by Val McDermid
Now the two men fell into a wordless embrace at the cemetery gates, clinging to each other like the shipwrecked to driftwood, not caring how unstable. At last, they parted, Matthias patting him gently on the shoulder. ‘Come back with me,’ he said.
‘You’ve got a letter for me,’ Gabriel had said, falling into step beside him.
‘It’s at the villa.’
A bus to the station, a train to Siena, then Matthias’s van back to the Villa Totti, and hardly a word exchanged. Sorrow blanketed them, bowing their heads and slumping their shoulders. By the time they reached the villa, drink was the only solution either of them could face. Thankfully, the rest of the BurEst troupe had set off earlier for a gig in Grossetto, leaving Gabriel and Matthias to bury their dead alone.
Matthias poured the wine and placed a fat envelope in front of Gabriel. ‘That’s the letter,’ he said, sitting down and rolling a spliff.
Gabriel picked it up and set it down again. He drank most of his glass of wine, then ran a finger round the edge of the envelope. He drank some more, shared the spliff and continued drinking. He couldn’t imagine anything Daniel had to tell him that would need so much paper. It hinted at revelation, and Gabriel wasn’t sure he wanted revelation right now. It was painful enough holding on to the memory of what he had lost.
At some point, Matthias got up and put a CD in a portable player. Gabriel was surprised by the same music he’d listened to earlier, recognizing the strange dissonances. ‘Dad sent that to me,’ he said. ‘He told me to play it today.’
Matthias nodded. ‘Gesualdo. He murdered his wife and her lover, you know. Some say he killed his second son because he wasn’t sure if he was really the father. And his father-in-law too, supposedly, because the old man was out for revenge and Gesualdo got his retaliation in first. Then he repented and spent the rest of his life writing church music. It just goes to show. You can do terrible things and still find redemption.’
‘I don’t get it.’ Gabriel said, uneasy. ‘Why would he want me to listen to that?’ They were already on the second bottle of wine and the third joint. He felt a little fuzzy round the edges, but nothing too serious.
‘You really should read the letter,’ Matthias said.
‘You know what’s in it,’ Gabriel said.
‘Kind of.’ Matthias stood up and made for the door. ‘I’m going out on the loggia for some fresh air. Read the letter, Gabe.’
It was hard not to feel there was something portentous about a letter delivered in such circumstances. Hard to avoid the fear that the world would be changed for ever. Gabriel wished he could pass; leave it unopened and let his life move on, unaltered. But he couldn’t ignore his father’s final message. Hastily, he grabbed it and ripped it open. His eyes watered at the sight of the familiar hand, but he forced himself to read on.
Dear Gabriel,
I always meant to tell you the truth about yourself but it never felt like the right time. Now I’m dying, and you deserve the truth but I’m too scared to tell you in case you walk away and leave me to face the end by myself. So I’m writing this letter that you’ll get from Matthias after I’m away. Tr y not to be too hard on me. I’ve done some stupid things but I did them out of love.
The first thing I am going to say is that although I’ve told you a lot of lies, the one thing that is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth is that I am your father and I love you more than any other living soul. Hang on to that when you wish I was alive so that you could kill me.
It’s hard to know where to start this story. But here goes. My name is not Daniel Porteous and I’m not from Glasgow. My first name is Michael, but everybody called me Mick. Mick Prentice, that’s who I used to be. I was a coal miner, born and raised in Newton of Wemyss in Fife. I had a wife and a daughter, Misha. She was four years old when you were born. But I’m getting ahead of myself here because the two of you have different mothers and I need to explain that.
The one thing I was any good at, apart from digging coal, was painting. I was good at art at school but there was no way somebody like me could do anything about that. I was headed for the pit and that was that. Then the Miners’ Welfare ran a class in painting and I got the chance to learn something from a proper artist. It turned out I had a knack for watercolours. People liked what I painted and I could sell them for a couple of quid now and again. At least, I could before the miners’ strike in 1984, when folk still had money for luxuries.
One afternoon in September 1983, I came off the day shift and the light was amazing, so I took my paints up on the cliffs on the far side of the village. I was painting a view of the sea though the tree trunks. The water looked luminous, I can still remember how it looked too beautiful to be real. Anyway, I was totally into what I was doing, not paying attention to anything else. And suddenly this voice said, ‘You’re really good.’
And the thing that got me right away was that she didn’t sound surprised. I was used to folk being amazed that a miner could paint a beautiful landscape. Like it was a monkey doing it or something. But not her. Not Catriona. Right from that first moment, she spoke to me like I was on an equal footing to her.
