Careless in Red

by Elizabeth George

  “That what she says?”

  “Eh?” Selevan took the scapular and shoved it into the breast pocket of his shirt. “She says she wants a prayerful life. That’s her very words. ‘I want a prayerful life, Grandie. I believe it’s what everyone should aspire to.’ As if sitting alone in a cave somewhere and eating grass for your meals and drinking your own piss once a week is going to do one bleeding thing to solve the world’s problems.”

  “That’s the plan, is it?”

  “Oh I don’t know what the effing plan is. No one knows, and that includes the girl. You see how it is? She hears about a cult she can join and she means to join it because this cult—unlike the rest of the God damn cults out there—is the one that’s going to save the world.”

  Jago looked thoughtful. Selevan hoped the other man was coming up with a solution to the problem of Tammy. But Jago said nothing, so Selevan had to speak again. He said, “I can’t get through to the girl. Can’t even begin to. Found a letter under her bed and they were telling her to come on by and check things out, have an interview here so’s we c’n take the measure of you and see if you’re suitable and if we like you and whatever else. I show her I found it and she goes off her chump ’cause I’m doing the snoop through her things.”

  Jago looked thoughtful. He scratched his head. “Were, eh?” he said.

  “What’s that?”

  “You were doing the snoop. I’n’t that the case?”

  “I got to. If I don’t, her mum’s all over me like melted cheese on the radiator. She says, ‘We need you to make her see the light. Someone’s got to make her see the light before it’s too late.’”

  “That’s just the problem,” Jago pointed out. “That’s where the lot of you ’re going wrong.”

  “Which’s where?” Selevan spoke to his friend without defence. If he was going at this problem of Tammy in the wrong way, he meant to learn the right way at once, and he’d come to Jago because of that.

  “The devil of young people,” Jago said, “is that they got to be allowed to take their own decisions, mate.”

  “But—”

  “Hear me out. It’s part of making their way to being grown. They take a decision, they make a mistake, and if no one rushes like the fire brigade to save them from the outcome, they learn from the whole experience. ’Tisn’t the job of the dad—or the granddad or the mum or the gran—to keep them from learning what they got to learn, mate. What they got to do is help work out the end of the story.”

  Selevan could see this. He could even run it through his mind and largely agree with it. But agreement was a process of intellect. It had nothing to do with heart. Jago’s position in life—having no children or grandkids of his own—made it simple for him to adhere to this admirable philosophy. It also explained why the young people felt able to talk to him. They talked; he listened. Likely, it was similar to sharing one’s secrets with a wall. But what was the point if the wall didn’t say, “Hang on a minute. You’re making a bloody fool of yourself”? Or, “You’re choosing wrong, damn it”? Or, “Listen to me cos I been alive about sixty years longer’n you and those years damn well ought to count for something or what’s the point in having lived them”? Beyond that, didn’t parents and grandparents have some right to sort out their offspring, not to mention to determine what the offspring would be doing with the rest of their lives? That was what had happened to him, wasn’t it? He may not have liked it, he may not have wanted it, he may not in a hundred years have chosen it for himself, but wasn’t he a better and stronger person for having rubbished his dreams of the Royal Navy in favour of a dutiful life on the farm?

  Jago was watching him, one bushy eyebrow raised above the frame of his worn-out specs. His expression said that he knew what Selevan was thinking about Jago-as-listener and he didn’t disagree with Selevan’s assessment. He said, “There’s more to it than that, mate, despite what you’re thinking. If you get to know ’em, you end up caring and you end up hating to see ’em decide something that you know’s for the bad. But no one listens when they’re young. Did you?”

  Selevan dropped his gaze. For that was the fly in the ointment of his life, when everything was laid out in front of him. He had listened. He had chosen as he’d been told to choose. And doing that hadn’t spared him a lifetime of regret. Indeed, it was the single cause of it.

  “Bloody hell,” he sighed. He put his head in his hands.

  “The very thing,” his friend Jago Reeth agreed.

