Careless In Red (4 page)

“She isn’t derailed.”

“She bloody well is. And where does that leave you, Dad? You pinned your dreams on her instead of living your own.”

“She’ll get back to it.”

“Don’t put money on that.”

“And don’t you—” Abruptly, Lew bit off whatever it was he’d intended to say.

They faced each other then across the width of kitchen. It was an expanse of less than ten feet, but it was also a chasm that grew wider every year. Each of them stood at his respective edge, and it seemed to Cadan that the time would come when one of them was going to topple over the side.

SELEVAN PENRULE TOOK HIS time about getting over to Clean Barrel Surf Shop, having quickly decided it would be unseemly to bolt out of the Salthouse Inn the moment the whisper went round about Santo Kerne. He certainly had reason to bolt, but he knew it wouldn’t look good. Beyond that, at his age he was beyond bolting anywhere. Too many years of milking cows, not to mention herding the bloody bovines in and out of pastures, and his back was permanently bent and his hips were done for. Sixty-eight years old, he felt like eighty. He should have sold out and opened up the caravan park thirty-five years earlier, and he would have done so had he only had the cash, the bollocks, the vision, no wife, and no kids. They were all gone now, the house was torn down, and the farm was converted. Sea Dreams, he’d called it. Four neat rows of holiday caravans like shoe boxes, perched on the cliffs above the sea.

In his car, he was careful. There were dogs occasionally on the country lanes. Cats too. Rabbits. Birds. Selevan hated the thought of hitting something, not so much because of the guilt or responsibility he might feel having brought about a death but because of the inconvenience it would cause him. He’d have to stop and he hated to stop once he set out on a course of action. In this case, the course of action was getting himself over to Casvelyn and into the surf shop where his granddaughter worked. He wanted Tammy to hear the news from him.

When he reached the town, he parked on the wharf, the nose of his antique Land Rover pointing towards the Casvelyn Canal, a narrow cut that had once connected Holsworthy and Launceston with the sea but that now meandered inland for seven miles before ending abruptly, like an interrupted thought. This put him across the River Cas from the centre of town where the surf shop was, but finding a spot for the car was always too much trouble over there—no matter the weather or the time of year—and, anyway, he wanted the walk. Tracing a path back along the crescent of road that defined the southwest edge of the town, he would have time to think. He had to have an approach that would play the information out and allow him to gauge her reaction to it. For what Tammy said she was and who Tammy really was were, as far as Selevan Penrule was concerned, in outright contradiction to each other. She just didn’t know that yet.

Out of the car, he gave a nod to several fishermen who stood smoking in the rain, their craft at rest against the side of the wharf. They’d have come up from the sea by way of the canal lock at the wharf ’s far end, and they presented a stark contrast to the boats and boatmen who would be in Casveyln with the start of summer. Selevan vastly preferred this group to those who would arrive with the better weather. True, he made his money from the tourist trade, but he didn’t have to like that fact.

He set off into the heart of town, going towards it along a string of shops. He stopped for a takeaway coffee at Jill’s Juices and then again for a packet of Dunhills and a roll of breath mints at Pukkas Pizza Slices Et Cetera (the accent being on the et cetera, for their pizza was rubbish in a shoe), which was where the Crescent made its turn up into the Strand. Here the road created a slow climb to the top of the town, and Clean Barrel Surf Shop stood on a corner half the distance up, just along a route that offered a hair salon, a decrepit nightclub, two extremely down-at-heel hotels, and a fish-and-chips takeaway.

He finished his coffee before he got to the surf shop. There was no bin nearby, so he folded the takeaway cup and put it in the pocket of his rain jacket. Ahead of him, he could see a young man with Julius Caesar hair having an earnest conversation with Nigel Coyle, Clean Barrel’s owner. This would be Will Mendick, Selevan thought. He’d had high hopes of Will, but so far they’d come to nothing.

Selevan heard Will saying to Nigel Coyle, “I admit I was wrong, Mr. Coyle. I shouldn’t even have suggested it. But it’s not like it’s something I ever did before,” to which Coyle replied, “You’re not a very good liar, are you,” before walking off with his car keys jingling in his hand.

Will said darkly, “Sod you, man. Sod you for a lark,” and as Selevan came up to him, “Hullo, Mr. Penrule. Tammy’s inside.”

