The Sweetest Poison

by Jane Renshaw

  Helen said, ‘So now you know Rob killed her.’

  DS Stewart flicked another look at Mum.

  They’d found Rob’s car a week ago, up a forestry track on the Hill of Saughs. And it was all round the parish that Caroline Beattie wasn’t speaking to her husband after he’d told the police that Rob’s bike was missing from their shed.

  Officially the police were still dealing with a double missing persons inquiry, but unofficially it was obvious they were assuming Suzanne was dead and Rob had killed her, although DS Stewart said that, given the state everyone had been in, it may well have been ‘unintended’. They were ‘keeping an open mind’ about what had happened, and urging Rob to come forward.

  But it was obvious what had happened.

  Rob must have driven up to the Knock, left his car some distance from the other vehicles, and sneaked up the path. He’d watched them all from the trees, waiting his chance.

  His chance to get Helen.

  Maybe he hadn’t meant to kill Suzanne. But he had killed her. He’d attacked Helen and killed Suzanne, and carried her down to his car, and put her in the boot. They hadn’t found any traces in there, so he must have wrapped her in something – a tarpaulin from one of the Land Rovers, maybe.

  He could have taken her anywhere. Maybe he drove up to Fintry Moss, to the end of one of the tracks up there, and carried her to one of the high lochans. Suzanne was just little. He could have carried her for miles. And then opened out the tarpaulin, got some heavy rocks, tied everything together with binder twine and thrown her into the water.

  Police divers had been up there and found nothing. But there were hundreds of lochans. And hundreds of square miles of hillside. He could have buried her. Dug a hole in the peaty soil, packed the earth in on top of her.

  Once he’d got rid of her he’d driven to Kirkton, got his bike from the shed and put it in the boot, driven up the Hill of Saughs, abandoned the car, cycled off. Disappeared.

  There was a police car permanently stationed in the yard outside, in case Rob came ‘in about’, as Uncle Jim put it, trying to attack Helen again – although DS Stewart had said the chances were he was hundreds of miles away by now. They had no real reason to think he’d come to the Parks, but just in case…

  Helen knew she should be scared, but all she could think of was Suzanne. How could Suzanne be dead? How was that possible?

  Mum, though, was going spare. She was insisting they put forward their plans to leave, to move to Auntie Anne’s. Probably a good idea. But Helen couldn’t make herself care about that either.

  DS Stewart rubbed the big knuckle of his thumb under his chin. ‘The other thing we have to tell you – the blood found around the gear stick in Rob Beattie’s car is his. Not Suzanne’s. Its DNA fingerprint matches hairs obtained from Rob’s room.’

  ‘So he was hurt,’ said Mum. ‘I can imagine how Caroline Beattie’s interpreting that.’

  DS Stewart didn’t say anything, but his lips twitched in a grimace.

  Mrs Beattie had taken a mad turn, Norrie said, joining in the search each day in Wellingtons and a boiler suit – but making it clear she was looking not for Suzanne’s body but for Rob’s. She’d done an interview with a reporter from a tabloid, going on about how Suzanne had a police record and was always in trouble, while Rob was a lovely boy, leader of the Youth Fellowship and volunteer at an old people’s home; a boy who was ‘incapable of violence.’ Helen’s story of him attacking her must be a mistake. There’d been a photo of Mrs Beattie looking awful, and under it: ‘Caroline Beattie: fears for “caring” son.’

  Pamela opened the briefcase they’d brought – one of those solid black ones – and began lifting sheets of paper in clear plastic out onto the table.

  ‘There’s something else,’ Helen said. ‘The day before – before it happened, Rob told me this stupid riddle. He said Mrs Robertson at The Pines told him it, but I’ve been to see her and she didn’t.’

  DS Stewart raised his eyebrows.

  ‘I’ve written it down.’ She pushed the sheet of paper across the table, and read it again, upside down, as he looked at it:

  I am a garden of delights

  I am a wasteland frozen.

  I am the dagger in the night

  I am the sweetest poison.

  What am I?

