The Sweetest Poison

by Jane Renshaw

  She sniffed. ‘Woodsmoke?’

  ‘Stay here, both of you.’ And he was off again, jogging down the track and then striking off it, ducking under the low branches of the trees.

  ‘Go with him,’ said Helen. ‘I’ll be fine here.’

  Chris shook his head but didn’t look at her.

  ‘Do you think it’s the poachers?’

  A shrug.

  ‘But they could be dangerous –’

  A smirk. Still he didn’t look at her.

  She wriggled across the gear stick and onto Hector’s seat, and opened the door, and jumped down onto the track. But she hadn’t got five yards when a hand, suddenly, was hard across her mouth, and a muscled wiry arm was around her waist, lifting her off her feet.

  50

  Chris manhandled her to the passenger door, pulled it open and tossed her up onto the seat. The air whoofed out of her lungs as she fell against the dashboard. Distantly there was a shout, and then another. She twisted to look out of the windscreen – a man was running out of the trees ahead, and Hector after him.

  Chris slammed the door on her. Before she could reach for it he was in at the driver’s side, firing up the engine. She shouted something. The man was swinging what looked like a mallet over his head – swinging it at Hector, who dodged, not away but in close under the man’s arm, as if in a bizarre dance, turning him around and abruptly down.

  There was another man. Running out of the trees. At Hector. Helen screamed his name, and screamed again, and then she saw that the mallet was in Hector’s hands, arcing towards the man’s face. It connected with a crunch, and the man flipped backwards and lay still.

  Chris cut the engine and got out.

  ‘Oh God oh God.’ She fumbled at the door; stumbled to the ground.

  Chris had one of them on his feet – just a boy, in dirty jeans and camouflaged jacket, eyes wide, mouth contorted, snot on his face. His right arm hung limp.

  ‘This isn’t him, is it?’ Hector bent over the other man, who was lying face down in the dust of the track, and yanked up his head by the hair. The man spat blood, and a tooth, and swore.

  Helen could only shake her head.

  It was obviously the boy’s father. They had the same body shape, broad at the shoulder and skinny at the bum. The same caved-in looking cheeks.

  ‘Too much to hope for.’ Hector dropped the man’s head and grabbed hold of his jacket, hauling him upright.

  ‘Broke ma... fucking nose...’ It was a Lowland accent.

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry. That was careless.’ Hector grinned at her as he pushed the man in front of him to the van.

  Its rear doors were standing open. Chris helped him shove the man inside. Immediately inside the doors there was a rack of tools, but beyond that there was a grill, dividing off the inner space. The middle section of the grill was hinged, opening outwards.

  Behind the grill there was only a bench, running along one side of the van, on which the boy was slumped. They pushed the man in beside him, and then Chris shut the hinged part of the grill and locked it with a key.

  A cage.

  It was a cage.

  Chris settled himself on a coil of rope under the tool rack, and Hector shut the doors on him.

  ‘Sorry about this.’ He put a hand on her arm.

  She shook it off. Her legs were trembly again; her knees, and the backs of her thighs. ‘What are you going to do to them?’

  ‘Dump them the other side of Aboyne. They’ll have a vehicle nearby, but we’ll dispose of that. And their gear. Chris will have a little chat with them, explain the procedure.’

  ‘You’re not taking them to the police?’

  He raised his eyebrows.

  ‘Hector –’

  ‘The police... All right, yes, we could take them to the police. But to what purpose? This way, their assets are seized, they’re, um, disincentivised... and all at no cost to the taxpayer.’

  ‘How can you – It’s not funny. They could have killed you. Or you might have killed them.’

  ‘Could try harder?’ His hand was back on her arm. ‘It’s okay. I’m sorry you had to see it. Shh. It’s okay.’

  He pulled her against him, and she breathed the familiar clean, sharp smell of his shirt, his skin. She put her hands on his back; felt the slight movement of his ribs as he breathed. He wasn’t gulping air like she was; he was breathing perfectly normally.

