Careless In Red (61 page)

That line of thought shot her directly back to Madlyn Angarrack, to Kerra Kerne, and to Daidre Trahair. Which in turn made her wonder where the bloody hell the vet had taken herself to for the day. That, in turn, led her inevitably to consider Thomas Lynley and his presence at Polcare Cove that morning, which took her over to the telephone to punch in the number of the mobile she’d given him.

“So what do we have?” she asked when her third attempt to get a connection to wherever he was proved successful. “And where in God’s name are you, Detective?”

He was on his way back to Casvelyn, he told her. He’d made a day of Newquay, Zennor, and Pengelly Cove. To her question of how the dickens this got them to Daidre Trahair, whom she still wished to see, by the way, he told her a tale of adolescent surfers, adolescent sex, adolescent drugs, drink, parties, caves on the beach, and death. Rich kids, poor kids, and in-between kids, and the cops failing to solve a case despite someone grassing.

“About Ben Kerne,” Lynley told her. “His friends thought from the first that Dellen was the grass. This is Dellen Kerne. Ben’s father thinks so as well.”

“And this is relevant for what reason?” Bea asked wearily.

“I think the answer to that is in Exeter.”

“Are you heading there now?”

“Tomorrow,” he told her. He paused before saying, “I haven’t run into Dr. Trahair, by the way. Has she turned up?” He sounded far too casual for Bea’s liking. She wasn’t a fool.

“Not a sign of her. And may I tell you how little I like that?”

“It could mean anything. She may have gone back to Bristol.”

“Oh please. I don’t believe that for a moment.”

He was silent. That was enough of a response.

“I’ve sent your Sergeant Havers out there to bring her in if she’s slithered home,” Bea told him.

“She’s not my Sergeant Havers,” Lynley said.

“I’d not be so quick about saying that,” Bea said.

She’d not rung off from him for five minutes when her mobile chimed with Sergeant Havers herself ringing.

“Nothing,” was her brief report, mostly broken up by a terrible connection. “Sh’ll I wait longer? Can do, if you want. Not often that I get to smoke in peace and listen to the surf.”

“You’ve done your bit,” Bea said. “Shove off home, then. Your Superintendent Lynley’s heading towards the inn as well.”

“He’s not my Superintendent Lynley,” Havers told her.

“What is it with you two?” Bea asked and rang off before the sergeant could work up an answer.

She decided her last task before leaving for the day was to phone Pete and make mother noises about his clothing, his eating, his schoolwork, and football. She’d enquire about the dogs as well. And if by chance Ray answered the phone, she’d be polite.

Pete answered, though, saving her the trouble. He was all afire about Arsenal’s acquisition of a new player, someone with an indecipherable name from…Had he actually said the South Pole? No. He had to have said São Paolo.

Bea made the appropriate noises of enthusiasm and ticked football off her list of topics. She went though eating and schoolwork and was about to go on to clothing—he hated to be asked about his underwear, but the fact of the matter was that he would wear the same pair of undershorts for a week if she didn’t stay on top of him about it—when he said, “Dad wants you to tell him when the next Sports Day is at school, Mum.”

“I always tell him when the next Sports Day at school is,” she replied.

“Yeah, but I mean he wants to go with you, not come on his own.”

“He wants or you want?” Bea asked shrewdly.

“Well, it’d be nice, wouldn’t it? Dad’s all right.”

Ray was making further inroads, Bea thought. Well, she could do nothing about that just now. She said they would see, and she told Pete she loved him. He returned the sentiment and they rang off.

But his remarks about Ray sent Bea back to the computer, where this time she went to her dating site. Pete needed a permanent man about the house, and she believed she was ready for something more defined than dating and the occasional bonk when Pete was staying the night at Ray’s.

She scrolled through the offerings, trying not to scrutinise the photos first, telling herself that keeping an open mind was essential. But a quarter hour of this topped up her dating despair in ways that nothing else ever could. She decided that if every person who indicated a love for romantic strolls on the beach at sunset actually took romantic strolls on the beach at sunset, the resulting mass of humanity would resemble Oxford Street during the Christmas season. It was such rubbish. Whose interests actually were candlelit dinners, romantic beach strolls, wine tasting in Bordeaux, and intimate chats in hot tubs or in front of a blazing coal fire in the Lake District? Was she meant to believe this?

