Careless in Red

  “Can’t tell you nothing,” was Kerne’s opening remark. He made it over his shoulder as he picked up one of the teacups and squinted at it, comparing a dismembered handle to the spot at which one had been shattered from the cup. “Know why you’re here, don’t I, but I can’t tell you nothing.”

  “You’ve been informed about your grandson’s death.”

  “Phoned, didn’t he.” Kerne hawked but mercifully did not spit. “Gave me the word. That’s it.”

  “Your son? Ben Kerne? He phoned?”

  “The same. Good for that, he was.” The emphasis on that indicated what else Kerne deemed his son good for, which was nothing.

  “I understand Ben hasn’t lived in Pengelly Cove for a number of years,” Lynley said.

  “Wouldn’t have him round.” Kerne grabbed up the tube of glue and applied a good-size dollop to both ends of the handle he’d chosen for the teacup. He had a steady hand, which was good for such employment. He had an unfortunate eye, which was bad. The handle clearly belonged to a different cup, as the colour wasn’t right and the shape was even less so. Nonetheless, Kerne held it in place, waiting for some acceptable form of agglutination to occur. “Sent him off to his uncle in Truro and there he stayed. Had to, didn’t he, once she followed him there.”

  “She?”

  Kerne shot him a look, one eyebrow raised. It was the sort of look that said You don’t know yet? “The wife,” he said shortly.

  “Ben’s wife. The present Mrs. Kerne?”

  “That’d be her. He went off to escape, and she was hot on his tail. Just like he was hot on hers and into hers, if you’ll pardon the expression. She’s a piece of work and I want no part of her and no part of him whilst he stays with the scrubber. Source of everything went wrong with him from day one till now, that Dellen Nankervis. And you c’n note that down in your whatever if you want. And note who said it. I’m not shamed of my feelings, as every one of them’s proved right over the years.” He sounded angry, but the anger seemed to be hiding what had been broken within him.

  “They’ve been together a long time,” Lynley noted.

  “And now Santo.” Kerne grabbed another teacup and handle. “You don’t think she’s at bottom of that? You do some sniffing. Sniff here, sniff Truro, sniff there. You’ll catch the smell of something nasty and the trail of it’s leading directly to her.” He used the glue again, with much the same result: a teacup and handle like distant relatives unacquainted with each other. “You tell me how,” he said.

  “He was abseiling, Mr. Kerne. There’s a cliff in Polcare Cove—”

  “Don’t know the spot.”

  “—north of Casvelyn, where the family live. It’s perhaps a two-hundred-foot drop. He had a sling fixed on the top of the cliff—we think it was attached to the pillar of a drystone wall—and the sling failed when he began his descent. But it had been tampered with.”

  Kerne didn’t look at Lynley, but he stopped his work for a moment. His shoulders heaved, then he shook his head forcefully.

  “I’m sorry,” Lynley said. “I understand Santo and his sister spent a great deal of time with you when they were younger.”

  “Cos of her.” He spat out the words. “She’d get a new man and bring him home and have him there in her husband’s own bed. D’he tell you that? Anyone tell you that? No, I expect not. Did that to him when she was a girl and did that to him when she was a woman grown. Up the chute, as well. More ’n once, she was.”

  “Made pregnant by someone else?” Lynley asked.

  “Doesn’t know that I know, does he,” Kerne said. “But she told me. Kerra, that is. Mum’s got pregnant off someone and she’s got to get rid of it, she tells us. Matter of fact, she tells me, just like that, and her nothing but ten years old. Ten bloody years and what sort of woman lets her little girl know the filthy business she’s making of her life? Dad says she’s having a bad patch, she tells us, but I saw her with the estate agent, Grandpa…Or the dance instructor, or the science teacher from the secondary school. What did it matter to her? When she got the itch, it had to be scratched and if Ben didn’t scratch it the way she liked and when she wanted, she’d damn well see to it someone else would. So don’t tell me she’s not at the bottom of this when she’s at the bottom of everything ever happened to that boy.”

