Careless In Red (44 page)

They left the Curlew Inn and went out into the evening, where darkness was falling. She remarked upon the change in seasons, the subtle manner in which daylight began extending itself from winter solstice onward. She said she never really understood why people hated winter so much as she herself found it a most comforting season. “It leads directly to renewal,” she said. “I like that about it. It always suggests forgiveness to me.”

“Are you in need of forgiveness?” They were walking in the direction of Lynley’s hired car, which he’d left at the junction of the high street and the lane leading down to the beach. He watched her in the fading light, waiting to read something revealing in her answer.

“We all are in some way or another, aren’t we?” Using this as a logical segue, she told him then of what she’d seen: Ben Kerne in the arms of a woman whom she’d assumed to be his mother. She confessed that she’d enquired on the matter: It was indeed Ann Kerne he’d visited. “I don’t know if it was forgiveness, of course,” she concluded. “But it was definitely emotional and they shared the feeling.”

In exchange and because it seemed only fair, Lynley told her a bit about his visit with Ben Kerne’s father. Not everything, because she was, after all, not above suspicion, and despite his liking for the woman he knew better than to forget that fact. So what he told her was limited to Eddie Kerne’s aversion to his son’s wife. “It seems he sees Mrs. Kerne as the root of what’s gone wrong in Ben’s life.”

“Including Santo’s death?”

“I expect he’d have it that way as well.”

Because of his conversation with the older Kerne, Lynley wanted to explore the sea caves. So when they were in the car and he’d started the engine, he drove not out of town, as logic would dictate, but rather down the steep lane in the direction of the cove below them. He said, “There’s something I want to see. If you prefer to wait in the car…?”

“No. I’d like to come as well.” She smiled and added, “I’ve never actually observed a detective at work.”

“This will be less detecting than satisfying my curiosity.”

“Most of the time, I suspect it’s the same thing.”

When he thought about it, Lynley couldn’t disagree. In the car park, he pulled parallel to a low seawall that looked to be of recent construction. As did the granite lifeboat shed, which sat nearby with a rescue torpedo buoy available next to it. He got out and looked at the cliffs that formed a horseshoe round the cove. They were high, with outcroppings like broken teeth, and a fall from them would likely prove fatal. Atop them sat houses and cottages, beaming lights in the gloom. At the far end of the southernmost cliff, the largest house of all sprawled in an impressive declaration of someone’s wealth.

Daidre came round the car to join him. “What are we here to see?” She drew her coat more closely round her body. A brisk wind blew.

“Caves,” he said.

“Are there caves here? Where?”

“On the water side of the cliffs. You can access them at low tide, but when the water’s in, they’re at least partially submerged.”

She mounted the wall and gave a look towards the sea. “I’m hopeless at this, which is pathetic for someone who spends part of her time on the coast. But I’d say it’s either going out or coming in, but in either case, it doesn’t make a lot of difference because it’s a fairly good distance from shore.” Then with a look at him, “Is that at all helpful?”

“Barely,” he said.

“That’s what I reckoned.” She hopped down on the sea side of the wall. He followed her.

Like so many beaches in Cornwall, this one began with boulders tumbled one upon the other near the car park. These were mostly granite, with lava mixed in, and the light streaks upon them gave mute testimony to the unimaginable former liquid nature of something now solid. Lynley extended his hand to help Daidre over them. Together they clambered carefully till they reached the sand.

“On its way out,” he told her. “That would be my first piece of detection.”

She paused and frowned. She looked round as if to understand how he’d reached this conclusion. “Oh yes, I see,” she finally said. “No footprints, but that could be because of the weather, couldn’t it? A bad time of year for the beach.”

“Yes. But look to the pools of water at the base of the cliffs.”

“Wouldn’t they always be there?”

“I daresay. Especially this time of year. But the rocks that back them wouldn’t be wet, and they are. The lights from the houses are glittering off them.”

“Very impressive,” she said.

“Elementary,” was his rejoinder.

They made their way across the sand. It was quite soft, telling Lynley they would need to take care. Quicksand wasn’t unheard of on the coast, especially in locations like this one, where the sea ebbed a considerable distance.

