Careless in Red

  “Sneaked,” Bea corrected patiently. She watched their son, and she didn’t resist the smile that came to her as he demonstrated the stealth whereby he’d managed to obliterate his father with paint. It was just the sort of game she’d always sworn to herself that her son wouldn’t play: a mimicry of war. And yet, in the end, wouldn’t boys always be just that?

  “You didn’t think I’d be that good, did you?” Pete asked his father, playfully punching him in the arm.

  Ray reached out, hooked his arm round Pete’s neck, and pulled him over. He planted a loud kiss on his son’s head and rubbed his knuckles through Pete’s thick hair. “Go get what you came for, Paintball Wizard,” he told him. “We’ve got dinner to attend to.”

  “Pizza!”

  “Curry or Chinese. That’s the best I’ll offer. Or we can have calves’ liver and onions at home. Served with sprouts and broad beans on the side.”

  Pete laughed. He darted out of the room and they heard him dash up the stairs.

  “He wanted his CD player,” Ray told Bea. He smiled as they listened to Pete crashing about his room. “Truth is, he wants an iPod and he thinks if he demonstrates how many CDs he’s got to carry round with him when he could be carrying this device the size of…what size are they? I can’t keep up with technology.”

  “These days that’s what kids are for. When it comes to technology, I’m utterly out of the loop without Pete.”

  Ray watched her for a moment as she spooned up a portion of sticky toffee sponge. She saluted him with it. He said, “Why do I think that’s your dinner, Beatrice?”

  “Because you’re a cop.”

  “So it is?”

  “Hmm.”

  “Are you on the fly?”

  “Wish,” she said. “But that’s not the word I’d choose to describe where I am or where the case is.”

  She decided to tell him. He was going to learn it all sooner or later, so it might as well be sooner and from her. She gave him all the details and waited for his reaction. “Damn,” he said. “That’s a real…” He seemed to look for a word.

  “Cock-up?” she offered. “Generated by yours truly?”

  “I wasn’t going to say that, exactly.”

  “But you were thinking it.”

  “The cock-up part, yes. Not the part about you.”

  Bea turned away from the expression of friendly compassion on his face. She stared at the window that in daylight would have looked upon a bit of her garden, or what went for her garden, which, she knew, should have been mulched by this time of the year but was instead offering itself to whatever stray seeds were dropped by skylarks and linnets in flight. Those seeds were germinating into weeds, and in another month or two she’d have a right royal mess of work on her hands. Good thing all she saw in the window was her reflection and Ray’s behind her, she thought. They provided a bit of distraction from the work she’d created for herself through lack of attention to her garden.

  She said, “I was set to blame you.”

  “For?”

  “The cock-up. Inadequate incident room. No MCIT blokes for love or money. There I am, hanging out to dry with Constable McNulty and Sergeant Collins and whomever you deign to send me—”

  “That’s not how it was.”

  “Oh, I know that.” Her voice was weary because she was weary. She felt as if she’d been swimming upstream for far too long. “And I’m the one who sent Constable McNulty to tell the Kernes the death was murder. I thought he’d use sense but of course I was wrong. And then when I’d learned what he’d told them, I thought we’d surely uncover something more, some scrap, some detail…It didn’t matter what it was. Just something useful as a trip wire for the moment the killer came sauntering by. But we didn’t.”

  “You may still.”

  “I doubt it. Unless you count a remark made about a surfing poster, which isn’t likely to amount to anything in the eyes of the CPS.” She set down the container of sponge. “I’ve told myself for years there’s no perfect murder. Forensic science is too advanced. As long as there’s a body to be found, there are too many tests, too many experts. No one can kill and leave not a single trace of himself behind. It’s impossible. Simply can’t be done.”

  “There’s truth in that, Beatrice.”

  “But what I failed to see is the loopholes. All the ways a killer could plan and organise and commit this…this ultimate crime…and do it in such a way that every bit of it could be explained. Even the most minute forensic bits could be deemed a rational part of one’s daily life. I didn’t see that. Why didn’t I see that?”

