Careless in Red

by Elizabeth George

  “Kerra and I intend to marry,” he added, as if this fine detail might smooth the troubled waters of what he mistakenly saw as Bea’s ostensible concern for the young woman’s virtue.

  “Ah. How nice. And Santo?” she asked him. “What sort of relationship did you have with him?”

  “Terrific lad,” was Alan’s reply. “He was hard not to like. He was no great intellectual, mind you, but he had a happiness about him, a playfulness. He was infectious, and from what I could see, people liked to be around him. People in general.”

  Joie de vivre, Bea thought. She pressed on. “And what about you in particular? Did you like to be around him?”

  “We didn’t spend much time together. I’m Kerra’s partner, so Santo and I…We were more like in-laws, I suppose. Cordial and friendly in conversation, but not anything else. We didn’t have the same interests. He was very physical. I’m more…cerebral?”

  “Which makes you better suited to run a business, I expect,” Bea noted.

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Like this business, for example.”

  The young man was no idiot. He, unlike the Stan and Ollie she was saddled with, could tell a hawk from a handsaw no matter the direction of the wind. He said, “Actually Santo was a bit relieved when he knew I was going to work here. It took an unwanted pressure off him.”

  “What sort of pressure?”

  “He’d have had to work with his mum in this part of the business, and he didn’t want to. At least, that’s what he led me to believe. He said he wasn’t suited for this end of the operation.”

  “But you don’t mind it? Working this end of things. Working with her?”

  “Not at all.” When he said this last bit, he kept his eyes well fixed on Bea’s and his entire body motionless. That alone made her wonder about the nature of his lie.

  She said, “I’d like to look at Santo’s climbing kit if you’ll point out where I can find it, Mr. Cheston.”

  “Sorry. Thing is, I don’t actually know where he kept it.”

  She had to wonder about that as well. He’d answered rather promptly, hadn’t he, as if he’d been expecting the question.

  She was about to press him further on this topic when he said, “Here’s Ben with Dellen,” into the sound of the old cagelike lift descending. She told the young man they’d speak again, no doubt. He said, Absolutely. Whenever the inspector wished.

  He returned to his office before the lift reached the ground floor and disgorged the Kernes. Ben came out first and extended his hand to assist his wife. She emerged slowly, looking rather like a somnambulist. Drugs, Bea thought. She’d be sedated, which was hardly unexpected in the mother of a dead child.

  The rest of her appearance, however, was unexpected. The polite term for it would have been faded beauty. Somewhere in her midforties, she suffered from the voluptuous woman’s curse: the luscious curves of her youth having given way to the spread and the sag of advancing middle age. She’d been a smoker as well and perhaps she still was, for her skin was heavily webbed round the eyes and creviced round the lips. She wasn’t fat, but she lacked the toned body that her husband possessed. Too little exercise and too much indulgence, Bea concluded.

  And yet the woman had a way about her: pedicured feet, manicured hands, sumptuous blond hair with a pleasing sheen, large violet eyes with thick dark lashes, and a manner of movement that asked for aid. Troubadours would have called her a damsel. Bea called her Big Trouble and waited to find out why.

  “Mrs. Kerne,” she said. “Thank you for joining us.” And then to Ben Kerne, “Is there somewhere we could talk? This shouldn’t take overly long.” The last bit was typical police casuistry. It would take however long it took for Bea to be satisfied.

  Ben Kerne said they could go up to the hotel’s first floor. The residents’ lounge was there. They’d be comfortable.

  They were. The room overlooked St. Mevan Beach, and it was fitted out with plush but durable new sofas, a large-screen television, a DVD player, a stereo, a pool table, and a kitchenette. This last feature possessed tea-making facilities and a shiny stainless-steel cappuccino machine. The walls displayed vintage posters of athletic scenes from the 1920s and 30s: skiers, hikers, cyclists, swimmers, and tennis players. It was well thought out and nicely done. A lot of money had gone into it.

