Careless In Red (38 page)

Christ, can’t you escape the bloody cow? his father demanded. She’s making you into a madman, boy. Cut her loose, God damn it, before she chews you up and spits you into the dirt.

He’d wanted to, but he found that he couldn’t. The hold she had on him had been too profound. There were other girls, but they were simple creatures compared to Dellen: gigglers, teasers, superficial natterers, endlessly combing their sun-streaked hair and asking a bloke did he think they looked fat. They had no mystery, no complexity of character. Most important, not a single one of them needed Ben as Dellen did. She always came back to him, and he was always ready. And if two other blokes made her pregnant during those frenzied years of their adolescence, he’d done no worse to her by the time he was twenty, and he’d even managed to equal their score.

The third time it happened, he asked to marry her, for she’d proved the very nature of her love: She’d followed him to Truro with no money to speak of and only what she’d been able to fit in a canvas holdall. She’d said, It’s yours, Ben, and so am I, with the inchoate curve of her belly telling the tale.

It would be better now, he’d thought. They would marry, and marriage would put an end forever to the cycles of connection, betrayal, breakup, longing, and reconnection.

So the story was that he’d removed from Pengelly Cove to Truro for a fresh start that had not come about. He’d removed from Truro to Casvelyn for the very same reason with much the same result. Indeed, with a far worse result this time. For Santo was dead, and the insubstantial fabric of Ben’s own life was torn asunder.

It seemed to Ben now that the idea of lessons needing to be taught had started everything. What an excruciating realisation it was that lessons needing to be taught had ended everything as well. Only the student and the teacher were different. The crucial fact of acceptance remained the same.

LYNLEY SETTLED ON THE idea of a drive down the coast to Pengelly Cove once DI Hannaford had identified it as the village from which the Kerne family had originated. “It’s a two birds and one stone situation,” he explained, to which Hannaford had shrewdly replied, “You’re avoiding a bit of responsibility here, aren’t you? What is it about Dr. Trahair that you don’t want me to know, Detective Superintendent?”

He wasn’t avoiding at all, he told her blithely. But as the Kernes needed looking into and as he was intended to garner Daidre Trahair’s trust on DI Hannaford’s own instructions to him, it seemed that having a rational reason for suggesting a drive to Daidre—

“It doesn’t have to be a drive,” Hannaford protested. “It doesn’t have to be anything. You don’t even have to see her to sift through her details, and I expect you know that.”

Yes, of course, he said. But here was an opportunity—

“All right, all right. Just mind you bloody well stay in touch.”

So he took Daidre Trahair with him, an arrangement which was easy enough to effect because he began by keeping his word to her, and he went to her cottage to repair the window he’d broken. He’d decided that the replacement of such could hardly involve a serious mental workout, and as an Oxford graduate—albeit with a degree in history, which hardly applied to matters vitric—he certainly had the brainpower to sort out how the repair needed to be made. The fact that he’d never in his life engaged in a single instance of home improvement did not dissuade him. Surely he was a man to match the mountain of the job. There would be no problem involved.

“This is so good of you, Thomas, but perhaps I ought to arrange for a glazier?” Daidre had said. She sounded doubtful about his intentions of wielding glass and putty.

“Nonsense. It’s all very straightforward,” he told her.

“Have you…I mean, before this?”

“Many times. Other projects, I mean. As far as windows are concerned, I admit to being something of a virgin. Now…Let’s see what we have.”

What they had was a cottage of two hundred years, possibly older, because Daidre wasn’t sure. She kept meaning to do a history of the place, she told him, but so far she’d not got round to it. She did know it had begun its life as a fishing hut used by a great house near Alsperyl. That house was vanished—its interior long ago destroyed by fire and its stones eventually carted away by locals who used them for everything from building cottages to defining property lines—but as it had dated to 1723, there was every chance that this little building was of a similar age.

This meant, of course, that nothing was straight, including the windows whose frames had been precisely constructed to fit apertures that were themselves without precision. Lynley discovered this to his dismay when he held the glass up to the frame once the debris of the broken window was cleared away. A slight horizontal drop existed, he saw, just enough to make the placement of the glass…something of a challenge.

He should have measured both ends, he realised. He felt his neck grow hot with embarrassment.

