Careless in Red

  “Because even when one thinks everything has been seen to, even when one thinks every i has been dotted, every t has been crossed, even when one thinks every sentence has a full stop at the end—”

  “You’re becoming tedious,” Aldara pointed out.

  Daidre took a sharp breath. “Someone is dead. How can you talk like that?”

  “All right. Tedious was a poor choice of words. Hysterical would have been better.”

  “This is a human being we’re talking about. This is a teenage boy. Not nineteen years old. Dead on the rocks.”

  “Now you are hysterical.”

  “How can you be like this? Santo Kerne is dead.”

  “And I’m sorry about that. I don’t want to think of a boy that young falling from a cliff and—”

  “If he fell, Aldara.”

  Aldara reached for her wineglass. Daidre noted—as she sometimes did—that the Greek woman’s hands were the only part of her that was not lovely. Aldara herself called them a peasant’s hands, made for pounding clothes against rocks in a stream, for kneading bread, for working the soil. With strong, thick fingers and wide palms, they were not hands made for delicate employment. “Why ‘if he fell’?” she asked.

  “You know the answer to that.”

  “But you said he was climbing. You can’t think someone…”

  “Not someone, Aldara. Santo Kerne? Polcare Cove? It’s not difficult to work out who might have harmed him.”

  “You’re talking nonsense. You go to the cinema far too often. Films make one start believing that people act like they’re playing parts devised in Hollywood. The fact that Santo fell while he was climbing—”

  “And isn’t that a bit odd? Whyever would he climb in this weather?”

  “You ask the question as if you expect me to know the answer.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Aldara—”

  “Enough.” Aldara firmly set her wineglass down. “I am not you, Daidre. I’ve never had this…this…oh, what shall I call it…this awe of men that you have, this feeling that they are somehow more significant than they actually are, that they are necessary in life, essential to a woman’s completion. I’m terribly sorry that the boy is dead, but it’s nothing to do with me.”

  “No? And this…?” Daidre indicated the two wineglasses, the two plates, the two forks, the endless repetition of what should have been but never quite was the number two. And there was the additional matter of Aldara’s clothing: the filmy dress that embraced and released her hips when she moved, the choice of shoes with toes too open and heels too high to be practical on a farm, the earrings that illustrated the length of her neck. There was little doubt in Daidre’s mind that the sheets on Aldara’s bed were fresh and scented with lavender and that there were candles ready to be lit in her bedroom.

  A man was at this moment on his way to her. He was even now pondering the removal of her clothes. He was wondering how quickly upon his arrival he could get down to business with her. He was thinking of how he was going to take her—rough or tender, up against the wall, on the floor, in a bed—and in what position, of whether he’d be up for the job of doing it more than twice because he knew merely twice would not be enough, not for a woman like Aldara Pappas. Earthy, sensual, ready. He damn well had to give her what she was looking for because if he didn’t, he’d be tossed aside and he didn’t want that.

  Daidre said, “I think you’re going to find otherwise, Aldara. I think you’re going to see that this…what happened to Santo…whatever it is—”

  “That’s nonsense,” Aldara cut in.

  “Is it?” Daidre put her palm on the table between them. She repeated her earlier question. “Who’re you expecting tonight?”

  “That doesn’t concern you.”

  “Are you completely mad? I had the police in my cottage.”

  “And that worries you. Why?”

  “Because I feel responsible. Don’t you?”

  Aldara seemed to consider the question, because it was a moment before she replied. “Not at all.”

  “And that’s that, then?”

  “I suppose it is.”

  “Because of this? The wine, the cheese, the lovely fire? The two of you? Whoever he is?”

  Aldara rose. She said, “You must leave. I’ve tried to explain myself to you time and again. But you see how I am as a moral question and not what it is, which is just a manifestation of the only way I can function. So yes, someone is on his way and, no, I’m not going to tell you who it is, and I’d vastly prefer it if you were not here when he arrives.”

  “You refuse to be touched by anything, don’t you?” Daidre asked her.

  “My dear, that is definitely the pot and the kettle,” was Aldara’s reply.

