by Jane Renshaw
It smelt of the earth and the snow.
He swiped a handful of snow round the inside of one of the buckets and shook it out. Then he attached the rope to its handle with a clip and lowered the bucket.
‘Is the water drinkable?’
‘We can boil it if you like, but yes.’
‘And where do we, um... If there’s no running water, what about – I kind of need to...’
‘Outside loo behind the shed. It’s an earth closet. There’s a bucket of earth and ashes next to the toilet – just chuck some of that down on top. I’ll give you a bucket of water to wash with.’
The earth closet was an experience she wasn’t keen to get used to. When she returned inside she found the fire in the range roaring, and the room not quite as cold as when they’d left it. There were sheets and a blanket and a quilt hanging from a pulley she hadn’t noticed before, just in front of the range. On the table was a tub of hot chocolate powder with two mugs and a spoon.
‘A hot drink, a bit of kip and a late breakfast,’ he said. ‘But I’m afraid we’ll have to wait a while for the kettle to boil.
‘I’m not sleeping with you. In any sense of the word.’
He grinned. ‘You’re banishing me to the frozen wastes of the upstairs bedrooms?’
‘I’m sure you’ll survive.’ She sat down at the table. ‘And now you can tell me exactly what you were doing at Drumdargie Castle.’
‘You really want to know?’ He took a seat opposite her.
The shadowed room, the soft glow from the fire and the oil lamp, the smell of old wood and musty old fabrics – she might indeed have been transported back in time. He could have been a character from a tale not by Byron but by Robert Louis Stevenson, sitting there looking at her with his dark eyes shining.
A rogue.
An outlaw.
A pirate.
‘You’re not going to tell me.’
‘Of course not. In fact, I can’t tell you.’ That form of words scrabbled at her memory. He had said something similar to her before, in different circumstances, but for the life of her she couldn’t remember when. Why did she feel it was important?
It wasn’t. He couldn’t tell her because she was a cop and he was a criminal.
It was as simple as that.
‘Thank you,’ he said, ‘for what you did tonight.’
She grimaced. ‘For setting a trap for you?’
‘For springing it. At the expense of your career and even your freedom, potentially... You had won. You had me, bang to rights, and I’ve no complaints about that. We had agreed, hadn’t we, on the rules of engagement? You played by the rules, and you won, and yet you –’
‘I don’t know why I did it,’ she snapped. ‘Okay? So don’t ask me why.’
He sat back, smiling slightly. ‘All right.’
The arrogant, self-satisfied bastard.
Eventually the kettle boiled and he made the hot chocolate and they drank it sitting in front of the range, on two kitchen chairs drawn close to the fire. His knee was almost touching hers. Almost, but not quite.
‘I’ve arranged to rendezvous with Gavin in two days’ time to touch base,’ he said eventually. ‘Half way back up the track.’
They had given Gavin their phones, just in case her colleagues were tracking them, so had no way of contacting anyone in the outside world. Conveniently for Hector, if she were to have a crisis of conscience, there was no possibility of contacting Phil or DCI Stewart.
‘Meanwhile, I thought we could pool our information, such as it is.’ He grimaced. ‘Typical of the Twat to contrive to get himself murdered. It’s not as if I greatly care who did it, but we need to know. There’s no other way I can see of exonerating ourselves.’
‘How can we possibly do that?’
‘You’re a police officer. This is your bread and butter, surely? Crime detection?’
She gave him a look, and he laughed suddenly, and, in spite of herself, in spite of everything, she couldn’t not smile. ‘Okay, Mr Forbes. Interview commencing at –’ She squinted at her watch in the soft light from the oil lamp. ‘Four-forty-two a.m.’ She sobered, examining what she could see of his face in the gloom. ‘If you didn’t do it, who do you think killed the Twat?’
‘Not very professional or respectful, is it, to refer to the murder victim –’
‘Do you know who killed Max Weber?’
‘No.’
