Careless In Red (66 page)

The answers turned out to be sorting, washing, chopping, slicing, pressing, and no. The mill in question was a piece of machinery—constructed of steel and painted bright blue—attached to an enormous wooden bin by means of a trough. The machinery of the mill itself consisted of this trough, a barrel-like bath, a water source, a rather sinister-looking press not dissimilar to an enormous vise, a wide pipe, and a mysterious chamber at the top of this pipe, which at the moment was open and being seen to by two individuals. One was a man wielding various tools against the machinery that appeared to operate a series of very sharp blades. The other was a woman who seemed to be monitoring his every move. He was wearing a knitted cap that came down to his eyebrows, as well as grease-stained jeans and a blue flannel shirt. She was garbed in jeans, boots, and a thick but cozy-looking chenille sweater. She was saying, “Have a care, Rod. I don’t want you bleeding all over my blades,” to which he replied, “No worries, luv. I been looking after clobber lots more difficult ’n this lot since you was in nappies.”

“Aldara Pappas?” Bea said.

The woman turned. She was quite exotic for this part of the world, not exactly pretty but striking, with large dark eyes, hair that was thick and shiny and black, and dramatic red lipstick emphasising a sensual mouth. The rest of her was sensual as well. Curves in all the right places, as Bea knew her former husband might have said. She looked to be somewhere in her forties, if the fine lines round her eyes were anything to go by.

The woman said, “Yes,” and gave one of those woman-evaluating-the-competition sort of looks both to Bea and to DS Havers. She seemed to linger particularly on the sergeant’s hair. The colour of this was sandy, the style not so much a style as an eloquent statement about impatience: Hacked over the bathroom sink seemed to be the best description. “What can I do for you?” Aldara Pappas’s tone suggested the task was hopeless.

“A bit of conversation will do.” Bea showed her identification. She nodded to Havers to show hers as well. The sergeant didn’t look happy about doing so since this required her to conduct an archaeological excavation through her shoulder bag, seeking the leather lump that went for her wallet.

“New Scotland Yard,” Havers told Aldara Pappas. Bea watched for a reaction.

The woman’s face was still although Rod gave an appreciative whistle. “What you get up to now, luv?” he asked Aldara. “You been poisoning the customers again?”

Aldara smiled faintly and told him to carry on. “I’ll be at the house if you need me,” she said.

She told Bea and Havers to follow her, and she took them through the cobbled courtyard of which the mill formed one edge. The other edges consisted of a jam kitchen, a cider museum, and an empty stall, presumably for the draft horse. In the middle of the yard, a pen housed a pig the approximate size of a Volkswagen Beetle. He snorted suspiciously and charged the fence.

“I could do with less drama, Stamos,” Aldara told the animal. Understanding or not, he retreated to a pile of what looked like rotting vegetation. He stuck his snout into this and flipped a portion of it into the air. “Clever boy,” Aldara said. “Do eat up.”

He was an orchard pig, she told them as she ducked through an arched gate that was partially concealed by a heavy vine, to the far side of the jam kitchen. PRIVATE was fixed onto a sign that swung from the gate’s handle. “His job used to be to eat the unusable apples after the harvest: Let him loose in the orchard and stand aside. Now he’s supposed to add an air of authenticity to the place, for visitors. The problem is that he wishes more to attack them than to fascinate them. Now. What can I do for you?”

Had they thought Aldara Pappas meant to make them welcome by leading them towards her house and offering them a nice steaming cuppa, they were soon corrected in that notion. The house was a farm cottage with a vegetable garden in front of it, odoriferous piles of manure sitting at the end of raised beds neatly defined by wooden rails. At one side of the garden was a small stone shed. She took them to this and dislodged a shovel and a rake from its interior, along with a pair of gloves. She brought a head scarf from the pocket of her jeans and used it to cover and hold back her hair in the fashion of a peasant woman or, for that matter, certain members of the royal family. Thus ready for labour, she began to shovel the manure and the compost into the vegetable beds. Nothing had been planted there yet.

She said, “I’ll continue with my chores while we talk, if you don’t mind. How might I help you?”

