by Jane Renshaw
‘I – I think he’s maybe stalking me.’
He reached out a hand and touched her arm. ‘Have you gone to the police?’
‘I will. But first I have to know if it’s him or not. Please. Could you just check the database?’
‘Yeah, not really supposed to give out client details?’
‘Karim –’
‘He might not have used his real name?’
‘Please?’ She let her eyes fill with the tears she’d been fighting.
He grimaced. Leaving the can and the cloth on a glass table, he walked across the shiny tiled floor to the reception counter. Helen followed him. Under the blazing lights she felt exposed, on view, as if they were performers on a stage. Helen’s role: sad little stalking victim.
‘Can I just – do you mind if I lock the door?’ She reached for the key and turned it.
When the computer had booted up, Karim muttered: ‘Two-thirty on Tuesday?’
‘Yes.’
‘Okay… two clients at two-thirty… Elaine Roberts and Moir Sandison.’
‘Okay. Thanks. That’s not his name, but – as you said, he probably wouldn’t have given his real name, would he? If he only came here to –’
‘You need to go to the police, Helen, yeah?’
‘Is there an address?’
He gave her a long look, then scribbled on a big yellow Post-It, pulled it from the pad and pushed it across the counter.
31 Eglinton Crescent, Flat 1F1
21
Back in the flat, door shut and triple-locked, chains on, she took a packet of crackers with her to the desk and nibbled one as she waited for the laptop to boot up.
Googling on ‘Moir Sandison’ brought up several pages of hits. There was a Moir Sandison on Facebook, but he lived in America, and most of the top hits seemed to refer to this person, a man in his sixties who was CEO of a graphic design company. When she restricted the search to the UK, she found another Moir Sandison on LinkedIn – an architect. But he lived in Manchester. A Moir Sandison, again from Manchester, had left comments on a rugby forum about the Scotland/Ireland game, and on the website of a company selling antique pens, thanking them for their excellent service.
No Moir Sandison in Edinburgh.
But it was a Scottish name. Could Moir Sandison from Manchester have family in Edinburgh and be here visiting them? There was no photo on the LinkedIn page. She brought up the website of the architecture firm he apparently worked for, but could find no mention of him there.
That was suspicious, wasn’t it?
What if Rob had created the whole fake identity of Moir Sandison just for the purpose of coming after Helen? What if Moir Sandison from Manchester only existed on the internet in case anyone decided to Google him? Maybe he was renting 31 Eglinton Crescent and needed a backstory in case the landlord Googled him?
She needed to call the police.
But they wouldn’t go round there demanding a DNA sample just because Helen had heard him cough in a particular way, would they?
She needed more.
She needed to go to Eglinton Crescent herself and make sure.
Only problem was that she would never in a million years be able to pluck up the courage to do that. Could she hire someone? Pay someone, a private investigator, to look into Moir Sandison? But how long would that take, to find someone, to set up a meeting...?
She needed to act now.
But do what?
She sat back, rubbing her eyes, and almost on automatic pilot she found herself reaching for the laptop and clicking on the Favourites menu.
She would let her subconscious work on the problem while she did a spot of cyberstalking. That was when people came up with their best ideas, wasn’t it, when they were relaxing in the bath or whatever? Well, this was her equivalent.
Already she could feel the tension leaving her body.
A smile tugging at the corners of her mouth.
She was scrupulous about not doing this at the museum. She only ever used the internet there for genuinely work-related stuff. Today she’d been downloading photographs of pottery fragments that had been found on an eroding bank of the Orbe River. Oskar Dufour at Berne University was convinced they dated from the late 1st Century BC, but she thought they were earlier, and perhaps Middle Eastern. He’d suggested she take a trip over there to have a look at them and some other finds he’d like her thoughts on. And maybe she would.
What would Suzanne have said about Oskar?
Probably: He’s practically collecting his pension?
She scrolled down her favourites list to ‘Pitfourie Estate’ and clicked.
