“Where was he, then?”
“Gone home. He was stupid about Dellen. Always stupid. Christ, if it hadn’t been for her, we wouldn’t have been at the bloody party at all. But he needed cheering up, so we said, Let’s go and have his drink and eat his food and listen to his music. Only she was there, that bloody Dellen with some new bloke, so Ben got into the wrong girl’s knickers in reaction to seeing Dellen, and after that, he just wanted to go home. Which was what he did. The rest of us talked to Nan and Nan went back to the party and…” Darren gestured in the direction of the cave, down below them, tucked into the cliff.
Lynley carried the story on, saying, “You stripped him in the cave, and you tied him up. You smeared faeces on him. Did you piss on him? No? What, then? Toss off? One of you? All of you?”
“He cried,” Darren said. “That’s what we wanted. That’s all we wanted. When he started to cry, we were finished with him. We untied him. We left him to make his way back up the cliff. The rest you know.”
Lynley nodded. The story made him feel queasy. It was one thing to surmise, another to hear the truth of the matter. There were so many Jamie Parsons on earth, and so many boys like these men before him. There was also the great divide between them and how that divide was or was not negotiated. Jamie Parsons had likely been unbearable. But being unbearable did not amount to being deserving of death.
Lynley said, “I’m curious about one thing.”
They waited. All of them looked at him: Darren Fields sullen, Chris Outer as cool as he’d likely been twenty-eight years ago, Frankie Kliskey expectant of a psychological blow of some sort.
“How did you manage to hold fast to the same story when the police went after you initially? Before they went after Ben Kerne, I mean.”
“We left the party at half past eleven. We parted at the high street. We went home.” It was Darren speaking, and Lynley got the point. Three sentences only, endlessly repeated. They may have been bloody stupid, those five boys involved, but they had not been ignorant of the law.
“What did you do with his clothes?”
“Countryside’s filled with adits and mine shafts,” Chris said. “That’s the nature of this part of Cornwall.”
“What about Ben Kerne? Did you tell him what had happened?”
“We left the party at half past eleven. We parted at the high street. We went home.”
So, Lynley thought, Ben Kerne had always been as ignorant of what had happened as everyone else had been, aside from the original five boys and Nancy Snow.
“What happened to Nancy Snow?” Lynley asked. “How could you be sure she’d not talk?”
“She was pregnant by Jack,” Darren told him. “Three months along. She had an interest in keeping Jack out of trouble.”
“What happened to her?”
“They married. After he died, she moved off to Dublin with another husband.”
“So you were safe.”
“We were always safe. We left the party at half past eleven. We parted at the high street. We went home.”
There was, in short, nothing more to be said. It was the same situation that had existed after Jamie Parsons’ death nearly thirty years earlier.
“Did you not feel some sense of responsibility once the police focused their attention on Ben Kerne?” Lynley asked them. “Someone grassed on him. Was it one of you?”
Darren laughed harshly. “Not bloody likely. Only person who’d’ve grassed on Ben would’ve been someone wanting to cause him trouble.”
Chapter Twenty-two