Careless in Red

Chapter Twenty-one

DESPITE JAGO’S WARNING, CADAN COULDN’T HELP HIMSELF. It was complete insanity and he damn well knew it, but he engaged in it anyway: the soft silken feel of her thighs tightening round him; the sound of her moaning and then the heightened growing rapturous yes of her response, and this set against a backdrop of waves crashing against the nearby shore; the mixed scents of the sea, of her female smells, and of wood rot from the tiny beach hut; the eternal female salt of her where he licked as she shrieked and yes yes as her fingers dug into his hair; the dim light from the cracks round the door casting a nearly ethereal glow on skin that was slick but lithe and firm and willing God so eager and ever so willing…

It could have been like that, Cadan thought, and despite the growing lateness of the day he wasn’t all that far from establishing Pooh in the sitting room, hauling his bicycle out of the garage, and pedaling frantically to Adventures Unlimited to take Dellen Kerne up on her offer to meet at the beach huts. He’d seen just enough films in the cinema to know that the older woman-younger man bit was never perfect-let alone permanent-which was a plus as far as he was concerned. The very idea of having it on with Dellen Kerne was all so right in Cadan’s mind that it had moved quite beyond rightness into another realm altogether: into the sublime, the mystical, the metaphysical. The only metaphorical monkey in the barrel was, alas, Dellen herself.

The woman was a nutter, no question about it. Despite his longing to press his lips to various parts of her body, Cadan knew barm when he saw barm, providing barm was actually a word, which he seriously doubted. But if it wasn’t a word, it needed to be one, and she was barm in spades. She was the walking, talking, breathing, eating, sleeping personification of barm, and the one thing Cadan Angarrack was besides randy enough to take on a herd of sheep was clever enough to give barm a wide berth.

He hadn’t gone to work that day, but he hadn’t been able to face any questions from his father about why he was hanging about the house. So to keep Lew from venturing into that conversational territory, Cadan had risen as usual, had dressed as usual-going so far as to don his paint-spattered jeans, which he considered a very nice touch indeed-and had shown up as usual at the breakfast table where Madlyn was eating a virtuous half grapefruit, and Lew was sliding a decent fry-up from the pan onto his plate.

Seeing Cadan, Lew had gestured towards the food in a surprisingly affable fashion. Cadan took this as a peace offering and as acknowledgement of his efforts at self-rehabilitation through gainful employment, so he accepted the food with a “Fantastic, Dad. Ta,” and tucked right in, asking his sister how she was coping.

Madlyn cast him a baleful glance that recommended a change in conversational direction, so Cadan gave his father a moment’s study and realised Lew had about him the ease of movement that had in the past signified recent sexual release. He decided that his father was unlikely to be wanking in the midst of his morning shower, and he said to him, “Get back with Ione, Dad?” in a man-to-man tone whose implication could not be misconstrued.

And Lew definitely did not misconstrue. Cadan could tell that much. For his father’s swarthy skin darkened ever so slightly before he went back to the cooker to prepare a second fry-up. This he did in silence.

So much for the warm, familial colloquy. But, no worries. Since there was to be no additional sound among them beyond that which was made by mastication and swallowing, the entire issue of Cadan’s employment did not come up. On the other hand, Cadan was burning to ask what the big deal actually was if they exchanged a few bawdy words about Lew successfully talking Ione out of her pique long enough to pin her manfully to the mattress. All right, Madlyn was there and perhaps one ought to show deference to her femininity-not to mention everything that had gone wrong for her recently-by not bringing up the coarser aspects of male-female relationships. On the other hand, a wink between men wouldn’t have gone amiss, and in finer days Lew had not been averse to allowing his son a wee bit of knowledge in the area of triumphant conquests.

Which made Cadan wonder what was going on.

Had Lew moved on to another woman? It was definitely in his nature. A succession of women had come into the lives of the small Angarrack clan, women who had generally ended up weeping, ranting, or trying to be reasonable with conversation at the kitchen table or the front door or in the garden or wherever because Lew Angarrack would not commit to them. But when another woman was being worked into the picture, Lew generally brought her home to meet the kids prior to sex because bringing her home to meet the kids always gave the impression that something was actually possible between them…like a future. So what did it mean that here Lew was in the kitchen loose of limb and looking like a man who’s properly oiled a woman’s hinges, when no one had been brought by at all? The kids were older, true enough, but some things were written in concrete round here and one of them had long been Lew’s behaviour.

