ULTIMATELY ON THAT MISERABLE DAY, CADAN FOUND HIMSELF in a situation in which the chickens of his machinations had finally come home to roost: caught in the sitting room of the family home in Victoria Road with his sister and Will Mendick. Madlyn, having just returned from work, was still in her Casvelyn of Cornwall getup?all stripes the colour of candy floss and a pinny with ruffles along the edges. She was slouched on the sofa, while Will stood in front of the fireplace with a bunch of daylilies dangling from his fingers. He’d shown good enough sense to buy the flowers and not bring along rejects from the wheelie bin. But that was the limit to the good sense he was showing.
Cadan himself was perched on a stool near his parrot. He’d left Pooh alone for most of the day, and he’d been intent upon making up for that with an elongated bit of bird massage, just the two of them, with the house?or at least the room?to themselves. But Madlyn had arrived home from work and on her heels had come Will. He’d apparently taken to heart Cadan’s bald-faced lies about his sister and her affections.
“…so I thought,” Will was saying, with scant encouragement from Madlyn, “that you might like…well, like to go out.”
“With who?” Madlyn said.
“With…well, with me.” He’d not presented her with the flowers yet, and Cadan was hoping fervently he’d pretend that he’d not brought them at all.
“And why would I want to do that, exactly?” Madlyn tapped her fingers on the arm of the sofa. This gesture, Cadan knew, had nothing to do with nervousness.
Will grew redder in the face?he was already blushing like a bloke with two left feet at a fox-trot lesson?and he shot a look towards Cadan that said, Give us a hand here, mate? Studiously, Cadan averted his eyes.
Will said, “Just…perhaps to get a meal?”
“Out of a bin, you mean?”
“No! God, Madlyn. I wouldn’t ask you to?”
“Look.” Madlyn had that Expression on her face. Cadan knew what it meant, but he also knew that Will hadn’t the first clue that his sister’s detonator was doing whatever detonators did just before the bomb went from UX to X. She pushed herself to the edge of the sofa and her eyes got narrow. “Just in case you don’t know, Will, which you apparently don’t, I had a talk with the police. A quite recent talk with them. They caught me out in a lie, and they crawled all over me. And guess what they knew?”
Will said nothing. Cadan urged Pooh onto his fist. He said, “Hey, what you got to say, Pooh?” The bird was usually very good at providing diversions, but Pooh was silent. If he felt the room’s tension, he wasn’t responding to it in his normal vociferous manner.
“They knew that I followed Santo. They knew what I saw. They knew, Will, that I knew what Santo was doing. Now how do you s’pose the cops knew that? And do you have any idea how that makes me look?”
“They don’t think that you…You don’t need to worry?”
“That’s hardly the point! My boyfriend’s having it off with a cow old enough to be his mum and he’s liking it and this particular cow happens to be the cow I work for and all this is going on under my nose with both of them looking like butter wouldn’t melt and he’s calling her Mrs. Pappas, mind you. Mrs. Pappas in front of me and you can bloody well depend on him not calling her Mrs. Pappas when he’s fucking her. And she knows he’s my boyfriend. That’s part of the fun. She’s specially friendly to me because of it. Only I don’t know. I even have a cup of tea with her and she asks me all about myself. ‘I like to get to know my girls,’ she says. Oh, too bloody right.”
“Don’t you see that’s why?”
“I do not. So there they are?those cops?and they’re looking at me and I can see what they know and what they think. Poor stupid cow she is. Her boyfriend’d rather do some old witch than be with her. And I didn’t need that, d’you see it, Will? I didn’t need their pity and I didn’t need them knowing because now it all gets written down for the world to see and everyone knows and do you know?have you any idea?what that feels like?”
“It wasn’t your fault, Madlyn.”
“That I wasn’t enough for him? So much not enough that he wanted her as well? How could that not be my fault? I loved him. We had something good, or that’s what I thought.”