Careless In Red (39 page)

“I’d no idea,” Lynley said. While Daidre looked at a dismal arrangement of fruit just inside the shop door, he was making a purchase of postcards that he would never use, along with stamps, a local newspaper, and a roll of breath mints, which he would. “The original Kernes had quite a brood, then?”

The postmistress rang up his selections. “Seven in all, Ann and Eddie produced. And all of them still round save the oldest. That would be Benesek. He’s been gone for donkey’s years. Are you friends of the Kernes?” The woman looked from Lynley to Daidre. She sounded doubtful.

Lynley said that he wasn’t a friend. He produced his police identification. The postmistress’s expression altered. Cops and Caution could not have been written more plainly on her face.

“Ben Kerne’s son has been killed,” Lynley told her.

“Has he?” she said, a hand moving to her heart. Unconsciously, she cupped her left breast. “Oh Lord. Now that’s a very sad bit of news. What happened to him?”

“Did you know Santo Kerne?”

“Wouldn’t be anyone round here who doesn’t know Santo. They stayed with Eddie and Ann on occasion when he and his sister—that would be Kerra—were little ’uns. Ann’d bring ’em in for sweets or ices. Not Eddie, though. Never Eddie. He doesn’t come to the village if he can help it. Hasn’t for years.”

“Why?”

“Some’d say too proud. Some’d say too shamed. But not his Ann. Besides, she had to work, hadn’t she, so Eddie could have his dream of living green.”

“Shamed about what?” Lynley asked.

She gave a brief smile, but Lynley knew it had nothing to do with friendliness or humour. Rather, it had to do with acknowledging the position each of them was in at the moment: he the professional interlocutor and she the source of information. “Small village,” she said. “When things go bad for someone, they c’n stay bad. If you know what I mean.”

It might have been a statement about the Kernes, but it also could have been a statement about her own position, and Lynley understood this. Postmistress and shopkeeper, she’d know a great deal about what was going on in Pengelly Cove. Citizen of the village, she would also know the course of wisdom was to keep her mouth closed about things that did not matter to an outsider.

“You’ll have to speak to Ann or Eddie,” she said. “Ann’s got a bit of a language problem from the stroke she had, but Eddie’ll bend your ear, I expect. You speak to Eddie. He’ll be at home.”

She gave them directions to the Kerne property, which proved to be a number of acres northeast of Pengelly Cove, a former sheep farm that had been transformed by one family’s attempt to live green.

Lynley accessed the land alone, Daidre having decided to remain in the village until his business with the Kernes was completed. He entered the property by means of a disintegrating rusty gate, which stretched across a stony lane but was unlocked. He rattled along for three-quarters of a mile before seeing a habitation, midway down the hillside. It was a mishmash of architecture characterised by wattle and daub, stone, tiles, timbers, scaffolding, and sheets of heavy plastic. The house could have been from any century. The fact that it was standing at all made it something of a marvel.

Not far beyond it, a waterwheel turned at the base of a sluice, both of them roughly constructed. The former appeared to be a source of electricity, if its connection to a hulking but rusty generator was any indication. The latter appeared to be redirecting a woodland stream so that it provided water to the wheel, to a pond, and then to a series of channels, which served an enormous garden. This was newly planted by the look of it, waiting for the sun of late spring and summer. A huge compost pile made an amorphous lump nearby.

Lynley parked near a stand of old bicycles. Only one of them had inflated tyres, and all of them were rusting to the point of disintegration. There appeared to be no direct route to the front or back door of the house. A path meandered from the bicycles in the vague direction of the scaffolding, but once in its near presence, it transformed to the occasional brick or two lying together amidst trampled weeds. By stepping from one set of bricks to the other, Lynley finally reached what seemed to be the entrance to the house: a door so pitted by weather, rot, and insect life that it seemed hardly credible to assume it was in working order.

It was, however. A few knocks forcefully applied to wood brought him face-to-face with an old and badly shaven gentleman, one eye clouded by a cataract. He was roughly and somewhat colourfully dressed in old khaki trousers and a lime green cardigan that was drooping round the elbows. He had sandals and orange-and-brown Argyll socks on his feet. Lynley decided he had to be Eddie Kerne. He produced his identification for the man as he introduced himself.