“Oh dear,” Daidre said. And then quickly, as if she believed her remark spoke of a lack of confidence, “Well, I’m sure it’s only a matter of—”

“Putty,” he said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“This merely calls for a greater amount of putty at one end. There’s no real problem.”

“Oh that’s lovely,” she said. “That’s good. That’s excellent.” She took herself off to the kitchen at once, murmuring obscurely about brewing tea.

He struggled with the project: the putty, the putty knife, the glass, the placement of the glass, the falling rain that he should have damn well known was going to make the entire enterprise impossible. She stayed in the kitchen. She remained there so long that he drew the conclusion she was not only laughing at his ineptitude but also hiding the fact that she herself could have repaired the window with one hand tied behind her back. After all, she was the woman who’d used him as a mop when it came to darts.

When at last she emerged, he’d managed to get the glass in, but it was obvious that someone with more skill than he was going to have to repair his repair. He admitted as much and apologised. He had to go down to Pengelly Cove, he told her, and if she had the time to accompany him there, he’d make everything up to her with dinner.

“Pengelly Cove? Why?” she asked.

“Police business,” he replied.

“Does DI Hannaford think there are answers in Pengelly Cove? And she’s setting you after them? Why not one of her own policemen?” Daidre asked. When he hesitated about giving her an answer, it took her only a moment to understand. She said, “Ah. So you’re not a suspect any longer. Is that wise of DI Hannaford?”

“What?”

“To dismiss you from suspicion because you’re a cop? Fairly shortsighted, isn’t it?”

“I think she’s had trouble coming up with a motive.”

“I see.” Her voice had altered, and he knew she’d put the rest of it together. If he was no longer a suspect, she still was. She would know that there was a reason for this, and she would probably know why.

He thought she might refuse to go with him, but she didn’t, and he was glad. He was seeking a way to get to the truth of who she was and what she was hiding, and with no easy resources at hand to do this, gaining her trust through companionship did seem the best way.

Miracles proved to be his means of access. They’d driven up from the cove and they were winding through Stowe Wood on their way to the A39 when he asked her if she believed in miracles. At first she frowned at the question. Then she said, “Oh. The Internet paperwork you saw. No, I don’t, actually. But a friend of mine—a colleague at the zoo, the primate keeper, as a matter of fact—is planning a trip for his parents because they believe in miracles and they’re in rather bad need of one at the moment. A miracle, that is, not a trip.”

“That’s very good of you to help him out.” He glanced over at her. Her skin was blotchy. “Your…” What was the colleague to her? he wondered. Your lover, your boyfriend, your erstwhile partner? Why this reaction?

“It’s an act of friendship,” she said, as if he’d asked those questions. “Pancreatic cancer. There’s no real coming back from that diagnosis, but he’s not an old man—Paul says his dad’s only fifty-four—and they want to try everything. I think it’s futile, but who am I to say? So I told him I’d…well, I’d look for the place with the best statistics. Rather silly, isn’t it?”

“Not necessarily.”

“Well, of course it is, Thomas. How does one apply statistics to a place dominated by mysticism and earnest if misplaced belief? If I bathe in these waters, are my chances for a cure better than if I scribbled my request on a scrap of paper and left it at the foot of a marble statue of a saint? What if I kiss the ground in Medjugorje? Or is the best course to stay home and pray to someone on the fast track for a halo? They need miracles to get their sainthood, don’t they? What about that route? It would at least save money that we can’t afford to spend anyway.” She drew a breath and he glanced her way again. She was leaning against the car door, and her face looked rather pinched. “Sorry,” she said. “I do go on. But one so hates to see people divorce themselves from their own common sense because a crisis has arisen. If you know what I mean.”

“Yes,” he said evenly. “As it happens, I do know what you mean.”

She raised her hand to her lips. She had strong-looking hands, sensible hands, a doctor’s hands, with clipped, clean nails. “Oh my God. I am so bloody sorry. I’ve done it again. Sometimes, my mouth goes off.”

“It’s all right.”

“It isn’t. You would have done anything to save her. I’m terribly sorry.”

“No. What you said is perfectly true. In crisis people thrash about, looking for answers, trying to get to a solution. And to them the solution is always what they want and not necessarily what’s actually best for anyone else.”

