Careless in Red (Inspector Lynley, #15)(110)

“He told a friend of his, a girl here in town?”

“That would be Tammy Penrule, I expect. She didn’t interest him in the way other girls interested him. If you’ve seen her, you know why.”

“?that he’d met someone, but that the situation was irregular. That was his word. Perhaps he meant unusual or abnormal? We don’t know. But he asked her for advice. Should he tell everyone involved? he asked her.”

Madlyn gave a harsh laugh. “Well, whatever it was, he didn’t tell me. But he was…” She stopped. Her eyes were unnaturally bright. She coughed and gave a little stamp with one foot. “Santo was Santo. I loved him then I hated him. I expect he just met someone else he wanted to f*ck. He liked to f*ck, you see. He definitely liked to f*ck.”

“But if it was ‘irregular’…Why would that be?”

“I don’t bloody know and I don’t bloody care. Maybe he had two girls at once. Maybe he had a girl and another bloke. Maybe he’d decided to f*ck his own mum. I don’t know.”

With that, she was gone, inside the building and shedding her anorak. Her face was hard, but Bea had a feeling the girl knew far more than she was saying.

For the moment, however, there was nothing else to gain in standing there on the pavement other than giving in to the temptation to purchase a pasty for dinner, which would certainly do her no good. So she went back to the police station, where she found the TAG officers?those thorns in her side?reporting their actions to Sergeant Collins, who was dutifully noting their completion on the china board.

“Where are we?” Bea asked him.

“We’ve got two cars that were noticed in the area,” Collins said. “A Defender and a RAV4.”

“In the vicinity of the cliff? Near Santo’s car? Where?”

“One of them was in Alsperyl?this is to the north of Polcare Cove?but there’s access to the cliff. It’s a bit of a walk across a paddock, but easy enough to get to the cove once you reach the coastal path. That vehicle would be the Defender. The RAV4 was just to the south of Polcare, up above Buck’s Haven.”

“Which is…?”

“Surfing spot. So that might have been why the car was there.”

“Why ‘might’?”

“Wasn’t a good day for surfing in that spot?”

“Waves were better at Widemouth Bay.” Constable McNulty put this in from Santo’s computer. Bea eyed him and made a mental note to see what he’d been up to in the past few hours.

“Whatever,” Collins said. “We’ve got the DVLA running all the Defenders and all the RAV4s from the area.”

“You have number plates?” Bea asked, feeling a frisson of excitement that was soon enough squashed.

“No luck on that,” Collins said. “But I reckon there are few enough Defenders down here, so we might have some joy seeing a familiar name on the list of owners. Same for the RAV4, although we can expect quite a number of them. We’ll have to go through the list and look for a name.”

All fingerprints from all relevant parties had been taken at this point, Collins continued, and all of them were being run through the PNC and being compared to the prints from Santo Kerne’s vehicle as well. Background checks were continuing. Ben Kerne’s finances were apparently square, and the only insurance on Santo was enough to bury him and nothing else. So far the only person of interest was one William Mendick, the bloke mentioned by Jago Reeth. He had a record, Collins informed her.

“Now that’s lovely,” Bea said. “What sort of record?”

“Went down for assault with intent in Plymouth, and he did time for it as well. He’s only just got out of open conditions.”

“His victim?”

“Some young hooligan called Conrad Nelson he got into a brawl with. Ended up paralysed, he did, and Mendick denied the whole thing…or at least he put it down to drink and asked for mercy. Both of them were drunk, he claimed. But Mendick’s got a real problem with it. His booze-ups led to regular fights in Plymouth, and part of his parole is attendance at AA meetings.”

“Can we check on that?”

“Don’t see how. Unless he’s turning in some sort of document to his parole officer, proving he was there. But what would that mean, anyway? He could be going to meetings regular as a saint and bluffing his way through the whole programme, if you know what I mean.”

She did. But Will Mendick with a drinking problem and Will Mendick with an assault conviction put a useful wrinkle in the blanket. She thought about this, about Santo Kerne’s black eye. As she thought, she wandered over to Constable McNulty’s station. She saw on the monitor of Santo Kerne’s computer exactly what she thought she’d see on the monitor of Santo Kerne’s computer: an enormous wave and a surfer riding it.

Damn the man. She snapped, “Constable, what the bloody hell are you doing?”

“Jay Moriarty,” McNulty said obscurely.

“What?”

“That’s Jay Moriarty,” he said, with a nod at the screen. “He was sixteen years old at the time, Guv. Can you credit that? They said that wave measured fifty feet.”

“Constable.” Bea did her best to restrain herself. “Does the term ‘living on borrowed time’ meaning anything to you?”