Careless In Red (48 page)

“Where there’s smoke there’s fire.” Havers lit up another cigarette as if to emphasise her point.

“You’re destroying your lungs and everyone else’s,” Mendick told her. “That’s a disgusting habit.”

“While wheelie-bin diving is what?” Havers asked.

“Not letting something go to waste.”

“Damn. I wish I shared your nobility of character. Reckon you lost sight of it—that noble part of you—when you bashed that bloke in Plymouth, eh?”

“I said I did my stretch.”

“We understand you told the judge it had to do with drink,” Bea said. “D’you still have a problem with that? Is it still leading you to go off the nut? That was your claim, I’ve been told.”

“I don’t drink any longer, so it’s not leading me anywhere.” He looked into the wheelie bin, spied something he apparently wanted, and dug down to bring forth a packet of fig bars. He stowed this in the bag and went on with his search. He ripped open and tossed a loaf of apparently stale bread onto the tarmac for the gulls. They went after it greedily. “I do AA if it’s anything to you,” he added. “And I haven’t had a drink since I came out.”

“I do hope that’s the case, Mr. Mendick. How did that altercation in Plymouth begin?”

“I told you it’s got nothing to do…” He seemed to rethink his angry tone—as well as the direction of the conversation—because he sighed and said, “I used to get blind drunk. I had a dustup with this yob, and I don’t know what it was about because when I drank like that I couldn’t remember what set me off or even if something set me off at all. I didn’t remember the fight the next day and I’m damn sorry that bloke ended up like he did, because it wasn’t my intention. I probably just wanted to sort him.”

“Is that your general method of sorting people?”

“When I drank, it was. It’s not something I’m proud of. It’s also over. I did my time. I made my amends. I try to stay clean.”

“Try?”

“Bloody hell.” He climbed up into the wheelie bin. He began a more furious rooting through its contents.

“Santo Kerne took a fairly serious punch sometime before he died,” Bea said. “I wonder if you can tell us anything about that.”

“I can’t,” he said.

“You can’t or you won’t?”

“Why d’you want to pin this on me?”

Because you look so damn guilty, Bea thought. Because you’re lying about something and I can read it in the colour of your skin, which is flaming now, from your cheeks to your ears and even to your scalp. “That’s my job,” Bea told him, “to pin this on someone. If that someone’s not you, I’d like to know why.”

“I had no reason to hurt him. Or to kill him. Or to anything.”

“How’d you come to know him?”

“I worked at Clean Barrel, that surf shop on the corner of the Strand.” Mendick nodded in the general direction. “He came in because he wanted a board. That’s how we met. Few months after he moved to town.”

“But you no longer work at Clean Barrel Surf Shop. Has that something to do with Santo Kerne as well?”

“I sent him to LiquidEarth for a board, and I got found out. I lost my job. I wasn’t supposed to be sending anyone to the competition. Not that LiquidEarth is the competition but there was no telling the boss man that, was there? So I got the sack.”

“Blamed him for that, did you?”

“Sorry to disappoint you, but no. It was the right thing to do, sending Santo to LiquidEarth. He was a beginner. He’d never even been out. He needed a beginner’s board. We didn’t have any decent ones at the time—just shit from China, if you want to know, and we sold that clobber mostly to tourists—so I told him to go see Lew Angarrack, who’d make him a good one that he could learn on. It would cost a bit more but it would be right for him. That’s what I did. That’s all I did. Jesus. From Nigel Coyle’s reaction, you would’ve thought I’d shot someone. Santo brought the board by to show me, Coyle happened to be there, and the rest is history.”

“Santo did you a bad turn, then.”

“So I killed him? Waited two years to kill him? Not likely. He felt bad enough about what happened. He apologised maybe six dozen times.”

“Where?”

“Where what?”

“Where did he apologise? Where did you see him?”

“Wherever,” he said. “The town’s small, like I said.”

“On the beach?”

“I don’t go to the beach.”

“In a surfing town like Casvelyn you don’t go to the beach?”

“I don’t surf.”

“You were selling surfboards but you yourself don’t surf? Why’s that, Mr. Mendick?”

“God damn it!” Mendick rose up. He towered above them in the wheelie bin, but he would have towered above them anyway, for he was tall albeit gangly.