Which brought to mind Dellen Kerne. Not that she was far from Cadan’s mind at any one moment, but it seemed to him that Lew’s secrecy meant there was reason for secrecy, and reason for secrecy implied the illicit, and illicit definitely led one down the mental garden path to adultery. A married woman. Christ, he concluded. His father had got to Dellen first. He didn’t know how, but he reckoned it had happened. He felt a stab of real jealousy.

So he had plenty of time during the day to dwell on the what-could-still-be’s of a run-in with Dellen. He had the feeling she wouldn’t take it amiss to be doing a father-and-son shag, but the truth was that he didn’t want to make things with his father worse than they’d already been, so he ended up trying to occupy himself with other thoughts.

The trouble here was that he was a doer, not a thinker. Heavy thinking bound him up in anxiety, the cure for which lay in two directions. One of them was action and the other was drink. Cadan knew which of the two he ought to choose, with respect to his history, but he damn well wanted to choose the other, and as the hours wore on, the wanting increased. When the wanting pressed him to the point at which rational thought was no longer possible, he gave Pooh a fruit plate to keep him occupied-among other edibles, the parrot was particularly partial to Spanish oranges-and he fetched his bicycle. Binner Down House was his destination.

Cadan’s purpose was to acquire a companion in the booze. Drinking alone more than once in a week suggested that a man might have something of a problem with mood-altering substances of the liquid variety, and Cadan didn’t wish to be labeled as anything other than a bon vivant. So he settled on Will Mendick as a likely partner in drink.

Nothing having progressed for Will in the Madlyn arena, it stood to reason he might well want to get soused. Once getting soused was accomplished, they could both sleep it off at Binner Down House with no one ever the wiser. It seemed like a grand idea.

Will lived at Binner Down House with nine surfers, male and female. He was the odd man out. He didn’t ride the waves because he didn’t like sharks and he wasn’t overly fond of weever fish either. Cadan found him on the south side of the property, which was an ancient place in the sort of condition a property gets into when it’s near the sea and no one takes proper care of it. So the land surrounding it was overgrown with gorse, bracken, and a tangle of sea grasses. A single gnarled cypress in what went for a front garden needed trimming, and weeds took the place of a lawn that had too long fought the good fight against them. The building itself was in sore need of repair, especially with regard to roof tiles and the wood surrounds of windows and doors. But the occupants had more important concerns than property maintenance, and a disreputable shed in which their surfboards lined up like colourful place markers in a book served as ample evidence of this. As did their wet suits, which generally hung to dry from the lower branches of the cypress.

The south side of the house faced Binner Down, from whose environs floated the lowing of cows. Along the wall of the building, a triangular sort of greenhouse had been fashioned. Its glass roof tilted into the house, with one side of it also glass and the other comprising the existing granite of the old building, but painted white to reflect the sun. This was a vinery, Cadan had learned, its purpose being to grow grapes.

Cadan found Will inside. He was bent to accommodate the tilted glass of the ceiling, digging round the base of an infant grapevine. When Cadan entered, Will straightened and said, “Fuck all, it’s about bloody time,” before he saw who it was coming through the door. “Sorry,” he then said. “I thought it was one of them.” He was, Cadan knew, referring to his surfing housemates.

“Still not helping round here?”

“Hell no. They might actually have to get off their bums.” Will had been using a pitchfork to work the soil-which didn’t look to Cadan the best way to go about it, considering the size of the plants, but he said nothing-and Will tossed the tool aside. He took up a cup of something sitting on a ledge, and he quaffed the rest of whatever was in it. It was warm in the greenhouse, as it was supposed to be despite the hour of the day, and he was sweating, which made his wispy hair cling to his skull. He was going to be bald by the time he was thirty, Cadan decided, and he gave silent thanks for his own thick locks.

“I owe you,” Cadan told Will by way of prefatory remarks. “I came by to tell you that.”

Will looked confused. He reached for his pitchfork and resumed his digging. “You owe me what, exactly?”

“An apology. For what I said.”

