Careless in Red

by Elizabeth George

  Two women came inside. One of them had stand-up hair that looked purple in the light. The other wore a knitted cap pulled low on her face, just to her eyes. The women looked around and Purple Hair settled on the inglenook.

  She strode over saying, “Ah. We’d like a word with you, Mr. Reeth.”

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  THEY DROVE WEST. THEY TALKED VERY LITTLE. WHAT LYNLEY wanted to know was why she had lied about details that could be so easily checked upon. Paul the primate keeper, for instance. It was a matter of a simple phone call to discover there was no Paul caring for primates at the zoo. Did she not see how that looked to the police?

  She glanced at him. She’d not worn her contact lenses on this day, and a bit of her sandy hair had fallen across the top of the frames of her glasses. She said, “I suppose I hadn’t thought of you as a cop, Thomas. And the answers to the questions you asked me—and the questions you had in your head but didn’t ask me—were private, weren’t they. They had nothing to do with Santo Kerne’s death.”

  “But keeping those answers to yourself made you suspect. You must see that.”

  “I was willing to take the risk.”

  They drove for a time in silence. The landscape altered as they approached the coast. From rough and rock-studded farmland whose ownership was delineated with irregular drystone walls patchy with grey-green lichen, the undulations of pasture and field gave way to hillside and combe, and a horizon that was marked with the great and derelict engine houses of Cornwall’s disused mines. She took a route into St. Agnes, a slate and granite village that tumbled down a hillside above the sea, its few steep streets twisting appealingly and lined with terrace cottages and with shops, all of them leading inexorably and ultimately, like the course of a river, down to the pebbled stretch of Trevaunance Cove. Here, at low water, tractors pulled skiffs into the sea and, at three-quarters tide, good-size swells from the west and southwest brought surfers from surrounding areas to jostle with each other for a place on ten-foot waves. But instead of ending up at the cove, where Lynley thought she’d been heading, she chose a direction out of town, driving north, following signs that were posted for Wheal Kitty.

  He said to her, “I couldn’t ignore the fact that you lied about recognising Santo Kerne when you saw his body. Why did you do that? Don’t you see how that threw suspicion on you?”

  “At the moment that couldn’t be important. Saying I knew him would have led to more questions. Answering questions would have left me pointing the finger…” She glanced his way. Her expression was irked, disbelieving. “Have you honestly no idea what it might feel like to be a person who involves people she knows in a police investigation? Surely you must understand how that might feel? You’re not insensate. There were confidential matters…There were things I’d promised to keep to myself. Oh, what am I saying? Your sergeant would have put you into the picture by now. Doubtless you had breakfast with her, if you didn’t speak to her last night. I can’t imagine she’d keep you in the dark about much.”

  “There were car tracks in your garage. More than one set.”

  “Santo’s. Aldara’s. Your sergeant would have told you about Aldara, I expect. Santo’s lover. The fact that they used my cottage.”

  “Why didn’t you just explain that from the first? Had you done so—”

  “What? You would have stopped short of looking into my past, sending your sergeant to Falmouth to question the neighbours, phoning the zoo, doing…What else? Have you spoken to Lok as well? Did you track him down? Did you ask him if he’s truly crippled or if I made that up? It does sound fantastic, doesn’t it, a Chinese brother with spinal bifida. Brilliant but bent. What an intriguing story.”

  “I know he’s at Oxford.” Lynley was regretful, but there was no help for what he’d done. It was part of the job. “That’s the extent.”

  “And you discovered this…how?”

  “It’s a small matter, Daidre. There’s cooperation between police agencies all over the world, let alone in our own country. It’s easier now than it ever was.”

  “I see.”

  “You don’t. You can’t. You’re not a cop.”

  “Neither were you. Neither are you. Or has all of that changed?”

  He couldn’t answer that question. He didn’t know the answer. Perhaps some things were in the blood and could not be shaken off merely because one desired to do so.

  They said nothing more. At one point, in his peripheral vision, he saw her raise a hand to her cheek and his fantasy had her weeping. But when he looked at her directly, he saw that she was merely seeing to the hair that had fallen over the frame of her glasses. She shoved it impatiently behind her ears.