“We came to talk about Santo Kerne,” Bea informed her. She jerked her head at Havers to indicate that the sergeant’s usual brand of ostentatious note taking was to begin. Havers obliged. She was watching Aldara steadily, and Bea liked the fact that Havers didn’t seem the least bit cowed by another—and decidedly more attractive—woman.

Aldara said, “Santo Kerne. What about him?”

“We’d like to talk to you about your relationship with him.”

“My relationship with him. What about it?”

“I hope this isn’t going to be your style of answering,” Bea said.

“My style of answering. What do you mean?”

“The Little Miss Echo bit, Miss Pappas. Or is it Missus?”

“Aldara will do.”

“Aldara, then. If it is your style—the echoing bit—we’re likely to be with you most of the day, and something tells me you’d not appreciate that. We’d be happy enough to oblige, however.”

“I’m not sure I understand your meaning.”

“The gaff ’s been blown,” Sergeant Havers told her. Her tone was impatient. “The chicken’s flown the coop. The orchard pig’s in the laundry. Whatever works.”

“What the sergeant means,” Bea added, “is that your relationship with Santo Kerne has come to light, Aldara. That’s why we’re here: to sort through it.”

“You were bonking him till he was blue in the face,” Sergeant Havers put in.

“Not to put too fine a point on it,” Bea added.

Aldara thrust her shovel into the pile of manure and hefted a load of it onto one of the beds. She looked as if she would have preferred hefting it at Havers. “This is your surmise,” she pointed out.

“This is what we were told by someone who knows,” Bea said. “She, evidently, was the one to wash the sheets when you didn’t get round to it. Now, since you had to meet at Polcare Cottage, may we assume there’s a middle-aged Mr. Pappas somewhere who wouldn’t be too pleased to know his wife was having it off with an eighteen-year-old boy?”

Aldara went for another shovelful of manure. She was working rapidly but barely took a deep breath, and she didn’t come close to breaking a sweat. “You may not assume. I’ve been divorced for years, Inspector. There’s a Mr. Pappas, but he’s in St. Ives, and we see virtually nothing of each other. We quite like it that way.”

“Have you children here, then? A daughter Santo’s age, perhaps? Or an adolescent son you’d prefer didn’t see his mummy dropping her knickers for another teenager?”

Aldara’s jaw hardened. Bea wondered which of her comments had hit the mark.

“I met Santo for sex in Polcare Cottage for one reason only: because both of us preferred it that way,” Aldara said. “It was a private matter, and that’s what each of us wanted.”

“Privacy? Or secrecy?”

“Both.”

“Why? Embarrassed to be doing a kid?”

“Hardly.” Aldara drove her shovel into the earth, and just as Bea thought she intended to take a rest, she went for the rake. She climbed into the nearest planting bed and began energetically working the manure into the soil. She said, “I have no embarrassment about sex. Sex is what it is, Inspector. Sex. And we both wanted sex, Santo and I. With each other, as it happens. But as this is something difficult for some people to understand—because of his age and my own—we sought a private place to…” She appeared to be looking for a euphemism, which seemed completely out of character in the woman.

“To service each other?” Havers offered. She managed to look bored, an I’ve-heard-it-all-before-now expression on her face.

“To be together,” Aldara said firmly. “For an hour. For two or three early on, when we were new together and…still discovering, I would call it.”

“Discovering what?” Bea said.

“What pleased the other. It is a process of discovery, isn’t it, Inspector? Discovery leading to pleasure. Or did you not know sex is about giving one’s partner pleasure?”

Bea let that one pass. “So this wasn’t a love-and-heartbreak situation for you.”

Aldara cast her a look. It spoke of both incredulity and long experience. “Only a fool equates sex with love, and I’m not a fool.”

“Was he?”

“Did he love me? Was this love-and-heartbreak, as you put it, for him? I have no idea. We didn’t speak of that. When it comes to it, we spoke very little at all after the initial arrangement. As I’ve said, this was about sex. The physical only. Santo knew that.”

“Initial arrangement?” Bea asked.

“Are you echoing me, Inspector?” Aldara smiled, but she directed the expression to the earth that she was busily raking.

Briefly, Bea understood the impulse investigators often had to smack a suspect. She said, “Why don’t you explain this ‘initial arrangement’ to us, Aldara? And while you’re doing it, perhaps you can touch upon your apparent lack of feeling regarding the murder of your lover, which, as you might surmise, certainly looks as if it can be linked rather more directly to you than you otherwise might appreciate.”

