Careless in Red (Inspector Lynley, #15)(130)

“I need?”

“You need to stay here.”

“I can’t. Give them to me. Don’t leave me like this.”

It was the cause, the very root of the tree. Don’t leave me like this. I love you, I love you…I don’t know why…My head feels like something about to blow up, and I can’t help…Come here, my darling. Come here, come here.

“They’ve sent someone down from London.” He could see from her expression that she did not understand. She’d strayed from Santo’s death at this point, and she wanted to stray further, but he would not let her. “A detective,” he said. “Someone from Scotland Yard. He spoke to my father.”

“Why?”

“They check everything when someone’s been murdered. They look into every nook and cranny of everyone’s life. Do you understand what that means? He spoke to Dad and Dad told him everything he knew.”

“About what?”

“About why I left Pengelly Cove.”

“But that has nothing to do with?”

“It’s something to look at and that’s what they do. They look.”

“Give me the pills.”

“No.”

She made a grab for them anyway. He held the bottle out of her reach. He said, “I didn’t sleep last night. Being in Pengelly Cove, talking to Dad…It brought everything back. That party at Cliff House, the drink, the drugs, groping in the shadows and who the hell cared who saw if things went further? And things did go further. Didn’t they?”

“I don’t remember. It was a long time ago. Ben. Please. Give me the pills.”

“You’ll go away if I do, but I want you here. You need to feel something of what I feel. I want that from you because if I don’t have that much…” What? he wondered. If she couldn’t give him what he asked of her now, what would he do that he hadn’t already tried and failed to do in the past? His threats were empty, and both of them knew it.

“Death asks for death in the end, no matter what we do,” he told her. “I didn’t like Santo surfing. I believed that surfing could lead him to where surfing had led me and I told myself that was my reason. But the truth was that I wanted to take from him the core of who he was because I was afraid. It all came down to my believing he had to live the way I live. I as much as said, Live like a dead man and I’ll love you for it. And these?” He gestured with the pills. Dellen tried to snatch them, so he whipped them away and rose from the bed. “These make you dead as well, dead to the world. But in the world is where I want you to be.”

“You know what’ll happen. I can’t stop myself. I try and I feel like my skull is pounding.”

“And it’s always been that way.”

“You know that.”

“So you get relief. From pills and from drink. And if there are no pills and if drink doesn’t work?”

“Give them to me!” She, too, rose from the bed.

He was near the window, so it took no effort. He opened it and spilled sedatives down the side of the building, into the muddy border where springtime plants languished, waiting for sun that was long in coming.

Dellen wailed. She ran to Ben. She beat her fists against him. He caught them and held them.

“I want you seeing,” he said. “And hearing and feeling. And remembering. If I have to cope with all of this alone?”

“I hate you!” she screamed. “You want and you want. But you won’t find someone who’ll give you what you want. That person’s not me. It never has been and you won’t let me go. And I hate you. God, God how I hate you!”

She tore herself from him and for a moment he thought she meant to dash from the room and scrabble in the mud below them in order to rescue her fast-dissolving pills. But instead she went to the cupboard, where she began yanking clothing from within. It was red upon red, crimson, magenta, and every point in between, and all of it she threw in a heap on the floor. She was looking for the one that said the most, he thought, like the crimson sundress on that long-ago evening.

He said, “Tell me what happened. I was with Parsons’s sister. I was doing what I could do to her, what she’d let me get away with, and that was a lot. He found us together and he threw me out. Not because he cared that his sister was about to get stuffed in the corridor of her parents’ house in the midst of a party but because he liked feeling superior to everyone, and this was another way to do it. It wasn’t a class thing. Or even a money thing. It was a Jamie thing. Tell me what happened between you once I left.”

She continued throwing her clothes on the floor. When she’d finished with the cupboard, she went to the chest. Here she did the same. Knickers and bras, petticoats, jerseys, scarves. Just the red of it all until the clothing was pooled round her feet like the pulp of fruit.

“Did you f*ck him, Dellen? I’ve never asked about any of them specifically, but this is the one I want to know. Did you say to him, ‘There’s a sea cave on the beach where Ben and I go for sex and I’ll meet you there.’ And he wouldn’t have known we were finished, you and I. He would have thought it a good way to sort me. So he’d meet you there and?”

“No!”

“?he’d f*ck you like you wanted. But he’d taken some of the drugs on offer?weed, coke, whatever else was there…LSD…Ecstasy?and he’d mixed them with whatever he was drinking and once he’d done what you wanted him to do, you just left him, passed out cold, and deep in the cave, and when the tide came in the way it always comes in?”