Careless in Red

by Elizabeth George

  “Correct on both fronts,” Bea told him. “DS Havers.”

  “I’ll need to keep Lily moving as we talk. We’re working on her weight. Getting it off, that is. Putting it on hasn’t been a problem, as she shows up at mealtimes as regular as a ne’er-do-well brother, and I’ve never been able to resist those eyes.”

  “I’m a dog owner myself,” Bea said.

  “Then you know what I mean.” He batted the ball some fifty yards and Lily went after it with a yelp. He said, “I expect you’ve come to talk about Santo Kerne. I reckoned someone would be here eventually. Who gave you my name?”

  “Is that an important detail?”

  “It could only be Aldara or Daidre. No one else knew, according to Santo. The world’s general ignorance of the arrangement, he was very good to point out, would prevent damage to my ego should my ego be inclined towards damage. Kind of him, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Tammy Penrule knew, as things turn out,” Bea told him. “At least she knew part of it.”

  “Did she indeed? So Santo lied to me. Unbelievable. Who would have expected dishonesty from such a sterling bloke? Did Tammy Penrule give you my name?”

  “No. Not Tammy.”

  “Daidre or Aldara then. And of the two of them, I’d think Aldara. Daidre plays her cards quite close.”

  He was so casual about the entire situation that Bea found herself taken aback for a moment. She’d learned over time to have no expectations of how an interview might or might not go, but she was unprepared for Max Priestley’s apparent indifference to being made a cuckold by an adolescent boy. She glanced at Sergeant Havers. The DS was making a study of Priestley. She’d taken the opportunity to apply the flame of a plastic lighter to her cigarette, and she narrowed her eyes against its smoke and directed her gaze to the man’s face.

  It seemed open enough, its expression pleasant. But there was no mistaking the sardonic quality of what Priestley was saying. To Bea’s way of thinking, his type of frankness generally meant that either his wounds ran deep or he’d found himself placed on the receiving end of what he himself had once dished out. Of course, in this current situation, there was the third alternative one had to consider, a killer’s attempt to cover his tracks through a show of indifference. But that alternative didn’t seem likely to her at the moment, and Bea couldn’t say why although she hoped it had nothing to do with his overall magnetism. He was, regrettably, quite a dish.

  “We’d like to talk to you about your relationship with Aldara,” Bea acknowledged. “She’s given us bits and pieces. We’re interested in your side of the affair.”

  “Did I kill Santo when I discovered he was having it off with my woman?” he enquired. “The answer’s no. You’d expect me to say that, though, wouldn’t you? Your average killer’s hardly going to admit to being one.”

  “I do find that’s generally the case.”

  “Come on, Lil!” Priestley shouted suddenly, frowning into the distance. Another dog walker had appeared at the far edge of the down. Priestley’s retriever had noticed and was bounding off in that direction. “Bloody dog,” he said. “Lily! Come!” The dog happily ignored him. He chuckled ruefully and looked back to Bea and Havers. “And to think I used to have such a magic touch with women.”

  It was as good a segue as any. Bea said, “It didn’t work with Aldara?”

  “It did at first. Right up till the time I discovered her magic was stronger than mine. And then…” He offered them a quirky smile. “I got a taste of my own medicine, as they say, and the flavour wasn’t something I liked.”

  At this indication that more was forthcoming, Sergeant Havers did her bit with her notebook and pencil, her cigarette dangling from her lips. Priestley noted this, nodded, said, “What the hell, then,” and began to complete the picture of his relationship with Aldara Pappas.

  They’d become acquainted at a meeting of business owners from Casvelyn and the surrounding area. He was there to do a story on the meeting; the business owners were there to glean ideas for increasing tourism during the off-season. Aldara was a cut above the other proprietors of this surf shop and that restaurant or hotel. It was, he said, a tough job not to take notice of her.

  “Her history was intriguing,” Priestley said. “A divorced woman taking on a derelict apple farm and building it into a decent tourist attraction. I wanted to do a story on her.”

  “Just a story?”

  “At first. I’m a newspaperman. I look for stories.”