  Bea wondered where the money for such a project had come from, and she was not shy about asking. Rather than reply, however, Ben Kerne asked if the police wanted something from the cappuccino machine. Bea demurred for both of them before Constable McNulty—who’d raised his head from his pad with what she considered precipitate enthusiasm—could accept. Kerne went to the machine anyway, saying, “If you don’t mind…,” and going on to make some sort of concoction, which he pressed upon his wife. She took it from him with no enthusiasm. He asked her to have a bit of it, and he sounded solicitous. Dellen said she didn’t want it, but Ben was obdurate. “You must,” he told her. They looked at each other and seemed to engage in a battle of wills. Dellen was the one to blink. She raised the cup to her lips and didn’t lower it till she’d drunk it all, leaving a disturbing smear of red where her lips had touched the stoneware.

  Bea asked them how long they’d been in Casvelyn, and Ben told her they’d arrived two years earlier. They’d come from Truro, he said, and he went on to explain that he’d owned two sporting goods shops in that town, which he’d sold—along with the family house—in order to finance, if only partially, the project of setting up Adventures Unlimited. Further money had come from the bank, naturally. One did not take on a venture like this without more than one source of financing. They were due to open in mid-June, he said. At least, they had been due to open. Now…He didn’t know.

  Bea let that go for the moment. She said, “Grow up in Truro, did you, Mr. Kerne? Were you and your wife childhood sweethearts?”

  He hesitated at this, for some reason. He looked to Dellen as if considering how best to phrase his answer. Bea wondered which of the questions was giving him pause: the growing up in Truro part or the childhood sweethearts part.

  “Not in Truro, no,” he finally answered. “But as to being childhood sweethearts…” He looked at his wife again, and there was no doubt that his expression was fond. “We’ve been together more or less since we were teenagers: sixteen and fifteen, wasn’t it, Dell?” He didn’t wait for his wife to reply. “We were like most kids, though. Together for a bit, broken up for a bit. Then forgiveness and getting back together. We did that for six or seven years before we got married, didn’t we, Dell?”

  Dellen said, “I don’t know. I’ve forgotten all that.” She had a husky voice, a smoker’s voice. It suited her. Anything else would have been wildly out of character.

  “Have you?” He turned from her to Bea. “It seemed to go on forever: the drama of our teenage years. As these things do, when you care for someone.”

  “What sort of drama?” Bea asked as next to her Constable McNulty kept up a gratifying scribbling against his pad.

  “I slept around,” Dellen said bluntly.

  “Dell…”

  “She’ll likely find out the truth, so we may as well tell it,” Dellen said. “I was the village tart, Inspector.” And then to her husband, “C’n you make me another coffee, Ben? And hotter, if you will. The last was rather lukewarm.”

  Ben’s face had altered to granite as she’d spoken. After a fractional hestitation, he rose from the sofa where he’d placed himself and his wife, and he went back to the cappuccino maker. Bea let the silence continue, and when Constable McNulty cleared his throat as if to speak, she knocked her foot against his to keep him quiet. She liked tension during an interview, especially if one of the suspects was inadvertently providing it to the other.

  Dellen finally spoke again, but she looked at Ben, as if what she said comprised a hidden message for him. “We lived down the coast, Ben and I, but not in a place like Newquay, where there’re at least a few diversions. We were from a village whe
re there was nothing to do besides the beach in summer and sex in winter. And sometimes sex in summer as well if the weather wasn’t good enough for the beach. We ran in packs then—a gang of kids—and we mixed it up with each other. Pairing off this way for a bit, pairing off that way for a bit. Till we got to Truro, that is. Ben went first and I—clever girl—followed him directly. And that made all the difference. Things changed for us in Truro.”

  Ben returned with her drink. He also brought with him a packet of cigarettes that he’d taken from somewhere in the kitchenette, and he lit one for her and handed it over. He sat next to her, quite close.

  Dellen downed the second coffee much as she’d done the first, as if her mouth were lined with asbestos. She took the cigarette from him and drew in on it expertly, doing what Bea always thought of as that double-inhaling bit: drawing smoke in, letting a bit out, drawing it all back in again. Dellen Kerne made the act look unique. Bea tried to get a bead on the woman. Dellen’s hands were unsteady.

  “Bright lights, big city?” she asked the Kernes. “Is that what took you to Truro?”

