Careless in Red

by Elizabeth George

  She said to him, “Lead on, Mr. Reeth. I’ll phone Mr. Kerne from the car.”

  ONLY TWO OF THEM were inside the caravan. A woman lay on a narrow banquette, a furry-looking blanket tucked round her and her head on a caseless pillow whose edges were stained from perspiration. She was an older woman, although it was impossible to tell how old because she was emaciated and her hair was thin, grey, and uncombed. Her colour was very bad. Her lips were scaly.

  Her companion was a younger woman who could have been any age between twenty-five and forty. With quite short hair of a colour and a condition that peroxide encouraged, she wore a long pleated skirt of a tartan pattern heavily reliant on blue and yellow, red knee socks, and a heavy pullover. She had no shoes on and she wore no makeup. She squinted in their direction as they entered, which suggested she either regularly wore or currently needed glasses.

  She said, “Mum, here’s Edrek.” She sounded weary. “Got a man with her as well. Not a doctor, are you? Not brought a doctor, have you, Edrek? I told you we’re finished with doctors.”

  The woman on the banquette stirred her legs slightly but did not turn her head. She was gazing at the water stains that hovered above them, on the ceiling of the caravan, like clouds ready to rain down rust. Her breathing was shallow and quick, as evidenced by the rise and fall of her hands, which were clasped in a disturbing corpselike posture high on her chest.

  Daidre spoke. “This is Gwynder, Thomas. My younger sister. This is my mother, my mother till I was thirteen, that is. She’s called Jen Udy.”

  Lynley glanced at Daidre. She spoke as if he and she were observers of a tableau on a stage. Lynley said to Gwynder, “Thomas Lynley. I’m not a doctor. Just a…friend.”

  Gwynder said, “Posh voice,” and continued what she’d been doing when they entered, which was carrying a glass to the woman on the banquette. It contained some sort of milky liquid. She said in reference to it, “Want you drinking this, Mum.”

  Jen Udy shook her head. Two of her fingers rose, then fell.

  “Where’s Goron?” Daidre asked. “And where’s…your father?”

  Gwynder said, “Your father ’s well, no matter what you like.” Although her choice of words could have carried a bitter undercurrent, they did not do so.

  “Where are they?”

  “Where else would they be? Daylight.”

  “At the stream or in the shed?”

  “Don’t know, do I. They’re wherever. Mum, you got to drink this. Good for you.”

  The fingers lifted and fell again. The head turned slightly, trying to pull itself towards the back of the banquette and out of sight.

  “Are they not helping you care for her, Gwynder?” Daidre asked.

  “Told you. Past the point of caring for her, aren’t we, and on to the point of waiting. You c’n make a difference in that.” Gwynder sat at the top of the banquette, by the stained pillow. She’d placed the glass on a ledge that ran along a window whose thin curtains were shut against the daylight, shedding a jaundiced glow against her mother’s face. She lifted both the pillow and her mother’s head and slid herself under them. She reached for the glass again. She held this to Jen Udy’s lips with one hand and with the other—curved round her head—she forced her mother’s mouth to open. Liquid went in. Liquid came out. The woman’s throat muscles moved as she swallowed at least part of it.

  “You need to get her out of here,” Daidre said. “This place isn’t good for her. And it isn’t good for you. It’s unhealthy and cold and miserable.”

  “Know that, don’t I?” Gwynder said. “That’s why I want to take her—”

  “You can’t possibly believe that will do any good.”

  “It’s what she wants.”

  “Gwynder, she’s not religious. Miracles are for believers. To take her all the way to…Look at her. She doesn’t even have the strength for the journey. Look at her, for heaven’s sake.”

  “Miracles are for everyone. And they’re what she wants. What she needs. ’F she doesn’t go, she’s going to die.”

  “She is dying.”

  “’S that what you want? Oh, I expect it is. You with your posh boyfriend there. Can’t believe you even brought him down here.”

  “He’s not my…He’s a policeman.”