  They talked both at the meeting and after the meeting. Plans were laid. Although he could have sent one of the Watchman’s two reporters to gather the facts, he did it himself instead. Admittedly, he was attracted to her.

  “So the newspaper story was an excuse?” Bea said.

  “I intended to do it. It got written eventually.”

  “Once you were in her knickers?” Havers asked.

  “One can only do a single thing at a time,” Priestley replied.

  “Which means…?” Bea hesitated and then saw the light. “Ah. You bedded her at once. That very day, when you went for the interview. Is that your usual MO, Mr. Priestley, or was this something special for you?”

  “It was mutual attraction,” Priestley said. “Very intense. Impossible to ignore.”

  A romantic, he said, would have called what happened between Aldara Pappas and him love at first sight. An analyst of love would have called it cathexis.

  “And what did you call it?” Bea asked the newspaperman.

  “Love at first sight.”

  “So you’re a romantic?”

  “Looks like I turned out to be.”

  His golden retriever bounded up to him. Her exploration of the other dog’s pertinent orifices complete, Lily was ready for another throw of the tennis ball. Priestley whacked it to the far edge of the down.

  “Something you didn’t expect?”

  “Never.” He watched the dog for a moment before turning back to them. “Prior to Aldara, I’d been a player all my life. I had no intention of getting hooked into anyone, and to prevent that—”

  “What? Marriage and babies?”

  “—I always had more than one woman on a string.”

  “Just like her,” Havers noted.

  “With a serious exception. I had two or three. Once I had four, but they always knew. I was honest with them from the start.”

  Havers said to Bea, “There you are, Guv. It happens sometimes. He brought them the dead whatever.”

  Priestley looked confused. Bea said to him, “But in the case of Mrs. Pappas?”

  “She was like no one else I’d had. It wasn’t just the sex thing. It was the whole package of her. Her intensity, her intelligence, her drive, her confidence, her sense of purpose. There’s nothing simpering, soft, or weak about her. There’s no manipulation. No subtle manouevring. No double message and no mixed or confusing signals. There’s nothing at all to be read or interpreted in her behaviour. Aldara’s like a man in the body of a woman.”

  “I notice you don’t credit her with personal honesty,” Bea pointed out.

  “I don’t,” he said. “That was my mistake.”

  He’d come to believe Aldara Pappas was, at long last in his life, the One. He’d never thought to marry. He’d never wanted to marry. He’d seen enough of his parents’ marriage to be firm in not wanting ever to live as they had lived: unable just to get on with each other, to cope with their differences, or to divorce. They’d never been able to manage any option they’d had; nor had they even seen they had options. Priestley hadn’t wanted to live that kind of life, and so he hadn’t.

  “But with Aldara, it was different,” he said. “She’d had a terrible first marriage. Husband was a rotter who let her think she was infertile when they couldn’t have kids. Said he’d been tested three ways to Sunday and found perfectly fit. Let her go to doctors and get all sorts of mad treatments, while he was shooting blanks the entire time. She was dead off men after years with him, but I brought her
round. I wanted what she wanted, whatever she wanted. Marriage? Fine. Kids? Fine. A mass of chimpanzees? Myself in tights and a tutu? I didn’t care.”

  “You had it bad,” DS Havers noted, looking up from her pad. She actually sounded marginally sympathetic, and Bea wondered if the man’s magic touch was rubbing off on her.

  “It was the fire thing,” Priestley said. “The fire didn’t die out between us, and I couldn’t see the slightest sign that it might. Then I discovered why.”

  “Santo Kerne,” Bea said. “Her affair with him kept her hot for you. Excitement. Secrecy.”

  “I was gobsmacked. I was bloody reeling. He came to me and spilled the whole story. Out of conscience, he said.”

  “You didn’t believe that?”

  “The conscience bit? Not on your life. Not when his conscience didn’t take him as far as telling his girlfriend. It doesn’t concern her, he informed me, as he had no intention of breaking off with her because of Aldara. So I wasn’t to worry that he—Santo—might want something more from Aldara than she was willing to give. It was a sex thing between them. ‘You’re number one,’ he told me. ‘I’m just there to pick up the slack.’”

