Careless In Red (82 page)

He wondered if he should let her think that was where he was taking her. But it seemed cruel to let the poor lass suffer. Truth of the matter was that she’d suffered enough. She’d held firm through everything that had been thrown at her and that had to mean something even if it meant what none of the rest of them could bear considering.

He said as he started up the car, “I made a phone call, I did. Day or two ago.”

She said dully, “Well, you’d have to, wouldn’t you.”

“Truth in that. They said come along. Wanted to talk to you as well, but I told ’em you were unavailable at present—”

“Ta for that, at least.” Tammy turned her head and examined the scenery. They were passing through Stratton, heading north on A39. There was no easy way to get out of Cornwall, but that had long been part of its draw. “I don’t much want to talk to them, Grandie. We’ve already said all there is to say.”

“Think that, do you?”

“We’ve talked and talked. We’ve rowed. I’ve tried to explain, but they don’t understand. They don’t want to understand. They’ve got their plans and I’ve got mine and that’s how it is.”

“Didn’t know you’d talked to them at all.” Selevan made his voice deliberately thoughtful, a man considering the ramifications of what his granddaughter was telling him.

“What d’you mean you didn’t know I’d talked to them?” Tammy demanded. “That’s all we did before I got here. I talked, Mum cried. I talked, Dad shouted. I talked, they argued with me. Only I didn’t want to argue because far as I can tell there’s nothing to argue about. You understand or you don’t, and they don’t. Well, how could they? I mean, Mum’s whole way of living should’ve told me she’d never be able to come onboard. A life of contemplation? Not very likely when your real interest is looking at fashion magazines and gossip magazines and wondering how you can make yourself into Posh Spice while you’re living in a place where, frankly, there’s not a whole lot of designer shops. And you weigh about fifteen stone more ’n she does anyway. Or whatever she’s called these days.”

“Who?”

“What d’you mean who? Posh Spice. Posh whoever. Mum has Hello! and OK! sent over by the lorry load, not to mention Vogue and Tatler and whatever else, and that’s her ambition. To look like all of them and to live like all of them and it’s not mine, Grandie, and it never will be, so you can send me home and nothing’ll be different. I don’t want what they want. I never have, and I never will.”

“I didn’t know you talked to them,” he repeated. “They said they’d not talked to you.”

“What do you mean?” She flung herself round in the seat so that she faced him.

“The Mother Whatever-she-is,” he said. “The abbot lady. What d’they call her?”

Tammy hesitated then. Her tongue came out and licked her lips and then her teeth caught the lower one and she sucked on it in a childlike reaction. Selevan felt his heart twist at the sight of this. So much of who she was was still a little girl. He could see how her parents couldn’t bear the thought of watching her disappear behind convent doors. Not this sort of convent at least, where no one emerged till they emerged in a coffin. It didn’t make sense to them. It was so…so un-girl-like, wasn’t it? She was supposed to care about pointy shoes with tall heels, about lipstick and hair thin-gummy dandershoots, about short skirts, long skirts, or in-between skirts, about jackets or not, waistcoats or not, about music and boys and film stars and when in her life she should lower her knickers for a bloke. But what she was not supposed to think about at the age of seventeen was the state of the world, war and peace, hunger and disease, poverty and ignorance. And what she definitely was never supposed to think about was sackcloth and ashes or whatever it was they wore, a small cell with a bed and a prayer stand and a cross, a set of rosary beads, and getting up at dawn and then praying and praying and praying and all the time locked away from the world.

Tammy said, “Grandie…” But she didn’t seem to trust herself to finish the sentence.

He said, “Tha’s who I am, girl. The granddad who loves you.”

“You phoned…?”

“Well, that’s what the letter said, didn’t it? Phone the Mother Whosis to arrange for a visit. Girls sometimes find they can’t cope, she said. They think there’s a romance to this kind of life, and I assure you there isn’t, Mr. Penrule. But we offer retreats to individuals and to groups and if she’d like to take part in one, we’d welcome her.”

Tammy’s eyes were Nan’s eyes once again, but Nan’s eyes as they should have been when she looked on her dad, not as they’d become as she’d listened to him rage. She said, “Grandie, you’re not taking me to the airport?”

