“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.