Selevan found his granddaughter restocking a rack with colourful brochures. He observed her the way he always observed her, like a species of mammal he’d never come upon before. Most of what he saw he disapproved of. She was skin and bones in black: black shoes, black tights, black skirt, black jersey. Hair too thin and cut too short and not even a bit of that sticky goo in it to make it do something other than what it did, which was lie lifelessly against her skull.

Selevan could have coped with the black and the skin and bones of the girl if she’d given the slightest bit of evidence that she might be normal. Ring her eyes with kohl and plant silver rings through her eyebrows and her lips and a stud in her tongue, and he understood that. Mind, he didn’t like it, but he understood. That was the fashion among certain people her age and they’d come to their senses, one hoped, before they disfigured themselves entirely. When they hit twenty-one or maybe twenty-five and they discovered that gainful employment wasn’t beating a path to their doorsteps, they’d sort themselves out. Like Tammy’s father. And what was he now? Lieutenant colonel in the army with a posting in Rhodesia or wherever, because Selevan could never keep track of him—and it would always be Rhodesia to Selevan, never mind what it wanted to call itself—and a distinguished career stretching out before him.

But as for Tammy? Can we send her to you, Dad? her father had asked Selevan, his voice coming over the phone line as true as if he’d been standing in the very next room and not in an African hotel where he’d parked his daughter prior to flying her off to England. And what was her granddad to do, then? She had her ticket. She was on her way. We can send her to you, can’t we, Dad? This isn’t the right environment for her. She sees too much. We think that’s the problem.

Selevan himself had his own ideas of what the problem was, but he liked the thought of a son relying on his father’s wisdom. Send her, Selevan told David. But mind, I’ll not have any of her nonsense if she’s going to stop with me. She’ll eat her meals and clean up after herself and—

That, his son told him, would not be a problem.

True enough. The girl barely left a wake behind her. If Selevan had thought she would cause him trouble, what he’d come to learn was that the trouble she caused came from not causing trouble at all. That wasn’t normal, which was the heart of the matter. For damn it all, she was his granddaughter. And that meant she was meant to be normal.

She tapped the final brochure into place and straightened the rack. She stepped back, as if to see its effect, just as Will Mendick came into the shop. He said to Tammy, “No bloody good. Coyle won’t take me back,” and then to Selevan, “You’re early today, Mr. Penrule.”

Tammy swung round from the brochure rack at this. She said, “Grandie. Didn’t you get my message?”

“Haven’t been home,” Selevan told her.

“Oh. I was…Will and I were meaning to have a coffee after closing.”

“Were you now?” Selevan was pleased. Perhaps, he thought, he’d been incorrect in his assessment of Tammy’s regard for the younger man.

“He was going to drive me home afterwards.” Then she frowned as she seemed to realise it was too early for her grandfather to be there to fetch her home anyway. She looked at a watch that flopped round on her thin wrist.

“Come from the Salthouse Inn,” Selevan said. “Been an accident out round Polcare Cove.”

“Are you all right?” she asked. “Did you get in a smash with the car or something?” She sounded concerned, and this gratified Selevan. Tammy loved her old granddad. He might be short with her, but she never held it against him.

“Not me,” he said, and here he began to watch her closely. “It was Santo Kerne.”

“Santo? What’s happened to him?”

Was there a rise to her voice? Panic? A warding off of bad news? Selevan wanted to think so, but he couldn’t reconcile the tone of her voice with the look that she exchanged with Will Mendick.

“Fell off the cliff, way I understand it,” he said. “Down Polcare Cove. Dr. Trahair brought some coast walker to the inn to phone the police. This bloke—the walker—he found the boy.”

“Is he all right?” Will Mendick asked even as Tammy said, “Santo’s all right, though, isn’t he?”

Selevan was definitely gratified at this: the rush of Tammy’s words and what that rush of words indicated about her feelings. No matter that Santo Kerne was about as worthless an object for a young girl’s affections as could be found. If affection was present, that was a positive sign, and Selevan Penrule had recently allowed the Kerne boy access to his property at Sea Dreams for just this reason. Give him a shortcut across to the sea cliffs or the sea itself and who knew what might blossom in Tammy’s heart? And that had been the objective, hadn’t it? Tammy, blossoming, and a diversion.

