by Jane Renshaw
He looked at Helen. ‘I didn’t mean – I hope you don’t think –’
‘I know. It’s okay.’ She wanted to jump up and hug him too. She looked at Hector. ‘It’s – The alarm system’s activated, isn’t it? There’s no way he could get into the house?’ And be lying in wait up there for Damian?
‘Yes, it’s activated,’ said Hector. ‘We’re safe enough. And I’ve taken what other precautions I felt necessary.’
She didn’t ask what those were. She didn’t have to. If Hector said they were safe then they were safe.
When Damian had limped to the double doors, and closed them behind him, Steve said, ‘All right, so what’s the secret? We tell Cat and Ruth to go to bed, and an hour later they might start making a move.’
‘Guests,’ said Hector. ‘Best behaviour – such as it is.’
‘Oh God, no, that just makes ours worse,’ said Fiona. ‘Playing to the gallery.’
Steve looked across at Norrie. ‘You’ve all these delights still ahead of you.’
Norrie was the first to leave, half an hour later, to walk home by the back path, and then Fiona couldn’t find her bag, and Helen and Fish helped her look. Returning from a fruitless search of the dining room, Helen, pausing at the half-shut drawing room doors, heard Steve say, ‘The banging on the toilet door – the bells jingling, for God’s sake – all now seemingly substantiated by this “identification” of Mr Findlay’s –’
‘And how do you explain away the email to Mr Beattie?’
‘She probably sent it herself. And scratched “Liar” on her own car.’
‘Of course she didn’t.’
‘There’s no “of course” about it. What she’s been going through would be enough to unbalance anyone, let alone someone with Helen’s history. She’s obviously incredibly vulnerable. Having you back in her life is the last thing she needs. What is it with you? Why can’t you ever just leave well alone?’
She wanted to fling open the doors and run at Steve and tell him to shut up, just shut up – what did he know about any of it? What did he know about what she needed?
And then Fish was coming in at the front door, waving the bag and grinning at Helen and saying, ‘In the car all along’ and ‘I suppose I’d better tell Hector he can rearm the guided missiles or whatever he’s got trained on the door’ and she put a smile on her face, and they went back into the room together.
57
‘Good morning.’ Hector was in his shirt sleeves at the massive Aga, stirring something in an old pan. He was wearing lightweight stone-coloured trousers – the kind serious walkers wore – and a Tattersall shirt tucked in at his flat stomach.
‘Good morning.’
Damian got up from the table. ‘There’s tea in the pot. Or coffee. Or juice. What would you like to eat? We can do porridge, eggs, bacon, sausages, tomato, um, fried bread –’
‘I think I’ll have some of this muesli, thanks.’
Hector tipped the contents of the pan onto a plate and handed it to Damian. Scrambled eggs. Damian sat back down at the table, pushing a sheet of paper to one side to make room for the plate. As he did so, he looked at Hector, who came over and picked up the paper.
‘Got this last night.’
She took it from him. It was a print-out of another email:
Dear Hector
You know that I lied, don’t you? That it wasn’t Rob. That he didn’t kill Suzanne. That the person responsible is someone else entirely.
Could I be any more of a pathetic loser? How many more lives am I going to ruin? I’m sorry. I’m so sorry about everything.
Love
Helen
‘I’ve forwarded it to Stewart,’ said Hector. ‘For what that’s worth. I don’t imagine they’ll have any more luck tracing it than they did the last one.’
She pushed the email away. The thought of him, of Rob, Moir, hunched over a keyboard chuckling as he typed those words –
Damian ground pepper over his eggs. ‘It’s definitely not possible that Rob didn’t kill Suzanne?’
Helen reached for the carton of juice. ‘Of course it’s not.’
Damian’s eyes on her were cool, considering. She looked down at her glass as she poured the juice, and he stood, and said to Hector, ‘I’m going to get your laptop. See if I can trace the IP address.’
‘Okay, go for it.’
