waves: You see it all the time. I didn’t want him out there alone. I wanted him to be with people. So if something happened to him…” He moved his gaze back to the posters, and what they depicted was-even to an unschooled observer like Bea-absolute danger embodied in an unimaginable tonnage of water: exposure to everything from broken bones to certain drowning. She wondered how many people died each year, coursing a nearly vertical declivity that, unlike the earth with its knowable textures, changed within seconds to trap the unwary.

She said, “Yet Santo was climbing alone when he fell. Just as he might have been had he gone for a surf. And anyway, surfers don’t always do this alone, do they?”

“On the wave itself. The surfer and the wave, alone. There may be others out there, but it’s not about them.”

“With climbing it is, though?”

“You depend on the other climber, and he depends on you. You keep each other safe.” He cleared his throat roughly and added, “What father wouldn’t want safety for his son?”

“And when Santo didn’t agree with your assessment of surfing?”

“What about it?”

“What happened between you? Arguments? Punishment? Do you tend towards violence, Mr. Kerne?”

He faced her, but in doing so he put his back to the window, so she could no longer read his face. He said, “What the hell sort of question is that?”

“One that wants answering. Santo’s eye was blackened by someone recently. What d’you know about that?”

His shoulders dropped. He moved again, but this time out of the light of the window and towards the other side of the room, where a computer and its printer sat on a single plywood sheet across two sawhorses forming a primitive desk. There was a stack of papers facedown on this desk; Ben Kerne reached for them. Bea stopped him before his fingers made contact. She repeated her question.

“He wouldn’t tell me,” Kerne said. “Obviously, I could tell he’d been punched. It was a bad blow. But he wouldn’t explain it, so I was left to think…” He shook his head. He seemed to have information he was loath to part with.

Bea said, “If you know something…if you suspect something…”

“I don’t. It’s just that…the young women liked Santo, and Santo liked the young women. He didn’t discriminate.”

“Between what?”

“Between available and unavailable. Between attached and unattached. Santo was…He was like pure mating instinct given human form. Perhaps an angry father punched him out. Or a furious boyfriend. He wouldn’t say. But he liked the lasses and the lasses liked him. And truth of the matter is that he was easily led where a determined young woman wanted him to go. He was…I’m afraid he was always that way.”

“Anyone in particular?”

“His last was a girl called Madlyn Angarrack. They’d been…what do you call it…an item? For more than a year.”

“Is she also a surfer by any chance?” Bea asked.

“A brilliant one, if Santo was to be believed. National champion in the making. He was quite taken with her.”

“And she with him?”

“It wasn’t a one-way street.”

“How was it for you, watching your son become involved with a surfer, then?”

Ben Kerne answered steadily. “Santo was always involved somewhere, Inspector. I knew it would pass, whatever it was. As I said, he liked the ladies. He wasn’t ready to settle. Not with Madlyn, not with anyone. No matter what.”

Bea thought that last was a strange expression. She said, “You wanted him to settle, though?”

“Like any father, I wanted him to keep his nose clean and stay out of trouble.”

“Not overly ambitious for him, then? Those are fairly limited as expectations go.”

Ben Kerne said nothing. Bea had the impression he was keeping something to himself, and it was her experience that in a murder enquiry, when someone did that, it was generally out of self-interest.

She said, “Did you ever beat Santo, Mr. Kerne?”

His gaze on her didn’t waver. “I’ve answered that question already.”

She let a silence hang there, but this one lacked fecundity. She was forced to move on. She did so by giving her attention to Santo’s computer. They would have to take it with them, she told Kerne. Constable McNulty would unhook it all and carry the components out to their car. Having said this, she reached for the stack of papers that Kerne had been going for on the desk. She flipped them over and spread them out.

They were, she saw, a variation of designs that incorporated the words Adventures Unlimited into each of them. In one the two words themselves formed into a curling wave. In another they made a circular logo in which the Promontory King George Hotel stood centrally. In a third they became the base upon which a variety of athletic feats were being accomplished by buffed-out silhouettes both masculine and feminine. In another they made a climbing apparatus.

“He…Oh God.”

Bea looked up from the designs to see Kerne’s stricken face. “What is it?” she asked.