  BEA HANNAFORD HADN’T STARTED her day in the best of moods, and her outlook wasn’t improving during her meeting with New Scotland Yard’s detective sergeant Barbara Havers. Upon the sergeant’s arrival in Casvelyn, Bea had instructed her to check into the Salthouse Inn and to do some serious trolling through what Thomas Lynley had so far managed to discover about Dr. Trahair. She knew DS Havers had long worked with Lynley in London, and if anyone was going to be able to wring something out of the man, it had seemed to Hannaford that it was going to be Barbara Havers. But “apparently clean so far” was the extent of what Havers had to report about Lynley’s excursions into the mysterious Daidre Trahair’s background, which made Hannaford wonder about her own wisdom in the entire affair. She, after all, had accepted the offer of the Met’s assistant commissioner Sir David Hillier to send Lynley’s former partner on loan to work the murder enquiry. The response of “He says she’s clean so far but he’s carrying on” in answer to “What do we know from Superintendent Lynley about Dr. Trahair?” had not been what Hannaford wished to hear. It had made her wonder about loyalties and where they ought to be lying.

  She herself had spoken to Lynley. He’d reported on his excursion to Pengelly Cove on the previous afternoon, and she could tell his interest was now decidedly caught up in the Kernes. This was all well and good since everything had to be looked into eventually, but digging into the Kernes’ background was not going to keep Lynley interested in Daidre Trahair, and interested in Daidre Trahair was exactly where Bea Hannaford wanted him to be. The vet was a liar, no question about it. Based upon the way she had looked at Lynley when Bea had seen them together—a bit of a mix among compassion, admiration, and lust—Lynley had appeared to be the best road to drive along if the destination was sorting the doctor’s truths from the doctor’s lies. Now Bea wasn’t so sure.

  So in speaking to Barbara Havers, Bea’s mood was blacker than it had been upon waking, and she wouldn’t have thought that possible. For she’d awakened with Pete’s questions and Pete’s comments of the previous day on her mind, which meant she’d awakened in exactly the same manner as she’d fallen asleep. Why do you hate him so much?…He loves you.

  Clearly, it was time for another round of Internet dating, if only she could have spared the hours it would take to troll, to select, to contact, to try to discern if the individual was worth an evening, and then somehow to find that evening. And then…What would be the point, really? How many more toads was she going to have to dine with, drink with, or coffee with before one of them showed colours more princely than amphibious? Hundreds, it seemed. Thousands. All that and she wasn’t even sure she wanted another relationship anyway. She, Pete, and the dogs were doing fine on their own.

  Thus, when Bea faced Barbara Havers in the vicinity of the china board as they looked over the day’s activities, she examined the Met sergeant with a critical eye having more to do with an assessment of her professional commitment than it had to do with an evaluation of her fashion sense, which was more deplorable than Bea would have thought possible in a female adult. Today DS Havers was wearing a lumpy fisherman’s sweater over a high-necked T-shirt with what looked like a coffee stain on its collar. She had on figure-reducing olive tweed trousers—easily an inch too short and possibly twelve years too old—and the same red high-top trainers on her feet. She looked like a cross between a street vagrant and a refugee fleeing from a war zone, with clothing provided from castoffs of Oxfam castoffs.

  Bea tried to ignore all this. She said to
her, “I’ve got the distinct impression Superintendent Lynley’s dragging his feet on the issue of Dr. Trahair. What do you think, Sergeant?” She then watched to gauge Havers’s answer.

  “He might well be,” Havers replied easily enough. “Considering all that’s happened to him, he’s not exactly one hundred percent. But if she’s at the bottom of what happened to this kid and he susses it out, he’ll move on her. You can depend on him.”

  “Are you saying I ought to allow him to pursue this in whatever way he sees fit?”

  Havers didn’t reply at once. She looked at the china board. Careful thought could indicate her priorities, and Bea made this a mark in her favour.

  “I think he’ll be okay,” Havers said. “The last thing he’s about to do is let anyone get away with murder, all things considered. If you know what I mean.”