  At Wheal Kitty, they did not approach the engine house or the buildings that surrounded it. These sat at a distance and cars were parked in front of some of them. Unlike nearly all of the old engine houses across the county, Wheal Kitty’s had been restored. It was now in use as a place of business and other businesses had sprung up round it, these in long, low buildings looking nothing like the period from which Wheal Kitty had come but still built of the local stone. Lynley was glad to see this. He always felt a twinge of sadness when he looked at the ghostly smokestacks and broken-down engine houses that marked the landscape. It was good to see them put to use again, for round St. Agnes was a veritable graveyard of mining shafts, particularly above Trevaunance Coombe, where a ghost town of engine houses and their accompanying smokestacks marked the landscape like silent witnesses to the land’s recovery from man’s assault upon it. And the land itself was a place of heather and gorse thriving amidst grey, granite outcroppings, providing nesting spots for herring gulls, jackdaws, and carrion crows. There were few trees. The windswept nature of the place did not encourage them.

  To the north of Wheal Kitty, the road narrowed. It became a lane first and ultimately a track, coursing downward into a steeply sided gully. Barely the width of Daidre’s Vauxhall, it descended in a series of switchbacks, guarded by boulders to their left and a fast-moving stream to their right. It finally ended at an engine house far more ruined than any they’d seen on the trip from Redruth. It was wildly overgrown with vegetation; just beyond it, a smokestack shot skyward in a similar state.

  “Here we are,” Daidre said. But she didn’t get out of the car. Instead, she turned to him and she spoke quietly. “Imagine this,” she said. “A traveller decides he wants to stop travelling because unlike his parents and their parents and the parents before them, he wants something different out of life. He has an idea that’s not very practical because nothing much he’s done has ever been practical, frankly, but he wants to try it. So he comes to this place, convinced, of all things, that there’s a living to be had from mining tin. He reads very poorly, but he’s done what homework he can on the subject, and he knows about streaming. D’you know what tin streaming is, Thomas?”

  “Yes.” Lynley looked beyond her, over her shoulder. Some seventy yards from where they were parked, an old caravan stood. Once white, now it was mostly laced the colour of rust, which streaked from its roof and from its windows at which yellow curtains printed with flowers drooped. Accompanying this impermanent structure were a tumbledown shed and a tarpaper-roofed cupboard that looked like an outdoor loo. “It’s drawing tin from small stones in a stream and following that stream to larger stones.”

  “Shode stones, yes,” Daidre said. “And then following them to the lode itself but if you can’t find the lode, it’s a small matter really because you still have the tin in the smaller stones and that can be made into…whatever you wish to make it into. Or you can sell it to metalworkers or jewellers, but the point is, you can support yourself—barely—if you work hard enough and you get lucky. So that’s what this traveller decides to do. Of course, it takes a lot more work than he anticipated and it’s not a particularly wholesome kind of life and there are interruptions: town councils, the government, assorted do-gooders coming round to inspect the premises. This causes something of
a distraction, so the traveller ends up travelling anyway, in order to find a proper stream in a proper location somewhat hidden away where he can be allowed to look for his tin in peace. But no matter where he goes, there are still problems because he’s got three children and a wife to provide for and since he alone can’t provide what needs to be provided, they all must help. He’s decided he will give the children lessons at home to save time from their having to be gone for hours to school every day. His wife will be their teacher. But life is hard and the instruction doesn’t actually happen and neither does much else in the way of nurturing. Like decent food. Or proper clothing. Jabs for this or that disease. Dentistry. Anything, really. The sorts of things typical children take for granted. When social workers come round, the children hide, and finally, because the family keeps moving, they slip through the cracks, all three of them. For years, actually. When they finally come to light, the eldest girl is thirteen years old and the younger two—the twins, a boy and a girl—are ten. They can’t read, they can’t write, they’re covered in sores, their teeth are quite bad, they’ve never seen a doctor, and the girl—by this I mean the thirteen-year-old—actually has no hair. It hasn’t been shaved. It’s fallen out. They’re removed at once. Large hue and cry. Local newspapers covering the story, complete with pictures. The twins are placed with a family in Plymouth. The thirteen-year-old is sent to Falmouth. There she’s ultimately adopted by the couple who begin as her foster parents. She is so…so filled up by their love for her that she puts her past behind her, completely. She changes her name to something she thinks of as pretty. Of course, she has no idea how to spell it, so she misspells it and her new parents are charmed. Daidre it is, they say. Welcome to your new life, Daidre. And she never goes back to visit who she was. Never. She puts it behind her and she never speaks of it and no one—no one—in her present life knows a thing about it because it is her deepest shame. Can you understand this? No, how could you. But that’s how it is and that’s how it remains until her sister tracks her down and insists—begs—that she come to this place, the very last place on earth that she can bear to come, the one place she has promised herself that no one from her present life will ever learn of.”