“Don’t know,” Selevan told her. “Just that Dr. Trahair came in and told Brian over Salthouse that Santo Kerne was down on the rocks ’n Polcare Cove. That’s all I know.”

“That doesn’t sound good,” Will Mendick said.

“Was he surfing, Grandie?” Tammy asked. But she didn’t look at her grandfather when she spoke. She kept her eyes on Will.

This made Selevan look more closely at the young man. Will, he saw, was breathing oddly, a bit like a runner, but his face had lost colour. He was a ruddy boy naturally, so it was noticeable when the blood drained away.

“Don’t know what he was doing, do I?” Selevan said. “But something’s happened to him, that’s for certain. And it looks bad.”

“Why?” Will asked.

“Cos they’d’ve hardly left the boy on the rocks alone if he’d only been hurt and not…” He shrugged.

“Not dead?” Tammy said.

“Dead?” Will repeated.

Tammy said, “Go, Will.”

“But how can I—”

“You’ll think of something. Just go. We’ll have coffee another time.”

That was apparently all he needed. Will nodded at Selevan and headed for the door. He touched Tammy on the shoulder as he passed her. He said, “Thanks, Tam. I’ll ring you.”

Selevan tried to take this as a positive sign.

DAYLIGHT WAS FAST FADING by the time Detective Inspector Bea Hannaford arrived in Polcare Cove. She’d been in the midst of buying football shoes for her son when her mobile had rung, and she’d completed the purchase without giving Pete a chance to point out that he’d not tried on every style available, as was his habit. She’d said, “We buy now or you come back later with your father,” and that had been enough. His father would force him into the least expensive pair, brooking no arguments about it.

They’d left the shop in a hurry and dashed through the rain to the car. She’d rung Ray from the road. It wasn’t his night for Pete, but Ray was flexible. He was a cop as well, and he knew the demands of the job. He’d meet them in Polcare Cove, he said. “Got a jumper?” he’d asked her.

“Don’t know yet,” she’d said.

Bodies at the bases of cliffs were not rare in this part of the world. People climbed foolishly on the culm, people wandered too near the edge of the cliffs and went over, or people jumped. If the tide was high, the bodies sometimes were never found. If it was low, the police had a chance to sort out how they had got there.

Pete was saying enthusiastically, “I bet it’s all bloody. I bet its head cracked open like a rotten egg and its guts ’n brains’re all over the place.”

“Peter.” Bea cast him a glance. He was slouched against the door, the shopping bag containing his shoes clutched to his chest as if he thought someone might rip it from him. He had spots on his face—the curse of the young adolescent, Bea remembered, although her own adolescence was forty years long gone—and braces on his teeth. Looking at him at fourteen years of age, she found it impossible to imagine the man he might one day become.

“What?” he demanded. “You said someone went over the cliff. I bet he went headfirst and splattered his skull. I bet he took a dive. I bet he—”

“You wouldn’t talk that way if you’d ever seen someone who’s fallen.”

“Wicked,” Pete breathed.

He was doing it deliberately, Bea thought, trying to provoke a row. He was angry that he had to go to his father’s and angrier still about the disruption to their plans, which had been the rare treat of takeaway pizza and a DVD. He’d chosen a film about football, which his father would not be interested in watching with him, unlike his mother. Bea and Pete were as one when it came to football.

She decided to let his anger go unconfronted. There wasn’t time to deal with it and, anyway, he had to learn to cope when plans got changed, because no plan was ever written in concrete.

The rain was coming down in sheets when they finally reached the vicinity of Polcare Cove. This wasn’t a place Bea Hannaford had been to before, so she peered through the windscreen and crawled along the lane. This descended through a woodland in a series of switchbacks before shooting out from beneath the budding trees, climbing up once again into farmland defined by thick earthen hedgerows, and descending a final time towards the sea. Here, the land opened to form a meadow at the northwest edge of which stood a mustard-coloured cottage with two nearby outbuildings, the only habitation in this place.

A panda car jutted partially into the lane from the cottage driveway, with another police vehicle sitting directly in front of it, nudging against a white Vauxhall near the cottage itself. Bea didn’t stop since to do so would have blocked the road entirely, and she knew there would be many more vehicles arriving and needing access to the beach long before the day was done. She went farther along towards the sea and found what went for a car park: a patch of earth that was potholed like a piece of Swiss cheese. There she stopped.