Careless In Red (54 page)

Some situations one came across required a person’s intervention, she thought. But surely this wasn’t one of them. She didn’t want to do what was being asked of her, but she was wise enough to know that wanting was not what this was about.

The sound of an unmuffled engine came to her not long after she reached the top of the cliff. She’d been sitting upon an outcrop of limestone, watching the kittiwakes, and following the majestic arcs the birds made in the air as they sought shelter in niches in the cliff. But now she stood and walked back to the path. A motorcycle, she saw, was coming down the lane. It reached her cottage and veered into the pebbly driveway, where it stopped. The rider removed his helmet and approached the front door.

Daidre thought of couriers and messengers when she saw him: someone carrying a package for her, perhaps a message from Bristol? But she was expecting nothing, and from what she could tell, the rider had nothing with him. He went round her cottage to seek another door or to look into a window. Or worse, she thought.

She made for the path and began to descend. There was no point to shouting because she couldn’t have been heard from this distance. Indeed, there was also little point in hurrying. The cottage was some way from the sea and she was some way above the lane. Likely by the time she got back, the rider would have left.

But the thought that someone might be breaking into her cottage spurred her downward. She kept her glances going between her footwork and her cottage as she went, and the fact that the motorcycle remained in place in her driveway kept her speed up and her curiosity piqued.

She arrived breathless and dashed in through the gate. Instead of a housebreaker half in and half out of a window, though, she found a girl clad in leathers lounging on her front step. She was sitting with her back against the bright blue door and her legs stretched out in front of her. She had a hideous silver ring through her septum and a turquoise-coloured choker tattooed brightly round her neck.

Daidre recognised her. Cilla Cormack, the bane of her own mother’s life. Her gran lived next door to Daidre’s family in Falmouth. What on earth, Daidre thought, was the girl doing here?

Cilla looked up as Daidre approached. The dull sun glinted off her septum ring, giving it the unappealing look of those rings once used on cows to urge their cooperation when they were attached to a lead. She said, “Hey,” and gave Daidre a nod. She rose and stamped her feet as if with the need to get the circulation going.

“This is a surprise,” Daidre said. “How are you, Cilla? How’s your mum?”

“Cow,” Cilla said, by which Daidre assumed she meant her mother, Cilla’s disputes with that woman being something of a neighbourhood legend. “C’n I use your toilet or summick?”

“Of course.” Daidre unlocked the front door. She ushered the girl inside. Cilla clomped across the entry and into the sitting room. “Through there,” Daidre said. She waited to see what would happen next because surely Cilla hadn’t come all the way from Falmouth just to use the loo.

Some minutes later—during which time water ran enthusiastically and Daidre began to wonder if the girl had decided to have a bath—Cilla returned. Her hair was wet and slicked back and she smelled as if she’d decided to help herself to Daidre’s scent as well. “Better, that,” she said. “Felt like bloody hell, I did. Roads’re bad this time of year.”

“Ah,” Daidre said. “Would you like…something? Tea? Coffee?”

“Fag?”

“I don’t smoke. I’m sorry.”

“Figgers, that.” Cilla looked round and nodded. “This’s nice, innit. But you don’t live here reg’lar, right?”

“No. Cilla, is there something…?” Daidre felt stymied by her upbringing. One didn’t come out and ask a visitor what on earth she was doing visiting. On the other hand, it was impossible that the girl had just been passing by. Daidre smiled and tried to look encouraging.

Cilla wasn’t the brightest bulb in the chandelier, but she did manage to get the point. She said, “My gran asked me would I come. Said you di’n’t have a mobile.”

Daidre felt alarmed. “Has something happened? What’s going on? Is someone ill?”

“Gran says Scotland Yard came by. She says you’d best know straightaway cos they were aksing about you. She says they went to your house first but when no one was home, they started banging doors up an’ down the street. She phoned up Bristol to tell you. You wa’n’t there, so she reckoned you might be here and she aksed would I come here to let you know. Whyn’t you get yourself a mobile, eh? Or even a phone here? That’d make sense, you know. I mean, just like in a emergency. Cos it’s one hell of a way to get here from Falmouth. And petrol…D’you know how much petrol costs these days?”

