“Until what blows over?” Lynley asked.
“Eh?” Kerne turned his head from the workbench to look at Lynley.
“You said your son needed to be gone a few years only, ‘till it all blows over.’ I was wondering what.”
Kerne’s good eye narrowed. He said, “You don’t talk like a cop. Cops talk like the rest of us, but you got a voice that…Where you from?”
Lynley wasn’t about to be diverted with a discussion of his roots. “Mr. Kerne, if you know something-and you obviously do-that might be related to the death of your grandson, I need to know what it is.”
He turned back to his bench. He said, “What happened happened years ago. Benesek’s…what? Seventeen? Eighteen? It’s nothing to do with Santo.”
“Please let me decide that. Tell me what you know.”
After making the imperative, Lynley waited. He hoped the old man’s sorrow-suppressed but so alive in him-would force him to speak.
Kerne finally did so, although it sounded as if he talked more to himself than to Lynley. “They’re all surfing, and someone gets hurt. Everyone points fingers at everyone else and no one takes the blame. But things get nasty, so me and his mum send him off to Truro till he isn’t likely to get no more squinty-eyed looks from people.”
“Who got hurt? How?”
Kerne slapped his palm on the bench. “I’m telling you it’s of no account. What’s it got to do with Santo? It’s Santo who’s dead, not his dad. Some bloody kid gets himself drunk one night and ends up sleeping it off in one of the sea caves down the cove. So what’s that got to do with Santo?”
“Were they surfing at night?” Lynley asked insistently. “What happened?”
“What d’you think bloody happened? They’re not surfing, they’re partying. And he’s partying like the rest of them. He mixes drugs of some sort with whatever else he’s swallowed and when the tide comes in, he’s done for. Tide sweeps into those caves more fast ’n a man can move cos they’re deep, aren’t they, and everyone knows if you go in, you best know where the sea is and what it’s doing cos if you don’t, you aren’t coming out. Oh you might think you are. You might think what the bloody hell does it matter cos I c’n swim, can’t I? But you get battered and turned about and it’s no one’s fault if you’re too bloody stupid to listen when you’re told not to go down to the cove when conditions are dicey.”
“But that’s what happened to someone,” Lynley said.
“That’s what happened.”
“To whom?”
“Lad come here for his summers. His family has money and they take the big cliff house. I don’t know them but Benesek does. All the young ones do cos they’re all down the beach in summers, aren’t they? This lad John or James…Yes, James…He’s the one.”
“The one who drowned?”
“Only his family don’t see it that way. They don’t want to see it’s his own damn fault. They want to blame and they choose our Benesek. Others as well, but Benesek’s at the bottom of what happened, so they say. They bring the cops from Newquay and they don’t let up, not the family and not the cops. You know something and you damn well will tell us, they say. But he don’t know a bleeding thing, does he, which is what he says over and over and the cops finally have to believe him, but at that point the kid’s dad’s built a bloody great stupid memorial to the boy and everyone’s looking at our Ben dead funny, so we send him to his uncle cos he’s got to have a chance in life, and he’s not bloody likely to have one here.”
Lynley said, “A memorial? Where?”
“Out on the coast somewheres. Up on the cliff. Likely they thought a memorial like that’d make people never forget what happened. I don’t walk the coast path, so I never saw it, but it’d be what they wanted so it’d stay fresh for people.” He laughed bleakly. “They’d spend a good sum, prob’ly hoping it’d haunt our Ben till the day he died, only they di’n’t know he’d never come home, so it went for nought.” He picked up another teacup, this one far more broken than its companions, with a large crack running from rim to bottom and a significant chip on each side, right where the drinker would place his lips. It seemed foolish to repair it, but it also seemed clear that Eddie Kerne was going to make the attempt anyway. He said quietly, “He was a good lad. I wanted the best for him. I tried to get the best for him. What dad doesn’t want the best for his lad?”
“No dad at all,” Lynley acknowledged.
AN EXPLORATION OF PENGELLY Cove didn’t take a great deal of time. After the shop and the two main streets, there was either the cove itself, an old church sitting just outside of town, or the Curlew Inn to occupy one’s time. Once she was left alone in the village, Daidre began with the church. She reckoned it might be locked up tight, as so many country churches were in these days of religious indifference and vandalism, but she was wrong. The place was called St. Sithy’s, and it was open, sitting in the middle of a graveyard where the remains of this year’s daffodils still lined the paths, giving way to columbine.
Within, the church smelled of stones and dust, and the air was cold. There was a switch for lights just inside the door, and Daidre used this to illuminate a single aisle, a nave, and a collection of multicoloured ropes that looped down from the bell tower. A roughly hewn granite baptismal font stood to her left, while to her right, an unevenly placed stone aisle led to pulpit and altar. It could have been any church in Cornwall save for one difference: an honesty stall. This comprised a table and shelves just beyond the baptismal font, and upon it used goods were for sale, with a locked wooden box serving as the till.
Daidre went to inspect all this and found no organisation to it but rather a quirky charm. Old lace mats mingled with the odd bit of porcelain; glass beads hung from the necks of well-used stuffed animals. Books eased away from their spines; cake plates and pie tins offered garden tools instead of sweets. There was even a shoe box of historic postcards, which she flipped through to see that most of them were already written upon, stamped, and received long ago. Among them was a depiction of a gipsy caravan, of the sort she hadn’t seen in years: rounded on the top and gaily painted, celebrating a peripatetic life. Unexpectedly, her vision blurred when she picked up this card. Unlike so many of the others, nothing had been written upon it.
She wouldn’t have done so at another time, but she bought the card. Then she bought two others with messages on them: one from an Auntie Hazel and Uncle Dan that depicted fishing boats in Padstow Harbour and another from Binkie and Earl showing a line of surfers standing in front of long Malibu boards that were upright in the Newquay sand. Fistral Beach scrolled across their feet, and this was apparently the location where-according to either Binkie or Earl-It happened here!!!! Wedding’s next December!
With these in her possession, Daidre left the church. But not before she looked at the prayer board, where members of the congregation posted their requests for collective appeals to their mutual deity. Most of these had to do with health, and it came to Daidre how seldom people seemed to consider their God unless physical illness descended upon them or upon someone they loved.
She was not religious, but here was an opportunity, she realised, to step up to the spiritual cricket pitch. The God of chance was bowling and she stood in front of the wicket with the bat in her hands. To swing or not and what did it matter? were the issues before her. She’d been searching the Internet for miracles, hadn’t she? What was this but another arena in which a miracle might be found?
She picked up the biro provided and a slip of paper, which turned out to be part of the back of an old handout on which a bake sale was being advertised. She flipped this to the blank side and she started to write. She got as far as Please pray for, but she found that she could advance no further. She couldn’t find the words to shape her request because she wasn’t even sure it was her request. So to write it and then to post it on a board for prayers proved too monumental a task, one that was coloured by a hypocrisy that she could not bear to live with. She replaced the pen, balled up the slip of paper and shoved it into her pocket. She left the church.