He was absolutely infuriating. ‘We’ve established that it must have been premeditated, with the electricity having been cut off. They must have arranged to meet him there, I suppose, rather than just happening to call in by chance and being provoked to murder him there and then.’
‘I don’t think chance had anything to do with it, no.’
‘So who could have done it?’
‘I’ve no idea.’
She sighed. ‘What do you know about John Innes’s death?’
He leant forward to the coal bucket by the range and used the little shovel to add coal to the fire. ‘I don’t know who killed him, either.’
‘That’s not what I asked you. Did you know he was a cop?’
He chucked the shovel back in the bucket with a clang. ‘Yes.’
She breathed out. ‘Okay...’
‘He told me he had evidence of drug-dealing against someone, but he wasn’t a hundred per cent sure of it. He wanted to give this person a chance to explain themselves. Presumably that was his big mistake.’
She digested this for a moment. ‘So he told you he was a cop, out of the blue? He just blurted it out, like – like I did?’
‘Damian got it out of him. He’d roped Mick and Chimp into helping him construct a hide, for watching a pair of ospreys that have been nesting in a pine on the other side of the hill behind the House. Chimp – John – was a bit of a wildlife nut himself. After they’d finished the hide, he and Damian spent an hour or so most days in there watching the ospreys. You may have noticed that Damian has something of a talent for weaselling information out of people... Chimp let something slip and I suppose ended up having to admit that he was an undercover cop charged with obtaining information against me.’
She couldn’t help smiling. ‘Oh God.’
‘Damian brought him to see me like a teacher bringing a naughty kid to the headmaster’s office.’
‘And you came to an arrangement with Chimp like the one you came to with me?’
‘Not quite like our arrangement, no. Actually, Chimp wanted out. He didn’t want to be a cop any more. He’d slotted in here pretty well, he’d made friends, he –’
‘He’d gone native.’
‘If you like.’
For a while neither of them spoke. She thought of Chimp, the man she’d never known but come to understand, she thought, a little. Someone without family, without roots, finding himself here, back in his own country, in this beautiful place, finding himself accepted, building hides to watch ospreys, sitting in the pub with his mates eating a bar supper and watching the football...
Only he’d never made it, that last day. He’d never made it to the pub and the football and his mates.
He’d ended up dead in a pond.
When it came to it, she found herself offering to share the box bed in the kitchen with Hector: ‘As long as there’s no funny business.’ She kept all her clothes on, snuggling under the still slightly damp sheet and blanket and quilt in the space between the wall and the long length of his body. He’d given her a ‘piggie’, a big stoneware hot water bottle with a stopper on the side and a knob on the end like a pig’s snout, wrapped in a towel, which she was hugging to herself.
She couldn’t sleep.
What had she done?
This wasn’t an epic Byron poem or a Robert Louis Stevenson story. She wasn’t a child on some thrilling adventure. She was an adult who would have to go back out into the world and face all the shocked and disappointed faces. Would she go to prison? What would her family say? Mum would make excuses for her – in Mum�
�s eyes, Claire, Gabby and David could do no wrong. But Dad, with his strict moral code, would be horrified. She had always been the responsible eldest child, the one he could count on to do the right thing. And Grannie. Grannie would be so disappointed in her. Wouldn’t she? Or would she get it? Her highest praise for a man was that he had ‘something about him’, and Hector certainly –
But that didn’t mean Grannie would condone what Claire had done.
How could anyone condone it?
And now she couldn’t stop the tears coming. She tried to muffle the sound with the sheet, her arms around herself, but then she felt his arm on top of hers, the reassuring weight of it pulling her back against his chest, and she was breathing in the tang of his skin, and he was saying, ‘We might not come out of this smelling of roses – bathing facilities are what you might call primitive – but I’m damned if I’m getting banged up for something I didn’t do. And I’m damned if you’ll suffer for it either. We’re not done yet.’
He moved the tips of his fingers over the back of her hand. It was incredibly soothing.