  “Perhaps you had other things on your mind. Distractions.”

  “Such as?”

  “Other parts of your own life. You do have other parts to your life, no matter your attempts to deny that.”

  She wanted to avoid. “Ray…”

  Clearly, he didn’t intend to let her. “You’re not a cop to the exclusion of everything else,” he said. “Good God, Beatrice, you’re not a machine.”

  “I wonder about that sometimes.”

  “Well, I don’t.”

  A blast of music came from upstairs: Pete deciding among his CDs. They listened for a moment to the shriek of an electric guitar. Pete liked his music historical. Jimi Hendrix was his favourite, although in a pinch Duane Allman and his medicine bottle would do just fine.

  “God,” Ray said. “Get that lad an iPod.”

  She smiled, then chuckled. “He’s something, that child.”

  “Our child, Beatrice,” Ray declared quietly.

  She didn’t reply. Instead, she took the sticky toffee sponge and tossed it in the rubbish. She washed the spoon she’d been using and set it on the draining board.

  Ray said, “Can we talk about it now?”

  “You do choose your moments, don’t you?”

  “Beatrice, I’ve wanted to talk about it for ages. You know that.”

  “I do. But at the present time…You’re a cop and a good one. You can see how I am. Get the suspect in a weak moment. Create the weak moment if you can. It’s elementary stuff, Ray.”

  “This isn’t.”

  “What?”

  “Elementary. Beatrice, how many ways can a man say to you that he was wrong? And how many ways can you say to a man that forgiveness isn’t part of your…what? Your repertoire? When I thought that Pete shouldn’t be—”

  “Don’t say it.”

  “I have to say it and you have to listen. When I thought that Pete shouldn’t be born…When I said you should abort—”

  “You said that’s what you wanted.”

  “I said lots of things. I say lots of things. And some of them I say without thinking. Especially when I’m…”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know. Frightened, I suppose.”

  “Of a baby? We’d already had one.”

  “Not of that. But of change. The difference it would make in our lives as we had them arranged.”

  “Things happen.”

  “I understand. And I would have come to understand that then if you’d allowed me the time to—”

  “It wasn’t only a single discussion, Ray.”

  “Yes. All right. I won’t claim it was. But I will say that I was wrong. In every discussion we had, I was wrong, and I’ve grieved over that…that wrongness, if you will, for years. Fourteen of them, to be exact. More if you include the pregnancy itself. I didn’t want it this way. I don’t want it this way.”

  “And…them?” she asked. “You had your diversions.”

  “What? Women? For God’s sake, Beatrice, I’m not a monk. Yes, there were women over the years. A whole bloody succession of them. Janice and Sheri and Sharon and Linda and whoever else, because I don’t remember them all. And I don’t remember them because I didn’t want them. I wanted to blot out…this.” He indicated the kitchen, the house, the people within it. “So what I’m asking you is to let me back in because this is where I belong and both of us know it.”

/>   “Do we?”

  “We do. Pete knows it as well. So do the bloody dogs.”

  She swallowed. It would be so easy…But then again, it wouldn’t. The stuff of men and women together was never easy.

  “Mum!” Pete was shouting from upstairs. “Where’d you put my Led Zepppelin CD?”

  “Lord,” Bea murmured with a shudder. “Someone, please, get that lad an iPod at once.”

  “Mum! Mummy!”

  She said to Ray, “I love it when he still calls me that. He doesn’t, often. He’s becoming so grown-up.” She called back, “Don’t know, darling. Check under your bed. And while you’re at it, put any clothes you find there in the laundry. And bring old cheese sandwiches down to the rubbish. Detach the mice from them, first.”

  “Very funny,” he shouted and continued to bang about. He said, “Dad! Make her tell me. Make her. She knows where it is. She hates it and she’s hidden it somewhere.”

