The Sweetest Poison

by Jane Renshaw

  Liar.

  What sort of sick game was Rob playing? He killed Suzanne. She may not be able to remember what had happened, she may not be able to remember it in the conscious part of her brain, but she knew that must be what had happened.

  And he was never going to make her say otherwise.

  It was almost twelve by the time she made it downstairs. Mrs MacIver, rolling pastry on the kitchen table, cast her eyes up to the clock before favouring Helen with a tight smile and a ‘Now then, Hel’nie Clack.’ She wore her hair in the same uncompromising bun. And Helen could have sworn she recognised the dress, plain navy, teamed with navy shoes.

  ‘Hello, Mrs MacIver.’

  ‘Lunch winna be long, but if you’re wanting your breakfast –’

  ‘No no. If I could just have a glass of water?’

  ‘There’s the tap.’

  There were two glasses draining next to the sink. She took one and ran a splash of water into it.

  ‘Thank you, for putting me up at such short notice.’

  Mrs MacIver’s attention was back on the pastry. It had split, and she was pressing the tear together with her fingers. ‘None of my doing.’

  ‘I’m sorry for the extra work –’

  ‘It’s the chiel you have to thank for it. For your room.’

  Damian then, not Hector.

  ‘Oh. Right. That was kind of him.’

  ‘What’s all this about some mannie you think is Robin Beattie?’

  ‘Hector told you...’

  ‘He’s told me I’ve not to leave the house unless one of the men’s with me. And the same goes for Damian and Hel’nie Clack.’ As if Hel’nie Clack was another person entirely. Maybe she was. ‘In case this mannie comes in about.’ Her mouth pursed in contempt – for ‘the mannie’, Hector or Helen wasn’t clear. ‘Himself and the chiel are in the garden – I’ve to get Gavin to take you, if you’re going.’

  It was more of an instruction than a question.

  ‘Right. Thank you.’

  And so she set off across the courtyard with Gavin Jenkins, smart and scrubbed-looking in a lightweight grey jacket, and tried to concentrate on what he was saying about the changes since she’d last been at Pitfourie, the renovation of the coach house and outbuildings, the garden, the old laundry.

  They crossed the lawn, and passed the tennis court with its pristine terracotta surface, and then her sandals were crunching on the gravel of the path to the old kitchen garden.

  The maroon door set into the wall was the same as she remembered, with its oversized Victorian latch. Gavin flicked the thumb-piece and pushed it open, and she followed him through.

  She’d expected a transformation like those she’d seen everywhere else: neat rows of vegetables and flowers, and box hedges, and tilled earth. But although one of the far corners was under cultivation – with raspberry canes and cabbages and potato shaws, and carrots, and were those sprouts? – the rest was nature run riot, great high elder bushes and brambles and ivy, and in the middle a swathe of long grass and wild flowers.

  The greenhouses against the far wall, though, had been repaired, and inside them she could see neat rows of plants.

  A voice spoke – Hector’s voice – and someone else laughed.

  Then silence.

  Tendrils of honeysuckle hung over the path, and a nettle nodded against the thin linen of her trousers. Moving from the shadow of the high wall, finished with brick for the ripening of fruit for a long-ago Victorian table, they passed into the sunlight and she was conscious, then, of the sounds around her – bees and other insects, and a thrush singing, trailing its song across the garden.

  The wild garden.

  That was what this was.

  Hector was standing with his back to them, arms folded, in the middle of the long grass. He was looking down at something which also held the attention of his brother – the chiel – who was sitting on one of those cheap collapsible chairs made of green nylon slung over an aluminium frame, a clipboard on his knee.

  Damian saw them first. He stood, and smiled, tucking the clipboard under his arm and pushing his hair off his forehead. The hair was tousled, and he wore jeans and trainers and a faded, if spotlessly clean, brown T-shirt. The sophisticated young man of yesterday had gone, you might think, until you met his eyes.

  And she supposed it was all very amusing – another infatuated female, spinning in orbit around his brother.

  But as Hector turned to her she couldn’t help it, she couldn’t not look at him, she couldn’t not drink him in: the firm, tanned skin over cheek and jaw; his beautiful eyes; the way his lips lifted a tiny bit at the corners before he gave her the full force of his smile.

