by Paul Torday
‘Mummy, I must go, there’s someone at the door.’
‘You never have any time for me, you’re so self-absorbed.’
I said goodbye and hung up firmly, but gently. I knew quite well the next time we spoke my mother would accuse me of slamming the phone down on her.
Mary and I travelled out to Heathrow and got the shuttle up to Edinburgh. There we picked up a small car and then put ourselves up in the airport hotel I had booked that morning. We kept firmly off the subject of our husbands and the evening had a superficial jollity to it. We drank rather a lot of white wine and I felt a little unsteady going to bed. Once my bedroom door closed behind me, I was stone cold sober in a moment. What on earth was I going to be told in the morning?
I lay awake half the night, or so it seemed. In body I was in a small, anonymous hotel room; in spirit I was already in Glen Gala, watching the dark trees waving in the wind, picturing the grim bulk of Beinn Caorrun Lodge. I had rung Mrs McLeish a few hours ago, to warn her we were coming up. There had been no reply; my only unsuccessful phone call of the day. Then I had rung Donald the stalker. He was in, but did not know where Mrs McLeish was.
‘I’m away myself in the morning to help a friend with the hind-stalking up in Aberdeenshire for a couple of weeks. He’s been giving me a hand here, so I owe him one.’
It sounded as if Beinn Caorrun would be deserted when we got there. Perhaps that would be a good thing: my meeting with Alex Grant would go unreported and I could decide for myself when, or if, I would tell Mikey about it. At last I fell into a shallow doze. Almost as soon as I had closed my eyes, it seemed, the telephone was ringing. It was my wake-up call.
Mary ate her two pieces of toast and a bowl of fruit that looked as if it had come straight from the tin. I sipped my coffee, but could barely swallow. I felt sick with apprehension. Then we were scraping the ice off the windshield of the hire car and, all too soon, were crossing the Forth Road Bridge and heading up the M90 towards Perth.
The roads were not busy but I seemed to have miscalculated all the same and it was already a few minutes after ten when we turned off the A9 up the narrow, single-track road that leads though Glen Gala. It was winter now, rather than late autumn, and the sky was a pale blue, feathered with high white cloud. In the hollows frost lingered; it had been a cold night.
‘Isn’t everything looking beautiful in this sunshine,’ exclaimed Mary brightly as we came towards the two white stones that marked the entrance to the Beinn Caorrun estate. I drove around the next bend and then slammed my brakes on, narrowly avoiding a car that was parked in the middle of the track.
It was a dark blue Land Rover Defender. The legend ‘Bridge of Gala Health Centre’ was stencilled in white lettering on the tailgate, beside the spare wheel. It sat squarely in the middle of the track and there was no possibility of edging past it as the trees on either side hemmed in too close. Overhead their canopy almost hid the sky, and the track itself was covered in pine needles so that it looked like part of the forest floor. The door on the driver’s side of the Land Rover was open.
‘The driver can’t be far away,’ suggested Mary. I gave two light taps on the horn but wished I hadn’t: the sound echoed loudly through the trees. Then I remembered where I had seen the car before.
‘That’s Alex Grant’s Land Rover,’ I said to Mary. ‘Why on earth has he parked it here?’ We both got out. The silence of early winter was absolute. The woods were still: only the faintest of breezes rustled the tops of the trees, bringing down the occasional shower of needles. No birds sang. The chill in the air very quickly got into our bones as we stood staring at the vehicle, which looked as if it had just been cleaned and polished that morning. I could hear a ticking sound, as if the Land Rover’s engine was still cooling down.
‘Alex?’ I called, nervously. ‘Dr Grant?’
I felt that the trees around me were listening, but in their dark silences there were no clues about what had happened here. There was something about the empty car, parked in the middle of the track, the driver’s door still open: it didn’t add up. Then Mary, who had walked a few steps farther, said, ‘Oh.’ Then frantically, ‘Elizabeth, come and see. This isn’t right; this isn’t right at all.’
At the edge of the track, beyond the driver’s door, lay something that the door itself had hidden from me. It was a man’s shoe, a brown suede boot, and it was lying upside down among the pine cones. We both backed away from it instinctively. Why would a man stop his car in the middle of the track, and then lose a shoe, and not come back for it?
‘Alex?’ I shouted again.
‘Don’t,’ said Mary. ‘Someone might hear you.’
I turned to tell her not to be an idiot, that I was shouting precisely because I wanted someone to hear me, when the force of what she had just said struck me. She was one step ahead of me. I was trying to reconstruct a bizarre series of events that had ended up with a man hopping around on one leg in the middle of a wood because he had lost his shoe. Mary had gone to the next level of the riddle. Alex Grant hadn’t come back for his shoe because he hadn’t been able to. He hadn’t been able to because someone had taken him from the car. Someone who didn’t much care whether Alex Grant had his shoes on or not. Another unwelcome thought crowded in on the last. As I remembered him, Alex Grant, although into his sixties, had been a big man. Whatever had happened here, he had been unable to resist. I suddenly realised I was thinking about Alex Grant in the past tense.
