Careless in Red

  “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 brevi
ty 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…