Careless In Red (29 page)

Then he walked towards the beach, the seawater pouring off him like a discarded cape. He trudged in the direction of the stairs.

As he did so, a figure—midnight silhouette—came forward to meet him.

KERRA HAD SEEN HIM leave the hotel. At first she hadn’t known it was her father. Indeed, for a mad moment her leaping heart had declared it to be Santo beneath her, striding across the terrace and up the steps towards the promontory and St. Mevan Beach to have a secret surf at night. She’d watched from above, and seeing only the black-garbed figure and knowing that figure had come out of the hotel…There was nothing else for her to think. It had all been a mistake, she’d thought nonsensically. A terrible, ghastly, horrible mistake. There was some other body discovered at the base of that cliff in Polcare Cove, but it was not her brother.

So she’d hurried to the stairs and she’d clattered down them, as the antique lift would have been too slow. She dashed through the dining hall, which, like the equipment room, opened onto the terrace, and she set across this and flew up the stairs. By the time she reached the promontory, the black-garbed figure was down on the beach, squatting next to the surfboard. So she waited there and there she watched. Only as he approached her after riding a single wave did she realise it was her father.

She was filled with questions and then with fury, with the eternal and unanswerable why’s of nearly everything that had defined her childhood. Why did you pretend…? Why did you argue with Santo about…? And beyond that, the who of it all. Who are you, Dad?

But she asked none of these half-formed questions as her father reached her position at the base of the steps. Instead she tried in the semidarkness to read his face.

He paused. His expression seemed to soften and he looked as if he intended to speak. But when he finally opened his mouth, it was only to say, “Kerra, love,” and then he passed her. He climbed the steps to the promontory path, and she followed him. Wordlessly, they approached the hotel, where they descended towards the empty swimming pool. At a hosepipe, her father paused and washed the seawater from his surfboard. Then he went on, into the hotel.

In the equipment room, he stripped off his wet suit. He was wearing his undershorts beneath it, and his skin was pimpled with the cold. But this didn’t seem to bother him because he didn’t shiver. Instead, he carried the wet suit to a large, heavy plastic rubbish bin in the corner of the room, and he dumped it inside without ceremony. The dripping surfboard he carried into another room—an inner room, Kerra saw, a room she had not yet investigated in the hotel—and there he put it into a cupboard. This he locked with a padlock, which he then tested, as if to make sure the cupboard’s contents were safe from prying eyes. From family eyes, she realised. From her eyes and from Santo’s eyes because her mother must have known this secret all along.

Santo, Kerra thought. The sheer hypocrisy of it all. She simply did not understand.

Her father used his T-shirt to dry himself off. He tossed it to one side and donned his pullover. He motioned for her to turn her back, which she did and heard the sound of him removing his undershorts, plopping them onto the floor, and then zipping his trousers. Then he said, “All right.” She turned back to him, and they faced each other. He waited, clearly, for her questions.

She determined to surprise him as he’d surprised her. So what she said was, “It’s because of her, isn’t it?”

“Who?”

“Mum. You couldn’t surf and watch her at the same time, so you stopped surfing. That’s why, isn’t it? I saw you, Dad. How long has it been? Twenty years? More?”

“Yes. Since before you were born.”

“So you put on your wet suit, you went out there, you took the first wave that came along, and that was it. No trouble. It was easy for you. It was child’s play for you. It was nothing. Like walking. Like breathing.”

“Yes. All right. It was.”

“Which means…How long had you surfed when you stopped?”

Her father picked up his T-shirt and folded it neatly, despite its condition, which was damp through. He said, “Most of my life. It’s what we did in those days. There was nothing else. You’ve seen how your grandparents live. We had the beach in the summer and school the rest of the time. There was work at home, trying to keep that bloody house from falling apart, and when there was free time, we surfed. There was no money for holidays. No cheap flights to Spain. It wasn’t like today.”

“But you stopped.”

“I stopped. Things change, Kerra.”

“Yes. She came along. That was the change. You got caught up in her, and by the time you saw what she’s really like, it was too late. You couldn’t get away. So you had to make a choice and you chose her.”

“It’s not that simple.” He moved past her, out of the smaller room and into the larger equipment room. He waited for her to follow him and when she was with him, he shut and locked the smaller room’s door.