Bea could see the veins throbbing in his temples. She wondered what it took for him to control that nasty temper of his and she also wondered what it took for him to unleash it on someone.

She felt Sergeant Havers tense next to her, and she glanced her way. The DS had a hard expression on her face, and Bea liked her for this, for it told her Havers wasn’t the sort of woman who backed down easily in a confrontation.

“Did you compete with other surfers?” Bea asked. “Did you compete with Santo? Did he compete with you? Did you give it up? What?”

“I don’t like the sea.” He spoke through his teeth. “I don’t like not knowing what’s beneath me in the water because there’re sharks in every part of the world and I don’t care to become acquainted with one. I know about boards and I know about surfing but I don’t surf. All right?”

“I suppose. Do you climb, Mr. Mendick?”

“Climb what? No, I don’t climb.”

“What do you do, then?”

“I hang with my friends.”

“Santo Kerne among them?”

“He wasn’t…” Mendick backed off from the rapidity of their conversation, as if he recognised how easily he could become trapped if he continued the pace. He packed more items into his rubbish bag—a few seriously dented tins, some packages of spinach and other greens, a handful of packaged herbs, a packet of tea cakes—before he climbed out of the bin and made his reply. “Santo didn’t have friends,” Mendick said. “Not in the normal sense. Not like other people do. He had people he associated with when he wanted them for something.”

“Such as?”

“Such as having experiences with them. That’s how he put it. He was all about that. Having experiences.”

“What sort of experiences?”

Mendick hesitated, which told Bea they’d come to the crux of the matter. It had taken her longer than she liked to get him to this point, and she briefly considered that she might be losing her touch. But at least she’d got him there, so she told herself there was life in her yet. “Mr. Mendick?” she said.

“Sex,” he replied. “Santo was dead mad about sex.”

“He was eighteen?” Havers noted. “Is there an eighteen-year-old boy alive who isn’t dead mad about sex?”

“The way he was? What he was into? Yeah, I’d say there’s eighteen-year-olds who aren’t a bit like him.”

“What was he into?”

“I don’t know. Just that it was off. That’s all she’d say. That and the fact he was cheating on her.”

“She?” Bea asked. “Would that be Madlyn Angarrack? What did she tell you?”

“Nothing. Just that what he was into made her sick.”

“Ah.” That brought them nearly full circle, Bea thought. And in this investigation full circle continually seemed to mean that yet another liar had been revealed.

“Close to Madlyn, are you?” Havers was asking.

“Not particularly. I know her brother. Cadan. So I know her as well. Like I said, Casvelyn’s small enough. Given time, everyone ends up knowing everyone.”

“In what sense would that be?” Bea asked Will Mendick.

He looked confused. “What?”

“The knowing bit,” she said. “Everyone ends up knowing everyone, you said. I was wondering in what sense you meant that?”

It was clear from Mendick’s expression that the allusion was lost upon him. But that was no matter. They had Madlyn Angarrack where they wanted her.

HAD IT NOT BEEN FOR THE RAIN ON THE PREVIOUS AFTERNOON, Ben Kerne would likely not have seen his father when he went to Pengelly Cove. But because of the rain, he’d insisted upon driving his mother back to Eco-House from the Curlew Inn at the end of her workday. She’d had her large three-wheeler with her, upon which she daily pedaled to and from work without too much difficulty despite her stroke in earlier years, but he’d insisted. The tricycle would fit into the back of the Austin, he told her. He wouldn’t have her on the narrow lanes in bad weather. She shouldn’t be on them in good weather either, if it came down to it. She wasn’t of an age—let alone in the physical condition—where she should be out on a tricycle anyway. To her carefully enunciated, poststroke words, “Got three wheels, Ben,” he said it didn’t matter. He said his father should have the common sense to purchase a vehicle now that he and his wife were old.

Even as he said this, he wondered at the evolution of parent-child relationships in which the parent ultimately becomes the child. And he wondered without wanting to wonder if his own fragile connection with Santo would have mutated in a similar fashion. He doubted it. Santo seemed at the moment as he would be forever: frozen in an eternal youth with no chance to move on to things more important than the concerns of randy adolescence.

