“I can certainly see your point. Nothing like finding two dead blokes to work up an appetite. Might as well make it a picnic, why don’t we? Relax away the afternoon. Great idea, don’t you think, Ellie? Let’s while away the hours in a house of murder. I don’t need out of this place. I don’t need to get back to my life.”
“Because it’s such a stellar life to get back to, right?”
Lightning flashed and a roll of thunder echoed. The sky darkened.
“I don’t want to stay here any more than you do, but who knows when we’re going to get out of here, with or without Maeve’s confession. I would like to have some energy for whatever else we have to today. So can we not do this on an empty stomach, please? That’s all I’m asking.”
Oliver blinked once, twice, then shrugged. “Well, since you said please. Five minutes. Nothing you need to cook. And bring something back for me and Ellie.”
He returned his arm to Ellie’s shoulder and herded her into the study. Lorna watched them go, her shoulders sagging in relief when the door closed behind them. Her hands trembled worse than ever while her mind tore itself between different images. Hollis’s body. The dog barking. Maeve in the cellar. She pressed her hands against the sides of her head, trying to put it all back together, slow the tape. For the first time, she doubted her ability to handle herself. Deep breaths slowed her thoughts and her pulse. After a final, silent count to ten, Lorna smoothed her hair and returned the armor that had protected her for so many years. She stepped over MacLeod’s body and made her way to the kitchen.
After grabbing a mishmash of snacks, Lorna joined her companions in the study. Oliver and Ellie, already drinking at the bar, had also taken the time to settle their nerves. Oliver’s excess of energy waned and Ellie no longer resembled a deer in flight. Lorna passed out the snacks while Oliver poured her a glass from a bottle of Dalmore and added a splash of soda. Lorna didn’t drink whisky, but asking for something else seemed too much effort. She watched the gold ribbon around the neck of the bottle as Oliver refilled their glasses. Drinking someone else’s liquor too early in the day and eating crap food while none of them knew what to say—time really had rewound itself.
“Five more minutes,” Oliver said, making a show of checking his watch. “Then we drag her out of there.”
“And what?” The whisky lingered on Lorna’s tongue. “Beat her up?”
“If it comes to that.”
“Are you forgetting it’s your fists that got us into this mess in the first place?”
He slammed his glass onto the bar, making Ellie jump. “That had nothing to do with it. And are you forgetting that your poor little Maeve killed Callum?”
“She’s not my Maeve.” Lorna downed the rest of her drink, then grabbed a handful of crisps. “And we don’t know she killed Callum.”
“We know she killed MacLeod.”
“Yes, but . . . Never mind.”
“No, go on. Do tell, Lorna. Clearly something’s on your mind.” Oliver leaned on the bar. “Share with the class. You were happy enough earlier to lock her up. What makes you so quick to defend her now?”
“You want to interrogate Maeve? Want to go beat it all out of her? Fine. Come on, let’s go now.” She poured herself another whisky, drank it in one, and slammed the glass down beside Oliver’s. “You think I won’t do it? That I can’t? That maybe I’m having reservations because I know Maeve is innocent? And I know she’s innocent because I’m the real killer? That’s what you and Ellie were talking about while I was gone, wasn’t it? Thought you could press my buttons. See if I’d confess to something? As if I haven’t been thinking the same about both of you. You said it yourself, Oliver. There’s no evidence of what happened that night. It could have been Maeve. It could even have been Hollis after all. It could’ve been any of us. Callum. Or MacLeod. So if we’re going to do what I think you want to do, then I want more proof than a piece of string.”
A flash of lightning was followed by a crack of thunder, loud as a tree bursting to pieces. Oliver held up his hands and licked the liquor from his lips, and Lorna knew what he was going to say. It was all happening again. A remake rehashing the plot of the original. As if by being together they could never stop this endless cycle.
“What I think is that we’ll all trust each other a little more,” he said, “if the three of us stick together.”
The lights shut off. The room dimmed like a cinema, spared total darkness by the benefit of the sun hidden somewhere by the storm clouds in noon sky.
