Careless in Red (Inspector Lynley, #15)(102)

“I’d no idea,” Lynley said. While Daidre looked at a dismal arrangement of fruit just inside the shop door, he was making a purchase of postcards that he would never use, along with stamps, a local newspaper, and a roll of breath mints, which he would. “The original Kernes had quite a brood, then?”

The postmistress rang up his selections. “Seven in all, Ann and Eddie produced. And all of them still round save the oldest. That would be Benesek. He’s been gone for donkey’s years. Are you friends of the Kernes?” The woman looked from Lynley to Daidre. She sounded doubtful.

Lynley said that he wasn’t a friend. He produced his police identification. The postmistress’s expression altered. Cops and Caution could not have been written more plainly on her face.

“Ben Kerne’s son has been killed,” Lynley told her.

“Has he?” she said, a hand moving to her heart. Unconsciously, she cupped her left breast. “Oh Lord. Now that’s a very sad bit of news. What happened to him?”

“Did you know Santo Kerne?”

“Wouldn’t be anyone round here who doesn’t know Santo. They stayed with Eddie and Ann on occasion when he and his sister?that would be Kerra?were little ’uns. Ann’d bring ’em in for sweets or ices. Not Eddie, though. Never Eddie. He doesn’t come to the village if he can help it. Hasn’t for years.”

“Why?”

“Some’d say too proud. Some’d say too shamed. But not his Ann. Besides, she had to work, hadn’t she, so Eddie could have his dream of living green.”

“Shamed about what?” Lynley asked.

She gave a brief smile, but Lynley knew it had nothing to do with friendliness or humour. Rather, it had to do with acknowledging the position each of them was in at the moment: he the professional interlocutor and she the source of information. “Small village,” she said. “When things go bad for someone, they c’n stay bad. If you know what I mean.”

It might have been a statement about the Kernes, but it also could have been a statement about her own position, and Lynley understood this. Postmistress and shopkeeper, she’d know a great deal about what was going on in Pengelly Cove. Citizen of the village, she would also know the course of wisdom was to keep her mouth closed about things that did not matter to an outsider.

“You’ll have to speak to Ann or Eddie,” she said. “Ann’s got a bit of a language problem from the stroke she had, but Eddie’ll bend your ear, I expect. You speak to Eddie. He’ll be at home.”

She gave them directions to the Kerne property, which proved to be a number of acres northeast of Pengelly Cove, a former sheep farm that had been transformed by one family’s attempt to live green.

Lynley accessed the land alone, Daidre having decided to remain in the village until his business with the Kernes was completed. He entered the property by means of a disintegrating rusty gate, which stretched across a stony lane but was unlocked. He rattled along for three-quarters of a mile before seeing a habitation, midway down the hillside. It was a mishmash of architecture characterised by wattle and daub, stone, tiles, timbers, scaffolding, and sheets of heavy plastic. The house could have been from any century. The fact that it was standing at all made it something of a marvel.

Not far beyond it, a waterwheel turned at the base of a sluice, both of them roughly constructed. The former appeared to be a source of electricity, if its connection to a hulking but rusty generator was any indication. The latter appeared to be redirecting a woodland stream so that it provided water to the wheel, to a pond, and then to a series of channels, which served an enormous garden. This was newly planted by the look of it, waiting for the sun of late spring and summer. A huge compost pile made an amorphous lump nearby.

Lynley parked near a stand of old bicycles. Only one of them had inflated tyres, and all of them were rusting to the point of disintegration. There appeared to be no direct route to the front or back door of the house. A path meandered from the bicycles in the vague direction of the scaffolding, but once in its near presence, it transformed to the occasional brick or two lying together amidst trampled weeds. By stepping from one set of bricks to the other, Lynley finally reached what seemed to be the entrance to the house: a door so pitted by weather, rot, and insect life that it seemed hardly credible to assume it was in working order.

It was, however. A few knocks forcefully applied to wood brought him face-to-face with an old and badly shaven gentleman, one eye clouded by a cataract. He was roughly and somewhat colourfully dressed in old khaki trousers and a lime green cardigan that was drooping round the elbows. He had sandals and orange-and-brown Argyll socks on his feet. Lynley decided he had to be Eddie Kerne. He produced his identification for the man as he introduced himself.

Kerne looked from it to him. He turned and walked away from the door, heading wordlessly back into the bowels of the house. The door hung open, so Lynley assumed he was meant to follow, which he did.

The interior of the house wasn’t a great improvement over the exterior. It appeared to be a work long in progress, if the age of the exposed timbers was anything to go by. Walls along the central passage into the place had long ago been taken down to their framing, but there was no scent of freshly replaced wood here. Instead there was a fur of dust upon the timbers, suggesting that a job had been begun years in the past without ever reaching completion.

A workshop was Kerne’s destination, and to get to it he led Lynley through a kitchen and a laundry room that featured a washing machine with an old-fashioned wringer and thick cords crisscrossing the ceiling where clothing was hung to dry in inclement weather. This room emanated the heavy scent of mildew, a sensory ambience only moderately improved upon when they got to the workshop beyond it. They reached this spot by means of a doorless opening in the far wall of the laundry room, separated from the rest of the house by a thick sheet of plastic that Kerne shoved to one side. This same sort of plastic covered what went for windows in the workshop, a room that had been fashioned more recently than the rest of the house: It was made of unadorned concrete blocks. It was frigid within, like an old-time larder without the marble shelves.