Chapter Eleven
DI BEA HANNAFORD ARRIVED AT THE POLICE STATION LATE, in a foul mood and with Ray’s parting words still gnawing at her. She didn’t want anything Ray had to say taking up residence in her consciousness, but he had a way of transmuting good-bye from an innocuous social moment into the bolt from a crossbow, and one had to be quick to avoid getting hit. She was fast on her verbal feet when there was nothing else on her mind. But that was impossible in the middle of a murder enquiry.
She’d had to cave in on the issue of Pete, another reason she was late to the station. Given the absence of MCIT officers to work the case, given only the loan of a TAG team-and who the bloody hell knew when they were going to be withdrawn?-she would be putting in long hours, and someone had to look after Pete. Not so much because Pete couldn’t look after himself, since he’d been cooking for years and he’d mastered the art of laundry the first time his mother had turned a beloved Arsenal T-shirt purple, but because he had to be ferried about from school to football coaching to this or that appointment and his time on the Internet had to be watched and his homework had to be monitored or he wouldn’t bother to do it. He was, in short, an average fourteen-year-old boy who needed regular parenting. Bea knew she ought to be grateful that her former husband was willing to step up to the challenge.
Except…She was convinced that Ray had orchestrated the entire situation just for that reason: to obtain unimpeded access to Pete. He wanted a more definite inroad with their son, and he’d seen this as an opportunity to make one. Pete’s new enthusiasm at having to stay at his father’s house suggested Ray was having some success in this area as well, which caused Bea to question exactly what constituted Ray’s approach to fatherhood: from the meals he served Pete to the freedom he gave him.
So she’d grilled her former husband as Pete had trotted off to the spare room-his room, as he had referred to it-to stow his belongings, and Ray had tunneled his way through her questions to their root, in his typical fashion. “He’s happy to be here because he loves me,” was his reply. “Just as he’s happy to be with you because he loves you. He has two parents, not one, Beatrice. All things in the balance, this is good, you know.”
She wanted to say, “Two parents? Oh, right. That’s brilliant, Ray,” but instead she said, “I don’t want him exposed to any-”
“Naked twenty-five-year-old women running about the house?” he asked. “Fear not. I’ve told my stable of beauties normally in residence here at the Playboy Mansion that the orgies are postponed indefinitely. Their hearts are broken-my own is devastated-but there you have it. Pete comes first.” He’d leaned against the kitchen work top. He’d been sorting through yesterday’s post, and there was no indication that anyone else was present in the house. She’d checked this as surreptitiously as possible, telling herself she did not want Pete exposed to anyone’s casual sex, not at his age and not before she’d had the opportunity to explain to him each one of the sexually transmitted diseases he could end up with if he played fast and loose with his body parts.
“You have,” Ray told her, “the oddest damn ideas of how I spend what little free time I possess, my dear.”
She didn’t engage. Instead she gave him a bag of groceries because she was damned if she was going to be in debt to him for having Pete to stay during a time when he was not scheduled to do so. Then she’d barked out their son’s name, hugged him good-bye, kissed him on the cheek with the loudest smack she could manage despite his squirming and his “Oh, Mum,” and she’d left the house.
Ray had followed her to her car. It was windy and grey outside, beginning to rain as well, but he didn’t hurry or seek shelter from the weather. He waited till she got in and he motioned for her to lower the window. When she’d done so, he leaned down and said, “What’s it going to take, Beatrice?”
She said, “What?” and she didn’t bother to hide her irritation.
“For you to forgive. What do I need to do?”
She shook her head, reversed down the driveway, and drove off. But she’d not been able to shake his question.
She was predisposed to be annoyed with Sergeant Collins and Constable McNulty when she finally strode into the station, but the two miserable louts made it impossible for her to feel anything close to annoyance. Collins had somehow risen to the occasion of her tardiness, deploying half of the TAG officers to canvass the area within a three-mile radius of Polcare Cove to see if they could come up with anything of note from those few who lived there in the several hamlets and on the farms. The others he’d told to work on background checks of everyone so far connected to the crime: each of the Kernes-and especially Ben Kerne’s financial status and whether that status was altered by his son’s demise-Madlyn Angarrack, her family, Daidre Trahair, Thomas Lynley, and Alan Cheston. Everyone was being asked for fingerprints, and the Kernes had been given the word that Santo’s body was ready for the formality of identification in Truro.
In the meantime, Constable McNulty had been engaged with Santo Kerne’s computer. When Bea arrived, he was checking through all the deleted e-mails (“Going to take bloody hours,” he informed her, sounding as if he hoped she’d tell him to forego the tedious operation, which she had no intention of doing), and before that he’d pulled from the computer’s files what seemed to be more designs for T-shirts.
McNulty had divided them into categories: local businesses whose names he recognised (largely pubs, hotels, and surf shops); rock bands both popular and extremely obscure; festivals, from music to the arts; and those designs that were questionable because he “had a feeling about them,” which Bea interpreted to mean he didn’t know what they were. She was wrong, as she soon discovered.
The first questionable T-shirt design was for LiquidEarth, a name Bea recognised from the invoice left in Santo Kerne’s car. This, McNulty explained, was the name of a surfboard shaper’s business. The board shaper was called Lewis Angarrack.
“As in Madlyn Angarrack?” Bea asked him.
“As in her dad.”
This was interesting. “What about the others?”
Cornish Gold was the second design he’d singled out. This belonged to a cider farm, he told her.
“How’s that important?”
“It’s the only business from outside Casvelyn. I thought that was worth looking into.”
McNulty, she thought, might not be as useless as she’d earlier concluded. “And the last one?” She gave the design her scrutiny. It appeared to be two-sided. The obverse declared “Commit an Act of Subversion” above a rubbish bin, which was suggestive of everything from bombs in the street to delving into the bins of celebrities for information to sell to the tabloids. On the reverse, however, things became clear. “Eat Free” declared an Artful Dodger urchin, who was pointing to the same rubbish bin, which had been upended, spilling its contents onto the ground.
“What d’you make of this?” Bea asked the constable.
“Don’t know,” he said, “but it seemed worth looking into because it’s got nothing to do with an organisation, unlike the others. Like I said, I had a feeling. What can’t be identified needs to be examined.”
He sounded like someone quoting a manual. But it was good sense, the first she’d heard from him. It gave her hope.
“You might have a future in this business,” she told him.
He didn’t look entirely pleased with the idea.
TAMMY WAS QUIET IN the morning, which concerned Selevan Penrule. She was always on the quiet side anyway, but this time her lack of conversation seemed to indicate a pensiveness she hadn’t previously been caught up in. Before, it always looked to her grandfather as if the girl was just preternaturally calm, yet another indication that something was off about her because, at her age, she wasn’t supposed to be calm about anything. She was supposed to be caught up worrying about her complexion and her figure, about having the right clothes and the perfect haircut, and other such nonsense. But this morning, she looked caught up in considering something. To Selevan, there could be little doubt about what that something was.