  ‘The answer’s obvious,’ she said. ‘The dagger in the night... It’s him. The answer’s Rob. It must be. This shows he was planning it, doesn’t it? He was planning to bring a knife and... And attack me.’

  ‘Well. Thank you, Helen. Anything like this you can remember is useful. It all helps us to build up a picture of what might have happened.’

  Helen made her voice uncertain. ‘And I’ve been wondering... about Suzanne’s bruises.’

  Pamela stopped rummaging in the case and pulled her notebook towards her.

  ‘Bruises,’ said DS Stewart.

  ‘She had bruises on her back. Maybe Rob made them.’

  ‘When did you see these bruises?’

  ‘That night. The night of the party.’ And she told them, too, about the cats.

  When she’d finished, the police officers exchanged glances. DS Stewart blew out his cheeks.

  And then she was in Mum’s arms, and Mum was saying, ‘I know, I know,’ and Helen was choking: ‘Why didn’t you listen, when I told you about Fergus?’

  ‘I should have listened.’

  ‘When something like this happens,’ said DS Stewart, ‘a lot of things, in retrospect, can take on a sinister cast. We’ve one woman who’s convinced Rob Beattie stole a statue of Pan from her garden.’

  He meant it kindly. He meant to make them smile.

  But Helen pushed away from Mum and glared across the table at him. ‘Well maybe he did.’

  Mum rubbed her back; pressed a tissue into her hand.

  DS Stewart said, ‘Would you like to leave the rest of this for another time?’

  ‘No.’

  He looked at Pamela, who said, ‘We’ve had the note you thought was written by Hector Forbes analysed by a graphologist, and it seems he was telling the truth, about this at least. It’s not his handwriting.’ She pushed one of the plastic-covered sheets of paper across the table. The words leapt at her:

  Meet me at the Land Rover – the one I was driving – at the stroke of midnight!

  ‘And he claims not to have written any letters to you either, except one – after your father died. The letter you said you lost.’

  It was as if all the blood in her body was draining away through the soles of her feet. She couldn’t speak.

  ‘And the graphologist confirms it. He didn’t write them.’ She handed Helen another sheet of paper inside plastic. It was a page from one of Hector’s letters, which the police had taken to have analysed:

  ... Never enough of course, and we have to... The same one as I remember, but... If you’re worried about...

  Stupidly, she said: ‘But they’re from Hector.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Pamela said. ‘They aren’t. The PO Box number you wrote to – it’s nothing to do with the Gordon Highlanders. It’s rented in the name of Brian Smith, and was paid for every month in cash by a young man whose description matches –’

  ‘Rob,’ said Helen.

  She wanted to snatch the letter up, away from everyone.

  Stupid.

  The ‘Hector’ who’d written those words, the ‘Hector’ she’d loved... He hadn’t even existed. No – he had existed, but he’d been a monster.

  He’d been Rob Beattie.

  The sweetest poison.

  Rob must know that she’d tried to poison him, and all these years he’d been biding his time –

  ‘He wrote them,’ she said. ‘Rob.’

  ‘No,’ said DS Stewart. ‘The graphologist thinks it was Suzanne.’

  Mum moved in her chair, and made a little sound in her throat.

  Helen shook her head.

  ‘There are certain “tells”, apparently, that leak out, e
ven when you’re copying someone else’s writing –’

  ‘He made her, then. He must have made her.’

  ‘It’s certainly a possibility. His dyslexia would mean he’d be unable, probably, to copy someone else’s writing himself.’

  ‘But how could they?’ This couldn’t be right. ‘There were things in those letters that Rob... Suzanne... couldn’t have known... Like the party on the Knock. In his last letter, he talked about the party he’d organised on the Knock, and Suzanne and Rob didn’t know about that until days later – until the actual day of the party. So they couldn’t have written that letter!’

  ‘We understand,’ said DS Stewart, ‘that Suzanne learnt about the party some days in advance from Malcolm Kerr. Hector Forbes had been in touch with him about the party, and the Kerr boy mentioned it to Suzanne when he bumped into her one day in Kirkton of Glass.’

