Careless in Red Read online

  Shortly thereafter, Kerra came out of the building. She stood in the car park, hands on hips, and she looked about. Cadan was squatting next to a tiny shipwrecked rowboat that acted as an obstacle on hole number six, and it came to him that she was searching for someone, possibly him. His modus operandi was generally to hide, since if someone was seeking him, it was usually because he’d bollocksed something up and was presently going to hear about it. But a quick evaluation of his performance in the painting department told him he’d been doing a class A job, so he rose and made his presence known.

  Kerra headed in his direction. She’d changed from what she’d been wearing earlier. She was decked out in Lycra, and Cadan recognised the kit: She had on her long-distance cyclist’s gear. Odd time of day to be going for a ride, he thought, but when you were the boss’s daughter, you made your own rules.

  Kerra spoke to him without preamble when she reached the ruins of the crazy golf course. Her voice was clipped. “I phoned the farm, but they told me she doesn’t work there any longer. I phoned your house, but she’s not there either. D’you know where she is? I want to speak with her.”

  Cadan took a moment to think about the remarks, the question, and the implications of each. He bought time by going to his bike, removing Pooh from the handlebars, and settling the bird on his shoulder.

  “Blow holes in the attic,” Pooh remarked.

  “Cade.” Kerra’s voice was patient but with an edge. “Please answer me. Now would be preferable to sometime in the future.”

  “It’s weird you want to know, is all,” Cadan told her. “I mean, it’s not like you’re friends with Madlyn any longer, so I was wondering…” He cocked his head so that his cheek touched Pooh’s side. He liked the feeling of the bird’s feathers against him.

  Kerra’s eyes narrowed. “You were wondering what?”

  “Santo. The cops showing up. You coming out here to talk to me. Asking me about Madlyn. Is all this related?”

  Kerra had her hair in a ponytail and she unbanded it so that it fell to her shoulders. She shook it out, then tied it back up. It seemed as much a gesture to buy time for her as rescuing Pooh from the bike had been for Cadan. Then she looked at him and seemed to focus more clearly. “What happened to your face?”

  “Plain old luck,” he said. “It’s the one I was born with.”

  “Don’t joke, Cadan. You know what I mean. The bruises, the scratches.”

  “I slipped. Occupational hazard. I was doing a no-footed cancan, and I hit the side of the pool the wrong way. Over at the leisure centre.”

  “You did that swimming?” She sounded incredulous.

  “Pool’s empty. I was practising there. On the bike.” He felt himself colour, and this irritated him. He made it a point never to be embarrassed about his passion, and he didn’t want to think why he was embarrassed now. “What’s going on?” he asked, with a nod at the hotel.

  “It wasn’t an ordinary fall. He was murdered. That’s what the police came to tell us. They sent their…whatever he is…their liaison officer. I think he’s meant to hang about serving us tea and biscuits to keep us from…I don’t know…What do people generally do when a member of the family is murdered? Go mad to get vengeance? Shoot up the town? Gnash their teeth? And what the hell is that, gnashing the teeth? Where is she, Cade?”

  “She already knows he died.”

  “That he died or that he was murdered? Where is she? He was my brother, and as she was his…his girlfriend—”

  “Your friend as well,” Cadan reminded her. “At least at one time.”

  “Don’t,” she said. “Just don’t, all right?”

  He shrugged. He directed his attention back to the crazy golf course and said, “This needs to go. It’s a wreck. You could repair it, but my guess is the cost would exceed the benefits. In the short term. In the long run…Who knows?”

  “Alan knows the long run. Profit and loss, long-term projections. He knows it all. But none of that matters because just now there may not be a reason to worry.”

  “About?”

  “About anything related to Adventures Unlimited. I doubt my father will have the stomach to open after what’s happened to Santo.”

  “What’s next, then, if you don’t open?”

  “Alan would say we try to find a buyer and recoup our investment. But then, that’s Alan. A mind for the figures if nothing else.”

  “Sounds like you’re cheesed off at him.”