  He wasn’t sorry about what had happened. He was sorry she’d had to see it.

  He patted her shoulder – like she was a child, or a daftie.

  She pulled back. He dropped his arms, and she stepped away.

  ‘What is – this?’ She opened her palms, encompassing him, the van, the track behind them.

  He shook his head, and raised his eyebrows again in the expression she knew so well, that she’d known all her life.

  But she didn’t know him.

  Her stupid fantasy about them, Hector and Damian and Irina – it could hardly be further from reality. The real Irina wasn’t swanning about some neighbouring stately home, playing the lady bountiful and doting on her son – she’d abandoned him because he was disabled. The real Damian couldn’t be further from her imaginary version. And the real Hector –

  ‘When I asked DCI Stewart what he had against you, he said: “Not quite enough”. What did he mean?’

  The smile was back. ‘He’s convinced I’m running some sort of criminal enterprise.’

  ‘And are you?’

  ‘Helen –’

  ‘I don’t want you going after Rob like this. You have to leave it to the police. Please. Hector. Not for his sake, I don’t care what happens to him, but this is just – It’s not right. You shouldn’t be doing this.’

  ‘All right. If that’s what you want.’

  They drove into Aboyne, and through it, and up into Glen Tanar. Helen closed her eyes and pretended to be asleep, forcing herself to breathe deeply, regularly, as her mind whirled, until the van slowed and stopped.

  ‘I’d say this is as good a place as any to drop our passengers.’

  There was a mossy dyke on either side of the road, the fields beyond poor, boggy, full of rushes.

  ‘They’d lit a fire,’ she said.

  ‘Uh huh...?’

  ‘They must have been intending to camp overnight. There’d have been plenty of time for the police to get up there and arrest them.’

  ‘The police would have arrested them, would they?’

  She took a long breath. ‘If we had found Rob – what were you going to do with him?’

  Silence. Then: ‘You’d be happy to hand him over to the police, and let justice take its course? Whatever that may be?’

  ‘I’d rather that than...’ She took a shaky breath. ‘Whatever alternative you’ve got in mind. That doesn’t mean I’d be “happy” with the outcome of the judicial process – Rob in a nice warm cell with TV and the internet and courses on basket weaving? Of course I wouldn’t be happy about it.’ Another breath. ‘I’ve no aspirations to the moral high ground.’

  ‘Well, if we’re getting metaphysical – I think you’d find it already a bit crowded.’

  ‘Is it? I can’t say I’ve noticed.’

  ‘What do you think would happen to our friends back there, if the so-called justice system was given the responsibility of dealing with them? No hard evidence... Do you think they’d even end up in court? And do you think they don’t know it, and aren’t laughing up their sleeves at it all? At all the suckers up there on the moral high ground?’

  ‘So your solution is to go in swinging a mallet.’

  ‘It wasn’t my mallet. Actually I think it was a sledgehammer.’

  And suddenly he laughed, his head flung back against the seat, and sitting there beside him in the cab, with a tattooed thug and two beaten-up poachers in the van behind them, she had to bite her lip to stop from laughing too. Laughing, and crying, for the ten-year-old girl held tight in the circle of his arm, swinging up, and up and up,
over the river’s peaty depths.

  51

  It was almost dark by the time they got back to the House, the distant hills soft against a dramatic sky in which bank upon bank of elongated clouds, underlit by the last, pinky-purple glow of the sunset, stretched into infinity. Hector parked the van in the courtyard and Chris jumped down. As Hector got out, Helen shuffled herself across the seat to the passenger door but she wasn’t quick enough; there he was, reaching up a hand to help her down.

  Ever the gentleman.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘I can manage.’

  He unlocked the back door and a beeping started, cutting off when he keyed in a code on a pad on the wall. In the kitchen he said, ‘You could embark on an archaeological dig through the contents of the fridge, if you like – I think there’s some ratatouille Damian made that’s half edible, if he hasn’t scoffed it. I’ll be back in a sec – I’ll just take this up to your room.’ He was carrying her suitcase.