“Still, I didn’t mean to cause you pain. I don’t ever mean that for anyone, for that matter.”

“Thank you.”

From there he couldn’t see how to get to her lies except to tell a few of his own, which he preferred not to do. Surely, it was up to Bea Hannaford to question Daidre Trahair about her alleged route from Bristol to Polcare Cove. It was up to Bea Hannaford to reveal to Daidre exactly what the police knew about her putative lunch at a pub, and it was up to Bea Hannaford to decide how to utilise that knowledge to force the vet into an admission of whatever it was that she needed to admit.

He used the pause in their conversation to head in another direction. He said lightly, “We started with a governess. Have I told you that? Completely nineteenth century. It only lasted till my sister and I rebelled and put frogs into her bed on Guy Fawkes night. And at that time of year, believe me, frogs weren’t easy to find.”

“Are you saying you actually had a governess as a child? Poor Jane Eyre with no Mr. Rochester to rescue her from a life of servitude, dining in her bedroom alone because she wasn’t upstairs or downstairs either?”

“It wasn’t as bad as that. She dined with us. With the family. We’d begun with a nanny but when it was time for school, the governess came onboard. This was for my older sister and me. By the time my brother was born—he’s ten years younger than I, have I told you?—that had all been put to rest.”

“But it’s so…so charmingly antique.” Lynley could hear the laughter in Daidre’s voice.

“Yes, isn’t it? But it was that, boarding school, or the village school where we would mix with the local children.”

“With their ghastly Cornish accents,” Daidre noted.

“The very thing. My father was determined that we would follow in his educational footsteps, which did not lead to the village school. My mother was equally determined we wouldn’t be packed off to boarding school at seven years of age—”

“Wise woman.”

“—so their compromise was a governess until we drove her off with her sanity barely intact. At which point, we did go to the local school, which was what we both wanted anyway. My father must have tested our accents every day, however. It seemed so. God forbid that we should ever sound common.”

“He’s dead now?”

“Years and years.” Lynley ventured a look. She was studying him and he wondered if she was considering the topic of schooling and wondering why they were talking about it. He said, “What about you?” and tried to make it casual, noting his discomfort as he did so. In the past, attempting to work a suspect round to a trap had presented no problem for him.

“Both of my parents are hale and hearty.”

“I meant school,” he said.

“Oh. It was all tediously normal, I’m afraid.”

“In Falmouth, then?”

“Yes. I’m not of the sort of family that packs its children off to boarding school. I went to school in town, with all the riffraff.”

She was caught. It was the moment at which Lynley would have ordinarily sprung the trap, but he knew he could have missed a school somewhere. She could have attended an institution now closed. He found that he wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt. He let matters go. They made the rest of the journey to Pengelly Cove in a companionable fashion. He spoke of how a privileged life had led to police work; she spoke of a passion for animals and how that passion had taken her from rescuing hedgehogs, seabirds, songbirds, and ducks to veterinary school and ultimately to the zoo. The only creature from the animal world that she didn’t like, she confessed, was the Canada goose. “They’re taking over the planet,” she declared. “Well, at least they seem to be taking over England.” Her favourite animal she declared to be the otter: freshwater or sea. She wasn’t particular when it came to otters.

In the village of Pengelly Cove, it was a matter of a few minutes in the post office—a single counter in the village’s all-purpose shop—to discover that more than one Kerne lived in the vicinity. They were all the progeny of one Eddie Kerne and his wife, Ann. Kerne maintained a curiosity that he called Eco-House some five miles out of town. Ann worked at the Curlew Inn although the job appeared to be a sinecure at this point since she was aging badly after a stroke some years ago.

“There’s Kernes crawling all over the landscape,” the postmistress told them. She was the lone labourer in the shop, a grey-haired woman of uncertain but clearly advanced years whom they’d come upon in the midst of sewing a tiny button onto a child-size white shirt. She poked her finger with the needle as she worked. She said bloody hell, damn and pardon and then wiped a spot of blood onto her navy cardigan before going on with, “You go outside and shout the name Kerne, ten people on the street’ll look up and say, ‘What?’” She examined the strength of her repair and bit off the thread.