“She was there that night?” Lynley asked.

“Oh aye, she was there. She’s what started things. Because she was there.” He sketched out the details: an adolescent relationship gone sour, two youngsters each showing the other one up with a willing new partner, Jamie reacting to his sister’s becoming openly entangled with Ben Kerne, Jamie’s attack on Ben…

“He needed sorting anyway, like you said,” Frankie Kliskey finished. “None of us liked the bloke. So Jack got Nan Snow to heat him up. End product was, Jamie wanted sex right there in the house.”

“Preferably where everyone could see he was getting it,” Darren Fields added.

“Where Jack could see he was getting it,” Chris pointed out. “That’s what Jamie was like.”

“But Nan said no.” Frankie went on with the story. “No way she’d do it with him where others could watch, especially where Jack could see. She said let’s go down to the cave to do it, so that’s what they did. That’s where we were waiting.”

“She knew what the plan was?”

“Jack told her,” Chris said. “She knew. Get Jamie down to the cave for sex. Don’t meet him there because he’s not stupid and he’ll smell a rat and won’t go down. Take him there instead. Act like you want it as bad as he does. We’ll handle the rest. So down they came round half past one in the morning. We were in the cave and Nan handed him over. The rest…You can work it out.”

“The odds were good. Six of you and one of him.”

“No,” Darren said. His voice was harsh. “Ben Kerne wasn’t ever there.”

“Where was he, then?”

“Gone home. He was stupid about Dellen. Always stupid. Christ, if it hadn’t been for her, we wouldn’t have been at the bloody party at all. But he needed cheering up, so we said, Let’s go and have his drink and eat his food and listen to his music. Only she was there, that bloody Dellen with some new bloke, so Ben got into the wrong girl’s knickers in reaction to seeing Dellen, and after that, he just wanted to go home. Which was what he did. The rest of us talked to Nan and Nan went back to the party and…” Darren gestured in the direction of the cave, down below them, tucked into the cliff.

Lynley carried the story on, saying, “You stripped him in the cave, and you tied him up. You smeared faeces on him. Did you piss on him? No? What, then? Toss off? One of you? All of you?”

“He cried,” Darren said. “That’s what we wanted. That’s all we wanted. When he started to cry, we were finished with him. We untied him. We left him to make his way back up the cliff. The rest you know.”

Lynley nodded. The story made him feel queasy. It was one thing to surmise, another to hear the truth of the matter. There were so many Jamie Parsons on earth, and so many boys like these men before him. There was also the great divide between them and how that divide was or was not negotiated. Jamie Parsons had likely been unbearable. But being unbearable did not amount to being deserving of death.

Lynley said, “I’m curious about one thing.”

They waited. All of them looked at him: Darren Fields sullen, Chris Outer as cool as he’d likely been twenty-eight years ago, Frankie Kliskey expectant of a psychological blow of some sort.

“How did you manage to hold fast to the same story when the police went after you initially? Before they went after Ben Kerne, I mean.”

“We left the party at half past eleven. We parted at the high street. We went home.” It was Darren speaking, and Lynley got the point. Three sentences only, endlessly repeated. They may have been bloody stupid, those five boys involved, but they had not been ignorant of the law.

“What did you do with his clothes?”

“Countryside’s filled with adits and mine shafts,” Chris said. “That’s the nature of this part of Cornwall.”

“What about Ben Kerne? Did you tell him what had happened?”

“We left the party at half past eleven. We parted at the high street. We went home.”

So, Lynley thought, Ben Kerne had always been as ignorant of what had happened as everyone else had been, aside from the original five boys and Nancy Snow.

“What happened to Nancy Snow?” Lynley asked. “How could you be sure she’d not talk?”

“She was pregnant by Jack,” Darren told him. “Three months along. She had an interest in keeping Jack out of trouble.”

“What happened to her?”

“They married. After he died, she moved off to Dublin with another husband.”

“So you were safe.”

“We were always safe. We left the party at half past eleven. We parted at the high street. We went home.”

There was, in short, nothing more to be said. It was the same situation that had existed after Jamie Parsons’ death nearly thirty years earlier.

“Did you not feel some sense of responsibility once the police focused their attention on Ben Kerne?” Lynley asked them. “Someone grassed on him. Was it one of you?”

Darren laughed harshly. “Not bloody likely. Only person who’d’ve grassed on Ben would’ve been someone wanting to cause him trouble.”

Chapter Twenty-two

“SHE THINKS YOU KILLED SANTO.” ALAN DIDN’T MAKE THE stunned declaration until they were well away from Adventures Unlimited. He’d manhandled Kerra out of her mother’s bedroom, marched her along the hotel corridor and down the stairs. She’d struggled and snarled, “Let me go. Alan! Let me God damn go,” but he’d been obdurate. He’d been strong as well. Who would have believed that someone as wiry as Alan Cheston could be so strong?

He’d taken her out of the hotel entirely: through the dining room door, onto the terrace, up the stone stairway, and along the promontory in the direction of St. Mevan Beach. It was too cold to be out there without a pullover or a jacket, but he didn’t stop to fetch something to protect them from the rising sea wind. In fact, he didn’t look as if he was even aware that the wind was brisk and soon to be biting.

They went down to the beach, and at this point Kerra gave up her struggle, submitting herself to be led wherever he was leading. She didn’t give up her fury, however. She would unleash it upon him when they got to where he’d decided to take her.

This turned out to be the Sea Pit, at the far end of the beach. They climbed up its seven crumbly steps and stood on the surrounding concrete deck. They looked down into the sand-strewn bottom of the pool, and for a moment Kerra wondered if he intended to throw her into the water like some primitive he-man taking control of his woman.

He didn’t. Instead, he said, “She thinks you killed Santo,” and then he released her.

Had he said anything else, Kerra would have gone on the attack: verbally, physically. But the statement demanded an answer that was at least marginally rational because the tone of it was both confused and frightened.

He spoke again. “I’ve never seen anything like that. You and your mum. That was a brawl. It was the sort of thing one sees…” He didn’t seem to know where one would see such a sight, but that would be typical. Alan was hardly the type to frequent locations where women got into hair-pulling, body-scratching, screaming-and-shrieking engagements with one another. Neither was Kerra if it came to that, but Dellen had pushed her to the breaking point. And there was a reason for what had happened between them. Alan would have to admit to that at least. He said, “I didn’t know what to do. That was so far beyond what I’ve ever had to cope with…”

She rubbed her arm where he’d held on to her. She said, “Santo stole Madlyn. He took her off me, and I hated him for that. Dellen knows it, so it was easy for her to go from that to saying I killed him. That’s her style.”

Alan looked, if anything, even more confused. He said, “People don’t steal people from other people, Kerra.”

“In my family, they do. Among the Kernes, it’s something between a knee-jerk reaction and an outright tradition.”