Careless in Red

by Elizabeth George

  “How lovely,” Daidre said. She waited for more. More, she hoped, would consist of Cilla’s leaving the premises so that Daidre could come to terms with the message the girl had brought. Scotland Yard in Falmouth. Asking questions. She felt anxiety climbing up her arms.

  “Anyway, got to dash,” Cilla said, as if reading Daidre’s mind. “Lookit, you best think about having a phone put in, eh? You could keep it in a cupboard or summick. Plug it in when you want it. That sort of thing.”

  “Yes. Yes, I will,” Daidre told her. “Thanks so much, Cilla, for coming all this way.”

  The girl left her then, and Daidre stood on the front step, watching her expertly kick-start the motorcycle—no electronic ignition for this rider—and turn it in the driveway. In a few more moments and with a wave, the girl was gone. She zoomed up the narrow lane, curved out of sight, and left Daidre to deal with the aftermath of her visit.

  Scotland Yard, she thought. Questions being asked. There could be only one reason—only one person—behind this.

  Chapter Twenty

  KERRA’S NIGHT HAD BEEN SLEEPLESS AND MUCH OF HER FOLLOWING day had been useless. She’d attempted to carry on as well as possible, keeping to a schedule of interviews that she’d set up in the preceding weeks: the search for potential instructors. She’d thought she could, at least, divert herself with the hopeful if unlikely pretence that Adventures Unlimited was actually going to open in the near future. The plan hadn’t worked.

  This is it. That simple declaration, that coy little arrow from This is it to the great sea cave depicted on the postcard, the implication that conversations of a nature having nothing to do with business had passed between the writer of those words and the reader of those words, what lay behind, beneath, and beyond those conversations…These disquieting and turbulent thoughts had been the stuff of Kerra’s day and the sleepless night that had preceded it.

  The postcard now had for some hours been burning a small rectangular patch against her skin from within the pocket where she’d stowed it. Each time she’d moved, she’d been aware of it, taunting her. She was going to have to do something about it, eventually. That dull burning told her as much.

  Kerra hadn’t been able to avoid Alan, as she would have liked to do that day. The marketing office was not far from her own cubbyhole, and while she’d routinely taken prospective instructors to the first-floor lounge for their interviews rather than inside her cubbyhole, she’d greeted them in the vicinity of the marketing office. Alan had popped out more than once to observe her, and she wasn’t long in working out what his silent observation meant.

  It was more than disapproval of her choice of candidates, all of them female. He’d made himself clear on that topic earlier, and Alan wasn’t the sort to keep pressing a point when someone was, in his opinion, being bloody-minded. Rather, his mute scrutiny of her told her that Busy Lizzie had mentioned Kerra’s visit to Pink Cottage. She’d likely told Alan about Kerra’s putative need to find a personal possession in Alan’s room, and he’d be wondering why Kerra herself hadn’t mentioned it. She had her answer ready had he cared to ask her, but he hadn’t asked.

  She didn’t know where her father was. She’d seen him go out in the direction of St. Mevan Beach some hours ago, and as far as she knew he’d not returned. She’d reckoned at first he’d gone to watch the surfers, for the swells were good and the wind was offshore and she herself had seen a ragtag line of them working their way across the promontory. Had things been wildly different, her brother, Santo, might have been among them, lining up out there in the water to get into position. Her father might have been there as well. Her father and her brother together, as a matter of fact. But things were not different, and they never would be. That appeared to be the family’s curse.

  And at the root of that curse: Dellen. It was as if all of them were wandering in a maze, trying to get to its mysterious centre, while all the time at its mysterious centre, Dellen waited, black-widow-like. The only way to elude her was to purge her, but it was far too late for that.

  “Want something?”

  Alan spoke. Kerra was in her office, where looking through a meagre stack of applicants was proving to be a dispiriting activity. She’d been working on sea kayaking, and she’d spoken to five possible instructors that day. Only two had the background she was looking for and, of them, only one had a physique suggestive of experience in the sea. The other looked like someone who kayaked on the River Avon, where the biggest challenge she faced would be taking care not to brain a cygnet with her paddle.

