Careless in Red (Inspector Lynley, #15)(29)

“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 watching 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.”