  Not to Santo, Lynley thought. Kerne was speaking of his son, from a well of bitterness and regret and a father’s knowledge that nothing he says or does can change the course of a son who’s made the wrong decision. In this, Kerne reminded Lynley of his own father and the admonitions he’d given throughout Lynley’s childhood about mixing too closely with anyone the elder man deemed common. It had done no good, and Lynley had always considered himself richer for the experience.

  “I’d no idea,” he said.

  “Well, you wouldn’t, would you, cos he’s not likely to tell anyone. But she gets her claws into him when he’s a lad, and from that point on, he doesn’t see straight. It’s off and on with them for years, and every time me and his mum start thinking he’s rid himself of the cow at last and he sees the light and she’s out of his hair and out of our hair and he can start to live normal like the rest of us, there she is again, filling his head with rubbish ’bout how she needs him and he’s the only one for her and she’s sorry so sorry that she had a shag with someone else but it wasn’t her fault was it cos he wasn’t there to take care of her was he, he wasn’t paying her proper attention…and there she is flashing her knickers at him and he can’t think things through, can’t see what she’s like or what she’s doing or how he’s caught. It leads to ruin, so we send him off. And doesn’t she follow…doesn’t the trollop just pack her bags and follow our Ben…” He set the second badly repaired cup to one side. He was breathing jerkily, a liquid sound in his chest. Lynley wondered if the man ever saw a doctor. “So what we think—me and his mum—is if we say to him, You’re no son of ours if you don’t rid yourself of this bloody cow, he’ll do it. He’s our boy, he’s our oldest, and he’s got his brothers and sisters to think about, and they love him, they do, and they all get on. We reckon he only needs to be gone a few years anyway, till it all blows over, and then he c’n return to where he belongs, which is with us. Only it doesn’t work, does it, because he will not shake himself of her. She’s under his skin and in his blood and there’s an end to the matter.”

  “Until what blows over?” Lynley asked.

  “Eh?” Kerne turned his head from the workbench to look at Lynley.

  “You said your son needed to be gone a few years only, ‘till it all blows over.’ I was wondering what.”

  Kerne’s good eye narrowed. He said, “You don’t talk like a cop. Cops talk like the rest of us, but you got a voice that…Where you from?”

  Lynley wasn’t about to be diverted with a discussion of his roots. “Mr. Kerne, if you know something—and you obviously do—that might be related to the death of your grandson, I need to know what it is.”

  He turned back to his bench. He said, “What happened happened years ago. Benesek’s…what? Seventeen? Eighteen? It’s nothing to do with Santo.”

  “Please let me decide that. Tell me what you know.”

  After making the imperative, Lynley waited. He hoped the old man’s sorrow—suppressed but so alive in him—would force him to speak.

  Kerne finally did so, although it sounded as if he talked more to himself than to Lynley. “They’re all surfing, and someone gets hurt. Everyone points fingers at everyone else and no one takes the blame. But things get nasty, so me and his mum send him off to Truro till he isn’t likely to get no more squinty-eyed looks from people.”

  “Who got hurt? How?”

  Kerne slapped his palm on the bench. “I’m telling you it’s of no account. What’s it got to do with Santo? It’s Santo who’s dead, not his dad. Some bloody kid gets himself drunk one night and ends up sleeping it off in one of the sea caves down the cove. So what’s that got to do with Santo?”

  “Were t
hey surfing at night?” Lynley asked insistently. “What happened?”

  “What d’you think bloody happened? They’re not surfing, they’re partying. And he’s partying like the rest of them. He mixes drugs of some sort with whatever else he’s swallowed and when the tide comes in, he’s done for. Tide sweeps into those caves more fast ’n a man can move cos they’re deep, aren’t they, and everyone knows if you go in, you best know where the sea is and what it’s doing cos if you don’t, you aren’t coming out. Oh you might think you are. You might think what the bloody hell does it matter cos I c’n swim, can’t I? But you get battered and turned about and it’s no one’s fault if you’re too bloody stupid to listen when you’re told not to go down to the cove when conditions are dicey.”