I began to shake uncontrollably.
‘We ought to tell someone about this,’ said Mary, ‘as soon as possible.’
‘Let’s get back down to the main road,’ I said. ‘Let’s go to the health centre at the Bridge of Gala. Just in case Alex is there.’
‘And if he’s not?’
We both knew he wouldn’t be.
‘Then we’ll have to tell someone. The police, maybe. You drive. I don’t think I can.’
We got back in the car and Mary started reversing back down the track to the junction with the road. It was impossible to turn here. She reversed very slowly and carefully, and I could hardly stop myself from screaming at her to go faster. At any moment I expected someone - or something - to come rushing at us from the darkness of the trees. Thankfully nothing did, and a moment later, although it seemed like a lifetime, Mary was driving us back down the road. A quarter of an hour later we were at the health centre.
No, said the receptionist, Dr Grant wasn’t in just now, he had gone up Glen Gala.
‘That’s why I’m here,’ I said. ‘I’m Elizabeth Gascoigne from Beinn Caorrun Lodge. Dr Grant was coming to meet me. We found his Land Rover on the Beinn Caorrun track but he wasn’t in it. We shouted for him but he didn’t come.’
Maybe his car had broken down, suggested the receptionist. Maybe he had decided to walk back.
‘The only sensible way back down is the road we just drove along. He wasn’t on it.’
‘Tell her about the shoe,’ suggested Mary. So I told her. The shoe did for the receptionist what it had done for us, and within moments she had gone next door to tell one of the other doctors. There was a short conference and then I heard somebody calling the Tayside Police.
It was a very long day. The police turned up in two squad cars, and then followed us up to the turn-off for Beinn Caorrun. I didn’t want to leave the road, so told them to go on up the driveway on their own. A policeman stayed with us while the rest of them went along the track. After about half an hour, a policeman came out of the woods on foot and approached our car. He leaned down to the window and said, ‘We need you two ladies to come with me for a moment, just to confirm the scene is as you first saw it. We need to know if anything’s been disturbed, if someone’s been back.’
With some reluctance we drove slowly back up the drive, and found the two police cars nose to tail behind the Land Rover. Yellow tape had been criss-crossed around the trees.
We both looked at the scene carefully. The dark blue vehicle’s door was stil
l open, and the shoe was exactly where we had seen it. ‘No, nothing’s changed.’
‘We’re treating this as a potential crime scene until we know better,’ said the officer who had walked in front of our car as we drove up the track. ‘One of our lads has been up to the big house and he’s just radioed in to say it’s all locked up. There doesn’t seem to be anyone there.’
I handed him the house keys. ‘Go and see for yourself,’ I said. ‘It ought to be empty, but you never know. Do you mind? I couldn’t face going there myself. There’s no alarm or anything.’
The officer walked around the edge of the scene and up towards the Lodge. Another policeman came over and said, ‘Let’s go down to the station at Perth and have a nice cup of tea until we can find out a bit more about what’s going on here.’
It sounded like a suggestion, but it wasn’t.
The waiting seemed interminable. After we had been at the station in Perth for an hour, a plainclothes policeman came and introduced himself to us. He was a tall, sandy-haired man, with pale blue eyes and a pale complexion, and he looked as if he knew his job. We were sitting in a small waiting room, with not much in the way of distraction, and Mary had begun to talk anxiously about getting back to London.
‘I’m Detective Sergeant Ferguson,’ he said. ‘Can you tell me why you two ladies were up in Glen Gala?’
I explained about the meeting with Dr Grant. I was careful not to say too much about why I was meeting him, but I couldn’t avoid saying that I was worried about my husband’s health.
‘And where is your husband just now?’ asked Ferguson.
‘He’s playing golf down in North Berwick with Mary’s husband Peter, and a whole lot of other people.’
The policeman took down details of where the members of Grouchers were staying, but otherwise did not seem inclined to ask further questions about Mikey, which came as something of a relief, for lots of reasons.
‘Have they come across any trace of Alex Grant yet?’ I asked.
‘Well, if you mean have we found him, I’m afraid the answer is not yet. We’ve got a big search team lined up to start tomorrow, but today we’ve only had the officers we could muster at short notice, and the Forest of Gala is awful thick and awful big. I don’t really want to tell you much more at the moment. You might be required as witnesses.’
‘Then can we go back to London?’ Mary said.
‘The duty sergeant’s got all your details, I believe?’ replied Ferguson. ‘Then we won’t detain you any further. We may need to be in touch, depending on how things develop in the next day or so. It’s likely we’ll copy the file to the National Missing Persons Bureau at Scotland Yard, and they may contact you as well.’
‘Please tell us as soon as there is any news,’ I said.
Ferguson didn’t smile. ‘It depends what the news is. You will be hearing from us, or from our colleagues in London, as soon as we are in a position to tell you anything.’
Mary and I drove back to Edinburgh Airport in silence. As we approached the rental return parking, I said, ‘Mary, I’m so sorry I’ve involved you in all this.’