Will straightened again. He wiped his arm across his forehead. He was wearing a flannel shirt, partially unbuttoned. He had on his usual black T-shirt beneath it. “What did you say?”

“That bit about Madlyn. The other day. You know. When you stopped by.” Cadan thought that the less said about Madlyn the better life would be for them both, but he did want to make sure Will knew what he was talking about. “Thing is, man, how the hell do I know who has a chance with my sister and who hasn’t?”

“Oh, I expect you’d know well enough. As you’re her brother.”

“Not as things turn out,” Cadan told him. “She was talking about you this morning at breakfast, as it happens. I heard that and I realised…Listen, man, I was dead wrong and I want you to know it.” He was lying, of course, but he reckoned he could be forgiven for that. A greater good was involved here: He didn’t actually know his sister’s mind on the subject of romantic entanglements, did he?-aside from how she felt about Santo Kerne at the moment and he wasn’t altogether sure of that, either-and, besides that, he needed Will Mendick just now. So if a small prevarication was going to get Will to open a bottle with him, that certainly could be forgiven. “What I’m saying’s that you shouldn’t write her off. She’s been in a bad way for a bit, and I reckon she needs you, even if she doesn’t know that yet.”

Will went to the far end of the greenhouse where supplies were kept and fetched down a box of fertiliser from a shelf. Cadan followed him.

“So I reckoned we could hoist a brew”-Cadan cringed internally at the bizarre expression; he sounded like someone on American telly-“and let bygones be bygones. What d’you say?”

“Can’t,” Will said. “I can’t leave at the moment.”

“That’s where you’re lucky. I wasn’t actually talking about leaving,” Cadan told him frankly. “I reckoned we could booze up here.”

Will shook his head. He returned to his vines and his pitchfork. Cadan had the distinct impression that something was eating at his friend’s peace of mind.

“Can’t. Sorry.” Will picked up the pace of his work and clarified his situation by adding tersely, “Cops were at the grocery, Cade. They gave me a grilling.”

“What about?”

“What the hell d’you think it was about?”

“Santo Kerne?”

“Yeah, Santo Kerne. Is there another subject?”

“Why you, for God’s sake?”

“The hell I know. They’ve been talking to everyone. How’d you escape?” Will dug furiously once again.

Cadan said nothing. He felt ill at ease all at once. Speculatively, he looked at Will. The fact that the cops had sought him out suggested things Cadan didn’t want to begin to consider.

“Well,” he said in the expansive tone that always indicates an end to a conversation.

“Yeah,” Will said grimly. “Well.”

Cadan made his farewell soon after this and was thus at a loose end once again. Will and Will’s troubles aside, fate seemed to be telling him that action was called for. And action meant the single deed-aside from drinking-that Cadan had not been able to get out of his brain.

Christ, but his mind seemed fixed on her. She might as well have been a deadly infection eating away at his brain. Cadan knew that his choices were simple: He had to get rid of her or he had to have her. Yet having her was not unlike committing ritual suicide, and he knew that if nothing else, so he rode from Binner Down House to the only place left in his limited list of escape hatches from the self: the Royal Air Station. He couldn’t come up with any other alternative. He’d lie to his father about having gone to work, if it came to that. He just needed to be somewhere that wasn’t at home alone or at Adventures Unlimited in the vicinity of that woman.

As luck had it, his father’s car wasn’t there. But Jago’s was, which seemed a godsend. If anyone could act the part of confidant, it was Jago Reeth.

Unfortunately, someone else had the same idea. Cadan walked in to find the two daughters of Ione Soutar in the reception area and the door to the inner workshops closed. Jennie was scrupulously attending to her school prep at the card table that served as his father’s desk while the redoubtable Leigh was pressing one finger to the side of her nostril, a tube of Super Glue on the counter in front of her along with a compact mirror into which she gazed.

“Mum’s inside, Cadan?” Leigh told him with that perpetual, maddening interrogatory inflection of hers, which always suggested she was speaking to a fool. “She’s said it’s personal, so you’re not to go in?”

“I expect she’s talking to Jago ’bout your dad,” Jennie added frankly. She was sucking on her lower lip as she rubbed out pencil marks she’d made on her paper. “She said it’s over, but she keeps crying at night in the bath when she thinks we can’t hear, so I reckon it’s not as over as she wants it to be.”

