“I said I did my stretch.”
“We understand you told the judge it had to do with drink,” Bea said. “D’you still have a problem with that? Is it still leading you to go off the nut? That was your claim, I’ve been told.”
“I don’t drink any longer, so it’s not leading me anywhere.” He looked into the wheelie bin, spied something he apparently wanted, and dug down to bring forth a packet of fig bars. He stowed this in the bag and went on with his search. He ripped open and tossed a loaf of apparently stale bread onto the tarmac for the gulls. They went after it greedily. “I do AA if it’s anything to you,” he added. “And I haven’t had a drink since I came out.”
“I do hope that’s the case, Mr. Mendick. How did that altercation in Plymouth begin?”
“I told you it’s got nothing to do…” He seemed to rethink his angry tone?as well as the direction of the conversation?because he sighed and said, “I used to get blind drunk. I had a dustup with this yob, and I don’t know what it was about because when I drank like that I couldn’t remember what set me off or even if something set me off at all. I didn’t remember the fight the next day and I’m damn sorry that bloke ended up like he did, because it wasn’t my intention. I probably just wanted to sort him.”
“Is that your general method of sorting people?”
“When I drank, it was. It’s not something I’m proud of. It’s also over. I did my time. I made my amends. I try to stay clean.”
“Try?”
“Bloody hell.” He climbed up into the wheelie bin. He began a more furious rooting through its contents.
“Santo Kerne took a fairly serious punch sometime before he died,” Bea said. “I wonder if you can tell us anything about that.”
“I can’t,” he said.
“You can’t or you won’t?”
“Why d’you want to pin this on me?”
Because you look so damn guilty, Bea thought. Because you’re lying about something and I can read it in the colour of your skin, which is flaming now, from your cheeks to your ears and even to your scalp. “That’s my job,” Bea told him, “to pin this on someone. If that someone’s not you, I’d like to know why.”
“I had no reason to hurt him. Or to kill him. Or to anything.”
“How’d you come to know him?”
“I worked at Clean Barrel, that surf shop on the corner of the Strand.” Mendick nodded in the general direction. “He came in because he wanted a board. That’s how we met. Few months after he moved to town.”
“But you no longer work at Clean Barrel Surf Shop. Has that something to do with Santo Kerne as well?”
“I sent him to LiquidEarth for a board, and I got found out. I lost my job. I wasn’t supposed to be sending anyone to the competition. Not that LiquidEarth is the competition but there was no telling the boss man that, was there? So I got the sack.”
“Blamed him for that, did you?”
“Sorry to disappoint you, but no. It was the right thing to do, sending Santo to LiquidEarth. He was a beginner. He’d never even been out. He needed a beginner’s board. We didn’t have any decent ones at the time?just shit from China, if you want to know, and we sold that clobber mostly to tourists?so I told him to go see Lew Angarrack, who’d make him a good one that he could learn on. It would cost a bit more but it would be right for him. That’s what I did. That’s all I did. Jesus. From Nigel Coyle’s reaction, you would’ve thought I’d shot someone. Santo brought the board by to show me, Coyle happened to be there, and the rest is history.”
“Santo did you a bad turn, then.”
“So I killed him? Waited two years to kill him? Not likely. He felt bad enough about what happened. He apologised maybe six dozen times.”
“Where?”
“Where what?”
“Where did he apologise? Where did you see him?”
“Wherever,” he said. “The town’s small, like I said.”
“On the beach?”
“I don’t go to the beach.”