The girl sounded aggrieved. Daidre went to the sideboard in the dining room and fetched twenty pounds. She handed it over. She said, “Thank you for coming. It can’t have been easy, all this way.”

Cilla relented. She said, “Well, Gran aksed. And she’s a good old girl, innit. She always lets me stop there when Mum throws me out, which’s about once a week, eh? So when she aksed me and said it was important…” She shrugged. “Anyways. Here I am. She said you should know. She also said…” Here Cilla frowned, as if trying to remember the rest of the message. Daidre wondered that the girl’s grandmother had not written it down. But then, it had probably occurred to the elderly woman that Cilla was likely to lose a note while a brief message of one or two sentences was not beyond her ability to pass along. “Oh. Yeah. She also said not to worry because she di’n’t tell them nuffink.” Cilla touched her septum ring, as if to make sure it was still in place. “So why’s Scotland Yard nosing round you?” she asked. Grinning, she added, “What you done? You got bodies buried in the garden or summick?”

Daidre smiled faintly. “Six or seven,” she said.

“Thought as much.” Cilla cocked her head. “You’ve gone dead white. You best sit down. Put your head…” She seemed to lose the thread of where one’s head was supposed to go. “You want a glass of water, eh?”

“No, no. I’m fine. Haven’t eaten much today…Are you sure you don’t want something?”

“Gotta get back,” she said. “I’ve a date tonight. M’boyfriend’s taking me dancing.”

“Is he?”

“Yeah. We’re taking lessons. Bit daft, that, but it’s summick to do, innit. We’re at that one where the girl gets thrown around a bit and you got to keep your back real stiff otherwise. Stick your nose in the air. That sorta thing. I got to wear high heels for it, which I don’t like much, but the teacher says we’re getting quite good. She wants us to be in a competition, she says. Bruce—that’s m’ boyfriend—he’s dead chuffed ’bout it and he says we got to practise every day. So that’s why we’re going dancing tonight. Mostly we practise in his mum’s sitting room, but he says we’re ready to go out in public.”

“How lovely,” Daidre said. She waited for more. More, she hoped, would consist of Cilla’s leaving the premises so that Daidre could come to terms with the message the girl had brought. Scotland Yard in Falmouth. Asking questions. She felt anxiety climbing up her arms.

“Anyway, got to dash,” Cilla said, as if reading Daidre’s mind. “Lookit, you best think about having a phone put in, eh? You could keep it in a cupboard or summick. Plug it in when you want it. That sort of thing.”

“Yes. Yes, I will,” Daidre told her. “Thanks so much, Cilla, for coming all this way.”

The girl left her then, and Daidre stood on the front step, watching her expertly kick-start the motorcycle—no electronic ignition for this rider—and turn it in the driveway. In a few more moments and with a wave, the girl was gone. She zoomed up the narrow lane, curved out of sight, and left Daidre to deal with the aftermath of her visit.

Scotland Yard, she thought. Questions being asked. There could be only one reason—only one person—behind this.

KERRA’S NIGHT HAD BEEN SLEEPLESS AND MUCH OF HER FOLLOWING day had been useless. She’d attempted to carry on as well as possible, keeping to a schedule of interviews that she’d set up in the preceding weeks: the search for potential instructors. She’d thought she could, at least, divert herself with the hopeful if unlikely pretence that Adventures Unlimited was actually going to open in the near future. The plan hadn’t worked.

This is it. That simple declaration, that coy little arrow from This is it to the great sea cave depicted on the postcard, the implication that conversations of a nature having nothing to do with business had passed between the writer of those words and the reader of those words, what lay behind, beneath, and beyond those conversations…These disquieting and turbulent thoughts had been the stuff of Kerra’s day and the sleepless night that had preceded it.

The postcard now had for some hours been burning a small rectangular patch against her skin from within the pocket where she’d stowed it. Each time she’d moved, she’d been aware of it, taunting her. She was going to have to do something about it, eventually. That dull burning told her as much.

Kerra hadn’t been able to avoid Alan, as she would have liked to do that day. The marketing office was not far from her own cubbyhole, and while she’d routinely taken prospective instructors to the first-floor lounge for their interviews rather than inside her cubbyhole, she’d greeted them in the vicinity of the marketing office. Alan had popped out more than once to observe her, and she wasn’t long in working out what his silent observation meant.

