Careless in Red

by Elizabeth George

  “And the equipment itself. Yes. That’s right. You can damage the equipment, put identical tape over the damage, and no one is the wiser.”

  “The sling, obviously. It would have been the easiest to damage although cutting it would have shown, if not to the naked eye, at least to the microscope.”

  “Which is exactly what happened. As we’ve discussed earlier.”

  “But there’s more, isn’t there, or you wouldn’t have shown me this.”

  “Forensics went through Santo’s kit,” Hannaford said. Hand on his elbow again, she began to guide him out of the shop. She kept her voice low. “Two of the chock stones had been seen to. Beneath the marking tape, both the plastic sheathing and the cable had been damaged. The sheathing was cut through; the cable was hanging on by a metaphorical thread. If the boy used either one for an abseil, he was done for. Same thing applied to the sling. He was a dead man walking. A dead climber climbing. What you will. It was only a matter of time before he used the right piece of equipment at the worst possible moment.”

  “Fingerprints?”

  “Galore,” Hannaford said. “But I’m not sure how useful they’re going to be since most climbers don’t go solo all the time, and we’re likely to find that’s the case with Santo.”

  “Unless there’s a print on the damaged pieces that doesn’t exist on any others. That would be difficult for someone to explain away.”

  “Hmm. Yes. But that whole bit has me wondering, Thomas.”

  “What whole bit is that?” Lynley asked.

  “Three damaged pieces instead of only one. What does that suggest to you?”

  He considered this. He said thoughtfully, “Only one bad piece was needed to send him to his death. But he was carrying three. You might conclude that the killer didn’t care when it happened or if the fall even killed him since he could have used the damaged chock stones quite low on an upward route and not used the sling at all.”

  “Any other conclusions?”

  “If he generally abseiled first and climbed back up afterwards, you might conclude that three pieces of damaged equipment indicate the killer was in a hurry to do away with the boy. Or, as difficult as it might be to believe…” He pondered a moment, wondering about the final likelihood and what that final likelihood suggested.

  She prompted him with, “Yes?”

  “Damaging three pieces…You might also conclude the killer wanted everyone to know it was murder.”

  She nodded. “Bit mad, isn’t it, but that’s what I was thinking.”

  IT WAS THE SHEER madness of love that had made Kerra want to get out of the hotel and onto her bike. She’d changed into her riding kit because of it and she’d determined that twenty miles or so would be sufficient to clear her head of the thought of it. A twenty-mile ride wouldn’t take her terribly long, either, not if the weather continued to improve, and not for someone in her condition. On a good day, with the weather cooperating, she could do sixty miles with one hand tied behind her back, so twenty was child’s play. It was also highly necessary child’s play, so she’d made herself ready and headed for the door.

  The arrival of the police officer had stopped her. It was the same bloke as the previous night, Constable McNulty, and he had on his face such a lugubrious expression that Kerra knew the news would be bad before he uttered it.

  He’d asked to see her parents.

  She’d told him that was impossible.

  They’re not here? he’d asked. It was a logical question.

  Oh, they were at home. Upstairs but unavailable. You can tell me what you’ve come to tell them. They’ve asked not to be disturbed.

  I’m afraid I need to ask you to fetch them, the officer said.

  And I’m afraid I have to refuse. They’ve asked to be left alone. They’ve made it clear. They’re finally resting. I’m sure you understand. Have you any children, Constable? Because when one loses a child, one reels, and they’re reeling.

  This wasn’t exactly true, but the truth would hardly garner sympathy. The thought of her mother and her father going at each other in Santo’s bedroom like randy adolescents made the contents of Kerra’s stomach curdle. She didn’t want anything to do with them just now. Especially she didn’t want anything to do with her father, whom she was growing to despise more and more with each passing hour. She’d despised him for years, but nothing he’d so far done or failed to do held a candle to what was going on at the moment.