  ‘But why write them?’ asked Mum, tightly. ‘Was it just a cruel joke, or was Rob planning some sort of – attack on Helen all along?’ She shook her head. ‘Rob. Of all people...’

  ‘Aye, well,’ said DS Stewart. ‘Lot of teenage boys go through a wild stage – in most cases, of course, it –’

  Helen jumped up. Her chair crashed back onto the flagstone floor. ‘At the Knock... He got Suzanne to write that note so he could –’

  Mum had stood too. She had an arm round Helen. Pamela righted the chair, and they eased her back into it. There were grey splotches over everything. She blinked.

  ‘Suzanne tried to warn me.’ She laced her fingers together on the table to stop them shaking, pressing down on them with her thumbs. ‘She said I should be careful, with Hector... And all the time she was talking about Rob. Not Hector. Rob.’

  Suzanne must have come after her down the path. And when Rob... She must have tried to stop him. And that was why she was dead.

  She closed her eyes, and opened them again, and stared across the table at DS Stewart. ‘Oh God,’ she said. ‘Oh God – I...’

  ‘What?’ said Pamela.

  ‘I remember... I remember Suzanne...’

  ‘What?’ said DS Stewart.

  ‘Suzanne was there – she grabbed Rob, she tried to stop him hitting me, and he punched her – he punched her... and she wasn’t moving...’

  That was what happened.

  It must have been.

  14

  It was a day like any other. The sun fell across the windowsill like it had yesterday morning, like it would tomorrow. She put her palm flat on the warm ledge and looked out across the yard and down the track to where it kinked across the burn. Then she turned and slowly walked right round the room, trailing her hand on the wall like a blind person, and thinking, stupidly:

  Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye.

  Stupid because it was just walls, a little metal fireplace, a window, an old hook on the back of the door.

  ‘Helen?’ Mum called from downstairs.

  ‘Coming.’

  In the kitchen Mum was standing in the middle of the room, like a visitor.

  ‘Right, I think that’s everything.’

  Their steps sounded too loud as they walked across the empty room, and Helen put her hand on the doorknob and opened the door and went through and out into the yard like she’d done all her life.

  And now she was looking across the yard at the byre tap, set into the stone, a huge old thing, green where the copper had tarnished. She and Suzanne used to shove their fingers up it to make the water spurt out at each other. But the person doing the spurting always got just as wet as the one being spurted.

  And – how daft was this? – she wanted to pull the tap off the pipe and put it in her bag.

  ‘Eh me,’ said Uncle Jim, on an indrawn breath.

  She wasn’t going to cry. She got in to the back of Uncle Jim’s car and Mum got in the front.

  No Auntie Ina. Someone had phoned up and said they’d seen Suzanne in Newcastle, and Auntie Ina had got the next train down there.

  If I could go back, I would, Helen wanted to scream into the air, all the way to Newcastle. If she could go back... if she could have seen that of course Hector Forbes wouldn’t write those things to her, of course he wouldn’t love her – If she could go back even further than that, if she could stop her eight-year-old self putting laburnum seeds in that sandwich –

  Then Suzanne wouldn’t have died saving her life.

  She shouldn’t be leaving. She should be staying, she should be helping. Or trying to. But Dr King, the psychiatrist they’d made her see, had told Mum that the best thing would be for Helen to get away, to go to Edinburgh as planned. And Helen hadn’t argued about it.

  Because she wanted to go. To be somewhere people didn’t know who she was.

  To be somewhere Rob couldn’t find her. Somewhere there were plenty of people, if he did.

  Selfish as she was, she’d started to worry about that. To be scared. She’d started imagining she heard him, at night, sneaking through the garden and in at the front door and up the stairs while the policemen dozed, oblivious, in the car out the back.

  She wanted away.

  In eight months Hector would be out of prison and then – what could she say to him? What could she say to anyone?

