“About what?”

“About why I left Pengelly Cove.”

“But that has nothing to do with-”

“It’s something to look at and that’s what they do. They look.”

“Give me the pills.”

“No.”

She made a grab for them anyway. He held the bottle out of her reach. He said, “I didn’t sleep last night. Being in Pengelly Cove, talking to Dad…It brought everything back. That party at Cliff House, the drink, the drugs, groping in the shadows and who the hell cared who saw if things went further? And things did go further. Didn’t they?”

“I don’t remember. It was a long time ago. Ben. Please. Give me the pills.”

“You’ll go away if I do, but I want you here. You need to feel something of what I feel. I want that from you because if I don’t have that much…” What? he wondered. If she couldn’t give him what he asked of her now, what would he do that he hadn’t already tried and failed to do in the past? His threats were empty, and both of them knew it.

“Death asks for death in the end, no matter what we do,” he told her. “I didn’t like Santo surfing. I believed that surfing could lead him to where surfing had led me and I told myself that was my reason. But the truth was that I wanted to take from him the core of who he was because I was afraid. It all came down to my believing he had to live the way I live. I as much as said, Live like a dead man and I’ll love you for it. And these-” He gestured with the pills. Dellen tried to snatch them, so he whipped them away and rose from the bed. “These make you dead as well, dead to the world. But in the world is where I want you to be.”

“You know what’ll happen. I can’t stop myself. I try and I feel like my skull is pounding.”

“And it’s always been that way.”

“You know that.”

“So you get relief. From pills and from drink. And if there are no pills and if drink doesn’t work-”

“Give them to me!” She, too, rose from the bed.

He was near the window, so it took no effort. He opened it and spilled sedatives down the side of the building, into the muddy border where springtime plants languished, waiting for sun that was long in coming.

Dellen wailed. She ran to Ben. She beat her fists against him. He caught them and held them.

“I want you seeing,” he said. “And hearing and feeling. And remembering. If I have to cope with all of this alone-”

“I hate you!” she screamed. “You want and you want. But you won’t find someone who’ll give you what you want. That person’s not me. It never has been and you won’t let me go. And I hate you. God, God how I hate you!”

She tore herself from him and for a moment he thought she meant to dash from the room and scrabble in the mud below them in order to rescue her fast-dissolving pills. But instead she went to the cupboard, where she began yanking clothing from within. It was red upon red, crimson, magenta, and every point in between, and all of it she threw in a heap on the floor. She was looking for the one that said the most, he thought, like the crimson sundress on that long-ago evening.

He said, “Tell me what happened. I was with Parsons’s sister. I was doing what I could do to her, what she’d let me get away with, and that was a lot. He found us together and he threw me out. Not because he cared that his sister was about to get stuffed in the corridor of her parents’ house in the midst of a party but because he liked feeling superior to everyone, and this was another way to do it. It wasn’t a class thing. Or even a money thing. It was a Jamie thing. Tell me what happened between you once I left.”

She continued throwing her clothes on the floor. When she’d finished with the cupboard, she went to the chest. Here she did the same. Knickers and bras, petticoats, jerseys, scarves. Just the red of it all until the clothing was pooled round her feet like the pulp of fruit.

“Did you fuck him, Dellen? I’ve never asked about any of them specifically, but this is the one I want to know. Did you say to him, ‘There’s a sea cave on the beach where Ben and I go for sex and I’ll meet you there.’ And he wouldn’t have known we were finished, you and I. He would have thought it a good way to sort me. So he’d meet you there and-”

“No!”

“-he’d fuck you like you wanted. But he’d taken some of the drugs on offer-weed, coke, whatever else was there…LSD…Ecstasy-and he’d mixed them with whatever he was drinking and once he’d done what you wanted him to do, you just left him, passed out cold, and deep in the cave, and when the tide came in the way it always comes in-”

“No!”

“-you were long gone. You’d got what you wanted, and what you wanted had nothing to do with getting stuffed and everything to do with getting revenge. And what you reckoned was that-Jamie being Jamie-he’d be the one to make certain I knew he’d had you the very next time he saw me. But what you hadn’t reckoned was the tide would get the better of your plan and-”

“I told!” she screamed. She had nothing more belonging to her to throw onto the floor, so she reached for the bedside table’s lamp and she brandished it. “I talked and I told everything I knew. Are you happy now? Is that what you’ve wanted to hear from me?”

Ben was rendered speechless. He wouldn’t have thought anything could have robbed him of words at this point, but he had none. He wouldn’t have thought there were any surprises left from his past, but that was clearly not going to be the case.

BEA AND DS HAVERS walked from Blue Star Grocery to Casvelyn of Cornwall. The bakery was in full production, preparing for the delivery of goods to the area’s pubs, hotels, cafés, and restaurants. Hence, the heady fragrance of flaky, succulent pastry formed a hypnotic miasma in the air. It became more powerful as they drew closer to the shop, and Bea heard Barbara Havers murmur fervently, “Bloody blooming hell.”

Bea glanced at her. The sergeant was gazing longingly in the direction of Casvelyn of Cornwall’s front window, where the trays of newly baked pasties lay in seductive, eye-popping, and utterly diet-busting ranks of cholesterol, carbohydrates, and calories. “Pleasant, isn’t it?” Bea said to the sergeant.

“It’s got Pop-Tarts beat. I’ll give you that.”

“You must have a pasty while you’re in Cornwall. And if you’re going to do so, these are the best.”

“I’ll make a note of it.” Havers gave a lingering look to them as she followed Bea into the shop.

Madlyn Angarrack was serving a line of customers while Shar heaved trays of the bakery’s products out of the enormous kitchen and into the display cases. It seemed they had more than pasties going on this day, since Shar was currently bringing out loaves of artisan bread, thick of crust and topped with rosemary.

Although Madlyn was busy, Bea had no intention of standing at the end of a queue. She excused herself to the waiting customers by ostentatiously showing her identification and murmuring, “Pardon. Police business,” as she passed them by. At the till, she said at some considerable volume, “A word, Miss Angarrack. Here or in the station, but in either case, now.”

Madlyn didn’t attempt to temporize. She said to her co-worker, “Shar, will you take the till?” although she did add meaningfully, “I won’t be a moment,” to indicate either her cooperation with the police or her intention of immediately demanding a solicitor. She then fetched a jacket and went outside.

“This is DS Havers,” Bea said by way of introduction. “She’s come down from New Scotland Yard to assist in the investigation.”

Madlyn’s eyes flicked to Havers and then back to Bea. In a voice that sounded something between wary and confused she said, “Why’s Scotland Yard-”

“Think about it.” Bea saw that being able to bandy about the term New Scotland Yard was going to have one or two unanticipated uses. It consisted of three words that asked people to sit up and take notice, no matter what they knew or did not know about the Metropolitan police.