“This is so good of you, Thomas, but perhaps I ought to arrange for a glazier?” Daidre had said. She sounded doubtful about his intentions of wielding glass and putty.
“Nonsense. It’s all very straightforward,” he told her.
“Have you…I mean, before this?”
“Many times. Other projects, I mean. As far as windows are concerned, I admit to being something of a virgin. Now…Let’s see what we have.”
What they had was a cottage of two hundred years, possibly older, because Daidre wasn’t sure. She kept meaning to do a history of the place, she told him, but so far she’d not got round to it. She did know it had begun its life as a fishing hut used by a great house near Alsperyl. That house was vanished—its interior long ago destroyed by fire and its stones eventually carted away by locals who used them for everything from building cottages to defining property lines—but as it had dated to 1723, there was every chance that this little building was of a similar age.
This meant, of course, that nothing was straight, including the windows whose frames had been precisely constructed to fit apertures that were themselves without precision. Lynley discovered this to his dismay when he held the glass up to the frame once the debris of the broken window was cleared away. A slight horizontal drop existed, he saw, just enough to make the placement of the glass…something of a challenge.
He should have measured both ends, he realised. He felt his neck grow hot with embarrassment.
“Oh dear,” Daidre said. And then quickly, as if she believed her remark spoke of a lack of confidence, “Well, I’m sure it’s only a matter of—”
“Putty,” he said.
“I beg your pardon?”
“This merely calls for a greater amount of putty at one end. There’s no real problem.”
“Oh that’s lovely,” she said. “That’s good. That’s excellent.” She took herself off to the kitchen at once, murmuring obscurely about brewing tea.
He struggled with the project: the putty, the putty knife, the glass, the placement of the glass, the falling rain that he should have damn well known was going to make the entire enterprise impossible. She stayed in the kitchen. She remained there so long that he drew the conclusion she was not only laughing at his ineptitude but also hiding the fact that she herself could have repaired the window with one hand tied behind her back. After all, she was the woman who’d used him as a mop when it came to darts.
When at last she emerged, he’d managed to get the glass in, but it was obvious that someone with more skill than he was going to have to repair his repair. He admitted as much and apologised. He had to go down to Pengelly Cove, he told her, and if she had the time to accompany him there, he’d make everything up to her with dinner.
“Pengelly Cove? Why?” she asked.
“Police business,” he replied.
“Does DI Hannaford think there are answers in Pengelly Cove? And she’s setting you after them? Why not one of her own policemen?” Daidre asked. When he hesitated about giving her an answer, it took her only a moment to understand. She said, “Ah. So you’re not a suspect any longer. Is that wise of DI Hannaford?”
“What?”
“To dismiss you from suspicion because you’re a cop? Fairly shortsighted, isn’t it?”
“I think she’s had trouble coming up with a motive.”
“I see.” Her voice had altered, and he knew she’d put the rest of it together. If he was no longer a suspect, she still was. She would know that there was a reason for this, and she would probably know why.
He thought she might refuse to go with him, but she didn’t, and he was glad. He was seeking a way to get to the truth of who she was and what she was hiding, and with no easy resources at hand to do this, gaining her trust through companionship did seem the best way.
Miracles proved to be his means of access. They’d driven up from the cove and they were winding through Stowe Wood on their way to the A39 when he asked her if she believed in miracles. At first she frowned at the question. Then she said, “Oh. The Internet paperwork you saw. No, I don’t, actually. But a friend of mine—a colleague at the zoo, the primate keeper, as a matter of fact—is planning a trip for his parents because they believe in miracles and they’re in rather bad need of one at the moment. A miracle, that is, not a trip.”
“That’s very good of you to help him out.” He glanced over at her. Her skin was blotchy. “Your…” What was the colleague to her? he wondered. Your lover, your boyfriend, your erstwhile partner? Why this reaction?