  She didn’t take up the remark. “Is she at home and just not answering the phone? I can go over there but I don’t want to take the trouble if she’s not there anyway. So d’you mind telling me that much?”

  “I expect she’s still with Jago,” he said.

  “Who’s Jago?”

  “Jago Reeth. Bloke that works for my dad. She was with him all night. She’s still with him, for all I know.”

  Kerra laughed shortly, without amusement. “Well, she’s moved on, hasn’t she? That was quick. Miraculous recovery from complete heartbreak. How very nice for her.”

  Cadan wanted to ask what it was to her, whether his sister moved on to another man or not. But instead he said, “Jago Reeth’s like…I don’t know. Maybe he’s seventy or something. He’s like a granddad to her, okay?”

  “What’s he do for your dad, then, some seventy-year-old?”

  She was definitely annoying him. She was being the boss’s daughter and you-better-treat-me-as-I’m-meant-to-be-treated, and that rubbed Cadan wrong. He said, “Kerra, does that matter, exactly? Why the hell d’you want to know?”

  And just like that, she altered. She gave a weird little cough and he saw the glitter of tears in her eyes. That glitter reminded him that her brother was dead, that he’d died only on the previous day, and that she’d just learned he’d been murdered.

  He said, “A glasser.” When she looked at him in confusion, he added, “Jago Reeth. He does the fiberglass on the boards. He’s an old surfer my dad picked up…I don’t know…six months ago maybe? He’s a detail man like Dad. And, what’s important, not like me.”

  “She spent the night with a seventy-year-old bloke?”

  “Jago phoned and said she was there.”

  “What time?”

  “Kerra…”

  “This is important, Cadan.”

  “Why? D’you think she gave your brother the bump? How was she supposed to do that? Shove him over the cliff?”

  “His equipment was messed with. That’s what the cop told us.”

  Cadan widened his eyes. “Hang on, Kerra. No way…And I mean no way. She may have been off her nut with everything that happened between them, but my sister is not—” He stopped himself. Not because of what he’d intended to say about Madlyn but because as he’d been speaking, his gaze had moved from Kerra to the beach below them and across that beach a surfer was jogging, his board under his arm and its leash trailing behind him in the sand. He was fully garbed, as he would be at this time of year, for the water was still quite cold. Head to toe in neoprene. Head to toe in black. You couldn’t, in fact, actually tell if the surfer was male or female from this distance.

  “What?” Kerra said.

  Cadan shuddered. He said quietly, “Madlyn may have been all over the map with how she reacted after what happened between her and Santo. I give you that.”

  “That and then some,” Kerra remarked.

  “But killing off her ex-boyfriend wouldn’t be part of her repertoire, okay? Jesus, Kerra, she kept thinking he was just going through a stage, you know.”

  “At first,” Kerra clarified.

  “Okay. Maybe only at first she thought that. But it doesn’t mean she’d finally get to the point of understanding how things really were and deciding the only reasonable thing to do was to kill him. Does that make sense to you?”

  “Love,” Kerra said, “never makes sense to me. People do all sorts of mad things when they’re in love with someone.”

  “Yeah?” Cadan said. “Is that the truth?
So, what about you?”

  She made no reply.

  “I rest my case,” he told her. And then he added, “Sea Dreams, if you have to know.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Where she is. Jago’s got a caravan at that holiday park where the dairy used to be. Out beyond Sawsneck Down. If you want to grill her, grill her there. For what it’s worth, though, you’ll be wasting your time.”

  “What makes you think I want to grill her?”

  “You sure as hell want something,” Cadan told her.

  ONCE BEA HANNAFORD HAD him in possession of a hired car, she told Lynley to follow her. She said to him, “I expect this isn’t your typical heap,” in reference to the Ford, “but at least you’ll fit it. Or it’ll fit you.”

  Under other circumstances, Lynley might have told her that she was being more than generous. Indeed, his breeding generally made that sort of remark second nature to him. But under the present circumstances, he merely told her that his usual mode of transportation had been totaled in February and he hadn’t yet replaced it with something else, so the Ford was fine.

