“That’s what I’m telling you.”
“But it was sex, wasn’t it,” Lynley said. “I’m right in that. He thought he was meeting someone for sex. Who?”
Silence.
Finally, “The past is dead.” It was Chris Outer this time, and he looked as steely as Darren Fields.
“The past is the past,” Lynley countered. “Santo Kerne is dead. Jamie Parsons is dead. Their deaths may or may not be related, but?”
“They’re not,” Fields said.
“?but until I know otherwise, I have to assume there may be a connection between them. And I don’t want the connection to be that each investigation ends in the same way: with an open verdict. Santo Kerne was murdered.”
“Jamie Parsons was not.”
“All right. I’ll accept that. DCI Wilkie believes it as well. You’re not going to be prosecuted more than a quarter century after the fact for having been so bloody stupid as to have left the boy in that cave. All I want to know is what happened that night.”
“It was Jack. Jack.” The admission fairly burst from Frankie Kliskey, as if he’d been waiting nearly thirty years to make it. He said to the others, “Jack’s dead now and what does it matter? I don’t want to carry this. I’m that bloody tired of carrying it, Darren.”
“God damn?”
“I held my tongue back then, and look at me. Look.” He held out his hands. They were shaking, like a palsy. “A cop comes round and it’s all back again and I don’t want living through it another time.”
Darren pushed his body away from the table, a gesture of disgust. But it was also a gesture of dismissal, one that could be interpreted as “Have it your way, then.”
There was another tight little silence among the men. In it, the gulls cawed and far below, a boat gunned its motor in the cove.
“She was called Nancy Snow,” Chris Outer said, slowly. “She was Jack Dustow’s girlfriend and Jack was one of us.”
“He’s the one who died of lymphoma,” Lynley said. “That would be Jack?”
“That would be Jack. He talked Nan into…doing what was done. We could have used Dellen?that’s Ben’s wife now, Dellen Nankervis as she was?because she was always ready for action?”
“She was there that night?” Lynley asked.
“Oh aye, she was there. She’s what started things. Because she was there.” He sketched out the details: an adolescent relationship gone sour, two youngsters each showing the other one up with a willing new partner, Jamie reacting to his sister’s becoming openly entangled with Ben Kerne, Jamie’s attack on Ben…
“He needed sorting anyway, like you said,” Frankie Kliskey finished. “None of us liked the bloke. So Jack got Nan Snow to heat him up. End product was, Jamie wanted sex right there in the house.”
“Preferably where everyone could see he was getting it,” Darren Fields added.
“Where Jack could see he was getting it,” Chris pointed out. “That’s what Jamie was like.”
“But Nan said no.” Frankie went on with the story. “No way she’d do it with him where others could watch, especially where Jack could see. She said let’s go down to the cave to do it, so that’s what they did. That’s where we were waiting.”
“She knew what the plan was?”
“Jack told her,” Chris said. “She knew. Get Jamie down to the cave for sex. Don’t meet him there because he’s not stupid and he’ll smell a rat and won’t go down. Take him there instead. Act like you want it as bad as he does. We’ll handle the rest. So down they came round half past one in the morning. We were in the cave and Nan handed him over. The rest…You can work it out.”
“The odds were good. Six of you and one of him.”
“No,” Darren said. His voice was harsh. “Ben Kerne wasn’t ever there.”