Careless In Red (23 page)

“And here I am,” she said.

“And here you are.”

He smiled and seemed to hesitate for some reason, which surprised Daidre as he didn’t seem the type of man who’d hesitate at anything. She said, “And?” and cocked her head. He had, she noted, a scar on his upper lip that relieved his otherwise off-putting appearance, which was handsome in that classical sense: He had strong features that were well defined. No indication of inbreeding here.

“I’ve come to ask you to dinner,” he said. “I’m afraid I can only offer you the Salthouse Inn as I’ve no funds of my own yet, and I can hardly invite you for a meal and ask you to pay for it, can I. But at the inn, they’ll put our meal on the books, and as breakfast was excellent—well, at least it was filling—I suspect dinner will be adequate as well.”

“What a dubious invitation,” she said.

He seemed to think about it. “D’you mean the ‘adequate’ part?”

“Yes. ‘Join me for an adequate albeit far-from-sumptuous meal.’ It’s one of those gallant post-Victorian requests one can only respond to with ‘Thank you, I think.’”

He laughed. “Sorry. My mother would roll in her grave, were she dead, which she isn’t. Let me say, then, that I’ve had a look at tonight’s menu, and it appears…if not brilliant, then at least swell.”

She laughed in turn. “Swell? Where on earth did that come from? Never mind. Don’t tell me. Have a meal here instead. I’ve something already prepared and there’s enough for two. It only wants baking.”

“But then I’ll be doubly in your debt.”

“Which is exactly where I want you, my lord.”

His face altered, all amusement drained away by her slip of the tongue. She cursed herself for her lapse in circumspection and what it presaged about her ability to keep other things to herself in his presence.

He said, “Ah. So you know.”

She sought an explanation and decided one existed that would be reasonable, even to him. “When you said last night that you were Scotland Yard, I wanted to know if that was the case. So I set about finding out.” She looked away from him for a moment. She saw that the herring gulls were settling in on the nearby cliff face for the night, pairing off onto ledges and into crevices, ruffling their wings, huddling against the wind. “I’m terribly sorry, Thomas,” she said.

After a moment during which more gulls landed and others soared and cawed, he said, “You’ve no need to apologise. I would have done the same in your situation. A stranger in your house claiming to be a policeman. Someone dead outside. What are you to believe?”

“That’s not what I meant.” She looked back at him. He was into the wind; she was against it. It played havoc with her hair, whipping it into her face despite the slide.

“Then what?” he said.

“Your wife,” she told him. “I’m so terribly sorry about what happened to her. What a wrenching thing for you to have to go through.”

“Ah,” he said. “Yes.” He moved his gaze to the seabirds. He would see them, Daidre knew, as she saw them, pairing off not because there was safety in numbers but because there was safety in just one other gull. “It was far more wrenching for her than for me,” he said.

“No,” Daidre said. “I don’t believe that.”

“Don’t you? Well, there’s little more wrenching than death by gunshot, I daresay. Especially when death is not immediate. I didn’t have to go through that. Helen did. She was there one moment, just trying to get her shopping in the front door. She was shot the next. That would be rather wrenching, wouldn’t you say?” He sounded bleak, and he didn’t look at her as he spoke. But he’d misunderstood her meaning, and Daidre sought to clarify it.

“I believe that death is the end of this part of our existence, Thomas: the spiritual being’s human experience. The spirit leaves the body and then goes on to what’s next. And what’s next has to be better than what’s here or what’s the point, really?”

“Do you actually believe that?” His tone walked the line between bitterness and incredulity. “Heaven and hell and nonsense in a similar vein?”

“Not heaven and hell. That all seems rather silly, doesn’t it. God or whoever up there on a throne, casting this soul downward to eternal torment, tossing this soul upward to sing hymns with the angels. That can’t be what this”—her arm took in the cliff side and the sea—“is all about. But that there’s something else beyond what we understand in this moment…? Yes, I do believe that. So for you…You’re still the spiritual being undergoing and attempting to understand the human experience while she now knows—”

“Helen,” he said. “Her name was Helen.”

“Helen, yes. Forgive me. Helen. She now knows what it was all about. But there’s little peace of mind in that. For you, I mean…Knowing that Helen’s moved on.”

“It wasn’t her choice,” he said.

“Is it ever, Thomas?”

