“We don’t choose where to love. We don’t choose who to love.”
“I don’t believe that for a moment,” she said. “Tell me why you didn’t like Santo surfing.”
“Because I believed no good would come of it.”
“Is that what happened to you?”
He said nothing. For a moment, Kerra thought he would not reply. But at last he said what she knew he would say. “Yes. Not a single good came of it for me. So I lay down the board and got on with my life.”
“With her,” Kerra noted.
“Yes. With your mother.”
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officers to work the case, given only the loan of a TAG team?and who the bloody hell knew when they were going to be withdrawn??she would be putting in long hours, and someone had to look after Pete.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.