Careless In Red (59 page)

They said nothing. An opaqueness had come into Darren Fields’s blue eyes, however, and this suggested to Lynley a determination to hold fast to whatever had been said in the past about Jamie Parsons. That made very good sense, from Darren’s perspective. Whatever had been said in the past had kept them out of the judicial system for nearly three decades. Why make an alteration now?

“Here’s what I know,” Lynley said.

“Hang on, man,” Darren Fields snapped. “Not a minute ago you were telling us that you’d come about another matter.”

“Ben’s kid,” Chris Outer pointed out. Frankie Kliskey said nothing, but his glance kept ping-ponging among them.

“Yes. I’ve come about that,” Lynley acknowledged. “But the two deaths have one man in common—Ben Kerne—and that has to be looked at. It’s the way these things work.”

“There’s nothing more to be said.”

“I think there is. I think there always was. So does DCI Wilkie if it comes to that, but the difference between us is—as I’ve said—that Wilkie believes what happened wasn’t intentional, while I’m far from certain of that. I could be reassured, but for that to happen, one of you or all of you are going to have to talk to me about that night and the cave.”

The three men made no reply although Outer and Fields exchanged a look. One couldn’t take a look to the bank, however, not to mention to DI Hannaford, so Lynley pressed forward. “Here’s what I know: There was a party. At that party there was an altercation between Jamie Parsons and Ben Kerne. Jamie had already needed sorting for any number of reasons, most of which had to do with who he was and how he treated people, and the way he dealt with Ben Kerne that night was apparently the final straw. So he got sorted in one of the sea caves. I believe the object was humiliation: hence the boy’s missing clothing, the marks on his wrists and ankles from having been tied up, and the faeces in his ears. My guess is that you likely pissed on him as well, but the urine would have been washed away by the tide, where the faeces were not. My question is, how did you get him down there to the cave? I’ve thought about this, and it seems to me that you had to have something that he wanted. If he was already drunk and perhaps already drugged, it can’t have been the promise of getting high. That leaves a form of contraband that he didn’t want others at the party—perhaps his sisters, who might’ve grassed to their parents—to see being exchanged. But not wanting to have others see him in possession of something that they themselves might have wanted seems out of character in the Jamie I’ve heard described. Having what others needed, wanted, admired, respected, whatever…that seems to have been how he operated. Showing these things off to people. Showing off full stop. Being better than everyone else. So I can’t see him agreeing to meet in a cave to take ownership of something illegal. That, then, seems to leave us with something more private that was promised him. Which seems to lead us to sex.”

Frankie’s eyes did it. Blue, their pupils enlarged. Lynley wondered how he’d managed to keep quiet when questioned by Wilkie away from his friends. But perhaps that had been it: Away from his friends he wouldn’t know what to say, so he’d say nothing. In their presence, he could wait for their lead.

“Young men—adolescent boys—will do just about anything if sex is part of the picture,” Lynley said. “I expect Jamie Parsons was no different to the rest of you when it came to that. So the question is, was he homosexual, and did one of you make a promise to him that was meant to be kept when he got down to the cave?”

Silence. They were very good at this. But Lynley was fairly certain he could go them one better.

“It would have had to be more than merely a promise, though,” he said. “Jamie wasn’t likely to respond to the mere suggestion of buggery. I reckon it would have had to be a move of some sort, a trigger, a signal so that he would know it was safe to proceed. What would that be? A knowing look. A word. A gesture. Hand on bum. Stiffie pressed up to him in a private corner. The sort of language that’s spoken by—”

“No one here’s a poof.” It was Darren who spoke. Not surprisingly, Lynley realised, as he was a teacher of young children and had the most to lose. “And none of the others were either.”

“The rest of your group,” Lynley clarified.

“That’s what I’m telling you.”

“But it was sex, wasn’t it,” Lynley said. “I’m right in that. He thought he was meeting someone for sex. Who?”

Silence.

Finally, “The past is dead.” It was Chris Outer this time, and he looked as steely as Darren Fields.

“The past is the past,” Lynley countered. “Santo Kerne is dead. Jamie Parsons is dead. Their deaths may or may not be related, but—”

“They’re not,” Fields said.

“—but until I know otherwise, I have to assume there may be a connection between them. And I don’t want the connection to be that each investigation ends in the same way: with an open verdict. Santo Kerne was murdered.”

“Jamie Parsons was not.”