  “Good at that, was he?” Havers asked.

  “I didn’t wait round long enough to find out. I phoned Aldara and broke off with her.”

  “Did you tell her why?”

  “I expect she worked it out. Either that, or Santo was as honest with her as he was with me. Which, come to think of it, gives Aldara something of a motive to kill him herself, doesn’t it?”

  “Is that your ego speaking, Mr. Priestley?”

  Priestley guffawed. “Believe me, Inspector, I’ve not much ego left.”

  “We’ll need your fingerprints. Are you willing to give them?”

  “Fingerprints, toe prints, and anything else you want. I’ve nothing to hide from anyone.”

  “That’s wise of you.” Bea nodded to Havers, who flipped her notebook closed. She told the newsman to come to the station, where his prints would be taken. Then she said to him, “As a point of curiosity, did you favour Santo Kerne with a black eye prior to his death?”

  “I would have loved to,” he said. “But, frankly, I didn’t think he was worth the effort.”

  JAGO’S APPROACH, WHEN HE revealed it to Cadan, was to employ the man-to-man talk: If Cadan wanted to put distance between himself and Dellen Kerne, there was only one way to do it and that was by facing Lew Angarrack. There was plenty of work at LiquidEarth, so there was no need for Jago to take Cadan’s part with his father. All that was necessary, he said, was an honest conversation in which mistakes were admitted, apologies extended, and amends promised.

  Jago made it all sound simple. Cadan was hot to do it at once. The only problem here was that Lew had gone for a surf—“Big swells in Widemouth Bay today,” Jago informed him—so Cadan was going to have to wait until his father’s return. Or he was going to have to go out to Widemouth Bay to meet him as he finished up his surf. This second proposal sounded like an excellent idea since, after a surf, Lew’s spirits would be high, which would likely translate to Lew’s amenability to Cadan’s plans.

  Jago lent his car to the endeavour. Saying, “Mind how you go, then,” he handed over his keys.

  Cadan set off. Without a driving license and mindful of Jago’s display of trust in him, he took supreme care. Hands at two o’clock and ten o’clock, eyes fixed ahead or flicking to the mirrors, the occasional glance at the speedometer.

  Widemouth Bay lay to the south of Casvelyn, some five miles down the coast. Flanked by largely friable cliffs of sandstone, it was much as its name suggested: a wide bay accessed from a large car park just off the coastal road. There was no town to speak of. Instead, summer cottages were sprinkled across the down east of the road, and the only businesses that served them, surfers, and tourists to the area were a seasonal restaurant and a shop hiring out body boards, surfboards, and wet suits.

  In summer the bay was madness because, unlike so many bays in Cornwall, it was no difficult matter to get to it, so it attracted day-trippers by the hundreds, holiday makers, and locals as well. In the off-season, it was left to surfers who flocked to it when the tide was mid to high, the wind was east, and the waves were breaking on the right-hand reef.

  Conditions were superb on this day, with swells that looked to be five feet. So the car park was littered with vehicles, and the lineup of surfers was impressive. Even so, when Cadan pulled in and parked, he could make out his father easily. Lew surfed the way he did most everything else: alone.

  It was largely a solitary sport anyway, but Lew managed to make it even more so. His was a figure set apart from the rest, farther out, content to wait for swells that rose only occasionally at this distance from the reefs. To look at him, one would think he knew nothing about the sport because certainly he ought to be waiting with the others, who were getting fairly consistent rides. But that wasn’t his way, and when a wave finally came that he liked, he was on its shoulder effortlessly, paddling with a minimum of effort and the experience of more than thirty years on the water.

  The others watched him. He dropped in smoothly, and there he was, angling across the wave’s green face, carving back towards the barrel, looking as if at any moment he’d catch a rail or the falls would take him, but knowing when to carve again so that the wave was his.

