Careless in Red (Inspector Lynley, #15)(212)

Dellen continued. “I was his special one. He made a fuss over me and he asked my parents could he take me to the cinema. To the seal sanctuary. To the Christmas panto. He bought me clothes he wanted to see me in because I was his favourite niece. We’ve got something special, he said. I wouldn’t buy you these things and take you to these places if you weren’t especially special to me.”

Out to sea, one of the surfers was successful, Ben saw. He dropped in and caught the wave and he carved, seeking what every surfer seeks, the racing green room whose shimmering walls rise and curve and endlessly shift, enclosing and then releasing. It was a beautiful ride and when it was over, the surfer dropped down onto the board and made his way out to the others again, accompanied by the yelps of his mates. Jokingly, they barked like dogs. When he reached them, one of them touched fists with him. Ben saw this and felt a sore place in his heart. He forced himself to attend to what Dellen was saying.

“It felt wrong,” she said, “but Uncle Hugo said it was love. The special part was being singled out. Not my brother, not my cousins, but me. So if he touched me here and asked me to touch him there, was that bad? Or was it just something that I didn’t understand?”

Ben felt her look at him and he knew he was meant to look at her as well. He was meant to look at her face and read the suffering there, and he was meant to meet her emotion with his own. But he couldn’t do it. For he found that a thousand Uncle Hugos couldn’t change a single one of the facts. If, indeed, there was an Uncle Hugo at all.

Next to him, he felt her move. He saw she was riffling through the pictures she had with her. He half-expected her to produce Uncle Hugo from within the stack, but she didn’t. Instead, she brought forth a photograph he recognised. Mum and Dad and two kids on summer holiday, a week on the Isle of Wight. Santo had been eight years old, Kerra twelve.

In the picture they were at a restaurant table, no meal in evidence, so they must have handed the camera to the waiter as they first sat, asking him to snap the happy family. All of them were smiling as required: Look at how we’re enjoying ourselves.

Pictures were the things of happy memories. They were also the instruments one used retrospectively to avoid the truth. For in Kerra’s small face, Ben could now read the anxiety, that desire to be just good enough to stop the wheel from turning another time. In Santo’s face, he could see the confusion, a child’s awareness of a present hypocrisy without the accompanying comprehension. In his own expression, he could see the gritty determination to make things right. And in Dellen’s face…what was always there: knowledge and anticipation. She was wearing a red scarf twined through her hair.

They gravitated towards her in the picture, all of them slightly leaning in her direction. His hand was over hers, as if he’d hold her there at the table instead of where she doubtless wished to be.

She can’t help herself, he’d said time and again. What he’d failed to see was that he could.

He took the picture from her and said to his wife, “It’s time for you to go.”

She said, “Where?”

“I’m not sure,” he said. “St. Ives. Plymouth. Back to Truro. Pengelly Cove perhaps. Your family’s there still. They’ll help you if you need help. If that’s what you want at this point.”

She was silent. He looked from the photo to her. Her eyes had darkened. She said, “Ben, how can you…? After what’s happened.”

“Don’t,” he said. “It’s time for you to go.”

“Please,” she said. “How will I survive?”

“You’ll survive,” he told her. “We both know that.”

“What about you? Kerra? What about the business?”

“Alan’s here. He’s a very good man. And otherwise, Kerra and I will cope. We’ve learned to do that very well.”

SELEVAN HAD FOUND THAT his plans altered once the police came to the Salthouse Inn. He told himself that he couldn’t just selfishly head out with Tammy for the Scottish border without knowing what was going on and, more important, without discovering if there was something he could do to assist Jago should assistance be required. He couldn’t imagine why such assistance might be necessary, but he thought it best to remain where he was?more or less?and wait for further information.

It wasn’t long in coming. He reckoned Jago wouldn’t return to the Salthouse Inn, so he himself didn’t wait there. Instead, he went back to Sea Dreams and paced in the caravan for a while, taking a nip now and then from a flask he’d filled to see him on the trip to the border, and finally he went outside and over to Jago’s caravan.

He didn’t go within. He had a duplicate key to the place, but it just didn’t feel right, although he reckoned Jago wouldn’t have minded had he entered. Instead he waited on the top of the metal steps, where a wider one played the role of porch and was suitable for his bum.

Jago rolled into Sea Dreams some ten minutes later. Selevan got creakily to his feet. He shoved his hands into the pockets of his jacket and walked over to Jago’s preferred spot to park the Defender. He said, “You all right, then, mate?” when Jago got out. “They didn’t give you aggro down the station, did they?”

“Not a bit,” Jago told him. “When it comes to the cops, a small measure of preparation is all that’s needed. Things go your way, then, instead of theirs. Surprises them a bit, but that’s what life is. One bloody surprise after another.”