As Damian headed for the stairs, Helen said, ‘What if the email Mr Beattie supposedly got – what if he sent it to himself? And sent you this? Or maybe Mrs Beattie did... What if they’re in collusion with him? With Rob?’
Hector sat down on the chair at the end of the table, almost as if he was settling down to hear her line of defence. Almost as if he might believe that Helen was responsible for the emails.
She breathed. ‘If you were Rob – right after it happened – after you’d killed her – you’d need help, wouldn’t you? To disappear. You’d need money. He had a savings account with a building society, but the police said he never tried to withdraw what was in it. The building society would have been alerted to look out for him, I suppose – it would’ve been too risky for him to try to withdraw his money.’
He nodded. Thank God, he nodded.
She took a swallow of juice. ‘Don’t you think he’d have gone to his mother? She would’ve helped him. No matter what he’d done.’
‘But her behaviour argues against that theory.’
A clatter on the stairs announced Damian’s return as he half-hopped, half-jumped down the last two steps, swinging from the hand rails as if from a piece of gymnastic apparatus. ‘Where the hell is your laptop?’
‘Oh – it’s in my room. Sorry. I’ll get –’
But Damian was already jumping back up the stairs.
‘– it,’ Hector finished, smiling as he met Helen’s eyes.
So she ventured: ‘He copes very well, doesn’t he, with – everything.’
The smile widened. ‘Yes, and this is where we hear thud thud thud from the stairs.’
Thus far, and no further.
He reached across the table for Damian’s plate. ‘If Rob did go to his family for help, why has Mrs Beattie been insisting he’s innocent so vocally all these years? If she knew him to be guilty – if she was secretly sending him money, helping him with his new identity, whatever – wouldn’t it make sense for her to keep her mouth shut rather than draw attention?’
‘But the two things aren’t incompatible, are they? She could have been helping him, and believe he’s innocent.’
He shrugged, dipping a fork into the eggs. ‘It’s possible.’
‘I’d like to go and see the Beatties. And check on Uncle Jim.’
He glanced at his watch. ‘If you really think it’ll do any good, we could ambush the Beatties after church.’
‘You don’t have to come with me.’
‘Wouldn’t miss it for the world.’
◆◆◆
Hector pulled in at the end of the line of cars stretching from the kirk almost to the manse gates. ‘Should be finished in five minutes, if he’s running true to form.’
The clock on the dashboard said 12:25. The service always used to finish at 12:30 sharp, unless there was a christening. Mum had always suspected that this was because Mr Beattie got his sermons from a book – God by the yard, she used to call it.
She opened her door and got out. From here, you could just see the grey slate roof of the manse amongst the trees. All along the top of the high garden wall was glass, cemented in place, cruel jagged triangles of it to repel invaders. When she was a little girl she used to hope that Robin Beattie might climb up on his own garden wall, miss his footing, and fall so that his neck landed on a shard of glass, severing an artery.
‘So what’s the plan?’ said Damian, as they headed back up the line of cars towards the kirk.
He’d had no luck tracing the source of the email sent to Hector. The IP address was for a mobile phone, and the chances were that the phone would turn out to b
e an unregistered pay-as-you-go, but Hector had sent the details to DCI Stewart in the hope that the police might be able to turn something up.
‘I suppose we wait for the service to finish and people to disperse...’ She shrugged.
‘No chance of that, once they’ve seen you and realised that for once there’s going to be a performance worth coming to church for.’ Damian shot a smile at her over his shoulder. ‘It’ll be pass the popcorn and quiet in the cheap seats. Although with Mrs Beattie’s powers of projection –’
‘So we’ll make ourselves inconspicuous until people have left,’ said Hector. ‘If you can manage that for ten minutes.’
‘I can give it a go.’
As they approached the little gate a car passed, a bit too fast considering there were vehicles parked on each side of the road and no pavement at this point, and Hector’s hand went suddenly forward to Damian’s arm, before dropping back without actually touching him.
It was instinctive, for Hector, this compulsion to protect.
But when was the last time anyone had reached for him like that? He’d always been the one everyone came to with their problems and woes and insecurities – but what about his problems? His woes? His insecurities?