“He designed T-shirts. On his computer. He was…Obviously, he was working on something for the business. I’d not asked him to do it. Oh God, Santo.”

He said the last like an apology. In reaction, Bea asked him about his son’s climbing equipment. Kerne told her that all of it was missing, every belay device, every chock stone, every rope, every item he would need for any climb he might make.

“Would he have needed all of it to make that climb yesterday?”

No, Kerne told her. He either began keeping it elsewhere without his father’s knowledge or he’d taken it all on the previous day when he set off to make his fatal climb.

“Why?” Bea asked.

“We’d had harsh words. He’d have reacted to them. It would have been an ‘I’ll show you’ sort of statement.”

“One that led to his death? Too much in a state to examine his kit closely? Was he the type to do that?”

“Impulsive, you mean? Impulsive enough to climb without looking over his equipment? Yes,” Kerne said, “he was exactly the type to do that.”

IT WAS, PRAISE GOD or praise whomever one felt like praising when praise was called for, the last radiator. Not the last radiator as in the last radiator of all radiators in the hotel, but the last radiator as in the last radiator he would have to paint for the day. Given a half hour to clean the brushes and seal the paint tins-after years of practise while working for his father, Cadan knew he could stretch out any activity as long as was necessary-it would be time to leave for the day. Halle-fucking-lujah. His lower back was throbbing and his head was reacting to the fumes once again. Clearly, he wasn’t meant for this type of labour. Well, that was hardly a surprise.

Cadan squatted back on his heels and admired his handiwork. It was dead stupid of them to put down the fitted carpet before they had someone paint the radiators, he thought. But he’d managed to get the most recent spill cleaned up with a bit of industrious rubbing, and what he’d not got up he reckoned the curtains would hide. Besides, it had been his only serious spill of the day, and that was saying something.

He declared, “We are out of here, Poohster.”

The parrot adjusted his balance on Cadan’s shoulder and replied with a squawk followed by, “Loose bolts on the fridge! Call the cops! Call the cops!” yet another of his curious remarks.

The door to the room swung open as Pooh flapped his wings, preparatory either to making a descent to the floor or to performing a less than welcome bodily function on Cadan’s shoulder. Cadan said, “Don’t you bloody dare, mate,” and a female voice said in concerned reply, “Who are you, please? What’re you doing here?”

The speaker turned out to be a woman in black, and Cadan reckoned that she was Santo Kerne’s mother, Dellen. He scrambled to his feet. Pooh said, “Polly wants a shag. Polly wants a shag,” displaying, not for the first time, the level of inapposition to which he was capable of sinking at a moment’s notice.

“What is that?” Dellen Kerne asked, clearly in reference to the bird.

“A parrot.”

She looked annoyed. “I can see it’s a parrot,” she told him. “I’m not stupid or blind. What sort of parrot and what’s he doing here and what’re you doing here, if it comes to that?”

“He’s a Mexican parrot.” Cadan could feel himself getting hot, but he knew the woman wouldn’t twig his discomfiture as his olive skin didn’t blush when blood suffused it. “His name is Pooh.”

“As in Winnie-the?”

“As in what he does best.”

A smile flickered round her lips. “Why don’t I know you? Why’ve I not seen you here before?”

Cadan introduced himself. “Ben…Mr. Kerne hired me yesterday. He probably forgot to tell you about me because of…” He saw the way he was headed too late to avoid heading there. He quirked his mouth and wanted to disappear, since-aside from painting radiators and dreaming about what could be done to the crazy golf course-his day had been spent in avoiding a run-in precisely like this: face-to-face with one of Santo Kerne’s parents in a moment when the magnitude of their loss was going to have to be acknowledged with an appropriate expression of sympathy. He said, “Sorry about Santo.”

She looked at him evenly. “Of course you are.”

Whatever that was supposed to mean. Cadan shifted on his feet. He had a paintbrush still in his hand and he wondered suddenly and idiotically what he was meant to do with it. Or with the tin of paint. They’d been brought to him and no one had said where to put them at the end of the workday. He’d not thought to ask.

“Did you know him?” Dellen Kerne said abruptly. “Did you know Santo?”

“A bit. Yeah.”

“And what did you think of him?”

