Careless in Red (Inspector Lynley, #15)(99)

“This stuff ’s total shit compared to the North Shore, you know” might have been bearable, but declared after a shout of “Give way, mate” had acted as the harbinger of snaking one of the locals, it was not something destined to impress anyone. The lineup meant nothing to Jamie Parsons. “Hey. Cope with it” was his answer to being informed that he was out of order among the surfers. Those things didn’t matter to him because he wasn’t one of them. He was better than they because of money, life, circumstances, education, possibility, or whatever you wanted to call it. He knew this, and they knew this. He just lacked the common sense to keep the fact to himself.

So a party at the Parsons home…? Of course they would go. They would dance to his music, eat up his food, drink down his drink, and smoke up his weed. They were owed because they’d put up with the sod. They’d had him round for five summers in a row, but this last one had been the worst.

Jamie Parsons, Ben thought now. He hadn’t considered the bloke in years. He’d been too consumed with Dellen Nankervis even though, as things turned out, it was Jamie Parsons and not Dellen Nankervis who had actually determined the course of his life.

It came to Ben as he stood at the edge of the car park and looked out at the surfers that everything he’d become was the result of decisions he’d made right here in Pengelly Cove. Not in Pengelly Cove the village, but in Pengelly Cove the geographical location: at high tide a horseshoe of water beating against slate and granite boulders; at low tide a vast sandy beach far beyond the cove itself, a beach that stretched in two directions, intruded upon by reefs and lava dykes and backed by sea caves that twisted into cliffs in which rich mineral veins could still be seen. Maws in the rock created by eons of geologic cataclysms and oceanic erosion, the sea caves had served as Ben Kerne’s destiny from the moment he’d seen them as a very young child. The dangers they presented made them utterly compelling. The privacy they offered made them utterly necessary.

His history was inextricably tied to Pengelly Cove’s two largest sea caves. They represented all the firsts he’d experienced: his first cigarette, his first spliff, his first drunk, his first kiss, his first sex. They also charted the storms that patterned the trajectory of his relationship with Dellen. For if his first kiss and first sex had been shared with Dellen Nankervis in one of the cove’s two great brooding sea caves, so also had those two caves borne witness to every betrayal they’d committed against each other.

Christ, can’t you escape the bloody cow? his father demanded. She’s making you into a madman, boy. Cut her loose, God damn it, before she chews you up and spits you into the dirt.

He’d wanted to, but he found that he couldn’t. The hold she had on him had been too profound. There were other girls, but they were simple creatures compared to Dellen: gigglers, teasers, superficial natterers, endlessly combing their sun-streaked hair and asking a bloke did he think they looked fat. They had no mystery, no complexity of character. Most important, not a single one of them needed Ben as Dellen did. She always came back to him, and he was always ready. And if two other blokes made her pregnant during those frenzied years of their adolescence, he’d done no worse to her by the time he was twenty, and he’d even managed to equal their score.

The third time it happened, he asked to marry her, for she’d proved the very nature of her love: She’d followed him to Truro with no money to speak of and only what she’d been able to fit in a canvas holdall. She’d said, It’s yours, Ben, and so am I, with the inchoate curve of her belly telling the tale.

It would be better now, he’d thought. They would marry, and marriage would put an end forever to the cycles of connection, betrayal, breakup, longing, and reconnection.

So the story was that he’d removed from Pengelly Cove to Truro for a fresh start that had not come about. He’d removed from Truro to Casvelyn for the very same reason with much the same result. Indeed, with a far worse result this time. For Santo was dead, and the insubstantial fabric of Ben’s own life was torn asunder.

It seemed to Ben now that the idea of lessons needing to be taught had started everything. What an excruciating realisation it was that lessons needing to be taught had ended everything as well. Only the student and the teacher were different. The crucial fact of acceptance remained the same.

LYNLEY SETTLED ON THE idea of a drive down the coast to Pengelly Cove once DI Hannaford had identified it as the village from which the Kerne family had originated. “It’s a two birds and one stone situation,” he explained, to which Hannaford had shrewdly replied, “You’re avoiding a bit of responsibility here, aren’t you? What is it about Dr. Trahair that you don’t want me to know, Detective Superintendent?”

He wasn’t avoiding at all, he told her blithely. But as the Kernes needed looking into and as he was intended to garner Daidre Trahair’s trust on DI Hannaford’s own instructions to him, it seemed that having a rational reason for suggesting a drive to Daidre?

“It doesn’t have to be a drive,” Hannaford protested. “It doesn’t have to be anything. You don’t even have to see her to sift through her details, and I expect you know that.”

Yes, of course, he said. But here was an opportunity?

“All right, all right. Just mind you bloody well stay in touch.”

So he took Daidre Trahair with him, an arrangement which was easy enough to effect because he began by keeping his word to her, and he went to her cottage to repair the window he’d broken. He’d decided that the replacement of such could hardly involve a serious mental workout, and as an Oxford graduate?albeit with a degree in history, which hardly applied to matters vitric?he certainly had the brainpower to sort out how the repair needed to be made. The fact that he’d never in his life engaged in a single instance of home improvement did not dissuade him. Surely he was a man to match the mountain of the job. There would be no problem involved.