He couldn’t let himself have any, because he had no one to take them to.
She wished –
She wished she could be that person? But how could she wish herself on him, when she didn’t even have the guts to tell him the truth about what she’d done? How could he ever trust her?
From the kirk the muffled strains of All Things Bright and Beautiful were drifting through the graveyard. At the top of the steps Hector said, ‘I hope you’re ready for some fireworks.’
‘Fireworks is what we want, isn’t it? We want her blurting things out without thinking. We don’t want a measured response.’
‘In that case, I think I can safely say you’ll get your wish.’
They sat on one of the table graves at the back of the kirkyard to wait for the end of the service. Not the one she and Hector had sat on long ago – this one was plain, with only the inscription and some curlicues – no emblems of mortality. No angels, no scythes, no hour glasses with the sands of time run out.
Damian leant over the stone to pick at the lichen. ‘This is the kind of place, isn’t it, where you might get jumped by a psychopath?’
‘Yes, thanks for that,’ said Helen.
A blackbird flapped up from behind one of the gravestones.
Damian straightened, flicked away the bits of lichen, and took his handkerchief from his pocket. ‘Did Rob Beattie torture animals? That’s meant to be a sign of a proto-psychopath, isn’t it?’
‘He certainly used to torment that poor mutt they had,’ said Hector. ‘What was its name?’
‘Scamp,’ said Helen. ‘And...’ She ran her finger along the edge of the stone slab. ‘He killed my three cats. I’m pretty sure he did.’
They both looked at her.
‘God,’ said Hector.
‘I’ve no evidence, but –’ She told them about Baudrins and Susie and Fergus. ‘I’m not absolutely sure it was him. Or anyone, for that matter. It could have been a series of accidents.’
Damian frowned. ‘And what about Lorna? Did he used to hurt her?’
‘Actually, no. I don’t think so. I think he was all right to her. She must have – well, loved him, I suppose. She must have done, to keep believing in his innocence.’
The stone was cold through the thin cotton of her skirt.
‘There’s her mother too, of course,’ said Hector. ‘Dripping her mad theories into her head.’
‘Do you want to hear my mad theory?’ said Damian.
‘No,’ said his brother.
‘Helen, you’re not going to like it. I apologise in advance for any offence caused.’
‘In that case,’ said Hector, ‘we definitely don’t want to hear it.’
‘What if Suzanne killed Rob? And attacked you?’
‘Am I speaking to myself? I said we don’t want to hear it.’
‘It’s been suggested before,’ said Helen wearily. ‘I think people must have come up with every possible permutation of who did what over the years. Suzanne killed Rob and attacked me because we’d been having an affair; my memory of events was clouded by the concussion, and I got it wrong. That was one of the variations.’
Damian’s grey gaze was wide. ‘But maybe you did get it wrong. Maybe you’re “remembering” what your brain is telling you must have happened. What if Rob had started to fall for you, in the course of your correspondence? And Suzanne realised it, and under the influence of a cocktail of drink and drugs went for you both? She kills Rob, disposes of his body and makes her getaway in his car. The police are looking for Rob, not Suzanne. So it’s easy for her to elude detection, set up a new life –’
‘Bollocks,’ said Hector. ‘For one thing, Suzanne was – what – five feet tall? And built like a ten-year-old. She’d never have been able to ‘dispose’ of Rob’s body. Not on her own – and who’d have been her accomplice?’
Damian shrugged. ‘Ina?’
‘And I suppose Moir Sandison is Suzanne in disguise?’ said Helen.
‘If he’s a professional scammer, like Peter Laing says, Suzanne could have paid him to target you – to get back at you for stealing her boyfriend. That would explain why he knows so much about you.’
‘And she waits sixteen years to do so?’ said Hector. ‘And why would she blame Helen, in any case? Helen – well.’
‘I didn’t know it was Rob I was writing to,’ she finished for him. ‘Suzanne would never have killed Rob.’ She stood, and turned to face them both. ‘She worshipped him.’ She met Damian’s eyes. ‘You don’t remember her, do you?’
