Careless In Red (55 page)

Kerra wondered if Alan had talked to Santo as well. She wondered what Santo had made or would have made of Alan’s ideas for Adventures Unlimited.

“I’d like to talk to him again, but I haven’t actually seen…” Alan hesitated. Then he finally appeared to give in to his curiosity. He asked, “What’s going on? Do you know?”

“About what, exactly?” Kerra kept her voice polite.

“I heard them…Earlier in the day…I’d gone upstairs to look for…” His face was colouring.

Ah, she thought, were they there at last? “To look for?” Now she sounded arch. She liked that and wouldn’t have thought it was possible to manage arch when what she felt was anything but.

“I heard your mum and dad. Or rather your mum. She was…” He lowered his head. He appeared to be examining his shoes. These were two-tone saddle shoes, and Kerra regarded them as he did the same. What other man would wear saddle shoes? she wondered. And what on earth did it mean that he somehow managed to carry off wearing them without looking like Bertie Wooster? “I know things are bad,” he said. “I’m just not sure what I’m meant to be doing. At first I thought soldiering on was the ticket, but now it’s begun to seem inhuman. Your mum’s clearly in pieces, your dad’s—”

“How would you know about that?” The question came out precipitately. Kerra regretted it the moment she spoke.

“About what?” Alan looked confused. He’d been speaking meditatively, and her question appeared to have disrupted his chain of thought.

“About the pieces my mother is in?”

“As I said, I heard her. I’d gone up because no one was about and we’re at the point when we have to decide whether we’re still taking bookings or throwing the whole thing into the rubbish.”

“Concerned about that, are you?”

“Shouldn’t we all be?” He leaned back in his chair. He looked at her squarely. He folded his hands over his stomach, and he spoke again. “Why don’t you tell me, Kerra?”

“What?”

“I think you know.”

“And I think that’s a trap.”

“You were at Pink Cottage. You went through my room.”

“You’ve got a good landlady.”

“What else would you expect?”

“So I suppose you’re asking me what I was looking for?”

“You told her you left something; I assume you left something. But I can’t work out why you didn’t ask me to fetch it here for you.”

“I didn’t want you to bother.”

“Kerra.” Huge breath drawn in, huge breath expelled. He slapped his hands onto his knees. “What in God’s name is going on?”

“Excuse me?” She managed arch again. “My brother’s been murdered. Does something else need to be ‘going on’ for things not to be quite as you’d like them?”

“You know what I mean. There’s what happened to Santo and God knows that’s a nightmare. And a gut-ripping tragedy.”

“Nice of you to add that last bit.”

“But there’s also what’s happened between you and me and that—whether you want to admit it or not—began the same day as what happened to Santo.”

“Murder happened to Santo,” Kerra said. “Why can’t you say that, Alan? Why can’t you say murder?”

“For the obvious reason. I don’t want you to feel worse than you already feel. I don’t want anyone to feel worse than they already feel.”

“Anyone?”

“Everyone. You. Your dad. Your mum. Kerra—”

She got to her feet. The postcard was singeing her skin. It begged to be withdrawn from her pocket and flung at him. This is it demanded an explanation. But the explanation already existed. Only the confrontation remained.

Kerra knew who needed to be on the other side of that confrontation, and it wasn’t Alan. She pardoned herself and she left her office. She used the stairs rather than the lift.

She entered her parents’ room without knocking, the postcard in her hand. At some point in the day the curtains had been opened, so dust motes swam in an oblong of weak spring sunlight. But no one had thought to open the window to refresh the rank air. It smelled of perspiration and sex.

Kerra hated the smell, for what it stated about her parents and the stranglehold one had upon the other. She walked across the room and shoved the window open as wide as she could get it to go. Cold air swept in.

When she turned, she saw that her parents’ bed was lumpy and the sheets were stained. A pile of her father’s clothes lay on the floor, as if his body had dissolved and left this trace of him behind. Dellen herself was not immediately evident, until Kerra walked round the bed and found her lying on the floor, atop a considerable pile of her own clothing. Red, this was, and it seemed to be every article of crimson that she possessed.

For only an instant as she gazed down upon her, Kerra felt renewed: a bulb’s single flower finally being released from both the soil and the stalk. But then her mother’s lips worked and her tongue appeared between them, French kissing the air. Her hand opened and closed. Her hips moved then rested. Her eyelids twitched. She sighed.

