Careless In Red by Elizabeth George Page B

window to get in. He told me there was a body on the rocks and I went down to it with him. I said I was a doctor—”
    “Well, you are a doctor. You might have been able to—”
    “No. It’s not that. Well, it is in a way because I could have done something, I suppose.”
    “You must more than suppose, Daidre. You’ve been educated well. You’ve qualified. You’ve managed to acquire a job of enormous responsibility and you cannot say—”
    “Aldara. Yes. All right. I know. But it was more than wanting to help. I wanted to see. I had a feeling.”
    Aldara said nothing. Sap crackled in one of the logs and the sound of it drew her attention to the fire. She looked at it long, as if checking to see that the logs remained where she had originally placed them. She finally said, “You thought it might be Santo Kerne? Why?”
    “It’s obvious, isn’t it?”
    “Why is it obvious?”
    “Aldara. You know.”
    “I don’t. You must tell me.”
    “Must I?”
    “Please.”
    “You’re being—”
    “I’m being nothing. Tell me what you want to tell me about why things are so obvious to you, Daidre.”
    “Because even when one thinks everything has been seen to, even when one thinks every i has been dotted, every t has been crossed, even when one thinks every sentence has a full stop at the end—”
    “You’re becoming tedious,” Aldara pointed out.
    Daidre took a sharp breath. “Someone is dead. How can you talk like that?”
    “All right. Tedious was a poor choice of words. Hysterical would have been better.”
    “This is a human being we’re talking about. This is a teenage boy. Not nineteen years old. Dead on the rocks.”
    “Now you are hysterical.”
    “How can you be like this? Santo Kerne is dead.”
    “And I’m sorry about that. I don’t want to think of a boy that young falling from a cliff and—”
    “If he fell, Aldara.”
    Aldara reached for her wineglass. Daidre noted—as she sometimes did—that the Greek woman’s hands were the only part of her that was not lovely. Aldara herself called them a peasant’s hands, made for pounding clothes against rocks in a stream, for kneading bread, for working the soil. With strong, thick fingers and wide palms, they were not hands made for delicate employment. “Why ‘if he fell’?” she asked.
    “You know the answer to that.”
    “But you said he was climbing. You can’t think someone…”
    “Not someone, Aldara. Santo Kerne? Polcare Cove? It’s not difficult to work out who might have harmed him.”
    “You’re talking nonsense. You go to the cinema far too often. Films make one start believing that people act like they’re playing parts devised in Hollywood. The fact that Santo fell while he was climbing—”
    “And isn’t that a bit odd? Whyever would he climb in this weather?”
    “You ask the question as if you expect me to know the answer.”
    “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Aldara—”
    “Enough.” Aldara firmly set her wineglass down. “I am not you, Daidre. I’ve never had this…this…oh, what shall I call it…this awe of men that you have, this feeling that they are somehow more significant than they actually are, that they are necessary in life, essential to a woman’s completion. I’m terribly sorry that the boy is dead, but it’s nothing to do with me.”
    “No? And this…?” Daidre indicated the two wineglasses, the two plates, the two forks, the endless repetition of what should have been but never quite was the number two. And there was the additional matter of Aldara’s clothing: the filmy dress that embraced and released her hips when she moved, the choice of shoes with toes too open and heels too high to be practical on a farm, the earrings that illustrated the length of her neck. There was little doubt in Daidre’s mind that the sheets on Aldara’s bed were fresh and scented with lavender and that there were candles ready to be lit in her bedroom.
    A man was at this moment on his way to her. He was even now