  Constable McNulty had reluctantly left the information once Alan had come out of the marketing office where he’d been reviewing a commercial video. Alan had said, “What is it, Kerra? May I help?” and he sounded firm and sure of himself, as if the past sixteen hours were continuing to transform him. “I’m Kerra’s fiancé,” he told the policeman. “Is there something I can do for you?”

  Fiancé? Kerra had thought. Kerra’s fiancé? Where was that coming from?

  Before she’d been able to correct him, the cop had given them the information. Murder. Several pieces of Santo’s kit had been tampered with. The sling and two chock stones as well. The police were going to want to interview the family first.

  Alan had said the expected: “You aren’t supposing one of the family…?” and managed to sound perplexed and outraged simultaneously.

  Everyone who knew Santo would be interviewed, Constable McNulty told them. He appeared rather excited about this, and it had come to Kerra how tediously boring the policeman’s life must be in Casvelyn in the off-season, with three-quarters of the summer population gone and those who remained either in their houses huddling against the Atlantic storms or committing only the occasional minor traffic violation to break the monotony of a constable’s life. All of Santo’s belongings would need to be examined, the constable told them. A family history would be constructed, and—

  That had been enough for Kerra. Family history? That would certainly be illuminating. A family history would show it all: bats in the belfry and skeletons in the closet, people who were permanently estranged and people who were just permanently strange.

  All of this gave her another reason to ride. And then came Cadan and the conversation with Cadan, which left her feeling blamed.

  After her words with him, she fetched her bike. Her father met her outside, Alan coming out behind him with an expression that said he’d passed along the information about Santo. So Alan didn’t need to mouth the words he knows although that’s what he did. Kerra wanted to tell him he’d had no right to tell her father anything. Alan wasn’t a member of the family.

  Ben Kerne said to Kerra, “Where are you going? I’d like you to stay here.” He sounded exhausted. He looked it, too.

  Did you fuck her again? was what Kerra wished to use as reply. Did she slip on her little red negligee and crook her finger and did you melt and not see anything else, not even that Santo is dead? Good way to forget for a few minutes, eh? Works a trick. Always has done.

  But she said none of that although she was positively itching to flay him. She said, “I need a ride just now. I’ve got to—”

  “You’re needed here.”

  Kerra glanced at Alan. He was watching her. Surprisingly, he indicated by cocking his head in the direction of the road that she should ride, no matter her father’s desires. Although she didn’t want to be, she was grateful for this display of understanding. Alan was, in this at least, fully on her side.

  “Does she need something from me?” Kerra asked her father.

  He looked behind him, up at the windows of the family’s flat. The curtains of the master bedroom were blocking out the daylight. Behind them, Dellen was coping in her Dellen way: on the crushed spines of her near relations.

  “She’s in black,” Kerra’s father said.

  “That’ll doubtless be a large disappointment to any number of people,” Kerra replied.

  Ben Kerne looked at her with eyes so anguished that for a moment Kerra regretted her words. Not his fault came to her. But at the same time there were things t
hat were her father’s fault, not the least of which was that they were even talking about her mother and, in doing so, that they were reduced to using a carefully chosen set of words, like semaphores and they two distant communicators with a secret language all their own.

  She sighed, an aggrieved party unwilling to apologise. That he, too, was aggrieved could not be allowed to count. She said, “Do you?”

  “What?”

  “Need something from me. Because she doesn’t. She’ll be wanting you. And no doubt vice versa.”

  Ben made no reply. He went back into the hotel without another word, shouldering past Alan, who looked rather like a man trying to decipher the Dead Sea Scrolls.

  Alan said, “A little harsh, that, Kerra. Don’t you think?”

  The last thing Kerra wanted to show Alan was gratitude for his previous understanding, so she welcomed the criticism. She said, “If you’ve decided to remain at work here, you need to become a little more familiar with the mechanism of your employment, okay?”