  “Is that why you lied to DI Hannaford about your route to Cornwall?” Lynley asked her.

  Daidre didn’t reply. She opened her door, and Lynley did likewise. They stood for a moment surveying the home she’d left eighteen years earlier. Aside from the caravan—unimaginably once the domicile of five people—there was little else. A ramshackle building seemed to hold the equipment for extracting tin from the stones in which it was found, and leaning up against this were three wheelbarrows of ancient vintage along with two bicycles with rusty panniers hanging from their sides. At one time, someone had planted a few terra-cotta pots with geraniums, but these were languishing, two of them on their sides and cracked, with the plants sprawled out like supplicants begging for a merciful end.

  “My name,” Daidre said, “was Edrek Udy. Do you know the meaning of Edrek, Thomas?”

  He said that he didn’t. He found that he didn’t want her to go further. He was filled with sadness that he’d unthinkingly invaded a life she’d worked so hard to forget.

  “Edrek,” she said, “means regret in Cornish. Come along and meet my family.”

  JAGO REETH DIDN’T LOOK the least bit surprised. He also didn’t look worried. He looked as he’d looked the first time Bea had come upon him at LiquidEarth: willing to be helpful. She wondered if they were wrong about him.

  He said that they could indeed have a word with him. They could join him and his mate Selevan Penrule there in the inglenook or they could ask for a more private location.

  Bea said she reckoned they’d have their conversation at the station in Casvelyn if he didn’t mind.

  He said politely, “’Fraid I do mind. ’M I under arrest, madam?”

  It was the madam that gave her pause. It was the way he said it: with the tone of someone who believes he’s sitting in the catbird seat.

  He went on with, “Because ’less I’m mistaken, I don’t need to accept your hospitality, if you know what I mean.”

  “Is there some reason you’d prefer not to talk to us, Mr. Reeth?”

  “Not a bit ’f that,” he said. “But if we’re to talk we’ll need to do it where I feel a comfort I’m not likely to feel in a police station, if you know what I mean.” He smiled affably, showing teeth long stained by tea and coffee. “Get all tightened up if I’m indoors too long. Tightened up, I can’t speak much at all. And I know this: Inside a station, I’m likely to be tightened permanently. If you know what I mean.”

  Bea narrowed her eyes. “Is that so?”

  “Bit of a claustrophobe, I am.”

  Reeth’s companion was listening to all this agog, his gaze going from Bea to Jago to Bea. He said, “Wha’s this about then, Jago?”

  To which Bea replied, “Would you like to bring your friend into the picture?”

  Reeth said, “They want a word about Santo Kerne. ’Nother word. I’ve spoke to them already.” Then to Bea, “And I’m dead chuffed to do it again, eh. Often as you like. Let’s just take ourselves out of the bar…We c’n decide where and when we’ll do our speaking.”

  DS Havers was about to say something. She’d opened her mouth when Bea gave her the look. Hold off, it said. They would see what Jago Reeth was up to.

  They followed him into the inn’s entry, the bar door closing behind them. They left the barman wiping out glasses and watching curiously. They left Selevan Penrule saying to Jago Reeth, “Have a care, mate.”

