The Sweetest Poison

by Jane Renshaw

  ‘No. Sorry.’

  ‘Peter Laing’s his real name. The others are aliases.’

  ‘And you’ve arrested him?’

  ‘He’s in custody at Drymen Police Station in Glasgow – being questioned as we speak. Hopefully we might learn something about Sandison.’ He returned the photograph to his pocket. ‘But there’s another bit of news. The graphologist reckons the writing on the back of the photograph left in the Eglinton Crescent flat doesn’t match the sample we obtained of Rob Beattie’s handwriting. These things are always couched in probabilities, but for all intents and purposes, I think we can say it isn’t Rob Beattie’s writing.’

  ‘Oh. But – you know he was dyslexic? That could mean his writing might have changed a lot. Or he could have deliberately changed it.’

  Uncle Jim moved in his chair.

  Helen frowned. ‘Did you tell the graphologist that Rob was dyslexic?’

  ‘I don’t know how much of a difference dyslexia would make.’

  ‘So could you tell them?’

  ‘I’ll mention it.’ As if he was doing her a favour.

  ‘Last night – I suppose you’ve heard about what happened from your colleagues who came out.’

  ‘I’ve seen your statement about that, yes.’

  ‘Something else has happened.’

  Uncle Jim gave her a sharp look.

  ‘Oh?’ said DCI Stewart.

  ‘I’d like to make another statement, please.’ And she told him what had happened in the toilets.

  He wrote it all down, swiftly, in shorthand. ‘But you didn’t see who it was.’

  ‘No. But Rob – when we were at school, I used to hide in the toilets to get away from him. And once – once he came inside the girls’ toilets, and started banging on the cubicle door. Just like today. How would Moir know about that unless he’s Rob? I never told him about it.’ And it suddenly struck her: ‘I never told anyone.’

  ‘Right... But –’

  ‘I know it seems unbelievable, I mean why would he follow me up here, why would he mess around doing these things to scare me – but you have to understand what he’s like. His mind doesn’t work like a normal person’s. He gets his kicks out of torturing people. The email; stalking me –’

  He looked down at the notes he’d taken. ‘When you came out of the toilet block, Damian Forbes was right outside.’

  ‘Yes. He’d heard me shouting. His girlfriend was there too. She can vouch for him.’

  ‘Why would he need vouching for?’

  ‘Just – the way you said he was “right outside”. As if you thought he might have been the culprit. I’m sure he wasn’t.’

  ‘Well. I don’t suppose we should hold his family connections against him.’

  Even such an indirect reference to Hector had the heat, ridiculously, rushing to her face. She smiled. ‘Ha. No.’

  He didn’t smile back.

  Was it not a joke, then?

  He clicked his pen, and dropped it and the notebook back into his pocket. ‘I’ll have this typed up for you to read and sign.’ He stood. ‘Thank you. You’ve been very helpful.’ And for the first time, he addressed Uncle Jim: ‘Some people don’t have their troubles to seek, eh?’

  Uncle Jim grunted. He didn’t get up.

  Helen showed him to the door. ‘When you said Damian’s family connections shouldn’t be held against him – were you implying something – about Hector?’

  He smoothed his tie. ‘It’s a cliché that gets used a lot in our line of work, but in this case it’s apt: a leopard doesn’t change its spots.’

  ‘It was sixteen years ago. We were all young and stupid –’

  He didn’t say anything.

  ‘What exactly have you got against him?’ Her face was burning.

  He patted the pockets of his suit jacket. ‘What have we got against Hector Forbes?’ He was looking off over the roof of the steading to the wooded slopes of Craig Dearg. ‘Not enough. Not quite enough.’

  48

  The drive had no potholes. The yews in front of the house were neatly clipped, and the flowerbeds a mass of colour – lupins and geraniums and lavender. The old rose garden spilled over with heavy blooms, pink and white and peach and dark purple.

  All this she noted with the part of her brain that wasn’t freaking out. And that part went absent without leave when she looked at the house and saw the man standing at the front door.