This was rocky ground. Cadan didn’t know how to reply other than to say, “He bought a surfboard from my dad.” He didn’t mention Madlyn, didn’t want to mention Madlyn, and didn’t want to think why he didn’t want to mention Madlyn.

“I see. Yes. But that doesn’t actually answer the question, does it?” Dellen came farther into the room. She went to the fitted clothes cupboard for some reason. She opened it. She looked inside. She spoke, oddly, into the cupboard’s interior. She said, “Santo was a great deal like me. You wouldn’t know that if you didn’t know him. And you didn’t know him, did you? Not actually.”

“Like I said. A bit. I saw him round. More when he was first learning to surf than later on.”

“Because you surf as well?”

“Me? No. Well, I mean I’ve been, of course. But it’s not like it’s the only…I mean, I’ve got other interests.”

She turned from the cupboard. “Do you? What are they? Sport, I expect. You look quite fit. And women as well. Young men your age generally have women as one of their main interests. Are you like other young men?” She frowned. “Can we open that window, Cadan? The smell of paint…”

Cadan wanted to say it was her hotel so she could do whatever she wanted to do, but he set down his paintbrush carefully, went to the window, and wrestled it open, which wasn’t easy. It needed adjusting or greasing or something. Whatever one did to rejuvenate windows.

She said, “Thank you. I’m going to have a cigarette now. Do you smoke? No? That’s a surprise. You have the look of a smoker.”

Cadan knew he was meant to ask what the look of a smoker was, and had she been somewhere between twenty and thirty years old, he would have done so. His attitude would have been that questions like that one, of a potentially metaphoric nature, could lead to interesting answers, which in turn could lead to interesting developments. But in this case, he kept his mouth shut and when she said, “You won’t be bothered if I smoke, will you?” he shook his head. He hoped she didn’t expect him to light her cigarette for her-because she did seem the sort of woman round whom men leapt like jackrabbits-since he had neither matches nor lighter with him. She was correct in her assessment of him, though. He was a smoker but he’d been cutting back recently, inanely telling himself it was tobacco and not drink that was the real root of his problems.

He saw that she’d brought a packet of cigarettes with her and she had matches as well, tucked into the packet. She lit up, drew in, and let smoke drift from her nostrils.

“Whose shit’s on fire?” Pooh remarked.

Cadan winced. “Sorry. He’s heard that from my sister a million times. He mimics her. He mimics everyone. Anyway, she hates smoking.” And then again, “Sorry,” because he didn’t want her to think he was being critical of her.

“You’re nervous,” Dellen said. “I’m making you that way. And the bird’s fine. He doesn’t know what he’s saying, after all.”

“Yeah. Well. Sometimes, though, I’d swear he does.”

“Like the remark about shagging?”

He blinked. “What?”

“‘Polly wants a shag,’” she reminded him. “It was the first thing he said when I came into the room. I don’t, actually. Want a shag, that is. But I’m curious why he said that. I expect you use that bird to collect women. Is that why you brought him with you?”

“He goes most everywhere with me.”

“That can’t be convenient.”

“We work things out.”

“Do you?” She observed the bird, but Cadan had the feeling she wasn’t really seeing Pooh. He couldn’t have said what she was seeing but her next remarks gave him at least an idea. “Santo and I were quite close. Are you close to your mother, Cadan?”

“No.” He didn’t add that it was impossible to be close to Wenna Rice Angarrack McCloud Jackson Smythe, aka the Bounder. She had never remained stationary long enough for closeness to be anywhere in the deck of cards she played.

“Santo and I were quite close,” Dellen said again. “We were very like. Sensualists. Do you know what that is?” She gave him no chance to answer, not that he could have given her a definition, anyway. She said, “We live for sensation. For what we can see and hear and smell. For what we can taste. For what we can touch. And for what can touch us. We experience life in all its richness, without guilt and without fear. That’s what Santo was like. That’s what I taught Santo to be.”

“Right.” Cadan thought how he’d like to get out of the room, but he wasn’t certain how to effect a departure that wouldn’t look like running away. He told himself there was no real reason to turn tail and disappear through the doorway, but he had a feeling, nearly animal in nature, that danger was near.

Dellen said to him, “What sort are you, Cadan? Can I touch your bird or will he bite?”