  ‘Thank you.’

  But when he’d gone, when she was standing alone in the middle of the big kitchen and a little thrill was running through her, a thrill at the thought of sitting down to a meal with Hector, she knew that it was wrong.

  That she couldn’t – shouldn’t – do this.

  She ran up the stairs, aware as she did so of muffled music. She yanked open the baize door and stepped through to the delicately falling notes of a classical piano recording, Chopin or Brahms or Liszt, cascading through the dimly shadowed hall. And she was brought up short, memories assailing her, memories of when she used to come to the House to see Suzanne and linger here at the baize door on a summer night like this, not liking to intrude any further into the family’s domain but thrilling to be almost a part of it, standing here breathing the scents of the big flower arrangement on the table just beyond the door, lingering to listen to the distant strains of Beethoven or Mozart or Chopin or whatever the old Laird had selected from his vast collection of classical music records.

  So many ghosts.

  Was Damian playing one of his father’s records? How well would you remember your father, if you were only seven when he died? But you would remember, surely, the house being filled with his music; there would be a response to it hard-wired into you, evoking – what? A feeling of security, maybe; of being a child drifting into happy slumber, knowing that your parents were just downstairs and all was right with the world.

  Her suitcase sat at the foot of the stairs, seemingly abandoned there.

  Hector was crossing the hall away from her, to the corridor that led into the Victorian part of the house.

  ‘Hector?’ As she went after him, she realised that the music was coming from the end of that corridor, through the open door of the Terrace Room, from which yellow light spilled.

  He stopped and turned, and she said, ‘Thank you, but I really think I should get back to the Mains.’

  In the dim light she couldn’t see his face properly.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘I just – I don’t think...’

  ‘Look... Helen. I’m sorry things didn’t quite pan out today as – well, as I would have wished.’

  As if what had happened had been completely beyond his control.

  She could just see the outline of his face. The piano notes tumbled, filling the high space above them with a dizzying, dancing lightness that confused her senses, that shivered suddenly up her spine as the melody reached its climax and then took her where she wasn’t expecting to go, all the lightness turned to cool shadow, measured and austere, but with something unbearably tender in it, something agonising that clawed at her insides, and it was suddenly not possible to stand here and look at him and listen to it any more.

  She turned away and walked quickly to her suitcase, pulling up the handle and starting to wheel it over the Persian carpet towards the door, and he was saying ‘Helen...’ and then she was struggling with the huge key in the lock on the front door, and he was reaching past her to release a bolt and the Yale, to key in the code to deactivate the alarm, and she was out into the night air, saying, ‘Thank you. I’ll...’ and struggling with the wheels on the gravel, and he was taking the case from her, the piano music pursuing them faintly, and she said, ‘No,’ and she could hear the smile in his voice as he said, ‘At least let me help you with this beast of a thing.’

  And so she walked with him to Stan.

  She pulled the key from her pocket and walked behind the car to open the boot –

  And stopped and stared at the back windscreen.

  L I A R was scratched on the glass in huge big letters.

  That hadn’t been there when she’d driven here. She’d have seen it, surely?

  Rob must have –

  Rob had been here.

  And now she was running, running back to the door and shouting ‘Damian! Where’s Damian?’ because Rob knew, he had always known how to hurt her –

  And he had always hated Hector.

  How better to hurt Hector, and so Helen, than by hurting his brother?

  ‘Damian!’ she shouted again as she ran through the hall and down the wide corridor to the Terrace Room towards the music, images rushing through her mind of Rob having found Damian there and – what?

  And smiling as he heard the van returning, and placed a record on the turntable.

