by Jane Renshaw
‘Huh?’
‘Now. If you don’t let me, I’ll call the police.’
He turned on his heel, leaving the door open, and walked away from her into the hallway. His gait was lumbering but at the same time athletic, powerful. Like a bull. She could see a wide hall, and doors off it.
She stepped inside. He had disappeared.
‘Suzanne?’ she said, her heart bumping.
If Suzanne was here, would she be able to tell? Would there be miniscule particles in the air, atoms from her skin, from her breath, that her subconscious would pick up on?
Suddenly he was back, right in front of her, thrusting a piece of paper in her face. On it was a big photograph of boys in football strips.
‘That’s me, okay?’ He stabbed a finger at it. ‘Captain of the Menstrie High football team. And that’s our coach, and that’s our headmaster Mr McKillop who was a football nut and therefore keeps in contact with me rather than any of the kids in my year who actually achieved anything meaningful.’
Helen looked at the photograph.
Yes. It was a younger version of the man standing in front of her.
‘Photoshop,’ was all she could say.
‘Oh right, and how do you explain Mr McKillop corroborating that I am who I say I am? Some huge conspiracy, all this, is it?’
She shook her head.
‘You want my DNA? You want them to analyse my DNA?’
She shook her head.
It wasn’t him. This man wasn’t Rob Beattie. It wasn’t the photo, or anything he’d said – it was the man himself. His face, his expression, that deep voice, the east Central Belt accent, the way his hair kinked round his ears.
It wasn’t him.
Suzanne wasn’t here.
How could she be? How could you keep a grown woman captive in a flat like this, with people underneath and above and through the walls?
‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
‘You need help.’
‘I’m very sorry. It must have been – horrible, to have the police come and ask you all those questions. But I really thought – My cousin... Suzanne... he killed her. He probably killed her. He attacked me and took her, and we don’t know where she is, we don’t know what he did to her –’
‘Oh God.’ He had a hand on her shoulder now, and she was gulping, sobs gulping up and her nose streaming, and she pulled a scrappy bit of tissue from her pocket and wiped at her face and he was saying, ‘Oh God’ again, and, ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t realise.’
She stepped away from him, and he dropped his hand and said, ‘What if I had been him?’
‘What?’
‘What if I had turned out to be him? Coming here on your own –’
‘Was stupid. I know.’ She managed a shaky smile.
‘I was going to say brave.’
She breathed. ‘I’m really sorry.’
‘No, I’m sorry. I’d no idea – of the background. The police didn’t tell me much. Um... I’d offer you a cup of tea or something, but you probably want to just get out of here.’ He smiled. ‘My sister always says I’m an insensitive bastard.’
‘I don’t blame you for being angry.’
‘I was well out of order. Look, at least let me take you to the Starbucks round the corner and buy you a coffee?’
‘Thanks, but you don’t need to do that.’
‘You’re shaking.’ He reached out again and put his hand on her arm. ‘Please. It’s the least I can do. You need to sit down and have something to drink. Something to eat. Maybe something with chocolate?’
She looked up at him.
‘Hey, the magic word. Not such an insensitive bastard after all, eh?’
27
She took a sip of hot coffee. ‘So you’re still in touch with your old headmaster?’
‘Off and on. More off than on really. God only knows what he thought when the boys in blue turned up on his doorstep. He always said I’d come to a sticky end. Used to call me Psycho Sandison.’ He shrugged, grinned, sat back a little in his chair. He was so obviously still proud of that, in a nice-teenager-trying-to-be-cool kind of way.
So she said, ‘Why?’
‘Well, I was a bit of a psycho on the football pitch. It has to be said.’
‘But you were the team captain.’
‘For my sins.’ He reached for his coffee. His shirt was tight across the width of his shoulders. You could see the muscles flexing under it when he moved.
How could she have thought he was Rob Beattie? Rob had never had this sort of physical presence; this rather obvious, male-stripper type of attractiveness.