Kerne looked from it to him. He turned and walked away from the door, heading wordlessly back into the bowels of the house. The door hung open, so Lynley assumed he was meant to follow, which he did.

The interior of the house wasn’t a great improvement over the exterior. It appeared to be a work long in progress, if the age of the exposed timbers was anything to go by. Walls along the central passage into the place had long ago been taken down to their framing, but there was no scent of freshly replaced wood here. Instead there was a fur of dust upon the timbers, suggesting that a job had been begun years in the past without ever reaching completion.

A workshop was Kerne’s destination, and to get to it he led Lynley through a kitchen and a laundry room that featured a washing machine with an old-fashioned wringer and thick cords crisscrossing the ceiling where clothing was hung to dry in inclement weather. This room emanated the heavy scent of mildew, a sensory ambience only moderately improved upon when they got to the workshop beyond it. They reached this spot by means of a doorless opening in the far wall of the laundry room, separated from the rest of the house by a thick sheet of plastic that Kerne shoved to one side. This same sort of plastic covered what went for windows in the workshop, a room that had been fashioned more recently than the rest of the house: It was made of unadorned concrete blocks. It was frigid within, like an old-time larder without the marble shelves.

Lynley thought of the term man-cave when he stepped into the workshop. A workbench, haphazardly hung cupboards, one tall stool, and myriad tools were crammed within, and the overall impression was one of sawdust, oil leakage, paint spills, and general filth. It comprised a somewhat dubious spot for a bloke to escape the wife and children, with his excuse the crucial tinkering on this or that project.

There appeared to be plenty of them on Eddie Kerne’s workbench: part of a hoover, two broken lamps, a hair dryer missing its flex, five teacups wanting handles, a small footstool belching its stuffing. Kerne seemed to be at work on the teacups, for an uncapped tube of glue was adding to the other scents in the room, most of which were associated with the damp. Tuberculosis seemed the likely outcome of an extended stay in such a place, and Kerne had a heavy cough that made Lynley think of poor Keats writing anguished letters to his beloved Fanny.

“Can’t tell you nothing,” was Kerne’s opening remark. He made it over his shoulder as he picked up one of the teacups and squinted at it, comparing a dismembered handle to the spot at which one had been shattered from the cup. “Know why you’re here, don’t I, but I can’t tell you nothing.”

“You’ve been informed about your grandson’s death.”

“Phoned, didn’t he.” Kerne hawked but mercifully did not spit. “Gave me the word. That’s it.”

“Your son? Ben Kerne? He phoned?”

“The same. Good for that, he was.” The emphasis on that indicated what else Kerne deemed his son good for, which was nothing.

“I understand Ben hasn’t lived in Pengelly Cove for a number of years,” Lynley said.

“Wouldn’t have him round.” Kerne grabbed up the tube of glue and applied a good-size dollop to both ends of the handle he’d chosen for the teacup. He had a steady hand, which was good for such employment. He had an unfortunate eye, which was bad. The handle clearly belonged to a different cup, as the colour wasn’t right and the shape was even less so. Nonetheless, Kerne held it in place, waiting for some acceptable form of agglutination to occur. “Sent him off to his uncle in Truro and there he stayed. Had to, didn’t he, once she followed him there.”

“She?”

Kerne shot him a look, one eyebrow raised. It was the sort of look that said You don’t know yet? “The wife,” he said shortly.

“Ben’s wife. The present Mrs. Kerne?”

“That’d be her. He went off to escape, and she was hot on his tail. Just like he was hot on hers and into hers, if you’ll pardon the expression. She’s a piece of work and I want no part of her and no part of him whilst he stays with the scrubber. Source of everything went wrong with him from day one till now, that Dellen Nankervis. And you c’n note that down in your whatever if you want. And note who said it. I’m not shamed of my feelings, as every one of them’s proved right over the years.” He sounded angry, but the anger seemed to be hiding what had been broken within him.

“They’ve been together a long time,” Lynley noted.

“And now Santo.” Kerne grabbed another teacup and handle. “You don’t think she’s at bottom of that? You do some sniffing. Sniff here, sniff Truro, sniff there. You’ll catch the smell of something nasty and the trail of it’s leading directly to her.” He used the glue again, with much the same result: a teacup and handle like distant relatives unacquainted with each other. “You tell me how,” he said.