  She was running through the open door, registering the changes to the room with one part of her brain, the grand piano in front of the four big windows looking onto the front lawn, the table against the wall with instrument cases on it, the table next to it with an incongruously modern sound system, but now the music had suddenly cut off and Damian was getting up from the long green velvet piano stool –

  And Rob wasn’t here.

  It hadn’t been a recording.

  Stupidly, she said, ‘You’re very good’ as Damian looked beyond her to Hector; and as Hector put a hand on her back she pulled away, she ran across the expanse of wax-polished floorboards and the twining foliage of the beautiful Victorian carpet to the windows and the French doors giving onto the terrace at the end of the house, and then to the four big windows on the side of the room that overlooked the courtyard.

  All these windows.

  Almost the whole of three of the walls of this massive room, the biggest room in the house, were windows.

  ‘He’s out there. He’s going to try to get in, he might already be... Hector, he’s Rob. He’s Rob.’ A draught of air, sweeping through the room, shivered on her skin. ‘Damian, you can’t stay here – this room, it’s too exposed, all these windows, he might –’

  And Hector said, ‘Come on then’ and he had his arm round her, warm across her shoulders, and he was guiding her from the room, and telling her that all the windows were covered by the alarm system, and then she was sitting upstairs in the library and letting Hector talk her into staying until ‘all this is resolved’, barely able to answer him, to nod pathetically, while Damian fastened the shutters on the windows.

  And then Hector had gone to check round the house, and Damian was sitting on the arm of her chair and taking her shaking hand in his steady one and saying, ‘You don’t need to worry. I hope he does try something. Bring it on, knobhead.’

  And on the wall behind him Black John looked down on them and it occurred to her to wonder what it did to your genes to have so many ancestors, going back seven, eight, nine hundred years, who had wrested what they had from their neighbours by force, by sheer bloodyminded strength of will.

  She wished that she had some of whatever Black John had passed down running in her veins.

  ‘I wonder how he knew you were here,’ said Damian.

  ‘He must have followed me, I suppose.’

  ‘But how? If he was watching the Mains, and saw you drive off – he couldn’t have had the motor home parked anywhere near, could he, or it would’ve been too much of a risk that someone would see it. Maybe he’s got a bike.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘But then he wouldn’t hav
e been able to keep up with you in your car.’ He was looking at her speculatively. ‘And why “liar”?’

  She was so tired.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  And to prevent him asking anything more, she said, ‘So you’re a musician?’

  He looked at her. ‘Right. By all means let’s talk about our hobbies. TV. The weather.’ And he lifted his eyebrows.

  ‘Rob,’ she said in the end. ‘He seems to be trying to make out I lied about him killing Suzanne. I think he’s trying to frighten me into changing my story, but – why would he want me to do that? It’s obvious he killed her. Why disappear if he didn’t?’

  Was that really why Rob was doing this? He wanted her to say he hadn’t killed Suzanne? Had that been his intention all along – first of all to punish her, and then to get her to change her story and say he was innocent so he could reappear, so he could be exonerated?

  He shrugged. ‘Might there have been another reason for his disappearance?’

  She just shook her head. ‘I don’t see what other reason there could be.’

  But what if he really was innocent?

  What if someone else had killed Suzanne?

  52

  She woke very late, to the birds and pagodas and chrysanthemums that rioted across the yellow walls of the Chinese Bedroom. She hadn’t closed the curtains the night before – she’d barely had the energy to go to the loo, and splash her face at the sink – and light fell across the bed in a hot rectangle.

  She could smell flowers. On the bamboo stand beside the bed there was a little pewter jug with pink and white striped roses crammed rather haphazardly into it, and stalks of lavender sticking up, bizarrely, from the centre.

  She pushed back the covers and padded over to the en suite. It had an Art Deco-style sink and bath and loo and shower, all so sparkling clean she was nervous about using anything. And it had its own window, draped in crisp antique lace, overlooking the terrace and the lawn and, behind a bank of rhododendrons, the tennis court and walled garden.

  She stared at her face in the mirror over the sink.