“Were they surfing at night?” Lynley asked insistently. “What happened?”
“What d’you think bloody happened? They’re not surfing, they’re partying. And he’s partying like the rest of them. He mixes drugs of some sort with whatever else he’s swallowed and when the tide comes in, he’s done for. Tide sweeps into those caves more fast ’n a man can move cos they’re deep, aren’t they, and everyone knows if you go in, you best know where the sea is and what it’s doing cos if you don’t, you aren’t coming out. Oh you might think you are. You might think what the bloody hell does it matter cos I c’n swim, can’t I? But you get battered and turned about and it’s no one’s fault if you’re too bloody stupid to listen when you’re told not to go down to the cove when conditions are dicey.”
“But that’s what happened to someone,” Lynley said.
“That’s what happened.”
“To whom?”
“Lad come here for his summers. His family has money and they take the big cliff house. I don’t know them but Benesek does. All the young ones do cos they’re all down the beach in summers, aren’t they? This lad John or James…Yes, James…He’s the one.”
“The one who drowned?”
“Only his family don’t see it that way. They don’t want to see it’s his own damn fault. They want to blame and they choose our Benesek. Others as well, but Benesek’s at the bottom of what happened, so they say. They bring the cops from Newquay and they don’t let up, not the family and not the cops. You know something and you damn well will tell us, they say. But he don’t know a bleeding thing, does he, which is what he says over and over and the cops finally have to believe him, but at that point the kid’s dad’s built a bloody great stupid memorial to the boy and everyone’s looking at our Ben dead funny, so we send him to his uncle cos he’s got to have a chance in life, and he’s not bloody likely to have one here.”
Lynley said, “A memorial? Where?”
“Out on the coast somewheres. Up on the cliff. Likely they thought a memorial like that’d make people never forget what happened. I don’t walk the coast path, so I never saw it, but it’d be what they wanted so it’d stay fresh for people.” He laughed bleakly. “They’d spend a good sum, prob’ly hoping it’d haunt our Ben till the day he died, only they di’n’t know he’d never come home, so it went for nought.” He picked up another teacup, this one far more broken than its companions, with a large crack running from rim to bottom and a significant chip on each side, right where the drinker would place his lips. It seemed foolish to repair it, but it also seemed clear that Eddie Kerne was going to make the attempt anyway. He said quietly, “He was a good lad. I wanted the best for him. I tried to get the best for him. What dad doesn’t want the best for his lad?”
“No dad at all,” Lynley acknowledged.