Careless In Red (2 page)

She said, “I don’t know who the hell you are or what you’re doing here, but you are going to leave directly. If you don’t leave, I shall become violent with you, and I assure you, you do not want that to happen.”

Then she reached behind her for the switch to the lights in the kitchen. She flipped it and illumination fell broadly across the sitting room to the man’s feet. He took a step towards her, which brought him fully into the light, and she saw his face.

She said, “My God. You’re injured. I’m a doctor. May I help?”

He gestured towards the sea. From this distance, she could hear the waves, as always, but they seemed closer now, the sound of them driven inland by the wind. “There’s a body on the beach,” he said. “It’s up on the rocks. At the bottom of the cliff. It’s…he’s dead. I broke in. I’m sorry. I’ll pay for the damage. I was looking for a phone to ring the police. What is this place?”

“A body? Take me to him.”

“He’s dead. There’s nothing—”

“Are you a doctor? No? I am. Take me to him. We’re losing time when we could otherwise be saving a life.”

The man looked as if he would protest. She wondered if it was disbelief. You? A doctor? Far too young. But he apparently read her determination. He took off the cap he was wearing. He wiped the arm of his jacket along his forehead, inadvertently streaking mud on his face. His light hair, she saw, was overlong, and his colouring was identical to hers. Both trim, both fair, they might have been siblings, even to the eyes. His were brown. So were hers.

He said, “Very well. Come with me,” and he came across the room and passed her, leaving behind the acrid scent of himself: sweat, unwashed clothing, unbrushed teeth, body oil, and something else, more profound and more disturbing. She backed away from him and kept her distance as they left the cottage and started down the lane.

The wind was fierce. They struggled against it and into the rain as they made their way swiftly towards the beach. They passed the point where the valley stream opened into a pool before tumbling across a natural breakwater and rushing down to the sea. This marked the beginning of Polcare Cove, a narrow strand at low water, just rocks and boulders when the tide was high.

The man called into the wind, “Over here,” and he led her to the north side of the cove. From that point, she needed no further direction. She could see the body on an outcropping of slate: the bright red windcheater, the loose dark trousers for ease of movement, the thin and exceedingly flexible shoes. He wore a harness round his waist and from this dangled numerous metal devices and a lightweight bag from which a white substance spilled across the rock. Chalk for his hands, she thought. She moved to see his face.

She said, “God. It’s…He’s a cliff climber. Look, there’s his rope.”

Part of it lay nearby, an extended umbilical cord to which the body was still attached. The rest of it snaked from the body to the bottom of the cliff, where it formed a rough mound, knotted skillfully with a carabiner protruding from the end.

She felt for a pulse although she knew there would be none. The cliff at this point was two hundred feet high. If he’d fallen from there—as he most certainly had—only a miracle could have preserved him.

There had been no miracle. She said to her companion, “You’re right. He’s dead. And with the tide…Look, we’re going to have to move him or—”

“No!” The stranger’s voice was harsh.

Daidre felt a rush of caution. “What?”

“The police have to see it. We must phone the police. Where’s the nearest phone? Have you a mobile? There was nothing…” He indicated the direction from which they’d come. There was no phone in the cottage.

“I haven’t a mobile,” she said. “I don’t bring one when I come here. What does it matter? He’s dead. We can see how it happened. The tide’s coming in, and if we don’t move him the water will.”

“How long?” he asked.

“What?”

“The tide. How long have we got?”

“I don’t know.” She looked at the water. “Twenty minutes? Half an hour? No more than that.”

“Where’s a phone? You’ve got a car.” And in a variation of her own words, “We’re wasting time. I can stay here with the…with him, if you prefer.”

She didn’t prefer. She had the impression he would depart like a spirit if she left things up to him. He would know she’d gone to make the phone call he so wanted made, but he himself would vanish, leaving her to…what? She had a good idea and it wasn’t a welcome one.

She said, “Come with me.”

