“I’m here about Santo Kerne, as I told you,” Lynley said. “About Ben Kerne as well. If my intentions were anything more than that, I’d hardly have been so transparent with you.”

The other two looked to Fields. He evaluated Lynley’s words. He finally jerked his head in what went for a nod and all of them returned to the table and its bench. Frankie Kliskey appeared to be the most nervous of them. An unusually small man, he chewed on the side of his index finger-in a spot that was dirty from engine oil and raw from frequent chewing-and his glance shot rabbitlike among them. For his part, Chris Outer seemed prepared to wait for matters to unfold in whatever way they would. He lit a cigarette in the cave of his hand, and he leaned against the bench with the collar of his leather jacket turned up, his eyes narrowed, and his expression reminiscent of James Dean in a scene from Rebel Without a Cause. Only the hair was missing. He was as bald as a chicken egg.

“I hope you can see this isn’t a trap of any kind,” Lynley said as a means of preamble. “David Wilkie-is the name familiar to you? Yes, I see that it is-believes that what happened to Jamie Parsons all those years ago was likely an accident. Wilkie doesn’t think now-nor did he apparently ever think-that what was premeditated among you was his death. The boy’s blood showed both alcohol and cocaine. Wilkie thinks you didn’t understand his condition and expected him to make it out on his own when you were finished with him.”

They said nothing. An opaqueness had come into Darren Fields’s blue eyes, however, and this suggested to Lynley a determination to hold fast to whatever had been said in the past about Jamie Parsons. That made very good sense, from Darren’s perspective. Whatever had been said in the past had kept them out of the judicial system for nearly three decades. Why make an alteration now?

“Here’s what I know,” Lynley said.

“Hang on, man,” Darren Fields snapped. “Not a minute ago you were telling us that you’d come about another matter.”

“Ben’s kid,” Chris Outer pointed out. Frankie Kliskey said nothing, but his glance kept ping-ponging among them.

“Yes. I’ve come about that,” Lynley acknowledged. “But the two deaths have one man in common-Ben Kerne-and that has to be looked at. It’s the way these things work.”

“There’s nothing more to be said.”

“I think there is. I think there always was. So does DCI Wilkie if it comes to that, but the difference between us is-as I’ve said-that Wilkie believes what happened wasn’t intentional, while I’m far from certain of that. I could be reassured, but for that to happen, one of you or all of you are going to have to talk to me about that night and the cave.”

The three men made no reply although Outer and Fields exchanged a look. One couldn’t take a look to the bank, however, not to mention to DI Hannaford, so Lynley pressed forward. “Here’s what I know: There was a party. At that party there was an altercation between Jamie Parsons and Ben Kerne. Jamie had already needed sorting for any number of reasons, most of which had to do with who he was and how he treated people, and the way he dealt with Ben Kerne that night was apparently the final straw. So he got sorted in one of the sea caves. I believe the object was humiliation: hence the boy’s missing clothing, the marks on his wrists and ankles from having been tied up, and the faeces in his ears. My guess is that you likely pissed on him as well, but the urine would have been washed away by the tide, where the faeces were not. My question is, how did you get him down there to the cave? I’ve thought about this, and it seems to me that you had to have something that he wanted. If he was already drunk and perhaps already drugged, it can’t have been the promise of getting high. That leaves a form of contraband that he didn’t want others at the party-perhaps his sisters, who might’ve grassed to their parents-to see being exchanged. But not wanting to have others see him in possession of something that they themselves might have wanted seems out of character in the Jamie I’ve heard described. Having what others needed, wanted, admired, respected, whatever…that seems to have been how he operated. Showing these things off to people. Showing off full stop. Being better than everyone else. So I can’t see him agreeing to meet in a cave to take ownership of something illegal. That, then, seems to leave us with something more private that was promised him. Which seems to lead us to sex.”

Frankie’s eyes did it. Blue, their pupils enlarged. Lynley wondered how he’d managed to keep quiet when questioned by Wilkie away from his friends. But perhaps that had been it: Away from his friends he wouldn’t know what to say, so he’d say nothing. In their presence, he could wait for their lead.

“Young men-adolescent boys-will do just about anything if sex is part of the picture,” Lynley said. “I expect Jamie Parsons was no different to the rest of you when it came to that. So the question is, was he homosexual, and did one of you make a promise to him that was meant to be kept when he got down to the cave?”

Silence. They were very good at this. But Lynley was fairly certain he could go them one better.

“It would have had to be more than merely a promise, though,” he said. “Jamie wasn’t likely to respond to the mere suggestion of buggery. I reckon it would have had to be a move of some sort, a trigger, a signal so that he would know it was safe to proceed. What would that be? A knowing look. A word. A gesture. Hand on bum. Stiffie pressed up to him in a private corner. The sort of language that’s spoken by-”

“No one here’s a poof.” It was Darren who spoke. Not surprisingly, Lynley realised, as he was a teacher of young children and had the most to lose. “And none of the others were either.”

“The rest of your group,” Lynley clarified.

“That’s what I’m telling you.”

“But it was sex, wasn’t it,” Lynley said. “I’m right in that. He thought he was meeting someone for sex. Who?”

Silence.

Finally, “The past is dead.” It was Chris Outer this time, and he looked as steely as Darren Fields.

“The past is the past,” Lynley countered. “Santo Kerne is dead. Jamie Parsons is dead. Their deaths may or may not be related, but-”

“They’re not,” Fields said.

“-but until I know otherwise, I have to assume there may be a connection between them. And I don’t want the connection to be that each investigation ends in the same way: with an open verdict. Santo Kerne was murdered.”

“Jamie Parsons was not.”

“All right. I’ll accept that. DCI Wilkie believes it as well. You’re not going to be prosecuted more than a quarter century after the fact for having been so bloody stupid as to have left the boy in that cave. All I want to know is what happened that night.”

“It was Jack. Jack.” The admission fairly burst from Frankie Kliskey, as if he’d been waiting nearly thirty years to make it. He said to the others, “Jack’s dead now and what does it matter? I don’t want to carry this. I’m that bloody tired of carrying it, Darren.”

“God damn-”

“I held my tongue back then, and look at me. Look.” He held out his hands. They were shaking, like a palsy. “A cop comes round and it’s all back again and I don’t want living through it another time.”

Darren pushed his body away from the table, a gesture of disgust. But it was also a gesture of dismissal, one that could be interpreted as “Have it your way, then.”

There was another tight little silence among the men. In it, the gulls cawed and far below, a boat gunned its motor in the cove.

“She was called Nancy Snow,” Chris Outer said, slowly. “She was Jack Dustow’s girlfriend and Jack was one of us.”

“He’s the one who died of lymphoma,” Lynley said. “That would be Jack?”

“That would be Jack. He talked Nan into…doing what was done. We could have used Dellen-that’s Ben’s wife now, Dellen Nankervis as she was-because she was always ready for action-”