“She needs to give him the permanent heave-ho?” Leigh said. “I mean, no offense, Cadan, but your father’s a dickhead? Women need to stand up for themselves and they need to stand firm and they especially need to kick arse when they’re not being treated the way they deserve to be treated. I mean, like, what sort of example is she setting for the two of us?”

“What the hell’re you doing to your face?” Cadan asked.

“Mummy wouldn’t let her get her nose pierced, so she’s gluing a stone on,” Jennie informed Cadan in the friendly fashion that was her nature. “C’n you do long division, Cade?”

“God, don’t ask him,” Leigh said to her sister. “He didn’t even pass one GSCE? You know that, Jennie.”

Cadan ignored her. “You want a calculator?” he asked Jennie.

“She’s supposed to show her work?” Leigh told him. She inspected her nose stud and said to the mirror, “I’m not stupid. I’m not going to rubbish up my face. Like I’d ackshully do that?” She rolled her eyes. “What d’you think, Jennie?”

Jennie said without looking, “I think you’re going to have a real row with her now.”

Cadan couldn’t disagree. Leigh looked like someone with a large spot of blood on the side of her nose. She should have chosen a different-coloured stone.

“Mum’s going to make her take it off,” Jennie went on. “It’ll hurt when she does, as well, cos the Super Glue holds it real good. You’ll be sorry, Leigh.”

“Shut up?” Leigh said.

“I only said-”

“Shut up? Put a sock in it? Cram your fist down your throat? Gag yourself with a shovel?”

“You aren’t s’posed to talk to me like-”

The inner door swung open. Ione stood there. She’d been crying. Massively, by the look of her. Damn, but she actually must love his father, Cadan thought.

He wanted to tell her to let his dad go and to get on with her life. Lew Angarrack wasn’t available, and he probably wouldn’t ever be. He’d been dumped by the Bounder-his one, true, eternal childhood love-and he’d not got past it. None of them had. That was their curse.

But how could one explain it to a woman who’d managed to carry on with her life when her marriage had ended? There was no way.

It looked, however, as if Jago had made a heroic effort in that direction. He stood behind Ione with a handkerchief in his hand. He was folding this and returning it to the pocket of his boiler suit.

Leigh took one look at her mother and rolled her eyes. She said, “I suppose this means we won’t be surfing any longer?”

Jennie added loyally, “I didn’t like it anyways,” as she gathered up her schoolbooks.

“Let’s go, girls,” Ione said. She cast a look round the workshop. “Nothing more to be said. Matters are quite finished here.”

Cadan she ignored altogether, as if he were a carrier of the family disease. He stepped out of the way as she herded her offspring out of the shop. She was setting off in the direction of her own shop in the air station as the door swung closed behind her.

“Poor lass,” was Jago’s comment on the matter.

“What’d you tell her?”

Jago went back into the glassing room. “The truth.”

“Which is?”

“No one changes a leopard’s spots.”

“What about the leopard?”

Jago was carefully peeling some blue tape from the rail of a pintail short board. Cadan noticed how bad his shakes were today. “Eh?” Jago said.

“Can’t a leopard change its own spots?”

“I’ll wager you c’n think that one through, Cade.”

“People do change.”

“Nope,” Jago said. “That they don’t.” He applied sandpaper to the resin seam. His glasses slipped down on his nose and he pushed them back into place. “Their reactions, p’rhaps. What they show to the world, if you see what I mean. That part changes if they want it to change. But the inside part? It stays the same. You don’t change who you are. Just how you act.” Jago looked up. A long hunk of his lank grey hair had come loose from his perennial ponytail, and it fell across his cheek. “What’re you doing here, Cade?”

“Me?”

“’Less you’ve changed your name, lad. Aren’t you meant to be at work?”

Cadan preferred not to answer that question directly, so he had a wander round the workshop as Jago continued to sand the rails of the board. He opened the shaping room-scene of his former attempt at employment at LiquidEarth-and he gazed inside.

The problem, he decided, was having been assigned to shaping boards. He had no patience for it. Shaping required a steady hand. It demanded the use of an endless catalogue of tools and templates. It asked one to consider so many variables that keeping them all in mind was an impossibility: the curve of the blank, single versus double concavity, the contours of the rails, the fin positions. Length of board, shape of tail, thickness of rail. One sixteenth of an inch made all the difference and bloody hell, Cadan, can’t you tell those channels are too deep? I can’t have you in here cocking things up.