“’Course not,” he said, as if it were the most reasonable thing in the world for him to fly in the face of her parents’ wishes and drive his granddaughter to the Scottish border to spend a week in a Carmelite convent. “They don’t know and they aren’t going to know.”

“But if I decide to stay…If I want to stay…If I find it’s what I think it is and what I need…You’ll have to tell them. And then what?”

“You let me worry about your parents,” he said.

“But they’ll never forgive you. If I decide…If I think it’s best, they’ll never agree. They’ll never think…”

“Girl,” Selevan said to his granddaughter, “they’ll think what they think.” He reached in the side compartment of his door and brought out an A to Z for the UK. He handed it over to her. He said, “Open that up. If we’re going to be driving all the way to Scotland, I’m going to need a bloody good navigator. Think you’re up for the job?”

Her smile was blinding. It crushed his heart. “I am,” she told him.

“Then let’s carry on.”

THE REACTION TO THE day’s events that stayed with Bea Hannaford the longest was the one that led her towards looking for someone to blame. She began with Ray. He seemed the most logical source of the difficulties that had resulted in a killer’s being able to walk blithely away from a murder charge. She told herself that had Ray only sent her the MCIT blokes she’d needed from the very beginning, she would not have had to rely on the TAG team he had sent her, men whose expertise was limited to heavy lifting and not to the finer points of a homicide investigation. She also would not have had to rely on Constable McNulty as part of that team, a man whose mad release of critical information to the dead boy’s family had put the police in a position of having virtually nothing that was known only to the killer and to themselves. Sergeant Collins, at least, she could live with, as he’d never left the station long enough to cause trouble. And as for DS Havers and Thomas Lynley…Bea wanted to blame them for something as well, if only for their infuriating loyalty to each other, but she didn’t have the heart to do so. Aside from withholding information about Daidre Trahair, which hadn’t turned out to be germane to the case anyway despite her own stubborn beliefs in the matter, they’d only done as she’d requested, more or less.

What she didn’t really want to consider was how everything came down to her in the end because she was, after all, in charge of the investigation and she had maintained a pigheaded position on more than one topic, from Daidre Trahair’s culpability to her own insistence upon an incident room here in the town and not where Ray had told her it should be, which was where incident rooms generally were, which was also where more adequate personnel were stationed. And she’d held firm to that desire to work in Casvelyn and not elsewhere simply because Ray had told her she was wrong to do so.

So while it all came down to Ray in the end, it also came down to her. This sort of thing put her future on the line.

No case to present. Were there four worse words? Oh, perhaps, our marriage is over were equally bad and God knew enough coppers heard those words spoken by a spouse who couldn’t take the life of a cop’s partner any longer. But no case to present meant leaving a bereaved family in the lurch, with no one brought to justice. It meant despite the long hours, the slog, the sifting through data, the forensics reports, the interviews, the discussions, the arranging of this piece that way and that piece this way, there was nothing left to do save begin the entire process again and hope for a different result or to leave the case open and declare it cold. Only how could it be cold, really, when they knew very well who the killer was and he was going to walk away? That was hardly a cold case. A cold case still shone with a glimmer of hope should something more turn up, whereas this case shone not in the slightest. The regional force might well ask her what she needed to make things right in Casvelyn, but that was more or less in her dreams because what the regional force were far more likely to ask was how she’d cocked this up so badly.

Ray was how, she told herself. Ray had no interest in her success. He was out to get her for almost fifteen years of estrangement, no matter that he’d brought them about himself.

For want of another direction, she told the team to start sifting through the data again, to see what they could come up with to pin Jago Reeth, aka Jonathan Parsons, to the wall of murder charge. What, she asked them, did they have that could be handed to the CPS, that could light the fire beneath those Crown prosecutors and set them off? There had to be something. So they’d begin this process on the following day and in the meantime they should all go home and get a decent night’s rest because they’d not be sleeping much till they had this matter sorted. Then she followed her own prescription.