He said, “He likes to be scratched on his head. Where you’d put his ears if birds had ears. I mean ears like ours because they can hear, obviously.”

“Like this?” She came close to Cadan, then. He could smell her scent. Musk, he thought. She used the nail of her index finger, which was painted red. Pooh accepted her ministrations, as he normally did. He purred like a cat, yet another sound he’d learned from a previous owner. Dellen smiled at the bird. She said to Cadan, “You didn’t answer me. What sort are you? Sensualist? Emotionalist? Intellectual?”

“Not bloody likely,” he replied. “Intellectual, I mean. I’m not intellectual.”

“Ah. Are you emotional? Bundle of feelings? Raw to the touch? Inside, I mean.”

He shook his head.

“Then you’re a sensualist, like me. Like Santo. I thought as much. You have that look about you. I expect it’s something your girlfriend appreciates. If you have one. Do you?”

“Not just now.”

“Pity. You’re quite attractive, Cadan. What do you do for sex?”

Cadan felt ever more the need to escape, yet she wasn’t doing a single thing except petting the bird and talking to him. Still, something was very off with the woman.

Then it came to him at a gallop that her son was dead. Not only dead but murdered. He was gone, kaput, given the chop, whatever. When a son died-or a daughter or a husband-wasn’t the mother supposed to rip up her clothes? tear at her hair? shed tears by the bucketful?

She said, “Because you must do something for sex, Cadan. A young virile man like you. You can’t mean me to think you live like a celibate priest.”

“I wait for summer,” he finally told her.

Her finger hesitated, less than an inch from Pooh’s green head. The bird sidestepped to get back within its range. “For summer?” Dellen said.

“Town’s full of girls then. Here on holiday.”

“Ah. You prefer the short-term relationship, then. Sex without strings.”

“Well,” he said. “Yeah. Works for me, that.”

“I expect it does. You scratch them and they scratch you and everyone’s happy with the arrangement. No questions asked. I know exactly what you mean. Although I expect that surprises you. A woman my age. Married, with children. Knowing what it means.”

He offered a half smile. It was insincere, just a way to acknowledge what she was saying without having to acknowledge what she was saying. He gave a look in the direction of the doorway. He said, “Well,” and tried to make his tone decisive, a way of saying, That’s that, then. Nice talking to you.

She said, “Why haven’t we met before this?”

“I just started-”

“No. I understand that. But I can’t sort out why we haven’t met before. You’re roughly Santo’s age-”

“Four years older, actually. He’s my-”

“-and you’re so like him as well. So I can’t sort out why you’ve never come round with him.”

“-sister’s age. Madlyn,” he said. “You probably know Madlyn. My sister. She and Santo were…Well, they were whatever you want to call it.”

“What?” Dellen asked blankly. “What did you call her?”

“Madlyn. Madlyn Angarrack. They-she and Santo-they were together for…I don’t know…Eighteen months? Two years? Whatever. She’s my sister. Madlyn’s my sister.”

Dellen stared at him. Then she stared past him, but she appeared to be looking at nothing at all. She said in a different voice altogether, “How very odd. She’s called Madlyn, you say?”

“Yeah. Madlyn Angarrack.”

“And she and Santo were…what, exactly?”

“Boyfriend and girlfriend. Partners. Lovers. Whatever.”

“You’re joking.”

He shook his head, confused, wondering why she’d think he was joking. “They met when he came to get a board from my dad. Madlyn taught him to surf. Santo, that is. Well, obviously, not my dad. That’s how they got to know each other. And then…well, I s’pose you could say they started hanging about together and things went from there.”

“And you called her Madlyn?” Dellen asked.

“Yeah. Madlyn.”

“Together for eighteen months.”

“Eighteen months or so. Yeah. That’s it.”

“Then why did I never meet her?” she said.

WHEN DI BEA HANNAFORD returned to the police station with Constable McNulty in tow, it was to find that Ray had managed to fulfill her wish for an incident room in Casvelyn and that Sergeant Collins had set the room up with a degree of expertise that surprised her. He’d somehow managed to get the upper-floor conference room in order, and now it was ready, with china boards upon which pictures of Santo Kerne were posted both in death and in life and on which activities could be listed neatly. There were also desks, phones, computers with HOLMES at the ready, printers, a filing cabinet, and supplies. The only thing the incident room didn’t have was, unfortunately, the most vital part of any investigation: the MCIT officers.

