Just now meant there would be a later. With the police, what was implied was generally more important than what was said.

“Where are you with the investigation?” he asked.

“This is the first step, Mr. Kerne, aside from forensics. They’re beginning with fingerprints: his equipment, his car, the contents of his car. They’ll move on from there. You”-and with a gesture that took in the hotel and obviously meant everyone within it-“will need to be fingerprinted. But for the moment, it’s questions. So if you’ll fetch your wife…”

There was nothing for it but to do as she requested. Anything else and he’d look uncooperative, so Dellen’s state couldn’t be allowed to matter.

Ben went up the stairs instead of taking the lift. He wanted to use the climb to think. There was so much he didn’t want the police to know, consisting of matters both buried and private.

At their bedroom, Ben knocked on the door softly, but he didn’t wait to hear his wife’s voice. He went into the darkness and moved towards the bed, where he switched on a lamp. Dellen lay as she’d lain when he’d last seen her. She was supine, one arm crooked across her eyes. Next to her on the bedside table were two bottles of pills and a glass of water. The glass’s rim bore a crescent of red lipstick.

He sat down on the edge of the bed, but she didn’t alter her position although her lips moved convulsively, so he knew she wasn’t asleep. He said, “The police have come. They want to talk to us. You’ll have to come down.”

Her head moved fractionally. “I can’t.”

“You must.”

“I can’t let them see me like this. You know that.”

“Dellen-”

She lowered her arm. She squinted in the light and turned her head away from it and from him. “I can’t and you know it,” she said again. “Unless you want them to see me like this. Is that it?”

“How can you say that, Dell?” He put his hand on her shoulder. He felt the answering tension run through her body.

“Unless,” she said again and she turned her head towards him, “you want them to see me like this. Because we know you prefer me this way, don’t you? You love me this way. You want me this way. I could almost think you arranged Santo’s death just to send me in this direction. It’s so useful to you, yes?”

Ben rose abruptly. He swung round so that she might not see his face.

She said at once, “I’m sorry. Oh God, Ben. I don’t know what I’m saying. Why don’t you leave me? I know you want to. You’ve wanted to forever. You wear our marriage like a hair shirt. Why?”

He said, “Please, Dell.” But he didn’t know what he was asking her for. He wiped his nose on the arm of his shirt and went back to her. “Let me help you. They’re not going to leave till they’ve spoken to us.” He didn’t add what he also might have told her: that the police were likely going to come back later to talk to Kerra and they could as well talk to Dellen then. That, he determined, could not be allowed to happen. He needed to be there when they spoke to Dellen, and if the investigators came back later, there was always a chance they’d catch Dellen alone.

He went to the wardrobe and pulled clothes out for her. Black trousers, black jersey, black sandals for her feet. He sorted out underwear and carried everything back to the bed.

“Let me help you,” he said.

It had been the imperative of their years together. He lived to serve her. She lived to be served.

He drew the blankets and sheet away from her body. Beneath them, she was nude, and her scent was rank, and he looked on her with no stirring of lust. No longer the form of the fifteen-year-old girl he’d rolled with in the maram grass between the dunes, her body expressed the loathing that her voice wouldn’t speak. She was pitted and stretched. She was dyed and painted. She was simultaneously barely real and all too corporeal. She was the past-embroilment and estrangement-made flesh.

He put his arm beneath her shoulders and he raised her. She’d begun to weep. It was a silent crying, ugly to watch. It stretched her mouth. It reddened her nose. It slit her eyes.

She said, “You want to, so do it. I’m not holding you here. I’ve never held you.”

He murmured, “Shhh, now. Put this on,” and he slid arms through the straps of her bra. She was no help to him, despite his encouragement. He was forced to cup her heavy breasts in his hands and fit the bra around them before he hooked it in the back. Thus he dressed her, and when he had her in her clothing, he urged her to her feet and she finally came to life.

She said again, “I can’t let them see me like this,” but her tone was different this time. She went to her dressing table and from among its clutter of cosmetics and costume jewellery, she brought forth a brush. This she vigorously ran through her long blonde hair till she had it untangled and fashioned into a passable chignon. She switched on a little brass lamp that he’d given her on a long ago Christmas, and she bent to the mirror to examine her face. She used powder and a bit of mascara, and then she rustled among the lipsticks to find the one she wanted, which she applied.

“All right,” she said, and she turned to him.

Head to toe in black, but her lips were red. They were as red as a rose might be. They were as red as blood indeed was.

IN CONDUCTING THE PRELIMINARIES of the investigation with the assistance of Constable McNulty and Sergeant Collins, Bea Hannaford learned soon enough that she had as helpmates the indisputable police equivalents of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. This realisation had abruptly descended upon her when Constable McNulty informed her-with a suitably lachrymose expression on his face-that he’d given the family the information about Santo Kerne’s death likely being a murder. While this in itself could not be called execrable police work, having gone on blithely to share with the Kernes the facts about the dead boy’s climbing equipment definitely was.

Bea had stared at McNulty, disbelieving at first. Then she’d understood that he was not misspeaking, that he had actually disclosed vital particulars of a police investigation to individuals who very well might be suspects. She’d exploded first. She’d wanted to strangle him second. Exactly what do you do all day, she’d enquired third in a nasty tone, toss off in public lavatories? Because, my man, you are the most wretched excuse for a police officer I’ve yet to meet. Are you aware that now we have nothing known only by ourselves and the killer? Do you understand the position that puts us in? After that, she’d told him to come with her and keep his mouth shut unless and until she told him he had permission to speak.

He’d shown good sense in this, at least. From the moment they’d arrived at the Promontory King George Hotel-a crumbling heap of derelict art deco that needed to be pulled down, in Bea’s opinion-Constable McNulty had uttered not a word. He’d even taken notes, never once looking up from his pad as she spoke to Alan Cheston while they waited for the return of Ben Kerne, one hoped with his wife in tow.

Cheston was not a niggard with details: He was twenty-five, he was putatively the partner of the Kerne daughter, he’d grown up in Cambridge as the only child of a retired physicist (“That’s Mum,” he explained with no little pride) and a retired university librarian (“That’s Dad,” he added unnecessarily). He’d studied at Trinity Hall, gone on to the London School of Economics, and worked in marketing in a Birmingham redevelopment corporation until his parents’ retirement to Casvelyn, at which point he moved to Cornwall to be close to them in their latter years. He owned a terrace house in Lansdown Road that was being renovated, making it suitable for the wife and family he hoped for, so in the meantime he was living in a bed-sit at the far end of Breakwater Road.