The Sweetest Poison

by Jane Renshaw

  Steve was handing one of the fliers to Hector. ‘These are all round town. What the hell?’

  ‘Make yourselves comfortable and we’ll fill you in. Who wants what to drink?’ And to Damian: ‘Are there nuts or something?’

  Fiona was holding her hands to the first fierce flames of the fire. ‘I’ve been hearing all sorts of things from patients.’

  Steve plonked himself down on one of the sofas. ‘So what’s the story?’

  She let Hector tell it – or rather an edited version of it, in which the flier was nothing more than an attempt to ‘gather information’. When he got to the bit about LIAR being scratched on Helen’s car, everyone was suddenly talking at once, and Fiona was sitting at Helen’s side with an arm round her and interrogating Hector about what he was doing to keep Helen safe, and Fish was raising his voice over everyone, asking questions; and then they were quiet as Hector told them what DCI Stewart had said, and the new information about Lisa Greig.

  ‘Christ’s sake!’ said Norrie. ‘So what are they doing about it? What are the police doing?’

  ‘Bugger all,’ said Hector.

  Helen sighed. ‘They’re doing all the usual things. At least they now know he was calling himself James Johnstone at one point, when he scammed Lisa Greig.’

  ‘Tracing someone like that – it’s not easy,’ said Fish. ‘They shed their identities like skins.’

  ‘But I’m sure they’ll catch him.’ Fiona squeezed Helen. ‘In the meantime... You have to make sure you don’t go anywhere alone, you have to –’

  And then Norrie was on his feet, his face red, and saying, ‘We have to do something,’ and Steve was telling him to sit down and have a drink, and Norrie sat, but kept on: ‘If he’s driving a motor home, how hard can it be to find him?’

  Hector set a bowl of crisps on the ottoman. ‘Problem is, the place is crawling with walkers just now, climbers, canoeists, Druids, you name it. One more nutter in a motor home isn’t going to attract undue attention.’

  ‘There’s plenty of us would help look.’

  ‘That’s a job for the police.’ Hector sat down in an armchair and stretched his legs across the rug. His mouth quirked as he looked over at Helen, at Damian, then down into his whisky.

  Damian widened his eyes at her, as if to say What can you do?

  ‘Aye,’ said Norrie. ‘But – God almighty. He’s out there somewhere –’

  ‘Mm,’ said Fish. ‘But as Hector says, going after this character has to be left to the police. He could be dangerous –’

  ‘Of course he’s dangerous. He’s a bloody psychopath.’ Norrie blinked at her. ‘You really think he could be Rob?’

  She nodded. ‘But – I’d like to hear what you all think.’

  And so they looked at the photographs of Moir. Hector had found some old ones featuring Rob, and they spent a tense five minutes contrasting and comparing. Were the eyes different colours, or was it just the light? Moir’s hair had a kink in it and Rob’s hadn’t, but Moir wore his hair longer – if Rob had let his grow, maybe it would have curled a little. The chins were very similar, but were they the same? Norrie thought he could be Rob; Steve and Fiona weren’t convinced; Hector and Fish thought there was no way. For one thing, Fish couldn’t believe that plastic surgery could so radically change a person’s nose; Fiona started on about all the amazing work that was possible now, on the faces of people who’d been in accidents or who had congenital deformities –

  ‘Yes, all right,’ said Fish. ‘But what about this?’ He tapped the photocopy with the writing on it. ‘It doesn’t match the sample of Rob’s handwriting the Beatties supplied.’

  ‘Who knows what they supplied, though,’ said Helen. ‘And the graphologist wasn’t told about Rob having dyslexia.’

  She wished she could tell them why she knew Moir had to be Rob. But she couldn’t admit to them that the email to Mr Beattie had been right; that she really was a liar.

  Fiona was still sitting close. ‘I’ve done a bit of research, and it seems that people with dyslexia are more prone to changes in their handwriting.’

  ‘Well, DCI Stewart is going to mention the dyslexia to the expert.’

  ‘The only way of knowing for sure, of course, is a DNA test,’ said Fish. ‘They didn’t get any DNA from the flat in Edinburgh? Did they do any forensics – look for hairs in the plughole, that kind of thing?’