  Ray called to him, “Son, I learned long ago that I can’t make this madwoman do anything.” Then he said to her quietly, “Can I, my dear. Because if I could, you know what it would be.”

  She said, “That you can’t.”

  “To my eternal regret.”

  She thought about his words, those he’d just said and those he’d said before. She said to him, “Not really eternal. Not exactly that.”

  She heard him swallow. “Do you mean it, Beatrice?”

  “I suppose I do.”

  They looked at each other, the window behind them doubling the image of man and woman and the hesitant step each of them took towards the other at precisely the same moment. Pete came pounding down the stairs. He shouted, “Found it! Ready to go, Dad.”

  “Are you as well?” Ray asked Bea quietly.

  “For dinner?”

  “And for what follows dinner.”

  She drew a long breath that matched his own. “I think I am,” she told him.

  Chapter Thirty

  THEY SPOKE LITTLE ON THE DRIVE BACK FROM ST. AGNES. And when they did speak, it was of mundane matters. She needed to stop for petrol, so they’d take a diversion from the main road if he didn’t mind.

  He didn’t mind at all. Did she want a cup of tea while they were at it? Surely there was a hotel or tea shop along the way where they might even have a proper Cornish cream tea. Scones, clotted cream, and strawberry jam.

  She remembered the days when it was difficult to find clotted cream outside of Cornwall. Did he?

  Yes. And proper sausages as well. Not to mention pasties. He’d always enjoyed good pasties, but they’d never had them at home, as his father had considered them…There he stopped himself. Common was the word of choice. Vulgar in its most precise usage.

  She supplied it for him, using the former term. She added, And you weren’t that, were you?

  He told her his brother was a narcotics user, because that was the truth of the matter. Tossed out of Oxford, his girlfriend dead with a needle in her arm, himself in and out of rehab ever since. He said he thought that he’d failed Peter altogether. When he should have been there for the boy—present, he meant, present in every possible way and not just a warm body occupying a sofa or something—he hadn’t been.

  Well, these things happen, she said. And you had your own life.

  As you have yours.

  She didn’t say what another woman in her same position might have said at the end of the day they’d just spent together: And do you think this levels the playing field, Thomas? but he knew she was thinking it, for what else could she think upon his mentioning Peter in the midst of nothing vaguely related to the topic? In spite of that, he wanted to add more life details, piling them up so that she would be forced to see similarities instead of differences. He wanted to tell her that his brother-in-law had been murdered some ten years earlier, that he himself had been suspected of the crime and had even been carted off to gaol and held twenty-four hours for a grilling because he’d hated Edward Davenport and what Edward Davenport had wrought upon his sister, and he’d never made a secret of that. But to tell her that seemed too much a begging for something that she wasn’t going to be able to give him.

  He deeply regretted the position he’d put her in because he could see how she would interpret his reaction to everything she’d revealed that day, no matter his declarations to the contrary. There was an enormous gulf between them created first by birth, second by childhood, and third by experience. That the gulf existed only in her head and not in his was something he could not explain to her. Such a declaration was facile, anyway. The gulf existed everywhere, and for her it was something so real that she would ever fail to see it was not equally real to him.

  You don’t actually know me, he wanted to tell her. Who I am, the people I move among, the loves that have defined my life. But then, how could you? Newspaper stories—tabloids, magazines, whatever—taken up from the Internet reveal only the dramatic bits, the heartrending bits, the salacious bits. Those elements of life comprising the valuable and unforgettable everyday bits are not included. They lack drama even as ultimately they define who a person is.

  Not that that mattered: who he was. It had ceased to matter with Helen’s death.

  Or so he had told himself. Except that what he felt now indicated something different. That he should care for another’s suffering spoke of…what? Rebirth? He didn’t want to be reborn. Recovery? He wasn’t sure he wanted to recover. But a sense of who he was at the core of who he appeared to be prompted him to feel at least something of what Daidre herself was feeling: caught out in the spotlight, naked when she’d worked so hard to fashion clothing for herself.