The cove broadened some one hundred yards from the boulders. At this point, when the tide was out, a grand beach stretched in both directions. They turned landward when the cliffs were entirely behind them. It was an easy matter, then, to see the caves.

The cliffs facing the water were cratered with them, darker cavities against dark stone, like dusted fingerprints, and two of them of enormous size. Lynley said, “Ah,” and Daidre said, “I’d no idea,” and together they approached the largest, a cavern at the base of the cliff upon which the biggest house was built.

The cave’s opening looked to be some thirty feet high, narrow and roughly shaped, like a keyhole turned on its head, with a threshold of slate that was streaked with quartz. It was gloomy within, but not altogether dark, for some distance at the rear of the cave dim light filtered from a roughly formed chimney that geologic action had eons ago produced in the cliff. Still, it was difficult to make out the walls until Daidre produced a matchbook from her shoulder bag and said to Lynley with an embarrassed shrug, “Sorry. Girl Guides. I’ve a Swiss army knife as well, if you need it. Plasters, too.”

“That’s comforting,” he told her. “At least one of us has come prepared.”

A match’s light showed them at first how deeply the cave was affected at high water, for hundreds of thousands of mollusks the size of drawing pins clung to the rough, richly veined stone walls, making them rougher still to a height of at least eight feet. Mussels formed black bouquets beneath them, and interspersed between these bouquets, multicoloured shellfish scalloped against the walls.

When the match burned low, Lynley lit another. He and Daidre worked their way farther in, picking through stones as the cave’s floor gained slightly in elevation, a feature that would have allowed the water to recede with the ebbing tide. They came upon one shallow alcove, then another, where the sound of dripping water was rhythmic and incessant. The scent within was utterly primeval. Here, one could easily imagine how all life had actually come from the sea.

“It’s rather wonderful, isn’t it?” Daidre spoke in a hushed voice.

Lynley didn’t reply. He’d been thinking of the myriad uses a spot like this had seen over the centuries. Everything from smugglers’ cache to lovers’ place of assignation. From children’s games of marauding pirates to shelter from sudden rainfall. But to use the cave for anything at all, one had to understand the tide because to remain in ignorance of the sea’s acts of governance was to court certain death.

Daidre was quiet next to him as his match burnt down and he lit another. He imagined a boy being caught in here, in this cave or in another just like it. Drunk, drugged, possibly unconscious, and if not unconscious, then sleeping it off. It didn’t matter at the end of the day. If he’d been in darkness and deep within this place when the tide swept in, he would likely not have known which way to go to attempt an escape.

“Thomas?”

The match flickered as he turned to Daidre Trahair. The light cast a glow against her skin. A piece of her hair had come loose from the slide she used to hold it back, and this fell to her cheek, curving into her lips. Without thinking, he brushed it away from her mouth. Her eyes—unusually brown, like his own—seemed to darken.

It came to him suddenly what a moment such as this one meant. The cave, the weak light, the man and the woman in close proximity. Not a betrayal, but an affirmation. The knowledge that somehow life had to go on.

The match burnt to his fingers. He dropped it hastily. The instant passed and he thought of Helen. He felt a searing within him because he couldn’t remember what this moment clearly demanded that he remember: When had he first kissed Helen?

He couldn’t recall and, worse, he didn’t know why he couldn’t recall. They’d known each other for years before their marriage, for he’d met her when she’d come to Cornwall in the company of his closest friend during one holiday or another from university. He may have kissed her then, a light touch on the lips in farewell at the end of that visit, a lovely-to-have-met-you gesture that meant nothing at the time but now might mean everything. For it was essential in that moment that he recall every instance of Helen in his life. It was the only way he could keep her with him and fight the void. And that was the point: to fight the void. If he floated into it, he knew he’d be lost.

He said to Daidre Trahair, who was only a silhouette in the gloom, “We should go. Can you lead us out?”

“Of course I can,” she said. “It shouldn’t be difficult.”

