Careless In Red (58 page)

Christ, but his mind seemed fixed on her. She might as well have been a deadly infection eating away at his brain. Cadan knew that his choices were simple: He had to get rid of her or he had to have her. Yet having her was not unlike committing ritual suicide, and he knew that if nothing else, so he rode from Binner Down House to the only place left in his limited list of escape hatches from the self: the Royal Air Station. He couldn’t come up with any other alternative. He’d lie to his father about having gone to work, if it came to that. He just needed to be somewhere that wasn’t at home alone or at Adventures Unlimited in the vicinity of that woman.

As luck had it, his father’s car wasn’t there. But Jago’s was, which seemed a godsend. If anyone could act the part of confidant, it was Jago Reeth.

Unfortunately, someone else had the same idea. Cadan walked in to find the two daughters of Ione Soutar in the reception area and the door to the inner workshops closed. Jennie was scrupulously attending to her school prep at the card table that served as his father’s desk while the redoubtable Leigh was pressing one finger to the side of her nostril, a tube of Super Glue on the counter in front of her along with a compact mirror into which she gazed.

“Mum’s inside, Cadan?” Leigh told him with that perpetual, maddening interrogatory inflection of hers, which always suggested she was speaking to a fool. “She’s said it’s personal, so you’re not to go in?”

“I expect she’s talking to Jago ’bout your dad,” Jennie added frankly. She was sucking on her lower lip as she rubbed out pencil marks she’d made on her paper. “She said it’s over, but she keeps crying at night in the bath when she thinks we can’t hear, so I reckon it’s not as over as she wants it to be.”

“She needs to give him the permanent heave-ho?” Leigh said. “I mean, no offense, Cadan, but your father’s a dickhead? Women need to stand up for themselves and they need to stand firm and they especially need to kick arse when they’re not being treated the way they deserve to be treated. I mean, like, what sort of example is she setting for the two of us?”

“What the hell’re you doing to your face?” Cadan asked.

“Mummy wouldn’t let her get her nose pierced, so she’s gluing a stone on,” Jennie informed Cadan in the friendly fashion that was her nature. “C’n you do long division, Cade?”

“God, don’t ask him,” Leigh said to her sister. “He didn’t even pass one GSCE? You know that, Jennie.”

Cadan ignored her. “You want a calculator?” he asked Jennie.

“She’s supposed to show her work?” Leigh told him. She inspected her nose stud and said to the mirror, “I’m not stupid. I’m not going to rubbish up my face. Like I’d ackshully do that?” She rolled her eyes. “What d’you think, Jennie?”

Jennie said without looking, “I think you’re going to have a real row with her now.”

Cadan couldn’t disagree. Leigh looked like someone with a large spot of blood on the side of her nose. She should have chosen a different-coloured stone.

“Mum’s going to make her take it off,” Jennie went on. “It’ll hurt when she does, as well, cos the Super Glue holds it real good. You’ll be sorry, Leigh.”

“Shut up?” Leigh said.

“I only said—”

“Shut up? Put a sock in it? Cram your fist down your throat? Gag yourself with a shovel?”

“You aren’t s’posed to talk to me like—”

The inner door swung open. Ione stood there. She’d been crying. Massively, by the look of her. Damn, but she actually must love his father, Cadan thought.

He wanted to tell her to let his dad go and to get on with her life. Lew Angarrack wasn’t available, and he probably wouldn’t ever be. He’d been dumped by the Bounder—his one, true, eternal childhood love—and he’d not got past it. None of them had. That was their curse.

But how could one explain it to a woman who’d managed to carry on with her life when her marriage had ended? There was no way.

It looked, however, as if Jago had made a heroic effort in that direction. He stood behind Ione with a handkerchief in his hand. He was folding this and returning it to the pocket of his boiler suit.

Leigh took one look at her mother and rolled her eyes. She said, “I suppose this means we won’t be surfing any longer?”

Jennie added loyally, “I didn’t like it anyways,” as she gathered up her schoolbooks.

“Let’s go, girls,” Ione said. She cast a look round the workshop. “Nothing more to be said. Matters are quite finished here.”

Cadan she ignored altogether, as if he were a carrier of the family disease. He stepped out of the way as she herded her offspring out of the shop. She was setting off in the direction of her own shop in the air station as the door swung closed behind her.

