“You surf yourself?” Bea asked Jago Reeth.
“Not these days. Not if I want to see tomorrow.” He peered up at her from his position bent over the board. His eyes behind his spectacles?the glass of which was flecked with white residue?were clear and sharp despite his age. “You’re here about Santo Kerne, I expect. Was a murder, eh?”
“You know that, do you?” Bea asked Jago Reeth.
“Didn’t know,” he said. “Just reckoned.”
“Why?”
“You’re here. Why else if not a murder? Or are you lot going round offering condolences to everyone who knew the lad?”
“You’re among those?”
“Am,” he said. “Not long, but I knew him. Six months or so, since I worked for Lew.”
“So you’re not an old-timer here in town?”
He made a long sweep with his paintbrush, the length of the board. “Me? No. I come up from Australia this time round. Been following the season long as I can tell you.”
“Summer or surfing?”
“Same thing in some places. Others, it’s winter. They always need blokes who can do boards. I’m their man.”
“Isn’t it a bit early for the season here?”
“Not hardly, eh? Just a few more weeks. And now’s when I’m needed most cos before the season starts is when the orders come in. Then in the season boards get dinged and repairs are needed. Newquay, North Shore, Queensland, California. I’m there to do them. Use to work first and surf later. Sometimes the reverse.”
“But not now.”
“Hell no. It’d kill me for sure. His dad thought it’d kill Santo, you know. Idjit, he was. Safer than crossing the street. And it gets a lad out in the air and sunlight.”
“So does sea cliff climbing,” Bea pointed out.
Jago eyed her. “And look what happened there.”
“D’you know the Kernes, then?”
“Santo. Like I said. And the rest of them from what Santo said. And that would be the limit of what I know.” He set his paintbrush in the pail, which he’d put on the floor beneath the board, and he scrutinised his work, squatting at the end of the board to study it from tail to nose. Then he rose and went to the door behind which the rails of a board were being shaped. He closed it behind him. In a moment, the tool was shut off.
Constable McNulty, Bea saw, was looking about, a line forming between his eyebrows, as if he was considering what he was observing. She knew nothing about the making of surfboards, so she said, “What?” and he roused himself from his thoughts.
“Something,” he said. “Don’t quite know yet.”
“About the place? About Reeth? About Santo? His family? What?”
“Not sure.”
She blew out a breath. The man would probably need a bloody Ouija board.
Lew Angarrak joined them. He was outfitted like Jago Reeth, in a white boiler suit fashioned from heavy paper, the perfect accompaniment to the rest of him, which was also white. His thick hair could have been any colour?probably salt and pepper, considering his age, which appeared to be somewhere past forty-five?but now it looked like a barrister’s wig, so thoroughly covered as it was by polystyrene dust. This same dust formed a fine patina on his forehead and cheeks. Round his mouth and eyes there was none, its absence explained by the air filter that dangled round his neck along with a pair of protective glasses.