His shoulders dropped. He moved again, but this time out of the light of the window and towards the other side of the room, where a computer and its printer sat on a single plywood sheet across two sawhorses forming a primitive desk. There was a stack of papers facedown on this desk; Ben Kerne reached for them. Bea stopped him before his fingers made contact. She repeated her question.
“He wouldn’t tell me,” Kerne said. “Obviously, I could tell he’d been punched. It was a bad blow. But he wouldn’t explain it, so I was left to think…” He shook his head. He seemed to have information he was loath to part with.
Bea said, “If you know something…if you suspect something…”
“I don’t. It’s just that…the young women liked Santo, and Santo liked the young women. He didn’t discriminate.”
“Between what?”
“Between available and unavailable. Between attached and unattached. Santo was…He was like pure mating instinct given human form. Perhaps an angry father punched him out. Or a furious boyfriend. He wouldn’t say. But he liked the lasses and the lasses liked him. And truth of the matter is that he was easily led where a determined young woman wanted him to go. He was…I’m afraid he was always that way.”
“Anyone in particular?”
“His last was a girl called Madlyn Angarrack. They’d been…what do you call it…an item? For more than a year.”
“Is she also a surfer by any chance?” Bea asked.
“A brilliant one, if Santo was to be believed. National champion in the making. He was quite taken with her.”
“And she with him?”
“It wasn’t a one-way street.”
“How was it for you, watching your son become involved with a surfer, then?”
Ben Kerne answered steadily. “Santo was always involved somewhere, Inspector. I knew it would pass, whatever it was. As I said, he liked the ladies. He wasn’t ready to settle. Not with Madlyn, not with anyone. No matter what.”
Bea thought that last was a strange expression. She said, “You wanted him to settle, though?”
“Like any father, I wanted him to keep his nose clean and stay out of trouble.”
“Not overly ambitious for him, then? Those are fairly limited as expectations go.”
Ben Kerne said nothing. Bea had the impression he was keeping something to himself, and it was her experience that in a murder enquiry, when someone did that, it was generally out of self-interest.
She said, “Did you ever beat Santo, Mr. Kerne?”
His gaze on her didn’t waver. “I’ve answered that question already.”
She let a silence hang there, but this one lacked fecundity. She was forced to move on. She did so by giving her attention to Santo’s computer. They would have to take it with them, she told Kerne. Constable McNulty would unhook it all and carry the components out to their car. Having said this, she reached for the stack of papers that Kerne had been going for on the desk. She flipped them over and spread them out.
They were, she saw, a variation of designs that incorporated the words Adventures Unlimited into each of them. In one the two words themselves formed into a curling wave. In another they made a circular logo in which the Promontory King George Hotel stood centrally. In a third they became the base upon which a variety of athletic feats were being accomplished by buffed-out silhouettes both masculine and feminine. In another they made a climbing apparatus.
“He…Oh God.”
Bea looked up from the designs to see Kerne’s stricken face. “What is it?” she asked.
“He designed T-shirts. On his computer. He was…Obviously, he was working on something for the business. I’d not asked him to do it. Oh God, Santo.”
He said the last like an apology. In reaction, Bea asked him about his son’s climbing equipment. Kerne told her that all of it was missing, every belay device, every chock stone, every rope, every item he would need for any climb he might make.
“Would he have needed all of it to make that climb yesterday?”
No, Kerne told her. He either began keeping it elsewhere without his father’s knowledge or he’d taken it all on the previous day when he set off to make his fatal climb.
“Why?” Bea asked.