Careless In Red (28 page)

Not unlike Ben himself and Santo, Ben realised now. The very hell of being a father was realising one’s own father cast a shadow one could not hope to escape.

He studied the calendar. Four weeks to opening and they had to open although he couldn’t see how they might be able to do so. His heart wasn’t in it, but they had so much money invested in the business that not to open or to postpone opening wasn’t an alternative he could choose. Besides, to Ben the bookings they had were covenants that could not be broken, and while there weren’t as many as he’d dreamed of having at this point in the business’s development, he had faith that bringing onboard Alan Cheston was going to take care of that. Alan had ideas and the wherewithal to make them into realities. He was clever, and a leader as well. Most important, he was not a bit like Santo.

Ben hated the disloyalty of the thought. In thinking it, he was doing what he vowed he would never do: repeat the past. You’re following your effing prong, boy! had been his father’s words, intoned with variation only in the emotion that underscored them: from sadness to fury to derision to contempt. Santo had done much the same, and Ben didn’t want to think what lay behind his son’s proclivity for sexual dalliance or where such a proclivity might have taken him.

Before he could avoid any longer, he picked up the phone on his desk. He punched in the numbers. He had little doubt his father would still be up and about the ramshackle house. Like Ben, Eddie Kerne was an insomniac. He’d be awake for hours yet, doing whatever it was one did at night when committed to a green lifestyle, as his father long had been. Eddie Kerne and his family had had electricity only if he could produce it from the wind or from water; they had water only if he could divert it from a stream or bring it up in a well. They had heat when solar panels produced it, they grew or raised what they needed for their food, and their house had been a derelict farm building, bought for a bargain and rescued from destruction by Eddie Kerne and his sons: granite stone by granite stone, whitewashed, roofed, and windowed so inexpertly that the winter wind hissed through the spaces between the frames and the walls.

His father answered in his usual way, with the barked greeting, “Speaking.” When Ben didn’t say anything at once, his father went on with, “If you’re there, start yapping. If not, get off the line.”

“It’s Ben,” Ben said.

“Ben who?”

“Benesek. I didn’t wake you, did I?”

After a brief pause, “And what if you did? You caring for anyone ’sides yourself these days?”

Like father, like son, Ben wanted to reply. I had a very good teacher. Instead he said, “Santo’s been killed. It happened yesterday. I thought you’d want to know, as he was fond of you and I thought perhaps the feeling was mutual.”

Another pause. This one was longer. And then, “Bastard,” his father said. His voice was so tight that Ben thought it might break. “Bastard. You don’t effing change, do you?”

“Do you want to know what happened to Santo?”

“What’d you let him get up to?”

“What did I do this time, you mean?”

“What happened, damn you. What God damn happened?”

Ben told him as briefly as possible. In the end he added the fact of murder. He didn’t call it murder. He used homicide instead. “Someone damaged his climbing kit,” he told his father.

“God damn.” Eddie Kerne’s voice had altered, from anger to shock. But he shifted back to anger quickly. “And what the hell were you doing while he was climbing some bloody cliff? Watching him? Egging him on? Or having it off with her?”

“He was climbing alone. I didn’t know he’d gone. I don’t know why he went.” The last was a lie, but he couldn’t bear to give his father any additional ammunition. “They thought at first it was an accident. But when they looked at his equipment, they saw it had been tampered with.”

“By who?”

“Well, they don’t know that, Dad. If they knew, they’d make an arrest and matters would be settled.”

“Settled? That’s how you talk about the death of your son? Of your flesh and blood? Of the means of carrying on your name? Settled? Matters get settled and you just go on? That it, Benesek? You and whatsername just stroll into the future and put the past behind you? But then, you’re good at doing that, aren’t you? So is she. She’s bleeding brilliant at doing that, ’f I recall right. How’s she taking all this? Getting in the way of her lifestyle, is it?”

Ben had forgotten the nasty emphases in his father’s speech, loaded words and pointed questions, all designed to carve away one’s fragile sense of self. No one was meant to be an individual in Eddie Kerne’s world. Family meant adherence to a single belief and a single way of life. Like father, like son, he thought abruptly. What a cock-up he’d made of the rough form of paternity he’d actually been granted.

