Careless In Red (34 page)

He walked from the car park to the police station at the end of Lansdown Road. This was a narrow cobbled lane of white terrace houses, ill roofed and largely stained by rainwater from rusty gutters. Most of them had fallen into the disrepair prevalent in the poorer sections of Cornwall, where gentrification had not yet extended its greedy fingers. One of them was undergoing refurbishment, however, its scaffolding suggesting that better times for someone had come to the neighbourhood.

The police station was an eyesore, even here, a grey stucco building with nothing of architectural interest to recommend itself. It was flat in front and flat on top, a shoe box with occasional windows and a notice board near its door.

Inside, a small vestibule offered a line of three institutional plastic chairs and a reception counter. Bea Hannaford sat behind this, the telephone receiver pressed to her ear. She raised a finger in greeting to Lynley and said to whoever was on the other end of the line, “Got it. Well, there’s no surprise in that, is there?…We’ll want to have another little chat with her, won’t we, then.”

She rang off and took Lynley up to the incident room, which was set up on the first floor of the building in what seemed to be otherwise a conference room, coffee room, locker room, and meal room. Up here they were making do with a few china boards and computers set up with HOLMES but clearly an insufficiency of manpower. The constable and the sergeant were hard at it, Lynley saw, and two other officers were huddled together exchanging either information on the case or background on the horses currently running at Newmarket. It was difficult to tell. Actions were listed on the china board, some completed and others pending.

DI Hannaford said to Sergeant Collins, “Man reception, Sergeant,” and then to Lynley when Collins left the room to do so, “She was lying, as it turns out.”

He said, “Who?” although there was only one she they’d been looking at, as far as he knew.

“Pro forma question, isn’t that?” the DI said meaningfully. “Our Dr. Trahair, that’s who. Not a pub remembers her on the route she claimed she took from Bristol. And she’d be remembered this time of year, considering how few people are out and about in this part of the country.”

“Perhaps,” he said. “But there must be a hundred pubs involved.”

“Not the way she came. Claiming that was the route may have been her first mistake. And where there’s one, there are others, trust me. What’ve you got on her?”

Lynley related what he’d gleaned from Falmouth about Daidre Trahair. He added what he knew about her brother, her work, and her education. Everything she’d said about herself checked out, he told her. So far, so good.

“Why is it I think you’re not telling me everything there is to tell?” was Bea Hannaford’s reply after a moment of observing him. “Are you holding back something, Superintendent Lynley?”

He wanted to say that he wasn’t Superintendent Lynley any longer. He wasn’t anything related to police work, which was why he also wasn’t required to tell her every fact he had acquired. But he said, “She’s doing some curious research on the Internet just now. There’s that, although I can’t see how it relates to murder.”

“What sort of research?”

“Miracles,” he said. “Or rather, places associated with miracles. Lourdes, for one. A church in New Mexico. There were others as well, but I didn’t have time to look through all the paperwork and I wasn’t wearing my reading glasses anyway. She’s been on the Internet at the Watchman. That’s the local paper. She knows the publisher, evidently.”

“That’d be Max Priestley.” It was Constable McNulty speaking up from a computer in one corner of the room. “He’s been in touch with the dead boy, by the way.”

“Has he indeed?” Bea Hannaford said. “Now that’s an interesting twist.” She told Lynley that the constable was digging through Santo Kerne’s old e-mails, looking for nuggets of information. “What’s he saying?”

“‘No skin off my back. Just watch your own.’ I reckon it’s Priestley ’cause it’s come from MEP at Watchman.co, et cetera. Although it could have come from anyone who knows his password and has access to a computer at the paper, I s’pose.”

“That’s it?” Hannaford asked the constable.

“That’s it from Priestley. But there’s a whole collection from the Angarrack girl, coming straight out of LiquidEarth. The course of most of the relationship being charted. Casual, closer, intimate, hot, graphic, and then nothing else. Like once they started doing the nasty, she didn’t want to commit it to writing.”

“Interesting, that,” Bea noted.

“S’what I thought as well. But ‘wild for him’ doesn’t even touch how she felt about the boy. You ask me, I’ll wager she wouldn’t’ve said no to the idea of someone chopping off his bollocks when they got to the endgame, her and Santo. What d’they say about a woman’s scorn?”

“‘A woman scorned,’” Lynley murmured.