She found her way with assurance, one hand moving lightly along the tops of the molluscs on the wall. He followed her, his heart pulsing behind his eyes. He believed he ought to say something about the moment that had passed between them, to explain himself in some way to Daidre. But he had no words, and even if he had possessed the language necessary to communicate the extent of his grief and his loss, they were not necessary. For she was the one to break the silence between them, and she did so when they emerged from the cave and began to make their way back to the car.

“Thomas, tell me about your wife,” she said.

LYNLEY FOUND HIMSELF HUMMING IN THE SHOWER THE NEXT morning. The water coursed through his hair and down his back, and he was in the middle of the waltz from Tchaikovsky’s The Sleeping Beauty before he stopped abruptly and realised what he was doing. He felt swept up in guilt, but it lasted only a moment. What came on its heels was a memory of Helen, the first one he’d had since her death that made him smile. She’d been completely hopeless about music, aside from a single Mozart that she regularly and proudly recognised. When she’d heard The Sleeping Beauty in his company for the first time, she’d said, “Walt Disney! Tommy, darling, when on earth did you start listening to Walt Disney? That seems entirely unlike you.”

He’d looked at her blankly till he’d made the connection to the old cartoon, which he realised she must have seen while visiting her niece and nephew recently. He said solemnly, “Walt Disney stole it from Tchaikovsky, darling,” to which she replied, “He didn’t ever! Did Tchaikovsky write the words as well?” To which he had raised his head ceilingward and laughed.

She hadn’t been offended. That had never been Helen’s way. Instead, she’d lifted a hand to her lips and said, “I’ve done it again, haven’t I? You see, this is the reason I need to keep buying shoes. So many pairs end up in my mouth and my saliva ruins them.”

She was completely impossible, he thought. Engaging, lovely, maddening, hilarious. And wise. Always, at heart, wise in ways he would not have thought possible. Wise about him and wise about what was essential and important between them. He missed her in this moment, yet he celebrated her as well. In that, he felt a slight shift within him, the first that had occurred since her murder.

He returned to his humming as he toweled himself off. He was still humming, towel wrapped round his waist, when he opened the door.

And came face-to-face with DS Barbara Havers.

He said, “My God.”

Havers said, “I’ve been called worse.” She scratched her mop of badly cut and currently uncombed hair. “Are you always so chipper before breakfast, sir? Because if you are, this is the last time I’m sharing a bathroom with you.”

He could, for the moment, do nothing but stare, so unprepared was he for the sight of his former partner. She was wearing floppy sky blue socks in lieu of slippers and she had on pink flannel pyjamas printed everywhere with the image of vinyl records, musical notes, and the phrase “Love like yours is sure to come my way.” She seemed to realise he was examining her getup because she said, “Oh. A gift from Winston,” in apparent reference to it.

“Would that be the socks or the rest of it?”

“The rest. He saw this in a catalogue. He said he couldn’t resist.”

“I’ll need to speak to Sergeant Nkata about his impulse control.”

She chuckled. “I knew you’d love them if you ever saw them.”

“Havers, the word love does not do justice to my feelings.”

She nodded at the bathroom. “You finished your morning whatevers in there?”

He stepped aside. “Have at it.”

She passed him but paused before closing the door. “Tea?” she said. “Coffee?”

“Come to my room.”

He was ready for her when she arrived, dressed for her day. He himself was clothed and he’d made tea—he wasn’t desperate enough to face the provided coffee crystals—when she knocked on his door and said unnecessarily, “It’s me.”

He opened it to her. She looked round and said, “You demanded the more elegant accommodation, I see. I’ve got something that used to be the garret. I feel like Cinderella before the glass boot.”

He held up the tin teapot. She nodded and plopped herself onto his bed, which he’d made. She lifted the old chenille counterpane and inspected the job he’d done. “Hospital corners,” she noted. “Very nice, sir. Is that from Eton or somewhere else in your chequered past?”

“My mother,” he said. “Proper bed making and the correct use of table linens were at the heart of her child rearing. Should I add milk and sugar or do you want to do your own honours?”

“You can do it,” she said. “I like the idea of you waiting on me. This is a first, and it may be a last, so I think I’ll enjoy it.”

He handed her the doctored tea, poured his own, and joined her on the bed as there was no chair. He said, “What are you doing here, Havers?”