  Chapter Five

  CADAN HAD HIGH HOPES THAT THE BACON STREAKIES WOULD do the trick. He also had high hopes that Pooh would do the trick. The Bacon Streakies, which were the bird’s favourite treat, were supposed to encourage and reward him. The system was to let the parrot see the bag of goodies dangling from Cadan’s fingers—a manoeuvre sufficient to get the bird’s interest—and then put him through his paces. The reward would follow, and there was absolutely no need to show Pooh the crunchy substance itself. He might have been a parrot, but he was no dummy when it came to food.

  But tonight, distractions diverted him. He and Cadan were not alone in the sitting room, and the other three individuals were proving more interesting to the parrot than the food on offer. So balancing on a small rubber ball and walking said ball across the length of the fireplace mantel did not hold the same promise that a lolly stick in the hands of a six-year-old girl held. A lolly stick carefully applied to the parrot’s feathered head, rubbed gently back and forth in the region where one assumed his ears to be, guaranteed ecstasy. A Bacon Streakie, on the other hand, effected only momentary gustatory satisfaction. So although Cadan made a heroic attempt to get Pooh to provide some entertainment for Ione Soutar and her two young daughters, entertainment was not forthcoming.

  “Why’s he not want to do it, Cade?” Jennie Soutar asked. She was the younger of the two. Her older sister, Leigh—who was, at ten, already wearing glittery eye shadow, lipstick, and hair extensions—looked as if she’d never expected the bird to do anything extraordinary in the first place and who cared anyway as the bird was neither a pop star nor someone likely to become a pop star. Instead of paying attention to the failed bird show, she’d been flipping through a fashion magazine, squinting at the pictures because she refused to wear her specs and was campaigning for contact lenses.

  Cadan said, “It’s the lolly stick. He knows you’ve got it. He wants to be petted again.”

  “C’n I pet him, then? C’n I hold him?”

  “Jennifer, you know how I feel about that bird.” These words were spoken by her mother. Ione Soutar was standing in the bay window, gazing out at Victoria Road. She’d been doing that for thirty minutes, and she didn’t look like a woman who intended to stop doing it anytime soon. “Birds carry germs and diseases.”

  “But Cade touches him all the time.”

  Ione shot her daughter a look. It seemed to say, “And just look at Cade, will you?”

  Jennie interpreted the expression on her mother’s face in whatever way Ione intended. She scooted back on the sofa—her legs sticking out in front of her—and she puffed out her lips in disappointment. It was, Cadan saw, a facial expression unwittingly identical to Ione’s.

  No doubt the feeling behind it was the same as well: disappointment. Cadan wanted to tell Ione Soutar that she was going to be endlessly disappointed as long as she had his father in her marital sights. On the surface it looked as if they were perfect for each other—two independent businesspeople with workshops in the same location on Binner Down, two parents years without partners, two parents who surfed, two children for each of them, two little girls interested in surfing, with a third older girl their role model and instructor, two family-oriented families…There was probably
also good sex involved as well, but Cadan didn’t like to speculate about that, as the thought of his father in a carnal embrace with Ione made his skin go prickly. Nonetheless, superficially it appeared to be logical that nearly three years in this association between man and woman ought to have resulted in something akin to a commitment from Lew Angarrack. But it hadn’t done, and Cadan had heard enough of his father’s end of telephone conversations to know Ione was no longer happy with the situation.

  She was currently annoyed as well. Two takeaway Pukkas pizzas had long since gone cold in the kitchen while she waited in the sitting room for Lew’s return. It was a wait that was beginning to seem futile to Cadan, for his father had showered and changed and rushed off on what Cadan saw as a real fool’s errand.

  It seemed to Cadan that a visit from Will Mendick had prompted Lew’s departure. Will had rumbled up Victoria Road in his wheezing old Beetle and as he’d unfolded his wiry frame from the car and approached the front door, Cadan could see from his ruddy face that something troubled him.

  He’d asked for Madlyn directly and said curtly, “Where is she, then? She wasn’t at the bakery either,” when Cadan revealed that she wasn’t at home.