  “Hardly,” Dellen said. “Ben had an uncle who took him in when he was eighteen. He kept rowing with his dad. Over me. Dad thought—this is Ben’s, not mine—that if he got him out of the village, he’d get him out of my hair as well. Or get me out of his. He didn’t reckon I’d follow. Did he, Ben?”

  Ben covered her hand with his. She was saying too much and all of them knew it, but only Ben and his wife knew why she was doing it. Bea considered what all this had to do with Santo as Ben endeavoured to wrest control of the conversation from Dellen by saying, “That’s a reinvention of history. Truth of the matter”—and this he said directly to Bea—“is that my dad and I never got on very well. His dream was to live entirely off the land, and after eighteen years of that, I’d had enough. I made arrangements to live with my uncle. I took off for Truro. Dellen followed me in…I don’t know…What was it? Eight months?”

  “Seemed like eight centuries,” Dellen said. “For my sins, I knew a good thing when I saw it. For my sins, I still do.” She kept her gaze on Ben Kerne as she said to Bea, “I’ve a wonderful husband whose patience I’ve tried for many years, Inspector Hannaford. Could I have another coffee, Ben?”

  Ben said, “Are you sure that’s wise?”

  “But make it hotter still, please. I don’t think that machine is working very well.”

  And it came to Bea that that was it: the coffee and what the coffee stood for. She hadn’t wanted it, and he’d insisted. Coffee as metaphor, and Dellen Kerne was rubbing his face in it.

  She said, “I’d like to see your son’s room, if I may. As soon as you’ve finished with your coffee, of course.”

  DAIDRE TRAHAIR WAS WALKING back towards Polcare Cove along the cliff top when she saw him. A brisk wind was blowing and she’d just stopped to refasten her hair in its tortoiseshell slide. She’d managed to capture most of it, and she’d shoved the rest of it behind her ears, and there he was, perhaps one hundred yards to the south of her. He’d obviously just climbed from the cove, so her first thought was that he was on his way again, resuming his walk, having been released from all suspicion by Detective Inspector Hannaford. She concluded that this release was reasonable enough: As soon as he’d said he was from New Scotland Yard, he’d probably been absolved from suspicion. If only she herself had been half so clever…

  Except she had to be truthful, at least with herself. Thomas Lynley had never told them he was from New Scotland Yard, had he? It had been something assumed last night by the other two the moment he’d said his name.

  He’d said Thomas Lynley. They’d said—one of them and she couldn’t remember which one it had been—New Scotland Yard? in such a way that seemed to speak volumes among them. He’d said something to indicate they were correct in their assumption and that had been it.

  She knew why now. For if he was Thomas Lynley of New Scotland Yard then he was also Thomas Lynley whose wife had been murdered in the street in front of their Belgravia house. Every cop in the country would know about that. The police were, after all, a brotherhood of sorts. This meant, Daidre knew, that all cops everywhere in the country were connected. She needed to remember that, and she needed to be careful round him, no matter his pain and her inclination to assuage it. Everyone had pain, she told herself. Life was all about learning to cope with it.

  He raised an arm to wave. She waved in turn. They walked towards each other across the top of the cliff. The path here was narrow and uneven—with shards of carboniferous stone tipping up from the soil—and along its east side gorse rustled thickly, a yellow intrusion standing hardily against the wind. Beyond the gorse, grass grew abundantly although it was closely cropped by the sheep that grazed freely upon it.

  When they were close enough to be heard by each other, Daidre said to Thomas Lynley, “So. You’re on your way, then?” But as soon as she spoke, she realised this was not the case, and she went on to add, “Except you’ve not got your rucksack with you, so you aren’t on your way at all.”

  He nodded solemnly. “You’d make a good detective.”

  “A decidedly elementary deduction, I’m afraid. Anything more would escape my notice. Are you out for a walk?”

  “I was looking for you.” As it had done to hers, the wind tossed his hair and he brushed it away from his forehead. Again, she thought how like hers it was. She assumed that he went quite blond in summer.

  “For me?” she asked. “How did you know where to find me? Beyond knocking at the door of the cottage, I mean. Because I hope I can presume you did knock this time. I don’t have many more windows to offer up to you.”