Seeing this, Kerra wondered for the first time what it was actually like to be this woman. But she didn’t want to entertain that thought, so she used her foot to flip her mother’s right leg roughly off her left leg. “Wake up,” she told her. “It’s time to talk.” She gazed at the postcard’s picture to gain the strength she needed. This is it her mother’s red writing said. Yes, Kerra thought. This was definitely it. “Wake up,” she said again, more loudly. “Get up from the floor.”

Dellen opened her eyes. For a moment she looked confused, until she saw Kerra. And then she pulled to her the garments nearest her right hand. She clutched these to her breasts and, in doing so, she uncovered a pair of shears and a carving knife. Kerra looked from these to her mother to the clothes. She saw that every item on the floor had been rendered useless through slashing, slicing, hacking, and cutting.

“I should have used them on myself,” Dellen said dully. “But I couldn’t. Still, wouldn’t you have been happy had I done it? You and your father? Happy? Oh God, I want to die. Why won’t anyone help me die?” She began to weep tearlessly and as she did so, she drew more and more of the clothing to her until she’d formed an enormous pillow of ruined clothes.

Kerra knew what she was meant to feel: guilt. She also knew what she was meant to do: forgive. Forgive and forgive until you were the incarnation of forgiveness. Understand until there was nothing left of you except that effort to understand.

“Help me.” Dellen extended her hand. Then she dropped it to the floor. The gesture was useless, virtually noiseless.

Kerra shoved the damning postcard back into her pocket. She grabbed her mother’s arm and hauled her upwards. She said, “Get up. You need to bathe.”

“I can’t,” Dellen said. “I’m sinking. I’ll be gone soon enough and long before I can…” And then a wily shift, perhaps reading from Kerra’s face a brittleness of which she needed to be wary. She said, “He threw out my pills. He had me this morning. Kerra, he…he as much as raped me. And then he…And then he…Then he threw out my pills.”

Kerra shut her eyes tight. She didn’t want to think about her parents’ marriage. She merely wanted to force the truth from her mother, but she needed to direct the course of that truth. “Up,” she said. “Come on. Come on. You’ve got to get up.”

“Why will no one listen to me? I can’t go on like this. Inside my mind is a pit so deep…Why won’t anyone help me? You? Your father? I want to die.”

Her mother was like a sack of sand and Kerra heaved her onto the bed. There Dellen lay. “I’ve lost my child.” Her voice was broken. “Why does no one begin to understand?”

“Everyone understands.” Kerra felt reduced inside, as if something were simultaneously squeezing her down and burning her up. Soon there would be nothing of her left. Only speaking would save her. “Everyone knows you’ve lost a child, because everyone else has lost Santo, too.”

“But his mother…only his mother, Kerra—”

“Please.” Something snapped within Kerra. She reached for Dellen and pulled her upright, forcing her to sit on the edge of the bed. “Stop the drama,” she said.

“Drama?” As so often had happened in the past, Dellen’s mood shifted, like an unanticipated seismic event. “You can call this drama?” she demanded. “Is that how you react to your own brother’s murder? What’s the matter with you? Have you no feelings? My God, Kerra. Whose daughter are you?”

“Yes,” Kerra said. “I expect you’ve asked yourself that question a number of times, haven’t you. Counting back the weeks and the months and wondering…Who does she look like? Who does she belong to? Who can I say fathered her and—this would be critical, wouldn’t it, Dellen?—will he believe me? Oh, p’rhaps if I look pathetic enough. Or pleased enough. Or happy enough. Or whatever it is that you look when you know you’ve got to explain some mess you’ve made.”

Dellen’s eyes had grown dark. She’d shrunk away from Kerra. She said, “How can you possibly say…?” and her hands rose to cover her face in a gesture that Kerra assumed was meant to be read as horror.

It was time. Kerra pulled the postcard from her pocket. She said, “Oh, stop it,” and she knocked her mother’s hands to one side and held the postcard to Dellen’s face. She put a hand on the back of her neck so Dellen could not remove herself from their conversation. She said, “Have a look at what I found. ‘This is it,’ Mum? ‘This is it’? What, exactly? What is ‘it’?”

“What are you talking about? Kerra, I don’t—”

“You don’t what? You don’t know what I’ve got in my hand? You don’t recognise the picture on this card? You don’t recognise your own bloody writing? Or is it this: You don’t know where this card even came from and if you do know—because we both damn well know that you know, all right?—then you just can’t imagine how it managed to get there. Which is it, Mum? Answer me. Which?”

