Careless in Red (Inspector Lynley, #15)(98)
These mines had long been served by remote stone villages, which were forced to redefine themselves or die altogether when mining failed. The land was bad for farming, too stony and barren and so constantly windswept that only thickets of gorse and the hardiest, low-growing weeds and wildflowers managed to gain a foothold. So people turned to cattle and sheep if they could afford a herd, and they turned to smuggling when times were tough.
Cornwall’s myriad coves were the provenance of smuggling. Those who were successful in this line of work were those who knew the ways of the sea and the tide. But over time this, too, gave way to other means of support. Transportation to the southwest improved, and transportation brought tourists. Among them were summer people who sunned themselves on the beaches and crisscrossed the countryside on walking paths. Among them, ultimately, came the surfers.
In Pengelly Cove, Ben saw them from above, where the main part of the village stood, unpainted granite that was roofed in slate, looking bleak and deserted in the wet spring weather. Three streets only defined the place: two that were lined with shops, houses, two pubs, and an inn called the Curlew and a third marking a steep and twisting route down to a small car park, a lifeboat station, the cove, and the sea.
Out among the waves, lifelong surfers braved the weather. For the swells were from the northwest, coming in even sets, and the grey faces of the waves were building to the barrels for which Pengelly Cove was known. Into these, the surfers dropped, carving across the face of a wave, rising to its shoulder, fading over the top to paddle out to the swell line and wait for another. No one wasted the energy riding a wave to shore, not in this weather and not with the waves breaking in mirror images of one another, over the reefs some one hundred yards out. The shore break was for rank beginners, a low wall of white water that gave the neophyte a semblance of success but no respectability.
Ben descended to the cove. He did so on foot rather than by car, leaving his vehicle in front of the Curlew Inn and walking back along the street to the junction. He wasn’t bothered by the weather. He was dressed for it, and he wanted to experience the cove as he’d experienced it in his youth: hiking down what had been only a path then, with no car park below and nothing else save the water, the sand, and the deep sea caves to greet him when he reached the bottom, his surfboard tucked under his arm.
He’d hoped to go to the sea caves now, but the tide was too high and he knew better than to risk it. So instead he considered all the ways that the place had altered in the years since he’d been here.
Money had come to the area. He could see that in the summer houses and the getaway cottages that overlooked the cove. Long ago there had been only one of them?far out on the end of the cliff, an impressive granite structure whose proud white paint and gleaming black gutters and trim spoke of more money than any local family had?but now there were at least a dozen, although Cliff House still stood, as proudly as ever. He’d been inside only once, at an adolescent party orchestrated by a family called Parsons who’d taken up residence for five summers in a row. A celebration before our Jamie heads off to university, they’d called the gathering.
None of the locals had liked Jamie Parsons, who’d spent his gap year traveling the globe and who hadn’t possessed the common sense to keep quiet about it. But all of them had been willing to pretend the kid was everything from best mate to the Second Coming for a night of carousing inside his home.
They’d had to look cool, though. Ben remembered that. They had to look like kids who experienced this sort of revelry all the time: end of summer, an invitation that had arrived for God’s sake by post, a rock band come down from Newquay to play, tables of food, a strobe above the dance area, and nighttime bolt holes all over the house where mischief of every imaginable kind could be got up to with no one the wiser. At least two of the Parsons kids were there?had there been four of them in all? perhaps five??but no parents. Beer of every imaginable kind, as well as the contraband: whiskey, vodka, rum mixed with cola, tabs of something no one would identify, and cannabis. Cannabis by the crateful, it seemed. Cocaine as well? Ben couldn’t remember.
What he did remember was the talk, and he remembered that because of surfing that summer and what had come of surfing that summer.
The great divide: It existed any place invaded seasonally by people not born and bred to a spot. There were always the townies…and the interlopers. In Cornwall especially, there were those who toiled and scrabbled to make a modest living, and there was everyone who arrived to spend their holiday time and money enjoying the pleasures of the southwest. The main pleasure was the coast with its brilliant weather, crystalline sea, pristine coves, and soaring cliffs. The lure, however, was the water.
Longtime residents knew the rules. Anyone who surfed regularly knew the rules, for they were easy and basic. Take your turn, do not snake, do not drop in when someone else calls a wave, give way to the more experienced, respect the hierarchy. The shore break belongs to beginners with wide boards, to kids playing in the water, and sometimes to knee boarders and body boarders wanting a quick return for their efforts. Anyone surfing beyond the shore break rode in at the end of a session but otherwise remained outside, dropping off the board or cutting over the shoulder of the wave and down the backside of it to paddle out again long before reaching the area where the beginners were. It was simple. It was also unwritten, but ignorance was never an acceptable excuse.
No one knew whether Jamie Parsons operated in ignorance or indifference. What everyone did know was that Jamie Parsons somehow felt that he had certain rights, which he saw as rights and not as what they actually were: inexcusable blunders.