“Then what happened?” Ben asked. “Please. What happened to Santo?”
“He’s had a cliff-climbing accident. Equipment failure. On the cliffs at Polcare Cove.”
“He was climbing?” Ben said stupidly. “Santo was climbing? Who was with him? Where?”
“No one, as it seems at the moment.”
“No one? He was climbing alone? At Polcare Cove? In this weather?” It seemed to Ben that all he could do was repeat the information like an automaton being programmed to speak. To do more than that meant he would have to embrace it, and he couldn’t bear that because he knew what embracing it was going to mean. “Answer me,” he said to the constable. “Bloody answer me, man.”
“Have you a picture of Alexander?”
“I want to see him. I must. It might not be?”
“That’s not possible just now. That’s why I need the photo. The body…He’s been taken to hospital in Truro.”
Ben leapt at the word. “So he’s not dead, then.”
“Mr. Kerne, I’m sorry. He’s dead. The body?”
“You said hospital.”
“To the mortuary, for the postmortem,” McNulty said. “I’m very sorry.”
“Oh my God.”
The front door opened below. Ben went to the lounge doorway and called out, “Dellen?” Footsteps came in the direction of the stairs. But then it was Kerra and not Ben’s wife who appeared in the doorway. She dripped rainwater onto the floor, and she’d removed her bicycle helmet. The very top of her head was the only part of her that appeared to be dry.
She looked at the constable, then said to Ben, “Has something happened?”
“Santo.” Ben’s voice was hoarse. “Santo’s been killed.”
“Santo.” Then, “Santo?” Kerra looked round the room in a kind of panic. “Where’s Alan? Where’s Mum?”
Ben found he couldn’t meet her eyes. “Your mother’s not here.”
“What’s happened, then?”
Ben told her what little he knew.
She said, as he had, “Santo was climbing?” and she looked at him with an expression that said what he himself was thinking: If Santo had gone climbing, he’d likely done so because of his father.
“Yes,” Ben said. “I know. I know. You don’t need to tell me.”
“Know what, sir?” It was the constable speaking.
It came to Ben that these initial moments were critical ones in the eyes of the police. They would always be critical because the police didn’t yet know what they were dealing with. They had a body and they reckoned having a body equated an accident, but on the chance that it wasn’t an accident, they had to be ready to point the finger and ask relevant questions and for the love of God, where was Dellen?
Ben rubbed his forehead. He thought, uselessly, that all of this was down to the sea, coming back to the sea, never feeling completely at ease unless the sound of the sea was not far off and yet being forced into feeling at ease for years and years while all the time longing for it and the great open heaving mass of it and the noise of it and the excitement of it and now this. It was down to him that Santo was dead.
No surfing, he’d said. I do not want you surfing. D’you know how many blokes throw their lives away just hanging about, waiting for waves? It’s mad. It’s a waste.
“…act as liaison,” Constable McNulty was saying.
Ben said, “What? What’s that? Liaison?”
Kerra was watching him, her blue eyes narrowed. She looked speculative, which was the last way he wanted his daughter to look at him just now. She said carefully, “The constable was telling us they’ll send a liaison officer round. Once they have the picture of Santo and they know for certain.” And then to McNulty, “Why d’you need a picture?”
“He had no identification on him.”
“Then how?”
“We found the car. A lay-by near Stowe Wood. His driving licence was in the glove box, and the keys in his rucksack fitted the door lock.”
“So this is just form,” Kerra pointed out.
“Essentially, yes. But it has to be done.”