“I sorted that,” Bea told him.
“You have to, I wager,” Barbara Havers noted pleasantly. “Bit tough for it to make it all the way to the Sudan before it rots, moulds, hardens, or whatevers. Costs you next to nothing as well, so it has that in its favour, too.”
Mendick eyed her as if evaluating her level of disrespect. Her face showed nothing. He appeared to take the decision to ignore any judgement they might make about his activity. He said, “You want to talk to me. So talk to me.”
“You knew Santo Kerne. Well enough for him to design a T-shirt for you, from what we’ve learned.”
“If you know that, then you’ll also know that this is a small town and most people here knew Santo Kerne. I hope you’re talking to them as well.”
“We’ll get to the rest of his associates eventually,” Bea replied. “Just now it’s you we’re interested in. Tell us about Conrad Nelson. He’s operating from a wheelchair these days, the way I hear it.”
Mendick had a few spots on his face, near his mouth, and these turned the colour of raspberries. He went back to sorting through the supermarket’s discards. He chose some bruised apples and followed them with a collection of limp courgettes. He said, “I did my time for that.”
“Which we know,” Bea assured him. “But what we don’t know is how it happened and why.”
“It’s nothing to do with your investigation.”
“It’s assault with intent,” Bea told him. “It’s grave bodily injury. It’s a stretch inside at the pleasure of you-know-who. When someone’s got details like that in his background, Mr. Mendick, we like to know about them. Especially if he’s an associate-close or otherwise-of someone who ends up murdered.”
“Where there’s smoke there’s fire.” Havers lit up another cigarette as if to emphasise her point.
“You’re destroying your lungs and everyone else’s,” Mendick told her. “That’s a disgusting habit.”
“While wheelie-bin diving is what?” Havers asked.
“Not letting something go to waste.”
“Damn. I wish I shared your nobility of character. Reckon you lost sight of it-that noble part of you-when you bashed that bloke in Plymouth, eh?”
“I said I did my stretch.”
“We understand you told the judge it had to do with drink,” Bea said. “D’you still have a problem with that? Is it still leading you to go off the nut? That was your claim, I’ve been told.”
“I don’t drink any longer, so it’s not leading me anywhere.” He looked into the wheelie bin, spied something he apparently wanted, and dug down to bring forth a packet of fig bars. He stowed this in the bag and went on with his search. He ripped open and tossed a loaf of apparently stale bread onto the tarmac for the gulls. They went after it greedily. “I do AA if it’s anything to you,” he added. “And I haven’t had a drink since I came out.”
“I do hope that’s the case, Mr. Mendick. How did that altercation in Plymouth begin?”
“I told you it’s got nothing to do…” He seemed to rethink his angry tone-as well as the direction of the conversation-because he sighed and said, “I used to get blind drunk. I had a dustup with this yob, and I don’t know what it was about because when I drank like that I couldn’t remember what set me off or even if something set me off at all. I didn’t remember the fight the next day and I’m damn sorry that bloke ended up like he did, because it wasn’t my intention. I probably just wanted to sort him.”
“Is that your general method of sorting people?”
“When I drank, it was. It’s not something I’m proud of. It’s also over. I did my time. I made my amends. I try to stay clean.”
“Try?”
“Bloody hell.” He climbed up into the wheelie bin. He began a more furious rooting through its contents.
“Santo Kerne took a fairly serious punch sometime before he died,” Bea said. “I wonder if you can tell us anything about that.”
“I can’t,” he said.
“You can’t or you won’t?”
“Why d’you want to pin this on me?”
Because you look so damn guilty, Bea thought. Because you’re lying about something and I can read it in the colour of your skin, which is flaming now, from your cheeks to your ears and even to your scalp. “That’s my job,” Bea told him, “to pin this on someone. If that someone’s not you, I’d like to know why.”
“I had no reason to hurt him. Or to kill him. Or to anything.”
“How’d you come to know him?”
“I worked at Clean Barrel, that surf shop on the corner of the Strand.” Mendick nodded in the general direction. “He came in because he wanted a board. That’s how we met. Few months after he moved to town.”
“But you no longer work at Clean Barrel Surf Shop. Has that something to do with Santo Kerne as well?”
“I sent him to LiquidEarth for a board, and I got found out. I lost my job. I wasn’t supposed to be sending anyone to the competition. Not that LiquidEarth is the competition but there was no telling the boss man that, was there? So I got the sack.”
“Blamed him for that, did you?”
“Sorry to disappoint you, but no. It was the right thing to do, sending Santo to LiquidEarth. He was a beginner. He’d never even been out. He needed a beginner’s board. We didn’t have any decent ones at the time-just shit from China, if you want to know, and we sold that clobber mostly to tourists-so I told him to go see Lew Angarrack, who’d make him a good one that he could learn on. It would cost a bit more but it would be right for him. That’s what I did. That’s all I did. Jesus. From Nigel Coyle’s reaction, you would’ve thought I’d shot someone. Santo brought the board by to show me, Coyle happened to be there, and the rest is history.”
“Santo did you a bad turn, then.”
“So I killed him? Waited two years to kill him? Not likely. He felt bad enough about what happened. He apologised maybe six dozen times.”
“Where?”
“Where what?”
“Where did he apologise? Where did you see him?”
“Wherever,” he said. “The town’s small, like I said.”
“On the beach?”
“I don’t go to the beach.”
“In a surfing town like Casvelyn you don’t go to the beach?”
“I don’t surf.”
“You were selling surfboards but you yourself don’t surf? Why’s that, Mr. Mendick?”
“God damn it!” Mendick rose up. He towered above them in the wheelie bin, but he would have towered above them anyway, for he was tall albeit gangly.
Bea could see the veins throbbing in his temples. She wondered what it took for him to control that nasty temper of his and she also wondered what it took for him to unleash it on someone.
She felt Sergeant Havers tense next to her, and she glanced her way. The DS had a hard expression on her face, and Bea liked her for this, for it told her Havers wasn’t the sort of woman who backed down easily in a confrontation.
“Did you compete with other surfers?” Bea asked. “Did you compete with Santo? Did he compete with you? Did you give it up? What?”
“I don’t like the sea.” He spoke through his teeth. “I don’t like not knowing what’s beneath me in the water because there’re sharks in every part of the world and I don’t care to become acquainted with one. I know about boards and I know about surfing but I don’t surf. All right?”
“I suppose. Do you climb, Mr. Mendick?”
“Climb what? No, I don’t climb.”
“What do you do, then?”
“I hang with my friends.”
“Santo Kerne among them?”
“He wasn’t…” Mendick backed off from the rapidity of their conversation, as if he recognised how easily he could become trapped if he continued the pace. He packed more items into his rubbish bag-a few seriously dented tins, some packages of spinach and other greens, a handful of packaged herbs, a packet of tea cakes-before he climbed out of the bin and made his reply. “Santo didn’t have friends,” Mendick said. “Not in the normal sense. Not like other people do. He had people he associated with when he wanted them for something.”