SHE TOOK THEM TO the Salthouse Inn. It was the only place within miles she could think of that was guaranteed to have a phone available. The inn sat alone at the junction of three roads: a white, squat, thirteenth-century hostelry that stood inland from Alsperyl, south of Shop, and north of Woodford. She drove there swiftly, but the man didn’t complain or show evidence of worry that they might end up down the side of the hill or headfirst into an earthen hedge. He didn’t use his seat belt, and he didn’t hold on.

He said nothing. Nor did she. They rode with the tension of strangers between them and with the tension of much unspoken as well. She was relieved when they finally reached the inn. To be out in the air, away from his stench, was a form of blessing. To have something in front of her—immediate occupation—was a gift from God.

He followed her across the patch of rocky earth that went for a car park, to the low-hung door. Both of them ducked to get inside the inn. They were at once in a vestibule cluttered with jackets, rainwear, and sodden umbrellas. They removed nothing of their own as they entered the bar.

Afternoon drinkers—the inn’s regulars—were still at their normal places: round the scarred tables nearest the fire. Coal, it put out a welcome blaze. It shot light into the faces bent to it and streamed a soft illumination against soot-stained walls.

Daidre nodded to the drinkers. She came here herself, so they were not unfamiliar to her nor she to them. They murmured, “Dr. Trahair,” and one of them said to her, “You come down for the tournament, then?” but the question fell off when her companion was observed. Eyes to him, eyes to her. Speculation and wonder. Strangers were hardly unknown in the district. Good weather brought them to Cornwall in droves. But they came and went as they were—strangers—and they did not generally show up in the company of someone known.

She went to the bar. She said, “Brian, I need to use your phone. There’s been a terrible accident. This man…” She turned from the publican. “I don’t know your name.”

“Thomas,” he told her.

“Thomas. Thomas what?”

“Thomas,” he said.

She frowned but said to the publican, “This man Thomas has found a body in Polcare Cove. We need to phone the police. Brian,” and this she said more quietly, “it’s…I think it’s Santo Kerne.”

CONSTABLE MICK MCNULTY WAS performing patrol duty when his radio squawked, jarring him awake. He considered himself lucky to have been in the panda car at all when the call came through. He’d recently completed a lunchtime quickie with his wife, followed by a sated snooze with both of them naked beneath the counterpane they’d ripped from the bed (“We can’t stain it, Mick. It’s the only one we’ve got!”), and only fifty minutes earlier he’d resumed cruising along the A39 on the lookout for potential malefactors. But the warmth of the car in combination with the rhythm of the windscreen wipers and the fact that his two-year-old son had kept him up most of the previous night weighed down his eyelids and encouraged him to look for a lay-by into which he could pull the car for a kip. He was doing just that—napping—when the radio burst into his dreams.

Body on the beach. Polcare Cove. Immediate response required. Secure the area and report back.

Who phoned it in? he wanted to know.

Cliff walker and a local resident. They would meet him at Polcare Cottage.

Which was where?

Bloody hell, man. Use your effing head.

Mick gave the radio two fingers. He started the car and pulled onto the road. He’d get to use the lights and the siren, which generally happened only in summer when a tourist in a hurry made a vehicular misjudgment with dire results. At this time of year, the only action he usually saw was from a surfer anxious to blast into the water of Widemouth Bay: Too much speed into the car park, too late to brake, and over the edge onto the sand he’d go. Well, Mick understood that urgency. He felt it himself when the waves were good and the only thing keeping him from his wet suit and his board were the uniform he wore and the thought of being able to wear it—right here in Casvelyn—into his dotage. Messing up a sinecure was not in his game plan. They did not refer to a posting in Casvelyn as the velvet coffin for nothing.

With siren and lights, it still took him nearly twenty minutes to reach Polcare Cottage, which was the only habitation along the road down to the cove. The distance wasn’t great as the crow flies—less than five miles—but the lanes were no wider than a car and a half, and, defined by farmland, woodland, hamlet, and village, not a single one of them was straight.

The cottage was painted mustard yellow, a beacon in the gloomy afternoon. It was an anomaly in an area where nearly every other structure was white, and in further defiance of local tradition, its two outbuildings were purple and lime, respectively. Neither of them was illuminated, but the small windows of the cottage itself streamed light onto the garden that surrounded it.