  Norrie had told her what had happened at the hospital. While she was being treated, the police had taken Hector away, and Norrie and Steve and Fiona and Fish had been left in a waiting room. Fiona had wanted them to lie about the drugs at the party, and tried to get Steve to say he was driving – he hadn’t taken any drugs and hadn’t drunk as much as Hector, so the police wouldn’t come down on him so hard – and when Steve said he wouldn’t, she’d started on Norrie. ‘You know what like she is,’ Norrie had said, and admitted he was on the point of agreeing when Steve had gone mental, shouting over Fiona, shouting that they all had to tell the police the truth about everything, because it might help them work out what had happened to Suzanne, and wasn’t that a bit more important than whether or not Hector got his just desserts? And Fiona had shouted back that Steve was just a coward, and in his place Hector wouldn’t have hesitated to take the rap for him.

  Now Fiona and Steve had split up, and Steve had gone back to Paisley.

  Jennifer Gordon had sold her story to the Daily Express.

  Hector had written Helen a letter, but she hadn’t read it. She’d thrown it on the fire and watched the black spread over the envelope, over the Helen in his neat sloping writing.

  Uncle Jim turned the key in the ignition and the car rolled down from the yard onto the track. Helen said, ‘Stop! Can you stop a second?’ and pushed open her door.

  The ditch at the side of the track was a late-summer tangle of long, dry grass and nettles and brambles, the tight fruit starting to form. No campion flowers, not at this time of year, but there was a mauve pom-pom of scabious down amongst the grass. She snapped its stem and took it back with her into the car, setting it on her lap and watching it, during the three-hour drive south, wilt and curl in the sticky heat.

  When she was twenty-three

  15

  It couldn’t be him.

  Hector.

  Could it?

  Standing by the bar, dark hair slightly tousled, handsome face slightly flushed. Looking straight at her.

  Hector was in South America.

  It’s just some random person.

  The lighting was bad. She couldn’t see his face properly. It was just some random person who looked a bit like Hector.

  Then someone moved between them and she couldn’t see him at all. And Martin leant over the table, his blond curls still damp from the rain, and said, ‘Helen? Are you OK?’

  She was hemmed in by Gabby on one side and Dave on the other. They were all squished up on the U-shaped bench round the table, fleece- and wool-clad arms pressed companionably against each other, coats and scarves and gloves and bags in a pile on the windowsill over their alcove. Safe from thieving hands. On the darkened panes the rain dripped and ran, distorting the yellow streetlights
and the white rectangles of the windows in the building opposite.

  It’s just some random person.

  How many times had that thought looped through her head when she got a glimpse of Suzanne’s back in the street ahead of her, Suzanne’s hand reaching to a shelf in the supermarket, Suzanne’s darting way of moving through a crowd?

  But still her heart would leap. Maybe those medieval philosophers were right, and the heart really did have its own consciousness. It was as if her brain knew that Suzanne was dead, but her heart wasn’t so sure. Her heart reckoned that if Suzanne was anywhere she’d be in London, maybe with Rob; maybe the two of them had set the whole thing up as a big sick joke. Or maybe he hadn’t killed her, maybe he’d kidnapped her and she had escaped and… because of all the trauma she’d lost her memory…?

  Her heart wasn’t too bright. And it never learned. Each time, her brain would be saying No but her heart would be thudding out: Maybe it is! Maybe! Maybe it is!

  A couple of times it had been Rob she’d thought she’d seen: a wide head on a lanky body; a jutting chin. And her heart and her head had both gone haywire, pounding away, sending adrenaline coursing through her, readying her nerves and her muscles and her heaving lungs to run – until she saw that it wasn’t him.

  But her heart and her head both knew he’d be back.

  Part of her brain was constantly on high alert for him, constantly checking everyone she saw, looking behind her in the street, checking she’d double-locked the door, jumping when someone put a hand on her shoulder. Constantly throwing up false alarms.

  But this was the first Hector.

  Martin said something else. She turned to Dave: ‘Can I get out for a sec?’ and edged past his long legs.

  The pub seemed to be full of giants, tall young men with wide shoulders and backs. She ‘sorry’-ed her way through the crush until she could see him.