It was the thought of randy adolescence that plagued him throughout the long night that followed his visit to Eco-House. Yet when he drove down the deeply rutted lane towards the old farmhouse, that was the last subject upon which he would have thought his mind would lock. Instead, he followed the rises, falls, and curves of that unpaved lane, and he marveled that the passage of years had done nothing to release him from the fear he’d always harboured towards his father. Apart from Eddie Kerne, he did not have to consider fear. Nearing him, it was as if he’d never left Pengelly Cove.

His mother had sensed this. She’d said in that altered voice she had—God, did she actually sound Portuguese? he’d wondered—that he’d find his father very much changed in the years he’d been gone. To which he’d replied, “He didn’t sound any different on the phone, Mum.”

Physically, she’d said. Now there was a frailty about him. He tried to hide it but he was feeling his age. She didn’t add that he was feeling his failure as well. Eco-House had been the dream of his life: living off the land, in harmony with the elements. Indeed, he’d planned to master those elements so that they worked for him. It had been an admirable attempt at living green, but he’d bitten off too much and he hadn’t possessed the jaws to chew it all.

If Eddie Kerne heard the Austin drive up to Eco-House, he didn’t emerge. Nor did he emerge as Ben wrestled his mother’s tricycle from the back of the car. When they approached the wreck of the old front door, however, Eddie was waiting for them. He swung it open before they reached it, as if he’d been watching from one of the filthy and ill-hung windows.

Despite his mother’s warning, Ben felt the shock when he saw his father. Old, he thought, and looking older than he actually was. Eddie Kerne wore old man’s spectacles—with thick, black frames and thick, smeared lenses—and behind them his eyes had lost much of their colour. One of them was clouded by a cataract, which Ben knew he’d never have removed. The rest of him was old as well: from his badly matched and badly patched clothing, to the places on his face that his razor had missed, to the corkscrew of hairs springing out of his ears and his nose. His gait was slow, and his shoulders were round. He was the personification of End of Days.

Ben felt a sudden rush of dizziness when he saw him. He said, “Dad.”

Eddie Kerne looked him over, one of those abrupt head-to-toe movements that—to an offspring of the adult performing them—tend to signify assessment and judgement simultaneously. He stepped away from the door without comment. He disappeared into the bowels of the house.

Under other circumstances Ben would have departed then. But his mother murmured, “Shush, shush,” from which he took comfort, no matter where she was directing the sound. It came straight from his childhood, and he embraced its meaning. Mummy’s here, darling. No need to cry. He felt her hand on the small of his back, urging him forward.

Eddie was waiting for them in the kitchen, which seemed to be the only remaining usable room in the downstairs of the house. It was well lit and warm, while the rest of the place was shrouded in shadows, packed with bits and bobs and clobber, smelling of mildew, filled with the skittering of rodents in the walls.

He’d put on the kettle. Ann Kerne nodded towards this meaningfully, as if it gave evidence of something within Eddie that had altered along with his physical decay. He shuffled to the cupboard and brought out three mugs, along with a jar of coffee crystals and a raggedy box of sugar cubes. When he had this on the chipped yellow table along with a plastic jug of milk, a loaf of bread, and an unwrapped cube of margarine, he said to Ben, “Scotland Yard. Not the locals, mind you, but Scotland Yard. Not like you thought, eh? It’s bigger’n the locals. Didn’t ’spect that, did you? Question is, did she?”

Ben knew who she was. She was who she had always been.

Eddie went on. “Other question is, who phoned ’em. Who wants Scotland Yard on the case and why’d they come running like a fire’s lit under ’em?”

“I don’t know,” Ben said.

“Wager you don’t. If it’s bigger ’n the locals, it’s bad. If it’s bad, it’s her. Things is home to roost now, Benesek. Knew this would happen, didn’t I?”

“Dellen’s nothing to do with this, Dad.”

“Don’t say her name round me. It’s a curse, it is.”

His wife said, “Eddie…,” in a conciliatory tone, and she put her hand on Ben’s arm as if afraid he would bolt.

But the sight of his father had abruptly changed things for Ben. So old, he thought. So terribly old. Broken as well. He wondered how he had failed to understand till now that life had long ago defeated his father. He’d beaten his fists against it—had Eddie Kerne—and refused to submit to its demands. These demands were for compromise and change: to take life on life’s terms, which required the ability to switch courses when necessary, to modify behaviours, and to alter dreams so that they could meet the realities that they came up against. But he’d never been able to do any of that, so he’d been crushed, and life had rolled over his shattered body.