  Behind them, rain skittered suddenly against the windows.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Because they don’t believe he can possibly be Rob. They only had the writing checked, I think, to get me off their backs. There was no way they were going to do a CSI job on the flat. Although there probably wouldn’t be any point anyway. He had the place professionally cleaned, apparently, before he left.’

  ‘Because he didn’t want anyone finding his DNA,’ said Norrie. ‘So he is Rob.’

  ‘No,’ said Hector. ‘Not necessarily. It could be that he wants Helen to think he is. He wants her to think he had to have the flat blitzed to obliterate his DNA.’

  ‘But why would he want her to think that?’

  ‘Because he’s a sick bastard.’ Hector glanced at her, just briefly, but with such concern –

  She shouldn’t be enjoying this. She shouldn’t be basking in his attention, in the attention of all of them, in this wonderful feeling of being back in their world, of being protected and worried about and fussed over.

  Smellie Nellie and her ridiculous problems.

  She frowned; tried to focus. ‘But if he is Rob... He wouldn’t want to leave any actual proof that he is, DNA or anything, but he’d get a kick out of letting me know who he was in other ways... unprovable ways... like writing “Smellie Nellie” on the photo. Like his cough. Like banging on the toilet door. Like, when I first met him, standing in front of me so I couldn’t get past... remember at school, Rob used to ambush me at the gates and not let me past?’ She’d been looking, she realised, all the time she’d been speaking, at Hector.

  Steve grunted. ‘Why didn’t anyone ever take the little shit in hand? If it’d been nipped in the bud by his parents...’

  ‘Mm.’ Hector swirled the whisky in his glass, first one way, then the other. ‘They’ll probably be saying the same about Ruth in twenty years’ time.’

  Fish grinned.

  Fiona said, ‘If his dyslexia had been diagnosed early enough, things might have been different.’

  ‘Plenty of people have dyslexia,’ said Norrie, ‘and don’t become psychopaths.’

  ‘No, but if a person has issues anyway, the dyslexia on top of those could be enough to push them over the edge.’

  ‘Bollocks,’ said Hector. ‘There was something fundamentally wrong with him. Something –’

  ‘Evil?’ suggested Steve. ‘Original sin, and all that?’

  ‘I was going to say, something in the structure of his brain. It was as if he was wired up to take pleasure in things a normal person would find abhorrent. As if his wires had been pulled out and crossed over.’

  ‘A well-known medical phenomenon,’ said Steve.

  ‘I don’t know that Rob Beattie was necessarily a psychopath,’ said Fish.

  ‘What was he then?’ said Norrie. ‘Misunderstood?’

  ‘Well,’ said a brittle voice from the door, ‘that’s dinner ready, Mr Forbes.’

  Hector stood. ‘Thank you, Mrs MacIver. It smells wonderful.’

  She didn’t crack a smile. ‘If we could have some help to carry it up. And I’ve said Charlene can go once we’ve served the main course.’

  ‘Yes, of course. And you can finish up too, if you like. We’ll load the dishwasher and tidy up.’

  ‘The silver and the good plates and glasses dinna go in the dishwasher.’

  ‘Come on, Mrs Mac,’ said Damian. ‘Where’s your sense of adventure?’

  ‘I’ll give you a sense of adventure,’ was the response, ‘if I find anything in that dishwasher in the morning that shouldna be.’

  When she’d gone
, Hector said, ‘Shall we shelve all this until after dinner?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Fiona at once. ‘I’m sorry, Helen – you must just say when you want us to shut up. When it’s getting too much.’

  ‘It’s fine. I’m really grateful, to you all, for – well. Wanting to help. But, yes, let’s talk about something other than me me me and my problems.’ As they moved into the hall, she asked Damian, ‘Can I help carry things up?’

  ‘Got it covered,’ Fish spoke over his shoulder, following Hector down the hall.

  The table in the dining room was set with a snowy white damask tablecloth and gleaming silver: three sets of candelabra marching down the middle, and an array of silver cutlery at each place; and a forest of glasses in which each of the candle flames was multiplied, over and over.