  “But that’s what happened to someone,” Lynley said.

  “That’s what happened.”

  “To whom?”

  “Lad come here for his summers. His family has money and they take the big cliff house. I don’t know them but Benesek does. All the young ones do cos they’re all down the beach in summers, aren’t they? This lad John or James…Yes, James…He’s the one.”

  “The one who drowned?”

  “Only his family don’t see it that way. They don’t want to see it’s his own damn fault. They want to blame and they choose our Benesek. Others as well, but Benesek’s at the bottom of what happened, so they say. They bring the cops from Newquay and they don’t let up, not the family and not the cops. You know something and you damn well will tell us, they say. But he don’t know a bleeding thing, does he, which is what he says over and over and the cops finally have to believe him, but at that point the kid’s dad’s built a bloody great stupid memorial to the boy and everyone’s looking at our Ben dead funny, so we send him to his uncle cos he’s got to have a chance in life, and he’s not bloody likely to have one here.”

  Lynley said, “A memorial? Where?”

  “Out on the coast somewheres. Up on the cliff. Likely they thought a memorial like that’d make people never forget what happened. I don’t walk the coast path, so I never saw it, but it’d be what they wanted so it’d stay fresh for people.” He laughed bleakly. “They’d spend a good sum, prob’ly hoping it’d haunt our Ben till the day he died, only they di’n’t know he’d never come home, so it went for nought.” He picked up another teacup, this one far more broken than its companions, with a large crack running from rim to bottom and a significant chip on each side, right where the drinker would place his lips. It seemed foolish to repair it, but it also seemed clear that Eddie Kerne was going to make the attempt anyway. He said quietly, “He was a good lad. I wanted the best for him. I tried to get the best for him. What dad doesn’t want the best for his lad?”

  “No dad at all,” Lynley acknowledged.

  AN EXPLORATION OF PENGELLY Cove didn’t take a great deal of time. After the shop and the two main streets, there was either the cove itself, an old church sitting just outside of town, or the Curlew Inn to occupy one’s time. Once she was left alone in the village, Daidre began with the church. She reckoned it might be locked up tight, as so many country churches were in these days of religious indifference and vandalism, but she was wrong. The place was called St. Sithy’s, and it was open, sitting in the middle of a graveyard where the remains of this year’s daffodils still lined the paths, giving way to columbine.

  Within, the church smelled of stones and dust, and the air was cold. There was a switch for lights just inside the door, and Daidre used this to illuminate a single aisle, a nave, and a collection of multicoloured ropes that looped down from the bell tower. A roughly hewn granite baptismal font stood to her left, while to her right, an unevenly placed stone aisle led to pulpit and altar. It could have been any church in Cornwall save for one difference: an honesty stall. This comprised a table and shelves just beyond the baptismal font, and upon it used goods were for sale, with a locked wooden box serving as the till.

  Daidre went to inspect all this and found no organisation to it but rather a quirky charm. Old lace mats mingled with the odd bit of porcelain; glass beads hung from the necks of well-used stuffed animals. Books eased away from their spines; cake plates and pie tins offered garden tools instead of sweets. There was even a shoe box of historic postcards, which she flipped through to see that most of them were already written upon, stamped, and received long ago. Among them was a depiction of a gipsy caravan, of the sort she hadn’t seen in years: rounded on the top and gaily painted, celebrating a peripatetic life. Unexpectedly, her vision blurred when she picked up this card. Unlike so many of the others, nothing had been written upon it.

  She wouldn’t have done so at another time, but she bought the card. Then she bought two others with messages on them: one from an Auntie Hazel and Uncle Dan that depicted fishing boats in Padstow Harbour and another from Binkie and Earl showing a line of surfers standing in front of long Malibu boards that were upright in the Newquay sand. Fistral Beach scrolled across their feet, and this was apparently the location where—according to either Binkie or Earl—It happened here!!!! Wedding’s next December!

