Careless in Red (Inspector Lynley, #15)(154)
Jago nodded. “She got you bad, eh?”
Cadan didn’t want to spend another moment on the subject of Dellen Kerne, either mentally or conversationally. He said, “No. Yes. Whatever. I’ve got to get out of there. Will you help?”
“’Course I will,” the old man said kindly. “Just give me some time to plan an approach.”
AFTER HIS CONVERSATION IN Zennor with the former detective, Lynley had returned to David Wilkie’s house, which was no particular distance from the church. There he’d ventured into the attic with the old man. An hour of rooting through cardboard boxes had produced Wilkie’s notes on the unresolved case of Jamie Parsons. These notes had in their turn produced the names of the boys who’d been so thoroughly questioned in the matter of Jamie’s death. Wilkie had no idea where those boys now resided, but Lynley thought it possible that at least one or two of them still lived in the vicinity of Pengelly Cove. If he was correct, they were waiting there to be questioned.
This same questioning occupied Lynley’s thoughts as he returned to that surfing village. He gave a great deal of consideration to how he wanted to make his next move.
As it turned out, with Ben Kerne in Casvelyn, one of the boys prematurely dead of lymphoma, and another having emigrated to Australia, only three of the original six still resided in Pengelly Cove, and it was not difficult to find them. Lynley tracked them down by starting at the pub, where a conversation with the publican led him to an auto body repair shop (Chris Outer), the local primary school (Darren Fields), and a marine engine maintenance business (Frankie Kliskey) in very short order. At each place of employment, he did and said the same thing. He produced his police identification, gave minimal details about the death under investigation in Casvelyn, and asked each man if he could free himself up to talk about Ben Kerne in another location in an hour’s time. The death of Ben Kerne’s son, Santo appeared to work the necessary magic, if magic it could be called. Each of the men had agreed.
Lynley had selected the coastal path for their conversation. Not far outside the village stood the memorial to Jamie Parsons that Eddie Kerne had spoken of. High up on the cliff, it comprised a tall-backed stone bench forming a curve round a circular stone table. In the middle of the table Jamie was deeply incised, along with the dates of his birth and his death. Once he arrived, Lynley remembered having seen this memorial during his lengthy walk along the coast. He’d sat in the shelter that the bench provided from the wind, and he’d stared not out to sea but at the boy’s name and the dates that marked the brevity of his life. Life’s brevity had filled his mind. Along with her, of course. Along with Helen.
On this day he realised once he sat on the bench to wait that, aside from a few minutes upon waking, he’d not thought about Helen, and the recognition of that fact brought her death even more heavily upon him. He found he didn’t want not to think of her daily and hourly, even as he understood that to exist in the present meant that she would move farther and farther into his past as time went forward. Yet it wounded him to know that. Beloved wife. Longed-for son. Both of them gone and he would recover. Even as this was the way of the world and of life, the very fact of his recovery seemed unbearable and obscene.
He rose from the bench and walked to the edge of the cliff. Another memorial?less formal than Jamie Parsons’s table and bench?lay here: a wreath of dead and disintegrating evergreens from the previous Christmas, a deflated balloon, a sodden Paddington bear, and the name Eric written in black marking pen on a tongue depressor. There were a dozen ways to die along the Cornish coast. Lynley wondered which one of them had taken this soul.
The sound of footfalls on the stony path just to the north of where he stood drew his attention to the route from Pengelly Cove. He saw the three men come over the rise together, and he knew they’d contacted one another. He’d expected as much when he’d first spoken to them. He’d even encouraged it. His design was to lay his cards on the table: They had nothing to fear from him.
Darren Fields was obviously their leader. He was the biggest of them and, as head teacher of the local primary school, he was likely in possession of the most education. He walked at the front of their line up the path; he was the first to nod at Lynley and to acknowledge the selection of meeting site with the words, “I thought as much. Well, we’ve said all there is to be said on that subject years ago. So if you’re thinking?”
“I’m here about Santo Kerne, as I told you,” Lynley said. “About Ben Kerne as well. If my intentions were anything more than that, I’d hardly have been so transparent with you.”
The other two looked to Fields. He evaluated Lynley’s words. He finally jerked his head in what went for a nod and all of them returned to the table and its bench. Frankie Kliskey appeared to be the most nervous of them. An unusually small man, he chewed on the side of his index finger?in a spot that was dirty from engine oil and raw from frequent chewing?and his glance shot rabbitlike among them. For his part, Chris Outer seemed prepared to wait for matters to unfold in whatever way they would. He lit a cigarette in the cave of his hand, and he leaned against the bench with the collar of his leather jacket turned up, his eyes narrowed, and his expression reminiscent of James Dean in a scene from Rebel Without a Cause. Only the hair was missing. He was as bald as a chicken egg.
“I hope you can see this isn’t a trap of any kind,” Lynley said as a means of preamble. “David Wilkie?is the name familiar to you? Yes, I see that it is?believes that what happened to Jamie Parsons all those years ago was likely an accident. Wilkie doesn’t think now?nor did he apparently ever think?that what was premeditated among you was his death. The boy’s blood showed both alcohol and cocaine. Wilkie thinks you didn’t understand his condition and expected him to make it out on his own when you were finished with him.”