“You have,” Ray told her, “the oddest damn ideas of how I spend what little free time I possess, my dear.”
She didn’t engage. Instead she gave him a bag of groceries because she was damned if she was going to be in debt to him for having Pete to stay during a time when he was not scheduled to do so. Then she’d barked out their son’s name, hugged him good-bye, kissed him on the cheek with the loudest smack she could manage despite his squirming and his “Oh, Mum,” and she’d left the house.
Ray had followed her to her car. It was windy and grey outside, beginning to rain as well, but he didn’t hurry or seek shelter from the weather. He waited till she got in and he motioned for her to lower the window. When she’d done so, he leaned down and said, “What’s it going to take, Beatrice?”
She said, “What?” and she didn’t bother to hide her irritation.
“For you to forgive. What do I need to do?”
She shook her head, reversed down the driveway, and drove off. But she’d not been able to shake his question.
She was predisposed to be annoyed with Sergeant Collins and Constable McNulty when she finally strode into the station, but the two miserable louts made it impossible for her to feel anything close to annoyance. Collins had somehow risen to the occasion of her tardiness, deploying half of the TAG officers to canvass the area within a three-mile radius of Polcare Cove to see if they could come up with anything of note from those few who lived there in the several hamlets and on the farms. The others he’d told to work on background checks of everyone so far connected to the crime: each of the Kernes?and especially Ben Kerne’s financial status and whether that status was altered by his son’s demise?Madlyn Angarrack, her family, Daidre Trahair, Thomas Lynley, and Alan Cheston. Everyone was being asked for fingerprints, and the Kernes had been given the word that Santo’s body was ready for the formality of identification in Truro.
In the meantime, Constable McNulty had been engaged with Santo Kerne’s computer. When Bea arrived, he was checking through all the deleted e-mails (“Going to take bloody hours,” he informed her, sounding as if he hoped she’d tell him to forego the tedious operation, which she had no intention of doing), and before that he’d pulled from the computer’s files what seemed to be more designs for T-shirts.
McNulty had divided them into categories: local businesses whose names he recognised (largely pubs, hotels, and surf shops); rock bands both popular and extremely obscure; festivals, from music to the arts; and those designs that were questionable because he “had a feeling about them,” which Bea interpreted to mean he didn’t know what they were. She was wrong, as she soon discovered.
The first questionable T-shirt design was for LiquidEarth, a name Bea recognised from the invoice left in Santo Kerne’s car. This, McNulty explained, was the name of a surfboard shaper’s business. The board shaper was called Lewis Angarrack.
“As in Madlyn Angarrack?” Bea asked him.
“As in her dad.”
This was interesting. “What about the others?”
Cornish Gold was the second design he’d singled out. This belonged to a cider farm, he told her.
“How’s that important?”
“It’s the only business from outside Casvelyn. I thought that was worth looking into.”
McNulty, she thought, might not be as useless as she’d earlier concluded. “And the last one?” She gave the design her scrutiny. It appeared to be two-sided. The obverse declared “Commit an Act of Subversion” above a rubbish bin, which was suggestive of everything from bombs in the street to delving into the bins of celebrities for information to sell to the tabloids. On the reverse, however, things became clear. “Eat Free” declared an Artful Dodger urchin, who was pointing to the same rubbish bin, which had been upended, spilling its contents onto the ground.