  Of course. There was that. What made him susceptible also made him a man who would never want another person to go through what he himself had gone through. Besides that, his very susceptibility could work in their favour since a vulnerable person was one in whose presence essential mistakes might be made by another person. These would be Dr. Trahair’s mistakes, naturally. Where she’d made one, she’d eventually make others.

  Bea said, “All right. Come with me, then. We’ve a bloke in town who did a turn inside for doing the job on someone, down the south coast. This was a few years ago. He ended up crying ‘It’s the drink’ to the judge, but as the bloke on the receiving end of his attention came up a paraplegic—”

  “Bloody hell,” DS Havers said.

  “—the judge sent him away. He’s out now, but so’s his temper and his proclivity for the drink. He knew Santo Kerne, and someone blackened Santo Kerne’s eye shortly before his death. Given, it’s not the sort of beating put this bloke away, but he wants a thorough talking to.”

  Will Mendick was at his place of employment, a modern brick supermarket looking wildly out of place as it stood at the junction of the top of Belle Vue and St. Mevan Crescent, which Bea pointed out to Havers as the route to Adventures Unlimited, a visible hulk out on the promontory. The market was also a very short distance from the baked delights of Casvelyn of Cornwall, and when they alighted from Bea’s Land Rover in the car park at the back of the grocery, the morning breeze was sending the fragrance of fresh pasties in their direction. Barbara Havers cut into this perfume by lighting a cigarette. She pulled at it hungrily as they walked along the side of the building to its front door, managing to smoke half of it before they entered.

  In an extremely optimistic embracing of spring, the supermarket’s management had turned off the heating, so it was frigid within. Custom was sparse at this time of day, and only one of the six tills was open. A question at it led Bea and Sergeant Havers towards the back of the premises. There, two swinging doors closed off the warehouse where goods were stored. NO ADMITTANCE and STAFF ONLY were posted upon them.

  Bea shouldered through, her identification ready. They encountered an unshaven man ducking into the employees’ loo and stopped him with a word, “Police.” He didn’t snap to as Bea would have liked, but at least he appeared cooperative. She asked for Will Mendick. At his response of “Outside, I expect,” they found themselves heading in the direction from which they’d originally come: working their way along the side of the building, but within it this time, along a gloomy aisle, and beneath towering shelves of paper products, boxed-up tins of this and that, and huge cartons printed with enough brands of junk food to keep morbid obesity going for several generations.

  On the south side of the building, a loading dock bore pallets of goods in the process of being removed from an enormous articulated lorry. Bea expected to find Will Mendick here, but the answer to another question pointed her over to a collection of wheelie bins at the far end of the dock. There, she saw a young man stowing discarded vegetables and other items into a black rubbish bag. This, apparently, was Will Mendick, committing the act of subversion for which Santo Kerne had created his T-shirt. He was fighting off the gulls to do it, though. Above and around him, they flapped their wings. They soared near him occasionally, apparently trying to frighten him off their patch, like extras in Hitchcock’s film.

  Mendick looked at Bea’s identification carefully when she produced it. He was tall and ruddy, and he grew immediately ruddier when he saw the cops had come to call. Definitely the skin of a guilty man, Bea thought.

  The young man glanced from Bea to Havers and back to Bea, and his expression suggested that neither woman fit his notions of what a cop should look like. “I’m on a break,” he told them, as if concerned that they were there to monitor his employment hours.

  “That’s fine with us,” Bea informed him. “We can talk while you…do whatever it is you’re doing.”

  “D’you know how much food is wasted in this country?” he asked her sharply.

  “Rather a lot, I expect.”

  “That’s an understatement. Try tonnes of it. Tonnes. A sell-by date passes and out it’s chucked. It’s a crime, it is.”

  “Good of you, then, to put it to use.”

  “I eat it.” He sounded defensive.

  “I sorted that,” Bea told him.

  “You have to, I wager,” Barbara Havers noted pleasantly. “Bit tough for it to make it all the way to the Sudan before it rots, moulds, hardens, or whatevers. Costs you next to nothing as well, so it has that in its favour, too.”

