“I don’t know. Would you? I still don’t see why you approved of one sport but not another.”
“It’s the type, all right?” Kerne gave an apologetic glance to Constable McNulty. “I didn’t like him mixing with surfers because for so many of them it’s their only world. I didn’t want him adopting it: the hanging about they do, waiting for the opportunity for a surf, their lives defined by isobar charts and tide tables, driving up and down the coast to find perfect waves. And when they’re not having a surf, they’re talking about it or smoking cannabis while they stand round in their wet suits afterwards, still talking about it. There’re blokes-and lasses as well, I admit it-whose entire worlds revolve round riding waves and traveling the globe to ride more waves. I didn’t want that for Santo. Would you want it for your son or daughter?”
“But if his world revolved round cliff climbing?”
“It didn’t. But at least it’s a sport where one depends upon others. It’s not solitary, the way surfing can be and generally is. A surfer alone on the waves: You see it all the time. I didn’t want him out there alone. I wanted him to be with people. So if something happened to him…” He moved his gaze back to the posters, and what they depicted was-even to an unschooled observer like Bea-absolute danger embodied in an unimaginable tonnage of water: exposure to everything from broken bones to certain drowning. She wondered how many people died each year, coursing a nearly vertical declivity that, unlike the earth with its knowable textures, changed within seconds to trap the unwary.
She said, “Yet Santo was climbing alone when he fell. Just as he might have been had he gone for a surf. And anyway, surfers don’t always do this alone, do they?”
“On the wave itself. The surfer and the wave, alone. There may be others out there, but it’s not about them.”
“With climbing it is, though?”
“You depend on the other climber, and he depends on you. You keep each other safe.” He cleared his throat roughly and added, “What father wouldn’t want safety for his son?”
“And when Santo didn’t agree with your assessment of surfing?”
“What about it?”
“What happened between you? Arguments? Punishment? Do you tend towards violence, Mr. Kerne?”
He faced her, but in doing so he put his back to the window, so she could no longer read his face. He said, “What the hell sort of question is that?”
“One that wants answering. Santo’s eye was blackened by someone recently. What d’you know about that?”
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.
“We’d had harsh words. He’d have reacted to them. It would have been an ‘I’ll show you’ sort of statement.”
“One that led to his death? Too much in a state to examine his kit closely? Was he the type to do that?”
“Impulsive, you mean? Impulsive enough to climb without looking over his equipment? Yes,” Kerne said, “he was exactly the type to do that.”
IT WAS, PRAISE GOD or praise whomever one felt like praising when praise was called for, the last radiator. Not the last radiator as in the last radiator of all radiators in the hotel, but the last radiator as in the last radiator he would have to paint for the day. Given a half hour to clean the brushes and seal the paint tins-after years of practise while working for his father, Cadan knew he could stretch out any activity as long as was necessary-it would be time to leave for the day. Halle-fucking-lujah. His lower back was throbbing and his head was reacting to the fumes once again. Clearly, he wasn’t meant for this type of labour. Well, that was hardly a surprise.