Careless in Red

by Elizabeth George

  “Neither of you cooked, then?”

  “Neither of us cooked. I could do eggs and toast, of course, and Helen was brilliant at opening tins of soup, beans, and smoked salmon although she could easily be expected to pop a tin in the microwave and possibly blow the entire electrical system in the house. We employed someone to cook for us. It was that, takeaway curry, or starvation. And one can eat only so much takeaway curry.”

  “You poor things,” Daidre said. “Come along, then. I expect you can learn at least something.”

  She returned to the kitchen and he followed her. From a cupboard, she took a wooden bowl—carved with primitive dancing figures round its rim—and she rustled up a cutting board and a number of, thankfully, recognisable foodstuffs meant to be combined into a salad. She set him to his task with a knife, saying, “Throw in anything. That’s the beauty of a salad. When you’ve got enough in the bowl, I’ll show you a simple dressing that won’t tax your sadly meagre talents. Any questions, then?”

  “I’m sure I’ll have them as I go along.”

  They worked in companionable silence, Lynley upon the salad and Daidre Trahair upon a dish with string beans and mint. Something was baking away in the oven—emitting the fragrance of pastry—while something else simmered in a pan. In time, they had a meal assembled, and Daidre instructed him in the art of laying a table, which he did, at least, know how to do but which he allowed her to demonstrate for him because allowing her that allowed him to watch and evaluate her.

  He was acutely aware of DI Hannaford’s instructions to him, and while he didn’t like the idea of using Daidre Trahair’s hospitality as a device of investigation instead of a means of friendly entrée into her world, the part of him that was a policeman trumped the part of him that was a social creature in need of communing with other like creatures. So he watched and waited and he remained alert for what crumbs he could gather about her.

  There were few enough. She was very careful. Which was, in itself, a valuable crumb.

  They tucked into their meal in her tiny dining room, where a piece of cardboard fixed over a window reminded him of his duty to repair it for her. They ate something she called Portobello Wellington, along with a side dish of couscous with sun-dried tomatoes, green beans done up with garlic and mint, and his salad dressed with oil, vinegar, mustard, and Italian seasoning. They had no wine to drink, merely water with lemon. She apologized for this, much as she had over the sherry.

  She said she hoped he didn’t mind a vegetarian meal. She wasn’t vegan, she explained, for she saw no sin in consuming animal products like eggs and such. But when it came to the flesh of her fellow creatures on the planet, it seemed too…well, too cannibalistic.

  “Whatever happens to the beasts, happens to man,” she said. “All things are connected.” It sounded to him like a quote, and even as he thought as much, she unblushingly told him it was. She said, appealingly, “Those aren’t my words, actually. I can’t remember who said them or wrote them, but when I first came across them years ago, they had the ring of truth.”

  “Isn’t there an application to zoos?”

  “Imprisoning beasts leading to man’s imprisonment, you mean?”

  “Something like that. I—forgive me—I don’t much care for zoos.”

  “Nor do I. They hearken back to the Victorians, don’t they? That excited quest for knowledge about the natural world without an accompanying compassion for that world. I myself loathe zoos, to be quite honest.”

  “But you choose to work in them.”

  “I choose to be committed to improving conditions for the animals therein.”

  “Subverting the system from within.”

  “It makes more sense than carrying a protest sign, doesn’t it.”

  “Rather like going on a foxhunt with a herring attached to your horse.”

  “Do you like foxhunting?”

  “I find it execrable. I’ve been only once, on Boxing Day one year. I must have been eleven years old. My conclusion was that Oscar had it right, although I couldn’t have said as much at the time. Just that I didn’t like it and the idea of a pack of dogs on the trail of a terrified animal…and then being allowed to tear it to pieces if they find it…It wasn’t for me.”

  “You’ve a soft heart, then, for the animal world.”

  “I’m not a hunter, if that’s what you mean. I would have made a very bad prehistoric man.”