The absence of a murder squad was going to leave Bea in the unenviable position of having to conduct the investigation with McNulty and Collins alone until such a time as a murder squad got there. Since that squad should have arrived along with the contents of the incident room, Bea labeled the situation unacceptable. It was also annoying because she knew very well that her former husband could get a murder squad from Land’s End to London in less than three hours if he was pressed to do so.

“Damn,” she muttered. She told McNulty to type up his notes officially and she went to a desk in the corner where she quickly discovered that having a phone within sight did not necessarily mean that it was connected to an actual telephone line. She looked meaningfully at Sergeant Collins, who said apologetically, “BT says another three hours. There’s no hookup up here, so they’re sending someone over from Bodmin to put one in. We have to use mobiles or the phones downstairs till then.”

“Do they know this is a murder enquiry?”

“They know,” he said, but his tone suggested that, murder or not, BT also didn’t much care.

Bea said, “Hell,” and took out her mobile. She walked to a desk in the corner and punched in Ray’s work number.

“There’s been something of a cock-up,” was what she told him when she had him on the phone at last.

He said, “Beatrice. Hullo. You’re welcome for the incident room. Am I having Pete for the night again?”

“I’m not phoning about Pete. Where’re the MCIT blokes?”

“Ah,” he said. “That. Well, we’ve a bit of a problem.” He went on to lower the boom. “Can’t be done, love. There’s no MCIT available at the moment to be sent to Casvelyn. You can ring Dorset or Somerset and try to get one of theirs, of course, or I can do it for you. In the meantime, I do have a TAG team I can send you.”

“A TAG team,” she said. “A TAG team, Ray? This is a murder enquiry. Murder. Major crime. Requiring a Major Crime Investigating Team.”

“Blood from a stone,” he returned. “There’s not much more I can do. I did try to suggest you maintain your incident room in-”

“Are you punishing me?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. You’re the one who-”

“Don’t you dare go there. This is professional.”

“I think I’ll have Pete with me till you’ve got a result,” he said mildly. “You’re going to be quite busy. I don’t want him staying on his own. It’s not a good idea.”

“You don’t want him staying…You don’t…” She was left speechless, a reaction to Ray so rare that its presence now left her even more speechless. What remained was ending the conversation. She should have done so with dignity but all she managed was to punch off the mobile and throw it onto the closest desk.

When it rang a moment later, she thought her former husband was phoning to apologise or, more likely, to lecture her about police procedure, about her propensity for myopic decision making, about perpetually crossing the boundaries of what was allowed while expecting someone to run interference for her. She snatched up the mobile and said, “What? What?”

It was the forensic lab, however. Someone called Duke Clarence Washoe-and was that name bizarre enough…what in God’s name had his parents been thinking?-ringing up with the fingerprint report.

“Got a real stew, mum,” was how he broke the news to her.

“Guv,” she said. “Or DI Hannaford. Not ma’am, madam, mum, or anything suggesting you and I are related or I’ve got royal connections, all right?”

“Oh. Right. Sorry.” A pause. He seemed to need a moment to adjust his approach. “We’ve got dabs from your vic all over the car-”

“Victim,” Bea said, and she thought wearily about what American television had done to normal communications. “Not vic. Victim. Or Santo Kerne, if you prefer. Let’s show a little respect, Mr. Washoe.”

“Duke Clarence,” he said. “You c’n call me Duke Clarence.”

“That delights me no end,” she replied. “Go on.”

“Eleven other different sets of prints as well. This is outside of the car. Inside, we’ve got seven sets. The vic…The dead boy’s. And six others who also left prints on the passenger door, fascia, window handles, and glove box. There’re prints on the CD cases as well. The boy and three others.”

“What about on the climbing equipment?”

“The only decent prints’re on that tape wrapped round it. But they’re Santo Kerne’s.”

“Damn,” Bea said.

“There’s a nice clear set on the boot of the car, though. Fresh ones, I’d guess. But I don’t know what good that’ll do you.”