All right. Fair enough. He was wretched at shaping. And glassing was so boring he wanted to weep. It frayed his nerves: all the delicacy required. The fiberglass unspooling from its roll with just enough excess not to be considered wasteful, the careful application of resin to fix the glass permanently to the polystyrene beneath it in such a way as to prevent air bubbles. The sanding, then the glassing again, then more sanding…

He couldn’t do it. He wasn’t made for it. You had to be born a glasser like Jago and that was that.

He’d wanted to work in the spray room from the first, applying the paint to his own board artwork. But that hadn’t been allowed. His father had told him he had to earn his way into that position by learning the rest of the business first, but when it had come down to it, Lew hadn’t demanded as much from Santo Kerne, had he?

“You’ll take over the business. Santo won’t. So you need to learn things top to bottom,” had been his father’s excuse. “I need an artist and I need one now. Santo knows how to design.”

He knows how to fuck Madlyn, you mean, Cadan had wanted to say. But really, what was the point? Madlyn had wanted Santo employed there, and Madlyn was the favoured child.

And now? Who knew? They’d both disappointed their father in the end, but there was a chance that Madlyn had finally disappointed him more.

“I’m ready to come back here,” Cadan said to Jago. “What d’you think?”

Jago straightened from the board and set down his sanding block. He examined Cadan before he spoke. “What’s going on?” he asked.

Cadan riffled through his brain to try to come up with a good reason for his change of heart, but there was only the truth if he were to stand a chance of getting back into his father’s good graces, with Jago’s assistance. He said, “You were right. I can’t work there, Jago. But I need your help.”

Jago nodded. “She got you bad, eh?”

Cadan didn’t want to spend another moment on the subject of Dellen Kerne, either mentally or conversationally. He said, “No. Yes. Whatever. I’ve got to get out of there. Will you help?”

“’Course I will,” the old man said kindly. “Just give me some time to plan an approach.”

AFTER HIS CONVERSATION IN Zennor with the former detective, Lynley had returned to David Wilkie’s house, which was no particular distance from the church. There he’d ventured into the attic with the old man. An hour of rooting through cardboard boxes had produced Wilkie’s notes on the unresolved case of Jamie Parsons. These notes had in their turn produced the names of the boys who’d been so thoroughly questioned in the matter of Jamie’s death. Wilkie had no idea where those boys now resided, but Lynley thought it possible that at least one or two of them still lived in the vicinity of Pengelly Cove. If he was correct, they were waiting there to be questioned.

This same questioning occupied Lynley’s thoughts as he returned to that surfing village. He gave a great deal of consideration to how he wanted to make his next move.

As it turned out, with Ben Kerne in Casvelyn, one of the boys prematurely dead of lymphoma, and another having emigrated to Australia, only three of the original six still resided in Pengelly Cove, and it was not difficult to find them. Lynley tracked them down by starting at the pub, where a conversation with the publican led him to an auto body repair shop (Chris Outer), the local primary school (Darren Fields), and a marine engine maintenance business (Frankie Kliskey) in very short order. At each place of employment, he did and said the same thing. He produced his police identification, gave minimal details about the death under investigation in Casvelyn, and asked each man if he could free himself up to talk about Ben Kerne in another location in an hour’s time. The death of Ben Kerne’s son, Santo appeared to work the necessary magic, if magic it could be called. Each of the men had agreed.

Lynley had selected the coastal path for their conversation. Not far outside the village stood the memorial to Jamie Parsons that Eddie Kerne had spoken of. High up on the cliff, it comprised a tall-backed stone bench forming a curve round a circular stone table. In the middle of the table Jamie was deeply incised, along with the dates of his birth and his death. Once he arrived, Lynley remembered having seen this memorial during his lengthy walk along the coast. He’d sat in the shelter that the bench provided from the wind, and he’d stared not out to sea but at the boy’s name and the dates that marked the brevity of his life. Life’s brevity had filled his mind. Along with her, of course. Along with Helen.

