Careless in Red

by Elizabeth George

  “Helen,” he said. “Her name was Helen.”

  “Helen, yes. Forgive me. Helen. She now knows what it was all about. But there’s little peace of mind in that. For you, I mean…Knowing that Helen’s moved on.”

  “It wasn’t her choice,” he said.

  “Is it ever, Thomas?”

  “Suicide.” He looked at her evenly.

  She felt a chill. “That’s not a choice. That’s a decision based upon the belief that there are no choices.”

  “God.” A muscle moved in his jaw. She so regretted her slip of the tongue. A simple expression—my lord—had reduced him to his wound. These things take time, she wanted to tell him. Such a cliché but so much truth within it.

  She said to him, “Thomas, do you fancy a walk? There’s something I’d like to show you. It’s a bit of a way…perhaps a mile up the coast along the path, but it’ll give us something of an appetite for dinner.”

  She thought he might refuse, but he did not. He nodded and she gestured him to follow her. They headed in the direction from which she’d just come, dipping down at first into another cove, where great fins of slate shot out of the encroaching surf and reached towards a treacherous cliff top of sandstone and shale. The wind and the waves made talking difficult, as did their positions—one behind the other—so Daidre said nothing, nor did Thomas Lynley. It was, she decided, better this way. Letting a moment pass without acknowledging it further was sometimes a more efficacious approach to healing than troubling a developing scar.

  Spring had brought wildflowers into areas more protected by the wind, and along the way into combes the yellow of ragwort mixed with the pinks of thrift while bluebells still marked the spots where ancient forests had once stood. There was scant habitation in the immediate environs of the cliffs when they ascended, but in the distance stone-built farmhouses crouched alongside their greater-size barns, and the cattle these served grazed in paddocks that were marked by Cornwall’s earthen hedgerows with their rich vegetation where dog rose and pennywort grew.

  The nearest village was a place called Alsperyl, which was also their destination. This comprised a church, a vicarage, a collection of cottages, an ancient schoolhouse, and a pub. All fashioned from the unpainted stone of the district, they sat some half mile to the east of the cliff path, beyond a lumpy paddock. Only the church spire was visible. Daidre pointed this out and said, “St. Morwenna’s, but we’re going this way just a bit farther if you can manage.”

  He nodded, and she felt foolish with her final remark. He was hardly infirm and grief did not rob one of the ability to walk. She nodded in turn and led him perhaps another two hundred yards where a break in the wind-tossed heather on the seaside edge of the path gave way to steps hewn into stone.

  She said, “It’s not much of a descent, but have care. The edge is still deadly. And we’re…I don’t know…perhaps one hundred fifty feet above the water?”

  Down a set of steps, which curved with the natural form of the cliff side, they came to another little path, nearly overgrown with gorse and patches of English stonecrop that somehow thrived here despite the wind. Perhaps twenty yards along, the path ended abruptly, but not with a precipitous cliff edge as one might expect. Rather, a small hut had been hewn into the cliff face. It was fronted with the old driftwood of ruined ships and sided—where such sides emerged beyond the cliff face itself—with small blocks of sandstone. Its wooden face was grey with age. The hinges that served its rough Dutch door bled rust onto pitted panels.

  Daidre glanced back at Thomas Lynley to see his reaction: such a structure in such a remote location. His eyes had widened, and a smile crooked his mouth. His expression seemed to say to her, What is this place?

  She replied to his unasked question, speaking above the wind that buffeted them. “Isn’t it marvelous, Thomas? It’s called Hedra’s Hut. Evidently—if the journal of the reverend Mr. Walcombe is to be believed—it’s been here since the late eighteenth century.”

  “Did he build it?”

  “Mr. Walcombe? No, no. He wasn’t a builder, but he was quite a chronicler. He kept a journal of the doings round Alsperyl. I found it in the library in Casvelyn. He was the vicar of St. Morwenna’s for…I don’t know…forty years, perhaps? He tried to save the tormented soul who did build this place.”