  ‘How are you feeling? Did you manage to sleep?’

  ‘Yes, thank you. Eventually. Hector... Thank you so much, for...’

  Where to start?

  He just kept smiling, and said to Gavin: ‘I think you’ve just squashed one of the subjects.’

  Gavin looked at his feet, and stepped back. ‘Oops. Sorry.’

  Damian said, ‘If it hasn’t got a stake with a number beside it, it’s expendable. For my purposes, anyway.’

  ‘I won’t ask what those are.’

  ‘No, best not,’ said Hector. ‘Not unless you’ve an hour or so to spare.’

  It was a dismissal. With a quick smile for Helen, Gavin turned and started back the way they’d come.

  ‘Sorry about the oversized nanny. But I don’t want you leaving the house on your own. Not unless I’m with you, or one of the men.’

  ‘I’m causing so much trouble. I don’t think I should stay. I could be putting everyone here in danger.’

  His lips became a straight line, and he shook his head slightly; impatiently. Why had she said that? He must know that she knew fine there was no way he’d agree to her leaving. Which was why she was safe to suggest it.

  She babbled: ‘The man who was watching the Mains last night – Is he still there? Uncle Jim...’

  ‘Yes, don’t worry, we’ll keep an eye on the Mains. Jim came over earlier to see you but we decided not to wake you. I said we’d call round, maybe tomorrow...’

  ‘Oh. Will he be all right on his own at the Mains, though?’

  ‘He won’t be on his own.’

  Damian, dropping the clipboard onto the chair, grinned. ‘What really freaked him out was Hector’s suggestion that he, Ben and Fly might want to join you here.’

  She smiled, trying and failing to imagine Uncle Jim, Ben and Fly installed in one of the bedrooms at the House – the Regency Room, perhaps, with its gold silk wall coverings and elegant Georgian furniture. Or – oh God – the White Room.

  ‘He’s quite enthusiastic about staking out the Mains,’ Damian went on. ‘Still a reasonable shot, apparently, with that shotgun of his.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Quite,’ said Hector. ‘As if Postie’s not traumatised enough by Fly.’

  Damian flicked a greenfly off his arm. ‘I’ve been thinking... If this man really is Rob, he must have engineered the whole thing. Your encounter in the salon. Everything.’

  Hector put a repressive hand on his arm.

  The possibility hadn’t occurred to her. ‘I suppose he must have done.’ She turned to Hector. ‘I need to convince the police that I’m not some mad time-waster... I need to convince them he’s out there and he’s going to... I don’t know what he’s going to do, but I need to convince them that he’s Rob, that the man who murdered Suzanne is back and they need to catch him. But they’re not going to take any notice of what I say any more. I need... I need corroboration from someone credible. I was thinking maybe Norrie... Maybe Norrie could have a look at the photos sometime and if he thinks it could be Rob he could make a statement or something... I don’t know. Do you think he might?’

  ‘Well, I thought I’d ask him, and Fish, and Fiona and Steve, to dinner tonight. It might help to thrash things out between us.’

  Us. It had been so long since she’d been part
of us.

  Fresh tears threatened.

  ‘If that’s okay with you?’

  She nodded. ‘Thank you.’ She held his eyes. Or he held hers. And her face was suddenly too hot, and he looked away.

  She looked down at the clipboard on the chair. The paper clipped into it was covered with columns of tiny figures. Along the top of the columns was written ‘Plant no.’, ‘Time’, ‘Pollinator group/species’ and ‘Visit duration’.

  So here they were, Black John’s boys, carrying on as if nothing had happened, as if a woman stalked by a psychopath hadn’t just dumped herself on them, as if he might not still be lurking out here somewhere. While she and Hector had been off looking for Rob and his motor home, he’d been here, maybe looking in at Damian in the Terrace Room, prowling around, before defacing her rear windscreen. And they weren’t in the least bit worried about it.

  Or did they not, after all, believe her? Did they think she’d scratched ‘Liar’ on her own car? Were they humouring her? Humouring poor mad Helen? Did they think she’d finally flipped her lid?