  Like her father, he looked struck. She was happy he felt the sting of her words. He said, “I’ve got it that you’re angry. But what I haven’t got is why. Not the anger part of it, but the afraid part of it that’s fueling the anger. I can’t suss that one. I’ve tried. I spent most of last night awake, trying.”

  “Poor you,” she said.

  “Kerra, none of this is like you. What’re you frightened about?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “I’m not frightened at all. You’re trying to talk about subjects you don’t understand.”

  “Then help me understand.”

  “Not my job,” she said. “I warned you off.”

  “You warned me off working here. This—you, what’s happening with you, and what happened to Santo—isn’t part of my employment.”

  She smiled briefly. “Stay round, then. If you haven’t already, you’re soon to find out what’s part and parcel of your employment. Now if you’ll excuse me, I want a ride. I doubt you’ll still be here when I return.”

  “Are you coming over tonight?”

  She raised her eyebrows. “I think that part might be finished between us.”

  “What are you saying? Something’s happened since yesterday. Beyond Santo, something’s happened.”

  “Oh, I do know that.” She mounted her bike, gearing it to take the rise of the driveway, heading into town.

  She coursed along the southeast edge of St. Mevan Down where unmowed grass bent heavily with a weight of raindrops and a few dogs romped, grateful for a respite in the rain. She, too, was grateful, and she decided she’d head roughly in the direction of Polcare Cove. She told herself she had no intention of going to the place where Santo had died, but if she ended up there by chance, she would consider it meant to be. She wouldn’t pay attention to the route. She would merely blast along the lanes as fast as she could, turning when she felt like turning, continuing straight on when she fancied that.

  She knew she needed a source of energy to do the sort of ride she had in mind, however, so when she saw Casvelyn of Cornwall (County’s Number One Pasty) to the right on the corner of Burn View Lane, she coasted over to the bakery, a large operation that supplied pasties up and down the coast to restaurants, shops, pubs, and smaller bakeries unable to bake their own. The business comprised an industrial-size kitchen in the back and a shop in the front, with ten bakers working in one area and two shop assistants in the other.

  Kerra leaned her bike against the front window, a stunning monument to pasties, bread loaves, pastry, and scones. She ducked inside, deciding in advance that she would have a steak-and-beer pasty and she’d eat it on her way out of town.

  At the counter, she placed her order with a girl whose impressive thighs looked like the result of their owner having sampled the products far too often. The requested pasty was being bagged and rung up at the till when the other shop assistant emerged with a tray of fresh goods to go into the display case. Kerra looked up as the kitchen door swung closed. At the same moment as her glance fell on the girl with the tray, that girl’s glance fell upon Kerra. Her steps faltered. She stood expressionless with the tray extended in front of her.

  “Madlyn,” Kerra said. It came to her much later how stupid she sounded. “I didn’t know that you worked here.”

  Madlyn Angarrack went to one of the display cases and opened it, sliding fresh pasties from the tray she held. She said to the other girl, who was in the process of bagging Kerra’s purchase, “What sort is that, Shar?” Her voice was curt.

  “Steak and beer.” Kerra was the one to answer. And then, “Madlyn, I was asking Cadan about you only twenty minutes ago. How long’ve you been—”

  “Give her one of these, Shar. They’re fresher.”

  Shar looked from Madlyn to Kerra, as if taking a reading off the tension in the air and wondering from which direction it was flowing. But she did as she was told.

  Kerra took her pasty over to where Madlyn was lining up display trays neatly. She said to her, “When did you start working here?”

  Madlyn glanced her way. “Why d’you want to know?” She shut the lid of the display case with a decisive snap. “Would that make some sort of difference to you?” She used the back of her wrist to move some hair from her face. It was short—her hair—quite dark and curly. At this time of year, the copper that streaked it from exposure to the summer sun was missing. It came to Kerra how remarkably like Cadan his sister looked: the same colour of hair that was thick with curls, the same olive skin, the same dark eyes, the same shape of face. The Angarracks were thus nothing like the Kerne siblings. Physically, as well as in every other way, Kerra and Santo had been nothing alike.