  Gwynder slowly clutched at the front of her pullover as she took in this detail. She said, “Why’ve you brought…?” And to Lynley, “We’re doing nought wrong. Can’t make us leave. The town council know…We’ve the rights of travellers. Aren’t bothering anyone.” And to Daidre, “Are there more of them out there? You come to take her? She won’t go without a fight. She’ll begin to scream. Can’t believe that you would do this to her. After everything…”

  “After what exactly?” Daidre’s voice sounded pinched. “After everything she did for me? For you? For all three of us? You seem to have a very short memory.”

  “And yours goes back to the start of time, eh?” Gwynder forced more of the liquid into their mother’s mouth. The result was much the same as before. What drained out of her dribbled down her cheeks and onto the pillow. Gwynder tried to sort this out by brushing it off, with little success.

  “She can be in hospice,” Daidre said. “It doesn’t have to go on this way.”

  “We’re meant to leave her there alone? Without her family? Lock her up and wait till they give us the word she’s gone? Well, I won’t do that, will I. And if you come to tell me tha’s the limit of what you mean to do to help her, you leave with your fancy man. Whoever he says he is. Because he’s not a cop. Cops don’t talk like him.”

  “Gwynder, please see reason.”

  “Get out, Edrek. Asked for your help and you said no. Tha’s how it is and we’ll cope from here.”

  “I’ll help within reason. But I won’t send the lot of you to Lourdes or Medjugorje or Knock or anywhere else because it isn’t reasonable, it doesn’t make sense, there are no miracles—”

  “Are! And one could happen to her.”

  “She’s dying of pancreatic cancer. No one walks away from that. She’s got weeks or days or perhaps even hours and…Is this how you want her to die? Like this? In this place? Inside this hovel? Without air or light or even a window to look at the sea?”

  “With people who love her.”

  “There is no love in this place. There never was.”

  “Don’t you say that!” Gwynder began to weep. “Just because…just because…Don’t you say that.”

  Daidre made a move towards her but stopped. She raised a hand to her mouth. Behind her glasses, Lynley saw that her eyes filled with tears.

  “Leave us to our weeks or days or hours, then,” Gwynder said. “Just go.”

  “Do you need—”

  “Go!”

  Lynley put his hand on Daidre’s arm. She looked at him. She removed her glasses and wiped her eyes with the sleeve of her coat, which she’d not removed. He said to her, “Come,” and he urged her gently to the door.

  “Hard fucking cunt,” Gwynder said to their backs. “D’you hear me, Edrek? Hard fucking cunt. Keep your money. Keep your fancy boy. Keep your life. Don’t need you or want you, so don’t come back. Hear me, Edrek? I’m sorry I even asked you in the first place. Don’t come back.”

  Outside the caravan, they paused. Lynley saw that tremors ran through Daidre’s body. He put his arm round her shoulders. “I’m terribly sorry,” he said.

  “Who the hell’re you lot?” The question came in a shout. Lynley looked in its direction. Two men had emerged from the shed. They would be Goron and Daidre’s father, he decided. They approached in a hurry. “Wha’s this, then?” the older man said.

  The younger said nothing. There seemed to be something wrong with him. Openly, he scratched at his testicles. He snuffled loudly and, like his twin in the caravan, he squinted. He nodded at them in a friendly fashion. His father did not.

  “What d’you lot want?” Udy asked. His gaze went from Lynley to Daidre and back to Lynley. He seemed to be asse
ssing everything about them but most particularly their shoes for some reason. Lynley saw why when he looked at Udy’s own feet. He wore boots but they were long past their prime. The soles were split at the toes.

  “Paying a call…” Daidre had stepped away from Lynley’s embrace. Face-to-face with her father, she bore no resemblance either to him or to her brother.

  “What you doing here, then?” Udy said. “We got no need of do-gooders round here. We make it on our own and always have done. So you lot clear out. This’s private property, this is, and there’s a sign posted.”

  It came to Lynley that while the women in the caravan knew who Daidre was, the men did not, that for some reason Gwynder had sought and found her sister on her own, perhaps knowing at some level that her mission was futile. Hence, Udy had no idea that he was speaking to his own daughter. But when Lynley considered this, it seemed reasonable. The thirteen-year-old who had been his daughter was someone from the past, not the accomplished, educated woman before him. Lynley waited for Daidre to identify herself. She did not do so.