  “We don’t have her on the GPS yet,” Cadan told him. “That’s next week, Will.”

  Will hadn’t seemed to appreciate the humour. “I need to find her.”

  “Why?”

  So he’d told him the news he’d had off the bird at Clean Barrel Surf Shop: Santo Kerne was dead as a doornail, his head mashed in or whatever it was that happened when one fell during a cliff climb.

  “He was climbing alone?” Climbing at all was the real question since Cadan knew what Santo Kerne really preferred doing, which was surf and shag, and shag and surf, both of which came quite easily to him.

  “I didn’t say he was alone,” Will pointed out sharply. “I don’t know who was with him or even if there was someone with him. Why d’you think he was alone?”

  Cadan didn’t have to reply at that point because Lew had heard Will’s voice and had apparently read something dire from the tone. He’d come from the back of the house where he’d been working on the computer and Will had brought him into the picture as well. “I’ve come to tell Madlyn,” Will explained.

  Too right, Cadan thought. The way to Madlyn was open, and Will was not a man to ignore a gaping doorway.

  “Damn,” Lew said in a thoughtful tone. “Santo Kerne.”

  Not one of them was exactly in extremis over the news, Cadan admitted to himself. He reckoned that he was the one who probably felt the worst, but that was likely because he had the least at stake in matters.

  “I’ll go look for her, then,” Will Mendick had said. “Where do you think…?”

  Who bloody knew? Madlyn’s emotions had been running their usual mad course since her breakup with Santo. She’d started with devastation and moved on to blind and unreasonable anger. As far as Cadan was concerned, the less he saw of her the better until she’d gone through her last stage—it was always revenge—and then got back to normal again. She might have been anywhere: robbing banks, breaking windows, pulling men in pubs, tattooing her eyelids, beating up small children, or off to regions unknown for a surf. With Madlyn, you just never knew.

  Lew said, “We’ve not seen her since breakfast.”

  “Damn.” Will bit the side of his thumb. “Well, someone’s got to tell her what’s happened.”

  Why? was what Cadan thought, but he didn’t say it. Instead, he said, “Think it should be you?” And he added foolishly, “Wise up, mate. When’re you planning to work things out? You’re not her type.”

  Will’s face flared. His skin was spotty anyway, and the spots enflamed.

  Lew said, “Cade.”

  Cade said, “But it’s true. Come on, man—”

  Will didn’t wait to hear the rest. He was out of the room and out of the door before Cadan could say another word.

  Lew said, “Christ, Cade,” as apparent commentary on Cadan’s finesse. Then he went upstairs for his shower.

  He hadn’t had one after his surf, so Cadan had first assumed his father was just doing what he ordinarily did: getting the sand and saltwater off. But then he’d left the house and he’d not returned. This had put Cadan in the position of trying and failing to entertain Ione and her daughters as they waited for his father.

  “Looking for Madlyn,” was what Cadan had told his father’s girlfriend. He’d explained about Santo and said nothing more. Ione was already fully in the picture about the Madlyn-Santo situation. She could not have been involved with Lew Angarrack and not known about the situation. Madlyn’s well-developed sense of drama would have made that completely impossible.

  Ione had gone into the kitchen, where she’d deposited the pizzas on the work top, set the table, and made a mixed salad. Then she’d returned to the sitting room. After forty minutes, she’d rung Lew’s mobile. If he had it with him, he didn’t have it on.

  “How stupid of him,” Ione said. “What if she comes home while he’s out looking for her? How’re we to let him know?”

  “He probably didn’t think of that,” Cadan said. “He went out in a rush.”

  This wasn’t exactly true, but it seemed more…well, more likely that a worried father would depart in a rush than as Lew had departed, which was quite calmly, as if he’d made a grim decision about something or as if he knew something that no one else knew.

  Now, having finished studying her fashion magazine, Leigh Soutar piped up in her usual fashion, with that bizarre cadence peculiar to young girls with too much exposure to adolescent films on satellite television. “Mum, I’m hungry?” she said. “I’m starving? Lookit the time, okay? Aren’t we having dinner?”