“Poor lass,” was Jago’s comment on the matter.

“What’d you tell her?”

Jago went back into the glassing room. “The truth.”

“Which is?”

“No one changes a leopard’s spots.”

“What about the leopard?”

Jago was carefully peeling some blue tape from the rail of a pintail short board. Cadan noticed how bad his shakes were today. “Eh?” Jago said.

“Can’t a leopard change its own spots?”

“I’ll wager you c’n think that one through, Cade.”

“People do change.”

“Nope,” Jago said. “That they don’t.” He applied sandpaper to the resin seam. His glasses slipped down on his nose and he pushed them back into place. “Their reactions, p’rhaps. What they show to the world, if you see what I mean. That part changes if they want it to change. But the inside part? It stays the same. You don’t change who you are. Just how you act.” Jago looked up. A long hunk of his lank grey hair had come loose from his perennial ponytail, and it fell across his cheek. “What’re you doing here, Cade?”

“Me?”

“’Less you’ve changed your name, lad. Aren’t you meant to be at work?”

Cadan preferred not to answer that question directly, so he had a wander round the workshop as Jago continued to sand the rails of the board. He opened the shaping room—scene of his former attempt at employment at LiquidEarth—and he gazed inside.

The problem, he decided, was having been assigned to shaping boards. He had no patience for it. Shaping required a steady hand. It demanded the use of an endless catalogue of tools and templates. It asked one to consider so many variables that keeping them all in mind was an impossibility: the curve of the blank, single versus double concavity, the contours of the rails, the fin positions. Length of board, shape of tail, thickness of rail. One sixteenth of an inch made all the difference and bloody hell, Cadan, can’t you tell those channels are too deep? I can’t have you in here cocking things up.

All right. Fair enough. He was wretched at shaping. And glassing was so boring he wanted to weep. It frayed his nerves: all the delicacy required. The fiberglass unspooling from its roll with just enough excess not to be considered wasteful, the careful application of resin to fix the glass permanently to the polystyrene beneath it in such a way as to prevent air bubbles. The sanding, then the glassing again, then more sanding…

He couldn’t do it. He wasn’t made for it. You had to be born a glasser like Jago and that was that.

He’d wanted to work in the spray room from the first, applying the paint to his own board artwork. But that hadn’t been allowed. His father had told him he had to earn his way into that position by learning the rest of the business first, but when it had come down to it, Lew hadn’t demanded as much from Santo Kerne, had he?

“You’ll take over the business. Santo won’t. So you need to learn things top to bottom,” had been his father’s excuse. “I need an artist and I need one now. Santo knows how to design.”

He knows how to fuck Madlyn, you mean, Cadan had wanted to say. But really, what was the point? Madlyn had wanted Santo employed there, and Madlyn was the favoured child.

And now? Who knew? They’d both disappointed their father in the end, but there was a chance that Madlyn had finally disappointed him more.

“I’m ready to come back here,” Cadan said to Jago. “What d’you think?”

Jago straightened from the board and set down his sanding block. He examined Cadan before he spoke. “What’s going on?” he asked.

Cadan riffled through his brain to try to come up with a good reason for his change of heart, but there was only the truth if he were to stand a chance of getting back into his father’s good graces, with Jago’s assistance. He said, “You were right. I can’t work there, Jago. But I need your help.”

Jago nodded. “She got you bad, eh?”

Cadan didn’t want to spend another moment on the subject of Dellen Kerne, either mentally or conversationally. He said, “No. Yes. Whatever. I’ve got to get out of there. Will you help?”

“’Course I will,” the old man said kindly. “Just give me some time to plan an approach.”

AFTER HIS CONVERSATION IN Zennor with the former detective, Lynley had returned to David Wilkie’s house, which was no particular distance from the church. There he’d ventured into the attic with the old man. An hour of rooting through cardboard boxes had produced Wilkie’s notes on the unresolved case of Jamie Parsons. These notes had in their turn produced the names of the boys who’d been so thoroughly questioned in the matter of Jamie’s death. Wilkie had no idea where those boys now resided, but Lynley thought it possible that at least one or two of them still lived in the vicinity of Pengelly Cove. If he was correct, they were waiting there to be questioned.