  Instead, she gathered herself together, fumbling with the zip on her jacket, as if with the need to do something with her hands. She said to the man, “Yes. Well, we’re leaving.”

  “You do that,” he said. “We got a business we’re running here and we don’t fancy trespassers comin’ round on the off-season. We open in June and there’ll be bits and bobs aplenty for sale then.”

  “Thank you. I’ll remember that.”

  “And mind the sign as well. If it says no trespassing, that’s what it bloody means. And it’ll say no trespassing till we’re opened, understand?”

  “Certainly. We understand.”

  There was actually no posted sign that Lynley had seen, either one forbidding trespass or one indicating this desolate spot was a place of business. But there seemed little enough reason to point out the man’s delusion to him. Far wiser to clear out and to put this place and its people and their way of life behind them. He understood, then, that this was exactly what Daidre had done. He also saw what her struggle now was.

  He said, “Come away,” and he put his arm round her shoulders once again and led her in the direction of her car. He could feel the stares of the two men behind them and, for reasons he didn’t wish to consider just then, he hoped they wouldn’t realise who Daidre was. He didn’t know what would happen if they realised it. Nothing dangerous, surely. At least nothing dangerous as one typically thought of danger. But there were other hazards here besides the removal of one’s personal safety. There was the emotional minefield that lay between Daidre and these people, and he felt an urgency to remove her from it.

  When they returned to the car, Lynley said he would drive. Daidre shook her head. She said, “No, no. I’m fine.” When they climbed inside, though, she didn’t start the engine at once. Instead, she pulled some tissues from the glove box and blew her nose. Then she rested her arms on the top of the steering wheel and peered out at the caravan in the distance.

  “So you see,” she said.

  He made no reply. Again, her hair had fallen over the frames of her glasses. Again, he wanted to push it away from her face. Again, he did not.

  “They want to go to Lourdes. They want a miracle. They have nothing else to hang their hopes on and certainly no money to finance what they want. Which is where I come in. Which is why Gwynder found me. So do I do this for them? Do I forgive these people for what they did, for how we lived, for what they couldn’t be? Am I responsible for them now? What do I owe them besides life itself? I mean the fact of life and not what I’ve done with it. And what does it mean, anyway, to owe someone for having given birth to you? Surely that’s not the most difficult part of taking on parenthood, is it? I hardly think so. Which means the rest of it—the rest of being a parent—they utterly mangled.”

  He did touch her then. He did what he’d seen her do herself: take the hair and tuck it back. His fingers touched the curve of her ear. He said, “Why did they come back, your brother and sister? Were they never adopted?”

  “There was…They called it an accident, their foster parents. They called it Goron playing with a plastic bag, but I think there was more to it than that. It probably should have been called—whatever ‘it’ was—disciplining an overactive little boy in the wrong way. In any event, he was damaged and deemed unadoptable by people who saw him and met him. Gwynder might have been adopted but she wouldn’t be parted from him. So they moved from home to home together, through the system, for years. When they were old enough, they came back here.” She smiled bleakly as she looked at him. “I wager this place—as well as this story—isn’t much like what you’re used to, is it, Thomas?”

  “I’m not certain it matters.” He wanted to say more but he was unsure how to put it so he settled with, “Are you willing to call me Tommy, Daidre? My family and friends—”

  She held up her hand. “I think not,” she said.

  “Because of this?”

  “No. Because this matters to me.”

  JAGO REETH MADE IT clear that he wanted Ben Kerne alone, with no hangers-on from his family present. He suggested Hedra’s Hut for the venue, and he used the word venue as if a performance would be given there.

  Bea told him he was a bloody damn fool if he expected the lot of them to traipse out to the sea cliff where that ancient perch was.

  He replied that fool or not, if she wanted a conversation with him, he knew his rights and he was going to employ them.

  She told him that one of his rights was not the right to decide where their meeting with Ben Kerne would occur.