Bloody hell, she thought. The dating scene was bleak. It got worse every year, making her more and more resolved to stick to her dogs for companionship. They might very well enjoy a soak in a hot tub, those three, and at least she’d be spared the pseudo-intimate conversation that went along with it.

She logged off the computer and headed out. Sometimes going home—even alone—was the only answer.

BEN KERNE COMPLETED THE cliff climb in good time, and his muscles were burning from the effort. He’d done it as Santo had intended to do it, abseiling down and then making the climb on the return although he could just as easily have parked below in Polcare Cove, and done everything in reverse. He could even have hiked up the coastal path to the top of the cliff and just done the abseil by itself. But he’d wanted to walk in Santo’s footsteps, and that required that he park his Austin not in the car park of the cove itself but in the lay-by not far from Stowe Wood, where Santo had left his own car. From there, he trudged along the public footpath to the sea as Santo would have done, and he fixed his sling to the same stone post where Santo’s own sling had failed him. Everything else was a matter of muscle memory. The abseil down took no time at all. The climb up required skill and thought, but that was preferable to being in the vicinity of Adventures Unlimited and Dellen.

At the end of the climb, Ben wanted to be exhausted. He sought to be drained, but he found that he was as agitated as he’d been when he’d begun the whole enterprise. His muscles were weary, but his mind was rattling along on autopilot.

As ever, it was Dellen he thought of. It was Dellen and the understanding he now had of what he’d done with his life in the pursuit of her.

He hadn’t understood at first what she was talking about when she’d shouted, “I told.” And then when her meaning began to dawn upon him, he didn’t want to believe her. For believing her would mean accepting that the cloud of suspicion under which he’d lived in Pengelly Cove—that very cloud of suspicion that had ultimately driven his final removal to Truro—had been deliberately created by this woman he loved.

So to avoid both belief and its aftermath, he said to her, “What the hell are you talking about?” and he concluded that she was striking out at him because he’d made accusations of her, because he’d thrown her pills from the window, and because, in doing so, he’d demanded something of her that she could not cope with at the moment.

Her face was screwed up with rage.

“You know,” she cried. “Oh, you bloody well know. You always believed I was the one who grassed you. I saw how you looked at me afterwards. I could see in your eyes…And then off to Truro you go and you leave me there with the consequences. God, I hated you. But then I didn’t because I loved you so much. And I love you now. And I hate you and why can’t you leave me alone?”

“You’re why the cops came back to me,” he said, hollowly. “That’s what you mean. You spoke to them.”

“I saw you with her. You wanted me to see you and I saw, and I knew you meant to fuck her and how do you think I felt?”

“So you decided to go one better? You took him down to the cave, had him, left him, and—”

“I couldn’t be who you wanted me to be. I couldn’t give you what you wanted, but you had no right to end things between us, because I’d done nothing. And then with his sister…I saw because you wanted me to see because you wanted me to suffer and so I wanted you to suffer in turn.”

“So you fucked him.”

“No!” Her voice rose to a scream. “I did not. I wanted you to feel how I felt. I wanted you to hurt like I hurt, how you made me hurt by wanting from me all those things that I could never give you. Why did you break with me? And why—why—won’t you leave me now?”

“So you accused me…?” There. He’d finally said it directly.

“Yes! I did. Because you’re so good. You’re so God damn bloody good, and it’s your miserable sainthood that I could not tolerate. Not then and not now. You keep turning the other God damn cheek and when you do that, I completely despise you. And whenever I despised you, you broke with me, and that’s when I loved you and wanted you most.”

He was left with saying only, “You’re mad.”

Then he had to get away from her. To remain in the bedroom meant he was going to have to come to terms with having built his life on a lie. For when the Newquay police had focused their enquiries upon him for week after week and month after month, he had turned to Dellen for comfort and strength. She made him whole, he’d thought. She made him what he was. Yes, she was difficult. Yes, they had their occasional troubles. But when it was right between them, weren’t they better than they could ever have been with anyone else?