None at all, Bea thought. Someone crossing the bloody road in town could’ve touched the damn car in passing. She would send forensics the prints gathered from everyone remotely connected to Santo Kerne, but the truth was that identifying whose fingers left dabs on the boy’s car probably wasn’t going to get them anywhere. This was a disappointment.

“Let me know what else you turn up,” she told Duke Clarence Washoe. “There’s got to be something from that car we can use.”

“As to that, we’ve got some hair caught up in the climbing equipment. That might turn up something.”

“Tissue attached?” she asked hopefully.

“Yes, indeed.”

“Keep it safe, then. Carry on, Mr. Washoe.”

“You c’n call me Duke Clarence,” he reminded her.

“Ah yes,” she said. “I’d forgotten that.”

They rang off. Bea sat down at the desk. She watched Constable McNulty across the room attempting to type up his notes, and it came to her that he didn’t actually know how to type. He was hunting for every letter to tap upon with his index fingers, with prodigious pauses between each tap. She knew if she watched him for longer than thirty seconds, she would scream, so she rose and began to head out of the room.

Sergeant Collins met her at the door. He said, “Phone’s below.”

She said fervently, “Thank God. Where are they?”

“Who?”

“BT.”

“BT? They’ve not arrived yet.”

“Then what-”

“The phone. You’ve a call downstairs. It’s an officer from-”

“Middlemore,” she finished. “That would be my former husband. Assistant Chief Constable Hannaford. Head him off for me. I need some time.” Ray, she decided, had tried on her mobile, and now he was trying to get through on the land line. He’d have built up a head of steam at this point. She didn’t particularly want to experience it. She said, “Tell him I’ve just set out to see to some business. Tell him to phone me back tomorrow. Or at home later.” She would give him that much.

“It’s not ACC Hannaford,” Collins said.

“You said an officer…”

“Someone called Sir David-”

“What is it with people?” Bea demanded. “I’ve just got off the phone with a Duke Clarence up in Chepstow and now it’s Sir David?”

“Hillier, he’s called,” Collins said. “Sir David Hillier. Assistant commissioner up at the Met.”

“Scotland Yard?” Bea asked. “Now, isn’t that just what I need.”

BY THE TIME HIS regular drinking hour at the Salthouse Inn had rolled round, Selevan Penrule was in need of one. He also was, at least to his way of thinking, deserving of one. Something strong from the sixteen men of Tain. Or however the hell many there were.

Having to cope with both his granddaughter’s pigheadedness and her mother’s hysteria in a single day would have been too much for any bloke. No wonder David had moved them all off to Rhodesia or whatever it was called these days. He’d probably thought a good bout of heat, cholera, TB, snakes, and tsetse flies-or whatever they had in that god-awful bloody climate of theirs-would sort both of them out. But it hadn’t done so if Tammy’s behaviour and Sally Joy’s voice on the phone were anything to go by.

“Is she eating properly?” Sally Joy had demanded from the bowels of Africa, where a decent connection on a telephone line was, apparently, something akin to the spontaneous transmogrification of tabby cat into two-headed lion. “Is she still praying, Father Penrule?”

“She’s-”

“Has she gained any weight? How much time is she on her knees? What about the Bible? Does she have a Bible?”

Jaysus in a sandwich, Selevan thought. Sally Joy made his bloody head swim. He said, “I told you I’d watch over the girl. That’s what I’m doing. ’S there anything else, then?”

“Oh, I’m tedious. I’m tedious. But you don’t understand what it’s like to have a daughter.”

“I had one myself, didn’t I? Four sons as well, if you’re interested.”

“I know. I know. But in Tammy’s case-”

“You either leave her to me or I send her back, woman.”

That got through. The last thing Sally Joy and David wanted was their daughter back in Africa, exposed to its hardships and believing that she could single-handedly do something about them.

“All right. I know. You’re doing what you can.”

And better than you did, Selevan thought. But that was before he’d caught Tammy on her knees. She’d fashioned herself what he called a prayer bench-she’d referred to it as a pree-something but Selevan was not one for fancy terms-in her bitsy sleeping area in the caravan and he’d thought at first she meant to hang her clothing from the back of it, the way gents did with their suits in posh hotels. But not long after breakfast, when he’d gone in search of her in order to drive her in to work, he’d found her kneeling in front of it with a book open on its narrow shelf, and she was reading studiously. This he’d discovered too late-the reading-because the first thing he’d assumed was that the girl was at her God damn beads again, and this despite the fact that he’d already removed two sets of them from her belongings. He’d pounced and hauled her back by her shoulders, saying, “We’ll none of this nonsense,” and then had seen that she was merely reading.