  He had a hand up, shading his eyes, and as she turned the car onto the gravel he moved the hand palm-outwards in a greeting. By the time she’d swung to a halt, and opened her door and stood, straightening the cross-over-y bit of the top, he was coming towards her, saying, ‘Helen!’ and grinning as if he’d been waiting there in anticipation of this moment for days.

  And he was just the same: the thick, dark, neatly barbered hair; the tanned, handsome face; the warm brown eyes alight with the smile that made all the rest irrelevant.

  And she knew in that moment, as she had always known, that for her there would only ever be this one man. It wasn’t something she had a choice about. It was part of her, like the colour of her eyes or the shape of her nose.

  The fact that she loved Hector Forbes.

  He was going to touch her. He would feel that she was trembling, like a silly schoolgirl.

  She tensed her muscles; clenched everything.

  But when he did touch her, his hands on her arms, warm and firm, there was nothing she could do about her reaction. It cut straight through her and she put up her hand, reflexively, as if to defend herself, flat against his upper arm; hard muscle under the crisp shirt. He bent his face to her, and his lips, cool, still smiling, touched her cheek. She didn’t turn her face to touch her own lips to his skin.

  She just stood there, smiling desperately, and said something. It might have been, ‘Oh, Hector – hello,’ as if it was a surprise to see him here outside his own house.

  And now his hand was on her back, and surely he must feel it, her reaction, a shock against his hand as he gently guided her towards the door, as if she might not know where to aim for. As if she might try to climb in through a window.

  ‘Have you eaten?’ he said. ‘Don’t worry. I’m not proposing to force-feed you any of Mrs MacIver’s culinary delights. I was thinking more in terms of a sandwich and something to drink.’

  ‘Thank you. That would be nice.’

  He had taken his hand away, but its imprint remained on her skin like a wound.

  Could something this strong, this visceral, this hardwired into her be completely one-sided? Such a connection – surely he had to feel something? In London... It hadn’t all been play-acting, had it?

  Or was that just wishful thinking?

  As they came into the hall the familiar baize door opened and a man came through it; in his forties, maybe, compact and muscly, tattooed biceps bulging from a khaki T-shirt, hair a stubbly fuzz over his skull. He didn’t say anything, just stood there, and Hector said, ‘Helen, this is Chris McClusky.’

  The man nodded at her.

  ‘Hello,’ she said.

  Hector said, ‘Why don’t you make yourself at home in the library, and I’ll see what I can scavenge?’

  She climbed the stairs on automatic pilot: the broad, shallow steps to the long half-landing with its windows overlooking the courtyard at the back of the house, from which a double sweep of stairs rose in a horse-shoe to the first floor. She took the right-hand set of steps, up to the wide landing, its Persian carpet bright in the early evening sun. There was a smell of beeswax and wood fires and flowers. On the table in front of the three Georgian windows was a big arrangement of roses in a blue and white jug, echoing the glimpses of the gardens beyond.

  And she had to stop, and grasp the edge of the table, and breathe.

  She turned slowly on the spot.

  It was just as she remembered.

  To the right, a wide passage ended in a Victorian bay window – that was the Scottish Baronial part of the house. Th
e passage was panelled to the picture rail in waxed mahogany, and from the rail hung the familiar lines of paintings, mostly dark old portraits and huge prints of battle scenes – horrendous things, full of dying horses and cannon smoke and whiskery men running each other through with sabres. The passage to her left was much narrower, and the panelling, painted a light mossy green, less regular and extending right up to the ceiling. The paintings here ran more to little oils of dead hares and partridges, and vases of flowers that somehow managed to look sinister, the bright blooms arching on their stalks against a pitch-black background; and if you looked closely you could see insects crawling over the petals, as if they’d come off a corpse just out of the picture.

  She climbed the two steps into the narrow passage. On the left was the door giving on to the back stairwell which cut right through the house, from the basement to the second floor, where the nursery used to be, and Suzanne’s little room. On the right was the door to the library; squat, 17th century probably.

