“To service each other?” Havers offered. She managed to look bored, an I’ve-heard-it-all-before-now expression on her face.

“To be together,” Aldara said firmly. “For an hour. For two or three early on, when we were new together and…still discovering, I would call it.”

“Discovering what?” Bea said.

“What pleased the other. It is a process of discovery, isn’t it, Inspector? Discovery leading to pleasure. Or did you not know sex is about giving one’s partner pleasure?”

Bea let that one pass. “So this wasn’t a love-and-heartbreak situation for you.”

Aldara cast her a look. It spoke of both incredulity and long experience. “Only a fool equates sex with love, and I’m not a fool.”

“Was he?”

“Did he love me? Was this love-and-heartbreak, as you put it, for him? I have no idea. We didn’t speak of that. When it comes to it, we spoke very little at all after the initial arrangement. As I’ve said, this was about sex. The physical only. Santo knew that.”

“Initial arrangement?” Bea asked.

“Are you echoing me, Inspector?” Aldara smiled, but she directed the expression to the earth that she was busily raking.

Briefly, Bea understood the impulse investigators often had to smack a suspect. She said, “Why don’t you explain this ‘initial arrangement’ to us, Aldara? And while you’re doing it, perhaps you can touch upon your apparent lack of feeling regarding the murder of your lover, which, as you might surmise, certainly looks as if it can be linked rather more directly to you than you otherwise might appreciate.”

“I had nothing to do with Santo Kerne’s death. I regret it, of course. And if I’m not prostrate with grief over it, that would be because-”

“It wasn’t a love-and-heartbreak situation for you, either,” Bea said. “That’s certainly clear as Swiss air. So what was it? What was it exactly, please?”

“I’ve told you. It was an arrangement he and I had for sex.”

“Did you know he was getting it elsewhere at the same time he was getting it from-or doing it to or whatever the hell it was-to you?”

“Of course I knew it.” Aldara sounded placid. “That was part of it.”

“It? What? The arrangement? What was ‘it’? A threesome?”

“Hardly. Part of it was the secrecy of it all, the aspect of having an affair, the fact that he had someone else. I wanted someone with someone else. That’s how I like it.”

Bea saw Havers blink, as if to clear her vision, like Alice finding herself down a rabbit hole with a randy bunny when prior experience had led her to expect only the Mad Hatter, the March Hare, and a cup of tea. Bea herself didn’t feel dissimilar.

She said, “So you knew about Madlyn Angarrack, that she was involved with Santo Kerne.”

“Yes. That’s how I met Santo in the first place. Madlyn worked for me here, in the jam kitchen. Santo fetched her at the end of the day several times, and I saw him then. Everyone saw him. It was most difficult not to see Santo. He was a highly attractive boy.”

“And Madlyn’s a rather attractive girl.”

“She is. Well, of course, she would be. And so am I, if it comes to that. An attractive woman. I find that attractive people are drawn to each other, don’t you?” Another glance in the direction of the police made it obvious that Aldara Pappas didn’t consider this question to be one that either of them could answer from personal experience. She said, “We took note of each other, Santo and I. I was at the point of needing someone very like him-”

“Someone with attachments?”

“-and I thought he might do, as there was a directness to his gaze that spoke of a certain maturity, a frame of mind that suggested he and I might speak the same language. We exchanged looks, smiles. It was a form of communication in which like-minded individuals say precisely what needs to be said and nothing more. He arrived early one day to fetch Madlyn, and I took him on a tour of the farm. We rode the tractor into the orchards, and it was there-”

“Just like Eve beneath the apple tree?” Havers said. “Or were you the snake?”

Aldara refused to be drawn out. She said, “This had nothing to do with temptation. Temptation depends on innuendo and there was no innuendo involved. I was forthright with him. I said the look of him appealed to me and I had been thinking what it would be like to have him in bed. How pleasant it might be for us both, if he was interested. I told him that if he wanted more than only his little girlfriend as a sexual partner, he was to phone me. At no time did I suggest he end his relationship with her. That would actually have been the last thing I wanted, as it might have made him rather too fond of me. It might have led to expectations of there being something more than was possible between us. On his part, these expectations, that is. On mine there were none.”

“I can see it might well have put you in a ludicrous light had he expected more and had you been forced to give it to him in order to keep him,” Bea noted. “A woman your age going public-as it were-with a teenage boy. Trotting down the aisle in church on Sunday morning, nodding to your neighbours and all of them thinking how…well, how lacking in something you must be to have to settle for an eighteen-year-old lover.”

Aldara moved to another pile of manure. She fetched the shovel and began to repeat the process she’d followed for the first vegetable bed. The earth within became rich and dark. Whatever she intended to plant within the borders of the bed, it was going to flourish.

She said, “First of all, Inspector, I don’t concern myself with what other people think, as what other people think about me-or anyone else or any thing for that matter-does not rob me of a single eyelash. This was a private matter between Santo and me. I kept it private. So did he.”

“Not exactly,” Havers noted. “Madlyn found out.”

“That was unfortunate. He wasn’t careful enough, and she followed him. There was one of those dreadful scenes between them-the accosting, the accusing, the denial, the admission, the explaining, the pleading-and she ended their involvement on the spot. That put me in the very last position I wished to be in: as Santo’s sole lover.”

“Did she know you were the woman inside the cottage when she turned up there?”

“Of course she knew. There was such a scene between them that I thought she might do violence. I had to emerge from the bedroom and do something about it.”

“Which was?”

“To separate them. To keep her from destroying the cottage or attacking him.” She leaned on her shovel and looked north, in the direction of the orchards, as if reliving her initial proposal to Santo Kerne and what that proposal had ultimately brought about. She said, as if she’d only just thought of the matter, “It was not supposed to be such a drama. When it became one, I had to rethink my own involvement with Santo.”

“Did you give him the old heave-ho as well?” Havers asked. “Not wanting big drama in your life.”

“I intended to, but-”

“I doubt he would have liked that much,” Havers said. “What bloke would? Finding himself out of two dolly birds in one fell swoop instead of just one. Being reduced to what…wanking in the shower?…when before he was getting it on all sides. I’ll wager he would’ve fought you on that one. Maybe even told you he could make things a bit tough on you, a bit embarrassing, if you tried to break it off.”

“Indeed,” she said, without a pause in her labours. “Had we got to that point, he might have done and said all of that. As it was, we never got to that point. I did have to rethink my involvement with him, and I decided that we could continue as long as he understood the rules.”

“Which were?”

“More caution and a very clear understanding about the present and the future.”

“Meaning?”

“The obvious. About the present, I wasn’t going to change my ways to suit him. About the future, there wasn’t one. And that was perfectly fine with him. Santo lived largely for the moment.”