“That bloody child,” Bea said. “He’s going to be the death of me.” She shouted, “Get the hell down from there, Peter Hannaford. I told you to stay in the car and I damn well meant it and you bloody well know it. And you, Constable. What the hell are you doing, letting a child-”

“They can’t hear you, love,” Ray said. “Let me.” He bellowed Pete’s name. He gave an order only a fool would have failed to obey. Pete scurried down the remainder of the path and had his excuse ready by the time he joined them.

“I didn’t go near the body,” he said. “You said I wasn’t meant to go near and I didn’t. Mick c’n tell you that. All I did was go up the path with him. He was-”

“Stop splitting hairs with your mother,” Ray told him.

Bea said, “You know how I feel when you do that, Pete. Now say hello to your father and get out of here before I wallop you the way you need to be walloped.”

“Hullo,” Pete said. He stuck out his hand for a shake. Ray accommodated him. Bea looked away. She wouldn’t have allowed a handshake. She would have grabbed the boy and kissed him.

Mick McNulty came up behind them. “Sorry, Guv,” he said. “I didn’t know-”

“No harm done.” Ray put his hands on Pete’s shoulders and firmly turned him in the direction of the Porsche. “I thought we’d do Thai food,” he said to his son.

Pete hated Thai food, but Bea left them to sort that out for themselves. She shot Pete a look that he could not fail to read: Not here, it said. He made a face.

Ray kissed Bea on the cheek and said, “Take care of yourself.”

She said, “Mind how you go, then. Roads’re slick.” And then because she couldn’t help herself, “I didn’t say before. You’re looking well, Ray.”

He replied, “Lot of good it’s doing me,” and walked off with their son. Pete stopped at Bea’s car. He brought forth his football shoes. Bea didn’t call out to tell him to let them be.

Instead she said to Constable McNulty, “So. What’ve we got?”

McNulty gestured towards the top of the cliff. “Rucksack up there for SOCO to bag. I expect it’s the kid’s.”

“Anything else?”

“Evidence of how the poor sod went down. I left it for SOCO as well.”

“What is it?”

“There’s a stile up top, some ten feet or so back from the edge of the cliff. Marks the far west end of a cow pasture up there. He’d put a sling round it, which was supposed to be what his carabiner and rope were fixed to for the abseil down the cliff.”

“What sort of sling?”

“Made of nylon webbing. Looks like fishing net if you don’t know what you’re looking at. It’s supposed to be a long loop. You drape it round a fixed object and each end is fastened with the carabiner, making the loop into a circle. You attach your rope to the carabiner and off you go.”

“Sounds straightforward.”

“Should have been. But the sling’s been taped together-presumably over a weak spot to strengthen it-and that’s exactly where it’s failed.” McNulty gazed back the way he’d come. “Bloody idiot. I can’t think why anyone’d just not get himself another sling.”

“What kind of tape was used for the repair?”

McNulty looked at her as if surprised by the question. “Electrical tape, this was.”

“Kept your digits off it?”

“’Course.”

“And the rucksack?”

“It was canvas.”

“I reckoned as much,” Bea said patiently. “Where was it? Why do you presume it was his? Did you have a look inside?”

“Next to the stile, so I reckon it was his all right. He probably carried his kit in it. Nothing in it now but a set of keys.”

“Car?”

“I reckon.”

“Did you have a look for it?”

“Thought it best to report back to you.”

“Think another time, Constable. Get back up there and find me the car.”

He looked towards the cliff. His expression told her how little he wanted to make a second climb up there in the rain. Well, that couldn’t be helped. “Up you go,” she told him pleasantly. “The exercise will do you a world of good.”

“Thought p’rhaps I ought to go by way of the road. It’s a few miles, but-”

“Up you go,” she repeated. “Keep an eye out along the trail as well. There may be footprints not already destroyed by the rain.” Or by you, she thought.

McNulty did not look happy, but he said, “Will do, Guv,” and set off back the way he’d come with Pete.

KERRA KERNE WAS EXHAUSTED and soaked to the skin because she’d broken her primary rule: Head into the wind on the first half of the ride; have the wind at your back on your route home. But she’d been in a hurry to be gone from Casvelyn, so for the first time in longer than she could remember, she hadn’t checked the Internet before donning her cycling kit and pedaling out of town. She’d just set off in her Lycra and her helmet. She’d clicked into the pedals and pumped so furiously that she was ten miles out of Casvelyn before she actually clocked her location. Then it was the location alone that she took into consideration and not the wind, which had been her error. She’d just kept riding vaguely east. When the weather rolled in, she was too far away to do anything to escape it other than seek shelter, which she did not want to do. Hence, muscle weary and bone wet, she struggled with the last of the thirty-five miles she needed to cover on her return.

She blamed Alan, blind and foolish Alan Cheston, who was supposed to be her life partner, with all that being a life partner implied, but who’d decided to go his own bloody-minded way in the one situation that she couldn’t countenance. And she blamed her father who was also blind and foolish-as well as stupid-but in a completely different manner and for a completely different set of reasons.

At least ten months earlier, she’d said to Alan, “Please don’t do this. It won’t work out. It’ll be-”

And he’d cut into her words, which he rarely did, which should have told her something about him that she hadn’t yet learned, but which did not. “Why won’t it work out? We won’t even see each other much, if that’s what worries you.”

It wasn’t what worried her. She knew what he was saying was true. He’d be doing whatever one did in the marketing department-which was less a department and more an old conference room located behind what used to be the reception desk in the mouldy hotel-and she’d be doing her thing with the trainee instructors. He’d be sorting out the chaos that her mother had wrought as the nominal director of the nonexistent marketing department while she-Kerra-tried to hire suitable employees. They might see each other at morning coffee or at lunch, but they might well not. So rubbing elbows with him at work and then rubbing other body parts later in the day was not what concerned her.

He’d said, “Don’t you see, Kerra, that I’ve got to get some solid employment in Casvelyn? And this is it. Jobs aren’t dangling from trees round here, and it was decent of your dad to offer it to me. I’m not about to look a gift horse.”

Her father was hardly a gift horse, Kerra thought, and decency had nothing to do with why he’d offered the marketing job to Alan. He’d made the offer because they needed someone to promote Adventures Unlimited to the masses but they also needed a certain kind of someone to do that marketing, and Alan Cheston appeared to be the kind of someone Kerra’s father had been looking for.

Her father was deciding based on appearance. To him, Alan was a type. Or perhaps better said, Alan was not a type. Her father thought the type to be avoided at Adventures Unlimited was a manly sort: grit under the fingernails, throw a woman across the bed, and have her till she saw stars. What he didn’t understand-and had never understood-was that there actually was no type. There was just maleness. And despite the rounding of his shoulders, the spectacles, the bobbling Adam’s apple, the delicate hands with those long, probing spatulate fingers, Alan Cheston was male. He thought like a male, he acted like a male, and most important, he reacted like a male. That was why Kerra had put her foot down, which had ultimately done no good because she wouldn’t say more than, “It won’t work out.” That proving useless, she’d done the only thing she could do in the situation, which was to tell him they’d likely have to end their relationship. To this, he’d calmly replied without the slightest tinge of panic to his words, “So that’s what you do when you don’t get what you want? You just cut people off?”