And there it was, the homepage with its panoramic banner photograph – the view from Aucharblet across to Lochnagar, with sheep in the field in the foreground, and on the left a big old sycamore spreading its branches across the screen.
Underneath was ‘Pitfourie Estate’ in big blue letters, and on the right a photograph of a capercaillie with his tail feathers fanned out. This photo changed regularly. Last month it had been a snowdrop with the sun on its petals. And the month before that there had been a lovely one of what Helen had decided was the field right in front of the house, thick with snow, the branches of the trees outlined in white like lace, the horses’ breath steaming around their heads.
She wondered who took these photos. Maybe Hector.
She smiled.
It was like immersing herself in a wonderful fictional world, only a hundred times better because it was real, it existed, and it was her world – or at least it had been.
What had she done before she had this?
Just after she’d moved back to Edinburgh from London two years ago, Auntie Anne had been diagnosed with an aggressive brain tumour. She’d been dead in six months. And then Lionel from the theatre group, Mum’s ‘tower of strength’, had married her and whisked her off to a Victorian villa he’d inherited in a picturesque part of Yorkshire.
And then the banging on the door had started, and Helen had had to sell that flat and buy this one.
She’d begun to have serious trouble sleeping. One night she’d given up trying; got up, made a cup of tea and switched on the laptop. She’d typed in, before she could think better of it, ‘Hector Forbes Pitfourie’. The first hit had been the Pitfourie Estate website. All the familiar names and places. Photographs of curlews and drifts of bog cotton. Touches of humour, here and there, that clawed at her heart.
She’d felt like a character in a kids’ book, waking at midnight and wandering, barefoot and wide-eyed, into a lost world.
On the left of the homepage was the menu:
Home
About Us
News
Woodlands and Forestry
Farms
Sporting and Tynoch Lodge
Holiday Cottages
Conservation Projects
Pitfourie History
NatureDork
Walks
Contact
The text on the homepage never changed much.
Welcome to our website. Pitfourie is a traditional estate encompassing 31 000 acres of native woodland, forestry plantation, farmland and moorland on Upper Deeside in the north-east of Scotland. The landscape here is amongst the most beautiful in Britain (not that we’re in any way biased!), from the high summits of Ben Aven and Tom na Creiche, to the ancient pinewood of Badentoul, to the slow pools and spectacular falls of the River Glass.
Our business interests include tenanted farms and houses, forestry, holiday lets and sporting activities.
Conservation is at the core of our management policy. We are currently working in partnership with the Woodland Trust, the Red Squirrel Survival Trust, Scottish Natural Heritage and the local community on a range of projects, foremost of which is the Caledonian Pine Project, which aims to expand the acreage of native woodland at Crask and Aultmore. The Inverdraught Scout Group and the children at Kirkton of Glass Primary School are helping us eradicate invasive bracken in Garble Wood.
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We welcome visitors to the Estate. In the Walks section of the website you can download a range of maps and guides with suggested walking routes. Self-catering cottages are available to rent throughout the year, and Tynoch Lodge can accommodate sporting parties of up to twenty-two.
Our sporting team offers traditional pheasant and grouse shoots, salmon and trout runs, and red deer stalking. We can provide vehicle and gun hire and also transport to and from Aberdeen Airport or railway station.
Campers are asked to contact the Estate Office for information on suitable sites. Visitors should ensure that dogs are kept on a leash if crossing a field containing livestock, and note that the area around the House of Pitfourie is strictly private. The house and grounds are not open to the public.
Helen clicked on the ‘News’ link in the menu. The screen changed to show a photograph of a man with a gun over his arm, and under it the title ‘Bill Coull retires’, followed by three paragraphs about Bill and his wife Cathy, which finished:
It only remains for me to thank Bill for all his hard work on the Estate over the years, and to say that his expertise, his energy and his cheerful presence generally will be greatly missed – if not his obsessive and some would say inexplicable enthusiasm for Aberdeen Football Club. I and all at Pitfourie wish him and Cathy many happy years of well-earned retirement.