“Seriously? Seriously?” Oliver said. Ellie was on the verge of crying again.
“Maybe there’s a generator somewhere,” Lorna said.
“Yeah, probably outside where we can’t get to it. Unless we had the keys.”
An electronic chime interrupted Lorna’s answer. Ellie pulled out her phone.
“I have a signal!” Ellie squeaked. “One bar . . . oh, it’s gone.”
Lorna and Oliver’s phones followed suit, beeping and buzzing like they’d been switched on after a long flight.
“I have one bar. Two. Now one,” Oliver said.
“The signal jammer,” Lorna said. “With the electricity out, that means the jammer’s lost power, too.”
“Oh.” Ellie took a long drink from her glass. “I suppose Maeve hadn’t thought of that.”
A faint glow shone from underneath the sofa. Without a word, Lorna crossed the room, crouching down on all fours to retrieve it. She sat back on her knees as she stared at the screen until Ellie asked what she had found.
“Hollis’s phone. This is him with I guess his daughter on the lock screen.” Lorna looked toward the window, then back to the phone. “Hollis was wearing his jacket. Which means he probably went outside before he was killed. Maybe he was trying to get a signal.”
“Do you think he contacted the police? Are they on their way?” Ellie asked.
“I don’t know. It’s locked, so I can’t check the call log. He’s had some emails since he last unlocked it, though, and a few missed calls from Linda. Whoever Linda is,” she added.
“It’s an iPhone, right?” Oliver asked. “What model?”
She turned it over, running her fingers over the Manchester United case. “I don’t know. Not the newest, I don’t think. The screen doesn’t go all the way to the edges.”
“It’s new enough to have fingerprint ID,” he said.
“But how do we unlock it if—” Ellie’s eyes went wide. “Oh.” She finished her whisky in a single drink.
“What’s the point, though?” Lorna asked. “Our phones are working now.”
“Because then we can check the call log,” Oliver said. “Check his texts. See if Hollis did manage to reach one of his detective mates. He said Manchester CID, right? Say they left last night, they’d reach us by the end of the day. And we could check his emails, too. Maybe he has it synched to his work account. I don’t think Hollis was trying to run out on us, either. I think he was piecing this together, and I want to see what he came up with. Then we can ring the police from our phones if he hasn’t already.”
“But I don’t understand,” Ellie said. “Why don’t we ring them now?”
“Because,” Lorna answered, seeing where Oliver was heading. “If Hollis has—had—a theory that Maeve was responsible, then that backs up why we threw her in the cellar. But also, if he decided to pass on any new information about what happened to Callum that night, anything that doesn’t back up our original story, or point to Maeve, then we’ll know about that, too.”
“After all,” Oliver said. “What’s the point of jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire, eh?”
Ellie
Very little light penetrated the windowless halls upstairs. Ellie and Lorna held up their phones for light as they turned the corner that led to the guest rooms, while Oliver carried the whisky bottle. The alcohol and crisps had smoothed the rough edges of their anxiety, but it was no easier entering this room knowing what to expect than it had b
een before. Ellie waited to see if what they had witnessed earlier had been an illusion. But the recreation of Hollis’s Caldwell Street bedroom remained, along with his body.
Oliver nudged Lorna toward the sofa. “Go on then.”
The room didn’t smell. It was too soon—and too cold—for that, but Ellie imagined it did, and that was enough to churn her stomach.
“Ellie, give me your jumper.”
She toyed with the top button. “It’s quite chilly in the house. And with the power off—”
“Give her your jumper, Ellie.”
Ellie took her time peeling the pale blue jumper off her shoulders and handing it to Lorna, who cast it over Hollis’s face.
“Was he right- or left-handed?” she asked.
“Right, I think,” said Oliver.
Lorna dropped his hand the first time she touched it, and Ellie jumped, thinking Hollis had moved.
“Come on, Lorna. Don’t be so squeamish.” But Oliver spoke the words to the floor, unable to look at the body.