  On the massive Victorian sideboard was a selection of bottles of wine and soft drinks, and a big glass jug of iced water. Steve inspected the wine while Damian hefted the jug. ‘Everyone want water?’

  Rain was streaming down the panes of the long Georgian windows. Fiona went straight to the fireplace, struck a long match and held it to the paper under the pyramid of sticks and pine cones.

  The room was so familiar – the huge table, the dark Victorian furniture, the picture over the sideboard of some long-dead, pantalooned, serious-faced Forbes children with a thin dog in an Italianate landscape – and yet different. There wasn’t that heavy smell of boiled meat and damp. The wallpaper wasn’t coming away in the corner above the little cupboard. The gilded frame around the mirror above the mantelpiece had been repaired.

  As she took a chair next to Norrie in front of the windows, she realised that this was the first time she’d ever actually sat down at this table.

  Hector came in just then with a tray, and behind him a pretty, curly-haired bap of a girl – Charlene, presumably – and behind her, Fish. They set the trays down on the sideboard and Charlene and Fish distributed the plates – a nest of salad leaves with smoked salmon, mussels and prawns – while Hector went round with the wine.

  ‘This looks edible,’ said Fish, when Charlene had gone.

  Hector, taking his place at the head of the table, examined his plate. ‘So it does.’ He looked down the table; flicked a glance to the windows; shifted slightly in his chair, picked up a platter of brown bread and offered it to Helen with a smile that didn’t reach the odd, intense expression in his eyes.

  She took a piece of bread. He used to get restless like this at school, she remembered, like a wild creature eager for its freedom – but that had been a happy, anticipatory sort of restlessness, while this was –

  What?

  She wasn’t imagining it, was she? The tension in the air between them?

  Fish speared a prawn and chewed. ‘Definitely acceptable.’

  ‘Hector’s new strategy,’ said Damian, passing Helen a blue dish of butter, ‘is to request a menu that consists of strictly separate elements. So, for the main course – sole fillets, new potatoes and broccoli. His reasoning is that turning that into brown sludge will be beyond even Mrs Mac’s powers – but as I pointed out, we know it will end up as brown sludge, so the closer the request is to the finished product, the less we have to worry about in terms of what the hell happened.’

  Steve grinned. ‘So taking that argument to its logical conclusion...’

  ‘Soup,’ said Hector. ‘Damian’s strategy is to ask for soup.’

  ‘Which she’s actually not bad at,’ said Damian. And as his brother raised his eyebrows: ‘Not too bad.’

  When the main course did arrive, presided over, this time, by Mrs MacIver herself, it came in a large shallow dish with a lid. Hector set it in the place of honour in front of him, and Damian lifted the lid.

  Various shapes lay concealed under a thick, glutinous brown gravy.

  ‘Ah...’ said Hector. ‘Sole fillets...?’

  Fish found the hallmarks on the napkin ring by his plate of sudden interest. Norrie noticed something out of the window, and Helen turned to look.

  ‘The potatoes and broccoli are in there too, are they?’ said Damian.

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘Keeps everything hot,’ said Hector, ‘having it all together.’

  Damian began to cough.

  Hector said over him: ‘Thank you, both of you, for all your work tonight. We’ll manage from here.’

  As the door closed behind the women, one of Damian’s coughs became a yelp, and Hector shooshed him, and that started everyone else off. Shouts of laughter hit the ceiling as Hector dipped the serving spoon into the sludge, and at last Helen was able to let the hysterics out.

  55

  Fiona, carrying the glass dish with the remains of the profiteroles, bumped the baize door open with her bottom and Helen, balancing a tray, walked through after her. She felt giddy. She’d had too much wine.

  Fiona jabbed a finger at the lighted panel next to the lift doors.

  ‘This is an innovation,’ said Helen.

  ‘Well, those kitchen stairs are a death trap. And it goes right up to the second floor too – up the middle of the stairwell.’

  Norrie followed them into the lift with some empty bottles. It disgorged them into the big storeroom at the back of the kitchen, now fitted out with shelves on which were stacked enough tins and jars and packets to stock a shop, and a huge American fridge, and two chest freezers. There was a sink, too, and a dishwasher, standing open, and a table in the middle of the room.