But she didn’t want to be soothed.
And certainly not by him.
She sat up, wrenching away. ‘Please don’t touch me.’
‘Sorry.’ The mattress depressed as he moved. ‘I’ll go upstairs.’
‘No,’ she said at once. She turned to face him. But in the glow from the fire, she could see that he had his back to her; he was sitting on the edge of the bed, about to get up. ‘You don’t have to do that. I don’t want you to do that. Please stay. But just...’
‘No touching.’ He turned his head to look at her. ‘Okay. If that’s what you want.’
It’s not what I want!
‘Yes.’
He got up to shovel more coal onto the fire, then came back into the bed, taking ridiculous pains, as he swung his legs up under the covers, to keep a few inches between them at all times.
‘If you moved further back against the wall,’ he said, ‘it would make things easier.’
‘I didn’t literally mean no touching. Obviously, in a bed this size, there’s going to be...’
‘Inadvertent contact.’
They were face to face, now, on the pillows. As the fire flared, she could make out the line of his temple, his cheek...
‘I don’t know what I’m going to do,’ she whispered, ‘if I can’t be a police officer.’
She could sense his smile. ‘Let’s not throw in the towel just yet. But would it really be the end of the world, if you had to do something else?’
‘Yes. I need to be in law enforcement. I need to... to be doing my bit, to make the world a safer place; to bring people to account.’
‘There are other ways of bringing people to account, other than being a police officer.’
She sighed.
‘You have an admirably altruistic attitude,’ he added.
‘No!’ she blurted. ‘There’s nothing admirable about it! I...’ Oh God. ‘I have to do it, because I... I need to make amends.’
He waited.
No. She couldn’t tell him about Dawn. She’d never confessed the truth to anyone except Grannie. Instead:
‘In my last job... There were two of us, Matt and me, undercover in the East End. He was posing as a drug supplier, selling wholesale to an OCG –’ She’d been about to explain that OCG stood for organised crime group, but of course he would know that. ‘I was posing as his girlfriend. The idea was to set up the boss of this gang, to sell him drugs in a reverse “buy and bust” operation... instead of the UCs buying drugs from the perps, we were offering to supply them, wholesale, undercutting our competitors. But what we were really after was a collar for murder. This gang was known to have carried out – or to have had carried out – at least six killings. But the witnesses, such as there weren’t, wouldn’t give evidence. The gang boss was a horrendous man – Kev Bristow. A musclebound thug who saw women as things to be possessed. He made a move on me, as we’d hoped, and I agreed to meet him at a fancy restaurant for dinner. The idea was that I’d get him drunk and boasting about the murders. I was wearing a wire and had back-up waiting in the kitchens. The code word to summon them was ‘Maserati’. During the meal I began to feel weird – light-headed and sleepy. I was pretty sure he’d slipped me Rohipnol or something but I was determined I could fight it, I could keep him talking until he admitted something and then I’d scream ‘Maserati’... The next thing I know, I’m in the back of a van. Then it’s a blank until I’m stumbling along outside the nick...’ She swallowed. ‘In a clown’s outfit.’
A big red and white all-in-one suit and massive, floppy yellow shoes that made it almost impossible to walk. Someone had painted a big clown’s smile on her face, and a single clown’s tear on her cheek.
He didn’t laugh.
She was pretty sure he wasn’t even smiling.
‘Christ,’ was all he said.
‘Total humiliation. Made all the worse, of course, because it was so comical.’
‘He realised you were wearing a wire?’
‘Must have done. But I’ve no idea how. And not only did we have nothing on him for the murders, the reverse buy-and-bust was a write-off too. Six months of work down the toilet. This... This job was my last chance saloon.’
‘I see.’
‘Got any clown costumes?’
‘If anyone’s in the running for clown of the year, I don’t think it’s you. I’m sorry about the balls-up. But I’m hopeful that things may yet work out satisfactorily.’
