Careless in Red (Inspector Lynley, #15)(109)

“Mum.” He made it a drawn-out and patient multisyllable word. I’m not a baby was the implication.

“Okay, okay. I’m off,” she said.

“See you later,” he told her. “Love you, Mum.”

SHE WENT BACK TO Casvelyn. The bakery where Madlyn Angarrack worked was established not any great distance from the police station, so she parked in front of that grey squat building and she walked to find it. The wind had picked up, blowing in from the northwest and carrying with it a chill reminder of winter. It would be this way until very late spring. That season came slowly, in fits and starts.

A pleasant-looking white building on the corner of Burn View Lane, Casvelyn of Cornwall was opposite St. Mevan Down. Bea reached it after a hike up Queen Street, where the pavements still held shoppers and cars still lined the kerb despite the growing lateness of the afternoon. It might have been any shopping precinct in any town in the country, Bea thought as she hurried along it. Here, identifying the shops by name, were the ubiquitous dismal plastic signs above doors and windows. Here, beneath them, were the tired-looking mothers pushing their babies in pushchairs and the uniformed schoolchildren smoking in front of a video arcade.

The bakery was only slightly different to the other shops, in that its signage was faux Victorian, fabricated from wood. In its bowfront window, trays held row upon row of the golden pasties for which the bakery was known. Within, two girls were boxing some of these up for a rangy young man wearing a hoodie with Outer Bombora, Outta Sight printed on the back.

One of these girls would be Madlyn Angarrack, Bea reckoned. She decided it had to be the slim, dark-haired one. The other, enormously overweight and spotty faced, sadly did not appear to be someone who might have been the object of an attractive eighteen-year-old boy’s lust.

Bea entered and waited till they had served the customer, who relieved them of the last of the day’s pasties. Then she asked for Madlyn Angarrack, and the dark-haired girl, as Bea had suspected, identified herself. Bea showed her warrant card and asked for a word. Madlyn wiped her hands down the front of her striped pinny, glanced at her companion who looked a bit too interested in the proceedings, and said she’d talk to Bea outside. She fetched an anorak. She didn’t, Bea noted, look surprised to have a detective come calling.

When they were out on the pavement, Madlyn said, “I know about Santo, that he was murdered. Kerra told me. Kerra’s his sister.”

“You wouldn’t be surprised that we’d want to speak with you, then.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised.” Madlyn gave no other information and she waited, as if fully informed of her rights and wanting to see how much Bea knew and what, if anything, Bea suspected.

“You and Santo were involved.”

“Santo,” Madlyn said, “was my lover.”

“You don’t call him your boyfriend?”

Madlyn glanced at the down across the street from them. Maram and sea lime grasses at its edge were being tossed by the growing wind. “He started out my boyfriend,” she said. “Boyfriend and girlfriend, that’s what we were. Going on dates, hanging about, surfing…That’s how I met him. I taught him surfing. But then we became lovers and I call it lovers because that’s what we were. Two people in love who expressed their love through sexual intercourse.”

“Baldly stated.” Most girls her age wouldn’t have been so direct. Bea wondered why she was.

“Well, that’s what it is, isn’t it?” Madlyn’s words sounded brittle. “A man’s penis entering a woman’s vagina. All the befores and all the afters as well, but it really comes down to a penis entering a vagina. So the truth is that Santo put his penis into my vagina and I let him do it. He was my first. I wasn’t his. I heard he was dead. I can’t say I’m sorry about it, but I didn’t know he’d been murdered. That’s actually all I have to tell you.”

“It’s not all I need to know, I’m afraid,” Bea told the girl. “Look. Would you like to go some place for a coffee?”

“I’m not off work yet. I can’t leave, and I shouldn’t even be out here talking to you.”

“If you’d like to meet later…?”

“That’s not necessary. I don’t know anything. I have nothing to tell you other than what I’ve already said. And this: Santo broke up with me nearly eight weeks ago and that was that. I don’t know why.”

“He gave you no reason?”

“It was time, he said.” She still sounded hard, but for the first time, her composure seemed slightly shaken. “There was probably someone else that he’d found, but he wouldn’t say. Just that it’d been good between us but it was time for it to end. One day things’re fine and the next day they’re over. That was probably the way he was with everyone, but I didn’t know it because I didn’t know him before he came to my father’s shop for a surfboard and wanted lessons.” She’d continued looking into the street and to the down beyond it, but now she turned her gaze to Bea. She said, “Is that all? I don’t know anything else.”

“I’ve been told that Santo was embarking on something irregular,” Bea said. “That was the word used. Irregular. I’m wondering if you know what that was.”

She frowned. “What do you mean, ‘irregular’?”