Lorna slipped the phone into Hollis’s crooked hand and pressed his thumb down. As soon as the phone unlocked, she pulled back.
“Well? Did he ring anyone?” Oliver asked.
“Hang on. I want to disable the security features first because I am not doing that again.”
Ellie craned her neck to watch the phone screen as Lorna found the call log.
“No. No, he didn’t make any outgoing calls.” She searched through his recent messages. “Someone left a voice mail last night, though. Linda, again.”
She put it on speaker.
“Hey, Dad. Sorry to bother you on your weekend away and all. But something a bit weird happened. The police came by, which isn’t all that unusual for us, yeah, but they weren’t local. Came from down south and said they needed to ask you questions about something. There was a fire at some house on . . . hang on. I wrote down the name. Coldwell Street? No, Caldwell. Can’t read my own writing. Anyway, I said I didn’t know what you’d have to do with a fire last month when you were being the big Catherine Marcus hero up here, and I said they could check that with DI Thompson and DS Khan, but then they said it wasn’t so much the fire itself, but that they have reason to suspect the fire had something to do with a death that happened there in the nineties when you lived there as a student? Which I said didn’t sound right ’cause you went to Nottingham. Anyway, I think it’s probably the lads playing a joke ’cause of your promotion and all. But the whole thing felt really, I don’t know, weird. Anyway, hopefully it’s just your phone being wonky up there in the Highlands. But give me a call when you get this. And remember to take a picture of a coo for me! Okay, love you! Bye bye bye.”
“She sounded nice,” Ellie said. “His daughter sounds very nice.”
“So Maeve burned down the Caldwell Street house?” said Oliver. “Probably took out all the furniture beforehand. Had it shipped up here. How long has she been planning this?”
Lorna tapped the phone against her palm. Oliver drank straight from the bottle and wiped his chin with the back of his hand. Neither of them noticed Ellie as she inched toward the doorway.
“I want to see what else Hollis has on that phone.” He reached for it, but Lorna pulled it back.
“I can look.”
“Then shut up and do it.”
Ellie stood in the hall now, waiting for them to yell at her to come back. But their argument took up all of their attention.
“Didn’t you listen to that voice mail?” Oliver was saying. “If the police are suspicious enough to travel up to Manchester to interview Hollis, it must be because Maeve already sent them something. And we don’t know what it was or what else he has.”
“But what if it wasn’t Maeve?”
“Then who else . . .”
“I . . . I think . . .”
A roll of thunder drowned out the rest of Lorna’s reply and covered Ellie’s footsteps as she back-stepped down the hall.
Bad things happened when Ellie drank. Alcohol reminded her what she was capable of. Revealed the side of herself she worked so hard to hide. The side these people brought out in her. She’d only had two small glasses downstairs, but on an empty stomach that was enough.
The house creaked and groaned in the storm, and Ellie turned around with every step, expecting someone, perhaps even Callum, to appear behind her. She rubbed the scratches on her arm and hurried upstairs to her room.
She reached under the bed and grabbed the jammer. Held it in her hands, torn between cradling it to her chest and throwing it out the window. Her phone beeped, and she welcomed the distraction. A text from Jilly.
if u dunt let me go 2 Kevs party ill h8 u 4eva
Ellie laughed. How had she never noticed how innocent her daughter was? Kevin Barlow’s party—a life or death situation. If only Jilly knew.
Ellie tied back her hair in a stiff ponytail and reread the last text she’d received from the Unknown Number:
Is it done yet?
Ellie tightened her ponytail again, letting the hairs pull at her scalp. She was good at following instructions. She could accomplish each task like a checklist no matter how difficult—come to Wolfheather House, bring a cellular signal jammer, feign surprise when the others arrive. But no matter how many times she checked her phone, no further instructions seemed forthcoming.
