“They’ve been together a long time,” Lynley noted.
“And now Santo.” Kerne grabbed another teacup and handle. “You don’t think she’s at bottom of that? You do some sniffing. Sniff here, sniff Truro, sniff there. You’ll catch the smell of something nasty and the trail of it’s leading directly to her.” He used the glue again, with much the same result: a teacup and handle like distant relatives unacquainted with each other. “You tell me how,” he said.
“He was abseiling, Mr. Kerne. There’s a cliff in Polcare Cove?”
“Don’t know the spot.”
“?north of Casvelyn, where the family live. It’s perhaps a two-hundred-foot drop. He had a sling fixed on the top of the cliff?we think it was attached to the pillar of a drystone wall?and the sling failed when he began his descent. But it had been tampered with.”
Kerne didn’t look at Lynley, but he stopped his work for a moment. His shoulders heaved, then he shook his head forcefully.
“I’m sorry,” Lynley said. “I understand Santo and his sister spent a great deal of time with you when they were younger.”
“Cos of her.” He spat out the words. “She’d get a new man and bring him home and have him there in her husband’s own bed. D’he tell you that? Anyone tell you that? No, I expect not. Did that to him when she was a girl and did that to him when she was a woman grown. Up the chute, as well. More ’n once, she was.”
“Made pregnant by someone else?” Lynley asked.
“Doesn’t know that I know, does he,” Kerne said. “But she told me. Kerra, that is. Mum’s got pregnant off someone and she’s got to get rid of it, she tells us. Matter of fact, she tells me, just like that, and her nothing but ten years old. Ten bloody years and what sort of woman lets her little girl know the filthy business she’s making of her life? Dad says she’s having a bad patch, she tells us, but I saw her with the estate agent, Grandpa…Or the dance instructor, or the science teacher from the secondary school. What did it matter to her? When she got the itch, it had to be scratched and if Ben didn’t scratch it the way she liked and when she wanted, she’d damn well see to it someone else would. So don’t tell me she’s not at the bottom of this when she’s at the bottom of everything ever happened to that boy.”
Not to Santo, Lynley thought. Kerne was speaking of his son, from a well of bitterness and regret and a father’s knowledge that nothing he says or does can change the course of a son who’s made the wrong decision. In this, Kerne reminded Lynley of his own father and the admonitions he’d given throughout Lynley’s childhood about mixing too closely with anyone the elder man deemed common. It had done no good, and Lynley had always considered himself richer for the experience.