  Kerra closed the last of the manila folders with their paltry bits of information. She wondered how best to answer Alan’s question. She was thinking it over—working on whether irony, sarcasm, or a display of wit was in her best interests—when he spoke again.

  “Kerra? Want something? Cup of tea? Coffee? Something to eat? I’m going out for a bit, and I can stop—”

  “No. Thanks.” She didn’t want to be beholden to him, even in so small a matter as this.

  Instead, she examined him and he examined her. It was one of those moments when two individuals who have been lovers scrutinise each other like cultural anthropologists studying a tract of land for the remains of an ancient civilization long believed to have dwelt there. There should be marks, signs, indications of a passage….

  “How does it go?” he asked.

  She knew that he was well aware of how it went, but she played the game. “I’ve come up with several strong possibilities. I’m doing additional interviews tomorrow. But the real question is whether we’re actually going to open, isn’t it? We seem rather without direction, especially today. Have you seen my father?”

  “Not for hours.”

  “What about Cadan? Did he show up to work on the radiators?”

  “Not sure. He may have done, but I haven’t seen him. It’s been rather quiet all the way round.”

  He didn’t mention Dellen. On this day, she was as she had always been when things went bad: the great unmentionable. Just the thought of her—of Dellen the malodorous dead elephant in the room—reduced everyone to mute trepidation.

  “What’ve you been…?” Kerra inclined her head towards his office. He seemed to take this as welcome, for he entered hers although this wasn’t what she’d intended. She wanted him at a distance. Things were, she’d decided, finished between them now.

  He said, “I’ve been trying to get everyone in place for the video. Despite what’s happened, I do still think…” He pulled out a chair from its position between the office wall and the open door. When he sat, they were virtually knee to knee. Kerra didn’t like this. She didn’t want any kind of proximity to him. “This is important,” Alan said. “I want your dad to see that. I know the timing couldn’t be worse, but—”

  “Not my mother?” Kerra inquired.

  Alan blinked. He looked momentarily puzzled, perhaps by her tone. He said, “Your mum as well, but she’s already onboard, so your dad—”

  “Oh. Is she?” Kerra said. “But then, I suppose she would be.” His embracing of her mother as a topic was surprising. Dellen’s opinion on anything had hardly ever counted, since she was incapable of consistency, so to hear someone counting it now came as something of a shock. Yet on the other hand, it did make sense. Alan worked with Dellen in marketing, on the rare occasions when Dellen actually worked at all, so they would have talked the video project through before he presented it to Kerra’s father. Alan would have wanted Dellen on his side: It meant one vote in the bag and a vote from someone who might have considerable influence with Ben Kerne.

  Kerra wondered if Alan had talked to Santo as well. She wondered what Santo had made or would have made of Alan’s ideas for Adventures Unlimited.

  “I’d like to talk to him again, but I haven’t actually seen…” Alan hesitated. Then he finally appeared to give in to his curiosity. He asked, “What’s going on? Do you know?”

  “About what, exactly?” Kerra kept her voice polite.

>   “I heard them…Earlier in the day…I’d gone upstairs to look for…” His face was colouring.

  Ah, she thought, were they there at last? “To look for?” Now she sounded arch. She liked that and wouldn’t have thought it was possible to manage arch when what she felt was anything but.

  “I heard your mum and dad. Or rather your mum. She was…” He lowered his head. He appeared to be examining his shoes. These were two-tone saddle shoes, and Kerra regarded them as he did the same. What other man would wear saddle shoes? she wondered. And what on earth did it mean that he somehow managed to carry off wearing them without looking like Bertie Wooster? “I know things are bad,” he said. “I’m just not sure what I’m meant to be doing. At first I thought soldiering on was the ticket, but now it’s begun to seem inhuman. Your mum’s clearly in pieces, your dad’s—”

  “How would you know about that?” The question came out precipitately. Kerra regretted it the moment she spoke.

  “About what?” Alan looked confused. He’d been speaking meditatively, and her question appeared to have disrupted his chain of thought.

  “About the pieces my mother is in?”