“Right. Well. I’d say we give her a closer look. She’d’ve likely had access to his climbing kit at some point. Or she’d’ve known where he kept it.”

“She’s on our list,” Hannaford said. “Is that it, then?”

“I’ve got e-mails from someone calling himself Freeganman as well, and I’d say that’s Mendick ’cause I doubt the town’s crawling with people of his ilk.”

Hannaford explained the moniker to Lynley: how they’d come to know it and with whom it was associated. She said to the constable, “And what’s Mr. Mendick got to say for himself?”

“‘Can we keep it between us?’ Not exactly illuminating, I’ll give you that, but still…”

“A reason to talk to him, then. Let’s put Blue Star Grocery on the schedule.”

“Right.” McNulty went back to the computer.

Hannaford strode over to a desk where she dug in a heavy-looking shoulder bag. She brought forth a mobile phone. This she tossed to Lynley. She said, “Reception’s the devil round here, I’ve found, but I want you carrying this and I want it turned on.”

“Your reason?” Lynley asked.

“I need a stated reason, do I, Superintendent?”

“If nothing else, because I outrank you” would have been his answer in other circumstances, but not in these. He said, “I’m curious. It suggests my usefulness to you hasn’t come to an end.”

“That would be correct. I’m undermanned and I want you available to me.”

“I’m not—”

“Bollocks. Once a cop, always a cop. There’s a need here, and you and I know you’re not about to walk away from a situation where your help is required. Beyond that, you’re a principal figure and you’re not going anywhere without me coming after you until you have my blessing to leave, so you may as well make yourself useful to me.”

“You’ve something in mind?”

“Dr. Trahair. Details. Everything. From her shoe size to her blood type and all points in between.”

“How am I supposed to—”

“Oh please, Detective. Don’t take me for a fool. You’ve sources and you’ve charm. Use them both. Dig into her background. Take her on a picnic. Wine her. Dine her. Read her poetry. Caress her palm. Gain her trust. I don’t bloody care how you do it. Just do it. And when you’ve done it, I want it all. Are we clear on that?”

Sergeant Collins had appeared in the doorway as Hannaford was speaking. He said, “Guv? Someone to see you. Queer bird called Tammy Penrule down below. Says she’s got information for you.”

The DI said to Lynley, “Keep that phone charged. Take your spade and use it. Do whatever you have to do.”

“I’m not comfortable with—”

“That’s not my concern. Murder’s not comfortable either.”

DOWNSTAIRS, BEA FOUND THE NAMED TAMMY PENRULE SITTING in one of the plastic reception chairs, her feet flat on the floor, her hands clasped in her lap, her back a plane perpendicular to the seat. She was dressed in black, but she wasn’t a Goth, as Bea first suspected when she caught sight of her. She wore no makeup, no hideous black nail enamel, and she had no silver protrusions erupting from various points on her head. She also wore no jewellery, and nothing else relieved the midnight of her clothes. She looked like mourning made flesh.

“Tammy Penrule?” Bea said to her, unnecessarily.

The girl jumped to her feet. She was thin as workhouse gruel. One couldn’t look at her without considering eating disorders.

“You’ve got information for me?” When the girl nodded, Bea said, “Come with me, then,” before she realised she had not yet located the interview rooms at the station. Stumbling about wasn’t going to inspire confidence in anyone, so she reversed herself, said, “Hang on a moment,” and found a cubbyhole next to a broom closet that would do until further exploration of the station might provide its secret as to the site of interrogations.

When she had Tammy Penrule situated in this spot, she said to her, “What’ve you got to tell me?”

Tammy licked her lips. She needed balm for them. They were badly chapped and a thin line of scabbing marked a spot where her lower lip had cracked seriously enough to bleed. “It’s about Santo Kerne,” she said.

“I’ve got that much.” Bea crossed her arms beneath her breasts. Unconsciously, it seemed, Tammy did the same, although she had no breasts to speak of, and Bea wondered if Santo Kerne’s relationship with Madlyn Angarrack had ended because of this girl. She hadn’t yet met Madlyn, but the fact that the girl had been a competitive surfer suggested someone…perhaps “more physically defined” was the term she wanted. This teenager seemed more like an evanescent being, corporeal only as long as she had the strength to manifest in human form. Bea couldn’t picture her spread-eagled beneath a hot-blooded adolescent boy.