“All right. I’ll accept that. DCI Wilkie believes it as well. You’re not going to be prosecuted more than a quarter century after the fact for having been so bloody stupid as to have left the boy in that cave. All I want to know is what happened that night.”

“It was Jack. Jack.” The admission fairly burst from Frankie Kliskey, as if he’d been waiting nearly thirty years to make it. He said to the others, “Jack’s dead now and what does it matter? I don’t want to carry this. I’m that bloody tired of carrying it, Darren.”

“God damn—”

“I held my tongue back then, and look at me. Look.” He held out his hands. They were shaking, like a palsy. “A cop comes round and it’s all back again and I don’t want living through it another time.”

Darren pushed his body away from the table, a gesture of disgust. But it was also a gesture of dismissal, one that could be interpreted as “Have it your way, then.”

There was another tight little silence among the men. In it, the gulls cawed and far below, a boat gunned its motor in the cove.

“She was called Nancy Snow,” Chris Outer said, slowly. “She was Jack Dustow’s girlfriend and Jack was one of us.”

“He’s the one who died of lymphoma,” Lynley said. “That would be Jack?”

“That would be Jack. He talked Nan into…doing what was done. We could have used Dellen—that’s Ben’s wife now, Dellen Nankervis as she was—because she was always ready for action—”

“She was there that night?” Lynley asked.

“Oh aye, she was there. She’s what started things. Because she was there.” He sketched out the details: an adolescent relationship gone sour, two youngsters each showing the other one up with a willing new partner, Jamie reacting to his sister’s becoming openly entangled with Ben Kerne, Jamie’s attack on Ben…

“He needed sorting anyway, like you said,” Frankie Kliskey finished. “None of us liked the bloke. So Jack got Nan Snow to heat him up. End product was, Jamie wanted sex right there in the house.”

“Preferably where everyone could see he was getting it,” Darren Fields added.

“Where Jack could see he was getting it,” Chris pointed out. “That’s what Jamie was like.”

“But Nan said no.” Frankie went on with the story. “No way she’d do it with him where others could watch, especially where Jack could see. She said let’s go down to the cave to do it, so that’s what they did. That’s where we were waiting.”

“She knew what the plan was?”

“Jack told her,” Chris said. “She knew. Get Jamie down to the cave for sex. Don’t meet him there because he’s not stupid and he’ll smell a rat and won’t go down. Take him there instead. Act like you want it as bad as he does. We’ll handle the rest. So down they came round half past one in the morning. We were in the cave and Nan handed him over. The rest…You can work it out.”

“The odds were good. Six of you and one of him.”

“No,” Darren said. His voice was harsh. “Ben Kerne wasn’t ever there.”

“Where was he, then?”

“Gone home. He was stupid about Dellen. Always stupid. Christ, if it hadn’t been for her, we wouldn’t have been at the bloody party at all. But he needed cheering up, so we said, Let’s go and have his drink and eat his food and listen to his music. Only she was there, that bloody Dellen with some new bloke, so Ben got into the wrong girl’s knickers in reaction to seeing Dellen, and after that, he just wanted to go home. Which was what he did. The rest of us talked to Nan and Nan went back to the party and…” Darren gestured in the direction of the cave, down below them, tucked into the cliff.

Lynley carried the story on, saying, “You stripped him in the cave, and you tied him up. You smeared faeces on him. Did you piss on him? No? What, then? Toss off? One of you? All of you?”

“He cried,” Darren said. “That’s what we wanted. That’s all we wanted. When he started to cry, we were finished with him. We untied him. We left him to make his way back up the cliff. The rest you know.”

Lynley nodded. The story made him feel queasy. It was one thing to surmise, another to hear the truth of the matter. There were so many Jamie Parsons on earth, and so many boys like these men before him. There was also the great divide between them and how that divide was or was not negotiated. Jamie Parsons had likely been unbearable. But being unbearable did not amount to being deserving of death.

Lynley said, “I’m curious about one thing.”

They waited. All of them looked at him: Darren Fields sullen, Chris Outer as cool as he’d likely been twenty-eight years ago, Frankie Kliskey expectant of a psychological blow of some sort.

“How did you manage to hold fast to the same story when the police went after you initially? Before they went after Ben Kerne, I mean.”

“We left the party at half past eleven. We parted at the high street. We went home.” It was Darren speaking, and Lynley got the point. Three sentences only, endlessly repeated. They may have been bloody stupid, those five boys involved, but they had not been ignorant of the law.