I just about shat myself, mind. I thought I was all alone, and suddenly somebody right next to me was speaking to me. She saw how freaked out I was and she laughed and said she was sorry to disturb me. By then, I’d noticed she was bloody gorgeous. Hair black as a jackdaw’s wing, bone structure like it had been carved with a flawless chisel. Eyes set deep so you’d have to get right up close to be sure of the colour (blue like denim, by the way) and a big smile that could wipe out the sun. You look so like her sometimes it catches my heart and makes me want to cry like a bairn.
So there I am in the woods, face to face with this amazing creature and I can’t find a word to say. She stuck her hand out and said, ‘I’m Catriona Grant.’ I practically choked myself clearing my throat so I could tell her my name. She said she was an artist too, a sculptor in glass. I was even more amazed then. The only other artist I’d ever met was the woman who took the painting classes, and she was no great shakes. But I just knew Catriona would live up to the job description. She walked about with this ring of confidence, the sort of thing you only have when you’re the real thing. But I’m running ahead of myself again.
Anyway, we talked a bit about the kind of work we were interested in making, and we got along pretty well. Me, I was just grateful to have anybody to talk to about art. I’d not seen much art in the flesh, so to speak, just what they had at Kirkcaldy Art Gallery. But it turns out they had some pretty good stuff there, which maybe helped me a bit in the early days.
Catriona told me she had a studio and a cottage on the main road and told me to come round and see her set-up. Then she went on her way and I felt like the light had gone out of the day.
It took me a couple of weeks to build up to going to see her studio. It wasn’t hard to get to - only a couple of miles through the woods - but I wasn’t sure if she really meant me to come or if she was just being polite. Shows how little I knew her back then! Catriona never said anything she didn’t mean. And by the same token, she never held back when she had something to say.
I went across to see her one day when it was raining and I couldn’t get painting. Her cottage was an old gatehouse on the Wemyss estate. It was no bigger than the house I was living in with my wife and kid, but she’d painted it in vibrant colours that made the rooms feel big and sunny even on a miserable grey day. But best of all was the studio and gallery she had out the back. A big glass kiln and plenty of working space, and at the other end, display shelves where people could come and buy. Her work was beautiful. Smooth, rounded lines. Very sensual shapes. And amazing colours. I’d never seen glass like it and even here in Italy you’d be hard pressed to find colours so rich and intense. The glass seemed to be on fire with different colours. You wanted to pick it up and hold it close to you. I wish I had a piece of hers but I never thought I’d need part of her until it was too late. Ma
ybe one day you’ll be able to track down something she made and then you’ll understand the power of her work.
It was a good afternoon. She made me coffee, proper coffee like you didn’t find much in Scotland back then. I had to put extra sugar in, it tasted funny to me at first. And we talked. I couldn’t believe the way we talked. Everything under the sun, or so it seemed. It was obvious from the first time she opened her mouth that day in the woods that she was a different class from me, but that afternoon it didn’t seem to make a lot of difference.
We arranged to meet again at the studio a few days later. I don’t think either of us had any notion that there might be risks in what we were doing. But we were playing with fire. Neither of us had anybody else in our lives that we could talk to the way we could talk to each other. We were young - I was 28 and she was 24, but back then we were a lot more innocent than you and your friends at the same age. And from the very first moment we met, there was electricity between us.
I know you don’t want to think about your mum and dad being in love and all that goes with it, so I won’t trouble you with the details. All I will say is we became lovers soon enough and I think for both of us it was like coming out into bright sunlight after you’ve been used to electric lights. We were daft about each other.
And of course it was impossible. I learned soon enough the truth about your mother. She wasn’t just any nice middle-class lassie. She wasn’t just plain Catriona Grant. She was the daughter of a man called Sir Broderick Maclennan Grant. It’s a name that everybody in Scotland knows, like everybody in Italy knows Silvio Berlusconi. Grant is a builder and developer. Everywhere you go in Scotland, you see his company’s name on cranes and hoardings. Plus he owns chunks of things like radio stations and a football club and a whisky distillery and a haulage company and a chain of leisure centres. He’s a bully as well. He tried to stop Catriona becoming a sculptor. Everything she did, she did in spite of him. He would never have stood for her having a relationship with someone as common as a miner. Never mind a miner who was married to somebody else.
And yes, I was married to somebody else. I’m not trying to excuse myself. I never meant to be a cheating bastard, but Catriona swept me off my feet. I never felt that way about anybody before or since. You might have noticed I’ve never been one for girlfriends. The thing is that nobody could ever match up to Catriona. The way she made me feel, I don’t think anybody else could do that.
And then she fell pregnant with you. You see, son, you’re not Gabriel Porteous. You’re really Adam Maclennan Grant. Or Adam Prentice, if you prefer that.
When that happened, I would have left my wife for Catriona, no question. I wanted to and I told her so. But she wasn’t long out of a relationship that had been going for years, on and off. She wasn’t ready to live with me and she wasn’t ready for another fight with her father. I don’t think anybody even suspected we knew each other. We were careful. I always came and went through the woods, and everybody knew I was a painter, so nobody paid any attention to me wandering about.