  She pushed it open and went in.

  The Laird and Irina used to sit here in the evenings, by a fire in the winter, and sometimes watching the little portable that had been the only TV in the house. Until Suzanne had persuaded them to let her have one in her room.

  Where the portable once sat, on the Pembroke table to one side of the fireplace, was a plasma screen. Otherwise the room was the same. She’d always liked it. It was coothie. The ceiling was low and its plasterwork eccentric. The fireplace was made of stone, plainly carved. All round the walls there were bookcases, and three windows looked down over the formal gardens and the fields in front of the house.

  The chairs on either side of the fireplace were monsters, with deep seats and high backs and lugs that stuck forward for you to rest your head against. The one facing her, the one that had been the Laird’s chair, still had the squashed, thin leather cushion she remembered. Irina had had the other chair reupholstered, in a tapestry style with twining vines, but now it was covered in tweed.

  The sofa was exactly the same, though – a big old saggy purple velvet one with a low back. The dogs always used to try to get up on it.

  And there was Black John, still hanging on the wall between two of the windows. And under him the glass-topped display table and its collection of geological samples and artefacts: bitties of stone and polished rocks, with faded labels under them saying things like ‘Fieldspar’ and ‘Gneiss’ in spidery writing; and what she now realised were early mediaeval spindle whorls, and a fragment of a Roman button-and-loop fastener, and some late Mesolithic flint knives and arrowheads. Fairy darts, those used to be called. People would find them lying in the fields and think they’d been left by the fairies, creeping about in the night shooting darts at the beasts.

  She sank down onto one of the window seats, onto the familiar faded chintz.

  So here she was.

  Sitting on a windowseat at the House, waiting for Hector to make her a sandwich.

  He hadn’t said anything about London – other than that oblique reference on the phone. But – she couldn’t help it, his words from that long-ago email kept looping round her brain:

  You are, and have always been, one of my favourite people in the world, and I’ll always remember our weekend together.

  There was a pile of magazines next to her. She glanced at the top one, and saw that it wasn’t a magazine, it was the scientific journal Nature, dated last week. The cover promised papers on microRNAs, bumblebee gut parasites, genomic analyses of cancer tumours, and a luminous quasar.

  She stood, and walked once, twice round the room.

  On the little side table between the Laird’s chair and the sofa was a square tin of toffees with a chipped picture of the Houses of Parliament on the lid, and an elastic band round it, and under it a scuffed green rectangle that looked like a folded chess board. She opened the tin. The lid had lost its hinge – hence the elastic band. Inside were not toffees but chunky wooden chess pieces.

  She replaced the lid of the box and the elastic band.

  He was going to help her. That was why he’d asked her here. He was going to sort out the Moir thing. The Rob thing. Whatever it was. Because he felt sorry for poor Smellie Nellie, in a bind as usual? Or because he felt some sort of obligation? Or because –

  Pathetic. She was pathetic. Moir – Rob – had been seen in Aboyne, and all she could think about was Hector Hector Hector.

  She made her way back downstairs and through the baize door. In the corridor beyond, set into the wall immediately on her left, was a flush grey sheet of metal, and next to it a lighted panel. A lift. And there were sturdy wooden handrails fixed to the walls on the steep stair descending to the kitchen.

  For Damian. For their little Stinker.

  And Mrs MacIver must be a fair age. She’d seemed ancient twenty years ago – how old must she be now? Surely she should have retired long ago?

  The kitchen was empty, and there were no signs of sandwich-making, but she could hear voices outside. She crossed the scullery to the back door, and stepped out into the courtyard.

  The man with the tattoos was squatting in front of a large white van. He was in the process of tightening a screw holding the van’s number plate in place. Another number plate was lying face-down on the cobbles. A younger man stood over him – this one could have been an architect or a surveyor: tweed jacket, shirt and tie, document folder. The brutal haircut, though, had something of the military about it.

  He smiled at Helen, and said, ‘Hi, it’s Helen, am I right? Are you looking for Hector?’

  She nodded.