  “As I said, I heard her. I’d gone up because no one was about and we’re at the point when we have to decide whether we’re still taking bookings or throwing the whole thing into the rubbish.”

  “Concerned about that, are you?”

  “Shouldn’t we all be?” He leaned back in his chair. He looked at her squarely. He folded his hands over his stomach, and he spoke again. “Why don’t you tell me, Kerra?”

  “What?”

  “I think you know.”

  “And I think that’s a trap.”

  “You were at Pink Cottage. You went through my room.”

  “You’ve got a good landlady.”

  “What else would you expect?”

  “So I suppose you’re asking me what I was looking for?”

  “You told her you left something; I assume you left something. But I can’t work out why you didn’t ask me to fetch it here for you.”

  “I didn’t want you to bother.”

  “Kerra.” Huge breath drawn in, huge breath expelled. He slapped his hands onto his knees. “What in God’s name is going on?”

  “Excuse me?” She managed arch again. “My brother’s been murdered. Does something else need to be ‘going on’ for things not to be quite as you’d like them?”

  “You know what I mean. There’s what happened to Santo and God knows that’s a nightmare. And a gut-ripping tragedy.”

  “Nice of you to add that last bit.”

  “But there’s also what’s happened between you and me and that—whether you want to admit it or not—began the same day as what happened to Santo.”

  “Murder happened to Santo,” Kerra said. “Why can’t you say that, Alan? Why can’t you say murder?”

  “For the obvious reason. I don’t want you to feel worse than you already feel. I don’t want anyone to feel worse than they already feel.”

  “Anyone?”

  “Everyone. You. Your dad. Your mum. Kerra—”

  She got to her feet. The postcard was singeing her skin. It begged to be withdrawn from her pocket and flung at him. This is it demanded an explanation. But the explanation already existed. Only the confrontation remained.

  Kerra knew who needed to be on the other side of that confrontation, and it wasn’t Alan. She pardoned herself and she left her office. She used the stairs rather than the lift.

  She entered her parents’ room without knocking, the postcard in her hand. At some point in the day the curtains had been opened, so dust motes swam in an oblong of weak spring sunlight. But no one had thought to open the window to refresh the rank air. It smelled of perspiration and sex.

  Kerra hated the smell, for what it stated about her parents and the stranglehold one had upon the other. She walked across the room and shoved the window open as wide as she could get it to go. Cold air swept in.

  When she turned, she saw that her parents’ bed was lumpy and the sheets were stained. A pile of her father’s clothes lay on the floor, as if his body had dissolved and left this trace of him behind. Dellen herself was not immediately evident, until Kerra walked round the bed and found her lying on the floor, atop a considerable pile of her own clothing. Red, this was, and it seemed to be every article of crimson that she possessed.

  For only an instant as she gazed down upon her, Kerra felt renewed: a bulb’s single flower finally being released from both the soil and the stalk. But then her mother’s lips worked and her tongue appeared between them, French kissing the air. Her hand opened and closed. Her hips moved then rested. Her eyelids twitched. She sighed.

  Seeing this, Kerra wondered for the first time what it was actually like to be this woman. But she didn’t want to entertain that thought, so she used her foot to flip her mother’s right leg roughly off her left leg. “Wake up,” she told her. “It’s time to talk.” She gazed at the postcard’s picture to gain the strength she needed. This is it her mother’s red writing said. Yes, Kerra thought. This was definitely it. “Wake up,” she said again, more loudly. “Get up from the floor.”

  Dellen opened her eyes. For a moment she looked confused, until she saw Kerra. And then she pulled to her the garments nearest her right hand. She clutched these to her breasts and, in doing so, she uncovered a pair of shears and a carving knife. Kerra looked from these to her mother to the clothes. She saw that every item on the floor had been rendered useless through slashing, slicing, hacking, and cutting.

  “I should have used them on myself,” Dellen said dully. “But I couldn’t. Still, wouldn’t you have been happy had I done it? You and your father? Happy? Oh God, I want to die. Why won’t anyone help me die?” She began to weep tearlessly and as she did so, she drew more and more of the clothing to her until she’d formed an enormous pillow of ruined clothes.

