Careless in Red (Inspector Lynley, #15)(48)

“She spent the night with a seventy-year-old bloke?”

“Jago phoned and said she was there.”

“What time?”

“Kerra…”

“This is important, Cadan.”

“Why? D’you think she gave your brother the bump? How was she supposed to do that? Shove him over the cliff?”

“His equipment was messed with. That’s what the cop told us.”

Cadan widened his eyes. “Hang on, Kerra. No way…And I mean no way. She may have been off her nut with everything that happened between them, but my sister is not?” He stopped himself. Not because of what he’d intended to say about Madlyn but because as he’d been speaking, his gaze had moved from Kerra to the beach below them and across that beach a surfer was jogging, his board under his arm and its leash trailing behind him in the sand. He was fully garbed, as he would be at this time of year, for the water was still quite cold. Head to toe in neoprene. Head to toe in black. You couldn’t, in fact, actually tell if the surfer was male or female from this distance.

“What?” Kerra said.

Cadan shuddered. He said quietly, “Madlyn may have been all over the map with how she reacted after what happened between her and Santo. I give you that.”

“That and then some,” Kerra remarked.

“But killing off her ex-boyfriend wouldn’t be part of her repertoire, okay? Jesus, Kerra, she kept thinking he was just going through a stage, you know.”

“At first,” Kerra clarified.

“Okay. Maybe only at first she thought that. But it doesn’t mean she’d finally get to the point of understanding how things really were and deciding the only reasonable thing to do was to kill him. Does that make sense to you?”

“Love,” Kerra said, “never makes sense to me. People do all sorts of mad things when they’re in love with someone.”

“Yeah?” Cadan said. “Is that the truth? So, what about you?”

She made no reply.

“I rest my case,” he told her. And then he added, “Sea Dreams, if you have to know.”

“What’s that?”

“Where she is. Jago’s got a caravan at that holiday park where the dairy used to be. Out beyond Sawsneck Down. If you want to grill her, grill her there. For what it’s worth, though, you’ll be wasting your time.”

“What makes you think I want to grill her?”

“You sure as hell want something,” Cadan told her.

ONCE BEA HANNAFORD HAD him in possession of a hired car, she told Lynley to follow her. She said to him, “I expect this isn’t your typical heap,” in reference to the Ford, “but at least you’ll fit it. Or it’ll fit you.”

Under other circumstances, Lynley might have told her that she was being more than generous. Indeed, his breeding generally made that sort of remark second nature to him. But under the present circumstances, he merely told her that his usual mode of transportation had been totaled in February and he hadn’t yet replaced it with something else, so the Ford was fine.

She said, “Good,” and advised him to mind his driving since he would be doing so without a licence until his wallet arrived. “It’ll be our little secret,” she said. She told him to follow her. She had something to show him.

What she had to show him was in Casvelyn, and he obediently trailed her there. He drove trying to keep his mind on that?simply on the driving?but he found the strength draining out of him with the sheer effort he made to hold his thoughts in check.

He’d told himself he was finished with murder. One did not watch a beloved wife die?the victim of an utterly senseless street killing?and walk away from that to think that tomorrow was simply another day. Tomorrow was, instead, something to be endured. So far he’d endured the endless succession of tomorrows he’d been living through by doing what was set in front of him and nothing more.

At first it had been Howenstow: seeing to matters on and around the land that was his legacy and the great house sitting upon that land. No matter that his mother, his brother, and an estate manager had been handling Howenstow matters for ages. He’d thrown himself into them to keep from throwing himself elsewhere, until half of what he’d taken on was a muddle and the other half was a wreck. His mother’s gentle admonition of “Darling, let me handle this,” or “John Penellin’s been working on this situation for weeks, Tommy,” or anything of a similar persuasion was something he brushed aside with a remark so terse that the dowager countess had sighed, pressed his shoulder, and left him to it.

But he found that Howenstow matters ultimately brought Helen into his mind, whether he wanted her there or not. The half-finished nursery had to be dismantled. Countryside clothing she’d left in their bedroom had to be gone through. A plaque for her resting place in the estate chapel?for the resting place she shared with their never-born son?had to be designed. And then there were the reminders of her: where he and she had walked together on the path from the house through the wood and over to the cove, where she’d stood in front of pictures in the gallery and lightheartedly commented on the physical attributes of some of his more questionable ancestors, where she’d browsed through ancient editions of Country Life in the library, where she’d curled up with?and ultimately dozed off over?a thick biography of Oscar Wilde.