  He offered his hand. ‘Gavin Jenkins.’

  The van, she noticed, was completely plain. There was no Estate logo on the side. No nothing.

  ‘You’re changing the number plates?’

  ‘No no, we’re just putting new ones on. The old ones were getting so grotty they were nearly illegible.’

  The van wobbled, and Hector emerged from the back of it. ‘Does your stomach think your throat’s been cut? Let’s see what’s in the fridge.’

  There was ham, and pickle, and tomatoes. A wholemeal loaf from the breadbin. She buttered the bread, badly, tearing it, and watched him cutting the tomatoes. This would be a good time to say something. About London. Or maybe his father. Damian.

  What had it been like, what was it like for him to be stuck here, looking after the Estate and a disabled child, when he could have been doing – well.

  Anything at all.

  His shirt sleeves were rolled up a few times, revealing tanned arms, hard-muscled but not like Moir’s. Moir’s physique was the kind you got from two hours’ sweating in a gym every day, but Hector’s gym had been Pitfourie – its mountains and rivers and fields – from the time he was a half-wild little boy, with no more thought of heart-rate recovery time or VO2 max than a wild cat quartering its territory.

  There were two little scars by his right wrist bone, and another on the back of his hand. He hadn’t had those in London. How had he got them?

  He was talking about Uncle Jim. Uncle Jim and his diet. And now he was looking at her, expecting her to contribute something.

  ‘Ina’s dead,’ she said, as if she was about thirteen and not quite au fait with adult conversation.

  He stopped slicing.

  She bit her lip. Giggling with hysterical laughter during a conversation about her dead aunt wasn’t going to help. ‘Jim didn’t tell me – I found a letter from a solicitor –’

  ‘I see. Well. I’m sorry.’

  Oh God. She really was going to start giggling.

  Chemistry class.

  Double chemistry last thing on a Friday afternoon. She and Suzanne had shared a workbench, and Suzanne would get more and more hyper as it got closer to the weekend, and they’d end up in hopeless giggles, and have to write sad things on the covers of their jotters to show each other, to stop themselves exploding and getting sent out to the corridor.

  Helen used to write things like ‘A little
toddler starving in a locked room’. And Suzanne would write ‘Hector’s parachute not opening’.

  And now they were sitting down at the kitchen table. And he was pouring her a glass of wine – water for him – and oh God, she’d never needed it more. But she made herself sip it like a normal person as she told him about Moir. All the reasons why she thought he was Rob. Sometimes it was hard to breathe and she had to stop talking, but he’d put that down to having to recount her ordeal. He was looking at her with those brown eyes of his, like what she was saying was the most crucially important thing he’d ever heard.

  By the time she’d got to the incident in the school toilets, she’d finished her glass of wine and he’d poured her not a refill but a glass of water.

  She glugged it. ‘Maybe it was just some kids, but I’m very glad Damian was there. He’s –’ And the silence stretched on, and she couldn’t think, she couldn’t think what to say, and to her horror she had started to cry.

  ‘Mm, I can think of several ways of ending that sentence,’ said Hector, and as she found a tissue and gulped and sniffed, he continued as if they were still having a normal conversation, saying that he understood that Fish was going to help her get her money from the bank, and how it was the sort of thing Fish did in his sleep – but as for the question of whether Moir Sandison was Rob Beattie – he’d studied the photographs and he wasn’t convinced.

  ‘I don’t suppose we’re going to settle the question other than with a DNA test. But regardless of who this bugger is, we need to get hold of him. And to that end... I’ve been having these fliers handed around.’

  He got up from the table and came back with a print-out – a montage of three of her photos of Moir, and along the bottom, ‘If you’ve seen this man, please contact: Hector Forbes’ and then two phone numbers and his email address. ‘And we’ve put it on the local community Facebook page. It’ll be interesting to see what Mr Findlay has to say. He and Maggie still live in the flat over the shop. I told him we’d be down there around seven.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘I also think it might be a good idea if you came to stay here rather than at the Mains. Just until all this is sorted out.’