Tammy said, “Santo talked to me.”

“Ah.”

The girl seemed to be waiting for more of a response, so Bea said cooperatively, “How did you know him?”

“From Clean Barrel Surf Shop,” Tammy said. “It’s where I work. He comes there for wax and the like. And to look at the isobar chart except I think that may have been just an excuse to hang about with the other surfers. You c’n look up the isobar chart on the Internet, and I expect they’ve got Internet over at the hotel.”

“Adventures Unlimited?”

Tammy nodded. The hollow of her throat was deep and shadowed. Above the neck of her jersey, the points of her collarbone protruded, like the excrescent evidence of dutch elm disease on the bark of a tree. “So that’s how I know him. That and Sea Dreams.”

Bea recognised the name of the caravan park and she cocked her head. Perhaps she’d been wrong about this girl and Santo. She said, “Did you meet him there?”

“No. Like I said, I met him at Clean Barrel.”

“Sorry. I don’t mean met him as in met him,” Bea clarified. “I mean met him as in having assignations with him.”

Tammy flushed. There was so little substance between her skin and her blood vessels that she coloured nearly to purple and she did so quickly. “You mean…Santo and me…for sex? Oh no. I live there. At Sea Dreams. My granddad owns the caravan park. I knew Santo from Clean Barrel, like I said, but he came to Sea Dreams with Madlyn. And he came on his own as well because there’s a cliff he used to practise on sometimes and granddad said he could get to it across our land if he wanted to abseil. Anyway, I saw him there and we talked sometimes.”

“On his own?” Bea asked. This was something new.

“Like I said. He climbed. Down and up but sometimes just up, so he’d come from below…or I suppose he just went down and then up all the time because I can’t quite remember. He also visited Mr. Reeth. So did she. Madlyn. Mr. Reeth, he works for Madlyn’s dad at—”

“Yes. I know. We’ve spoken to him.” But what she didn’t know was that Santo had been there to Sea Dreams on his own. This was a new wrinkle.

“He was nice, Santo.”

“He was especially nice to girls, I gather.”

Tammy’s flush had receded, and she didn’t flush again. “Yes, I suppose he was. But it wasn’t like that for me because…Well, that’s not important. What is important is that we talked from time to time. When he was finished with his climbing or when he was leaving Mr. Reeth’s. Or sometimes when he was waiting for Madlyn to get there from work.”

“They didn’t come together?”

“Not always. Madlyn works in town now, but she didn’t earlier. She had to come a greater distance than Santo, from out by Brandis Corner. She worked on a farm, making jam.”

“I expect she preferred teaching surfing.”

“Oh yes, she did. She does. But that’s in the season, when she teaches surfing. She’s got to do something else the rest of the year. She works in the bakery now. In town. They make pasties. Mostly for wholesale, but they sell some of them out of the shop as well.”

“And where does Santo fit in with all this?”

“Santo. Of course.” She’d been using her hands to gesture with as she talked, but now she clasped them again in her lap. She said, “We talked now and again. I liked him, but I didn’t like him in the way most girls probably would, if you know what I mean, so I think that made me different and maybe safer or something. For advice or whatever because he couldn’t go to his dad or his mum—”

“Why not?”

“His dad, he said, would’ve got the wrong impression, and his mum…I don’t know his mum, but I get the idea she’s…well, she’s not very mummish, apparently.” She smoothed her skirt. It looked like something that would be scratchy against the skin and it was virtually shapeless, a fashion penance. “Anyway, Santo asked me for advice about something and that’s what I thought you ought to know.”

“Advice of what kind?”

She seemed to look for a gentle way to say what came next and, not finding a euphemism, went for a circuitous route to the truth. “He was…He’d got someone new, you see, and the situation was irregular—that’s the word he used when he talked to me, he said it was irregular—and he wanted to ask me what I thought he should do about that.”

“Irregular. That was his word? You’re sure?”

Tammy nodded. “He said he thought he loved her—this is Madlyn—but he wanted this other thing as well. He said he wanted it very badly and if he wanted this other thing the way he wanted this other thing, did it mean he didn’t actually love Madlyn?”

“He talked to you about love, then?”

“No, that part was more like Santo talking to Santo. He wanted to know what I thought he should do about the whole situation. Should he be honest with everyone about it? he wanted to know. Should he tell the truth start to finish? he asked.”