“I had nothing to do with Santo Kerne’s death. I regret it, of course. And if I’m not prostrate with grief over it, that would be because—”

“It wasn’t a love-and-heartbreak situation for you, either,” Bea said. “That’s certainly clear as Swiss air. So what was it? What was it exactly, please?”

“I’ve told you. It was an arrangement he and I had for sex.”

“Did you know he was getting it elsewhere at the same time he was getting it from—or doing it to or whatever the hell it was—to you?”

“Of course I knew it.” Aldara sounded placid. “That was part of it.”

“It? What? The arrangement? What was ‘it’? A threesome?”

“Hardly. Part of it was the secrecy of it all, the aspect of having an affair, the fact that he had someone else. I wanted someone with someone else. That’s how I like it.”

Bea saw Havers blink, as if to clear her vision, like Alice finding herself down a rabbit hole with a randy bunny when prior experience had led her to expect only the Mad Hatter, the March Hare, and a cup of tea. Bea herself didn’t feel dissimilar.

She said, “So you knew about Madlyn Angarrack, that she was involved with Santo Kerne.”

“Yes. That’s how I met Santo in the first place. Madlyn worked for me here, in the jam kitchen. Santo fetched her at the end of the day several times, and I saw him then. Everyone saw him. It was most difficult not to see Santo. He was a highly attractive boy.”

“And Madlyn’s a rather attractive girl.”

“She is. Well, of course, she would be. And so am I, if it comes to that. An attractive woman. I find that attractive people are drawn to each other, don’t you?” Another glance in the direction of the police made it obvious that Aldara Pappas didn’t consider this question to be one that either of them could answer from personal experience. She said, “We took note of each other, Santo and I. I was at the point of needing someone very like him—”

“Someone with attachments?”

“—and I thought he might do, as there was a directness to his gaze that spoke of a certain maturity, a frame of mind that suggested he and I might speak the same language. We exchanged looks, smiles. It was a form of communication in which like-minded individuals say precisely what needs to be said and nothing more. He arrived early one day to fetch Madlyn, and I took him on a tour of the farm. We rode the tractor into the orchards, and it was there—”

“Just like Eve beneath the apple tree?” Havers said. “Or were you the snake?”

Aldara refused to be drawn out. She said, “This had nothing to do with temptation. Temptation depends on innuendo and there was no innuendo involved. I was forthright with him. I said the look of him appealed to me and I had been thinking what it would be like to have him in bed. How pleasant it might be for us both, if he was interested. I told him that if he wanted more than only his little girlfriend as a sexual partner, he was to phone me. At no time did I suggest he end his relationship with her. That would actually have been the last thing I wanted, as it might have made him rather too fond of me. It might have led to expectations of there being something more than was possible between us. On his part, these expectations, that is. On mine there were none.”

“I can see it might well have put you in a ludicrous light had he expected more and had you been forced to give it to him in order to keep him,” Bea noted. “A woman your age going public—as it were—with a teenage boy. Trotting down the aisle in church on Sunday morning, nodding to your neighbours and all of them thinking how…well, how lacking in something you must be to have to settle for an eighteen-year-old lover.”

Aldara moved to another pile of manure. She fetched the shovel and began to repeat the process she’d followed for the first vegetable bed. The earth within became rich and dark. Whatever she intended to plant within the borders of the bed, it was going to flourish.

She said, “First of all, Inspector, I don’t concern myself with what other people think, as what other people think about me—or anyone else or any thing for that matter—does not rob me of a single eyelash. This was a private matter between Santo and me. I kept it private. So did he.”

“Not exactly,” Havers noted. “Madlyn found out.”

“That was unfortunate. He wasn’t careful enough, and she followed him. There was one of those dreadful scenes between them—the accosting, the accusing, the denial, the admission, the explaining, the pleading—and she ended their involvement on the spot. That put me in the very last position I wished to be in: as Santo’s sole lover.”

“Did she know you were the woman inside the cottage when she turned up there?”

“Of course she knew. There was such a scene between them that I thought she might do violence. I had to emerge from the bedroom and do something about it.”