  Kerra knew what she was meant to feel: guilt. She also knew what she was meant to do: forgive. Forgive and forgive until you were the incarnation of forgiveness. Understand until there was nothing left of you except that effort to understand.

  “Help me.” Dellen extended her hand. Then she dropped it to the floor. The gesture was useless, virtually noiseless.

  Kerra shoved the damning postcard back into her pocket. She grabbed her mother’s arm and hauled her upwards. She said, “Get up. You need to bathe.”

  “I can’t,” Dellen said. “I’m sinking. I’ll be gone soon enough and long before I can…” And then a wily shift, perhaps reading from Kerra’s face a brittleness of which she needed to be wary. She said, “He threw out my pills. He had me this morning. Kerra, he…he as much as raped me. And then he…And then he…Then he threw out my pills.”

  Kerra shut her eyes tight. She didn’t want to think about her parents’ marriage. She merely wanted to force the truth from her mother, but she needed to direct the course of that truth. “Up,” she said. “Come on. Come on. You’ve got to get up.”

  “Why will no one listen to me? I can’t go on like this. Inside my mind is a pit so deep…Why won’t anyone help me? You? Your father? I want to die.”

  Her mother was like a sack of sand and Kerra heaved her onto the bed. There Dellen lay. “I’ve lost my child.” Her voice was broken. “Why does no one begin to understand?”

  “Everyone understands.” Kerra felt reduced inside, as if something were simultaneously squeezing her down and burning her up. Soon there would be nothing of her left. Only speaking would save her. “Everyone knows you’ve lost a child, because everyone else has lost Santo, too.”

  “But his mother…only his mother, Kerra—”

  “Please.” Something snapped within Kerra. She reached for Dellen and pulled her upright, forcing her to sit on the edge of the bed. “Stop the drama,” she said.

  “Drama?” As so often had happened in the past, Dellen’s mood shifted, like an unanticipated seismic event. “You can call this drama?” she demanded. �
��Is that how you react to your own brother’s murder? What’s the matter with you? Have you no feelings? My God, Kerra. Whose daughter are you?”

  “Yes,” Kerra said. “I expect you’ve asked yourself that question a number of times, haven’t you. Counting back the weeks and the months and wondering…Who does she look like? Who does she belong to? Who can I say fathered her and—this would be critical, wouldn’t it, Dellen?—will he believe me? Oh, p’rhaps if I look pathetic enough. Or pleased enough. Or happy enough. Or whatever it is that you look when you know you’ve got to explain some mess you’ve made.”

  Dellen’s eyes had grown dark. She’d shrunk away from Kerra. She said, “How can you possibly say…?” and her hands rose to cover her face in a gesture that Kerra assumed was meant to be read as horror.

  It was time. Kerra pulled the postcard from her pocket. She said, “Oh, stop it,” and she knocked her mother’s hands to one side and held the postcard to Dellen’s face. She put a hand on the back of her neck so Dellen could not remove herself from their conversation. She said, “Have a look at what I found. ‘This is it,’ Mum? ‘This is it’? What, exactly? What is ‘it’?”

  “What are you talking about? Kerra, I don’t—”

  “You don’t what? You don’t know what I’ve got in my hand? You don’t recognise the picture on this card? You don’t recognise your own bloody writing? Or is it this: You don’t know where this card even came from and if you do know—because we both damn well know that you know, all right?—then you just can’t imagine how it managed to get there. Which is it, Mum? Answer me. Which?”

  “It’s nothing. It’s just a postcard, for heaven’s sake. You’re behaving like—”

  “Like someone whose mother fucked the man she thought she was going to marry,” Kerra cried. “In this cave where you fucked the rest of them.”

  “How can you possibly—”

  “Because I know you. Because I’ve watched you. Because I’ve seen the story play out over and over. Dellen in need and who’s there to help her but a willing male of whatever age because it never bloody mattered to you, did it? Just that you had him, whoever he was and whoever he belonged to…because what you wanted and when you wanted it was more important than…” Kerra felt her hands begin shaking. She pressed the card to her mother’s face. “I should make you…God. God, I should make you…”