But wasn’t it exactly the look Rob would have aimed for, given time, and access to a gym? The kind of look Suzanne would have loved? She used to have a thing for all those muscly action-hero types: Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone and that other one. Hunks.
Outside on the pavement, he said, ‘Look. I can see you’re still not totally convinced. That I am who I say I am.’
‘I am convinced. I know you’re not him. Obviously, you’re not.’
‘Can we meet here again? Tomorrow maybe, after work? I’d like to show you some proper evidence.’
‘Really, that’s not necessary.’
‘Please? I hate to think of you walking around wondering... well. If Psycho Sandison really is a psychopath.’ Cough-cough cough.
◆◆◆
So they met the next day, Moir with a briefcase of ‘evidence’ which he spread out on the table between their coffee mugs and the plates of cake. There were more team photographs, and programmes from Menstrie High School plays with Moir Sandison in the more minor roles (‘Launcelot Gobbo: a foolish man in the service of Shylock’), and cuttings from the local paper featuring his exploits on the football pitch. There was an old letter from his mum from when he’d spent a summer in Germany, full of gossip from home.
He folded the letter and put it back in its envelope. ‘My parents died when I was at uni.’
As Suzanne would have said: Playing the dead parents card. A grin was trying to twitch the muscles of her face. What would he think, if she started to grin?
She pursed her mouth. ‘Oh, I’m sorry.’
‘Mum had cancer. Dad couldn’t cope after she died. Got up one morning, drove the car into the garage, ran a hose from the exhaust –’
‘Oh – no!’ Oh God.
He shrugged. ‘A long time ago now.’
‘But that must have been so – I just can’t imagine –’
‘It was tough for a while. My sister Rebecca – she blamed herself. She was meant to be going home that weekend, but decided to go to a gig instead.’ He pushed a photograph towards her. ‘That’s Bec. She’s a couple of years older than me.’
The photograph showed Moir and an attractive woman with long hair and fashionable narrow glasses, sitting in the sun outside a cafe in Greece or Italy or France, his arm round her as they leaned into each other and smiled for the camera.
‘And that’s us as kids.’
This one was of a mother and father and two children of about ten and eight, standing in front of a Christmas tree. The little girl was wearing a riding hat and beaming at the camera with exactly the same confident smile as her adult self, but the boy was standing disconsolately, a shiny red football shirt taut over his fat little chest, podgy bare legs white and sausage-like in the shorts.
‘Dad’s idea to get the weight off me was to enrol me in the local football club’s youth programme. Nightmare for the first couple of months, but he made me stick at it, thank God.’ He pulled a face. ‘What do I look like?’
Morbidly obese?
At least it was okay to smile this time. To laugh. ‘You’re sweet!’
‘Always was an idle little so-and-so. I’d be the size of a house by now if I didn’t make myself go to the gym every day... There’s more – but I think I’ve inflicted my life story on you for long enough.’ As he reached to take back the photograph, his fingers brushed hers. ‘So, do you reckon the ev
idence stacks up?’
She felt herself flushing as she met his eyes. ‘Of course it does. I – don’t know why I fixated on you like I did. I mean you don’t even look like him, not really –’
‘Not so sure about that. I checked him out on the internet last night. I can see there is a resemblance. I can understand how you might have wondered...’
‘It wasn’t that you resemble him, though – that wasn’t what attracted my attention – it was – this’ll sound ridiculous, but you know when you clear your throat, you do it three times? He used to do that. But even that’s not the same really. He used to do two quieter coughs and then a louder one, but yours are all – well – more or less at the same volume.’
He laughed. ‘You know, I wasn’t even aware that I had a particular throat-clearing cough.’
‘It’s sort of – cuh cuh cuh.’
She laughed, and a woman at another table looked over, and Moir grinned and said, ‘Captain Caveman, eh? Me Tarzan. Ungowa.’
He’d make a great Tarzan – a knife in his teeth, naked torso glistening with sweat, muscular thighs pumping as he chased down a lion in one of those ridiculously accelerated sequences –
She forked a piece of icing off the cake.