  The sudden thought of Santo made Kerra blink, hard. She didn’t want him there: not in her mind and definitely not near her heart. Madlyn seemed to take this as a reaction to her question and to its inimical tone because she went on to say, “I heard about Santo. I’m sorry he fell.”

  Yet it seemed pro forma, too much an obligation performed. Because of this, Kerra said more brutally than she otherwise would have done, “He didn’t fall. He was murdered. The police have been to tell us a little while ago. They didn’t know at first, when he was found. They couldn’t tell.”

  Madlyn’s mouth opened as if she would speak, her lips clearly forming the first part of murdered, but she did not say it. Instead she said, “Why?”

  “Because they had to look at his climbing kit, didn’t they. Under their microscopes or whatever. I expect you can figure out the rest.”

  “I mean why would someone murder Santo?”

  “I find it hard to believe you, of all people, would even ask that question.”

  “Are you saying…” Madlyn balanced the empty tray vertically, against her hip. “We were friends, Kerra.”

  “I think you were a lot more than friends.”

  “I’m not talking about Santo. I’m talking about you and me. We were friends. Close friends. You might say best friends. So how you can think that I’d ever—”

  “You ended our friendship.”

  “I started seeing your brother. That was all I did. Full stop.”

  “Yes. Well.”

  “And you defined everything after that. No one sees my brother and remains my friend. That was your position. Only you didn’t even say that much, did you? You just made the cut with your rusty scissors and that was it. No more friendship when someone does something you don’t want them to do.”

  “It was for your own good.”

  “Oh really? What? Getting cut off from someone…getting cut off from a sister? Because that’s what you were to me, all right? A sister.”

  “You could have…” Kerra didn’t know how to go on. She also couldn’t see how they’d come to this. She’d wanted to talk to Madlyn, it was true. That was why she’d earlier gone to Cadan about his sister. But the conversation she’d been having with Madlyn Angarrack in her brain had not resembled the conversation she was having with Madlyn Angarrack no
w. That mental conversation had not taken place in the presence of a second shop assistant who was attending their colloquy with the sort of rabid spectator’s interest that precedes a girl fight at a secondary school. Kerra said quietly, “It’s not as if I didn’t warn you.”

  “Of what?”

  “Of what it would be like for you if you and my brother…” Kerra glanced at Shar. There was a glitter to her eyes that was discomfiting. “You know what I’m talking about. I told you what he was like.”

  “But what you didn’t tell me was what you were like. What you are like. Mean and vindictive. Look at you, Kerra. Have you even cried? Your own brother dead and here you are, right as could be, going about on your bike without a care in the world.”

  “You seem to be coping well enough yourself,” Kerra pointed out.

  “At least I didn’t want him to die.”

  “Didn’t you? Why’re you here? What happened to the farm?”

  “I quit the farm. All right?” Her face had gone red. Her grip on the tray she’d brought with her from the kitchen had become so tight that her knuckles were white as she went on. “Are you happy now, Kerra? Have you learned what you wanted to know? I sorted out the truth. And do you want to know how I did that, Kerra? He claimed that he’d always be honest with me, of course, but when it came to this…Oh get out of here. Get out.” She raised the tray as if to throw it.

  “Hey, Mad…” Shar spoke uneasily. Doubtless, Kerra thought, the other girl had never seen the rage of which Madlyn Angarrack was fully capable. Doubtless Shar had never opened a postal package and discovered within it pictures of herself with her head cut off, pictures of herself with her eyeballs stabbed by the lead of a pencil, handwritten notes and two birthday cards once saved but now smeared with faeces, a newspaper article about the head of instructors at Adventures Unlimited with bollocks and shit written in red pencil across it. No return address, but none had been needed. Nor had been any other sort of message, when the intentions of the sender were so clearly illustrated by the contents of the envelope in which they’d come.