“He was abseiling, Mr. Kerne. There’s a cliff in Polcare Cove—”

“Don’t know the spot.”

“—north of Casvelyn, where the family live. It’s perhaps a two-hundred-foot drop. He had a sling fixed on the top of the cliff—we think it was attached to the pillar of a drystone wall—and the sling failed when he began his descent. But it had been tampered with.”

Kerne didn’t look at Lynley, but he stopped his work for a moment. His shoulders heaved, then he shook his head forcefully.

“I’m sorry,” Lynley said. “I understand Santo and his sister spent a great deal of time with you when they were younger.”

“Cos of her.” He spat out the words. “She’d get a new man and bring him home and have him there in her husband’s own bed. D’he tell you that? Anyone tell you that? No, I expect not. Did that to him when she was a girl and did that to him when she was a woman grown. Up the chute, as well. More ’n once, she was.”

“Made pregnant by someone else?” Lynley asked.

“Doesn’t know that I know, does he,” Kerne said. “But she told me. Kerra, that is. Mum’s got pregnant off someone and she’s got to get rid of it, she tells us. Matter of fact, she tells me, just like that, and her nothing but ten years old. Ten bloody years and what sort of woman lets her little girl know the filthy business she’s making of her life? Dad says she’s having a bad patch, she tells us, but I saw her with the estate agent, Grandpa…Or the dance instructor, or the science teacher from the secondary school. What did it matter to her? When she got the itch, it had to be scratched and if Ben didn’t scratch it the way she liked and when she wanted, she’d damn well see to it someone else would. So don’t tell me she’s not at the bottom of this when she’s at the bottom of everything ever happened to that boy.”

Not to Santo, Lynley thought. Kerne was speaking of his son, from a well of bitterness and regret and a father’s knowledge that nothing he says or does can change the course of a son who’s made the wrong decision. In this, Kerne reminded Lynley of his own father and the admonitions he’d given throughout Lynley’s childhood about mixing too closely with anyone the elder man deemed common. It had done no good, and Lynley had always considered himself richer for the experience.

“I’d no idea,” he said.

“Well, you wouldn’t, would you, cos he’s not likely to tell anyone. But she gets her claws into him when he’s a lad, and from that point on, he doesn’t see straight. It’s off and on with them for years, and every time me and his mum start thinking he’s rid himself of the cow at last and he sees the light and she’s out of his hair and out of our hair and he can start to live normal like the rest of us, there she is again, filling his head with rubbish ’bout how she needs him and he’s the only one for her and she’s sorry so sorry that she had a shag with someone else but it wasn’t her fault was it cos he wasn’t there to take care of her was he, he wasn’t paying her proper attention…and there she is flashing her knickers at him and he can’t think things through, can’t see what she’s like or what she’s doing or how he’s caught. It leads to ruin, so we send him off. And doesn’t she follow…doesn’t the trollop just pack her bags and follow our Ben…” He set the second badly repaired cup to one side. He was breathing jerkily, a liquid sound in his chest. Lynley wondered if the man ever saw a doctor. “So what we think—me and his mum—is if we say to him, You’re no son of ours if you don’t rid yourself of this bloody cow, he’ll do it. He’s our boy, he’s our oldest, and he’s got his brothers and sisters to think about, and they love him, they do, and they all get on. We reckon he only needs to be gone a few years anyway, till it all blows over, and then he c’n return to where he belongs, which is with us. Only it doesn’t work, does it, because he will not shake himself of her. She’s under his skin and in his blood and there’s an end to the matter.”

“Until what blows over?” Lynley asked.

“Eh?” Kerne turned his head from the workbench to look at Lynley.

“You said your son needed to be gone a few years only, ‘till it all blows over.’ I was wondering what.”

Kerne’s good eye narrowed. He said, “You don’t talk like a cop. Cops talk like the rest of us, but you got a voice that…Where you from?”

Lynley wasn’t about to be diverted with a discussion of his roots. “Mr. Kerne, if you know something—and you obviously do—that might be related to the death of your grandson, I need to know what it is.”

He turned back to his bench. He said, “What happened happened years ago. Benesek’s…what? Seventeen? Eighteen? It’s nothing to do with Santo.”

“Please let me decide that. Tell me what you know.”