Careless in Red (Inspector Lynley, #15)(161)

“I’d not be so quick about saying that,” Bea said.

She’d not rung off from him for five minutes when her mobile chimed with Sergeant Havers herself ringing.

“Nothing,” was her brief report, mostly broken up by a terrible connection. “Sh’ll I wait longer? Can do, if you want. Not often that I get to smoke in peace and listen to the surf.”

“You’ve done your bit,” Bea said. “Shove off home, then. Your Superintendent Lynley’s heading towards the inn as well.”

“He’s not my Superintendent Lynley,” Havers told her.

“What is it with you two?” Bea asked and rang off before the sergeant could work up an answer.

She decided her last task before leaving for the day was to phone Pete and make mother noises about his clothing, his eating, his schoolwork, and football. She’d enquire about the dogs as well. And if by chance Ray answered the phone, she’d be polite.

Pete answered, though, saving her the trouble. He was all afire about Arsenal’s acquisition of a new player, someone with an indecipherable name from…Had he actually said the South Pole? No. He had to have said S?o Paolo.

Bea made the appropriate noises of enthusiasm and ticked football off her list of topics. She went though eating and schoolwork and was about to go on to clothing?he hated to be asked about his underwear, but the fact of the matter was that he would wear the same pair of undershorts for a week if she didn’t stay on top of him about it?when he said, “Dad wants you to tell him when the next Sports Day is at school, Mum.”

“I always tell him when the next Sports Day at school is,” she replied.

“Yeah, but I mean he wants to go with you, not come on his own.”

“He wants or you want?” Bea asked shrewdly.

“Well, it’d be nice, wouldn’t it? Dad’s all right.”

Ray was making further inroads, Bea thought. Well, she could do nothing about that just now. She said they would see, and she told Pete she loved him. He returned the sentiment and they rang off.

But his remarks about Ray sent Bea back to the computer, where this time she went to her dating site. Pete needed a permanent man about the house, and she believed she was ready for something more defined than dating and the occasional bonk when Pete was staying the night at Ray’s.

She scrolled through the offerings, trying not to scrutinise the photos first, telling herself that keeping an open mind was essential. But a quarter hour of this topped up her dating despair in ways that nothing else ever could. She decided that if every person who indicated a love for romantic strolls on the beach at sunset actually took romantic strolls on the beach at sunset, the resulting mass of humanity would resemble Oxford Street during the Christmas season. It was such rubbish. Whose interests actually were candlelit dinners, romantic beach strolls, wine tasting in Bordeaux, and intimate chats in hot tubs or in front of a blazing coal fire in the Lake District? Was she meant to believe this?

Bloody hell, she thought. The dating scene was bleak. It got worse every year, making her more and more resolved to stick to her dogs for companionship. They might very well enjoy a soak in a hot tub, those three, and at least she’d be spared the pseudo-intimate conversation that went along with it.

She logged off the computer and headed out. Sometimes going home?even alone?was the only answer.

BEN KERNE COMPLETED THE cliff climb in good time, and his muscles were burning from the effort. He’d done it as Santo had intended to do it, abseiling down and then making the climb on the return although he could just as easily have parked below in Polcare Cove, and done everything in reverse. He could even have hiked up the coastal path to the top of the cliff and just done the abseil by itself. But he’d wanted to walk in Santo’s footsteps, and that required that he park his Austin not in the car park of the cove itself but in the lay-by not far from Stowe Wood, where Santo had left his own car. From there, he trudged along the public footpath to the sea as Santo would have done, and he fixed his sling to the same stone post where Santo’s own sling had failed him. Everything else was a matter of muscle memory. The abseil down took no time at all. The climb up required skill and thought, but that was preferable to being in the vicinity of Adventures Unlimited and Dellen.

At the end of the climb, Ben wanted to be exhausted. He sought to be drained, but he found that he was as agitated as he’d been when he’d begun the whole enterprise. His muscles were weary, but his mind was rattling along on autopilot.

As ever, it was Dellen he thought of. It was Dellen and the understanding he now had of what he’d done with his life in the pursuit of her.

He hadn’t understood at first what she was talking about when she’d shouted, “I told.” And then when her meaning began to dawn upon him, he didn’t want to believe her. For believing her would mean accepting that the cloud of suspicion under which he’d lived in Pengelly Cove?that very cloud of suspicion that had ultimately driven his final removal to Truro?had been deliberately created by this woman he loved.

So to avoid both belief and its aftermath, he said to her, “What the hell are you talking about?” and he concluded that she was striking out at him because he’d made accusations of her, because he’d thrown her pills from the window, and because, in doing so, he’d demanded something of her that she could not cope with at the moment.

Her face was screwed up with rage.