“It’s an act of friendship,” she said, as if he’d asked those questions. “Pancreatic cancer. There’s no real coming back from that diagnosis, but he’s not an old man—Paul says his dad’s only fifty-four—and they want to try everything. I think it’s futile, but who am I to say? So I told him I’d…well, I’d look for the place with the best statistics. Rather silly, isn’t it?”
“Not necessarily.”
“Well, of course it is, Thomas. How does one apply statistics to a place dominated by mysticism and earnest if misplaced belief? If I bathe in these waters, are my chances for a cure better than if I scribbled my request on a scrap of paper and left it at the foot of a marble statue of a saint? What if I kiss the ground in Medjugorje? Or is the best course to stay home and pray to someone on the fast track for a halo? They need miracles to get their sainthood, don’t they? What about that route? It would at least save money that we can’t afford to spend anyway.” She drew a breath and he glanced her way again. She was leaning against the car door, and her face looked rather pinched. “Sorry,” she said. “I do go on. But one so hates to see people divorce themselves from their own common sense because a crisis has arisen. If you know what I mean.”
“Yes,” he said evenly. “As it happens, I do know what you mean.”
She raised her hand to her lips. She had strong-looking hands, sensible hands, a doctor’s hands, with clipped, clean nails. “Oh my God. I am so bloody sorry. I’ve done it again. Sometimes, my mouth goes off.”
“It’s all right.”
“It isn’t. You would have done anything to save her. I’m terribly sorry.”
“No. What you said is perfectly true. In crisis people thrash about, looking for answers, trying to get to a solution. And to them the solution is always what they want and not necessarily what’s actually best for anyone else.”
“Still, I didn’t mean to cause you pain. I don’t ever mean that for anyone, for that matter.”
“Thank you.”
From there he couldn’t see how to get to her lies except to tell a few of his own, which he preferred not to do. Surely, it was up to Bea Hannaford to question Daidre Trahair about her alleged route from Bristol to Polcare Cove. It was up to Bea Hannaford to reveal to Daidre exactly what the police knew about her putative lunch at a pub, and it was up to Bea Hannaford to decide how to utilise that knowledge to force the vet into an admission of whatever it was that she needed to admit.
He used the pause in their conversation to head in another direction. He said lightly, “We started with a governess. Have I told you that? Completely nineteenth century. It only lasted till my sister and I rebelled and put frogs into her bed on Guy Fawkes night. And at that time of year, believe me, frogs weren’t easy to find.”
“Are you saying you actually had a governess as a child? Poor Jane Eyre with no Mr. Rochester to rescue her from a life of servitude, dining in her bedroom alone because she wasn’t upstairs or downstairs either?”
“It wasn’t as bad as that. She dined with us. With the family. We’d begun with a nanny but when it was time for school, the governess came onboard. This was for my older sister and me. By the time my brother was born—he’s ten years younger than I, have I told you?—that had all been put to rest.”
“But it’s so…so charmingly antique.” Lynley could hear the laughter in Daidre’s voice.
“Yes, isn’t it? But it was that, boarding school, or the village school where we wo
uld mix with the local children.”
“With their ghastly Cornish accents,” Daidre noted.
“The very thing. My father was determined that we would follow in his educational footsteps, which did not lead to the village school. My mother was equally determined we wouldn’t be packed off to boarding school at seven years of age—”
“Wise woman.”
“—so their compromise was a governess until we drove her off with her sanity barely intact. At which point, we did go to the local school, which was what we both wanted anyway. My father must have tested our accents every day, however. It seemed so. God forbid that we should ever sound common.”
“He’s dead now?”
“Years and years.” Lynley ventured a look. She was studying him and he wondered if she was considering the topic of schooling and wondering why they were talking about it. He said, “What about you?” and tried to make it casual, noting his discomfort as he did so. In the past, attempting to work a suspect round to a trap had presented no problem for him.
“Both of my parents are hale and hearty.”
“I meant school,” he said.
“Oh. It was all tediously normal, I’m afraid.”
“In Falmouth, then?”
“Yes. I’m not of the sort of family that packs its children off to boarding school. I went to school in town, with all the riffraff.”
