Elizabeth George - Careless in Red

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.”

“Don’t,” he said. “It’s time for you to go.”

“Please,” she said. “How will I survive?”

“You’ll survive,” he told her. “We both know that.”

“What about you? Kerra? What about the business?”

“Alan’s here. He’s a very good man. And otherwise, Kerra and I will cope. We’ve learned to do that very well.”

SELEVAN HAD FOUND THAT his plans altered once the police came to the Salthouse Inn. He told himself that he couldn’t just selfishly head out with Tammy for the Scottish border without knowing what was going on and, more important, without discovering if there was something he could do to assist Jago should assistance be required. He couldn’t imagine why such assistance might be necessary, but he thought it best to remain where he was-more or less-and wait for further information.

It wasn’t long in coming. He reckoned Jago wouldn’t return to the Salthouse Inn, so he himself didn’t wait there. Instead, he went back to Sea Dreams and paced in the caravan for a while, taking a nip now and then from a flask he’d filled to see him on the trip to the border, and finally he went outside and over to Jago’s caravan.

He didn’t go within. He had a duplicate key to the place, but it just didn’t feel right, although he reckoned Jago wouldn’t have minded had he entered. Instead he waited on the top of the metal steps, where a wider one played the role of porch and was suitable for his bum.

Jago rolled into Sea Dreams some ten minutes later. Selevan got creakily to his feet. He shoved his hands into the pockets of his jacket and walked over to Jago’s preferred spot to park the Defender. He said, “You all right, then, mate?” when Jago got out. “They didn’t give you aggro down the station, did they?”

“Not a bit,” Jago told him. “When it comes to the cops, a small measure of preparation is all that’s needed. Things go your way, then, instead of theirs. Surprises them a bit, but that’s what life is. One bloody surprise after another.”

“S’pose,” Selevan said. But he felt a twinge of uneasiness, and he couldn’t exactly say why. There was something about Jago’s way of talking, something in the tone, that wasn’t altogether the Jago he knew. He said warily, “They didn’t rough you up, mate?”

Jago barked a laugh. “Those two cows? Not likely. We just had a bit of a conversation and that was the end of it. Long time in coming, but it’s over now.”

“Wha’s going on, then?”

“Nothing, mate. Something went on long time ago, but that’s all finished. My work here is done.”

Jago passed Selevan and stepped up to the door of the caravan. He hadn’t locked it, Selevan saw, so there’d been no need for him to wait on the steps in the first place. Jago went inside and Selevan followed. He stood uncertainly just at the door, however, because he wasn’t sure what was going on.

He said, “You made redundant, Jago?”

Jago had gone into the bedroom at the end of the caravan. Selevan couldn’t see him, but he could hear the noise of a cupboard opening and of something being dragged from the shelf above the clothing rail. In a moment Jago appeared in the doorway, a large duffel bag drooping from his hand. “What?” he asked.

“I asked were you made redundant. You said your work was finished. You been sacked or something?”

Jago looked as if he was thinking about this, which was strange as far as Selevan was concerned. One was made redundant or not. One was sacked or not. Surely the question didn’t need consideration. Finally Jago smiled quite a slow smile that wasn’t much like him. He said, “That’s exactly it, mate. Redundant. I was made redundant…long time ago.” He paused and looked thoughtful and next spoke to himself, “More than a quarter of a century,” he said. “A long time in coming.”

“What?” Selevan felt a restless urgency to get to the root of the matter because this Jago was different to the Jago he’d been sitting in the inglenook with for the last six or seven months, and he vastly preferred that other Jago, who spoke directly and not in…well, in parables or the like.

He said, “Mate, has something happened with them cops? Did they do something to…? You don’t sound like yourself.” Selevan could imagine what the cops might do. True, they’d been women, but fact was that Jago was an old codger round the same age as Selevan, and he was in poor condition for his years. Besides that, had they taken him to the station, there’d be blokes there-other cops-who could rough him up. And cops could rough one up in places where no evidence was left. Selevan knew that. He watched telly, especially American films on Sky. He’d seen how it was done. Bit of pressure on the thumbnails. Couple of sewing needles screwed into the skin. It wouldn’t take much on a bloke like Jago. Only…he wasn’t acting like a man who’d suffered some sort of humiliation at the hands of the cops, was he.