“Did Santo know?”

“About?”

“This.” She gestured to the door he’d locked. “You were good, weren’t you? I saw enough to know that. So why…?” Suddenly, she was as close to weeping as she’d come in the last terrible thirty hours or so.

He was watching her. She saw that he looked ineffably sad, and in that sadness she understood that while they were a family—the four of them then, the three of them now—they were a family in name only. Beyond a common surname, they were and had always been merely a repository of secrets. She’d believed that all of these secrets had to do with her mother, with her mother’s troubles, her mother’s periods of bizarre alteration. And these were secrets to which she herself had long been a party because there was no way to avoid knowing them when the simple act of coming home from school might put her in the midst of what had always been referred to as “a bit of an embarrassing situation.” Don’t breathe a word to Dad, darling. But Dad knew anyway. All of them knew by the clothes she wore, the tilt of her head when she was speaking, the rhythm of her sentences, the tap of her fingers on the table during dinner, and the restlessness of her gaze. And the red. They knew from the red. For Kerra and Santo, what came on the heels of that colour was a prolonged visit to the elder Kernes and “What’s the cow up to now?” from her granddad. But “Say nothing to your grandparents about this, understand?” was the injunction that Kerra and Santo had lived by. Keep the faith, keep the secret, and eventually things would return to normal, whatever normal was.

But now Kerra understood there were even more secrets than those which she’d kept about her mother: arcane bits of knowledge that went beyond Dellen’s convoluted psyche and touched upon Kerra’s father as well. Embracing this stinging piece of truth, Kerra realised there was no solid place to put down her foot if she wished to walk forward and pass into the future.

“I was thirteen years old,” she said. “There was a bloke I liked, called Stuart. He was fourteen and he had terrible spots, and I liked him. The spots made him seem safe, you know? Only he wasn’t safe. It’s funny actually because all I’d done was go to the kitchen to fetch us some jam tarts and a drink—less than five minutes—and that’s all it took. Stuart didn’t understand what was going on. But I knew, didn’t I, because I’d grown up knowing. So had Santo. Only he was safe because—let’s face it—he was just like her.”

“Not in all ways,” her father said. “No. Not that.”

“That,” she said. “You know it. That. And in ways that affected me.”

“Ah. Madlyn.”

“We were best friends. Before Santo got his hands on her.”

“Kerra, Santo didn’t intend—”

“Yes, he did. He bloody well did. And the worst part of it was that he didn’t need to pursue her. He was already pursuing…what…three other girls? Or was it that he’d already been through three other girls?” She knew that she sounded what she was: bitter. But it seemed to her in that moment that nothing in her life had ever been secure from depredation.

Her father said, “Kerra, people go their own way. There’s nothing you can do about it.”

“Do you actually believe that? Is that how you defend her? Defend him?”

“I’m not—”

“You are. You always have done, at least when it comes to her. She’s made a fool of you for my entire life and I’ll put money down on the bet she’s made a fool of you since the day you met her.”

If Ben was offended by Kerra’s remark, he didn’t say so. Rather he said, “It’s not your mother I’m talking about, love, and it’s not Santo. It’s this Stuart lad, whoever he was. It’s Madlyn Angarrack.” He paused before finishing with, “It’s Alan, Kerra. It’s everyone. People will go their own way. You’re best off to let them.”

“Like you did, you mean?”

“I can’t explain things further.”

“Because it’s a secret?” she asked, and she did not care that the question sounded like a taunt. “Like everything else in your life? Like the surfing?”

“We don’t choose where to love. We don’t choose who to love.”

“I don’t believe that for a moment,” she said. “Tell me why you didn’t like Santo surfing.”

“Because I believed no good would come of it.”

“Is that what happened to you?”

He said nothing. For a moment, Kerra thought he would not reply. But at last he said what she knew he would say. “Yes. Not a single good came of it for me. So I lay down the board and got on with my life.”

“With her,” Kerra noted.

“Yes. With your mother.”

