“You said ‘We adopted him.’ I liked that.”

“Ah. Well, it was a family decision. We always reached big decisions as a family. We had Sunday-afternoon family meetings, right after the joint of beef and the Yorkshire pud.”

“Your parents weren’t vegetarians, then?”

“Goodness no. It was meat and veg. Lamb, pork, or beef every Sunday. The occasional chicken. Sprouts-Lord, I do hate sprouts…always did and always will-boiled into submission, as well as carrots and cauliflower.”

“But no beans?”

“Beans?” She looked at him blankly.

“You said your mother taught you to cook green beans.”

She looked at the bowl of them, where ten or twelve remained uneaten. She said, “Oh yes. The beans. That would have been after her cookery course. My father went for Mediterranean food in a very big way and Mum decided there had to be life beyond spaghetti Bolognese, so she set about finding it.”

“In Falmouth?”

“Yes. I did say I grew up in Falmouth.”

“School there as well?”

She observed him openly. Her face was kind, and she was smiling, but her eyes were wary. “Are you interrogating me, Thomas?”

He held up both hands, a gesture meant to be read as openness and submission. “Sorry. Occupational hazard. Tell me about Gertrude Jekyll.” For a moment, he wondered if she would do so. He added helpfully, “I saw you’ve a number of books about her.”

“The very antithesis of Capability Brown,” was her answer, given after a moment of thought. “She understood that not everyone had sweeping landscapes to work with. I like that about her. I’d have a Jekyll garden if I could but I’m probably doomed to succulents here. Anything else in the wind and the weather…well, one has to be practical about some things.”

“If not about others?”

“Definitely.” They’d finished their meal during their conversation and she stood, preparatory to gathering up the dishes. If she’d taken offence at his questioning of her, she hid it well, for she smiled at him and told him to come along, as he was meant to help with the washing up. “After that,” she said, “I shall thoroughly scour your soul and reduce you to rubble, metaphorically speaking of course.”

“How shall you manage all that?”

“In a single evening, you mean?” She cocked her head in the direction of the sitting room. “With a game of darts,” she told him. “I’ve a tournament to practice for and while I expect you’ll not be much of a challenger, you’ll do in a pinch.”

“My only reply to that must be that I’ll trounce you and humiliate you,” Lynley told her.

“With a gauntlet like that thrown down, we must play at once, then,” she told him. “Loser does the washing up.”

“You’re on.”

BEN KERNE KNEW HE would have to phone his father. Considering the old man’s age, he also knew that he ought to drive the distance to Pengelly Cove and break the news about Santo in person, but he hadn’t been to Pengelly Cove in years, and he couldn’t face going there just now. It wouldn’t have changed at all-partly due to its remote location and even more due to the commitment of its citizens to never altering a thing, including their attitudes-and the lack of change would catapult him back into the past, which was the penultimate place in which he wished to dwell. The last place was in the present. He longed for a limbo of the mind, a mental Lethe in which he could swim until memory itself no longer concerned him.

Ben would have let the entire matter go had Santo not been beloved of his grandparents. Ben knew it was unlikely they would ever contact him. They hadn’t done so since his marriage, and the only time he’d spoken to them at all was when he’d phoned occasionally, either holding a stilted conversation with them at holiday time or speaking more freely to his mother when he phoned her office, or desperate for a place to send Santo and Kerra when Dellen was in one of her bad periods. Things might have been different had he written to them. He may have worn them down over time. But he was no writer, and even if he had been, there was Dellen to consider and his loyalty to Dellen and everything that loyalty to Dellen had demanded of him since his adolescence. So he’d let go of all attempts at reconciliation, and they had done the same. And when his mother had suffered a stroke suddenly in her late fifties, he’d learned of her condition only because the event had occurred during a period when Santo and Kerra had been staying with their grandparents, and they’d brought the news with them upon their return. Even Ben’s own brothers and sisters had been forbidden from passing the information along.

Another man might have extended the same treatment to his parents now, allowing them to learn of Santo’s death in whatever way fate allowed them to learn it. But Ben had tried-and failed in so many ways-to be a man unlike his father, and that meant creating a breach in the wall that surrounded his heart at this moment, allowing some form of compassion to enter it despite his need to hide himself away in a place where it would be safe for him to grieve all the things he needed to grieve.

At any rate, the police were going to contact Eddie and Ann Kerne, because that was what the police did. They delved into the lives and histories of everyone associated with the deceased-God, he was calling Santo the deceased and what did that mean about the state of his heart?-and they looked for anything that could be used to assign blame. Doubtless his father’s grief upon hearing about Santo would propel him into expletive first and accusation second, with no wife there willing or able to act as a moderating influence upon his words, but rather with Ann Kerne standing nearby looking what she felt, which would be tormented after years with a man whom she loved but could do little to temper. And although there was nothing for Ben to be accused of in Santo’s death, the job of the police was to make deductions, connecting dots no matter how unrelated they were one to another. So he didn’t need them talking to his father with his father unaware of what had happened to his favourite grandchild.

Ben decided to make the call from his office and not from the family’s flat. He went down by means of the stairs because doing so prolonged the inevitable. When he was in his office, he didn’t at once pick up the phone. Instead, he looked at the china board upon which the weeks prior to and after Adventures Unlimited’s opening day were marked in the fashion of a calendar and filled with both activities and bookings. He could see their need of Alan Cheston displayed on this board. For months before Alan’s advent, Dellen had been in charge of marketing Adventures Unlimited, but she’d not made much of a job of it. She had ideas but virtually no follow-through. Organisational skills were not her strength.

And what is her strength, if you don’t mind my asking? his father would have enquired. But never mind that, no answer required. The whole effing village knows what she’s good at and make no mistake about that, my boy.

Untrue, of course. It was just his father’s way of taking the piss because he believed that children were meant not to get puffed up, which was translated in Eddie Kerne’s mind to children not being meant to have confidence in their own decisions. He wasn’t a bad man, just set in his ways and his ways were not Ben’s ways, so they’d come into conflict.

Not unlike Ben himself and Santo, Ben realised now. The very hell of being a father was realising one’s own father cast a shadow one could not hope to escape.

He studied the calendar. Four weeks to opening and they had to open although he couldn’t see how they might be able to do so. His heart wasn’t in it, but they had so much money invested in the business that not to open or to postpone opening wasn’t an alternative he could choose. Besides, to Ben the bookings they had were covenants that could not be broken, and while there weren’t as many as he’d dreamed of having at this point in the business’s development, he had faith that bringing onboard Alan Cheston was going to take care of that. Alan had ideas and the wherewithal to make them into realities. He was clever, and a leader as well. Most important, he was not a bit like Santo.