  Mendick eyed her as if evaluating her level of disrespect. Her face showed nothing. He appeared to take the decision to ignore any judgement they might make about his activity. He said, “You want to talk to me. So talk to me.”

  “You knew Santo Kerne. Well enough for him to design a T-shirt for you, from what we’ve learned.”

  “If you know that, then you’ll also know that this is a small town and most people here knew Santo Kerne. I hope you’re talking to them as well.”

  “We’ll get to the rest of his associates eventually,” Bea replied. “Just now it’s you we’re interested in. Tell us about Conrad Nelson. He’s operating from a wheelchair these days, the way I hear it.”

  Mendick had a few spots on his face, near his mouth, and these turned the colour of raspberries. He went back to sorting through the supermarket’s discards. He chose some bruised apples and followed them with a collection of limp courgettes. He said, “I did my time for that.”

  “Which we know,” Bea assured him. “But what we don’t know is how it happened and why.”

  “It’s nothing to do with your investigation.”

  “It’s assault with intent,” Bea told him. “It’s grave bodily injury. It’s a stretch inside at the pleasure of you-know-who. When someone’s got details like that in his background, Mr. Mendick, we like to know about them. Especially if he’s an associate—close or otherwise—of someone who ends up murdered.”

  “Where there’s smoke there’s fire.” Havers lit up another cigarette as if to emphasise her point.

  “You’re destroying your lungs and everyone else’s,” Mendick told her. “That’s a disgusting habit.”

  “While wheelie-bin diving is what?” Havers asked.

  “Not letting something go to waste.”

  “Damn. I wish I shared your nobility of character. Reckon you lost sight of it—that noble part of you—when you bashed that bloke in Plymouth, eh?”

  “I said I did my stretch.”

  “We understand you told the judge it had to do with drink,” Bea said. “D’you still have a problem with that? Is it still leading you to go off the nut? That was your claim, I’ve been told.”

  “I don’t drink any longer, so it’s not leading me anywhere.” He looked into the wheelie bin, spied something he apparently wanted, and dug down to bring forth a packet of fig bars. He stowed this in the bag and went on with his search. He ripped open and tossed a loaf of apparently stale bread onto the tarmac for the gulls. They went after it greedily. “I do AA if it’s anything to you,” he added. “And
I haven’t had a drink since I came out.”

  “I do hope that’s the case, Mr. Mendick. How did that altercation in Plymouth begin?”

  “I told you it’s got nothing to do…” He seemed to rethink his angry tone—as well as the direction of the conversation—because he sighed and said, “I used to get blind drunk. I had a dustup with this yob, and I don’t know what it was about because when I drank like that I couldn’t remember what set me off or even if something set me off at all. I didn’t remember the fight the next day and I’m damn sorry that bloke ended up like he did, because it wasn’t my intention. I probably just wanted to sort him.”

  “Is that your general method of sorting people?”

  “When I drank, it was. It’s not something I’m proud of. It’s also over. I did my time. I made my amends. I try to stay clean.”

  “Try?”

  “Bloody hell.” He climbed up into the wheelie bin. He began a more furious rooting through its contents.

  “Santo Kerne took a fairly serious punch sometime before he died,” Bea said. “I wonder if you can tell us anything about that.”

  “I can’t,” he said.

  “You can’t or you won’t?”

  “Why d’you want to pin this on me?”

  Because you look so damn guilty, Bea thought. Because you’re lying about something and I can read it in the colour of your skin, which is flaming now, from your cheeks to your ears and even to your scalp. “That’s my job,” Bea told him, “to pin this on someone. If that someone’s not you, I’d like to know why.”

  “I had no reason to hurt him. Or to kill him. Or to anything.”

  “How’d you come to know him?”

  “I worked at Clean Barrel, that surf shop on the corner of the Strand.” Mendick nodded in the general direction. “He came in because he wanted a board. That’s how we met. Few months after he moved to town.”