She didn’t say anything, but parked the car in its slot. We both got out and took our overnight bags from the back seat. As we walked towards the rental office, Mary suddenly said, ‘Do you know more about this than you’re telling me, Elizabeth?’
We both stopped and stared at each other.
‘I swear to God I don’t,’ I said. ‘That’s why we went up - to find out from Alex Grant whatever it was he wanted to tell me about Mikey. Now I might never know.’
We returned the keys and papers and then went to the terminal and sat in the departure lounge. Just before we were called for boarding, Mary, who had not spoken for almost half an hour, asked me: ‘What do you think happened up there?’
What did I think? I was trying as hard as I could not to think. I was trying to shut my brain down, to deprive it of the power of rational thought, of putting two and two together. I knew Mikey and Peter were together at North Berwick playing golf. That was what I knew. I knew that Mikey had been there all day, playing a round with three other men, never out of anyone’s sight for a moment. I knew I would ring him tonight, probably tomorrow morning now because it would be late when we got back, and he would be cheerful, and tell jokes about the other golfers.
I knew Alex Grant had asked me to meet him because there was something awful about Mikey he felt he had to tell me. I knew that whatever it was, some chance had prevented me from hearing it, and now I might never learn what he had to say. I shook my head.
‘I don’t know, Mary. I don’t want to know.’
I don’t know, I said to myself a thousand times as the plane taxied down the runway and took off. I looked out of the window as we flew south, the dark clouds below reflecting the glow of a waxing moon, and said to myself: I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know.
As I lay awake in bed at Helmsdale Mansions, my heart said to me, But you do know. You do.
15
Her Black Gaze Made Me Shudder in My Sleep
Mary had offered to put me up at her house that night, but I wanted to be at home in case Mikey came back from North Berwick, or rang me. He did neither. I don’t know why I expected that he would. For some reason that I did not want to articulate to myself, I could not raise the courage to call him at the Marine Hotel and tell him about Alex Grant.
The next morning I was half awake and wondering whether I shouldn’t be getting ready for work when the doorbell rang. I put on a dressing gown and went to the door. Outside was a courier, in motorbike leathers. He handed me a black plastic bag, and a document pack, and asked me to sign for them, which I did without thinking. I went back into the flat and looked at what he had given me. The black plastic bag was a bin liner, containing all my personal belongings from my desk at work. The document pack required more effort: first to open it, then to understand its contents. It was from my employers, and it took me a moment or two to decode the legal jargon, but ‘stay at home until we find a legal way of firing you’ was what it came down to. I scribbled, ‘Don’t worry, I resign’ across the face of the letter, signed and dated it, and then dropped it on the kitchen table to deal with later. Then I trailed off to the bathroom to have a shower.
Today was Mikey’s last day at North Berwick and he would be home some time tomorrow. Between now and then I needed to understand what was going on. I needed to work out what I would say to him, after he had come through the door and poured himself his whisky, and asked me how things were. I’d tell him about losing my job, of course, or giving it up, but I didn’t think that would worry him much. Then what would I say? How about something like, ‘Oh, by the way, Mikey, Alex Grant asked me to go up and see him so he could tell me more about your mental condition. Only the funny thing is, Dr Grant seems to have disappeared.’
I couldn’t really see how the conversation would work. I made myself a cup of coffee and then did something I hadn’t done for three years. I went to a drawer where I knew there was a packet of cigarettes from the last time I had given them up, and found that I had three left. They were very stale, but I lit one all the same and smoked it.
Another thought struck me. Supposing the door opened and Mikey came in but it wasn’t the Mikey I knew and loved? What if it were some other version of Mikey that came into the flat, something that looked like him, but wasn’t him at all? What if he was dangerous? That was what Alex Grant had implied. I could hear his voice in my head, as clearly as when he had spoken to me over the telephone not quite forty-eight hours earlier: ‘You might be in danger. I might be. Stephen Gunnerton might be.’
Why us three? Because we all knew different aspects of Mikey and joining up those jigsaw pieces might reveal a very different picture to the one I held in my mind or, these days, in my heart. Something had happened to Alex Grant, hadn’t it? If he were safe and sound, then where was he? Why hadn’
t he rung in to say: I went for a walk and got lost. I saw something in the wood and went to look for it. It’s OK. I’m back at home now. There were too many questions, and no answers at all.
I didn’t know what to do with myself. I was beginning to feel I would go mad, sitting alone in the flat, waiting for something to happen. Then something did happen: the doorbell rang again. I went to the door thinking, it’s another courier, it’s a letter from Celia begging me to come back. But it wasn’t a courier. A young dark-haired man in a dark blue suit stood there, holding up some ID. He was thin, and quite short, and had a sharp-featured face like a fox.
‘Detective Sergeant Henshaw, Mrs Gascoigne, from the National Missing Persons Bureau at Scotland Yard. Can I come in for a moment?’
I felt sick. What was he going to tell me?
‘Is it about Alex Grant?’ I asked, opening the door to allow him in.