It was more than disapproval of her choice of candidates, all of them female. He’d made himself clear on that topic earlier, and Alan wasn’t the sort to keep pressing a point when someone was, in his opinion, being bloody-minded. Rather, his mute scrutiny of her told her that Busy Lizzie had mentioned Kerra’s visit to Pink Cottage. She’d likely told Alan about Kerra’s putative need to find a personal possession in Alan’s room, and he’d be wondering why Kerra herself hadn’t mentioned it. She had her answer ready had he cared to ask her, but he hadn’t asked.

She didn’t know where her father was. She’d seen him go out in the direction of St. Mevan Beach some hours ago, and as far as she knew he’d not returned. She’d reckoned at first he’d gone to watch the surfers, for the swells were good and the wind was offshore and she herself had seen a ragtag line of them working their way across the promontory. Had things been wildly different, her brother, Santo, might have been among them, lining up out there in the water to get into position. Her father might have been there as well. Her father and her brother together, as a matter of fact. But things were not different, and they never would be. That appeared to be the family’s curse.

And at the root of that curse: Dellen. It was as if all of them were wandering in a maze, trying to get to its mysterious centre, while all the time at its mysterious centre, Dellen waited, black-widow-like. The only way to elude her was to purge her, but it was far too late for that.

“Want something?”

Alan spoke. Kerra was in her office, where looking through a meagre stack of applicants was proving to be a dispiriting activity. She’d been working on sea kayaking, and she’d spoken to five possible instructors that day. Only two had the background she was looking for and, of them, only one had a physique suggestive of experience in the sea. The other looked like someone who kayaked on the River Avon, where the biggest challenge she faced would be taking care not to brain a cygnet with her paddle.

Kerra closed the last of the manila folders with their paltry bits of information. She wondered how best to answer Alan’s question. She was thinking it over—working on whether irony, sarcasm, or a display of wit was in her best interests—when he spoke again.

“Kerra? Want something? Cup of tea? Coffee? Something to eat? I’m going out for a bit, and I can stop—”

“No. Thanks.” She didn’t want to be beholden to him, even in so small a matter as this.

Instead, she examined him and he examined her. It was one of those moments when two individuals who have been lovers scrutinise each other like cultural anthropologists studying a tract of land for the remains of an ancient civilization long believed to have dwelt there. There should be marks, signs, indications of a passage….

“How does it go?” he asked.

She knew that he was well aware of how it went, but she played the game. “I’ve come up with several strong possibilities. I’m doing additional interviews tomorrow. But the real question is whether we’re actually going to open, isn’t it? We seem rather without direction, especially today. Have you seen my father?”

“Not for hours.”

“What about Cadan? Did he show up to work on the radiators?”

“Not sure. He may have done, but I haven’t seen him. It’s been rather quiet all the way round.”

He didn’t mention Dellen. On this day, she was as she had always been when things went bad: the great unmentionable. Just the thought of her—of Dellen the malodorous dead elephant in the room—reduced everyone to mute trepidation.

“What’ve you been…?” Kerra inclined her head towards his office. He seemed to take this as welcome, for he entered hers although this wasn’t what she’d intended. She wanted him at a distance. Things were, she’d decided, finished between them now.

He said, “I’ve been trying to get everyone in place for the video. Despite what’s happened, I do still think…” He pulled out a chair from its position between the office wall and the open door. When he sat, they were virtually knee to knee. Kerra didn’t like this. She didn’t want any kind of proximity to him. “This is important,” Alan said. “I want your dad to see that. I know the timing couldn’t be worse, but—”

“Not my mother?” Kerra inquired.

Alan blinked. He looked momentarily puzzled, perhaps by her tone. He said, “Your mum as well, but she’s already onboard, so your dad—”

“Oh. Is she?” Kerra said. “But then, I suppose she would be.” His embracing of her mother as a topic was surprising. Dellen’s opinion on anything had hardly ever counted, since she was incapable of consistency, so to hear someone counting it now came as something of a shock. Yet on the other hand, it did make sense. Alan worked with Dellen in marketing, on the rare occasions when Dellen actually worked at all, so they would have talked the video project through before he presented it to Kerra’s father. Alan would have wanted Dellen on his side: It meant one vote in the bag and a vote from someone who might have considerable influence with Ben Kerne.