She was caught. It was the moment at which Lynley would have ordinarily sprung the trap, but he knew he could have missed a school somewhere. She could have attended an institution now closed. He found that he wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt. He let matters go. They made the rest of the journey to Pengelly Cove in a companionable fashion. He spoke of how a privileged life had led to police work; she spoke of a passion for animals and how that passion had taken her from rescuing hedgehogs, seabirds, songbirds, and ducks to veterinary school and ultimately to the zoo. The only creature from the animal world that she didn’t like, she confessed, was the Canada goose. “They’re taking over the planet,” she declared. “Well, at least they seem to be taking over England.” Her favourite animal she declared to be the otter: freshwater or sea. She wasn’t particular when it came to otters.
In the village of Pengelly Cove, it was a matter of a few minutes in the post office—a single counter in the village’s all-purpose shop—to discover that more than one Kerne lived in the vicinity. They were all the progeny of one Eddie Kerne and his wife, Ann. Kerne maintained a curiosity that he called Eco-House some five miles out of town. Ann worked at the Curlew Inn although the job appeared to be a sinecure at this point since she was aging badly after a stroke some years ago.
“There’s Kernes crawling all over the landscape,” the postmistress told them. She was the lone labourer in the shop, a grey-haired woman of uncertain but clearly advanced years whom they’d come upon in the midst of sewing a tiny button onto a child-size white shirt. She poked her finger with the needle as she worked. She said bloody hell, damn and pardon and then wiped a spot of blood onto her navy cardigan before going on with, “You go outside and shout the name Kerne, ten people on the street’ll look up and say, ‘What?’” She examined the strength of her repair and bit off the thread.
“I’d no idea,” Lynley said. While Daidre looked at a dismal arrangement of fruit just inside the shop door, he was making a purchase of postcards that he would never use, along with stamps, a local newspaper, and a roll of breath mints, which he would. “The original Kernes had quite a brood, then?”
The postmistress rang up his selections. “Seven in all, Ann and Eddie produced. And all of them still round save the oldest. That would be Benesek. He’s been gone for donkey’s years. Are you friends of the Kernes?” The woman looked from Lynley to Daidre. She sounded doubtful.
Lynley said that he wasn’t a friend. He produced his police identification. The postmistress’s expression altered. Cops and Caution could not have been written more plainly on her face.
“Ben Kerne’s son has been killed,” Lynley told her.
“Has he?” she said, a hand moving to her heart. Unconsciously, she cupped her left breast. “Oh Lord. Now that’s a very sad bit of news. What happened to him?”
“Did you know Santo Kerne?”
“Wouldn’t be anyone round here who doesn’t know Santo. They stayed with Eddie and Ann on occasion when he and his sister—that would be Kerra—were little ’uns. Ann’d bring ’em in for sweets or ices. Not Eddie, though. Never Eddie. He doesn’t come to the village if he can help it. Hasn’t for years.”
“Why?”
“Some’d say too proud. Some’d say too shamed. But not his Ann. Besides, she had to work, hadn’t she, so Eddie could have his dream of living green.”
“Shamed about what?” Lynley asked.
She gave a brief smile, but Lynley knew it had nothing to do with friendliness or humour. Rather, it had to do with acknowledging the position each of them was in at the moment: he the professional interlocutor and she the source of information. “Small village,” she said. “When things go bad for someone, they c’n stay bad. If you know what I mean.”
It might have been a statement about the Kernes, but it also could have been a statement about her own position, and Lynley understood this. Postmistress and shopkeeper, she’d know a great deal about what was going on in Pengelly Cove. Citizen of the village, she would also know the course of wisdom was to keep her mouth closed about things that did not matter to an outsider.
“You’ll have to speak to Ann or Eddie,” she said. “Ann’s got a bit of a language problem from the stroke she had, but Eddie’ll bend your ear, I expect. You speak to Eddie. He’ll be at home.”
