Aldara went for another shovelful of manure. She was working rapidly but barely took a deep breath, and she didn’t come close to breaking a sweat. “You may not assume. I’ve been divorced for years, Inspector. There’s a Mr. Pappas, but he’s in St. Ives, and we see virtually nothing of each other. We quite like it that way.”
“Have you children here, then? A daughter Santo’s age, perhaps? Or an adolescent son you’d prefer didn’t see his mummy dropping her knickers for another teenager?”
Aldara’s jaw hardened. Bea wondered which of her comments had hit the mark.
“I met Santo for sex in Polcare Cottage for one reason only: because both of us preferred it that way,” Aldara said. “It was a private matter, and that’s what each of us wanted.”
“Privacy? Or secrecy?”
“Both.”
“Why? Embarrassed to be doing a kid?”
“Hardly.” Aldara drove her shovel into the earth, and just as Bea thought she intended to take a rest, she went for the rake. She climbed into the nearest planting bed and began energetically working the manure into the soil. She said, “I have no embarrassment about sex. Sex is what it is, Inspector. Sex. And we both wanted sex, Santo and I. With each other, as it happens. But as this is something difficult for some people to understand?because of his age and my own?we sought a private place to…” She appeared to be looking for a euphemism, which seemed completely out of character in the woman.
“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.