  “Ah. That would be the Hedra from Hedra’s Hut, then?”

  “The very woman. Apparently, she was widowed when her husband—who fished the waters out of Polcare Cove—was caught in a storm and drowned, leaving her with one young son. According to Mr. Walcombe—who does not generally embellish his facts—the boy disappeared one day, likely having ventured too near the edge of the cliff in an area too friable to support his weight. Rather than confront the deaths of both husband and son within six months of each other, poor Hedra chose to believe a selkie had taken the boy. She told herself he’d wandered down to the water—God knows how he managed it from this height—and there the seal waited in her human form and beckoned him into the sea to join the rest of the…” She frowned. “Blast. I’ve quite forgotten what a group of seals is called. It can’t be a herd. A pod? But that’s whales. Well, no matter at the moment. That’s what happened. Hedra built this hut to watch for his return, and that’s what she did for the rest of her life. It’s a poignant story, isn’t it?”

  “Is it true?”

  “If we can believe Mr. Walcombe. Come inside. There’s more to see. Let’s get out of the wind.”

  The upper and lower doors closed by means of wooden bars that slid through rough wooden handles and rested on hooks. As she pushed the top one back and then the bottom one, and swung the doors open, she said over her shoulder, “Hedra knew what she was about. She gave herself quite a sturdy place to wait for her son. It’s framed in timber all round. Each side has a bench, the roof has quite decent beams to hold it up, and the floor is slate. It’s as if she knew she’d be waiting for a while, isn’t it?”

  She led the way in, but then stopped short. Behind her, she heard him duck under the low lintel to join her. She said, “Oh blast,” in disgust and he said, “Now, that’s a shame.”

  The wall directly in front of them had been defaced and defaced recently if the freshness of the cuts into the wooden panels of the little building were anything to go by. The remains of a heart which had been earlier carved into the wood—no doubt accompanied by lovers’ initials—curved round a series of vicious hack marks that now gouged deeply, as if into flesh. No initials were left.

  “Well,” Daidre said, trying to sound philosophical about the mess, “I suppose it’s not as if the walls haven’t already been carved up. And at least it isn’t spray paint. But still…One wonders…Why do people do such things?”

  Thomas was observing the rest of the hut, with its more than two hundred years of carvings: initials, dates, other hearts, the occasional name. He said thoughtfully, “Where I went to school, there’s a wall…It’s not too far from the entry, actually, so no visitor can ever miss it…Pupils have put their initials into it for…I don’t know…I expect they’ve done it since the time of Henry the sixth. Whenever I go back—because I do go back occasionally…one does—I look for mine. They’re still there. They somehow say I’m real, I existed then, I exist even now. But when I look at all the others—and there are hundreds, probably thousands of them—I can’t help thinking how fleeting life is. It’s the same thing here, isn’t it?”

  “I suppose it is.” She ran her fingers over several of the older carvings: a Celtic cross, the name Daniel, B.J. + S.R. “I like to come here to think,” she told him. “Sometimes I wonder who were these people all coupled together so confidently. And did their love last? I wonder that as well.”

  For his part, Lynley touched the poor gouged heart. “Nothing lasts,” he said. “That’s our curse.”

  Chapter Nine

  BEA HANNAFORD SAW MUCH THAT SEEMED TYPICAL IN SANTO Kerne’s bedroom, and for the first time she was glad to have Constable McNulty doing penanc
e as her dogsbody. For the walls of Santo’s bedroom bore a plethora of surfing posters and, from what Bea could tell, what McNulty didn’t know about surfing, the locations of the photos, and the surfers themselves didn’t actually bear knowing. She couldn’t conclude that his knowledge was in any way relevant to anything, however. She was merely relieved that, at the end of the day, McNulty did know something about something.

  “Jaws,” he murmured obscurely, gazing awestruck at a liquid mountain down which a thumb-size madman rushed. “Bloody hell, look at that bloke. That’s Hamilton, off Maui. He’s dead mad. He’ll do anything. Christ, this looks like a tsunami, doesn’t it?” He whistled low and shook his head.

