Careless in Red

Chapter Eleven

DI BEA HANNAFORD ARRIVED AT THE POLICE STATION LATE, in a foul mood and with Ray’s parting words still gnawing at her. She didn’t want anything Ray had to say taking up residence in her consciousness, but he had a way of transmuting good-bye from an innocuous social moment into the bolt from a crossbow, and one had to be quick to avoid getting hit. She was fast on her verbal feet when there was nothing else on her mind. But that was impossible in the middle of a murder enquiry.

She’d had to cave in on the issue of Pete, another reason she was late to the station. Given the absence of MCIT officers to work the case, given only the loan of a TAG team-and who the bloody hell knew when they were going to be withdrawn?-she would be putting in long hours, and someone had to look after Pete. Not so much because Pete couldn’t look after himself, since he’d been cooking for years and he’d mastered the art of laundry the first time his mother had turned a beloved Arsenal T-shirt purple, but because he had to be ferried about from school to football coaching to this or that appointment and his time on the Internet had to be watched and his homework had to be monitored or he wouldn’t bother to do it. He was, in short, an average fourteen-year-old boy who needed regular parenting. Bea knew she ought to be grateful that her former husband was willing to step up to the challenge.

Except…She was convinced that Ray had orchestrated the entire situation just for that reason: to obtain unimpeded access to Pete. He wanted a more definite inroad with their son, and he’d seen this as an opportunity to make one. Pete’s new enthusiasm at having to stay at his father’s house suggested Ray was having some success in this area as well, which caused Bea to question exactly what constituted Ray’s approach to fatherhood: from the meals he served Pete to the freedom he gave him.

So she’d grilled her former husband as Pete had trotted off to the spare room-his room, as he had referred to it-to stow his belongings, and Ray had tunneled his way through her questions to their root, in his typical fashion. “He’s happy to be here because he loves me,” was his reply. “Just as he’s happy to be with you because he loves you. He has two parents, not one, Beatrice. All things in the balance, this is good, you know.”

She wanted to say, “Two parents? Oh, right. That’s brilliant, Ray,” but instead she said, “I don’t want him exposed to any-”

“Naked twenty-five-year-old women running about the house?” he asked. “Fear not. I’ve told my stable of beauties normally in residence here at the Playboy Mansion that the orgies are postponed indefinitely. Their hearts are broken-my own is devastated-but there you have it. Pete comes first.” He’d leaned against the kitchen work top. He’d been sorting through yesterday’s post, and there was no indication that anyone else was present in the house. She’d checked this as surreptitiously as possible, telling herself she did not want Pete exposed to anyone’s casual sex, not at his age and not before she’d had the opportunity to explain to him each one of the sexually transmitted diseases he could end up with if he played fast and loose with his body parts.

“You have,” Ray told her, “the oddest damn ideas of how I spend what little free time I possess, my dear.”

She didn’t engage. Instead she gave him a bag of groceries because she was damned if she was going to be in debt to him for having Pete to stay during a time when he was not scheduled to do so. Then she’d barked out their son’s name, hugged him good-bye, kissed him on the cheek with the loudest smack she could manage despite his squirming and his “Oh, Mum,” and she’d left the house.

Ray had followed her to her car. It was windy and grey outside, beginning to rain as well, but he didn’t hurry or seek shelter from the weather. He waited till she got in and he motioned for her to lower the window. When she’d done so, he leaned down and said, “What’s it going to take, Beatrice?”

She said, “What?” and she didn’t bother to hide her irritation.

“For you to forgive. What do I need to do?”

She shook her head, reversed down the driveway, and drove off. But she’d not been able to shake his question.

She was predisposed to be annoyed with Sergeant Collins and Constable McNulty when she finally strode into the station, but the two miserable louts made it impossible for her to feel anything close to annoyance. Collins had somehow risen to the occasion of her tardiness, deploying half of the TAG officers to canvass the area within a three-mile radius of Polcare Cove to see if they could come up with anything of note from those few who lived there in the several hamlets and on the farms. The others he’d told to work on background checks of everyone so far connected to the crime: each of the Kernes-and especially Ben Kerne’s financial status and whether that status was altered by his son’s demise-Madlyn Angarrack, her family, Daidre Trahair, Thomas Lynley, and Alan Cheston. Everyone was being asked for fingerprints, and the Kernes had been given the word that Santo’s body was ready for the formality of identification in Truro.

In the meantime, Constable McNulty had been engaged with Santo Kerne’s computer. When Bea arrived, he was checking through all the deleted e-mails (“Going to take bloody hours,” he informed her, sounding as if he hoped she’d tell him to forego the tedious operation, which she had no intention of doing), and before that he’d pulled from the computer’s files what seemed to be more designs for T-shirts.

McNulty had divided them into categories: local businesses whose names he recognised (largely pubs, hotels, and surf shops); rock bands both popular and extremely obscure; festivals, from music to the arts; and those designs that were questionable because he “had a feeling about them,” which Bea interpreted to mean he didn’t know what they were. She was wrong, as she soon discovered.

