“There’s always something, Mr. Reeth,” Bea said.
Jago looked at her in a kindly way. “Fingerprints on the boot of the car? In the interior? On the keys to the car? Inside the boot? The Confessor and the boy spent hours together, perhaps they even worked together at…let’s say it was at his dad’s business. They each rode in the other’s car, they were mates, they were pals, they were surrogate father and surrogate son, they were surrogate mother and surrogate son, they were surrogate brothers, they were lovers, they were…anything. It doesn’t matter, you see, because it all can be explained away. Hair inside the boot of the car? The Confessor’s? Someone else’s? Same thing, really. The Confessor planted someone else’s or even his own or her own because it can be a woman, we’ve already seen that. What about fibres? Clothing fibres…perhaps on the tape that marked the equipment. Wouldn’t that be lovely? But the Confessor helped wrap that equipment or he or she touched that equipment because…why? Because the boot was used for other things as well-a surfing kit, perhaps?-and things would get moved round here and there and in and out. What about access to the equipment? Everyone had that. Every single person in the poor lad’s life. What about motive? Well, nearly everyone, it seems, had that as well. So at the end of the day, there is no answer. There is only speculation but no case to present. Which the killer probably considers the beauty of the crime but which you and I know, Mr. Kerne, is any crime’s biggest horror: that the killer simply walks away. Everyone knows who did it. Everyone admits it. Everyone shakes a head and says, What a tragedy. What a useless, senseless, maddening-”
“I think that’s enough, Mr. Reeth. Or Mr. Parsons,” Bea said.
“-horror because the killer walks away now he-or she, of course-has done his business.”
“I said that’s enough.”
“And the killer can’t be touched by the cops and all the cops can do is sit there and drink their tea and wait and hope to find something somewhere someday…But they get busy, don’t they? Other things on their plates. They shove you to one side and say don’t ring us every day, man, because when a case goes cold-like this one will-there’s no point to ringing, so we’ll ring you if and when we can make an arrest. But it never comes, does it, that arrest. So you end up with nothing but ashes in an urn and they may as well have burnt your body on the day they burned his because the soul of you is gone anyway.”
He was finished, it seemed, his recital completed. All that was left was the sound of harsh breathing, which was Jago Reeth’s, and outside, the cry of gulls and the gusting of the wind and the crash of the surf. In a suitably well-rounded television drama, Bea thought, Reeth would rise to his feet now. He would dash for the door and throw himself over the cliff, having at long last achieved the vengeance he’d anticipated and having no further reason to continue living. He’d take the leap and join his dead Jamie. But this, unfortunately, was not a television drama.
His face seemed lit from within. Spittle had collected at the corners of his mouth. His tremors had worsened. He was waiting, she saw, for Ben Kerne’s reaction to his performance, for Ben Kerne’s embracing of a truth that no one could alter and no one could resolve.
Ben finally lifted his head and gave the reaction. “Santo,” he said, “was not my son.”
Chapter Twenty-nine
THE CRY OF THE GULLS SEEMED TO GROW LOUDER, AND FROM far below them the slamming of waves on rock indicated that the tide was in. Ben thought what this meant and the irony of it: excellent surfing conditions today.
The breathing that had been Jago Reeth’s stopped, drawn in and held as perhaps the old man decided whether to believe what Ben had told him. For Ben, it no longer mattered what anyone believed. Nor, finally, did it matter at all that Santo had not been his by blood. For he saw that they had been father and son in the only way that mattered between a man and a boy, which had everything to do with history and experience and nothing to do with a single blindly swimming cell that through sheerest chance makes piercing contact with an egg. Thus his failures were every bit as profound as a blood father’s would have been towards a son. For he’d made every paternal move out of fear and not love, always waiting for Santo to show the colours of his true origins. Since after their adolescence Ben had never known any one of his wife’s lovers, he had waited for Dellen’s least desirable characteristics to surface in her son, and when anything remotely Dellen-like had appeared, that had been Ben’s focus and passion. He as much as moulded Santo into his mother, so great was the emphasis he had placed upon anything in the boy that had seemed like her.
“He wasn’t,” Ben repeated, “my son.” How pathetically true, he realised now.
Jago Reeth said, “You’re a bloody liar. You always were.”
“I only wish that was the case.” Ben saw another detail now. It fell into place neatly and corrected his previous misunderstanding. He said to Reeth, “She talked to you, didn’t she? I thought she meant the police, but she didn’t. She talked to you.”
DI Hannaford said, “Mr. Kerne, you’ve no need to say anything.”
Ben said, “He needs to know the truth. I had nothing to do with what happened to Jamie. I wasn’t there.”
Jago Reeth said abruptly, “Liar. You’d say that, wouldn’t you.”
“Because it’s the truth. I’d had a scuffle with him. He tossed me out of his party. But I went for a wander and then I went home. What Dellen told you…” He wasn’t sure, then, that he could go on, but he knew that he had to, if only to do the only thing that could be done to avenge Santo’s death. “What Dellen told you, she told you out of jealousy. I’d been with your daughter. A snog. We’d got carried away. Dellen saw us, and she had to get even because that’s what she and I did to each other. Tit for tat, together and apart, in love and in hate, it never mattered. We were bound by something that we couldn’t break free of.”
“You’re a liar now. As you were then.”
“So she went to you and she told you I did…whatever she told you I did. But what I know about that night is what you know and that’s what I’ve always known: Jamie-your son-went down to that cave for some reason after that party and that’s where he died.”
“Don’t you bloody claim that,” Reeth said fiercely. “You ran off. You left Pengelly Cove and you never returned. You had a reason to leave and we both know what it was.”
“Yes. I had a reason. Because no matter what I told him, my own dad, like you, believed I was guilty.”
“With damn good cause.”
“What you will, Mr. Parsons. As you wish. Now and forever, if you like. But I wasn’t there, so I suppose your job isn’t done, is it. Because what she told you…and it was you she told, wasn’t it…? She lied.”
“Why would she ever…? Why would anyone…?”
Ben saw it. The reason, the cause. Beyond the tit for tat and the love and hate, beyond the parry and thrust of what had gone for their relationship for nearly thirty years, he saw. “Because that’s who she is,” he said. “Because that’s simply what she does.”
He left it at that. He got to his feet. At the hut’s doorway, he paused, one small matter left unclear to him. He said to Reeth, “Have you watched me all these years, Mr. Parsons? Has that really been the extent of your life? How you’ve defined yourself? Waiting till I had a boy the very same age as Jamie was when Jamie died and then moving in for the kill?”
“You don’t know what it’s like,” Reeth said. “But you will, man. You bloody sodding will.”
“Or did you find me because of…” Ben considered this. “Because of Adventures Unlimited? The purest chance, reading the newspaper somewhere-wherever you were-and seeing that story poor Alan worked so hard to arrange. Was that it? That story in the Mail on Sunday? Then dashing here and establishing yourself and waiting, because you’d got so bloody good at biding your time. Because you thought-you believed-that if you did to me what you were so sure I’d done to you, that would…what? Give you peace? Close the circle? Finish things properly? How can you believe that?”