“It’s nothing. It’s just a postcard, for heaven’s sake. You’re behaving like—”

“Like someone whose mother fucked the man she thought she was going to marry,” Kerra cried. “In this cave where you fucked the rest of them.”

“How can you possibly—”

“Because I know you. Because I’ve watched you. Because I’ve seen the story play out over and over. Dellen in need and who’s there to help her but a willing male of whatever age because it never bloody mattered to you, did it? Just that you had him, whoever he was and whoever he belonged to…because what you wanted and when you wanted it was more important than…” Kerra felt her hands begin shaking. She pressed the card to her mother’s face. “I should make you…God. God, I should make you…”

“No!” Dellen squirmed beneath her. “You’re mad.”

“Even Santo can’t stop you. Santo dead can’t stop you. I thought, ‘This will get through to her,’ but it didn’t, did it? Santo dead—my God, Santo murdered—didn’t make a ripple. Not the slightest diversion in what you planned.”

“No!”

Dellen began to fight her, clawing at her hands and her fingers now. She kicked and rolled to get away, but Kerra was too strong. So she began to scream.

“You did this! You! You!” Dellen grabbed at her daughter’s hair and eyes. She pulled Kerra down. They rolled on the bed, seeking purchase among the mass of linens and covers. Their voices shrieked. Their arms flailed. Their legs kicked. Their hands grasped. They found. They lost. They grasped again, punching and pulling as Dellen shrieked, “You. You. You did it.”

The bedroom door crashed open. Footsteps hurried across the room. Kerra felt herself lifted and heard Alan’s voice in her ear.

“Easy,” he said. “Easy, easy. Jesus. Kerra, what’re you doing?”

“Make her tell you,” Dellen cried. She had fallen to her side on the bed. “Make her tell you everything. Make her tell you what she’s done to Santo. Make her tell you about him. Santo!”

One arm holding Kerra, Alan began moving towards the door.

“Let me go!” Kerra cried. “Make her tell the truth.”

“You come with me,” Alan told her instead. “It’s time that you and I had a real talk.”

BOTH OF THE CARS, similar to those that had been reported in the general area on the day of Santo Kerne’s death, were standing at one side of LiquidEarth when Bea and DS Havers pulled up at the erstwhile Royal Air Station. A quick glance through the window showed that Lew Angarrack’s RAV4 held a surfing kit along with a short board. Jago Reeth’s Defender held nothing as far as they could see. It was pitted with rust on the outside—the salt air was murder on any car in this part of the country—but otherwise it was as clean as was possible, which wasn’t very clean at all, considering the weather and the likelihood that he had to keep it parked outside. It did have floor mats and on both driver’s side and passenger’s side there was plenty of dried mud for their consideration. But mud was a hazard of life on the coast from late autumn through the end of spring, so its presence in the Defender didn’t count for as much as Bea would have liked.

Daidre Trahair being God-only-knew-where at this point, taking another jaunt over to the surfboard maker’s establishment had seemed the logical next move. Every lead needed to be followed up, and both Jago Reeth and Lewis Angarrack were eventually going to have to explain what they were doing in the general vicinity of Santo Kerne’s fall, no matter that Bea would have vastly preferred to have Daidre Trahair to the station for the thorough grilling she so richly deserved.

Bea had taken a call from Thomas Lynley on their way out to the old air station. He’d gone from Newquay to Zennor, and he was on his way to Pengelly Cove again. He might have something for her, he said. But that something required additional nosing round the area from which the Kerne family had sprung. He sounded unduly excited.

“And what about Dr. Trahair?” she had asked him sharply.

He hadn’t yet seen her, he said. But then, he hadn’t expected to. He hadn’t actually been keeping an eye open for her, as a matter of fact and if he was being honest. His mind had been on other things. This new situation with the Kernes—

Bea hadn’t wanted to hear about the Kernes, this new situation or otherwise. She didn’t trust Thomas Lynley, and this fact cheesed her off because she wanted to trust him. She needed to trust everyone involved in looking into the death of Santo Kerne, and the fact that she couldn’t made her cut him off abruptly. “Should you see our fair and gamboling Dr. Trahair along the way, you bring her to me,” she said. “Are we clear on that?”