  He smiled and begged to differ with her. It might not have been his right, he said, but the fact of the matter was that she probably wanted him to be in a location where he felt easy with conversation. And Hedra’s Hut was that location. They’d be cosy enough there. Out of the cold and the wind. Snug as four bugs rolled in the same rug, if she knew what he meant.

  “He’s got something up his sleeve,” was Sergeant Havers’s assessment of the situation once they set off trailing Jago Reeth’s Defender in the direction of Alsperyl. They’d wait at the village church for Mr. Kerne, Jago had informed them. “Best phone the superintendent and let him know where we’re going,” Havers went on. “I’d have backup as well. Those blokes from the station…? Got to be a way they can hide themselves round the place.”

  “Not unless they disguise themselves as cows, sheep, or gulls,” Bea told her. “This bloke’s thought of all the angles.”

  Lynley, Bea found, wasn’t answering his mobile, which made her curse the man and wonder why she’d bothered to give him a phone in the first place. “Where’s the blasted man got off to?” she asked and then replied to her own question with a grim declaration of, “Well, I wager we know the answer to that, don’t we.”

  At Alsperyl, which was no great distance from the Salthouse Inn, they remained in their respective cars, parked close to the village church. When Ben Kerne finally joined them, they’d been sitting there for nearly thirty minutes. During this time, Bea had phoned the station to give the word where they were and phoned Ray to do likewise.

  Ray said, “Beatrice, are you barking mad? D’you have any idea how irregular this is?”

  “I’ve got half a dozen ideas,” she told him. “I’ve also got sod all to work with unless this bloke gives me something I can use.”

  “You can’t think he intends—”

  “I don’t know what he intends. But there will be three of us and one of him and if we can’t manage—”

  “You’ll check him for weapons?”

  “I’m a fool but not a bloody fool, Ray.”

  “I’m having whoever’s out on patrol in your area head to Alsperyl.”

  “Don’t do that. If I need backup, I can easily phone the Casvelyn station for it.”

  “I don’t care what you can and cannot do. There’s Pete to consider, and if it comes down to it, there’s myself as well. I won’t rest easy unless I kn
ow you’ve got proper backup. Christ, this is bloody irregular.”

  “As you’ve said.”

  “Who’s with you at present?”

  “Sergeant Havers.”

  “Another woman? Where the hell is Lynley? What about that sergeant from the station? He looked like he had half a wit about him. For God’s sake, Bea—”

  “Ray. This bloke’s round seventy years old. He’s got some sort of palsy. If we can’t take care of ourselves round him, we need to be carted off.”

  “Nonetheless—”

  “Good-bye, darling.” She rang off and shoved the mobile into her bag.

  Shortly after she finished her phone calls—also telling Collins and McNulty at the Casvelyn station where she was—Ben Kerne arrived. He got out of his car and zipped his windcheater to the chin. He glanced at Jago Reeth’s Defender in some apparent confusion. He then saw Bea and Havers parked next to the lichenous stone wall that defined the churchyard and he walked over to them. As he approached, they got out of the car. Jago Reeth did likewise.

  Bea saw that Jago Reeth’s eyes were fixed on Santo Kerne’s father. She saw that his expression had altered from the easy affability that he’d shown them in the Salthouse Inn. Now his features fairly blazed. She imagined it was the look seasoned warriors had once worn when they finally had the necks of their enemies beneath their boots and a sword pressing into their throats.

  Jago Reeth said nothing to any of them. He merely jerked his head towards a kissing gate at the west end of the car park, next to the church’s notice board.

  Bea spoke. “If we’re meant to attend you, Mr. Reeth, then I have a condition as well.”

  He raised an eyebrow, the extent to which he apparently intended to communicate until they got to his preferred destination.

  “Put your hands on the bonnet and spread your legs. And trust me, I’m not interested in checking to see what sort of cobblers you’ve got.”

  Jago cooperated. Havers and Bea patted him down. His only weapon was a biro. Havers took this and tossed it over the wall into the churchyard. Jago’s expression said, Satisfied?