“What did you do with his clothes?”

“Countryside’s filled with adits and mine shafts,” Chris said. “That’s the nature of this part of Cornwall.”

“What about Ben Kerne? Did you tell him what had happened?”

“We left the party at half past eleven. We parted at the high street. We went home.”

So, Lynley thought, Ben Kerne had always been as ignorant of what had happened as everyone else had been, aside from the original five boys and Nancy Snow.

“What happened to Nancy Snow?” Lynley asked. “How could you be sure she’d not talk?”

“She was pregnant by Jack,” Darren told him. “Three months along. She had an interest in keeping Jack out of trouble.”

“What happened to her?”

“They married. After he died, she moved off to Dublin with another husband.”

“So you were safe.”

“We were always safe. We left the party at half past eleven. We parted at the high street. We went home.”

There was, in short, nothing more to be said. It was the same situation that had existed after Jamie Parsons’ death nearly thirty years earlier.

“Did you not feel some sense of responsibility once the police focused their attention on Ben Kerne?” Lynley asked them. “Someone grassed on him. Was it one of you?”

Darren laughed harshly. “Not bloody likely. Only person who’d’ve grassed on Ben would’ve been someone wanting to cause him trouble.”

“SHE THINKS YOU KILLED SANTO.” ALAN DIDN’T MAKE THE stunned declaration until they were well away from Adventures Unlimited. He’d manhandled Kerra out of her mother’s bedroom, marched her along the hotel corridor and down the stairs. She’d struggled and snarled, “Let me go. Alan! Let me God damn go,” but he’d been obdurate. He’d been strong as well. Who would have believed that someone as wiry as Alan Cheston could be so strong?

He’d taken her out of the hotel entirely: through the dining room door, onto the terrace, up the stone stairway, and along the promontory in the direction of St. Mevan Beach. It was too cold to be out there without a pullover or a jacket, but he didn’t stop to fetch something to protect them from the rising sea wind. In fact, he didn’t look as if he was even aware that the wind was brisk and soon to be biting.

They went down to the beach, and at this point Kerra gave up her struggle, submitting herself to be led wherever he was leading. She didn’t give up her fury, however. She would unleash it upon him when they got to where he’d decided to take her.

This turned out to be the Sea Pit, at the far end of the beach. They climbed up its seven crumbly steps and stood on the surrounding concrete deck. They looked down into the sand-strewn bottom of the pool, and for a moment Kerra wondered if he intended to throw her into the water like some primitive he-man taking control of his woman.

He didn’t. Instead, he said, “She thinks you killed Santo,” and then he released her.

Had he said anything else, Kerra would have gone on the attack: verbally, physically. But the statement demanded an answer that was at least marginally rational because the tone of it was both confused and frightened.

He spoke again. “I’ve never seen anything like that. You and your mum. That was a brawl. It was the sort of thing one sees…” He didn’t seem to know where one would see such a sight, but that would be typical. Alan was hardly the type to frequent locations where women got into hair-pulling, body-scratching, screaming-and-shrieking engagements with one another. Neither was Kerra if it came to that, but Dellen had pushed her to the breaking point. And there was a reason for what had happened between them. Alan would have to admit to that at least. He said, “I didn’t know what to do. That was so far beyond what I’ve ever had to cope with…”

She rubbed her arm where he’d held on to her. She said, “Santo stole Madlyn. He took her off me, and I hated him for that. Dellen knows it, so it was easy for her to go from that to saying I killed him. That’s her style.”

Alan looked, if anything, even more confused. He said, “People don’t steal people from other people, Kerra.”

“In my family, they do. Among the Kernes, it’s something between a knee-jerk reaction and an outright tradition.”

“That’s rubbish.”

“Madlyn and I were friends. Then Santo came along and gave her the eye and Madlyn went mad for him. She couldn’t even talk about anything else, so we ended up…Madlyn and I…We ended up with nothing because she and Santo…and what he did…And God, it was just so typical. He was just like Dellen. He didn’t want Madlyn. He just wanted to see if he could get her away from me.” Now that she was finally putting it all into words, Kerra found she couldn’t stop. She ran a hand through her hair, grasped it hard, and pulled, as if pulling it would cause her to feel something different from what she’d felt so long. “He didn’t need Madlyn. He could’ve had anyone. So could Dellen if it comes to that. She can have anyone. She has had anyone, any time she’s felt the itch. She doesn’t need…She doesn’t.”