  With these in her possession, Daidre left the church. But not before she looked at the prayer board, where members of the congregation posted their requests for collective appeals to their mutual deity. Most of these had to do with health, and it came to Daidre how seldom people seemed to consider their God unless physical illness descended upon them or upon someone they loved.

  She was not religious, but here was an opportunity, she realised, to step up to the spiritual cricket pitch. The God of chance was bowling and she stood in front of the wicket with the bat in her hands. To swing or not and what did it matter? were the issues before her. She’d been searching the Internet for miracles, hadn’t she? What was this but another arena in which a miracle might be found?

  She picked up the biro provided and a slip of paper, which turned out to be part of the back of an old handout on which a bake sale was being advertised. She flipped this to the blank side and she started to write. She got as far as Please pray for, but she found that she could advance no further. She couldn’t find the words to shape her request because she wasn’t even sure it was her request. So to write it and then to post it on a board for prayers proved too monumental a task, one that was coloured by a hypocrisy that she could not bear to live with. She replaced the pen, balled up the slip of paper and shoved it into her pocket. She left the church.

  She refused to feel guilt. Anger was easier. It might have been the last refuge of the fearful, but she didn’t care. She used terms like I don’t need, I don’t care, and I certainly don’t owe and these carried her from the church through the graveyard, from the graveyard to the road, and from there along Pengelly Cove’s main street. By the time she reached the Curlew Inn, she’d dismissed all matters relating to prayer boards, and she was helped in her efforts by the sight of Ben Kerne entering the Curlew Inn before her.

  She’d never met him. She knew of him, of course, and she’d heard him mentioned in the midst of more than one conversation in the last two years. But she might not have recognised him so readily had she not just that morning been looking at his picture in the Watchman’s article about his enterprise involving the Promontory King George Hotel.

  She’d been heading for the Curlew Inn anyway, so she followed Ben Kerne inside. She had the advantage, as they’d never been introduced. Consequently, it was an easy matter to be his distant shadow. She reckoned he was seeking his mother, as she’d overheard the postmistress’s conversation with Thomas Lynley about Ann Kerne’s employment. It was either that, she decided, or he wanted a meal, but she thought that was unlikely although it was indeed nearing time for dinner.

  Once within, Ben Kerne didn’t walk in the direction of the inn’s restaurant, and as he moved, it was obvious to Daidre that he was quite familiar with this place. He bypassed a reception desk, and he walked down a gloomy corridor towards a square of light that fell from the window of what seemed to be
an illuminated office at the back of the building. He entered without knocking on the door, which suggested that either he was expected or he wished his appearance to come as a surprise and hence to disarm whoever was inside.

  Daidre moved quickly to observe, and she was in time to see an older woman rising awkwardly from behind a desk. She was grey of hair and colourless of face, and part of her dragged a bit, and Daidre recalled she’d suffered a stroke. But she’d recovered well enough to be able to hold out one arm to her son. When he strode to her, she embraced him in a grip so fierce that Daidre could see its power to crush his body to hers. They said nothing to each other. Instead they merely expressed and rested within the bond of mother and child.

  The sheer force of the moment reached through the office window to Daidre and embraced her as well. But she felt no succour rushing through her. Instead, she felt a grief she could not bear to experience. She turned away.

  Chapter Fifteen

  DI BEA HANNAFORD INTERRUPTED HER WORKDAY BECAUSE OF the dogs. She knew this was a feeble excuse that would have proved embarrassing had someone pointed it out to her, but that fact did not lessen its efficacy. Dogs One, Two, and Three needed to be fed, walked, and otherwise attended to, and Bea told herself that only an inexperienced companion to canines actually believed that dogs were sufficient company for each other during the long hours when their humans had to be away. So not too long after her conversation with Tammy Penrule, she checked on the progress among the officers in the incident room—there was little enough of this and damn if Constable McNulty wasn’t studying large surfing waves on the screen of Santo Kerne’s computer monitor and doing everything but drooling over them—and afterwards she climbed into her car and drove to Holsworthy.