  “I knocked,” he said. “When no one answered, I had a look round and saw the fresh footprints. I followed them. It was simple enough.”

  “And here I am,” she said.

  “And here you are.”

  He smiled and seemed to hesitate for some reason, which surprised Daidre as he didn’t seem the type of man who’d hesitate at anything. She said, “And?” and cocked her head. He had, she noted, a scar on his upper lip that relieved his otherwise off-putting appearance, which was handsome in that classical sense: He had strong features that were well defined. No indication of inbreeding here.

  “I’ve come to ask you to dinner,” he said. “I’m afraid I can only offer you the Salthouse Inn as I’ve no funds of my own yet, and I can hardly invite you for a meal and ask you to pay for it, can I. But at the inn, they’ll put our meal on the books, and as breakfast was excellent—well, at least it was filling—I suspect dinner will be adequate as well.”

  “What a dubious invitation,” she said.

  He seemed to think about it. “D’you mean the ‘adequate’ part?”

  “Yes. ‘Join me for an adequate albeit far-from-sumptuous meal.’ It’s one of those gallant post-Victorian requests one can only respond to with ‘Thank you, I think.’”

  He laughed. “Sorry. My mother would roll in her grave, were she dead, which she isn’t. Let me say, then, that I’ve had a look at tonight’s menu, and it appears…if not brilliant, then at least swell.”

  She laughed in turn. “Swell? Where on earth did that come from? Never mind. Don’t tell me. Have a meal here instead. I’ve something already prepared and there’s enough for two. It only wants baking.”

  “But then I’ll be doubly in your debt.”

  “Which is exactly where I want you, my lord.”

  His face altered, all amusement drained away by her slip of the tongue. She cursed herself for her lapse in circumspection and what it presaged about her ability to keep other things to herself in his presence.

  He said, “Ah. So you know.”

  She sought an explanation and decided one existed that would be reasonable, even to him. “When you said last night that you were Scotland Yard, I wanted to know if that was the case. So I set about finding out.” She looked away from him for a moment. She saw that the herring gulls were settling in on the nea
rby cliff face for the night, pairing off onto ledges and into crevices, ruffling their wings, huddling against the wind. “I’m terribly sorry, Thomas,” she said.

  After a moment during which more gulls landed and others soared and cawed, he said, “You’ve no need to apologise. I would have done the same in your situation. A stranger in your house claiming to be a policeman. Someone dead outside. What are you to believe?”

  “That’s not what I meant.” She looked back at him. He was into the wind; she was against it. It played havoc with her hair, whipping it into her face despite the slide.

  “Then what?” he said.

  “Your wife,” she told him. “I’m so terribly sorry about what happened to her. What a wrenching thing for you to have to go through.”

  “Ah,” he said. “Yes.” He moved his gaze to the seabirds. He would see them, Daidre knew, as she saw them, pairing off not because there was safety in numbers but because there was safety in just one other gull. “It was far more wrenching for her than for me,” he said.

  “No,” Daidre said. “I don’t believe that.”

  “Don’t you? Well, there’s little more wrenching than death by gunshot, I daresay. Especially when death is not immediate. I didn’t have to go through that. Helen did. She was there one moment, just trying to get her shopping in the front door. She was shot the next. That would be rather wrenching, wouldn’t you say?” He sounded bleak, and he didn’t look at her as he spoke. But he’d misunderstood her meaning, and Daidre sought to clarify it.

  “I believe that death is the end of this part of our existence, Thomas: the spiritual being’s human experience. The spirit leaves the body and then goes on to what’s next. And what’s next has to be better than what’s here or what’s the point, really?”

  “Do you actually believe that?” His tone walked the line between bitterness and incredulity. “Heaven and hell and nonsense in a similar vein?”

  “Not heaven and hell. That all seems rather silly, doesn’t it. God or whoever up there on a throne, casting this soul downward to eternal torment, tossing this soul upward to sing hymns with the angels. That can’t be what this”—her arm took in the cliff side and the sea—“is all about. But that there’s something else beyond what we understand in this moment…? Yes, I do believe that. So for you…You’re still the spiritual being undergoing and attempting to understand the human experience while she now knows—”