  When they were alone, Jago Reeth said in a voice altogether different from the one they’d heard him use not only a moment ago but also in their earlier conversations with him, “I’m afraid you didn’t answer my question. Am I under arrest, Inspector?”

  “Should you be?” Bea asked. “And thank you for discarding the persona.”

  “Inspector, please. Don’t play me for a fool. You’ll find I know my rights better than most. Indeed, you can say I’ve made a study of my rights. So you can arrest me if you like and pray you’ve got enough to hold me at least six hours. Or nine at the most since you yourself would be doing the review after those first six hours, wouldn’t you. But after that…What superintendent on earth will authorise a questioning period of twenty-four hours at this point in your investigation? So you must decide what it is you want from me. If it’s conversation, then I must tell you that conversation isn’t about to happen inside a lockup. And if it’s a lockup that you want, then I’ll have to insist on a solicitor’s presence and I’m likely to employ my primary right at that point, one so often forgotten by those wishing to be helpful.”

  “And that is?”

  “Don’t please play ignorant with me. You know as well as I that I needn’t say another word to you.”

  “Despite how that will look?”

  “Frankly, I don’t care how it looks. Now what would you and your assistant here prefer? A frank conversation or my kind and silent gaze resting upon you or the wall or the floor in the police station? And if it’s to be a conversation, then I—and not you—will determine where it happens.”

  “Rather sure of yourself, Mr. Reeth. Or should I call you Mr. Parsons?”

  “Inspector, you may call me whatever you like.” He rubbed his hands together, the gesture one would use to rid the palms of flour in baking or soil in planting. “So. What’s it to be?”

  At least, Bea told herself, she had the answer to wily or ignorant. “As you wish, Mr. Reeth. Shall we ask for a private room here at the inn?”

  “I’ve a better location in mind,” he told her. “If you’ll pardon me while I fetch my jacket…? There’s another exit to the bar, by the way, so you’ll want to come with me if you’re concerned I might do a runner.”

  Bea nodded to DS Havers. The sergeant looked only too willing to accompany Jago Reeth just about anywhere. The two of them disappeared into the bar for the le
ngth of time it took Jago Reeth to fetch his belongings and have whatever word he felt necessary with his friend in the inglenook. They emerged and Jago led the way outside. They’d have to drive to get there, he said. Had either one of them a mobile, by the way? He asked this last with deliberate courtesy. Obviously, he knew they carried mobile phones. Bea expected him to make the requirement that they leave their mobile phones behind, which she was about to tell him was a complete nonstarter. But then he made an unexpected request.

  “I’d like Mr. Kerne to be present.”

  “That,” Bea told him, “is not about to happen.”

  Again the smile. “Oh, I’m afraid it must, Inspector Hannaford. Unless, of course, you wish to arrest me and hold me for those nine hours you have available to you. Now as to Mr. Kerne—”

  “No,” Bea said.

  “A short drive to Alsperyl. I assure you, he’ll enjoy it.”

  “I won’t ask Mr. Kerne—”

  “I do think you’ll find that no asking will be necessary. You merely need to make the offer: a conversation about Santo with Jago Reeth. Or with Jonathan Parsons, if you prefer. Mr. Kerne will be happy to have that conversation. Any father who wants to know exactly what happened to his son on the day—or the night—he died would have that conversation. If you know what I mean.”

  Sergeant Havers said, “Guv,” in an urgent tone.

  Bea knew she wanted a word and that word would doubtless be one of caution. Don’t place this bloke in a position of power. He doesn’t determine the course of affairs. We do. We’re the cops, after all.

  But believing that was sophistry at this point. The course was caution, to be sure. But it was going to have to be caution employed in a scenario devised by their suspect. Bea didn’t like this, but she didn’t see another route to take other than to let him go on his way. They could indeed hold him in custody for nine hours, but while nine hours in a cell or even alone in an interview room might unnerve some people and prompt them to talk, she was fairly certain nine hours or ninety were not going to unnerve Jago Reeth.