  “Want a Bacon Streakie?” Cadan asked her.

  “Yuck,” Leigh said. “Junk food?”

  “And pizza is what?” Cadan enquired politely.

  “Pizza,” Leigh told him, “is highly nutritious? There are at least two food groups involved and anyway I’m having only one slice, okay?”

  “Right,” Cadan said. He’d seen Leigh at the trough before this night, and when it came to pizza she regularly forgot her intention of becoming the Kate Moss of her generation. The day she stopped at one slice of pizza would be the day pigs took to the air in droves.

  “I’m hungry, too,” Jennie said. “Could we not eat, Mummy?”

  Ione cast one last agonised look at the street. “I suppose,” she said.

  She headed in the direction of the kitchen. Jennie popped off the sofa and followed, scratching her bum as she went. Leigh practised a catwalk prance in her sister’s wake, casting a baleful look at Cadan as she passed him.

  “Stupid bird?” she said. “He doesn’t even talk? What sort of parrot doesn’t even talk?”

  “One who saves his vocabulary for useful conversations,” Cadan said.

  Leigh stuck out her tongue and left the room.

  After a dreary meal of pizza left too long on the work top and salad left to the ministrations of a preoccupied chef wielding too much vinegar, Cadan offered to do the washing up and hoped in this offer that Ione would take her offspring and depart. No such luck. She hung about another ninety minutes, exposing Cadan to Leigh’s withering comments about the quality of his dishwashing and drying. She phoned Lew’s mobile four more times before taking herself and the girls to their home.

  This left Cadan in his least favourite position: alone with his thoughts. He was thus relieved to field a phone call at long last revealing Madlyn’s whereabouts, but he was less relieved when the caller wasn’t his father. And he became downright concerned when a casual question on his part revealed that his father had not even been round seeking to discover Madlyn for himself. This concern led Cadan directly to being unnerved—a condition he didn’t care to speculate upon—so when his father finally turned up just shortly after midnight, Cadan was fairly cheesed off at the bloke for causing within him sensations he preferred not to feel. He was watchin
g telly when the kitchen door opened and shut. Thereafter Lew appeared in the doorway to the lounge, standing in the shadows of the corridor.

  Cadan said briefly, “She’s with Jago.”

  Lew blinked and said, “What?”

  “Madlyn,” Cadan said. “She’s with Jago? He rang. He said she’s asleep.”

  No reaction from his father. Cadan felt an unaccountable chill at this. It ran up and down his arms like a dead baby’s fingers. He reached for the telly remote and clicked the off button.

  “You were looking for her, right?” Cadan didn’t wait for an answer. “Ione was here. Her and the girls. Crikey, that Leigh’s a cow, you ask me.” Silence. So he said, “You were, right?”

  Lew turned and went back to the kitchen. Cadan heard the fridge opening and something being poured into a pan. His father would be heating milk for his nightly Ovaltine. Cadan decided he wanted one himself—although the truth was, he wanted to read his father at the same time as he didn’t want to read his father—so he shuffled to the kitchen to join him.

  He said, “I asked Jago what she was doing there. You know what I mean. Just, ‘What the heck’s she doing there, mate?’ because first of all why would she want to spend the night with Jago…What is he, seventy years old? That creeps me out if you know what I mean although he’s all right I expect but it’s not like he’s a relative or anything…and second of all…” But he couldn’t remember what the second of all was. He was babbling because his father’s obdurate silence was unnerving him more than he was already unnerved. “And Jago said he was up at the Salthouse with Mr. Penrule when this bloke came in with that woman who’s got the cottage in Polcare Cove. She said there was a body out there and Jago heard her say that she reckoned it was Santo. So Jago went to fetch Madlyn from the bakery to break the news to her. He didn’t phone here at first because…I don’t know. I s’pose she went dead mental on him when he told her and he had to cope with her.”

  “Did he say that?”

  Cadan was so relieved that his father was finally speaking that he said, “Who? Say what?”