So we agreed to keep things as they were. Most days we saw each other, even if it was only for twenty minutes or so. And once you were born, I spent as much time with the two of you as I could. By then, I was on strike so I didn’t have work to keep me from you.
I’m not going to do your head in by telling you all about the year-long miners’ strike that broke the union and the spirits of the men. There’s plenty of books about it. Go and read David Peace’s GB84if you want an idea of what it was like. Or get the DVD of Billy Elliot. All you need to know is that every week that passed made me long for something different, some life where the three of us could be together.
By the time you were a few months old, Catriona had changed her mind too. She wanted us to be together. A fresh start somewhere nobody knew us. The big problem was that we had no money. Catriona was making a pretty bare living from her glass work and I wasn’t working at all because of the strike. She could only afford her cottage and studio because her mother paid the rent. That was a kind of bribe, to get Catriona to stay near at hand. So we knew her mum wouldn’t be paying for us to set up home anyplace else. We couldn’t stay put either. Me walking out on my wife and daughter at the height of the strike to go and live with somebody from the bosses’ class would have been seen as worse than being a scab. They’d have put bricks through our windows. So without a bit of money to get us started, we were screwed.
Then Catriona had this idea. The first time she mentioned it, I thought she’d lost her mind. But the more she talked about it, the more she convinced me it would work. The idea was that we’d fake a kidnap. I’d walk out on my family, make it look like I’d gone scabbing, and hide at Catriona’s. A few weeks later, you and Catriona would disappear and her father would get a ransom note. Everybody would think you’d been kidnapped. We knew her father would pay the ransom, if not for her then for you. I would take the money, you and Catriona would go back, then a few weeks later, Catriona would take you away, saying she was too upset by the kidnapping to carry on living there. And we’d all meet up and start our life together.
It sounds simple when you say it fast. But it got complicated, and things went to shit. As it turns out, your mother couldn’t have had a worse idea if she’d spent her whole life working on it.
The first thing we realized when we started making the detailed plans was that we couldn’t do it with just two of us. We needed an extra pair of hands. Can you imagine trying to find somebody we could trust to join in with a plan like that? I didn’t know anybody who would be mad enough to join us, but Catriona did. One of her old pals from the College of Art in Edinburgh, a guy called Toby Inglis. One of those upper-class mad bastards who are up for anything. You’ve always known him as Matthias, the puppeteer. The man who will have given you this letter. And he’s still a mad bastard, by the way.
He had the bright idea of making the kidnapping look like a political act. He came up with these posters of a sinister puppeteer with his marionettes and used them to deliver the ransom notes as if they were from some anarchist group. It was a good idea. It would have been a better idea if he’d destroyed the screen he used to print them, but Toby’s always thought he was one degree smarter than everybody else. So he kept the screen and he still uses that same poster sometimes for special performances. Every time I see it, my bowels turn to water. All it would take is one person to recognize where it comes from and we’d have found ourselves up to our necks in it.
But I’m getting ahead of myself again. I really wasn’t sure whether I should tell you all of this, and Toby thought maybe it would be better to let sleeping dogs lie, especially since you’ll be having to cope with me not being around any more. But the more I thought about it, the more it seemed to me that you have a right to know the whole truth, even if it’s hard for you to deal with. Just remember the years we’ve had together. Remember the good stuff, it’s what redeems all the crap I did. At least, I hope that’s how it works.
A very bad thing happened the night I left my wife and daughter. I walked out in the morning without saying anything about leaving. I’d heard there was a bunch of scabs going down to Nottingham that night and I figured everybody would think I’d gone with them. I went straight round to Catriona’s and I spent the day looking after you while she was working. It was bloody cold that day, and we were going through a lot of wood. After dark, I went out to chop some more logs.
This is hard for me. I haven’t talked about this for twenty-two years and still it haunts me. When I was growing up, I had two pals. Like you and Enzo and Sandro. One of them, Andy Kerr, had become a union official. The strike was hard on him and he was off work with depression. He lived in a cottage in the woods about three miles west of Catriona’s place. He loved natural history, and he used to walk the woods at night so he could watch badgers and owls and that kind of thing. I loved him like a brother.
I was chopping the wood when he came round the end of the workshop. I don’t know
who got the bigger shock. He asked what the hell I was doing, chopping wood for Catriona Maclennan Grant. Then he twigged. And he lost it. He came at me like a madman. I dropped the axe and we fought like stupid wee boys.
The fight’s all a bit of a blur to me. The next thing I remember is Andy just stopping. Collapsing into me so I had to put my arms round him to stop him falling. I just stared at him. I couldn’t make sense of it. Then I saw Catriona standing behind him holding the axe. She’d hit him with the blunt end,