“Looks like I turned out to be.”
His golden retriever bounded up to him. Her exploration of the other dog’s pertinent orifices complete, Lily was ready for another throw of the tennis ball. Priestley whacked it to the far edge of the down.
“Something you didn’t expect?”
“Never.” He watched the dog for a moment before turning back to them. “Prior to Aldara, I’d been a player all my life. I had no intention of getting hooked into anyone, and to prevent that?”
“What? Marriage and babies?”
“?I always had more than one woman on a string.”
“Just like her,” Havers noted.
“With a serious exception. I had two or three. Once I had four, but they always knew. I was honest with them from the start.”
Havers said to Bea, “There you are, Guv. It happens sometimes. He brought them the dead whatever.”
Priestley looked confused. Bea said to him, “But in the case of Mrs. Pappas?”
“She was like no one else I’d had. It wasn’t just the sex thing. It was the whole package of her. Her intensity, her intelligence, her drive, her confidence, her sense of purpose. There’s nothing simpering, soft, or weak about her. There’s no manipulation. No subtle manouevring. No double message and no mixed or confusing signals. There’s nothing at all to be read or interpreted in her behaviour. Aldara’s like a man in the body of a woman.”
“I notice you don’t credit her with personal honesty,” Bea pointed out.
“I don’t,” he said. “That was my mistake.”
He’d come to believe Aldara Pappas was, at long last in his life, the One. He’d never thought to marry. He’d never wanted to marry. He’d seen enough of his parents’ marriage to be firm in not wanting ever to live as they had lived: unable just to get on with each other, to cope with their differences, or to divorce. They’d never been able to manage any option they’d had; nor had they even seen they had options. Priestley hadn’t wanted to live that kind of life, and so he hadn’t.
“But with Aldara, it was different,” he said. “She’d had a terrible first marriage. Husband was a rotter who let her think she was infertile when they couldn’t have kids. Said he’d been tested three ways to Sunday and found perfectly fit. Let her go to doctors and get all sorts of mad treatments, while he was shooting blanks the entire time. She was dead off men after years with him, but I brought her round. I wanted what she wanted, whatever she wanted. Marriage? Fine. Kids? Fine. A mass of chimpanzees? Myself in tights and a tutu? I didn’t care.”
“You had it bad,” DS Havers noted, looking up from her pad. She actually sounded marginally sympathetic, and Bea wondered if the man’s magic touch was rubbing off on her.
“It was the fire thing,” Priestley said. “The fire didn’t die out between us, and I couldn’t see the slightest sign that it might. Then I discovered why.”
“Santo Kerne,” Bea said. “Her affair with him kept her hot for you. Excitement. Secrecy.”
“I was gobsmacked. I was bloody reeling. He came to me and spilled the whole story. Out of conscience, he said.”
“You didn’t believe that?”
“The conscience bit? Not on your life. Not when his conscience didn’t take him as far as telling his girlfriend. It doesn’t concern her, he informed me, as he had no intention of breaking off with her because of Aldara. So I wasn’t to worry that he?Santo?might want something more from Aldara than she was willing to give. It was a sex thing between them. ‘You’re number one,’ he told me. ‘I’m just there to pick up the slack.’”
“Good at that, was he?” Havers asked.
“I didn’t wait round long enough to find out. I phoned Aldara and broke off with her.”
“Did you tell her why?”
“I expect she worked it out. Either that, or Santo was as honest with her as he was with me. Which, come to think of it, gives Aldara something of a motive to kill him herself, doesn’t it?”