  Ben Kerne was with them, but he didn’t venture into the room. His wife had remained below, in the lounge. It had been obvious that Kerne hadn’t wanted to leave her on her own, but he’d been caught between the police and his spouse. He couldn’t accommodate one while attempting to monitor the other. He’d had little choice in the matter, then. They would either wander the hotel till they found Santo’s bedroom as he saw to his wife, or he would have to take them there. He’d chosen the latter, but it was fairly clear that his mind was elsewhere.

  “So far we’ve heard nothing about Santo and surfing,” Bea said to Ben Kerne, who stood in the doorway.

  Kerne said, “He started surfing when we first came to Casvelyn.”

  “Is his surfing kit here? Board, wet suit, whatever else…”

  “Hood,” McNulty murmured. “Gloves, boots, extra fins—”

  “That’ll do, Constable,” Bea told him sharply. “Mr. Kerne probably gets the point.”

  “No,” Ben Kerne said. “He kept his kit elsewhere.”

  “Did he? Why?” Bea said. “Not exactly convenient, is it?”

  Ben looked at the posters as he replied. “I expect he didn’t like to keep it here.”

  “Why?” she repeated.

  “He likely suspected I’d do something with it.”

  “Ah. Constable…?” Bea was gratified to see that Mick McNulty took the hint and once more attended to his note taking, although Ben Kerne couldn’t say, when asked, where Santo had indeed kept his gear. Bea said to him, “Why would Santo think you might do something with his kit, Mr. Kerne? Or do you mean to his kit?” And she thought, If the surfing kit, why not the cliff-climbing kit?

  “Because he knew I didn’t particularly want him to like surfing.”

  “Really? It seems a harmless enough sport, compared to cliff climbing.”

  “No sport is completely harmless, Inspector. But it wasn’t that.” Kerne seemed to be looking for a way to explain, and he came into the bedroom to do so. He observed the posters. His face was stony.

  Bea said, “Do you surf, Mr. Kerne?”

  “I wouldn’t prefer Santo not surf if I did it myself, now would I.”

  “I don’t know. Would you? I still don’t see why you approved of one sport but not another.”

  “It’s the type, all right?” Kerne gave an apologetic glance to Constable McNulty. “I didn’t like him mixing with surfers because for so many of them it’s their only world. I didn’t want him adopting it: the hanging about they do, waiting for the opportunity for a surf, their lives defined by isobar charts and tide tables, driving up and down the coast to find perfect waves. And when they’re not having a surf, they’re talking about it or smoking cannabis while they stand round in their wet suits afterwards, still talking about it. There’re blokes—and lasses as well, I admit it—whose entire worlds revolve round riding waves and traveling the globe to ride more waves. I didn’t want that for Santo. Would you want it for your son or daughter?”

  “But if his world revolved round cliff climbing?”

  “It didn’t. But at least it’s a sport where one depends upon others. It’s not solitary, the way surfing can be and generally is. A surfer alone on the waves: You see it all the time. I didn’t want him out there alone. I wanted him to be with people. So if something happened to him…” He moved his gaze back to the posters, and what they depicted was—even to an unschooled observer like Bea—absolute danger embodied in an unimaginable tonnage of water: exposure to everything from broken bones to certain drowning. She wondered how many people died each year, coursing a nearly vertical declivity that, unlike the earth with its knowable textures, changed within seconds to trap the unwary.

  She said, “Yet Santo was climbing alone when he fell. Just as he might have been had he gone for a surf. And anyway, surfers don’t always do this alone, do they?”

  “On the wave itself. The surfer and the wave, alone. There may be others out there, but it’s not about them.”

  “With climbing it is, though?”

  “You depend on the other climber, and he depends on you. You keep each other safe.” He cleared his throat roughly and added, “What father wouldn’t want safety for his son?”

  “And when Santo didn’t agree with your assessment of surfing?”

  “What about it?”