So when she’d followed him to Truro, he’d embraced what he decided that meant. When her trembling lips had pronounced the words, “I’m pregnant again,” he’d embraced this announcement as if an angel had appeared before him in a dream, as if the imaginary walking staff he daily carried had indeed bloomed with lilies upon his waking. And when she got rid of that baby as well—just as she’d done with the babies before it, his and the offspring of two others—he’d soothed her and agreed that she wasn’t quite ready, that they weren’t quite ready, that the time wasn’t right. He owed her the allegiance she’d shown him, he decided. She was a troubled spirit. He loved her and he could cope with that.

When they finally married, he felt as if he’d captured an exotic bird. She was not to be held in a cage, however. He could only have her if he set her free.

“You’re the only one I truly want,” she would say. “Forgive me, Ben. It’s you that I love.”

Now on the top of the cliff, Ben’s breath returned to normal from the climb. The sheen of sweat he wore chilled him in the sea breeze, and he became aware of the lateness of the day. He realised that in making the abseil down the face of the cliff, he’d ultimately stood in the very spot where Santo had lain, dead or dying. And it came to him that, while walking in Santo’s footsteps along the path from the road, while fastening the sling to the old stone post, while rappelling down and preparing for the climb back up, he’d not thought of Santo once. He’d come to do so, and he’d still not managed it. His mind had been filled—as always—with Dellen.

This seemed to him the ultimate betrayal, the monstrous one. Not that Dellen had betrayed him by casting suspicion on him all those years ago. But that he himself had just betrayed Santo. A pilgrimage to the very spot where Santo had perished had not been enough to exorcise the boy’s mother from his thoughts. Ben realised that he lived and breathed her as if she were a contagion afflicting only him. Away from her, he might as well have been with her, which was the reason he’d kept returning.

He was in this, he thought, as sick as she was. Indeed, he was sicker. For if she could not help being the Dellen she was and had always been, he could stop being the perversely loyal Benesek who’d made it far too simple for her just to continue.

When he rose from the boulder on which he’d sat to catch his breath, he felt stiff from cooling down in the breeze. He knew he’d pay in the morning for the rapidity of the climb. He went to the stone post where the sling was looped, and he began drawing the rope back up the cliff, looping it carefully and just as carefully examining it for frays. Even in this he found he could not concentrate on Santo.

There was a moral question involved in all this, Ben knew, but he found he lacked the courage to ask it.

DAIDRE TRAHAIR HAD BEEN waiting in the public bar of the Salthouse Inn the better part of an hour when Selevan Penrule came through the door. He looked round the room when he saw that his daily drinking companion was not nursing a Guinness in the inglenook, which Selevan and Jago Reeth regularly commandeered for themselves, and he ventured over to join Daidre at her table by the window.

“Thought he’d be here by now,” Selevan said without preamble as he pulled out a chair. “Rang me to say he’d be late, he did. Cops were there talking to him and Lew. Cops’re talking to everyone. Talk to you yet?” He gave a sailor’s salute to Brian, who’d ventured out of the kitchen upon Selevan’s entrance. Brian said, “The regular?” and Selevan said, “Aye,” and then back to Daidre, “Even talked to Tammy, they did, though that was cos the girl had something to tell them and not cos they had questions of her. Well, why should they? She knew the boy, but that was the extent of it. Wished it otherwise, and I don’t mind saying that, but she wasn’t interested. All for the best as things turned out, eh? Bloody hell, though, I wish they’d get to the bottom of this. Feel sorry for the family, I do.”

Daidre would have preferred it if the old man hadn’t decided to join her, but she couldn’t come up with an excuse that would politely communicate her desire to be left in peace. For she’d never come into the Salthouse Inn prior to this for the purpose of having a bit of peace, so why would he assume that now? No one would come to the Salthouse Inn for peace, as the inn was where denizens of the area gathered for gossip and conviviality, not for meditation.

She said, “They want to talk to me,” and she showed him the note she’d found at her cottage. It was written on the back of DI Hannaford’s card. “I’ve spoken to them already,” she said. “The day Santo died. I can’t think why they want to question me again.”

Selevan looked at the card, turning it over in his hands. “Looks serious,” he told her. “With them leaving their cards and the like.”