Hector Forbes
Usually these News items weren’t signed, although she thought she could tell the ones Hector had written. She read it again, and a third time, hearing his voice in her head. The bits Hector wrote never had any of the spelling mistakes or grammatical errors that sometimes appeared elsewhere on the website – although those errors usually disappeared within a few days.
She thought she knew what the set-up must be. Someone in the office –probably the person called Gillian Webster who was listed on the Contact page – looked after the website on a day-to-day basis, and Hector only had time to look at it every week or so. That was when he picked up the mistakes.
She’d checked the online marriage records at ScotlandsPeople, and nothing had come up for any ‘Hector Forbes’ in the last eleven years. That didn’t mean he hadn’t married in England or abroad, of course. But if he’d had a wife, she would have been mentioned, surely, on the website; shown with him there sometimes, and in the Press and Journal? It was likely he had a partner, of course it was, but Hector hadn’t splashed his private life all over the internet so she didn’t know. He wasn’t on Facebook or Instagram or Twitter. Ridiculously, she felt faintly aggrieved about this, a little bit annoyed with him, as if he was deliberately thwarting her.
Damian was surprisingly cagey too. She thought she’d found him on Facebook – it was the only page, anyway, for someone called Damian Forbes in the right part of the country. She took a second to bring up the page in a new window, but there was nothing new on it – still no public information other than ‘Lives in Aboyne’, which probably wasn’t quite right, but people in rural areas often seemed to give the nearest town. The profile picture was still a big black slug, and the cover photo a spectacular one of the Northern Lights – just illuminated sky, green and yellow and blue, with only a sliver of darkened, unidentifiable hillside beneath it.
She closed the window and returned to the Pitfourie Estate website, where she copied the ‘News’ text and saved it into a fresh Word document. Then she opened the NatureDork page.
There was a new photo of a robin with a mealworm in his beak, and underneath:
Robin Wars Part 2
News from the Western Front: Napoleon has been forced to concede the stretch of territory from the Clearing to Nest Box 1. Attila has taken possession of the tree formally favoured for hanky-panky by Napoleon and Josephine, and can be seen there at intervals throughout the day, calling loudly. It’s pretty much total humiliation for Napoleon.
On the Home Front, Napoleon has been spotted at the feeding station making an **** [Ed: censored] of himself in a pitiful attempt to impress Josephine, and offering her the occasional mealworm, but seems more interested in stuffing his own beak than hers, while keeping a constant wary eye out (let’s hope not literally) for a fresh offensive from Attila.
The task of building up Josephine’s energy reserves in preparation for the breeding season seems to have been delegated by Napoleon to NatureDork, whose expenditure on mealworms from the online RSBP shop threatens to create personal debt of such unmanageable proportions as to finally bring down the UK economy. Not that Napoleon, Josephine or Attila is worried about NatureDork’s financial embarrassment. More worrying for them is the possibility that NatureDork’s actions, in providing a superabundance of mealworms, have tipped the finely tuned natural balance of their ecosystem into a catastrophic spiral of irresponsibility and aggression.
But that’s humans for you.
NatureDork
NatureDork was always anonymous, but she was pretty sure he wasn’t Hector – there was just something about the turn of phrase. And Hector would be too busy to sit around birdwatching all day.
Her theory, based on nothing at all, was that NatureDork was Damian.
A little boy fascinated by animals’ skulls was likely to go on to have an interest in nature, wasn’t he? And his activities at school tended to support this idea. He would presumably be going into his final year (already!) at Glencoil in the autumn. She didn’t know for sure because, no doubt in line with some absurd politically correct directive, the school never posted any details about individual pupils on the website. But she knew he was a pupil there – or at least he had been two years ago – from Googling on ‘Damian Forbes’. She’d found his name in articles about an interschools chess tournament and a debating competition, and, another three years back, a science workshop run by Aberdeen University. And he’d won a national mathematics competition when he was thirteen. Maths, science, nature – they all went together in the general scheme of dorkdom, didn’t they?