Ben said, “There’s no funeral planned yet. The police haven’t released the body. I’ve not seen him, even.”

“Then how the hell d’you know it’s Santo?”

“As his car was at the site, as his identification was in the car, as he hasn’t returned home yet, I think it’s safe to assume the body is Santo.”

“You’re a piece of work, Benesek. Talking about your own son like that.”

“What do you want me to say when nothing I say is going to be right? I phoned to tell you because you’re going to learn about it anyway from the police, and I thought—”

“You don’t want that, do you? Me ’n’ cops in a converse. My jaw wagging and their ears perked up.”

“If that’s what you believe,” Ben said. “What I was going to say is that I reckoned you’d appreciate hearing the news from me and not from the police. They’ll be talking to you and Mum. They’ll be talking to everyone associated with Santo. I thought you’d want to know what they were doing on your property when they finally show up.”

“Oh, I’d reckon it’d have to do with you,” Eddie Kerne said.

“Yes. I suppose you would.”

Ben rang off then, no farewell given. He’d been standing, but now he sat at his desk. He felt a great pressure building within him, as if a tumour in his chest was growing to a size that would cut off his breath. The room seemed close. Soon the air would be used up.

What he needed was escape. Like always, his father would have said. His father: a man who rewrote history to suit whatever purpose the moment demanded. But there was no history to this moment. There was only getting through the now.

He rose. He went along the corridors to the equipment room, where he’d earlier gone himself and where he’d taken DI Hannaford. This time, though, he didn’t approach the row of long cupboards where the climbing equipment was stored. Rather, he went through the room to a smaller one, where a storage cupboard the size of a large wardrobe had a padlock hanging from a hasp. He possessed the only key to this lock, and he used it now. When he swung it open, the scent of old rubber was strong. It had been more than twenty years, he thought. Before Kerra’s birth, even. Likely the thing would fall apart.

But it didn’t. He was in the wet suit before he had a clear thought as to why he was in it, shoulders to ankles in neoprene, pulling the zip up his back by its cord, one hard tug and the rest was easy. No corrosion because he’d always taken care of his kit.

“Come on, come on, let’s bloody get home,” his mates would say to him. “Don’t be such a wanker, Kerne. We’re freezing our arses out here.”

But there was a hosepipe available, and he’d used it to rinse the saltwater off. Then he did the same when he got his kit home. Surfing kits were expensive and he had no intention of needing to purchase another because saltwater had corroded and rotted the one he owned. So he washed the wet suit thoroughly—its boots, gloves, and hood as well—and he washed the board. His mates hooted and called him a poofter, but he would not be moved from his intentions.

In that and in everything else, he thought now. He felt cursed by his own determination.

The board was in the cupboard as well. He eased it out and examined it. Not a ding anywhere, the deck still waxed. A real antique by the standards of today, but perfectly suitable for what he intended. Whatever that was, because he didn’t quite know. He just wanted to be out of the hotel. He scooped up boots, gloves, and hood. He tucked the surfboard under his arm.

The equipment room had a door that led to the terrace and from there to the still empty swimming pool. A concrete stairway at the far end of the pool area took one up to the promontory for which the old hotel had been named, and a path along the edge of this promontory followed the curve of St. Mevan Beach. A line of beach huts were tucked into the cliff here, not the standard huts which were generally freestanding, but rather a joined rank of them, looking like a long and low-slung stable with narrow blue doors.

Ben followed this route, breathing in the cold salt air and listening to the crash of the waves. He paused above the beach huts to don his neoprene hood, but the boots and gloves he would pull on when he got to the edge of the water.

He looked out at the sea. The tide was high, so the reefs were covered, and the reefs would keep the waves consistent. From this distance five feet seemed their size, with swells coming from the south. They were breaking right, with an offshore wind. Had it been daylight—even dawn or dusk—conditions would be considered good, even at this time of year when the water would be as cold as a witch’s heart.