  Well, if they did, she had to convince them otherwise. She had to convince them that she was a hundred percent sane and normal.

  She said, ‘This looks...’

  ‘Very interesting?’ suggested Hector. ‘Are you agog to know all about the evolutionary implications of the markings on the petals of the common spotted orchid?’

  ‘I’m agog to know how a stopwatch figures.’ She’d just seen it, in the net cup hanging from the arm of the chair. ‘I wouldn’t have thought evolution worked quite that fast.’

  They both laughed, and Damian said, ‘I’m trying to find out whether there’s an association between flower morphology – the patterns of the spots – and the duration of visits by different types of pollinator. I watch each flower for fifteen minutes and note down which pollinators visit it, and for how long. Then on the following day I switch the order to account for temporal effects, so in the analysis –’

  ‘Yes,’ said Hector. ‘Personally, I can’t get enough of the statistical analysis.’

  Helen bent to peer at one of the orchids. Each stem had dozens of frilly white flowers, lined and spotted with purple, clustered together on a heavy spike. ‘The patterns are really beautiful, aren’t they?’

  ‘And they do vary quite a bit.’ Damian bent too, and slid his fingers under one of the individual flowers, turning it up so she could see. ‘Some pollinators have vision in the UV spectrum, but –’

  Hector hooked an arm round Damian’s neck. ‘Enough.’ And to Helen: ‘You’ve had breakfast?’

  ‘No. But that’s my own fault for having such a long lie.’ She straightened, and said to Damian, ‘Thank you for doing my room.’

  ‘You’re welcome. Do you like the flowers?’

  ‘Love them.’

  ‘Mm.’ Hector adjusted the headlock. ‘You’d think a budding Charles Darwin would be a dab hand at all things botanical. You’d also think that anyone who expends so much time and energy on their own appearance would have a highly developed aesthetic sensibility. But ask him to put some flowers in a vase and you end up with something that looks like it’s been arranged by a colour-blind marmoset.’

  Damian wriggled. ‘Actually, colour vision in marmosets is a bit weird.’

  Hector released him. ‘Most females can see blues and greens and reds, but some females and all males can see only blues and greens.’

  Damian blinked, and put a hand through his hair. ‘How do you know that?’

  Hector’s gaze rested on the boy in a sort of tender scrutiny identical to the way Fiona had looked at Lizzie. ‘The same way I know lots of bits of useless information, presumably.’

  The thrush sang, a sweet tumbling and trilling of notes above their heads, and Damian looked up, and Hector smiled.

  So she’d been wrong about him not finding someone to love.

  Romantic love – why was the world so obsessed with it? It was a poor thing next to the other kind – the kind that wasn’t jealous, or needy, or selfish; that was given without any conditions; that asked nothing of its object in return.

  ‘Well,’ said Damian. ‘You might thank me one day. You never know when it might come in useful. Say the world was overrun by rabid marmosets –’

  ‘ – I’d know that my best chance of survival would be to dress as a giant tomato.’

  ‘Um, no, that wouldn’t do you any good. Most of them would just see you as a big juicy bluey-green prey item instead of a red one.’ And into the expectant pause: ‘Okay, I’m sketchy on the finer details, but knowing the enemy’s weakness is the first step to defeating them, isn’t it? According to any rabid-primates-on-the-rampage type films I’ve ever seen.’

  ‘Right. So actually it is a completely useless fact, even in the event of marmoset world domination.’

  ‘Pretty much.’ Damian was looking at Helen. ‘Would you like some rasps?’

  Her head was spinning. ‘What?’

  ‘To make up for no breakfast?’ He waved a hand at the cultivated corner of the garden. ‘Wait here and I’ll get you some.’

  ‘Good idea,’ said Hector. And as they stood watching him, Helen unwilling to take her eyes from him in case Rob was lurking somewhere among the overgrown vegetation, he went on: ‘Last night... I’ve had a report from one of the Estate workers that there was a car parked up the track past Milton, which is just quarter of a mile or so from here if you cut through the wood... this was at half past eight, quarter to nine. He didn’t, unfortunately, take the registration number. It’s a popular place for dog walkers, so he didn’t think anything of it. Dark blue Fiat.’

