“Where?”
“The cliff in Polcare Cove. He fell and was killed. A man out walking the coastal path was the one to find him. He came to the cottage.”
“You were there when this happened?”
“No. I drove down from Bristol this afternoon. When I got to the cottage, the man was inside. He was looking for a phone. I came in on him.”
“You came in on a man inside your cottage? My God. How frightening. How did he…? Did he find the extra key?”
“He broke a 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?”