Careless In Red by Elizabeth George Page B

stopped at Bea’s car. He brought forth his football shoes. Bea didn’t call out to tell him to let them be.
    Instead she said to Constable McNulty, “So. What’ve we got?”
    McNulty gestured towards the top of the cliff. “Rucksack up there for SOCO to bag. I expect it’s the kid’s.”
    “Anything else?”
    “Evidence of how the poor sod went down. I left it for SOCO as well.”
    “What is it?”
    “There’s a stile up top, some ten feet or so back from the edge of the cliff. Marks the far west end of a cow pasture up there. He’d put a sling round it, which was supposed to be what his carabiner and rope were fixed to for the abseil down the cliff.”
    “What sort of sling?”
    “Made of nylon webbing. Looks like fishing net if you don’t know what you’re looking at. It’s supposed to be a long loop. You drape it round a fixed object and each end is fastened with the carabiner, making the loop into a circle. You attach your rope to the carabiner and off you go.”
    “Sounds straightforward.”
    “Should have been. But the sling’s been taped together—presumably over a weak spot to strengthen it—and that’s exactly where it’s failed.” McNulty gazed back the way he’d come. “Bloody idiot. I can’t think why anyone’d just not get himself another sling.”
    “What kind of tape was used for the repair?”
    McNulty looked at her as if surprised by the question. “Electrical tape, this was.”
    “Kept your digits off it?”
    “’Course.”
    “And the rucksack?”
    “It was canvas.”
    “I reckoned as much,” Bea said patiently. “Where was it? Why do you presume it was his? Did you have a look inside?”
    “Next to the stile, so I reckon it was his all right. He probably carried his kit in it. Nothing in it now but a set of keys.”
    “Car?”
    “I reckon.”
    “Did you have a look for it?”
    “Thought it best to report back to you.”
    “Think another time, Constable. Get back up there and find me the car.”
    He looked towards the cliff. His expression told her how little he wanted to make a second climb up there in the rain. Well, that couldn’t be helped. “Up you go,” she told him pleasantly. “The exercise will do you a world of good.”
    “Thought p’rhaps I ought to go by way of the road. It’s a few miles, but—”
    “Up you go,” she repeated. “Keep an eye out along the trail as well. There may be footprints not already destroyed by the rain.” Or by you, she thought.
    McNulty did not look happy, but he said, “Will do, Guv,” and set off back the way he’d come with Pete.
    KERRA KERNE WAS EXHAUSTED and soaked to the skin because she’d broken her primary rule: Head into the wind on the first half of the ride; have the wind at your back on your route home. But she’d been in a hurry to be gone from Casvelyn, so for the first time in longer than she could remember, she hadn’t checked the Internet before donning her cycling kit and pedaling out of town. She’d just set off in her Lycra and her helmet. She’d clicked into the pedals and pumped so furiously that she was ten miles out of Casvelyn before she actually clocked her location. Then it was the location alone that she took into consideration and not the wind, which had been her error. She’d just kept riding vaguely east. When the weather rolled in, she was too far away to do anything to escape it other than seek shelter, which she did not want to do. Hence, muscle weary and bone wet, she struggled with the last of the thirty-five miles she needed to cover on her return.
    She blamed Alan, blind and foolish Alan Cheston, who was supposed to be her life partner, with all that being a life partner implied, but who’d decided to go his own bloody-minded way in the one situation that she couldn’t countenance. And she blamed her father who was also blind and foolish—as well as stupid—but in a completely different manner and for a completely different set of reasons.
    At least ten months