  “No killing sabre-tooth tigers for you.”

  “Evolution, I’m afraid, would have ground to a precipitate halt had I been at the tribal helm.”

  She laughed. “You’re very droll, Thomas.”

  “Only in fits and starts,” he told her. “Tell me how you subvert the system.”

  “The zoo? Not as well as I would like to.” She helped herself to more green beans and she passed the bowl to him, saying, “Have some more. This is my mother’s recipe. The secret is what you do with the mint, popping it into the hot olive oil just long enough to wilt it, which releases its flavour.” Her nose wrinkled. “Or something like that. Anyway, the beans you boil only five minutes. Any longer and they’ll be mushy, which is the last thing you want.”

  “Nothing being worse than a mushy bean,” he noted. He took another helping. “All praise to your mother. These are very good. You’ve done her proud. Where is she, your mother? Mine’s just south of Penzance. Near Lamorna Cove. And I fear she cooks about as well as I do.”

  “You’re a Cornwall man, then?”

  “More or less, yes. And you?”

  “I grew up in Falmouth.”

  “Born there?”

  “I…Well, yes, I suppose. I mean, I was born at home and at the time my parents lived just outside Falmouth.”

  “Were you really? How extraordinary,” Lynley said. “I was born at home as well. We all were.”

  “In more rarefied surroundings than my own birthing chamber, I daresay,” Daidre pointed out. “How many of you are there?”

  “Just three. I’m the middle child. I’ve an older sister—that would be Judith—and a younger brother, Peter. You?”

  “One brother. Lok.”

  “Unusual name.”

  “He’s Chinese. We adopted him when I was seventeen.” She cut a wedge of her Portobello Wellington neatly and held it on her fork as she went on. “He was six at the time. He’s reading maths at Oxford at the moment. Quite brainy, the dickens.”

  “How did you come to adopt him?”

  “We saw him on the telly, actually, a programme on BBC1 about Chinese orphanages. He was handed over because he has spinal bifida. I think his parents thought he’d not be able to care for them in their old age—although I don’t know that for sure, mind you—and they didn’t have the wherewithal to care for him either, so they gave him up.”

  Lynley observed her. She seemed completely without artifice. Everything she said could be easily verified. But still…“I like the we,” he told her.

  She was spearing up some salad. She held the fork midway to her mouth, and she coloured lightly. “The we?” she said, and it came to Lynley that she thought he was referring to the two of them, at that moment, seated at her little dining table. He grew hot as well.

  “You said ‘We adopted him.’ I liked that.”

  “Ah. Well, it was a family decision. We always reached big decisions as a family. We had Sunday-afternoon family meetings, right after the joint of beef and the Yorkshire pud.”

  “Your parents weren’t vegetarians, then?”

  “Goodness no. It was meat and veg. Lamb, pork, or beef every Sunday. The occasional chicken. Sprouts—Lord, I do hate sprouts…always did and always will—boiled into submission, as well as carrots and cauliflower.”

  “But no beans?”

  “Beans?” She looked at him blankly.

  “You said your mother taught you to cook green beans.”

  She looked at the bowl of them, where ten or twelve remained uneaten. She said, “Oh yes. The beans. That would have been
after her cookery course. My father went for Mediterranean food in a very big way and Mum decided there had to be life beyond spaghetti Bolognese, so she set about finding it.”

  “In Falmouth?”

  “Yes. I did say I grew up in Falmouth.”

  “School there as well?”

  She observed him openly. Her face was kind, and she was smiling, but her eyes were wary. “Are you interrogating me, Thomas?”

  He held up both hands, a gesture meant to be read as openness and submission. “Sorry. Occupational hazard. Tell me about Gertrude Jekyll.” For a moment, he wondered if she would do so. He added helpfully, “I saw you’ve a number of books about her.”