  “What happened between you? Arguments? Punishment? Do you tend towards violence, Mr. Kerne?”

  He faced her, but in doing so he put his back to the window, so she could no longer read his face. He said, “What the hell sort of question is that?”

  “One that wants answering. Santo’s eye was blackened by someone recently. What d’you know about that?”

  His shoulders dropped. He moved again, but this time out of the light of the window and towards the other side of the room, where a computer and its printer sat on a single plywood sheet across two sawhorses forming a primitive desk. There was a stack of papers facedown on this desk; Ben Kerne reached for them. Bea stopped him before his fingers made contact. She repeated her question.

  “He wouldn’t tell me,” Kerne said. “Obviously, I could tell he’d been punched. It was a bad blow. But he wouldn’t explain it, so I was left to think…” He shook his head. He seemed to have information he was loath to part with.

  Bea said, “If you know something…if you suspect something…”

  “I don’t. It’s just that…the young women liked Santo, and Santo liked the young women. He didn’t discriminate.”

  “Between what?”

  “Between available and unavailable. Between attached and unattached. Santo was…He was like pure mating instinct given human form. Perhaps an angry father punched him out. Or a furious boyfriend. He wouldn’t say. But he liked the lasses and the lasses liked him. And truth of the matter is that he was easily led where a determined young woman wanted him to go. He was…I’m afraid he was always that way.”

  “Anyone in particular?”

  “His last was a girl called Madlyn Angarrack. They’d been…what do you call it…an item? For more than a year.”

  “Is she also a surfer by any chance?” Bea asked.

  “A brilliant one, if Santo was to be believed. National champion in the making. He was quite taken with her.”

  “And she with him?”

  “It wasn’t a one-way street.”

  “How was it for you, watching your son become involved with a surfer, then?”

  Ben Kerne answered steadily. “Santo was always involved somewhere, Inspector. I knew it would pass, whatever it was. As I said, he liked the ladies. He wasn’t ready to settle. Not with Madlyn, not with anyone. No matter what.”

  Bea thought that last was a strange expression. She said, “You wanted him to settle, though?”

  “Like any father, I wanted him to keep his nose clean and stay out of trouble.”

  “Not overly ambitious for him, then? Those are fairly limited as expectations go.”

  Ben Kerne said nothing. Bea had the impression he was keeping something to himself, and it was her experience that in a murder enquiry, when someone did that, it was generally out of self-interest.

  She said, “Did you ever beat Santo, Mr. Kerne?”

  His gaze on her didn’t waver. “I’ve answered that question already.”

  She let a si
lence hang there, but this one lacked fecundity. She was forced to move on. She did so by giving her attention to Santo’s computer. They would have to take it with them, she told Kerne. Constable McNulty would unhook it all and carry the components out to their car. Having said this, she reached for the stack of papers that Kerne had been going for on the desk. She flipped them over and spread them out.

  They were, she saw, a variation of designs that incorporated the words Adventures Unlimited into each of them. In one the two words themselves formed into a curling wave. In another they made a circular logo in which the Promontory King George Hotel stood centrally. In a third they became the base upon which a variety of athletic feats were being accomplished by buffed-out silhouettes both masculine and feminine. In another they made a climbing apparatus.

  “He…Oh God.”

  Bea looked up from the designs to see Kerne’s stricken face. “What is it?” she asked.

  “He designed T-shirts. On his computer. He was…Obviously, he was working on something for the business. I’d not asked him to do it. Oh God, Santo.”

  He said the last like an apology. In reaction, Bea asked him about his son’s climbing equipment. Kerne told her that all of it was missing, every belay device, every chock stone, every rope, every item he would need for any climb he might make.

  “Would he have needed all of it to make that climb yesterday?”

  No, Kerne told her. He either began keeping it elsewhere without his father’s knowledge or he’d taken it all on the previous day when he set off to make his fatal climb.

  “Why?” Bea asked.

  “We’d had harsh words. He’d have reacted to them. It would have been an ‘I’ll show you’ sort of statement.”