On this day he realised once he sat on the bench to wait that, aside from a few minutes upon waking, he’d not thought about Helen, and the recognition of that fact brought her death even more heavily upon him. He found he didn’t want not to think of her daily and hourly, even as he understood that to exist in the present meant that she would move farther and farther into his past as time went forward. Yet it wounded him to know that. Beloved wife. Longed-for son. Both of them gone and he would recover. Even as this was the way of the world and of life, the very fact of his recovery seemed unbearable and obscene.

He rose from the bench and walked to the edge of the cliff. Another memorial-less formal than Jamie Parsons’s table and bench-lay here: a wreath of dead and disintegrating evergreens from the previous Christmas, a deflated balloon, a sodden Paddington bear, and the name Eric written in black marking pen on a tongue depressor. There were a dozen ways to die along the Cornish coast. Lynley wondered which one of them had taken this soul.

The sound of footfalls on the stony path just to the north of where he stood drew his attention to the route from Pengelly Cove. He saw the three men come over the rise together, and he knew they’d contacted one another. He’d expected as much when he’d first spoken to them. He’d even encouraged it. His design was to lay his cards on the table: They had nothing to fear from him.

Darren Fields was obviously their leader. He was the biggest of them and, as head teacher of the local primary school, he was likely in possession of the most education. He walked at the front of their line up the path; he was the first to nod at Lynley and to acknowledge the selection of meeting site with the words, “I thought as much. Well, we’ve said all there is to be said on that subject years ago. So if you’re thinking-”

“I’m here about Santo Kerne, as I told you,” Lynley said. “About Ben Kerne as well. If my intentions were anything more than that, I’d hardly have been so transparent with you.”

The other two looked to Fields. He evaluated Lynley’s words. He finally jerked his head in what went for a nod and all of them returned to the table and its bench. Frankie Kliskey appeared to be the most nervous of them. An unusually small man, he chewed on the side of his index finger-in a spot that was dirty from engine oil and raw from frequent chewing-and his glance shot rabbitlike among them. For his part, Chris Outer seemed prepared to wait for matters to unfold in whatever way they would. He lit a cigarette in the cave of his hand, and he leaned against the bench with the collar of his leather jacket turned up, his eyes narrowed, and his expression reminiscent of James Dean in a scene from Rebel Without a Cause. Only the hair was missing. He was as bald as a chicken egg.

“I hope you can see this isn’t a trap of any kind,” Lynley said as a means of preamble. “David Wilkie-is the name familiar to you? Yes, I see that it is-believes that what happened to Jamie Parsons all those years ago was likely an accident. Wilkie doesn’t think now-nor did he apparently ever think-that what was premeditated among you was his death. The boy’s blood showed both alcohol and cocaine. Wilkie thinks you didn’t understand his condition and expected him to make it out on his own when you were finished with him.”

They said nothing. An opaqueness had come into Darren Fields’s blue eyes, however, and this suggested to Lynley a determination to hold fast to whatever had been said in the past about Jamie Parsons. That made very good sense, from Darren’s perspective. Whatever had been said in the past had kept them out of the judicial system for nearly three decades. Why make an alteration now?

“Here’s what I know,” Lynley said.

“Hang on, man,” Darren Fields snapped. “Not a minute ago you were telling us that you’d come about another matter.”

“Ben’s kid,” Chris Outer pointed out. Frankie Kliskey said nothing, but his glance kept ping-ponging among them.

“Yes. I’ve come about that,” Lynley acknowledged. “But the two deaths have one man in common-Ben Kerne-and that has to be looked at. It’s the way these things work.”

“There’s nothing more to be said.”

“I think there is. I think there always was. So does DCI Wilkie if it comes to that, but the difference between us is-as I’ve said-that Wilkie believes what happened wasn’t intentional, while I’m far from certain of that. I could be reassured, but for that to happen, one of you or all of you are going to have to talk to me about that night and the cave.”