When she got to Holsworthy, she opened the cupboard in which she kept her brooms, her mops, and also her wines. She chose a bottle at random and carried it to the kitchen. Red, she discovered. Shiraz. Something from South Africa called Old Goats Roam in Villages. That sounded interesting. She couldn’t recall when or where she’d bought it, but she was fairly certain she’d made the purchase solely because of the name and the label.

She opened it, poured herself a brimming mug, and she sat at the table where her position forced her to contemplate her calendar. This proved to be as depressing as thinking about the last six days, once she considered her most recent Internet date, which had occurred nearly four weeks previously. An architect. He’d looked good on the screen and he’d sounded good on the phone. A bit of chit and a bit of chat and nervous laughter and all that rubbish but that was to be expected, right? After all, this wasn’t the normal way men and women met, whatever went for normal these days, because she didn’t know any longer. A cup of coffee, perhaps? they’d asked each other. A drink somewhere? Certainly, fine. He’d showed up with photos of his holiday home, more photos of his holiday boat, extra photos of his holiday on skis, and additional photos of his car, which may or may not have been a vintage Mercedes, because by the time they’d got to it, Bea hadn’t cared. Me, me, me, his conversation had declared. All me, baby, and all the time. She’d wanted either to weep or to sleep. By the end of the evening, she’d had two martinis and she shouldn’t have driven herself anywhere, but the desire to flee had overcome her sense, so she’d puttered carefully along the road and prayed she’d not get stopped. He’d said to her with an affable smile, “Hell. Talked only about myself, didn’t I? Well, next time…,” and she’d thought, Won’t be a next time, darling. Which was what she’d thought of all of them.

God, how wretched. This couldn’t be how life was meant to be lived. And now…she couldn’t even dredge up his name, just the moniker she’d given him, Boat Wanker, which distinguished him from all the other wankers. Was there a way, she wondered, to find a man in her age group without baggage, or a man who might be a person first and a profession leading up to the acquisition of countless possessions second? She was beginning to think not, unless that man was one of a score of divorcés she’d also met, blokes with nothing to their names but a heap of a car, a bed-sit, and a mountain of credit card bills. Yet there had to be something in between those two extremes of male availability. Or was this how one’s remaining years were intended to go when an unmarried woman reached what had once been coyly referred to as “a certain age”?

Bea downed her wine. She ought to eat, she thought. She wasn’t sure if there was anything in the fridge, but certainly she could rustle up a tin of soup. Or perhaps a few of those beef sticks Pete liked for snacks? An apple? Perhaps. A jar of peanut butter? Well, certainly there was Marmite to spread on mouldy bread. This was England, after all.

She dragged herself to her feet. She opened the fridge. She stared into its cold and heartless depths. There was sticky toffee sponge, she discovered, so she could check pudding off her menu list. And far in the back was an old minced beef and onion roll. This could do as a main course. Now for the starter…? Perhaps Pot Noodle? In the veg department, there had to be a tin of something…Chickpeas? Carrots and turnips? Bea wondered what she’d been thinking when she’d last done the shopping. Probably nothing, she decided. She’d likely been pushing the trolley along the aisles without an idea in her head as to what she might cook. The thought of proper nutrition for Pete had probably prompted a spontaneous visit to the market, but once there, she’d got distracted by something like a call on her mobile and the end result was…this.

She took out the sticky toffee sponge and decided to skip the starter, the entrée, and the veg altogether, getting right down to the pudding, which, after all, everyone knew was the best part of the meal and why should she deny herself that when she wanted cheering up and this had the best potential to do the job?

She was about to tuck into it when bim bim BIM boom BOOM sounded on her front door, followed by the scrape of Ray’s key in the lock. He came in talking. He was saying, “…spirit of compromise, mate,” to which Pete replied, “Pizza is a compromise, Dad, when one’s set on McDonald’s.”

“Don’t you dare buy him a Big Mac,” Bea called.

“You see?” Ray said. “Mum quite agrees.”

They came into the kitchen. They were wearing matching baseball caps, and Pete had his Arsenal sweatshirt on. Ray was in jeans and a paint-stained windcheater. Pete’s jeans had a great hole in the knee.

“Where’re the dogs?” Bea asked them.