“Made easier if Santo was dead, I daresay,” Bea pointed out.

“I’ve told you. I didn’t know where he kept his equipment, and had I known-”

“I knew,” Jago Reeth cut in. “Santo’s dad kept trying to sort him, see, after Madlyn came up pregnant. Like I said before, they rowed. Part of the row was that act-like-a-man-for-once challenge dads give their sons sometimes, and for Santo, it’s easier to apply acting like a man to something other than act-like-the-proper-father-of a-baby-that’s-coming. So he takes his climbing kit to do just that. ’Nstead of, ‘You want me to stand by Madlyn, I’ll stand by Madlyn,’ it was easier to have it, ‘You’d rather I climb cliffs than surf? Then I’ll climb. I’ll show you a real cliff climber, come down to it.’ Then off he went to climb. Now. Then. Whenever. He kept his kit in the boot of his car. I knew it was there.”

“May I assume that Madlyn knew as well?”

“She was with me,” Jago said. “The two of us had gone to Asperyl. We made the walk out to Hedra’s Hut. There was something inside she wanted to be rid of. It was the last thing that tied her to Santo Kerne.”

Aside from Santo himself, Bea thought. She said, “And what would this be?”

Jago set his sanding block gently on the deck of the surfboard. He said, “Look, she fell dead hard for Santo. He was-pardon, Lew, no dad likes to hear this-he was her first in bed. When things ended with them, she was in a bad way about it. And then came the matter of losing that baby. She was having trouble getting past it all, and who wouldn’t. So I told her to get rid of everything Santo, start to finish. She’d done that but there was this one last bit, so that’s what we were doing there. They’d carved their initials in the hut. Stupid kid stuff, with a heart and everything, if you c’n believe it. We went there to destroy it. Not the hut, mind you. It’s been there…Christ, what? A hundred years? We didn’t want to hurt the hut. Just the initials. We left the heart as it was.”

“Why not carry all this to the logical end?” Bea asked him.

“Which would be what?”

“The obvious, Mr. Reeth,” Havers put in. “Why not give Santo Kerne the chop as well?”

Lew Angarrack said hotly, “You hang on just a God damn minute-”

Bea cut him off. “Is she a jealous girl? Has she a history of striking back when she’s hurt? Either of you can answer, by the way.”

“If you’re trying to say-”

“I’m trying to get to the truth, Mr. Angarrack. Did Madlyn tell you-or you, Mr. Reeth-that Santo was seeing someone else in the midst of all this? And I do use seeing as a euphemism, by the way. He was shagging one of the older women hereabouts at the same time as he was shagging and impregnating your daughter. She’s told us as much, at least the shagging part. Well, she had to, as we’ve caught her in more than one lie so far and I’m afraid she’d lied herself into a brick wall. As things turn out, she’d followed the boy and there they were in this woman’s home, the virile, energetic, and young white ram enthusiastically tupping the ageing ewe. Did you know about this? Did you, Mr. Reeth?”

Lew Angarrack said, “No. No.” His drove his hand through his greying hair, dislodging a sand fall of polystyrene dust. “I’ve been caught up in my own affairs…I knew she and the boy were done for, and I thought that with time…Madlyn’s always been edgy. I’ve long thought it was due to her mum and the fact she left us and the fact that Madlyn doesn’t cope well with being left. Well, that seemed natural enough to me, and she always got past it in the end if something died between herself and someone else. I believed she’d get past this as well, even past the loss of the baby. So when she was as…as disturbed as she was, I did what I could, or what I thought I could to help her through it.”

“Which was?”

“I sacked the boy, and I encouraged her to get back to her surfing. Get back in shape. Get back on the circuit. I told her no one goes through life without getting their heart broken into bits, but people recover.”

“Like you had?” Havers asked.

“If it comes to it, yes.”

“And what did you know of this other woman?” Bea asked him.

“Nothing. Madlyn never said…I knew nothing.”

“You, Mr. Reeth?”

Jago picked up his block and examined it. He nodded slowly. “She told me. She wanted me to have a word with the boy. I s’pose it was to try to set him straight. But I told her it wouldn’t do much good. That age? A boy i’n’t thinking with his brain, and didn’t she see that? I tell her there’s lots of fish in the sea, like they say. I say, Let’s be rid of this sorry piece of business, girl, and get on with our lives. It’s the only way.”

He didn’t seem to realise what he had just said. Bea eyed him carefully. She could tell that Havers was doing the same. Bea said, “Irregular is the term that’s been used for what Santo was up to on the side while he was seeing Madlyn, and Santo himself was the one to use it. He was advised to be honest about it, about the irregular bit. He may have been, but he apparently wasn’t with Madlyn. Was he honest with you, Mr. Reeth? You appear to have something of a touch with young people.”

“I only knew what our Madlyn knew,” Jago Reeth said. “Irregular, you say? That was the word was used?”

“Irregular, yes. Irregular enough for him to ask advice about it.”

“Having it on with an older woman might’ve been irregular enough,” Lew noted.

“But enough to seek advice about it?” Bea asked, more to herself than to them.

“S’pose,” Jago said, “it depends on who the woman was, eh? It always comes down to that in the end.”

Chapter Twenty-one

DESPITE JAGO’S WARNING, CADAN COULDN’T HELP HIMSELF. It was complete insanity and he damn well knew it, but he engaged in it anyway: the soft silken feel of her thighs tightening round him; the sound of her moaning and then the heightened growing rapturous yes of her response, and this set against a backdrop of waves crashing against the nearby shore; the mixed scents of the sea, of her female smells, and of wood rot from the tiny beach hut; the eternal female salt of her where he licked as she shrieked and yes yes as her fingers dug into his hair; the dim light from the cracks round the door casting a nearly ethereal glow on skin that was slick but lithe and firm and willing God so eager and ever so willing…

It could have been like that, Cadan thought, and despite the growing lateness of the day he wasn’t all that far from establishing Pooh in the sitting room, hauling his bicycle out of the garage, and pedaling frantically to Adventures Unlimited to take Dellen Kerne up on her offer to meet at the beach huts. He’d seen just enough films in the cinema to know that the older woman-younger man bit was never perfect-let alone permanent-which was a plus as far as he was concerned. The very idea of having it on with Dellen Kerne was all so right in Cadan’s mind that it had moved quite beyond rightness into another realm altogether: into the sublime, the mystical, the metaphysical. The only metaphorical monkey in the barrel was, alas, Dellen herself.

The woman was a nutter, no question about it. Despite his longing to press his lips to various parts of her body, Cadan knew barm when he saw barm, providing barm was actually a word, which he seriously doubted. But if it wasn’t a word, it needed to be one, and she was barm in spades. She was the walking, talking, breathing, eating, sleeping personification of barm, and the one thing Cadan Angarrack was besides randy enough to take on a herd of sheep was clever enough to give barm a wide berth.

He hadn’t gone to work that day, but he hadn’t been able to face any questions from his father about why he was hanging about the house. So to keep Lew from venturing into that conversational territory, Cadan had risen as usual, had dressed as usual-going so far as to don his paint-spattered jeans, which he considered a very nice touch indeed-and had shown up as usual at the breakfast table where Madlyn was eating a virtuous half grapefruit, and Lew was sliding a decent fry-up from the pan onto his plate.