Mick silenced the siren and parked the police car, although he left the headlamps on and the roof lights twirling, which he considered a nice touch. He pushed through a gate and passed an old Vauxhall in the driveway. At the front door, he knocked sharply on the bright blue panels. A figure appeared quickly on the other side of a stained-glass window high on the door, as if she’d been standing nearby waiting for him. She wore snug jeans and a turtleneck sweater; long earrings dangled as she gestured Mick inside.

“I’m Daidre Trahair,” she said. “I made the call.”

She admitted him to a small square entry crammed with Wellingtons, hiking boots, and jackets. A large egg-shaped iron kettle that Mick recognised as an old mining kibble stood to one side, filled with umbrellas and walking sticks instead of with ore. A gouged and ill-used narrow bench marked a spot for changing in and out of boots. There was barely space to move.

Mick shook the rainwater from his jacket and followed Daidre Trahair into the heart of the cottage, which was the sitting room. Here, an unkempt bearded man was squatting by the fireplace, taking ineffective stabs at five pieces of coal with a duck-headed poker. They should have used a candle beneath the coal until it got going, Mick thought. That was what his mum had always done. It worked a treat.

“Where’s the body?” he said. “I’ll want your details as well.” He took out his notebook.

“The tide’s coming in,” the man said. “The body’s on the…I don’t know if it’s part of the reef, but the water…You’ll want to see the body surely. Before the rest. The formalities, I mean.”

Being given a suggestion like this—by a civilian who no doubt obtained all his information about procedure from police dramas on ITV—got right up Mick’s nose. As did the man’s voice, whose tone, timbre, and accent were completely out of keeping with his appearance. He looked like a vagrant but certainly didn’t talk like one. He put Mick in mind of what his grandparents referred to as “the old days,” when before the days of international travel people always known as “the quality” cruised down to Cornwall in their fancy cars and stayed in big hotels with wide verandas. “They knew how to tip, they did,” his granddad would tell him. “’Course things were less dear in those days, weren’t they, so tuppence went a mile and a shilling’d take you all the way to London.” He exaggerated like that, Mick’s granddad. It was, his mother said, part of his charm.

“I wanted to move the body,” Daidre Trahair said. “But he”—with a nod at the man—“said not to. It’s an accident. Well, obviously, it’s an accident, so I couldn’t see why…Frankly, I was afraid the surf would take him.”

“Do you know who it is?”

“I…no,” she said. “I didn’t get much of a look at his face.”

Mick hated to cave in to them, but they were right. He tilted his head in the direction of the door. “Let’s see him.”

They set off into the rain. The man brought out a faded baseball cap and put it on. The woman used a rain jacket with the hood pulled over her sandy hair.

Mick paused at the police car and fetched the small flash camera that he’d been authorised to carry. Its purchase had been intended for a moment just like this. If he had to move the body, they’d at least have a visual record of what the spot had looked like before the waves rose to claim the corpse.

At the water’s edge, the wind was fierce, and a beach break was coming from both left and right. These were rapid waves, seductive swells building offshore. But they were forming fast and breaking faster: just the sort of surf to attract and demolish someone who didn’t know what he was doing.

The body, however, wasn’t that of a surfer. This came as something of a surprise to Mick. He’d assumed…But assuming was an idiot’s game. He was glad he’d jumped only to mental conclusions and said nothing to the man and woman who’d phoned for help.

Daidre Trahair was right. It looked like some kind of accident. A young climber—most decidedly dead—lay on a shelf of slate at the base of the cliff.

Mick swore silently when he stood over the body. This wasn’t the best place to cliff climb, either alone or with a partner. While there were swathes of slate, which provided good handholds, toe-holds, and cracks into which camming devices and chock stones could be slid for the climber’s safety, there were also vertical fields of sandstone that crumbled as easily as yesterday’s scones if the right pressure was put upon them.

From the look of things, the victim had been attempting a solo climb: an abseil down from the top of the cliff, followed by a climb up from the bottom. The rope was in one piece and the carabiner was still attached to the rewoven figure-eight knot at the end. The climber himself was still bound to the rope by a belay device. His descent from above should have gone like clockwork.