She couldn’t find a proper photograph of him. There was a photo on someone’s blog of all the children who’d attended the science workshop, but there were over a hundred of them and each face was too small to make out features properly. She’d been able to pick out the Glencoil contingent from their uniforms, though, and there was just something about one of the boys, in the middle of the second row – she was sure he was Damian.
His hair was no longer bright blond – it was just ordinary mud colour now, and messy, in an I’ve-got-better-things-to-do-than-bother-about-my-hair kind of way, rather than in an attempt to ape the latest fashion. His face was chubby and smiling. He looked like he was really happy to be there, and she could imagine him being unselfconsciously enthusiastic about everything in a completely uncool way. But he’d be one of those boys who didn’t care about being cool, and was popular in spite – or because – of it.
She’d looked up Glencoil in the Guide to Fee-Paying Schools in Scotland and it had come out above average, but not brilliant. Presumably the estate finances didn’t run to Eton, what with having to pay inheritance tax when the Laird died – although she’d have thought Irina’s parents might have coughed up.
Maybe Irina didn’t want him going away to boarding school. But Helen couldn’t imagine Irina letting her own feelings get in the way of her son’s education. She would want the best for him, surely?
It was so frustrating, knowing so much but not quite enough.
Maybe Irina and Damian lived at the House with Hector, but something made her think not. In a cottage on the estate maybe, although the idea of Irina in a cottage... It was far more likely that she’d remarried and was installed in some other stately home in the area.
There was no second marriage for her in the online records. A Google search on her name had just turned up obituaries for the old Laird.
Surely Irina would have a new partner by now, though? Helen hoped he was good with Damian. But even if he was the best stepfather ever, it wouldn’t be him Damian confided in and depended on and took his troubles to.<
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It would be Hector.
Hector would have been the one to encourage his interest in wildlife. She could just imagine him saying, ‘How about doing a nature column for the website?’ and maybe Damian not being sure if he could, and Hector saying, ‘Of course you can do it, you’re practically a walking encyclopaedia of useless information about wildlife,’ and ever since, Damian had been coming up with these funny little pieces, mainly about birds but also about other things – like the genetics of primroses, and how a wood ant colony was organised.
He was becoming really good at them. He was obviously exceptionally bright. And very sweet – although he’d no doubt be appalled that anyone could think so. And there was something about his sense of humour that reminded her of Hector.
Of course NatureDork could be any random person living on the Estate. But she liked to think he was Damian. She liked to imagine Irina standing behind her son to look at the screen, and draping her arms round him and resting her chin on his shoulder to read as he typed up the latest instalment, and laughing in all the right places. And maybe suggesting names for the birds. There was definitely something Irina-ish about Napoleon and Josephine.
She saved the latest NatureDork and sent it to the printer.
Then she navigated back to the News page and stared at Hector’s signature.
And his words from eleven years ago suddenly came into her head:
I hope you’re not still living in fear of that fucking little shit, Helen.
22
Eglinton Crescent was very West End – very fantoosh, as Dad would have said. A grand sweep of bay-windowed Victorian sandstone facing onto an acre or so of gardens – gardens maintained for the exclusive use of the residents of the streets around them. It was the kind of area that had a high density of consulates and bridge clubs.
The closest parking space she’d been able to find was three doors down from Number 31, but from where she sat in Stan, her little red Mini, she could see the door quite well because of the curve of the terrace. It was reached up four wide, shallow steps which gave onto an expanse of flagstones spanning the chasm between pavement and building. Beneath the flagstone bridge was the basement which in Victorian times would have been the servants’ domain. Of course most of the houses had been turned into flats decades ago. There was a discreet row of buzzers set into the frame of the door.