The first questionable T-shirt design was for LiquidEarth, a name Bea recognised from the invoice left in Santo Kerne’s car. This, McNulty explained, was the name of a surfboard shaper’s business. The board shaper was called Lewis Angarrack.

“As in Madlyn Angarrack?” Bea asked him.

“As in her dad.”

This was interesting. “What about the others?”

Cornish Gold was the second design he’d singled out. This belonged to a cider farm, he told her.

“How’s that important?”

“It’s the only business from outside Casvelyn. I thought that was worth looking into.”

McNulty, she thought, might not be as useless as she’d earlier concluded. “And the last one?” She gave the design her scrutiny. It appeared to be two-sided. The obverse declared “Commit an Act of Subversion” above a rubbish bin, which was suggestive of everything from bombs in the street to delving into the bins of celebrities for information to sell to the tabloids. On the reverse, however, things became clear. “Eat Free” declared an Artful Dodger urchin, who was pointing to the same rubbish bin, which had been upended, spilling its contents onto the ground.

“What d’you make of this?” Bea asked the constable.

“Don’t know,” he said, “but it seemed worth looking into because it’s got nothing to do with an organisation, unlike the others. Like I said, I had a feeling. What can’t be identified needs to be examined.”

He sounded like someone quoting a manual. But it was good sense, the first she’d heard from him. It gave her hope.

“You might have a future in this business,” she told him.

He didn’t look entirely pleased with the idea.

TAMMY WAS QUIET IN the morning, which concerned Selevan Penrule. She was always on the quiet side anyway, but this time her lack of conversation seemed to indicate a pensiveness she hadn’t previously been caught up in. Before, it always looked to her grandfather as if the girl was just preternaturally calm, yet another indication that something was off about her because, at her age, she wasn’t supposed to be calm about anything. She was supposed to be caught up worrying about her complexion and her figure, about having the right clothes and the perfect haircut, and other such nonsense. But this morning, she looked caught up in considering something. To Selevan, there could be little doubt about what that something was.

Selevan contemplated his approach. He thought about his conversation with Jago Reeth and what Jago had said on the subject of guiding and not directing a young person. Despite Selevan’s earlier reaction of easy-for-you-to-say-mate, he had to admit that Jago had spoken good sense. What was the point of trying to impose one’s will upon an adolescent when that adolescent had a will as well? It wasn’t as if people were all meant to do the same thing as their parents, was it? If they did, the world would never change, would never develop, would perhaps never even be interesting. It would all be lockstep, one generation after another. But, on the other hand, was that so bad?

Selevan didn’t know. What he did know was that he’d ended up, despite his own wishes in the matter and because of a cruel twist of fate in the person of his father’s ill health, doing the same thing as his parents. He’d given in to duty, and the end result had been carrying on with a dairy farm that he’d intended, as a young boy and then an adolescent, to escape as soon as possible. He’d never thought that situation was fair, so he had to ask himself how fair the family were being on Tammy, opposing her desires. On the other hand, what if her desires weren’t her desires at all but only the result of her fear? Now that was a question that wanted answering. But it couldn’t be answered unless it was asked.

He waited, though. First, he had to keep his promise to her and her parents, and that meant he had to go through her rucksack before he drove her to work. She submitted to the search with resignation. She watched him in silence. He could feel her gaze on him as he pawed through her belongings for contraband. Nothing. A meagre lunch. A wallet holding the five pounds he’d given her for spending money two weeks earlier. Lip balm and her address book. There was a paperback novel as well, and he leapt upon this as evidence. But the title-Shoes of the Fisherman-suggested she was reading at last about Cornwall and her heritage, so he let it go. He handed the rucksack over to her with a gruff, “See you keep it this way,” and then he noted she was wearing something he’d not seen before. It wasn’t a new garment. She was still in unrelieved black from head to toe, like Queen Victoria in the post-Albert period, but she had something different round her neck. It was inside her jersey, its green cord the only part he could see.

He said, “What’s this, then?” and he pulled it out. Not a necklace, he realised. Because if it was, it was the oddest necklace he’d ever looked at.

It had two ends, each of which was identical. They had small squares of cloth attached to them. These were embroidered with an ornamental M above which was embroidered a small gold crown. Selevan examined the cloth squares suspiciously. He said to Tammy, “What’s this, then, girl?”

“Scapular,” she told him.

“Scapper-what?”

“Scapular.”

“And the M means?”

“Mary.”

“Mary who?” he demanded.

She sighed. “Oh, Grandie,” was her reply.

This response didn’t exactly fill him with relief. He pocketed the scapular and told her to get her arse out to the car. When he joined her, he knew it was time, so he spoke.

“Is it the fear?” he asked her.

“What fear?”

“You know what fear. Men,” he said. “Has your mum…You know. You bloody well know what I’m talking about, girl.”

“I don’t, actually.”

“Has your mum told you…?”