  Fiona dumped down the dish. ‘If you think that’s smart, come and see this.’

  They were opening the back door, Fiona having keyed in the code to deactivate the alarm, when Norrie caught up with them. ‘Hope you weren’t thinking of going out there on your own.’

  The rain had stopped. They crossed the slick courtyard, and walked out through the arched tunnel under the clock tower, and under a copse of dripping pine trees to the old laundry.

  Helen remembered the laundry as being more or less a ruin. Now the roof was straight and the walls repaired and repointed in lime mortar. The rows of Georgian windows were painted a soft green. Fiona opened the big door at the end of the building and flicked on the lights.

  They were in a passage, panelled in grey tongue-and-groove, with black-and-white photographs on the walls showing the laundry in Edwardian times, women in white aprons standing outside.

  Fiona opened a door onto light and space, and air, and a faintly chemically smell. Stretching in front of them was a swimming pool, its gently moving surface bouncing the light to ripple along the walls and the rafters high above.

  It was beautiful: very modern and sleek, the tiles round the sides a pale oat colour, the chrome handrails at the steps sparkling silver. Over the Georgian windows, translucent, Japanese-style blinds were pulled.

  Fiona had gone to stand right on the edge, looking down into the water as if she might just jump in. Norrie had disappeared.

  ‘The girls practically live here. Although where Cat’s concerned, the pool’s not the main attraction.’ She stopped. ‘Sorry. You don’t want to hear about Cat’s nonsense.’

  ‘I do. Please tell me about Cat’s nonsense.’

  Fiona smiled, and said, too lightly: ‘She’s hopelessly in love with Damian.’

  Helen stiffened. Did she know, then, after all?

  Fiona stepped back from the edge. ‘Blushes furiously whenever he speaks to her, and can hardly get out a reply. Damian of course is oblivious. “Have I done something to upset Cat?” he asked me the other day. Maybe I should tell him – Hector thinks we should – but I promised Cat on pain of death not to.’

  Helen knew she herself was blushing furiously. ‘If Cat doesn’t want him to know, I don’t think you should say anything.’

  ‘Oh, I won’t. And if she has to have a crush on anyone, I’m glad it’s Damian. Isn’t he a sweetheart?’

  And for the rest of her life, Cat would measure every other man against him.

  ‘He is. I don’t know how Irina – I can�
�t understand how she could have –’

  ‘Oh God, I know, don’t ask me.’

  ‘She seemed such a doting mother.’

  ‘Well. Yes. And Damian adored her. I used to think they couldn’t be true, the stories we used to hear – the nanny they had after Suzanne was best friends with one of the nurses in the practice, and she used to regale us with – well. All sorts of stories.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘A lot of it was probably exaggerated. But – I was walking behind them once, Irina and Damian, when she’d just picked him up from school, and he was all excited, telling her he’d made her something, and he produced this bizarre – thing – from his bag, made out of papier-maché I think. Brown and rather faecal-looking, with odd green excrescences sticking out of it. He said it was a tree for her to put her rings on – to put on her dressing table. And she hooted with laughter, and hugged him, and said, “Oh darling, I think this is the best place for it, don’t you?” And she plucked it from his hand and dropped it into the bin outside the shoppie. I don’t suppose she knew I was behind her. I could have slapped her.’ Fiona coloured slightly as she said this, as if having a desire to inflict violence might be in breach of her Hippocratic Oath.

  ‘The worst thing was the way Damian reacted. Or didn’t react. He just took with it. Laughed. But when she went ahead of him into the shoppie he looked back at the bin, and the expression on his little face –’

  ‘That’s horrible.’ She didn’t want to hear any more. ‘What’s through there?’ She pointed to a door next to the one they’d come through.

  ‘Oh, changing rooms and showers and stuff.’

  ‘This building isn’t alarmed – or even locked?’

  ‘Well, no. There’s nothing to steal, is there?’

  ‘But isn’t it the kind of thing Rob would do? Let himself in and go for a swim, right under our noses?’

  ‘And pee in the pool.’

  They looked at each other. And before Helen could stop her Fiona had walked to the other door and flicked on a light just inside it.