It wasn’t even a Bible. But it also wasn’t much better. She was soaking up some saint’s writing. “St. Teresa of Avila,” she revealed. “Grandie, it’s just philosophy.”

“If it’s some saint’s scribbles, it’s religious muck,” was what he told her as he snatched up the book. “Filling your head with rubbish, you are.”

“That’s not fair,” she said, and her eyes became moist.

They’d driven to Casvelyn in silence, afterwards, with Tammy turned away from him, so all he could see was the curve of her stubborn little jaw and the sheenless fall of her hair. She’d sniffed and he’d understood she was crying and he’d felt…He didn’t know how he felt because-and he cursed her parents soundly for sending her to him-he was trying to help the girl, to bring her to whatever senses she had left, to get her to see she was meant to be living her life and not spending it caught up in reading about the doings of saints and sinners.

He felt irritated with her, then. Defiance he could deal with. He could shout and be rough. But tears…He said, “They’re lezzies, you know, the lot of them, girl. You got that, don’t you?”

She said in a small voice, “Don’t be stupid,” and she cried a little harder.

He was reminded of Nan, his daughter. A ride in the car and Nan in this same position, turned away from him. “It’s just Exeter,” she’d said. “It’s just a club, Dad.” And his reply, “We’ll be having none of that nonsense while you’re under my roof. So dry your eyes or feel my palm, and it won’t be drying them for you.”

Had he really been so hard with the girl when all she’d wanted to do was go clubbing with her mates? But he had, he had. For clubbing with mates was how things started, and where they ended was in disgrace.

All of that seemed so innocent now. What had he been thinking in denying Nan a few hours of pleasure because he’d had none when he was her age?

The day passed slowly, with Selevan’s internal skies quite clouded. He was more than ready for the Salthouse Inn by the time the appointed hour rumbled round for his embrace of the sixteen men of Tain. He was also ready for some conversation, and this would be provided by his regular companion of the spirits, who was waiting for him in the smoky inglenook of the Salthouse Inn’s public bar when he arrived late in the afternoon.

This was Jago Reeth, and he sat with his regular pint of Guinness cupped in his hands, his ankles hooked round the legs of his stool, and his back hunched over so that his spectacles-repaired at the temple with a twist of wire-slid to the end of his bony nose. He was wearing his usual getup of crusty jeans and sweatshirt, and his boots were, as always, grey with the dust of carved polystyrene from the surfboard maker’s workshop where he was employed. He was beyond the age of a pensioner, but as he was fond of putting it when asked: Old surfers did not die or fade away; they merely looked for regular jobs when their days of riding waves were finished.

Jago’s had concluded because of Parkinson’s, and Selevan always felt a gruff sympathy for his contemporary when he saw how the shakes had come into his hands. But any expression of concern was always brushed aside by Jago. “I had my day,” he was fond of saying. “Time to let the youngsters have theirs.”

Thus he was the perfect confessor for Selevan’s current situation, and once Selevan had his Glenmorangie in hand, he told his friend about his morning skirmish with Tammy in answer to the question, “How’s tricks?” which Jago asked as he raised his own glass to his mouth. He used two hands to do it, Selevan noted.

“She’s going over to the lezzies,” Selevan told him as a conclusion to his tale.

Jago shrugged. “Well, kids’re meant to do what they want to do, mate. Anything else and you’re buying trouble. Don’t see any point to that, do I.”

“But her parents-”

“What do parents know? What did you know if it comes down to it? And you had, what? Five yourself? Did you know your arse from a pickle when you dealt with them?”

He hadn’t known his arse from a pickle when he’d dealt with anything, Selevan had to admit, even when he’d dealt with his wife. He’d been too caught up in being cheesed off at having to cope with the bloody dairy instead of doing what he’d wanted to do, which had been the navy, seeing the world, and getting the hell away from Cornwall. He’d made a dog’s dinner of his role as father and husband, and he hadn’t done much better with his role as dairyman.