  She said, “Good,” and advised him to mind his driving since he would be doing so without a licence until his wallet arrived. “It’ll be our little secret,” she said. She told him to follow her. She had something to show him.

  What she had to show him was in Casvelyn, and he obediently trailed her there. He drove trying to keep his mind on that—simply on the driving—but he found the strength draining out of him with the sheer effort he made to hold his thoughts in check.

  He’d told himself he was finished with murder. One did not watch a beloved wife die—the victim of an utterly senseless street killing—and walk away from that to think that tomorrow was simply another day. Tomorrow was, instead, something to be endured. So far he’d endured the endless succession of tomorrows he’d been living through by doing what was set in front of him and nothing more.

  At first it had been Howenstow: seeing to matters on and around the land that was his legacy and the great house sitting upon that land. No matter that his mother, his brother, and an estate manager had been handling Howenstow matters for ages. He’d thrown himself into them to keep from throwing himself elsewhere, until half of what he’d taken on was a muddle and the other half was a wreck. His mother’s gentle admonition of “Darling, let me handle this,” or “John Penellin’s been working on this situation for weeks, Tommy,” or anything of a similar persuasion was something he brushed aside with a remark so terse that the dowager countess had sighed, pressed his shoulder, and left him to it.

  But he found that Howenstow matters ultimately brought Helen into his mind, whether he wanted her there or not. The half-finished nursery had to be dismantled. Countryside clothing she’d left in their bedroom had to be gone through. A plaque for her resting place in the estate chapel—for the resting place she shared with their never-born son—had to be designed. And then there were the reminders of her: where he and she had walked together on the path from the house through the wood and over to the cove, where she’d stood in front of pictures in the gallery and lightheartedly commented on the physical attributes of some of his more questionable ancestors, where she’d browsed through ancient editions of Country Life in the library, where she’d curled up with—and ultimately dozed off over—a thick biography of Oscar Wilde.

  Because reminders of Helen were everywhere at Howenstow, he’d begun his walk. Trudging along the entire South-West Coast Path was the last possible challenge Helen would ever have undertaken (“My God, Tommy, you’ve got to be mad. What would I do for shoes that aren’t utterly appalling in appearance?”), so he knew he could walk the length of it with impunity, should he choose to do so. There would be not a single reminder of her along the way.

  But he’d not counted on the memorials he’d come across. Nothing he’d read about the path prior to walking it had prepared him for those. From simple bunches of dying flowers to wooden benches engraved with the names of the departed, death greeted him nearly every day. He’d left the Yard because he could not face another sudden brutal passing of a human being, but there it was: confronting him with a regularity that mocked his every attempt to forget.

  And now this. DI Hannaford wasn’t exactly involving him in the murder investigation itself, but she was putting him close to it. He didn’t want that, but at the same time, he didn’t know how he could avoid it because he read the inspector as a woman who was as good as her word: Should he conveniently disappear from the region of Casvelyn, she would happily fetch him back and not rest till she’d done so.

  As to what she was asking him to do…Like DI Hannaford, Lynley believed Daidre Trahair was lying about the route she’d taken from Bristol to Polcare Cove on the previous day. Unlike DI Hannaford, Lynley also knew Daidre Trahair had lied more than once about knowing Santo Kerne. There were going to be reasons behind both of these lies—far beyond what the vet had told him when he’d confronted her about her knowledge of the dead boy’s identity—and he didn’t know if he wanted to uncover them. Her reasons for obfuscation were doubtless personal, and the poor woman was hardly a killer.

  Yet why did he think that? he asked himself. He knew better than anyone that killers wore a thousand different guises. Killers were men; killers were women. Killers, to his anguish, were children. And victims everywhere—no matter how foul they might actually be—were not meant to be dispatched by anyone, whatever the motive for untimely sending them to their eternal reward or punishment. The whole basis for their society rested upon the idea that murder was wrong, start to finish, and that justice had to be served so that closure—if not satisfaction, not relief, and certainly not an end to grief—might at least be achieved on the entire event. Justice equated to naming and convicting the killer, and justice was what was owed to those the victim summarily left behind.

