Elizabeth George: Careless in Red

She said, “I was set to blame you.”

“For?”

“The cock-up. Inadequate incident room. No MCIT blokes for love or money. There I am, hanging out to dry with Constable McNulty and Sergeant Collins and whomever you deign to send me-”

“That’s not how it was.”

“Oh, I know that.” Her voice was weary because she was weary. She felt as if she’d been swimming upstream for far too long. “And I’m the one who sent Constable McNulty to tell the Kernes the death was murder. I thought he’d use sense but of course I was wrong. And then when I’d learned what he’d told them, I thought we’d surely uncover something more, some scrap, some detail…It didn’t matter what it was. Just something useful as a trip wire for the moment the killer came sauntering by. But we didn’t.”

“You may still.”

“I doubt it. Unless you count a remark made about a surfing poster, which isn’t likely to amount to anything in the eyes of the CPS.” She set down the container of sponge. “I’ve told myself for years there’s no perfect murder. Forensic science is too advanced. As long as there’s a body to be found, there are too many tests, too many experts. No one can kill and leave not a single trace of himself behind. It’s impossible. Simply can’t be done.”

“There’s truth in that, Beatrice.”

“But what I failed to see is the loopholes. All the ways a killer could plan and organise and commit this…this ultimate crime…and do it in such a way that every bit of it could be explained. Even the most minute forensic bits could be deemed a rational part of one’s daily life. I didn’t see that. Why didn’t I see that?”

“Perhaps you had other things on your mind. Distractions.”

“Such as?”

“Other parts of your own life. You do have other parts to your life, no matter your attempts to deny that.”

She wanted to avoid. “Ray…”

Clearly, he didn’t intend to let her. “You’re not a cop to the exclusion of everything else,” he said. “Good God, Beatrice, you’re not a machine.”

“I wonder about that sometimes.”

“Well, I don’t.”

A blast of music came from upstairs: Pete deciding among his CDs. They listened for a moment to the shriek of an electric guitar. Pete liked his music historical. Jimi Hendrix was his favourite, although in a pinch Duane Allman and his medicine bottle would do just fine.

“God,” Ray said. “Get that lad an iPod.”

She smiled, then chuckled. “He’s something, that child.”

“Our child, Beatrice,” Ray declared quietly.

She didn’t reply. Instead, she took the sticky toffee sponge and tossed it in the rubbish. She washed the spoon she’d been using and set it on the draining board.

Ray said, “Can we talk about it now?”

“You do choose your moments, don’t you?”

“Beatrice, I’ve wanted to talk about it for ages. You know that.”

“I do. But at the present time…You’re a cop and a good one. You can see how I am. Get the suspect in a weak moment. Create the weak moment if you can. It’s elementary stuff, Ray.”

“This isn’t.”

“What?”

“Elementary. Beatrice, how many ways can a man say to you that he was wrong? And how many ways can you say to a man that forgiveness isn’t part of your…what? Your repertoire? When I thought that Pete shouldn’t be-”

“Don’t say it.”

“I have to say it and you have to listen. When I thought that Pete shouldn’t be born…When I said you should abort-”

“You said that’s what you wanted.”

“I said lots of things. I say lots of things. And some of them I say without thinking. Especially when I’m…”

“What?”

“I don’t know. Frightened, I suppose.”

“Of a baby? We’d already had one.”

“Not of that. But of change. The difference it would make in our lives as we had them arranged.”

“Things happen.”

“I understand. And I would have come to understand that then if you’d allowed me the time to-”

“It wasn’t only a single discussion, Ray.”

“Yes. All right. I won’t claim it was. But I will say that I was wrong. In every discussion we had, I was wrong, and I’ve grieved over that…that wrongness, if you will, for years. Fourteen of them, to be exact. More if you include the pregnancy itself. I didn’t want it this way. I don’t want it this way.”

“And…them?” she asked. “You had your diversions.”

“What? Women? For God’s sake, Beatrice, I’m not a monk. Yes, there were women over the years. A whole bloody succession of them. Janice and Sheri and Sharon and Linda and whoever else, because I don’t remember them all. And I don’t remember them because I didn’t want them. I wanted to blot out…this.” He indicated the kitchen, the house, the people within it. “So what I’m asking you is to let me back in because this is where I belong and both of us know it.”

“Do we?”

“We do. Pete knows it as well. So do the bloody dogs.”

She swallowed. It would be so easy…But then again, it wouldn’t. The stuff of men and women together was never easy.

“Mum!” Pete was shouting from upstairs. “Where’d you put my Led Zepppelin CD?”

“Lord,” Bea murmured with a shudder. “Someone, please, get that lad an iPod at once.”

“Mum! Mummy!”

She said to Ray, “I love it when he still calls me that. He doesn’t, often. He’s becoming so grown-up.” She called back, “Don’t know, darling. Check under your bed. And while you’re at it, put any clothes you find there in the laundry. And bring old cheese sandwiches down to the rubbish. Detach the mice from them, first.”

“Very funny,” he shouted and continued to bang about. He said, “Dad! Make her tell me. Make her. She knows where it is. She hates it and she’s hidden it somewhere.”

Ray called to him, “Son, I learned long ago that I can’t make this madwoman do anything.” Then he said to her quietly, “Can I, my dear. Because if I could, you know what it would be.”

She said, “That you can’t.”

“To my eternal regret.”

She thought about his words, those he’d just said and those he’d said before. She said to him, “Not really eternal. Not exactly that.”

She heard him swallow. “Do you mean it, Beatrice?”

“I suppose I do.”

They looked at each other, the window behind them doubling the image of man and woman and the hesitant step each of them took towards the other at precisely the same moment. Pete came pounding down the stairs. He shouted, “Found it! Ready to go, Dad.”

“Are you as well?” Ray asked Bea quietly.

“For dinner?”

“And for what follows dinner.”

She drew a long breath that matched his own. “I think I am,” she told him.

THEY SPOKE LITTLE ON THE DRIVE BACK FROM ST. AGNES. And when they did speak, it was of mundane matters. She needed to stop for petrol, so they’d take a diversion from the main road if he didn’t mind.

He didn’t mind at all. Did she want a cup of tea while they were at it? Surely there was a hotel or tea shop along the way where they might even have a proper Cornish cream tea. Scones, clotted cream, and strawberry jam.

She remembered the days when it was difficult to find clotted cream outside of Cornwall. Did he?

Yes. And proper sausages as well. Not to mention pasties. He’d always enjoyed good pasties, but they’d never had them at home, as his father had considered them…There he stopped himself. Common was the word of choice. Vulgar in its most precise usage.