Thus, when Bea faced Barbara Havers in the vicinity of the china board as they looked over the day’s activities, she examined the Met sergeant with a critical eye having more to do with an assessment of her professional commitment than it had to do with an evaluation of her fashion sense, which was more deplorable than Bea would have thought possible in a female adult. Today DS Havers was wearing a lumpy fisherman’s sweater over a high-necked T-shirt with what looked like a coffee stain on its collar. She had on figure-reducing olive tweed trousers-easily an inch too short and possibly twelve years too old-and the same red high-top trainers on her feet. She looked like a cross between a street vagrant and a refugee fleeing from a war zone, with clothing provided from castoffs of Oxfam castoffs.
Bea tried to ignore all this. She said to her, “I’ve got the distinct impression Superintendent Lynley’s dragging his feet on the issue of Dr. Trahair. What do you think, Sergeant?” She then watched to gauge Havers’s answer.
“He might well be,” Havers replied easily enough. “Considering all that’s happened to him, he’s not exactly one hundred percent. But if she’s at the bottom of what happened to this kid and he susses it out, he’ll move on her. You can depend on him.”
“Are you saying I ought to allow him to pursue this in whatever way he sees fit?”
Havers didn’t reply at once. She looked at the china board. Careful thought could indicate her priorities, and Bea made this a mark in her favour.
“I think he’ll be okay,” Havers said. “The last thing he’s about to do is let anyone get away with murder, all things considered. If you know what I mean.”
Of course. There was that. What made him susceptible also made him a man who would never want another person to go through what he himself had gone through. Besides that, his very susceptibility could work in their favour since a vulnerable person was one in whose presence essential mistakes might be made by another person. These would be Dr. Trahair’s mistakes, naturally. Where she’d made one, she’d eventually make others.
Bea said, “All right. Come with me, then. We’ve a bloke in town who did a turn inside for doing the job on someone, down the south coast. This was a few years ago. He ended up crying ‘It’s the drink’ to the judge, but as the bloke on the receiving end of his attention came up a paraplegic-”
“Bloody hell,” DS Havers said.
“-the judge sent him away. He’s out now, but so’s his temper and his proclivity for the drink. He knew Santo Kerne, and someone blackened Santo Kerne’s eye shortly before his death. Given, it’s not the sort of beating put this bloke away, but he wants a thorough talking to.”
Will Mendick was at his place of employment, a modern brick supermarket looking wildly out of place as it stood at the junction of the top of Belle Vue and St. Mevan Crescent, which Bea pointed out to Havers as the route to Adventures Unlimited, a visible hulk out on the promontory. The market was also a very short distance from the baked delights of Casvelyn of Cornwall, and when they alighted from Bea’s Land Rover in the car park at the back of the grocery, the morning breeze was sending the fragrance of fresh pasties in their direction. Barbara Havers cut into this perfume by lighting a cigarette. She pulled at it hungrily as they walked along the side of the building to its front door, managing to smoke half of it before they entered.
In an extremely optimistic embracing of spring, the supermarket’s management had turned off the heating, so it was frigid within. Custom was sparse at this time of day, and only one of the six tills was open. A question at it led Bea and Sergeant Havers towards the back of the premises. There, two swinging doors closed off the warehouse where goods were stored. NO ADMITTANCE and STAFF ONLY were posted upon them.
Bea shouldered through, her identification ready. They encountered an unshaven man ducking into the employees’ loo and stopped him with a word, “Police.” He didn’t snap to as Bea would have liked, but at least he appeared cooperative. She asked for Will Mendick. At his response of “Outside, I expect,” they found themselves heading in the direction from which they’d originally come: working their way along the side of the building, but within it this time, along a gloomy aisle, and beneath towering shelves of paper products, boxed-up tins of this and that, and huge cartons printed with enough brands of junk food to keep morbid obesity going for several generations.
On the south side of the building, a loading dock bore pallets of goods in the process of being removed from an enormous articulated lorry. Bea expected to find Will Mendick here, but the answer to another question pointed her over to a collection of wheelie bins at the far end of the dock. There, she saw a young man stowing discarded vegetables and other items into a black rubbish bag. This, apparently, was Will Mendick, committing the act of subversion for which Santo Kerne had created his T-shirt. He was fighting off the gulls to do it, though. Above and around him, they flapped their wings. They soared near him occasionally, apparently trying to frighten him off their patch, like extras in Hitchcock’s film.
Mendick looked at Bea’s identification carefully when she produced it. He was tall and ruddy, and he grew immediately ruddier when he saw the cops had come to call. Definitely the skin of a guilty man, Bea thought.
The young man glanced from Bea to Havers and back to Bea, and his expression suggested that neither woman fit his notions of what a cop should look like. “I’m on a break,” he told them, as if concerned that they were there to monitor his employment hours.
“That’s fine with us,” Bea informed him. “We can talk while you…do whatever it is you’re doing.”
“D’you know how much food is wasted in this country?” he asked her sharply.
“Rather a lot, I expect.”
“That’s an understatement. Try tonnes of it. Tonnes. A sell-by date passes and out it’s chucked. It’s a crime, it is.”
“Good of you, then, to put it to use.”
“I eat it.” He sounded defensive.
“I sorted that,” Bea told him.
“You have to, I wager,” Barbara Havers noted pleasantly. “Bit tough for it to make it all the way to the Sudan before it rots, moulds, hardens, or whatevers. Costs you next to nothing as well, so it has that in its favour, too.”
Mendick eyed her as if evaluating her level of disrespect. Her face showed nothing. He appeared to take the decision to ignore any judgement they might make about his activity. He said, “You want to talk to me. So talk to me.”
“You knew Santo Kerne. Well enough for him to design a T-shirt for you, from what we’ve learned.”
“If you know that, then you’ll also know that this is a small town and most people here knew Santo Kerne. I hope you’re talking to them as well.”
“We’ll get to the rest of his associates eventually,” Bea replied. “Just now it’s you we’re interested in. Tell us about Conrad Nelson. He’s operating from a wheelchair these days, the way I hear it.”
Mendick had a few spots on his face, near his mouth, and these turned the colour of raspberries. He went back to sorting through the supermarket’s discards. He chose some bruised apples and followed them with a collection of limp courgettes. He said, “I did my time for that.”
“Which we know,” Bea assured him. “But what we don’t know is how it happened and why.”
“It’s nothing to do with your investigation.”
“It’s assault with intent,” Bea told him. “It’s grave bodily injury. It’s a stretch inside at the pleasure of you-know-who. When someone’s got details like that in his background, Mr. Mendick, we like to know about them. Especially if he’s an associate-close or otherwise-of someone who ends up murdered.”
“Where there’s smoke there’s fire.” Havers lit up another cigarette as if to emphasise her point.