For a while there was silence, apart from an occasional crack from the fire in the range, the occasional settling sound as the coals moved.
‘That’s not what you meant, is it?’ he said at last. ‘You don’t have to tell me,’ he added at once.
A long silence. And then:
‘Dawn,’ she said. ‘Her name was Dawn.’
And she found herself pouring it all out as he lay there beside her, silently listening. She told him how Lena and the other mean girls at school had called her The Hulk and made her life a misery, and how she’d used her chameleon skills to make herself disappear in a crowd.
‘I hated myself. I hated my body. A good day was when no one noticed me. Then, in the summer before I started sixth form, I took up running and put myself on a starvation diet. When I went back to school in the autumn, everything changed.’
Lena had pushed into the lunchtime queue next to her and pronounced, ‘Wow, Claire, looking good.’ After they’d chosen their salads, Lena had guided her to a table occupied by a loud, laughing group of girls trading gossip and giving boys marks out of ten. It had been the first time that Claire had used her chameleon skills not to avoid the mean girls but to copy them, mirror them, be one of them. She’d strutted with them to their next class, copying their body language, head up, confident, marching along the corridors in a straight line so everyone else had to get out of their way.
It had felt so good.
People treated her like she mattered when she did her mean girl act. Boys who never used to give her the time of day wanted to talk to her. Several asked her out, and she took great pleasure in knocking them back. She developed a great line in put-downs, much to the delight of the other girls.
And then Dawn had started hanging around the group.
‘She talked and talked and talked,’ Claire told Hector. ‘But it was so banal and dull – she could go on for five minutes about whether it was Monday or Tuesday she’d been to the dentist – “It was Tuesday. No, it must have been Monday, because that was the day I was meant to hand in my English essay and I knew I was going to have an extra day to do it because I was going to the dentist...” In hindsight there was something... manic about her chatter, something off. But at the time, none of us picked that up. I started referring to her as Yawn, behind her back, and the other girls latched onto it.’ She moved onto her back so she wasn’t facing him any more. ‘It didn’t feel like bullying, because she was so brash. So confident. She
was the one coming to us, trying to join in when we didn’t want her. She followed us everywhere. She even followed me one day to my house.’
Hector said, ‘I think I know where this is going.’
‘No. You don’t.’ Claire took a breath. ‘We had a few basic tactics to exclude her. If we were sitting together, we would ‘circle the wagons’ as Lena put it, each of us moving a little, subtly turning our backs on Dawn when she tried to nose in. Not telling her if we had a group outing arranged, that sort of thing. But nothing worked. She had such a thick skin – or so we thought. Then one night, there was a party at Lena’s house. Dawn hadn’t been invited, of course, but she turned up, and Lena lost it. Told her no one wanted her around, that she was the most boring girl on the planet. Nobody liked her and she was a pain in the arse and couldn’t say anything interesting if her life depended on it. “We call you Yawn!” And everyone was chanting it. “Yawn Yawn Yawn!” People were pretending to yawn, staggering about and keeling over as if it was just too much of an effort staying awake around her.’ She stopped, staring at the faint flicker of firelight on the ceiling.
‘What happened?’
‘She killed herself. Drank toilet cleaner. Her mum found her, the next morning. She was already dead. There was nothing they could do.’
She sat up, abruptly, in the bed.
She couldn’t look at him.
‘There were no consequences, for any of us. We weren’t even questioned by the police. Her parents didn’t know, I suppose, what had been going on. We got away with it.’
She put her hands over her face.
‘Hmm,’ he said. ‘Sounds like Dawn was a bit of a nutter.’
She dropped her hands; turned and stared at him. Whatever reaction she’d expected, it wasn’t this. ‘Even if she had been a “nutter”, which she wasn’t –’
‘Okay: sounds like she had “mental health issues”, which were nothing to do with you, or Lena, or anyone else. They were probably at the root of what made her such a nightmare in the first place. The way you all behaved towards her could be looked on as an effect rather than the cause of her problems.’