  Cadan didn’t need to see a scoreboard or hear a commentary to know his father was good. Lew seldom spoke of it, but he’d surfed competitively in his twenties, harbouring a dream of worldwide travel and recognition before the Bounder had left him with two small children to care for. At that point, Lew had been forced to rethink his chosen path. What he’d come up with was LiquidEarth. From shaping his own boards, he’d gone on to shape boards for others. Thus he lived vicariously the peripatetic life of a world-class surfer. It couldn’t have been easy for his father to give up on what he’d hoped to do with his life, Cadan realised, and he wondered why he’d never thought about that before now.

  When Lew came out of the water, Cadan was waiting for him. He’d fetched a towel from within the RAV4 and he handed it over. Lew propped his short board against the car and took the towel with a nod. He pulled off his hood and rubbed his hair vigorously. He began to peel off his wet suit. It was still the winter suit, Cadan noted. The water wouldn’t warm up for two more months.

  “What’re you doing here, Cade?” Lew asked him. “How’d you get here? Aren’t you meant to be at work?” He stepped out of the wet suit and wrapped the towel round his waist. From within the car, he brought out a T-shirt and then a sweatshirt printed with LiquidEarth’s logo. He donned these and worked on getting out of his swimming suit. He said nothing else until he was dressed and loading his kit into the back of the car. And then it was to repeat, “What are you doing here, Cade? How did you get here?”

  “Jago let me use his wheels.”

  Lew looked round the car park and spotted the Defender. “Without your driving licence,” he said.

  “I didn’t take chances. I drove like a nun.”

  “That’s hardly the point. And why aren’t you at work? Have you been sacked?”

  Cadan didn’t intend it and didn’t want it, but he felt the quick anger that always seemed to be the outcome of a conversation with his father. He said without considering where it would take them, “I guess you’d think that, wouldn’t you?”

  “Past history.” Lew stepped past Cadan and went for his board. There were showers at the far side of the car park, and Lew could have used them to wash the saltwater from his kit, but he didn’t do so as the job he could do at home would be more thorough and consequently more to his liking. And it seemed to Cadan that that was his father’s way about everything. To my liking was the motto Lew lived by.

  Cadan said, “As it happens, I haven’t been sacked. I’ve been doing a bloody good job over there.”

  “I see. Congratulations. What’re you doing here, then?”

  “I came to tal
k to you. Jago said you were here. And he offered his car, by the way. I didn’t ask.”

  “Talk to me about what?” Lew slammed home the back of the RAV4. From the driver’s seat, he rustled through a paper bag and brought out a sandwich encased in a plastic box. He prised open the lid and lifted out half. He offered the other half to Cadan.

  A peace offering, Cadan decided. He shook his head but was careful to say thanks. “About coming back to LiquidEarth,” Cadan said. “If you’ll have me.” He added this last as his own form of peace offering. His father had the power in this situation and he knew that his part was to acknowledge that fact.

  “Cadan, you just told me—”

  “I know what I said. But I’d rather work for you.”

  “Why? What happened? Adventures Unlimited not to your liking?”

  “Nothing’s happened. I’m doing what you’ve wanted me to do. I’m thinking about the future.”

  Lew looked out at the sea, where the surfers patiently waited for the next good swell. “I expect you have a plan of some sort?”

  “You need a sprayer,” Cadan said.

  “I need a shaper as well. Summer’s coming. We’re behind on our orders. We’re competing with those hollow-core boards, and what we have over them is—”

  “Attention to individual needs. I know. But part of the need is the artwork, isn’t it? The look of the board as well as the shape. I can do that. That’s what I’m good at. I can’t shape boards, Dad.”

  “You can learn to shape them.”

  It always came down to this in the end: what Cadan wanted versus what Lew believed. “I tried. I wrecked more blanks than I shaped properly and you don’t want that. It wastes time and money.”

  “You’ve got to learn. It’s part of the process and if you don’t know the process—”

  “Shit! You didn’t make Santo learn the process. Why didn’t he have to learn it, start to finish, like you’re telling me?”

  Lew gave his attention back to Cadan. “Because I didn’t build the goddamn business for Santo,” he said quietly. “I built it for you. But how the hell can I leave it to you if you don’t understand it?”