No one surfed at night. There were too many dangers, from sharks to reefs to rips. But this wasn’t so much about surfing as it was about remembering, and while Ben didn’t want to remember, talking to his father was forcing him to do so. It was either that or remaining within the Promontory King George Hotel, and that he could not do.

He descended the steps to the beach. There were no lights here, but tall streetlamps that followed the path along the promontory above shed at least some illumination onto the rocks and sand. He picked his way through hunks of slate and sandstone boulders, clitter from the cliff top that now formed the base of the promontory, and he stepped at last onto the sand. This wasn’t the soft sand of a tropical isle, but rather the grit produced over eons as a frozen land of permafrost warmed till slow-moving landslides left coarse gravel in their wake, and water forever beating upon these stones reduced them to hard little grains that glittered in sunlight but shone dull otherwise, grey and dun coloured, unforgiving upon flesh and abrasive to the touch.

To his right was the Sea Pit, high tide filling it with new water now, nearly submersing it in order to do so. To his left was the tributary of the River Cas and beyond it what remained of the Casvelyn Canal. In front of him was the sea, restless and demanding. It drew him forward.

He set his board on the sand and donned his boots and gloves. He squatted for a moment—a huddled figure in black with his back to Casvelyn—and he watched the phosphorescence in the waves. He’d been to the beach at night as a youth, but those visits had not been for a surf. With their surfing done for the day, they’d make a fire ring. When embers were all that was left of the blaze, they’d pair off and if the tide was low, the great sea caves of Pengelly Cove beckoned. There they’d make love. On a blanket or not. Semiclothed or nude. Drunk, slightly tipsy, or sober.

She’d been younger then. She’d been his. She was what he wanted, all that he wanted. She had known it as well, and the trouble had come from that knowing.

He rose and approached the water with his board. He had no leash for it, but that didn’t matter. If it got away from him, it got away from him. Like so much else in his life, keeping the board close by should he fall from it was a concern beyond his control just now.

His feet and ankles felt the shock of the cold first and then his legs and thighs and upwards. It would take a few moments for his body temperature to warm the water within his wet suit, and in the meantime the bitter cold of it reminded him he was alive.

Thigh deep, he eased onto the board and began to paddle out through the white water towards the right-hand reef break. The spray hit his face and the waves washed over him. He thought—briefly—he might paddle forever, straight into morning, paddle until he was so far from shore that Cornwall itself would be only a memory. But instead, bleakly governed by love and by duty, he stopped beyond the reef at the swells, and there he straddled his board. He sat first with his back to the shore, looking out at the vast and undulating sea. Then he turned the board round and saw the lights of Casvelyn: the line of tall lamps shining whitely along the promontory and then the amber glow behind the curtained windows of the houses in town, like the gaslights of the nineteenth century, or the open fires of an earlier time.

The swells were seductive, offering him a hypnotic rhythm that was as comforting as it was false. It felt, he thought, like a return to the womb. One could stretch out on the board, bob in the sea, and sleep forever. But swells broke—the sheer volume of the water collapsing in on itself—as the landmass beneath it sloped up into the shore. There was danger here as well as seduction. One had to act or one submitted to the force of the waves.

He wondered if, after all these years, he would recognise the moment: that confluence of shape, force, and curl telling the surfer it was time to drop in. But some things ultimately were second nature, and he found that taking a wave was one of them. Understanding and experience coalesced into skill, and the passage of time had not robbed him of that.

The peak built, and he rose with it: paddling first, then up on one knee, and then erect. No deck grip at the tail of the board, holding the back foot in position, because on this board—on his board—such a device had never been placed. He skimmed for a second across the wave’s shoulder. He dropped into its face. He carved, getting high and fast, with his muscles acting on memory alone. Then he was in the barrel and it was clean. Green room, mate, they would have yelled. Sheeee-it! You’re in the green room, Kerne.

He rode until there was only white water, and there he stepped off, thigh deep in the shallows once again, catching the board before it got away from him. He paused with the inside waves breaking against him. His breath came hard, and he stood there till the pounding of his heart grew slower.