  I’d like to turn back time, he told her.

  She looked at him and he saw from her expression that she thought he was talking of something else. Of course you would, she said. My God, who wouldn’t in your position?

  Not about Helen, he said, although I’d give nearly anything to bring her back to me if I could.

  Then, what?

  This. What I’ve brought you to.

  It’s part of your job, she said.

  But it wasn’t his job. He wasn’t a cop. He’d walked away from that part of his life because he couldn’t bear it a moment longer, because it had taken him away from Helen, and had he known how many hours upon hours he’d be away from her and each of those hours trickling through a glass in which the remaining days of her life were contained…. He would have called a halt to all of it.

  No, he said. Not part of my job. That’s not why I was here.

  Well, they asked you to. She asked you. I can’t think you did it all on your own. Came up with the plan, whatever.

  I did. He said it heavily and he regretted having to say it at all. But I want you to know that if I’d known…because, you see, you don’t seem like…

  Like them? she asked. I’m cleaner? More educated? More accomplished? Better dressed? More well-spoken? Well, I’ve had eighteen years to put them…it…that whole terrible…I want to call it an “episode” but it wasn’t an episode. It was my life. It made me who I am no matter who I try to be now. These sorts of things define us, Thomas, and that defined me.

  Thinking that, he told her, negates the last eighteen years, doesn’t it? It negates your parents, what they did for you, how they loved you and made you part of their family.

  You’ve met my parents. You’ve seen my family. And how we lived.

  I meant your other parents. The ones who were your parents as parents are meant to be.

  The Trahairs. Yes. But they don’t change the rest of it, do they. They can’t. The rest is…the rest. And it’s there as it always will be.

  That’s no cause for shame.

  She looked at him. She’d found the petrol station she was seeking, and they’d pulled into its forecourt. She’d turned off the ignition and rested her hand on the door handle. He’d done the same, ever the gentleman, unwilling to let her pump the petrol herself.

  She said, That’s just it, you see.
r />   What? he asked her.

  People like you—

  Please don’t, he said. There is no people-like-me. There are just people. There’s just the human experience, Daidre.

  People like you, she persisted nonetheless, think it’s about shame because that’s what you would feel in the same circumstances. Travelling about. Living most of the time in a rubbish tip. Bad food. Cast-off clothing. Loose teeth and ill-formed bones. Shifty eyes and sticky fingers. Why read or write when one can steal? That’s what you think and you’re hardly wrong. But the feeling, Thomas, has nothing at all to do with shame.

  Then…?

  Sorrow. Regret. Like my name.

  We’re the same, then, you and I, he told her. Despite the differences—

  She laughed, a single weary note. We are not that, she replied. I expect you played at it, you and your brother and your sister and your mates. Your parents may have even found you a gipsy caravan and parked it somewhere quite hidden away on the estate. You could go there and play dress-up and act the part, but you couldn’t have lived it.

  She got out of the car. He did the same. She went to the pumps and studied them, as if trying to decide which type of petrol she needed when she probably knew very well what was required for her car. As she hesitated, he went for the nozzle himself. He began to fill the tank for her.

  She said, I expect your man does that for you.

  He said, Don’t.

  She said, I can’t help it. I’ll never be able to help it.

  She shook her head in a fierce little movement, as if to deny or obliterate all that was left unspoken between them. She climbed back into the car and shut the door. He saw that she looked straight ahead afterwards, as if there was something in the window of the petrol station’s shop that she needed to memorise.

  He went to pay. When he climbed in the car, he saw she’d put a neat stack of notes on his seat to cover the cost of the petrol. He took them, folded them neatly, and put them into the empty ashtray just above the gearshift.

  She said, I don’t want you to pay, Thomas.

  He said, I know. But I hope you can cope with the fact that I intend to do so.