  “The very antithesis of Capability Brown,” was her answer, given after a moment of thought. “She understood that not everyone had sweeping landscapes to work with. I like that about her. I’d have a Jekyll garden if I could but I’m probably doomed to succulents here. Anything else in the wind and the weather…well, one has to be practical about some things.”

  “If not about others?”

  “Definitely.” They’d finished their meal during their conversation and she stood, preparatory to gathering up the dishes. If she’d taken offence at his questioning of her, she hid it well, for she smiled at him and told him to come along, as he was meant to help with the washing up. “After that,” she said, “I shall thoroughly scour your soul and reduce you to rubble, metaphorically speaking of course.”

  “How shall you manage all that?”

  “In a single evening, you mean?” She cocked her head in the direction of the sitting room. “With a game of darts,” she told him. “I’ve a tournament to practice for and while I expect you’ll not be much of a challenger, you’ll do in a pinch.”

  “My only reply to that must be that I’ll trounce you and humiliate you,” Lynley told her.

  “With a gauntlet like that thrown down, we must play at once, then,” she told him. “Loser does the washing up.”

  “You’re on.”

  BEN KERNE KNEW HE would have to phone his father. Considering the old man’s age, he also knew that he ought to drive the distance to Pengelly Cove and break the news about Santo in person, but he hadn’t been to Pengelly Cove in years, and he couldn’t face going there just now. It wouldn’t have changed at all—partly due to its remote location and even more due to the commitment of its citizens to never altering a thing, including their attitudes—and the lack of change would catapult him back into the past, which was the penultimate place in which he wished to dwell. The last place was in the present. He longed for a limbo of the mind, a mental Lethe in which he could swim until memory itself no longer concerned him.

  Ben would have let the entire matter go had Santo not been beloved of his grandparents. Ben knew it was unlikely they would ever contact him. They hadn’t done so since his marriage, and the only time he’d spoken to them at all was when he’d phoned occasionally, either holding a stilted conversation with them at holiday time or speaking more freely to his mother when he phoned her office, or desperate for a place to send Santo and Kerra when Dellen was in one of her bad periods. Things might have been different had he written to them. He may have worn them down over time. But he was no writer, and even if he had been, there was Dellen to consider and his loyalty to Dellen and everything that loyalty to Dellen had demanded of him since his adolescence. So he’d let go of all attempts at reconciliation, and they had done the same. And when his mother had suffered a stroke suddenly in her late fifties, he’d learned of her condition only because the event had occurred during a period when Santo and Kerra had been staying with their grandparents, and they’d brought the news with them upon their return. Even Ben’s own brothers and sisters had been forbidden from passing the information along.

  Another man might have extended the same treatment to his parents now, allowing them to learn of Santo’s death in whatever way fate allowed them to learn it. But Ben had tried—and failed in so many ways—to be a man unlike his father, and that meant creating a breach in the wall that surrounded his heart at this moment, allowing some form of compassion to enter it despite his need to hide himself away in a place where it would be safe for him to grieve all the things he needed to grieve.

  At any rate, the police were going to contact Eddie and Ann Kerne, because that was what the police did. They delved into the lives and histories of everyone associated with the deceased—God, he was calling Santo the deceased and what did that mean about the state of his heart?—and they looked for anything that could be used to assign blame. Doubtless his father’s grief upon hearing about Santo would propel him into expletive first and accusation second, with no wife there willing or able to act as a moderating influence upon his words, but rather with Ann Kerne standing nearby looking what she felt, which would be tormented after years with a man whom she loved but could do little to temper. And although there was nothing for Ben to be accused of in Santo’s death, the job of the police was to make deductions, connecting dots no matter how unrelated they were one to another. So he didn’t need them talking to his father with his father unaware of what had happened to his favourite grandchild.