The three men made no reply although Outer and Fields exchanged a look. One couldn’t take a look to the bank, however, not to mention to DI Hannaford, so Lynley pressed forward. “Here’s what I know: There was a party. At that party there was an altercation between Jamie Parsons and Ben Kerne. Jamie had already needed sorting for any number of reasons, most of which had to do with who he was and how he treated people, and the way he dealt with Ben Kerne that night was apparently the final straw. So he got sorted in one of the sea caves. I believe the object was humiliation: hence the boy’s missing clothing, the marks on his wrists and ankles from having been tied up, and the faeces in his ears. My guess is that you likely pissed on him as well, but the urine would have been washed away by the tide, where the faeces were not. My question is, how did you get him down there to the cave? I’ve thought about this, and it seems to me that you had to have something that he wanted. If he was already drunk and perhaps already drugged, it can’t have been the promise of getting high. That leaves a form of contraband that he didn’t want others at the party-perhaps his sisters, who might’ve grassed to their parents-to see being exchanged. But not wanting to have others see him in possession of something that they themselves might have wanted seems out of character in the Jamie I’ve heard described. Having what others needed, wanted, admired, respected, whatever…that seems to have been how he operated. Showing these things off to people. Showing off full stop. Being better than everyone else. So I can’t see him agreeing to meet in a cave to take ownership of something illegal. That, then, seems to leave us with something more private that was promised him. Which seems to lead us to sex.”

Frankie’s eyes did it. Blue, their pupils enlarged. Lynley wondered how he’d managed to keep quiet when questioned by Wilkie away from his friends. But perhaps that had been it: Away from his friends he wouldn’t know what to say, so he’d say nothing. In their presence, he could wait for their lead.

“Young men-adolescent boys-will do just about anything if sex is part of the picture,” Lynley said. “I expect Jamie Parsons was no different to the rest of you when it came to that. So the question is, was he homosexual, and did one of you make a promise to him that was meant to be kept when he got down to the cave?”

Silence. They were very good at this. But Lynley was fairly certain he could go them one better.

“It would have had to be more than merely a promise, though,” he said. “Jamie wasn’t likely to respond to the mere suggestion of buggery. I reckon it would have had to be a move of some sort, a trigger, a signal so that he would know it was safe to proceed. What would that be? A knowing look. A word. A gesture. Hand on bum. Stiffie pressed up to him in a private corner. The sort of language that’s spoken by-”

“No one here’s a poof.” It was Darren who spoke. Not surprisingly, Lynley realised, as he was a teacher of young children and had the most to lose. “And none of the others were either.”

“The rest of your group,” Lynley clarified.

“That’s what I’m telling you.”

“But it was sex, wasn’t it,” Lynley said. “I’m right in that. He thought he was meeting someone for sex. Who?”

Silence.

Finally, “The past is dead.” It was Chris Outer this time, and he looked as steely as Darren Fields.

“The past is the past,” Lynley countered. “Santo Kerne is dead. Jamie Parsons is dead. Their deaths may or may not be related, but-”

“They’re not,” Fields said.

“-but until I know otherwise, I have to assume there may be a connection between them. And I don’t want the connection to be that each investigation ends in the same way: with an open verdict. Santo Kerne was murdered.”

“Jamie Parsons was not.”

“All right. I’ll accept that. DCI Wilkie believes it as well. You’re not going to be prosecuted more than a quarter century after the fact for having been so bloody stupid as to have left the boy in that cave. All I want to know is what happened that night.”

“It was Jack. Jack.” The admission fairly burst from Frankie Kliskey, as if he’d been waiting nearly thirty years to make it. He said to the others, “Jack’s dead now and what does it matter? I don’t want to carry this. I’m that bloody tired of carrying it, Darren.”

“God damn-”

“I held my tongue back then, and look at me. Look.” He held out his hands. They were shaking, like a palsy. “A cop comes round and it’s all back again and I don’t want living through it another time.”

Darren pushed his body away from the table, a gesture of disgust. But it was also a gesture of dismissal, one that could be interpreted as “Have it your way, then.”

There was another tight little silence among the men. In it, the gulls cawed and far below, a boat gunned its motor in the cove.

“She was called Nancy Snow,” Chris Outer said, slowly. “She was Jack Dustow’s girlfriend and Jack was one of us.”

“He’s the one who died of lymphoma,” Lynley said. “That would be Jack?”

“That would be Jack. He talked Nan into…doing what was done. We could have used Dellen-that’s Ben’s wife now, Dellen Nankervis as she was-because she was always ready for action-”

“She was there that night?” Lynley asked.

