Careless in Red (Inspector Lynley, #15)(10)

“Don’t know,” Selevan told her. “Just that Dr. Trahair came in and told Brian over Salthouse that Santo Kerne was down on the rocks ’n Polcare Cove. That’s all I know.”

“That doesn’t sound good,” Will Mendick said.

“Was he surfing, Grandie?” Tammy asked. But she didn’t look at her grandfather when she spoke. She kept her eyes on Will.

This made Selevan look more closely at the young man. Will, he saw, was breathing oddly, a bit like a runner, but his face had lost colour. He was a ruddy boy naturally, so it was noticeable when the blood drained away.

“Don’t know what he was doing, do I?” Selevan said. “But something’s happened to him, that’s for certain. And it looks bad.”

“Why?” Will asked.

“Cos they’d’ve hardly left the boy on the rocks alone if he’d only been hurt and not…” He shrugged.

“Not dead?” Tammy said.

“Dead?” Will repeated.

Tammy said, “Go, Will.”

“But how can I?”

“You’ll think of something. Just go. We’ll have coffee another time.”

That was apparently all he needed. Will nodded at Selevan and headed for the door. He touched Tammy on the shoulder as he passed her. He said, “Thanks, Tam. I’ll ring you.”

Selevan tried to take this as a positive sign.

DAYLIGHT WAS FAST FADING by the time Detective Inspector Bea Hannaford arrived in Polcare Cove. She’d been in the midst of buying football shoes for her son when her mobile had rung, and she’d completed the purchase without giving Pete a chance to point out that he’d not tried on every style available, as was his habit. She’d said, “We buy now or you come back later with your father,” and that had been enough. His father would force him into the least expensive pair, brooking no arguments about it.

They’d left the shop in a hurry and dashed through the rain to the car. She’d rung Ray from the road. It wasn’t his night for Pete, but Ray was flexible. He was a cop as well, and he knew the demands of the job. He’d meet them in Polcare Cove, he said. “Got a jumper?” he’d asked her.

“Don’t know yet,” she’d said.

Bodies at the bases of cliffs were not rare in this part of the world. People climbed foolishly on the culm, people wandered too near the edge of the cliffs and went over, or people jumped. If the tide was high, the bodies sometimes were never found. If it was low, the police had a chance to sort out how they had got there.

Pete was saying enthusiastically, “I bet it’s all bloody. I bet its head cracked open like a rotten egg and its guts ’n brains’re all over the place.”

“Peter.” Bea cast him a glance. He was slouched against the door, the shopping bag containing his shoes clutched to his chest as if he thought someone might rip it from him. He had spots on his face?the curse of the young adolescent, Bea remembered, although her own adolescence was forty years long gone?and braces on his teeth. Looking at him at fourteen years of age, she found it impossible to imagine the man he might one day become.

“What?” he demanded. “You said someone went over the cliff. I bet he went headfirst and splattered his skull. I bet he took a dive. I bet he?”

“You wouldn’t talk that way if you’d ever seen someone who’s fallen.”

“Wicked,” Pete breathed.

He was doing it deliberately, Bea thought, trying to provoke a row. He was angry that he had to go to his father’s and angrier still about the disruption to their plans, which had been the rare treat of takeaway pizza and a DVD. He’d chosen a film about football, which his father would not be interested in watching with him, unlike his mother. Bea and Pete were as one when it came to football.

She decided to let his anger go unconfronted. There wasn’t time to deal with it and, anyway, he had to learn to cope when plans got changed, because no plan was ever written in concrete.

The rain was coming down in sheets when they finally reached the vicinity of Polcare Cove. This wasn’t a place Bea Hannaford had been to before, so she peered through the windscreen and crawled along the lane. This descended through a woodland in a series of switchbacks before shooting out from beneath the budding trees, climbing up once again into farmland defined by thick earthen hedgerows, and descending a final time towards the sea. Here, the land opened to form a meadow at the northwest edge of which stood a mustard-coloured cottage with two nearby outbuildings, the only habitation in this place.

A panda car jutted partially into the lane from the cottage driveway, with another police vehicle sitting directly in front of it, nudging against a white Vauxhall near the cottage itself. Bea didn’t stop since to do so would have blocked the road entirely, and she knew there would be many more vehicles arriving and needing access to the beach long before the day was done. She went farther along towards the sea and found what went for a car park: a patch of earth that was potholed like a piece of Swiss cheese. There she stopped.

Pete reached for the handle of his door. She said, “Wait here.”

“But I want to see?”

“Pete, you heard me. Wait here. Your father’s on his way. If he shows up and you’re not in the car…Do I need to say more?”

Pete threw himself back against the seat, looking sulky. “It wouldn’t hurt if I looked. And it’s not my night to stay at Dad’s anyway.”