She gave them directions to the Kerne property, which proved to be a number of acres northeast of Pengelly Cove, a former sheep farm that had been transformed by one family’s attempt to live green.
Lynley accessed the land alone, Daidre having decided to remain in the village until his business with the Kernes was completed. He entered the property by means of a disintegrating rusty gate, which stretched across a stony lane but was unlocked. He rattled along for three-quarters of a mile before seeing a habitation, midway down the hillside. It was a mishmash of architecture characterised by wattle and daub, stone, tiles, timbers, scaffolding, and sheets of heavy plastic. The house could have been from any century. The fact that it was standing at all made it something of a marvel.
Not far beyond it, a waterwheel turned at the base of a sluice, both of them roughly constructed. The former appeared to be a source of electricity, if its connection to a hulking but rusty generator was any indication. The latter appeared to be redirecting a woodland stream so that it provided water to the wheel, to a pond, and then to a series of channels, which served an enormous garden. This was newly planted by the look of it, waiting for the sun of late spring and summer. A huge compost pile made an amorphous lump nearby.
Lynley parked near a stand of old bicycles. Only one of them had inflated tyres, and all of them were rusting to the point of disintegration. There appeared to be no direct route to the front or back door of the house. A path meandered from the bicycles in the vague direction of the scaffolding, but once in its near presence, it transformed to the occasional brick or two lying together amidst trampled weeds. By stepping from one set of bricks to the other, Lynley finally reached what seemed to be the entrance to the house: a door so pitted by weather, rot, and insect life that it seemed hardly credible to assume it was in working order.
It was, however. A few knocks forcefully applied to wood brought him face-to-face with an old and badly shaven gentleman, one eye clouded by a cataract. He was roughly and somewhat colourfully dressed in old khaki trousers and a lime green cardigan that was drooping round the elbows. He had sandals and orange-and-brown Argyll socks on his feet. Lynley decided he had to be Eddie Kerne. He produced his identification for the man as he introduced himself.
Kerne looked from it to him. He turned and walked away from the
door, heading wordlessly back into the bowels of the house. The door hung open, so Lynley assumed he was meant to follow, which he did.
The interior of the house wasn’t a great improvement over the exterior. It appeared to be a work long in progress, if the age of the exposed timbers was anything to go by. Walls along the central passage into the place had long ago been taken down to their framing, but there was no scent of freshly replaced wood here. Instead there was a fur of dust upon the timbers, suggesting that a job had been begun years in the past without ever reaching completion.
A workshop was Kerne’s destination, and to get to it he led Lynley through a kitchen and a laundry room that featured a washing machine with an old-fashioned wringer and thick cords crisscrossing the ceiling where clothing was hung to dry in inclement weather. This room emanated the heavy scent of mildew, a sensory ambience only moderately improved upon when they got to the workshop beyond it. They reached this spot by means of a doorless opening in the far wall of the laundry room, separated from the rest of the house by a thick sheet of plastic that Kerne shoved to one side. This same sort of plastic covered what went for windows in the workshop, a room that had been fashioned more recently than the rest of the house: It was made of unadorned concrete blocks. It was frigid within, like an old-time larder without the marble shelves.
Lynley thought of the term man-cave when he stepped into the workshop. A workbench, haphazardly hung cupboards, one tall stool, and myriad tools were crammed within, and the overall impression was one of sawdust, oil leakage, paint spills, and general filth. It comprised a somewhat dubious spot for a bloke to escape the wife and children, with his excuse the crucial tinkering on this or that project.
There appeared to be plenty of them on Eddie Kerne’s workbench: part of a hoover, two broken lamps, a hair dryer missing its flex, five teacups wanting handles, a small footstool belching its stuffing. Kerne seemed to be at work on the teacups, for an uncapped tube of glue was adding to the other scents in the room, most of which were associated with the damp. Tuberculosis seemed the likely outcome of an extended stay in such a place, and Kerne had a heavy cough that made Lynley think of poor Keats writing anguished letters to his beloved Fanny.