“Suicide.” He looked at her evenly.

She felt a chill. “That’s not a choice. That’s a decision based upon the belief that there are no choices.”

“God.” A muscle moved in his jaw. She so regretted her slip of the tongue. A simple expression—my lord—had reduced him to his wound. These things take time, she wanted to tell him. Such a cliché but so much truth within it.

She said to him, “Thomas, do you fancy a walk? There’s something I’d like to show you. It’s a bit of a way…perhaps a mile up the coast along the path, but it’ll give us something of an appetite for dinner.”

She thought he might refuse, but he did not. He nodded and she gestured him to follow her. They headed in the direction from which she’d just come, dipping down at first into another cove, where great fins of slate shot out of the encroaching surf and reached towards a treacherous cliff top of sandstone and shale. The wind and the waves made talking difficult, as did their positions—one behind the other—so Daidre said nothing, nor did Thomas Lynley. It was, she decided, better this way. Letting a moment pass without acknowledging it further was sometimes a more efficacious approach to healing than troubling a developing scar.

Spring had brought wildflowers into areas more protected by the wind, and along the way into combes the yellow of ragwort mixed with the pinks of thrift while bluebells still marked the spots where ancient forests had once stood. There was scant habitation in the immediate environs of the cliffs when they ascended, but in the distance stone-built farmhouses crouched alongside their greater-size barns, and the cattle these served grazed in paddocks that were marked by Cornwall’s earthen hedgerows with their rich vegetation where dog rose and pennywort grew.

The nearest village was a place called Alsperyl, which was also their destination. This comprised a church, a vicarage, a collection of cottages, an ancient schoolhouse, and a pub. All fashioned from the unpainted stone of the district, they sat some half mile to the east of the cliff path, beyond a lumpy paddock. Only the church spire was visible. Daidre pointed this out and said, “St. Morwenna’s, but we’re going this way just a bit farther if you can manage.”

He nodded, and she felt foolish with her final remark. He was hardly infirm and grief did not rob one of the ability to walk. She nodded in turn and led him perhaps another two hundred yards where a break in the wind-tossed heather on the seaside edge of the path gave way to steps hewn into stone.

She said, “It’s not much of a descent, but have care. The edge is still deadly. And we’re…I don’t know…perhaps one hundred fifty feet above the water?”

Down a set of steps, which curved with the natural form of the cliff side, they came to another little path, nearly overgrown with gorse and patches of English stonecrop that somehow thrived here despite the wind. Perhaps twenty yards along, the path ended abruptly, but not with a precipitous cliff edge as one might expect. Rather, a small hut had been hewn into the cliff face. It was fronted with the old driftwood of ruined ships and sided—where such sides emerged beyond the cliff face itself—with small blocks of sandstone. Its wooden face was grey with age. The hinges that served its rough Dutch door bled rust onto pitted panels.

Daidre glanced back at Thomas Lynley to see his reaction: such a structure in such a remote location. His eyes had widened, and a smile crooked his mouth. His expression seemed to say to her, What is this place?

She replied to his unasked question, speaking above the wind that buffeted them. “Isn’t it marvelous, Thomas? It’s called Hedra’s Hut. Evidently—if the journal of the reverend Mr. Walcombe is to be believed—it’s been here since the late eighteenth century.”

“Did he build it?”

“Mr. Walcombe? No, no. He wasn’t a builder, but he was quite a chronicler. He kept a journal of the doings round Alsperyl. I found it in the library in Casvelyn. He was the vicar of St. Morwenna’s for…I don’t know…forty years, perhaps? He tried to save the tormented soul who did build this place.”

“Ah. That would be the Hedra from Hedra’s Hut, then?”

“The very woman. Apparently, she was widowed when her husband—who fished the waters out of Polcare Cove—was caught in a storm and drowned, leaving her with one young son. According to Mr. Walcombe—who does not generally embellish his facts—the boy disappeared one day, likely having ventured too near the edge of the cliff in an area too friable to support his weight. Rather than confront the deaths of both husband and son within six months of each other, poor Hedra chose to believe a selkie had taken the boy. She told herself he’d wandered down to the water—God knows how he managed it from this height—and there the seal waited in her human form and beckoned him into the sea to join the rest of the…” She frowned. “Blast. I’ve quite forgotten what a group of seals is called. It can’t be a herd. A pod? But that’s whales. Well, no matter at the moment. That’s what happened. Hedra built this hut to watch for his return, and that’s what she did for the rest of her life. It’s a poignant story, isn’t it?”

