“You’re going to know,” Reeth said. “You’re going to see. Because what I’ve said here-every word of it, man-is speculation. I know my rights. I made a study of my rights. So when I walk out of here-”
“Don’t you see? It doesn’t matter,” Ben replied. “Because I’m walking out of here first.”
He did so. He closed the door behind him and strode along the path towards the steps. His throat ached with the strain of holding back everything he’d been holding back-even without acknowledging that fact-for so many years. He heard his name called, and he turned.
DI Hannaford joined him. She said, “He’s made an error somewhere, Mr. Kerne. They always make an error. We’re going to find it. No one thinks of everything. I want you to hang on.”
Ben shook his head. “It doesn’t matter,” he said again. “Will it bring Santo back?”
“He’s got to pay. That’s how this works.”
“He’s already paying. And even if he isn’t, he’s going to see the only thing there is to see: There’s no peace for him in what he’s done. He can’t scrub it from his brain. None of us can do that.”
“Nonetheless,” Hannaford said. “We’ll be pursuing this.”
“If you must,” Ben said. “But not for my sake.”
“For Santo’s sake, then. He’s owed-”
“He is. God, how he is. He’s just not owed this.”
Ben walked from her, making his way along the path and up the stone steps to the top of the cliff. There, he followed the South-West Coast Path the short distance to the pastures they’d crossed, and he returned to his car. They could do with Jago Reeth or Jonathan Parsons what they wished to do or, indeed, what they were able to do within the confines of the law and the rights he said he knew so well. For whatever they did or did not do would not be sufficient to absolve Ben of the burden of responsibility that would always be his. This responsibility, he saw, went far beyond Santo’s death. It was described by the choices he’d made time and again and what those choices had done to mould the very people he’d claimed to love.
In days to come, he knew he would weep. He couldn’t now. He was numb. But the grief of loss was inescapable, and he accepted that for the first time in his life.
When he got home, he went in search of her. Alan was at work in his office, on the phone with someone and standing at a bulletin board on which he’d affixed two lines of index cards which Ben recognised as the plan for the video he wished to make about Adventures Unlimited. Kerra was talking to a tall blond youth, a prospective instructor no doubt. Ben didn’t bother either of them.
He climbed the stairs. She wasn’t in the family quarters, nor did she appear to be anywhere else in the building. He felt a fluttering in his chest at this, and he went to the wardrobe to check, but her clothing was still there and the rest of her belongings were in the chest of drawers. He finally saw her from the window, a figure in black on the beach whom he might have taken as a surfer in a wet suit had he not possessed a lifetime of knowledge about the shape of her and the texture of her hair. She was standing with her back to the hotel. As the tide was high, most of the beach was covered, and the water was lapping round her ankles. It would still be frigid this time of year, but she wore no protection against it.
He went to join her. He saw when he reached her that she was carrying a bundle of photographs. She was hollow eyed. She looked nearly as numb as he himself felt.
He said her name. She said, “I hadn’t thought of him in years. But there he was in my mind today, like he’d been waiting to get in all this time.”
“Who?”
“Hugo.”
A name he’d never once heard before and not one he cared about hearing now. He said nothing. Far out in the waves, five surfers formed a lineup. A swell rose behind them and Ben watched to see who would be in position to drop in. None of them were. The wave broke too far ahead of them, leaving them waiting for the next one in the set and another attempt at a ride.
Dellen continued. “I was his special one. He made a fuss over me and he asked my parents could he take me to the cinema. To the seal sanctuary. To the Christmas panto. He bought me clothes he wanted to see me in because I was his favourite niece. We’ve got something special, he said. I wouldn’t buy you these things and take you to these places if you weren’t especially special to me.”
Out to sea, one of the surfers was successful, Ben saw. He dropped in and caught the wave and he carved, seeking what every surfer seeks, the racing green room whose shimmering walls rise and curve and endlessly shift, enclosing and then releasing. It was a beautiful ride and when it was over, the surfer dropped down onto the board and made his way out to the others again, accompanied by the yelps of his mates. Jokingly, they barked like dogs. When he reached them, one of them touched fists with him. Ben saw this and felt a sore place in his heart. He forced himself to attend to what Dellen was saying.
“It felt wrong,” she said, “but Uncle Hugo said it was love. The special part was being singled out. Not my brother, not my cousins, but me. So if he touched me here and asked me to touch him there, was that bad? Or was it just something that I didn’t understand?”
Ben felt her look at him and he knew he was meant to look at her as well. He was meant to look at her face and read the suffering there, and he was meant to meet her emotion with his own. But he couldn’t do it. For he found that a thousand Uncle Hugos couldn’t change a single one of the facts. If, indeed, there was an Uncle Hugo at all.
Next to him, he felt her move. He saw she was riffling through the pictures she had with her. He half-expected her to produce Uncle Hugo from within the stack, but she didn’t. Instead, she brought forth a photograph he recognised. Mum and Dad and two kids on summer holiday, a week on the Isle of Wight. Santo had been eight years old, Kerra twelve.
In the picture they were at a restaurant table, no meal in evidence, so they must have handed the camera to the waiter as they first sat, asking him to snap the happy family. All of them were smiling as required: Look at how we’re enjoying ourselves.
Pictures were the things of happy memories. They were also the instruments one used retrospectively to avoid the truth. For in Kerra’s small face, Ben could now read the anxiety, that desire to be just good enough to stop the wheel from turning another time. In Santo’s face, he could see the confusion, a child’s awareness of a present hypocrisy without the accompanying comprehension. In his own expression, he could see the gritty determination to make things right. And in Dellen’s face…what was always there: knowledge and anticipation. She was wearing a red scarf twined through her hair.
They gravitated towards her in the picture, all of them slightly leaning in her direction. His hand was over hers, as if he’d hold her there at the table instead of where she doubtless wished to be.
She can’t help herself, he’d said time and again. What he’d failed to see was that he could.
He took the picture from her and said to his wife, “It’s time for you to go.”
She said, “Where?”
“I’m not sure,” he said. “St. Ives. Plymouth. Back to Truro. Pengelly Cove perhaps. Your family’s there still. They’ll help you if you need help. If that’s what you want at this point.”
She was silent. He looked from the photo to her. Her eyes had darkened. She said, “Ben, how can you…? After what’s happened.”