He said, but not in an unfriendly fashion, “Easy for you to say, mate.” For Jago had no children, had never had a wife, and had spent his youth and his middle age following waves.

Jago smiled, showing teeth that had seen hard use and little maintenance. “Too right,” he admitted. “I ought to keep it plugged.”

“And how’s a duffer like me supposed to understand a lass anyway?” Selevan asked.

“Just keep’m from getting stuffed too soon, ’n my opinion.” Jago downed the rest of his Guinness and pushed away from the table. He was tall, and it took a moment for him to untangle his long legs from the stool. While Jago went to the bar for another drink, Selevan considered what his friend had said.

It was good advice, except it didn’t apply to Tammy. Getting stuffed was not her interest. What hung between men’s legs had not so far beguiled her in the least. Should the girl ever come up pregnant, there’d be cause for celebration, not the general outcry one might assume would normally rise from outraged parents and relations.

“Never been a lezzie in my house,” he said when Jago returned.

“Why’n’t you ask her about it, then?”

“Now how the hell am I s’posed to put it?”

“‘Like the bush better’n the prong, my sweet? Why would that be?’” Jago offered, and then he grinned. “Look, mate, you’re meant to keep the doors open between you by pretending what’s in front of your face i’n’t in front of your face. Kids’re different to what they were like when we were young. Get started early and don’t know what they’re about, do they. You’re there to guide them, not to direct them.”

“That’s what I’m trying to do,” Selevan said.

“It’s the how of it, man.”

Selevan couldn’t argue with this. He’d mucked up the how of it with his own children and now he was doing the same with Tammy. In contrast-he had to admit-Jago Reeth did have a way with the youngsters. Selevan had seen both of the Angarrack young people come and go from Jago’s hired caravan at Sea Dreams and when the dead boy-Santo Kerne-had dropped by to ask Selevan’s permission for beach access from his property, he’d ended up spending more time with the ancient surfer than in the water when that permission was given: waxing Santo’s board together, setting its fins, examining it for dings and imperfections, sitting in deck chairs on the patch of scrub grass next to the caravan and talking. About what? Selevan wondered. How did one talk to another generation?

Jago answered as if the questions had been asked aloud, saying, “’S more about listening than anything else, not speechifying when all you itch to do is make a speech. Or give a lecture. Bloody hell, how I want to give a lecture. But I wait till they finally say to me, ‘So what d’you think?’ and there’s the opening. Simple as that.” He winked. “But not easy, mind you. Quarter hour with them and the last thing you want is having your youth back. Trauma and tears.”

“That’d be the girl,” Selevan said wisely.

“Oh, aye. That’d be the girl. She fell and fell hard. Didn’t ask for my advice in the befores. Didn’t ask for my advice in the afters. But”-here he took a hefty swig of his stout and sloshed it round his mouth which was, Selevan thought, probably his only bow to oral hygiene-“I broke my own rule at the end of the day.”

“Speechifying?”

“Telling her what I’d do in her place.”

“Which was?”

“Kill the bastard.” Jago spoke casually, as if Santo Kerne were not as dead as a Christmas goose on the table. Selevan raised both eyebrows at this. Jago went on. “That not being possible, ’course, I told her to do it like a symbol. Kill off the past. Wave it good-bye. Make a bonfire of it. Toss in everything that bore on the two of them together. Diaries. Journals. Letters. Cards. Photos. Valentines. Paddington bears. Used-up condoms from their very first shag if she’d been feeling sentimental at that juncture. Everything. Just get rid of it all and move along.”

“Easy enough to say,” Selevan noted.

“Truth there. But when it’s a lass’s first and they’ve gone the full mile, it’s the only way when things go bad. Clean house of the bloke, you ask me. Which she was finally on her way to doing when…well…when it happened.”

“Bad, that.”

Jago nodded. “Makes it worse for the girl. How’s she supposed to see Santo Kerne in a real light now? No. She’s got her work cut out, getting over this. Wish it hadn’t happened, none of it. He wasn’t a bad lad, but he had his ways, and she didn’t see that till too bleeding late. By that time the locomotive was steaming out of the station, and all that was left to do was step out of the way.”

“Love’s a bitch of a thing,” Selevan said.

“It’s a killer, that,” Jago agreed.