She led the way in, but then stopped short. Behind her, she heard him duck under the low lintel to join her. She said, “Oh blast,” in disgust and he said, “Now, that’s a shame.”
The wall directly in front of them had been defaced and defaced recently if the freshness of the cuts into the wooden panels of the little building were anything to go by. The remains of a heart which had been earlier carved into the wood?no doubt accompanied by lovers’ initials?curved round a series of vicious hack marks that now gouged deeply, as if into flesh. No initials were left.
“Well,” Daidre said, trying to sound philosophical about the mess, “I suppose it’s not as if the walls haven’t already been carved up. And at least it isn’t spray paint. But still…One wonders…Why do people do such things?”
Thomas was observing the rest of the hut, with its more than two hundred years of carvings: initials, dates, other hearts, the occasional name. He said thoughtfully, “Where I went to school, there’s a wall…It’s not too far from the entry, actually, so no visitor can ever miss it…Pupils have put their initials into it for…I don’t know…I expect they’ve done it since the time of Henry the sixth. Whenever I go back?because I do go back occasionally…one does?I look for mine. They’re still there. They somehow say I’m real, I existed then, I exist even now. But when I look at all the others?and there are hundreds, probably thousands of them?I can’t help thinking how fleeting life is. It’s the same thing here, isn’t it?”
“I suppose it is.” She ran her fingers over several of the older carvings: a Celtic cross, the name Daniel, B.J. + S.R. “I like to come here to think,” she told him. “Sometimes I wonder who were these people all coupled together so confidently. And did their love last? I wonder that as well.”
For his part, Lynley touched the poor gouged heart. “Nothing lasts,” he said. “That’s our curse.”
Chapter Nine
BEA HANNAFORD SAW MUCH THAT SEEMED TYPICAL IN SANTO Kerne’s bedroom, and for the first time she was glad to have Constable McNulty doing penance as her dogsbody. For the walls of Santo’s bedroom bore a plethora of surfing posters and, from what Bea could tell, what McNulty didn’t know about surfing, the locations of the photos, and the surfers themselves didn’t actually bear knowing. She couldn’t conclude that his knowledge was in any way relevant to anything, however. She was merely relieved that, at the end of the day, McNulty did know something about something.
“Jaws,” he murmured obscurely, gazing awestruck at a liquid mountain down which a thumb-size madman rushed. “Bloody hell, look at that bloke. That’s Hamilton, off Maui. He’s dead mad. He’ll do anything. Christ, this looks like a tsunami, doesn’t it?” He whistled low and shook his head.
Ben Kerne was with them, but he didn’t venture into the room. His wife had remained below, in the lounge. It had been obvious that Kerne hadn’t wanted to leave her on her own, but he’d been caught between the police and his spouse. He couldn’t accommodate one while attempting to monitor the other. He’d had little choice in the matter, then. They would either wander the hotel till they found Santo’s bedroom as he saw to his wife, or he would have to take them there. He’d chosen the latter, but it was fairly clear that his mind was elsewhere.
“So far we’ve heard nothing about Santo and surfing,” Bea said to Ben Kerne, who stood in the doorway.
Kerne said, “He started surfing when we first came to Casvelyn.”
“Is his surfing kit here? Board, wet suit, whatever else…”
“Hood,” McNulty murmured. “Gloves, boots, extra fins?”
“That’ll do, Constable,” Bea told him sharply. “Mr. Kerne probably gets the point.”
“No,” Ben Kerne said. “He kept his kit elsewhere.”
“Did he? Why?” Bea said. “Not exactly convenient, is it?”
Ben looked at the posters as he replied. “I expect he didn’t like to keep it here.”
“Why?” she repeated.