Careless in Red (Inspector Lynley, #15)(33)

She struggled, but he held her firmly. He knew he couldn’t let her leave the room. She was on the edge, and if she went over, they all would go with her and he couldn’t have that. Not in addition to Santo.

He was stronger than she, so he began to move her even as she fought him. He got her to the floor, and he held her there with the weight of his body. She writhed, trying to throw him off.

He covered her mouth with his. He felt her resistance for a moment and then it was gone, as if it had never been. She tore at him, but it was clothing now: She ripped at his shirt, at the buckle of his belt; she pushed his jeans desperately over his buttocks.

He thought, Yes, and he showed no tenderness as he pulled her sweater over her head. He shoved up her bra and fell on her breasts. She gasped and lowered the zip on her trousers. Savagely, he slapped her hand away. He would do it, he thought. He would own her.

In a fury, he made her naked. She arced to accept him and cried out as he took her.

Afterwards, both of them wept.

KERRA HEARD IT ALL. How could she help it? The family flat had been transformed as inexpensively as possible from a collection of rooms on the hotel’s top floor. Because it was needed elsewhere, very little money had gone into the insulation of the walls. They weren’t paper thin, but they might as well have been.

She heard their voices first?her father’s soft and her mother’s rising?then the shrieking, which she could not ignore, and then the rest. Hail the conquering hero, she thought.

Dully, she said to Alan, “You need to go,” although part of her was also saying, Do you understand now?

Alan said, “No. We need to talk.”

“My brother has died. I don’t think we need to anything.”

“Santo,” Alan said quietly. “Your brother’s name was Santo.”

They were still in the kitchen although not at the table where they’d been sitting when Ben had joined them. With the rising noise from Santo’s bedroom, Kerra had shoved away from the table and gone to the sink. There she’d turned on the water to fill a pan, although she had no idea what she would do with it.

She’d remained there after she’d turned off the taps. Outside, she could see Casvelyn, just the top of it where St. Issey Road met St. Mevan Crescent. An unappealing supermarket called Blue Star Grocery sprawled like a nasty thought at this V-shaped junction, a bunker of brick and glass that made her wonder why modern conveniences had to be so ugly. Its lights were still on for evening shopping, and just beyond it, more lights indicated cars moving carefully along the northwest and southeast boundaries of St. Mevan Down. Workers were heading home for the evening, to the various hamlets that for centuries had popped up like toadstools along the coast. Smugglers’ havens, Kerra thought. Cornwall had always been a lawless place.

She said, “Please go.”

Alan said, “Do you want to tell me what this is about?”

“Santo”?and she said his name with deliberate slowness?“is what this is about.”

“You and I are a couple, Kerra. When people?”

“A couple,” she cut in. “Oh, yes. How true.”

He ignored her sarcasm. “When people are a couple, they face things together. I’m here. I’m staying. So you can choose which thing you’d like to face with me.”

She shot him a look. She hoped he read in it derision. He wasn’t supposed to be like this, especially not now. She hadn’t taken him on as her partner only to have him reveal a side of himself that proved he was someone she didn’t actually know. He was Alan, wasn’t he? Alan. Alan Cheston. Bit of a weak chest, so winters were tough on him, often cautious to a maddening extreme, churchgoing, parents loving, unathletic, sheep not shepherd. Respectful as well. And respectable. He was the sort of bloke who’d said May I…? before he’d tried to hold her hand. But now…this person just now…This was not the Alan who’d never missed a Sunday dinner at his mum and dad’s since he’d left university and London Bloody School of Economics. This was not the floppy-haired and white-skinned Alan who practised yoga and served meals-on-wheels and was never known to dive into the Sea Pit, just above St. Mevan Beach, without sticking his toes in first to test the temperature of the water. He wasn’t supposed to be telling her how things were going to be.

Yet he stood there doing it. He stood there in front of the steel-fronted fridge and he looked…implacable, Kerra thought. The sight of him made her veins feel icy.

He said, “Talk to me.” His voice sounded firm.

The firmness undid her. So what she said in reply was, “I can’t.”

Even this wasn’t what she intended to say. But his eyes, which were generally so deferential, were compelling at the moment. She knew that came from power, knowledge, and lack of fear, and where that had come from was what made Kerra turn from him. She would cook, she decided. They were all going to have to eat eventually.

“Fine,” Alan said to her back. “I’ll talk, then.”

“I have to make a meal,” she told him. “We all have to eat. If we lose our strength, things will get worse. In the next few days, there’s going to be so much to do. Arrangements, phone calls. Someone has to call my grandparents. Santo was their favourite. I’m the oldest of the grandkids?there’re twenty-seven of us…isn’t that obscene, what with overpopulation and that sort of thing??but Santo was their favourite. We spent time with them, Santo and I. Sometimes a month. Once nine weeks. They need to be told and my father won’t do it. They don’t speak, he and Granddad. Not unless they have to.”