“Is it true?”

“If we can believe Mr. Walcombe. Come inside. There’s more to see. Let’s get out of the wind.”

The upper and lower doors closed by means of wooden bars that slid through rough wooden handles and rested on hooks. As she pushed the top one back and then the bottom one, and swung the doors open, she said over her shoulder, “Hedra knew what she was about. She gave herself quite a sturdy place to wait for her son. It’s framed in timber all round. Each side has a bench, the roof has quite decent beams to hold it up, and the floor is slate. It’s as if she knew she’d be waiting for a while, isn’t it?”

She led the way in, but then stopped short. Behind her, she heard him duck under the low lintel to join her. She said, “Oh blast,” in disgust and he said, “Now, that’s a shame.”

The wall directly in front of them had been defaced and defaced recently if the freshness of the cuts into the wooden panels of the little building were anything to go by. The remains of a heart which had been earlier carved into the wood—no doubt accompanied by lovers’ initials—curved round a series of vicious hack marks that now gouged deeply, as if into flesh. No initials were left.

“Well,” Daidre said, trying to sound philosophical about the mess, “I suppose it’s not as if the walls haven’t already been carved up. And at least it isn’t spray paint. But still…One wonders…Why do people do such things?”

Thomas was observing the rest of the hut, with its more than two hundred years of carvings: initials, dates, other hearts, the occasional name. He said thoughtfully, “Where I went to school, there’s a wall…It’s not too far from the entry, actually, so no visitor can ever miss it…Pupils have put their initials into it for…I don’t know…I expect they’ve done it since the time of Henry the sixth. Whenever I go back—because I do go back occasionally…one does—I look for mine. They’re still there. They somehow say I’m real, I existed then, I exist even now. But when I look at all the others—and there are hundreds, probably thousands of them—I can’t help thinking how fleeting life is. It’s the same thing here, isn’t it?”

“I suppose it is.” She ran her fingers over several of the older carvings: a Celtic cross, the name Daniel, B.J. + S.R. “I like to come here to think,” she told him. “Sometimes I wonder who were these people all coupled together so confidently. And did their love last? I wonder that as well.”

For his part, Lynley touched the poor gouged heart. “Nothing lasts,” he said. “That’s our curse.”

BEA HANNAFORD SAW MUCH THAT SEEMED TYPICAL IN SANTO Kerne’s bedroom, and for the first time she was glad to have Constable McNulty doing penance as her dogsbody. For the walls of Santo’s bedroom bore a plethora of surfing posters and, from what Bea could tell, what McNulty didn’t know about surfing, the locations of the photos, and the surfers themselves didn’t actually bear knowing. She couldn’t conclude that his knowledge was in any way relevant to anything, however. She was merely relieved that, at the end of the day, McNulty did know something about something.

“Jaws,” he murmured obscurely, gazing awestruck at a liquid mountain down which a thumb-size madman rushed. “Bloody hell, look at that bloke. That’s Hamilton, off Maui. He’s dead mad. He’ll do anything. Christ, this looks like a tsunami, doesn’t it?” He whistled low and shook his head.

Ben Kerne was with them, but he didn’t venture into the room. His wife had remained below, in the lounge. It had been obvious that Kerne hadn’t wanted to leave her on her own, but he’d been caught between the police and his spouse. He couldn’t accommodate one while attempting to monitor the other. He’d had little choice in the matter, then. They would either wander the hotel till they found Santo’s bedroom as he saw to his wife, or he would have to take them there. He’d chosen the latter, but it was fairly clear that his mind was elsewhere.

“So far we’ve heard nothing about Santo and surfing,” Bea said to Ben Kerne, who stood in the doorway.

Kerne said, “He started surfing when we first came to Casvelyn.”

“Is his surfing kit here? Board, wet suit, whatever else…”

“Hood,” McNulty murmured. “Gloves, boots, extra fins—”

“That’ll do, Constable,” Bea told him sharply. “Mr. Kerne probably gets the point.”

“No,” Ben Kerne said. “He kept his kit elsewhere.”

“Did he? Why?” Bea said. “Not exactly convenient, is it?”