“Is it true?”

“If we can believe Mr. Walcombe. Come inside. There’s more to see. Let’s get out of the wind.”

The upper and lower doors closed by means of wooden bars that slid through rough wooden handles and rested on hooks. As she pushed the top one back and then the bottom one, and swung the doors open, she said over her shoulder, “Hedra knew what she was about. She gave herself quite a sturdy place to wait for her son. It’s framed in timber all round. Each side has a bench, the roof has quite decent beams to hold it up, and the floor is slate. It’s as if she knew she’d be waiting for a while, isn’t it?”

She led the way in, but then stopped short. Behind her, she heard him duck under the low lintel to join her. She said, “Oh blast,” in disgust and he said, “Now, that’s a shame.”

The wall directly in front of them had been defaced and defaced recently if the freshness of the cuts into the wooden panels of the little building were anything to go by. The remains of a heart which had been earlier carved into the wood-no doubt accompanied by lovers’ initials-curved round a series of vicious hack marks that now gouged deeply, as if into flesh. No initials were left.

“Well,” Daidre said, trying to sound philosophical about the mess, “I suppose it’s not as if the walls haven’t already been carved up. And at least it isn’t spray paint. But still…One wonders…Why do people do such things?”

Thomas was observing the rest of the hut, with its more than two hundred years of carvings: initials, dates, other hearts, the occasional name. He said thoughtfully, “Where I went to school, there’s a wall…It’s not too far from the entry, actually, so no visitor can ever miss it…Pupils have put their initials into it for…I don’t know…I expect they’ve done it since the time of Henry the sixth. Whenever I go back-because I do go back occasionally…one does-I look for mine. They’re still there. They somehow say I’m real, I existed then, I exist even now. But when I look at all the others-and there are hundreds, probably thousands of them-I can’t help thinking how fleeting life is. It’s the same thing here, isn’t it?”

“I suppose it is.” She ran her fingers over several of the older carvings: a Celtic cross, the name Daniel, B.J. + S.R. “I like to come here to think,” she told him. “Sometimes I wonder who were these people all coupled together so confidently. And did their love last? I wonder that as well.”

For his part, Lynley touched the poor gouged heart. “Nothing lasts,” he said. “That’s our curse.”

Chapter Nine

BEA HANNAFORD SAW MUCH THAT SEEMED TYPICAL IN SANTO Kerne’s bedroom, and for the first time she was glad to have Constable McNulty doing penance as her dogsbody. For the walls of Santo’s bedroom bore a plethora of surfing posters and, from what Bea could tell, what McNulty didn’t know about surfing, the locations of the photos, and the surfers themselves didn’t actually bear knowing. She couldn’t conclude that his knowledge was in any way relevant to anything, however. She was merely relieved that, at the end of the day, McNulty did know something about something.

“Jaws,” he murmured obscurely, gazing awestruck at a liquid mountain down which a thumb-size madman rushed. “Bloody hell, look at that bloke. That’s Hamilton, off Maui. He’s dead mad. He’ll do anything. Christ, this looks like a tsunami, doesn’t it?” He whistled low and shook his head.

Ben Kerne was with them, but he didn’t venture into the room. His wife had remained below, in the lounge. It had been obvious that Kerne hadn’t wanted to leave her on her own, but he’d been caught between the police and his spouse. He couldn’t accommodate one while attempting to monitor the other. He’d had little choice in the matter, then. They would either wander the hotel till they found Santo’s bedroom as he saw to his wife, or he would have to take them there. He’d chosen the latter, but it was fairly clear that his mind was elsewhere.

“So far we’ve heard nothing about Santo and surfing,” Bea said to Ben Kerne, who stood in the doorway.

Kerne said, “He started surfing when we first came to Casvelyn.”

“Is his surfing kit here? Board, wet suit, whatever else…”

“Hood,” McNulty murmured. “Gloves, boots, extra fins-”

“That’ll do, Constable,” Bea told him sharply. “Mr. Kerne probably gets the point.”

“No,” Ben Kerne said. “He kept his kit elsewhere.”

“Did he? Why?” Bea said. “Not exactly convenient, is it?”

Ben looked at the posters as he replied. “I expect he didn’t like to keep it here.”

“Why?” she repeated.

“He likely suspected I’d do something with it.”

“Ah. Constable…?” Bea was gratified to see that Mick McNulty took the hint and once more attended to his note taking, although Ben Kerne couldn’t say, when asked, where Santo had indeed kept his gear. Bea said to him, “Why would Santo think you might do something with his kit, Mr. Kerne? Or do you mean to his kit?” And she thought, If the surfing kit, why not the cliff-climbing kit?

“Because he knew I didn’t particularly want him to like surfing.”

“Really? It seems a harmless enough sport, compared to cliff climbing.”

“No sport is completely harmless, Inspector. But it wasn’t that.” Kerne seemed to be looking for a way to explain, and he came into the bedroom to do so. He observed the posters. His face was stony.

Bea said, “Do you surf, Mr. Kerne?”

“I wouldn’t prefer Santo not surf if I did it myself, now would I.”

“I don’t know. Would you? I still don’t see why you approved of one sport but not another.”

“It’s the type, all right?” Kerne gave an apologetic glance to Constable McNulty. “I didn’t like him mixing with surfers because for so many of them it’s their only world. I didn’t want him adopting it: the hanging about they do, waiting for the opportunity for a surf, their lives defined by isobar charts and tide tables, driving up and down the coast to find perfect waves. And when they’re not having a surf, they’re talking about it or smoking cannabis while they stand round in their wet suits afterwards, still talking about it. There’re blokes-and lasses as well, I admit it-whose entire worlds revolve round riding waves and traveling the globe to ride more waves. I didn’t want that for Santo. Would you want it for your son or daughter?”

“But if his world revolved round cliff climbing?”

“It didn’t. But at least it’s a sport where one depends upon others. It’s not solitary, the way surfing can be and generally is. A surfer alone on the waves: You see it all the time. I didn’t want him out there alone. I wanted him to be with people. So if something happened to him…” He moved his gaze back to the posters, and what they depicted was-even to an unschooled observer like Bea-absolute danger embodied in an unimaginable tonnage of water: exposure to everything from broken bones to certain drowning. She wondered how many people died each year, coursing a nearly vertical declivity that, unlike the earth with its knowable textures, changed within seconds to trap the unwary.

She said, “Yet Santo was climbing alone when he fell. Just as he might have been had he gone for a surf. And anyway, surfers don’t always do this alone, do they?”

“On the wave itself. The surfer and the wave, alone. There may be others out there, but it’s not about them.”

“With climbing it is, though?”

“You depend on the other climber, and he depends on you. You keep each other safe.” He cleared his throat roughly and added, “What father wouldn’t want safety for his son?”

“And when Santo didn’t agree with your assessment of surfing?”

“What about it?”

“What happened between you? Arguments? Punishment? Do you tend towards violence, Mr. Kerne?”

He faced her, but in doing so he put his back to the window, so she could no longer read his face. He said, “What the hell sort of question is that?”