  Ben decided to make the call from his office and not from the family’s flat. He went down by means of the stairs because doing so prolonged the inevitable. When he was in his office, he didn’t at once pick up the phone. Instead, he looked at the china board upon which the weeks prior to and after Adventures Unlimited’s opening day were marked in the fashion of a calendar and filled with both activities and bookings. He could see their need of Alan Cheston displayed on this board. For months before Alan’s advent, Dellen had been in charge of marketing Adventures Unlimited, but she’d not made much of a job of it. She had ideas but virtually no follow-through. Organisational skills were not her strength.

  And what is her strength, if you don’t mind my asking? his father would have enquired. But never mind that, no answer required. The whole effing village knows what she’s good at and make no mistake about that, my boy.

  Untrue, of course. It was just his father’s way of taking the piss because he believed that children were meant not to get puffed up, which was translated in Eddie Kerne’s mind to children not being meant to have confidence in their own decisions. He wasn’t a bad man, just set in his ways and his ways were not Ben’s ways, so they’d come into conflict.

  Not unlike Ben himself and Santo, Ben realised now. The very hell of being a father was realising one’s own father cast a shadow one could not hope to escape.

  He studied the calendar. Four weeks to opening and they had to open although he couldn’t see how they might be able to do so. His heart wasn’t in it, but they had so much money invested in the business that not to open or to postpone opening wasn’t an alternative he could choose. Besides, to Ben the bookings they had were covenants that could not be broken, and while there weren’t as many as he’d dreamed of having at this point in the business’s development, he had faith that bringing onboard Alan Cheston was going to take care of that. Alan had ideas and the wherewithal to make them into realities. He was clever, and a leader as well. Most important, he was not a bit like Santo.

  Ben hated the disloyalty of the thought. In thinking it, he was doing what he vowed he would never do: repeat the past. You’re following your effing prong, boy! had been his father’s words, intoned with variation only in the emotion that underscored them: from sadness to fury to derision to contempt. Santo had done much the same, and Ben didn’t want to think what lay behind his son’s proclivity for sexual dalliance or where such a proclivity might have taken him.

  Before he could avoid any longer, he picked up the phone on his desk. He punched in the numbers. He had little doubt his father would still be up and about the ramshackle house. Like Ben, Eddie Kerne was an insomniac. He’d be awake for hours yet, doing whatever it was one did at night when committed to a green lifestyle, as his father long had been. Eddie Kerne and his family had had electricity only if he could
produce it from the wind or from water; they had water only if he could divert it from a stream or bring it up in a well. They had heat when solar panels produced it, they grew or raised what they needed for their food, and their house had been a derelict farm building, bought for a bargain and rescued from destruction by Eddie Kerne and his sons: granite stone by granite stone, whitewashed, roofed, and windowed so inexpertly that the winter wind hissed through the spaces between the frames and the walls.

  His father answered in his usual way, with the barked greeting, “Speaking.” When Ben didn’t say anything at once, his father went on with, “If you’re there, start yapping. If not, get off the line.”

  “It’s Ben,” Ben said.

  “Ben who?”

  “Benesek. I didn’t wake you, did I?”

  After a brief pause, “And what if you did? You caring for anyone ’sides yourself these days?”

  Like father, like son, Ben wanted to reply. I had a very good teacher. Instead he said, “Santo’s been killed. It happened yesterday. I thought you’d want to know, as he was fond of you and I thought perhaps the feeling was mutual.”

  Another pause. This one was longer. And then, “Bastard,” his father said. His voice was so tight that Ben thought it might break. “Bastard. You don’t effing change, do you?”

  “Do you want to know what happened to Santo?”

  “What’d you let him get up to?”

  “What did I do this time, you mean?”

  “What happened, damn you. What God damn happened?”

  Ben told him as briefly as possible. In the end he added the fact of murder. He didn’t call it murder. He used homicide instead. “Someone damaged his climbing kit,” he told his father.

  “God damn.” Eddie Kerne’s voice had altered, from anger to shock. But he shifted back to anger quickly. “And what the hell were you doing while he was climbing some bloody cliff? Watching him? Egging him on? Or having it off with her?”