“Oh aye, she was there. She’s what started things. Because she was there.” He sketched out the details: an adolescent relationship gone sour, two youngsters each showing the other one up with a willing new partner, Jamie reacting to his sister’s becoming openly entangled with Ben Kerne, Jamie’s attack on Ben…

“He needed sorting anyway, like you said,” Frankie Kliskey finished. “None of us liked the bloke. So Jack got Nan Snow to heat him up. End product was, Jamie wanted sex right there in the house.”

“Preferably where everyone could see he was getting it,” Darren Fields added.

“Where Jack could see he was getting it,” Chris pointed out. “That’s what Jamie was like.”

“But Nan said no.” Frankie went on with the story. “No way she’d do it with him where others could watch, especially where Jack could see. She said let’s go down to the cave to do it, so that’s what they did. That’s where we were waiting.”

“She knew what the plan was?”

“Jack told her,” Chris said. “She knew. Get Jamie down to the cave for sex. Don’t meet him there because he’s not stupid and he’ll smell a rat and won’t go down. Take him there instead. Act like you want it as bad as he does. We’ll handle the rest. So down they came round half past one in the morning. We were in the cave and Nan handed him over. The rest…You can work it out.”

“The odds were good. Six of you and one of him.”

“No,” Darren said. His voice was harsh. “Ben Kerne wasn’t ever there.”

“Where was he, then?”

“Gone home. He was stupid about Dellen. Always stupid. Christ, if it hadn’t been for her, we wouldn’t have been at the bloody party at all. But he needed cheering up, so we said, Let’s go and have his drink and eat his food and listen to his music. Only she was there, that bloody Dellen with some new bloke, so Ben got into the wrong girl’s knickers in reaction to seeing Dellen, and after that, he just wanted to go home. Which was what he did. The rest of us talked to Nan and Nan went back to the party and…” Darren gestured in the direction of the cave, down below them, tucked into the cliff.

Lynley carried the story on, saying, “You stripped him in the cave, and you tied him up. You smeared faeces on him. Did you piss on him? No? What, then? Toss off? One of you? All of you?”

“He cried,” Darren said. “That’s what we wanted. That’s all we wanted. When he started to cry, we were finished with him. We untied him. We left him to make his way back up the cliff. The rest you know.”

Lynley nodded. The story made him feel queasy. It was one thing to surmise, another to hear the truth of the matter. There were so many Jamie Parsons on earth, and so many boys like these men before him. There was also the great divide between them and how that divide was or was not negotiated. Jamie Parsons had likely been unbearable. But being unbearable did not amount to being deserving of death.

Lynley said, “I’m curious about one thing.”

They waited. All of them looked at him: Darren Fields sullen, Chris Outer as cool as he’d likely been twenty-eight years ago, Frankie Kliskey expectant of a psychological blow of some sort.

“How did you manage to hold fast to the same story when the police went after you initially? Before they went after Ben Kerne, I mean.”

“We left the party at half past eleven. We parted at the high street. We went home.” It was Darren speaking, and Lynley got the point. Three sentences only, endlessly repeated. They may have been bloody stupid, those five boys involved, but they had not been ignorant of the law.

“What did you do with his clothes?”

“Countryside’s filled with adits and mine shafts,” Chris said. “That’s the nature of this part of Cornwall.”

“What about Ben Kerne? Did you tell him what had happened?”

“We left the party at half past eleven. We parted at the high street. We went home.”

So, Lynley thought, Ben Kerne had always been as ignorant of what had happened as everyone else had been, aside from the original five boys and Nancy Snow.

“What happened to Nancy Snow?” Lynley asked. “How could you be sure she’d not talk?”

“She was pregnant by Jack,” Darren told him. “Three months along. She had an interest in keeping Jack out of trouble.”

“What happened to her?”

“They married. After he died, she moved off to Dublin with another husband.”

“So you were safe.”

“We were always safe. We left the party at half past eleven. We parted at the high street. We went home.”

There was, in short, nothing more to be said. It was the same situation that had existed after Jamie Parsons’ death nearly thirty years earlier.

“Did you not feel some sense of responsibility once the police focused their attention on Ben Kerne?” Lynley asked them. “Someone grassed on him. Was it one of you?”

Darren laughed harshly. “Not bloody likely. Only person who’d’ve grassed on Ben would’ve been someone wanting to cause him trouble.”