  ‘So you think Rob parked it there and came through the wood? He’s using a car to get about and the motor home is hidden away somewhere...? That would explain how he was able to follow me from the Mains without me noticing. He could have been staking out the Mains from the trees, with the car parked maybe up the road... And when he saw me leaving he ran back to it and followed me.’

  ‘It’s possible.’ Hector shrugged. ‘As far as the motor home line of enquiry goes, the CCTV outside the jeweller’s didn’t pick any up at the relevant time.’

  ‘Oh... So you think Mr Findlay might have made a mistake?’

  ‘There’s a first time for everything, but I’d say it’s more likely our man turned off before that point. Took a short cut up to the main road.’

  ‘Which would suggest he knows the town.’

  ‘Maybe.’ He pulled seeds off a high stem of grass. ‘And I’d a call this morning from Shona Robertson. Shona Morrison as was. She and her husband Brian were on the back road to Logie Coldstone a couple of nights ago, and met a tractor, and Brian had to reverse for “miles” because a motor home and, interestingly, a car were parked in the passing place at the corner in Habbie’s Wood. When they came back past it, Shona made Brian stop, and got out to remonstrate. No one in the car. There were lights on inside the motor home, but the curtains were drawn and no one answered her shouts. Well, you wouldn’t, would you? She thinks it could have been a Swift like the ones in the flier.’

  Helen grimaced. ‘Shona...’

  ‘Mm.’ He let the grass seeds fall from his hand. ‘But I talked to John Donaldson this morning – at Balnamoon, just down from the wood. He remembers seeing a motor home there, on Wednesday night, although not a car.’

  ‘Could Shona describe the car?’

  ‘“Dark”.’

  Helen took a breath. ‘You have to go to the police and tell them all this.’

  ‘Well, yes, that’s the plan. In fact, Campbell Stewart wants to “have a word” with us both later. I said we’d meet him at the Estate Office at three.’

  ‘Has something happened? Has Peter Laing – has he told them who Moir really is?’

  ‘I imagine you’d have heard directly if that were the case. No, I think it’s “a word” in the sense of a bollocking. Seems Mr Findlay has been on at the local boys, complaining about ordinary citizens – that’s us
– having to take up the slack where the police force leave off.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Bit of a red rag to a bull. Poor old Campbell.’

  The birds sang. A bee floated past her face. Across the garden, the sun was bright on Damian’s hair as he reached a hand into the raspberry bushes, then swung round and stretched across to another red clump. There was an easy grace to all his movements, as there was to Hector’s; an obvious inborn athleticism.

  ‘What have you told Damian, about yesterday? About... trying to find Rob... About those men... The poachers...’

  ‘I’ve rather been putting off that conversation – but I’ll fill him in before we go. He’d only get it out of Chris eventually anyway.’

  ‘Chris?’

  ‘Mm. The Spanish Inquisition could learn a thing or two from my little brother.’

  53

  The Estate Office had originally been a Victorian villa, and in the lobby there were still things like a gothic fireplace with a mottled red marble mantelpiece, and next to it a curved brass and ebony handle for summoning servants. But above the mantelpiece, instead of an ornately framed mirror or a stag at bay, there was a map of the Estate. She used to stand on her toes to try and read the names of the farms. They were all marked on it, even the ones that were just ruins now like Altmore.

  Set into the opposite wall was a sliding window through to the office where Mrs Gordon used to work, with a little bell beside it to ring if she didn’t see you – which she always used to pretend she didn’t.

  The woman sitting in there now was presumably Gillian Webster, solidly built and cheery, chattering away to a man standing by her desk.

  DCI Stewart.

  Hector opened the door next to the window and said, ‘Campbell – punctual as ever – please come up.’

  Hector’s office was the one his father had had, upstairs, with a view through the branches of a sycamore to a tattie field and, over to the right, the back of Miss Duff’s garden. It was hot, sun streaming in across the faded Persian carpet. Hector went to each of the two windows in turn and flung up their lower sashes, letting cool air drift in.