Alan had said the expected: “You aren’t supposing one of the family…?” and managed to sound perplexed and outraged simultaneously.
Everyone who knew Santo would be interviewed, Constable McNulty told them. He appeared rather excited about this, and it had come to Kerra how tediously boring the policeman’s life must be in Casvelyn in the off-season, with three-quarters of the summer population gone and those who remained either in their houses huddling against the Atlantic storms or committing only the occasional minor traffic violation to break the monotony of a constable’s life. All of Santo’s belongings would need to be examined, the constable told them. A family history would be constructed, and?
That had been enough for Kerra. Family history? That would certainly be illuminating. A family history would show it all: bats in the belfry and skeletons in the closet, people who were permanently estranged and people who were just permanently strange.
All of this gave her another reason to ride. And then came Cadan and the conversation with Cadan, which left her feeling blamed.
After her words with him, she fetched her bike. Her father met her outside, Alan coming out behind him with an expression that said he’d passed along the information about Santo. So Alan didn’t need to mouth the words he knows although that’s what he did. Kerra wanted to tell him he’d had no right to tell her father anything. Alan wasn’t a member of the family.
Ben Kerne said to Kerra, “Where are you going? I’d like you to stay here.” He sounded exhausted. He looked it, too.
Did you fuck her again? was what Kerra wished to use as reply. Did she slip on her little red negligee and crook her finger and did you melt and not see anything else, not even that Santo is dead? Good way to forget for a few minutes, eh? Works a trick. Always has done.
But she said none of that although she was positively itching to flay him. She said, “I need a ride just now. I’ve got to?”
“You’re needed here.”
Kerra glanced at Alan. He was watching her. Surprisingly, he indicated by cocking his head in the direction of the road that she should ride, no matter her father’s desires. Although she didn’t want to be, she was grateful for this display of understanding. Alan was, in this at least, fully on her side.
“Does she need something from me?” Kerra asked her father.
He looked behind him, up at the windows of the family’s flat. The curtains of the master bedroom were blocking out the daylight. Behind them, Dellen was coping in her Dellen way: on the crushed spines of her near relations.
“She’s in black,” Kerra’s father said.
“That’ll doubtless be a large disappointment to any number of people,” Kerra replied.
Ben Kerne looked at her with eyes so anguished that for a moment Kerra regretted her words. Not his fault came to her. But at the same time there were things that were her father’s fault, not the least of which was that they were even talking about her mother and, in doing so, that they were reduced to using a carefully chosen set of words, like semaphores and they two distant communicators with a secret language all their own.
She sighed, an aggrieved party unwilling to apologise. That he, too, was aggrieved could not be allowed to count. She said, “Do you?”
“What?”
“Need something from me. Because she doesn’t. She’ll be wanting you. And no doubt vice versa.”
Ben made no reply. He went back into the hotel without another word, shouldering past Alan, who looked rather like a man trying to decipher the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Alan said, “A little harsh, that, Kerra. Don’t you think?”