  Part of Lynley cried out that this was not his problem. Part of him knew that now and forever and more than ever, it would always be.

  By the time they reached Casvelyn he was, if not reconciled to the matter, then at least in moderate accord with it. Everything needed to be accounted for in an investigation. Daidre Trahair was part of that everything, having made herself so the moment she lied.

  Casvelyn’s police station was in Lansdown Road, in the heart of the town, directly at the bottom of Belle Vue’s course up the town’s main acclivity, and it was here in front of the plain, grey two-storey structure that Bea Hannaford parked. Lynley thought at first that she meant to take him inside and introduce him around, but instead she said, “Come with me,” and she put a hand on his elbow and guided him back the way they had come.

  At the junction of Lansdown Road and Belle Vue, they crossed a triangle of land where benches, a fountain, and three trees provided Casvelyn with an outdoor gathering place in good weather. From there they headed over to Queen Street, which was lined with shops like those on Belle Vue Lane: everything from purveyors of furniture to pharmacies. There, Bea Hannaford paused and peered in both directions till she apparently saw what she wanted, for she said, “Yes. Over here. I want you to see what we’re dealing with.”

  Over here referred to a shop selling sporting goods: both equipment and clothing for outdoor activities. Hannaford did an admirably quick recce of the place, found what she wanted, told the shop assistant they needed no help, and directed Lynley to a wall. Upon it were hung various metallic devices, mostly of steel. It wasn’t rocket science to sort out they were used for climbing.

  She chose a package that held three devices constructed of lead, heavy steel cable, and plastic sheathing. The lead was a thick wedge at the end of a cable perhaps one quarter inch thick. This looped through the wedge at one end and also formed another loop at the other end. In the middle was a tough plastic sheath, which wrapped tightly round the cable and thus held the two sides of it closely together. The result was a sturdy cord with a slug of lead at one end and a loop at the other.

  “This,” Hannafor
d said to Lynley, “is a chock stone. D’you know how it’s used?”

  Lynley shook his head. Obviously, it was meant for cliff climbing. Equally so, its loop end would be used to connect the chock stone to some other device. But that was as much as he could sort out.

  DI Hannaford said, “Hold up your hand, palm towards yourself. Keep your fingers tight. I’ll show you.”

  Lynley did as she asked. She slid the cable between his upright index and middle fingers, so that the slug of lead was snug against his palm and the loop at the other end of the cable was on her side of his hand.

  She said, “Your fingers are a crack in the cliff face. Or an aperture between two boulders. Your hand is the cliff itself. Or the boulders themselves. Got it?” She waited for his nod. “The lead piece—that’s the chock stone—gets shoved down the crack in the cliff or the aperture between the boulders as far as it can go, with the cable sticking out. In the loop end of the cable”—here she paused to scan the wall of climbing gear till she found what she wanted and scooped it up—“you clip a carabiner. Like this.” She did so. “And you fix your rope to the carabiner with whatever sort of knot you’ve been taught to use. If you’re climbing up, you use chock stones on the way, every few feet or whatever you’re comfortable with. If you’re abseiling, you can use them at the top instead of a sling to fix your rope to whatever you’ve chosen to hold it in place while you descend.”

  She took the chock stone from him and replaced it along with the carabiner on the wall of goods. She turned back and said, “Climbers mark each part of their kit distinctly because they often climb together. Let’s say you and I are climbing. I use six chock stones or sixteen chock stones; you use ten. We use my carabiners but your slings. How do we sort it all out quickly and without discussion in the end…? By marking each piece with something that won’t easily come off. Bright tape is just the ticket. Santo Kerne used black electrical tape.”

  Lynley saw where she was heading with this. He said, “So if someone wishes to play fast and loose with someone else’s kit, he merely needs to get his hands on the same kind of tape—”