Chapter Thirteen

DOWNSTAIRS, BEA FOUND THE NAMED TAMMY PENRULE SITTING in one of the plastic reception chairs, her feet flat on the floor, her hands clasped in her lap, her back a plane perpendicular to the seat. She was dressed in black, but she wasn’t a Goth, as Bea first suspected when she caught sight of her. She wore no makeup, no hideous black nail enamel, and she had no silver protrusions erupting from various points on her head. She also wore no jewellery, and nothing else relieved the midnight of her clothes. She looked like mourning made flesh.

“Tammy Penrule?” Bea said to her, unnecessarily.

The girl jumped to her feet. She was thin as workhouse gruel. One couldn’t look at her without considering eating disorders.

“You’ve got information for me?” When the girl nodded, Bea said, “Come with me, then,” before she realised she had not yet located the interview rooms at the station. Stumbling about wasn’t going to inspire confidence in anyone, so she reversed herself, said, “Hang on a moment,” and found a cubbyhole next to a broom closet that would do until further exploration of the station might provide its secret as to the site of interrogations.

When she had Tammy Penrule situated in this spot, she said to her, “What’ve you got to tell me?”

Tammy licked her lips. She needed balm for them. They were badly chapped and a thin line of scabbing marked a spot where her lower lip had cracked seriously enough to bleed. “It’s about Santo Kerne,” she said.

“I’ve got that much.” Bea crossed her arms beneath her breasts. Unconsciously, it seemed, Tammy did the same, although she had no breasts to speak of, and Bea wondered if Santo Kerne’s relationship with Madlyn Angarrack had ended because of this girl. She hadn’t yet met Madlyn, but the fact that the girl had been a competitive surfer suggested someone…perhaps “more physically defined” was the term she wanted. This teenager seemed more like an evanescent being, corporeal only as long as she had the strength to manifest in human form. Bea couldn’t picture her spread-eagled beneath a hot-blooded adolescent boy.

Tammy said, “Santo talked to me.”

“Ah.”

The girl seemed to be waiting for more of a response, so Bea said cooperatively, “How did you know him?”

“From Clean Barrel Surf Shop,” Tammy said. “It’s where I work. He comes there for wax and the like. And to look at the isobar chart except I think that may have been just an excuse to hang about with the other surfers. You c’n look up the isobar chart on the Internet, and I expect they’ve got Internet over at the hotel.”

“Adventures Unlimited?”

Tammy nodded. The hollow of her throat was deep and shadowed. Above the neck of her jersey, the points of her collarbone protruded, like the excrescent evidence of dutch elm disease on the bark of a tree. “So that’s how I know him. That and Sea Dreams.”

Bea recognised the name of the caravan park and she cocked her head. Perhaps she’d been wrong about this girl and Santo. She said, “Did you meet him there?”

“No. Like I said, I met him at Clean Barrel.”

“Sorry. I don’t mean met him as in met him,” Bea clarified. “I mean met him as in having assignations with him.”

Tammy flushed. There was so little substance between her skin and her blood vessels that she coloured nearly to purple and she did so quickly. “You mean…Santo and me…for sex? Oh no. I live there. At Sea Dreams. My granddad owns the caravan park. I knew Santo from Clean Barrel, like I said, but he came to Sea Dreams with Madlyn. And he came on his own as well because there’s a cliff he used to practise on sometimes and granddad said he could get to it across our land if he wanted to abseil. Anyway, I saw him there and we talked sometimes.”

“On his own?” Bea asked. This was something new.

“Like I said. He climbed. Down and up but sometimes just up, so he’d come from below…or I suppose he just went down and then up all the time because I can’t quite remember. He also visited Mr. Reeth. So did she. Madlyn. Mr. Reeth, he works for Madlyn’s dad at-”

“Yes. I know. We’ve spoken to him.” But what she didn’t know was that Santo had been there to Sea Dreams on his own. This was a new wrinkle.

“He was nice, Santo.”

“He was especially nice to girls, I gather.”

Tammy’s flush had receded, and she didn’t flush again. “Yes, I suppose he was. But it wasn’t like that for me because…Well, that’s not important. What is important is that we talked from time to time. When he was finished with his climbing or when he was leaving Mr. Reeth’s. Or sometimes when he was waiting for Madlyn to get there from work.”

“They didn’t come together?”

“Not always. Madlyn works in town now, but she didn’t earlier. She had to come a greater distance than Santo, from out by Brandis Corner. She worked on a farm, making jam.”

“I expect she preferred teaching surfing.”

“Oh yes, she did. She does. But that’s in the season, when she teaches surfing. She’s got to do something else the rest of the year. She works in the bakery now. In town. They make pasties. Mostly for wholesale, but they sell some of them out of the shop as well.”

“And where does Santo fit in with all this?”

“Santo. Of course.” She’d been using her hands to gesture with as she talked, but now she clasped them again in her lap. She said, “We talked now and again. I liked him, but I didn’t like him in the way most girls probably would, if you know what I mean, so I think that made me different and maybe safer or something. For advice or whatever because he couldn’t go to his dad or his mum-”

“Why not?”

“His dad, he said, would’ve got the wrong impression, and his mum…I don’t know his mum, but I get the idea she’s…well, she’s not very mummish, apparently.” She smoothed her skirt. It looked like something that would be scratchy against the skin and it was virtually shapeless, a fashion penance. “Anyway, Santo asked me for advice about something and that’s what I thought you ought to know.”

“Advice of what kind?”

She seemed to look for a gentle way to say what came next and, not finding a euphemism, went for a circuitous route to the truth. “He was…He’d got someone new, you see, and the situation was irregular-that’s the word he used when he talked to me, he said it was irregular-and he wanted to ask me what I thought he should do about that.”

“Irregular. That was his word? You’re sure?”

Tammy nodded. “He said he thought he loved her-this is Madlyn-but he wanted this other thing as well. He said he wanted it very badly and if he wanted this other thing the way he wanted this other thing, did it mean he didn’t actually love Madlyn?”

“He talked to you about love, then?”

“No, that part was more like Santo talking to Santo. He wanted to know what I thought he should do about the whole situation. Should he be honest with everyone about it? he wanted to know. Should he tell the truth start to finish? he asked.”

“And what did you tell him?”

“I said he should be honest. I said he should always be honest because when people are honest about who they are, what they want, and what they do, it gives other people-this is the people they’re involved with, I mean-the chance to decide if they really want to be with them.” She looked at Bea and her expression was earnest. “So I suppose he was, you see,” she said. “Honest, I mean. And that’s why I’ve come. I think that maybe he’s dead because of it.”

“MORE THAN ANYTHING ELSE, it’s a question of balance,” was the declaration that Alan used to conclude. “You see that, don’t you, darling?”

Kerra’s hackles stood stiffly. Darling was too much. There was no darling. She was no darling. She thought she’d made that clear to Alan, but the bloody man refused to believe it.