Careless in Red (Inspector Lynley, #15)(151)

Which brought to mind Dellen Kerne. Not that she was far from Cadan’s mind at any one moment, but it seemed to him that Lew’s secrecy meant there was reason for secrecy, and reason for secrecy implied the illicit, and illicit definitely led one down the mental garden path to adultery. A married woman. Christ, he concluded. His father had got to Dellen first. He didn’t know how, but he reckoned it had happened. He felt a stab of real jealousy.

So he had plenty of time during the day to dwell on the what-could-still-be’s of a run-in with Dellen. He had the feeling she wouldn’t take it amiss to be doing a father-and-son shag, but the truth was that he didn’t want to make things with his father worse than they’d already been, so he ended up trying to occupy himself with other thoughts.

The trouble here was that he was a doer, not a thinker. Heavy thinking bound him up in anxiety, the cure for which lay in two directions. One of them was action and the other was drink. Cadan knew which of the two he ought to choose, with respect to his history, but he damn well wanted to choose the other, and as the hours wore on, the wanting increased. When the wanting pressed him to the point at which rational thought was no longer possible, he gave Pooh a fruit plate to keep him occupied?among other edibles, the parrot was particularly partial to Spanish oranges?and he fetched his bicycle. Binner Down House was his destination.

Cadan’s purpose was to acquire a companion in the booze. Drinking alone more than once in a week suggested that a man might have something of a problem with mood-altering substances of the liquid variety, and Cadan didn’t wish to be labeled as anything other than a bon vivant. So he settled on Will Mendick as a likely partner in drink.

Nothing having progressed for Will in the Madlyn arena, it stood to reason he might well want to get soused. Once getting soused was accomplished, they could both sleep it off at Binner Down House with no one ever the wiser. It seemed like a grand idea.

Will lived at Binner Down House with nine surfers, male and female. He was the odd man out. He didn’t ride the waves because he didn’t like sharks and he wasn’t overly fond of weever fish either. Cadan found him on the south side of the property, which was an ancient place in the sort of condition a property gets into when it’s near the sea and no one takes proper care of it. So the land surrounding it was overgrown with gorse, bracken, and a tangle of sea grasses. A single gnarled cypress in what went for a front garden needed trimming, and weeds took the place of a lawn that had too long fought the good fight against them. The building itself was in sore need of repair, especially with regard to roof tiles and the wood surrounds of windows and doors. But the occupants had more important concerns than property maintenance, and a disreputable shed in which their surfboards lined up like colourful place markers in a book served as ample evidence of this. As did their wet suits, which generally hung to dry from the lower branches of the cypress.

The south side of the house faced Binner Down, from whose environs floated the lowing of cows. Along the wall of the building, a triangular sort of greenhouse had been fashioned. Its glass roof tilted into the house, with one side of it also glass and the other comprising the existing granite of the old building, but painted white to reflect the sun. This was a vinery, Cadan had learned, its purpose being to grow grapes.

Cadan found Will inside. He was bent to accommodate the tilted glass of the ceiling, digging round the base of an infant grapevine. When Cadan entered, Will straightened and said, “Fuck all, it’s about bloody time,” before he saw who it was coming through the door. “Sorry,” he then said. “I thought it was one of them.” He was, Cadan knew, referring to his surfing housemates.

“Still not helping round here?”

“Hell no. They might actually have to get off their bums.” Will had been using a pitchfork to work the soil?which didn’t look to Cadan the best way to go about it, considering the size of the plants, but he said nothing?and Will tossed the tool aside. He took up a cup of something sitting on a ledge, and he quaffed the rest of whatever was in it. It was warm in the greenhouse, as it was supposed to be despite the hour of the day, and he was sweating, which made his wispy hair cling to his skull. He was going to be bald by the time he was thirty, Cadan decided, and he gave silent thanks for his own thick locks.

“I owe you,” Cadan told Will by way of prefatory remarks. “I came by to tell you that.”

Will looked confused. He reached for his pitchfork and resumed his digging. “You owe me what, exactly?”

“An apology. For what I said.”

Will straightened again. He wiped his arm across his forehead. He was wearing a flannel shirt, partially unbuttoned. He had on his usual black T-shirt beneath it. “What did you say?”

“That bit about Madlyn. The other day. You know. When you stopped by.” Cadan thought that the less said about Madlyn the better life would be for them both, but he did want to make sure Will knew what he was talking about. “Thing is, man, how the hell do I know who has a chance with my sister and who hasn’t?”

“Oh, I expect you’d know well enough. As you’re her brother.”

“Not as things turn out,” Cadan told him. “She was talking about you this morning at breakfast, as it happens. I heard that and I realised…Listen, man, I was dead wrong and I want you to know it.” He was lying, of course, but he reckoned he could be forgiven for that. A greater good was involved here: He didn’t actually know his sister’s mind on the subject of romantic entanglements, did he??aside from how she felt about Santo Kerne at the moment and he wasn’t altogether sure of that, either?and, besides that, he needed Will Mendick just now. So if a small prevarication was going to get Will to open a bottle with him, that certainly could be forgiven. “What I’m saying’s that you shouldn’t write her off. She’s been in a bad way for a bit, and I reckon she needs you, even if she doesn’t know that yet.”