“They want to go to Lourdes. They want a miracle. They have nothing else to hang their hopes on and certainly no money to finance what they want. Which is where I come in. Which is why Gwynder found me. So do I do this for them? Do I forgive these people for what they did, for how we lived, for what they couldn’t be? Am I responsible for them now? What do I owe them besides life itself? I mean the fact of life and not what I’ve done with it. And what does it mean, anyway, to owe someone for having given birth to you? Surely that’s not the most difficult part of taking on parenthood, is it? I hardly think so. Which means the rest of it?the rest of being a parent?they utterly mangled.”
He did touch her then. He did what he’d seen her do herself: take the hair and tuck it back. His fingers touched the curve of her ear. He said, “Why did they come back, your brother and sister? Were they never adopted?”
“There was…They called it an accident, their foster parents. They called it Goron playing with a plastic bag, but I think there was more to it than that. It probably should have been called?whatever ‘it’ was?disciplining an overactive little boy in the wrong way. In any event, he was damaged and deemed unadoptable by people who saw him and met him. Gwynder might have been adopted but she wouldn’t be parted from him. So they moved from home to home together, through the system, for years. When they were old enough, they came back here.” She smiled bleakly as she looked at him. “I wager this place?as well as this story?isn’t much like what you’re used to, is it, Thomas?”
“I’m not certain it matters.” He wanted to say more but he was unsure how to put it so he settled with, “Are you willing to call me Tommy, Daidre? My family and friends?”
She held up her hand. “I think not,” she said.
“Because of this?”
“No. Because this matters to me.”
JAGO REETH MADE IT clear that he wanted Ben Kerne alone, with no hangers-on from his family present. He suggested Hedra’s Hut for the venue, and he used the word venue as if a performance would be given there.
Bea told him he was a bloody damn fool if he expected the lot of them to traipse out to the sea cliff where that ancient perch was.
He replied that fool or not, if she wanted a conversation with him, he knew his rights and he was going to employ them.
She told him that one of his rights was not the right to decide where their meeting with Ben Kerne would occur.
He smiled and begged to differ with her. It might not have been his right, he said, but the fact of the matter was that she probably wanted him to be in a location where he felt easy with conversation. And Hedra’s Hut was that location. They’d be cosy enough there. Out of the cold and the wind. Snug as four bugs rolled in the same rug, if she knew what he meant.
“He’s got something up his sleeve,” was Sergeant Havers’s assessment of the situation once they set off trailing Jago Reeth’s Defender in the direction of Alsperyl. They’d wait at the village church for Mr. Kerne, Jago had informed them. “Best phone the superintendent and let him know where we’re going,” Havers went on. “I’d have backup as well. Those blokes from the station…? Got to be a way they can hide themselves round the place.”
“Not unless they disguise themselves as cows, sheep, or gulls,” Bea told her. “This bloke’s thought of all the angles.”
Lynley, Bea found, wasn’t answering his mobile, which made her curse the man and wonder why she’d bothered to give him a phone in the first place. “Where’s the blasted man got off to?” she asked and then replied to her own question with a grim declaration of, “Well, I wager we know the answer to that, don’t we.”
At Alsperyl, which was no great distance from the Salthouse Inn, they remained in their respective cars, parked close to the village church. When Ben Kerne finally joined them, they’d been sitting there for nearly thirty minutes. During this time, Bea had phoned the station to give the word where they were and phoned Ray to do likewise.
Ray said, “Beatrice, are you barking mad? D’you have any idea how irregular this is?”
“I’ve got half a dozen ideas,” she told him. “I’ve also got sod all to work with unless this bloke gives me something I can use.”
“You can’t think he intends?”
“I don’t know what he intends. But there will be three of us and one of him and if we can’t manage?”
“You’ll check him for weapons?”
“I’m a fool but not a bloody fool, Ray.”