This same questioning occupied Lynley’s thoughts as he returned to that surfing village. He gave a great deal of consideration to how he wanted to make his next move.

As it turned out, with Ben Kerne in Casvelyn, one of the boys prematurely dead of lymphoma, and another having emigrated to Australia, only three of the original six still resided in Pengelly Cove, and it was not difficult to find them. Lynley tracked them down by starting at the pub, where a conversation with the publican led him to an auto body repair shop (Chris Outer), the local primary school (Darren Fields), and a marine engine maintenance business (Frankie Kliskey) in very short order. At each place of employment, he did and said the same thing. He produced his police identification, gave minimal details about the death under investigation in Casvelyn, and asked each man if he could free himself up to talk about Ben Kerne in another location in an hour’s time. The death of Ben Kerne’s son, Santo appeared to work the necessary magic, if magic it could be called. Each of the men had agreed.

Lynley had selected the coastal path for their conversation. Not far outside the village stood the memorial to Jamie Parsons that Eddie Kerne had spoken of. High up on the cliff, it comprised a tall-backed stone bench forming a curve round a circular stone table. In the middle of the table Jamie was deeply incised, along with the dates of his birth and his death. Once he arrived, Lynley remembered having seen this memorial during his lengthy walk along the coast. He’d sat in the shelter that the bench provided from the wind, and he’d stared not out to sea but at the boy’s name and the dates that marked the brevity of his life. Life’s brevity had filled his mind. Along with her, of course. Along with Helen.

On this day he realised once he sat on the bench to wait that, aside from a few minutes upon waking, he’d not thought about Helen, and the recognition of that fact brought her death even more heavily upon him. He found he didn’t want not to think of her daily and hourly, even as he understood that to exist in the present meant that she would move farther and farther into his past as time went forward. Yet it wounded him to know that. Beloved wife. Longed-for son. Both of them gone and he would recover. Even as this was the way of the world and of life, the very fact of his recovery seemed unbearable and obscene.

He rose from the bench and walked to the edge of the cliff. Another memorial—less formal than Jamie Parsons’s table and bench—lay here: a wreath of dead and disintegrating evergreens from the previous Christmas, a deflated balloon, a sodden Paddington bear, and the name Eric written in black marking pen on a tongue depressor. There were a dozen ways to die along the Cornish coast. Lynley wondered which one of them had taken this soul.

The sound of footfalls on the stony path just to the north of where he stood drew his attention to the route from Pengelly Cove. He saw the three men come over the rise together, and he knew they’d contacted one another. He’d expected as much when he’d first spoken to them. He’d even encouraged it. His design was to lay his cards on the table: They had nothing to fear from him.

Darren Fields was obviously their leader. He was the biggest of them and, as head teacher of the local primary school, he was likely in possession of the most education. He walked at the front of their line up the path; he was the first to nod at Lynley and to acknowledge the selection of meeting site with the words, “I thought as much. Well, we’ve said all there is to be said on that subject years ago. So if you’re thinking—”

“I’m here about Santo Kerne, as I told you,” Lynley said. “About Ben Kerne as well. If my intentions were anything more than that, I’d hardly have been so transparent with you.”

The other two looked to Fields. He evaluated Lynley’s words. He finally jerked his head in what went for a nod and all of them returned to the table and its bench. Frankie Kliskey appeared to be the most nervous of them. An unusually small man, he chewed on the side of his index finger—in a spot that was dirty from engine oil and raw from frequent chewing—and his glance shot rabbitlike among them. For his part, Chris Outer seemed prepared to wait for matters to unfold in whatever way they would. He lit a cigarette in the cave of his hand, and he leaned against the bench with the collar of his leather jacket turned up, his eyes narrowed, and his expression reminiscent of James Dean in a scene from Rebel Without a Cause. Only the hair was missing. He was as bald as a chicken egg.

“I hope you can see this isn’t a trap of any kind,” Lynley said as a means of preamble. “David Wilkie—is the name familiar to you? Yes, I see that it is—believes that what happened to Jamie Parsons all those years ago was likely an accident. Wilkie doesn’t think now—nor did he apparently ever think—that what was premeditated among you was his death. The boy’s blood showed both alcohol and cocaine. Wilkie thinks you didn’t understand his condition and expected him to make it out on his own when you were finished with him.”