DI BEA HANNAFORD ARRIVED AT THE POLICE STATION LATE, in a foul mood and with Ray’s parting words still gnawing at her. She didn’t want anything Ray had to say taking up residence in her consciousness, but he had a way of transmuting good-bye from an innocuous social moment into the bolt from a crossbow, and one had to be quick to avoid getting hit. She was fast on her verbal feet when there was nothing else on her mind. But that was impossible in the middle of a murder enquiry.

She’d had to cave in on the issue of Pete, another reason she was late to the station. Given the absence of MCIT officers to work the case, given only the loan of a TAG team—and who the bloody hell knew when they were going to be withdrawn?—she would be putting in long hours, and someone had to look after Pete. Not so much because Pete couldn’t look after himself, since he’d been cooking for years and he’d mastered the art of laundry the first time his mother had turned a beloved Arsenal T-shirt purple, but because he had to be ferried about from school to football coaching to this or that appointment and his time on the Internet had to be watched and his homework had to be monitored or he wouldn’t bother to do it. He was, in short, an average fourteen-year-old boy who needed regular parenting. Bea knew she ought to be grateful that her former husband was willing to step up to the challenge.

Except…She was convinced that Ray had orchestrated the entire situation just for that reason: to obtain unimpeded access to Pete. He wanted a more definite inroad with their son, and he’d seen this as an opportunity to make one. Pete’s new enthusiasm at having to stay at his father’s house suggested Ray was having some success in this area as well, which caused Bea to question exactly what constituted Ray’s approach to fatherhood: from the meals he served Pete to the freedom he gave him.

So she’d grilled her former husband as Pete had trotted off to the spare room—his room, as he had referred to it—to stow his belongings, and Ray had tunneled his way through her questions to their root, in his typical fashion. “He’s happy to be here because he loves me,” was his reply. “Just as he’s happy to be with you because he loves you. He has two parents, not one, Beatrice. All things in the balance, this is good, you know.”

She wanted to say, “Two parents? Oh, right. That’s brilliant, Ray,” but instead she said, “I don’t want him exposed to any—”

“Naked twenty-five-year-old women running about the house?” he asked. “Fear not. I’ve told my stable of beauties normally in residence here at the Playboy Mansion that the orgies are postponed indefinitely. Their hearts are broken—my own is devastated—but there you have it. Pete comes first.” He’d leaned against the kitchen work top. He’d been sorting through yesterday’s post, and there was no indication that anyone else was present in the house. She’d checked this as surreptitiously as possible, telling herself she did not want Pete exposed to anyone’s casual sex, not at his age and not before she’d had the opportunity to explain to him each one of the sexually transmitted diseases he could end up with if he played fast and loose with his body parts.

“You have,” Ray told her, “the oddest damn ideas of how I spend what little free time I possess, my dear.”

She didn’t engage. Instead she gave him a bag of groceries because she was damned if she was going to be in debt to him for having Pete to stay during a time when he was not scheduled to do so. Then she’d barked out their son’s name, hugged him good-bye, kissed him on the cheek with the loudest smack she could manage despite his squirming and his “Oh, Mum,” and she’d left the house.

Ray had followed her to her car. It was windy and grey outside, beginning to rain as well, but he didn’t hurry or seek shelter from the weather. He waited till she got in and he motioned for her to lower the window. When she’d done so, he leaned down and said, “What’s it going to take, Beatrice?”

She said, “What?” and she didn’t bother to hide her irritation.

“For you to forgive. What do I need to do?”

She shook her head, reversed down the driveway, and drove off. But she’d not been able to shake his question.

She was predisposed to be annoyed with Sergeant Collins and Constable McNulty when she finally strode into the station, but the two miserable louts made it impossible for her to feel anything close to annoyance. Collins had somehow risen to the occasion of her tardiness, deploying half of the TAG officers to canvass the area within a three-mile radius of Polcare Cove to see if they could come up with anything of note from those few who lived there in the several hamlets and on the farms. The others he’d told to work on background checks of everyone so far connected to the crime: each of the Kernes—and especially Ben Kerne’s financial status and whether that status was altered by his son’s demise—Madlyn Angarrack, her family, Daidre Trahair, Thomas Lynley, and Alan Cheston. Everyone was being asked for fingerprints, and the Kernes had been given the word that Santo’s body was ready for the formality of identification in Truro.