‘Ahhhh-ah-a-ah-a!’
She giggled. ‘Shhh!’
‘Hey, look at my power over the animal kingdom.’ He pointed his own fork at a tiny fly crawling across the table towards him. ‘Moir Sandison: King of the Jungle!’
‘Stop it!’
The woman was looking over at them again.
He squashed the fly with a napkin and leant back in his chair, smirking like a naughty child.
28
She went to the sideboard at the foot of the stairs and looked through the letters lying on its shiny surface. Whoever picked up the post from the mat left any letters for the other flats here, but there weren’t any for her or Moir. Maybe that meant that Moir was home before her and had already collected them.
She carried on up the stairs.
How strange life was. The first time she’d climbed these stairs she’d been hoping to find Suzanne at the end of them. Now she was hoping to find the man she’d thought was her murderer.
She stopped at the door on the right and rummaged in her bag for her keys.
Eilidh said she was mad, moving in with him so soon; putting her flat on the market; ‘committing’ herself, when she’d only known him a few months.
And maybe she was. She didn’t care.
It wasn’t as if she was losing out financially. Quite the opposite. Moir wouldn’t take the rent she’d offered to pay him. He wouldn’t take any money for bills or Council Tax or anything else. His argument was that two could live as cheaply as one, and now he was eating in so much more, having Helen there was actually saving him money. In any case, he earned three times what she did and, call him an unreconstructed sexist pig of a caveman, but in his book the man should be the one bringing home the bacon.
But when her flat was sold, she’d insist on making a proper contribution. They could either stay on here or find a new place. Maybe a house, with a garden they didn’t have to share with anyone else.
She let herself in and dumped her bag down on the marble-topped table by the door and called out: ‘Helloooo-o!’
Moir appeared from the sitting room, and came and took her face in his hands, and kissed her gently. She loved this moment, when they first saw each other after a day at work; she loved that she couldn’t predict what he’d do. Sometimes he’d be desperate to get her into the bedroom, so desperate she’d find bruises later on her skin, in the oddest places; other times he’d be busy on his laptop and barely exchange a greeting; and other times he’d be like this, treating her like a china doll.
‘How did it go?’ He tucked her hair behind her ears.
‘Quite well, I think. Interviews are always such a joke though, aren’t they? Like there’s an unwritten script you have to follow: “So, Helen, what would you say your weaknesses were?” “Oh, well, I’m a bit of a perfectionist. And a workaholic”.’
He smiled. ‘But in your case, both those things happen to be true. Those bastards don’t know how lucky they are.’ Cough-cough cough.
He immediately grimaced an apology. He thought the cough thing upset her.
It certainly upset Mum.
Helen had put off introducing him to Mum and Lionel for as long as she could. But when they’d moved in together, she’d bitten the bullet and gone to Penistone for a weekend on her own, with photographs of Moir, to prepare the ground. They’d all sat in the conservatory and Helen had passed Mum the first photo. ‘Doing his Delia Smith impression.’
Mum had gone very still, and although this photo was one in which the resemblance wasn’t, she’d thought, noticeable, she’d known at once what Mum was thinking.
He looks like Rob Beattie. Oh God, is Helen off her rocker, like those poor souls who’re kidnapped and become obsessed with their tormentors? Going out and finding a man who looks just like Rob Beattie –
And so Helen had had to tell them how she and Moir had met. She’d tried to make a joke of it, and Mum had laughed and said, ‘Poor Moir,’ and then looked again at the photo and said he really didn’t look like Rob at all. Lionel had shoved his oar in at that point – he seemed somehow to be an expert on Rob Beattie as well as everything else – and while he was pontificating about troubled teens Helen had focused past his bullet-shaped head to where she imagined Dad standing watching them, his expression completely deadpan apart from his eyes as they met hers.
Although what Dad’s ghost would be doing haunting a market town in Yorkshire she didn’t know.