When she first got that text last night, as she ran the water for the shower to cover the sound of her movements, she had immediately retrieved the signal jammer from her suitcase and plugged it in underneath the bed. She thought it was safest to get rid of the box somewhere and had managed to hide it in the cellar before entering the dining room for the first time. How was she supposed to know Lorna and Oliver would go looking down there? And how had they found it behind those dusty old boxes anyway? It was almost as if they had known what they were looking for. Or at least Oliver had because didn’t he say he was the one who found the box?
She wondered now if Maeve had been given instructions, too. And if the two of them had known what they were really getting into this weekend, what about Oliver and Lorna? How much of what they said was the truth, and how much of it was an act?
Ellie stuffed her phone in her pocket, then took the signal jammer to a different room, sliding it underneath a random bed, and returned to the hall, where she heard Oliver and Lorna arguing in the room with Hollis’s body. But as she prepared to return to them, she noticed an open door. One in the closed wing, just on the other side of the rope. One that had not been open when they’d last been together on this floor. Ellie looked over her shoulder, then ducked under the rope.
Enough light filtered through the window that she knew what she was seeing had to be real. The wire-framed bed and crate of cleaning supplies. The framed photos hanging on the walls. The paperboard desk that took up too much space. Like the room that housed Hollis’s body, this room had been turned into a replica of her Caldwell Street bedroom. A memory came to Ellie, long buried underneath years of purposeful forgetfulness, and she yanked open the drawer to the desk, but there was no folder. No notebook. No diary. Only a blue envelope with her name typed on the front. She pinched it with two fingers and extracted it from the drawer.
There once was a girl named Ellie,
Who faked being good and jolly.
She always thought it not her fault
Whene’er she committed assault,
So her brain’s now about to be jelly.
Oliver
“Let me get this straight,” Oliver said. “You don’t think Maeve killed Callum because she killed MacLeod?”
“Yes. I mean no. I mean . . .” She pressed her palms into her eyes and let out a frustrated groan. “I mean I don’t think it’s as simple as we think it is. Something’s not quite right.”
“Dunno. Seems pretty straightforward to me. Maeve murders Callum. Decides she doesn’t want any witnesses, so she lures us all here to finish us off. Old man MacLeod isn’t supposed to show up but he does and she tak
es him out, too.”
Lorna threw up her hands. “But why? What’s her motive? You said you watch Forensic Files, right? The murderer always has a motive.”
“I told you. We’re witnesses.”
“And if Callum had been killed last week, I’d buy that. But it’s been over twenty fucking years, Oliver. I didn’t feel like the police were suddenly closing in on me. Did you? They never even investigated his death as a murder. This”—she waved her hands at the house—“only reopens something that had been shut tight, nice and tidy. If Maeve killed Callum, she wouldn’t be thick enough to restart something that would get the finger pointed at her.”
Oliver ran a hand over his head and sighed. “Say you’re right. Maeve didn’t kill Callum. But since she’s the one behind this, then why does it matter who did do him in? We don’t need to answer that question for our ‘benefactor’ because we have her locked in the cellar. All we need to do is take care of her and go our separate ways. Leave the past in the past.”
Lorna dug her toe into the carpet, then kicked aimlessly at the air. “Do you really think she’s capable of pulling off something like this on her own?”
Oliver shrugged. “Why not? All it would take is a little planning. We know Maeve’s unemployed, so she’s got plenty of time on her hands. Although this would also take a fair bit of cash, and I’m not sure where she’d get that from. Course, she could have a rich dead uncle or something. Anyway, it would have to be someone who knew what life was like in Caldwell Street. I mean, Callum never did those Happy Wednesday notes for anyone other than us. And like you said, the police never investigated his death as murder. So other than the five of us, no one else knows what happened that night. That makes it a short list of people who . . .”
Lorna glanced suddenly at Hollis’s covered face.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Hollis said the same thing last night. The last time we spoke. He said it’s a short list of people who would know all these details.” She approached Hollis and tentatively patted his pockets. Oliver’s lip curled at the thought of touching the body. “Hollis was making notes last night, but he wasn’t using his phone. He wrote them in a notepad. If he’d figured anything out before he . . . it would be in his notebook, not his phone.”
They Did Bad Things Page 14