The girl jumped to her feet. She was thin as workhouse gruel. One couldn’t look at her without considering eating disorders.
“You’ve got information for me?” When the girl nodded, Bea said, “Come with me, then,” before she realised she had not yet located the interview rooms at the station. Stumbling about wasn’t going to inspire confidence in anyone, so she reversed herself, said, “Hang on a moment,” and found a cubbyhole next to a broom closet that would do until further exploration of the station might provide its secret as to the site of interrogations.
When she had Tammy Penrule situated in this spot, she said to her, “What’ve you got to tell me?”
Tammy licked her lips. She needed balm for them. They were badly chapped and a thin line of scabbing marked a spot where her lower lip had cracked seriously enough to bleed. “It’s about Santo Kerne,” she said.
“I’ve got that much.” Bea crossed her arms beneath her breasts. Unconsciously, it seemed, Tammy did the same, although she had no breasts to speak of, and Bea wondered if Santo Kerne’s relationship with Madlyn Angarrack had ended because of this girl. She hadn’t yet met Madlyn, but the fact that the girl had been a competitive surfer suggested someone…perhaps “more physically defined” was the term she wanted. This teenager seemed more like an evanescent being, corporeal only as long as she had the strength to manifest in human form. Bea couldn’t picture her spread-eagled beneath a hot-blooded adolescent boy.
Tammy said, “Santo talked to me.”
“Ah.”
The girl seemed to be waiting for more of a response, so Bea said cooperatively, “How did you know him?”
“From Clean Barrel Surf Shop,” Tammy said. “It’s where I work. He comes there for wax and the like. And to look at the isobar chart except I think that may have been just an excuse to hang about with the other surfers. You c’n look up the isobar chart on the Internet, and I expect they’ve got Internet over at the hotel.”
“Adventures Unlimited?”
Tammy nodded. The hollow of her throat was deep and shadowed. Above the neck of her jersey, the points of her collarbone protruded, like the excrescent evidence of dutch elm disease on the bark of a tree. “So that’s how I know him. That and Sea Dreams.”
Bea recognised the name of the caravan park and she cocked her head. Perhaps she’d been wrong about this girl and Santo. She said, “Did you meet him there?”
“No. Like I said, I met him at Clean Barrel.”
“Sorry. I don’t mean met him as in met him,” Bea clarified. “I mean met him as in having assignations with him.”
Tammy flushed. There was so little substance between her skin and her blood vessels that she coloured nearly to purple and she did so quickly. “You mean…Santo and me…for sex? Oh no. I live there. At Sea Dreams. My granddad owns the caravan park. I knew Santo from Clean Barrel, like I said, but he came to Sea Dreams with Madlyn. And he came on his own as well because there’s a cliff he used to practise on sometimes and granddad said he could get to it across our land if he wanted to abseil. Anyway, I saw him there and we talked sometimes.”
“On his own?” Bea asked. This was something new.
“Like I said. He climbed. Down and up but sometimes just up, so he’d come from below…or I suppose he just went down and then up all the time because I can’t quite remember. He also visited Mr. Reeth. So did she. Madlyn. Mr. Reeth, he works for Madlyn’s dad at?”
“Yes. I know. We’ve spoken to him.” But what she didn’t know was that Santo had been there to Sea Dreams on his own. This was a new wrinkle.
“He was nice, Santo.”
“He was especially nice to girls, I gather.”
Tammy’s flush had receded, and she didn’t flush again. “Yes, I suppose he was. But it wasn’t like that for me because…Well, that’s not important. What is important is that we talked from time to time. When he was finished with his climbing or when he was leaving Mr. Reeth’s. Or sometimes when he was waiting for Madlyn to get there from work.”