responsibility was marred by the faded words tattooed on the knuckles of either hand. Love and Hate. Shades of Night of the Hunter; in his younger days he must have fancied himself as a latter day Robert Mitchum. ‘Ten minutes later, he called back and said he was only messing. Having a laugh with the lady of the house, that’s the way he put it. Cheeky bugger. In fairness, though, there’s no real harm in him.’
‘So he didn’t deny it?’
Mustoe’s meaty shoulders rippled in a dismissive gesture and he took a swig of tea from a chipped Newcastle United mug. ‘Must have read the signs wrong, he said, the stupid sod. Mind you, speaking as one bloke to another, we’ve all read the signs wrong in our time, haven’t we, Mr Kind?’
Reading the signs wrong. Men did it all the time. Very often, there weren’t even any signs to be misread, but that didn’t stop them. There was nothing more to say. As he reversed out of the yard, Daniel couldn’t help asking himself if Gabrielle Anders had died because Barrie Gilpin had misread the signs.
He drove down the hill into Kendal and squeezed into the last vacant parking space on top of the Westmorland Shopping Centre. Outside, a straggly-haired, dungaree-clad Joni Mitchell wannabe plucked at a guitar and wailed about the big yellow taxi that had taken away her old man; presumably he wanted to flee from her singing.
On the opposite side of Stricklandgate stood the Carnegie Library, where an affable assistant found him copies of the local papers from the time of Gabrielle’s murder. The reports told him little he did not already know about the case, but carried a couple of photographs of his father that he’d never seen before. One was a close-up, a head and shoulders shot revealing tired eyes and a fleshiness of the jowls that suggested too many nights in smoky bars. The other was taken at Underfell, close to the crime scene, and showed Ben Kind issuing directions to his subordinates. At his side was a slender young woman officer with a pageboy haircut, paying close attention. Hannah Scarlett?
At ten fifteen he set off for their rendezvous. Kendal was a fiendish maze of courtyards and ginnels, but he was learning his way around the grey limestone buildings. Stramongate was a couple of minutes from the library, an ancient thoroughfare leading from the main shopping street over a bridge crossing the Kent. As soon as he’d spotted the church, he identified the benches that Hannah Scarlett had mentioned, scattered around a stretch of grass by the bend in the river. On a hillock overlooking the scene stood fragments of a ruined castle. It was starting to drizzle as he sat down facing the no-fishing signs by the weir.
A woman in a leather jacket was striding along the path from the bridge. Medium height, short brown hair damp from the rain. The pageboy cut was no more, but he was certain this was Hannah Scarlett. As she came nearer, her gaze locked on him. In his stomach he felt an unexpected jab of apprehension. Maybe Miranda was right. This woman might know stuff about his father it was better for him not to know.
She came to a halt a couple of yards short of the bench. ‘Daniel Kind.’
It was a statement, not a question. Her face had a few freckles and was faintly tanned by the wind and sun. She wore no make-up or jewellery and didn’t have a single ring on her long slim fingers. He couldn’t detect a perfume. He guessed that her attitude was take me as you find me. When they shook hands, her grip was firm. Her gaze was intense as she weighed him up. Her dark eyes gave nothing away. It would be no joke, being a suspect under interrogation by Hannah Scarlett.
‘It isn’t every day I get to meet a television celebrity from the soft south.’ Her voice was husky, not easy to hear against the crash of water cascading over the weir. He caught the faint undertow of scepticism in her words. Not a woman who was easily impressed.
‘All that is history,’ he said with a grin.
She winced. ‘So a flair for lousy jokes runs in the family? Did he train you in the art of card tricks, too?’
He waved her to sit down. ‘I used to think my dad had a pretty good sense of humour. As for conjuring, he always used to enthrall my sister and me. I never did figure out how he could make the King of Diamonds turn into the Ace of Spades. Then again, I was only twelve years old.’
She joined him on the bench, leaving a gap between them. ‘Presumably there was a lot of resentment when he left, as well as unhappiness.’
‘For my mother and Louise, yes. Both of them were very bitter, his name became a dirty word. Me, I was just dazed. His running off with Cheryl was a disaster that came out of the clear blue sky. Being told that he’d walked out was like being hit by a falling tree.’
‘You had no warning?’
‘I suppose Mum realised something was up, but we never discussed where and why they went off the rails. Talking about the time when we were a family of four, not three, was absolutely off-limits.’
‘He hated hurting you all.’
‘You think so?’
‘I know so. Of course, he and I didn’t talk about what had gone wrong between him and your mother, that was private. Over a lager one night after we’d wrapped up a case, he told me that not a day passed without his conscience nagging him. Your sister was — what, fifteen at the time? Studying for her exams? He had a lot to feel guilty about and it didn’t help when he phoned her and tried to explain.’
Daniel leaned forward. ‘Louise never mentioned to me that he called.’
‘Did she not? She told him that he’d ruined the lives of all three of you. Swore at him and said some vicious things about Cheryl. She made it clear she never wanted to speak to him again. That cut him up, and yet he had to admit that it was his own fault.’
Daniel’s eyes settled on a board by the river. Dangerous Water. ‘All through my teens, I had this recurrent dream. The settings varied — home, school, my uncle’s house — but the plot-line was always the same. The phone would be ringing and I knew it was Dad, wanting to talk to me, to say that one day we’d be together again. I never made it to the phone in time. It would fall silent the moment before I picked up the receiver, and all I’d ever hear would be the dialling tone.’
‘Now you know why he didn’t call you sooner. Once bitten, twice shy. But he was thrilled when you eventually made contact with him.’
‘Whenever we did speak, he came over as a bit of an old curmudgeon.’
‘That was just his way. To survive as a detective, you need a hard shell. But if you harden up all the way to the heart, maybe you’ve got a problem.’
For a moment, he wondered if Hannah Scarlett might be talking as much about herself as about his father. She seemed cool and collected in person, as she had on the phone. Whatever might lie beneath the surface poise, she could hardly be more different from impulsive, vulnerable Miranda. This was a woman who kept her feelings under lock and key.
‘Deep down, he was as compassionate as any cop I’ve met. Not that he’d thank me for saying it.’ She paused. ‘You deserve to know what he was really like. I don’t blame his wife and daughter for judging him harshly, but there are two sides to every story.’
Daniel said, ‘I haven’t come just for you to tell me what you think I’d like to hear.’
Her eyes narrowed. ‘I wouldn’t do that.’
‘It’s good of you to spare this time to talk to me.’
‘The least I can do. I owe your father a great deal.’
She told him how Ben Kind had taken her under his wing and about how much she’d learned from him. How he’d taught her that showing empathy for the victims of crime must not stop her from detaching her emotions from the case. How often he’d urged her to keep her eye on the ball; every investigation was full of crap that could distract even an experienced detective. The secret was never to lose focus.
‘As the years passed, he gave up on amateur magic, concentrated on playing the gruff sceptic. A popular act with the older men, a chap on my team plays that game. You have to look past the scowls and grumbles, try to make out what they really think and feel.’
‘And what did Ben Kind really think and feel?’
‘He was a decent man, Daniel. The only wrong thing he ever did that I know of was leaving you and your family in the lurch so that he could run off with Cheryl. I suppose he felt cornered.’
‘Meaning what?’
She studied her unvarnished nails for a moment, as if making up her mind how much to say. ‘He did once let something slip. Whilst he was still living at home, Cheryl gave him an ultimatum. Although she made most of the running, after they’d slept together a couple of times, she insisted that if he didn’t make an honest woman of her,