His wife’s mum hadn’t. Poor Dot knew nothing. She’d come to him not only a virgin but as ignorant as a newborn lamb. He’d made a mess of things because of his inexperience and his nerves, which had evidenced as impatience and had reduced her to frightened tears. But modern girls weren’t like that, were they? They knew it all before they were ten.

On the other hand, ignorance and fear explained a lot about Tammy. For they could be what lay at the root of how she was living at present, all huddled into herself.

He said, “Has your mum told you ’bout it, girl?”

“About what?”

“Birds and bees. Cats and kittens. Has your mum told you?”

“Oh, Grandie,” she said.

“Stop the oh grandie and put me in the bloody picture. Because if she hasn’t…” Poor Dot, he thought. Poor ignorant Dot. The oldest girl in a family of girls, never having seen a grown naked man except in museums and hadn’t the poor fool woman actually believed that the male genitalia were shaped like fig leaves…God, what a horror the wedding night had been and what he’d learned from it all was the idjit he’d been to have been respectful and waited for marriage because if they’d done it beforehand at least she would have known whether she wanted to marry at all…Only she would have insisted upon marriage at that point, so any way you looked at, he’d have been caught. As he was always caught: by love, by duty, and now by Tammy.

“So what’s oh grandie meant to mean?” he asked her. “You know? You’re embarrassed? You’re what?”

She lowered her head. He thought she might be about to cry, and he didn’t want that, so he started the car. They rumbled up the slope and out of the caravan park. He saw that she was not going to speak. She intended to make this difficult for him. Damn and blast her, she was a stubborn little thing. He couldn’t reckon where she got that from, but it was no wonder her parents had reached the point of despair with her.

Well, there was nothing for it but to hammer away if she wasn’t going to answer him. So out of the caravan park and up the lane on the way into Casvelyn, Selevan got out his tools. “It’s the natural order of things,” he told her. “Men and women together. Anything else is unnatural and I mean anything else, if you receive my meaning, girl. Nothing to be worried over because we got separate parts, don’t we, and our separate parts’re meant to be joined. You got man on top and woman on bottom. They put their things together because that’s how it goes. He slides in and they rustle about and when it’s all said and done, they go to sleep. Sometimes they get a baby out of it. Sometimes they don’t. But it’s all the way it’s supposed to be and if a man’s got any wits about him, it’s a jolly nice thing that they both enjoy.”

There. He’d said it. But he wanted to repeat one part, to make certain she understood. “Anything else,” he said with a tap on the steering wheel, “isn’t in the natural order of things, and we’re meant to be natural. Natural. Like nature. And in nature, what you don’t see and don’t ever see is-”

“I’ve been talking to God,” Tammy said.

Now that was a real conversation stopper, Selevan thought. Straight out of the blue, like he hadn’t been trying to make a point with the girl. He said, “Have you, now? And what’s God been saying back? Nice that he’s got time for you, by the by, ’cause the bugger’s never had time for me.”

“I’ve tried to listen.” Tammy spoke like a girl with things on her mind. “I’ve tried to listen for his voice,” she said.

“His voice? God’s voice? From where? You expecting it out of the gorse or something?”

“God’s voice comes from within,” Tammy said, and she brought a lightly clenched fist to her skinny chest. “I’ve tried to listen to the voice from inside myself. It’s a quiet voice. It’s the voice of what’s right. You know when you hear it, Grandie.”

“Hear it a lot, do you?”

“When I get quiet I do. But now I can’t.”

“I’ve seen you quiet day and night.”

“But not inside.”

“How’s that?” He looked over at her. She was concentrating on the rain-streaked day, hedgerows dripping as the car skimmed past them, a magpie taking to the sky.

“My head’s full of chatter,” she said. “If my head won’t be silent, I can’t hear God.”

Chatter? he thought. What was the maddening girl on about? One moment he thought he had her sorted, the next he was flummoxed again. “What d’you got up there, then?” he asked, and he poked her head. “Goblins and ghoulies?”

“Don’t make fun,” she told him. “I’m trying to tell you…But there’s nothing and there’s no one that I can ask, you see. So I’m asking you, as it’s the only thing left that I can think to do. I s’pose I’m asking for help, Grandie.”

Now, he thought, they were down to it. This was the moment the girl’s parents had hoped for, time with her granddad paying off. He waited for more. He made a hmph noise to indicate his willingness to listen. The moments ticked by as they approached Casvelyn. She said nothing more till they were in town.

Then it was brief. He’d pulled to the kerb in front of Clean Barrel Surf Shop before she finally spoke. “If I know something,” she said to him, her eyes fixed on the shop’s front door, “and if what I know might cause someone trouble…What should I do, Grandie? That’s what I’ve been asking God, but he hasn’t answered. What should I do? I could keep asking because when something bad happens to someone you care about, it seems like-”

“The Kerne boy,” he interrupted. “D’you know something about the Kerne boy, Tammy? Look at me square, girl, not out of the window.”

She did. He could see she was troubled beyond what he had thought. So there was only one answer, and despite the irritations it might cause in his own life, he owed it to her to give it. “You know something, you tell the police,” he said. “Nothing else to it. You do it today.”