Mum and Lionel had come to stay a couple of times since then. Moir had made a big effort, cooking his famous chilli and pretending he wanted to watch Antiques Roadshow, and losing to Lionel at Scrabble. Mum had made a big effort too, but Helen had seen her, sometimes, looking at Moir –
Now he was leading her into the sitting room. ‘I’ve got something for you.’
It was a high-ceilinged room, almost square, with a lovely old fireplace. The first floor flats had been made out of what would once have been the grandest rooms in the old house.
But poor Moir! His taste ran to the minimalist – and the expensive – and now his cool bachelor pad was wall-to-wall junk shop finds and cute cross-stitch pictures of kittens and the old saggy sofa Helen hadn’t been able to part with, set at right angles to his sleek leather one and looking ridiculous.
But when they snuggled in front of the TV it was Helen’s comfy old rag-bag they always chose, not his beautiful designer ‘piece’. He said he was becoming converted to shabby chic.
He led her to the sofa. She sat down with him, his thigh pressed against hers. He reached for a bag on the coffee table: a small maroon carrier bag with gold lettering. A bag from a jeweller’s.
Oh God oh God!
He put his hand inside and pulled out –
A small silver picture frame.
She made herself smile. It was one of those hinged frames in three parts – for a bigger photo in the middle and two smaller ones on each side. In the middle section was a photo of the two of them, from the day they’d gone to Falkland Palace. Moir was handsome as ever, and she didn’t look too bad herself – the week before, Moir had treated her to an expensive cut and colour at a salon in the West End, and she was wearing a fifties-style dress she’d never have chosen but which Moir had insisted on buying for her.
In the left-hand section was the photo of his family in front of the Christmas tree, the one he was so cute and fat and grumpy in. The right-hand section was empty.
‘I thought you might like to put one of your family here. Maybe one with Suzanne in it?’
‘What a lovely idea. It’s lovely. Thank you.’
He made them both coffee, and she went and got one of her photo albums, and sat back down with it to look for a suitable photograph. Maybe this one of Suzanne, squatting by the burn, grinning
at the camera with the sun in her eyes. It was one of those photos where you could almost see the person continuing to move on through the moment, hear the burn rushing, feel the sun beating down. It was hard to believe it was just some coloured ink on a piece of paper. Hard to believe that Suzanne wasn’t there right this minute, and if you went down past the Mains to the bridge you wouldn’t see her, eight-year-old Suzanne, turning back to the water to guddle that twig in the mud.
Funny, but as time went on she seemed to miss Suzanne more, not less. She no longer saw her in the street, but at odd times she’d be surprised by a memory she didn’t even know she had. Like in a meeting at work yesterday, when she’d slipped off her sandals under the table, and a memory had come rushing. How old had they been – eleven? Twelve? They’d decided to give each other’s feet a manicure, and got towels and nail clippers and scissors and pumice and lotions and potions and nail polish, and set everything out in Suzanne’s bedroom like a beauty salon. Helen had imagined walking down the street in Kirkton in her flipflops with grown-up painted toenails, and Hector coming towards her, and doing a double-take, and thinking Helen Clack is looking very glamorous these days.
But they’d ended up drawing a face on each of their toes, and naming them, and giggling away at tea and annoying Auntie Ina and Uncle Jim with the toe people’s voices – Helen’s feet were in socks and trainers, and her toe people were suffocating, and Suzanne’s, in sandals, had to mount a rescue operation under the table, undoing Helen’s laces and pulling off her shoes and socks. No help from hands allowed.
‘That’s enough, now, the pair of you,’ Uncle Jim had said at last.
That was what Dad had called them too.
The pair of you.
They had been a pair. Closer in age than any sisters could be without being twins; and twins, as Suzanne said, were unholy freaks of nature. Much better to be different. Much better to be cousins.
But as they’d got older, Helen had started to worry that they were too different in one vital respect: Rob. If they ever set up home together – she imagined a big cold Victorian manse (Suzanne, a minister’s wife!) – would Helen be able to bring herself to go and stay in the same house as Rob Beattie? Would she want Rob coming to stay with her? Would they gradually stop seeing each other, all because of him?