‘No.’
Of course he didn’t. ‘She used to take your cot into her room when you were teething, and cuddle you, and sing to you – and tell you stories about that soft elephant you were obsessed with.’
Damian was looking at her with a slight, faintly dismissive frown, as if the idea that he could ever have been six months old, and teething, and obsessed with a toy elephant just wasn’t credible.
It was the exact same look Irina would give you when you’d said something particularly stupid, and just for a second the charm slipped and you saw what she really thought. But then you’d be deciding you’d imagined it, as she nodded and smiled and made out like you were the most wonderful person she’d ever met in her life.
She wanted to say something about Irina. About how Suzanne had been more of a mother to him than she ever had. But she said only, ‘Little did she know that sixteen years later you’d be casually discussing whether she was a murderer, like it’s a game... like she doesn’t even matter... like she wasn’t even a real person.’
The frown became a grimace: apologetic and rueful and self-deprecating and completely charming.
She turned and walked away, back towards the kirk, where people were spilling out into the sunshine, yattering, laughing; children running through the gravestones.
Mr Beattie was standing at the door, a benign expression on his doughy face as he patronised two elderly ladies – one of whom, she realised, was Mrs Smart who used to have the shoppie. Mrs Smart, but old.
She advanced up the path, digging in her bag for a photo of Moir, passing faces unfamiliar and familiar and everything in between; faces that turned to follow her progress; voices that dipped in excited speculation, or disapproval, or put-on pity.
‘Is this Rob?’ she said, and thrust the photograph at him.
He blinked, his smile fixed in place.
‘Is it him?’
58
He made no move to take the photograph. He said to the two women, ‘I’m sure it will be a great success,’ and to Helen, in a rapid, soft, lilting voice, almost a whisper, as if reciting a prayer: ‘You have our sympathy my dear but what do you think can possibly be gained by persisting with this fiction this is not my son.’
Amen.
‘You haven’t even looked at it.’
‘I’ve been through all the material shown to us by the police.’ His eyes darted behind her, and then back to the people still coming out of the kirk.
‘It’s Rob, isn’t it? This is Rob.’ She shook the photograph at him.
He moved abruptly towards the open door as a large woman in a pink jacket came striding out, pushed past him and lunged at Helen, snatching the photograph and flinging it to the ground.
‘Robin is dead.’
Hector was beside her.
‘As you well know.’ Mrs Beattie pushed her face up to Helen’s – and for a moment she was back in a hospital bed, Auntie Ina’s face huge in her vision.
There was something weird about Mrs Beattie’s mouth – the lipstick. It wasn’t contained within the borders of the top lip, but made jaunty excursions into the faint moustache above.
Mr Beattie muttered, ‘Now, now, Caroline.’
‘How could it have been Robin who took the bike from the shed? If it’d been Robin, he’d have taken the money. Didn’t know about that, did you?’ She turned on Hector. ‘Didn’t know what was in the tin? But he would have done. You slipped up there!’
Hector raised his eyebrows at Helen. ‘There was a tin in the shed, apparently. With money in it for the gardener. Hidden in its usual place amongst the kindling. Rob knew about the tin, so Mrs Beattie’s argument is that, if it was Rob who took the bike, he’d also have taken the money in the tin.’
Helen took a step towards Mrs Beattie. ‘He’d just murdered Suzanne! Not exactly a huge surprise that he wasn’t thinking straight enough to remember some small change in a stupid tin!’
Mrs Beattie stepped back, her hands to the sides of her cheeks as if Helen had slapped her.
‘Come on, Mum.’ Lorna; glaring at Helen and putting an arm up to her mother’s shoulders. ‘Come on.’
Helen walked away from them all. She walked round the back of the kirk, between the pair of yew trees, down the mossy path that led to the gravestone: a sturdy slab of speckled grey granite with her grandparents’ names incised in black – the grandparents she couldn’t remember – and under them, Dad’s.