The Sweetest Poison

by Jane Renshaw

  She put her hand on the top of the stone, and closed her eyes.

  ‘Helen. I’m sorry, but – I don’t want you going off on your own just now.’ Hector was standing on the grass a little distance away. ‘Your uncle will be expecting us.’

  She nodded. They had a cool-box in the car, packed with soup and sandwiches and a chicken pie to take to Uncle Jim for lunch. And a raspberry pavlova Hector had found in the freezer.

  He handed her the photo of Moir.

  They walked back down the path in silence. The headstones here were arranged companionably in family groups that spanned the generations, from the early 1800s to the present. The family names that she’d known all her life: Gordon and Smart and Hewitt and Duff.

  She stopped at a small, polished black granite stone set alongside a substantial Victorian one. The name on it was William Duff.

  ‘Keeper who used to smoke foul cigars in confined spaces? Moustache and prominent ears? Morose old bastard?’

  She smiled. ‘I don’t remember him.’ But something had caught her attention. She went closer to the stone. Not the name, but the date under it.

  She touched the numbers incised into the granite. The date of his death, sixteen years ago: just ten days before Midsummer’s Eve. Ten days before Suzanne.

  ‘She should have something. Suzanne. Does a person have to be buried here, to have a memorial put up?’

  ‘I don’t think so. If you’re cremated you can still have a stone put up, or your name added to an existing one, I think. And there are plenty of names of local lads who died in far-flung outposts of Empire.’

  But would Suzanne have wanted a big slab of granite with her name on it? Maybe one of those tacky ones, with doves and sunbeams. Something ridiculous like that. Something funny.

  They carried on down the path. Even thinking about Suzanne being dead wasn’t completely unbearable when she was with him. Even if all they were doing was walking along a path in silence.

  On the gravel track beyond the back gate to the kirkyard, by the wall of the manse garden, several cars were parked, and Steve was there with Fiona’s parents, strapping Lizzie into a car seat. Damian was standing by the gate talking to Fish, who was grinning in an I-shouldn’t-be-finding-this-funny sort of way.

  As Hector and Helen joined them, Fish turned to her. ‘I’ve been having a think about the business with your account. Rather than concentrating on his using a false identity when the two of you opened the account – which is complicated by your joint signing of the declaration – our best angle of attack will probably be to contend that, because he used a forged passport as a form of identification to withdraw the cash, and a birth certificate that wasn’t his, the bank shouldn’t have authorised the withdrawals and is therefore liable.’

  ‘But surely – proof of identity when you’re withdrawing money is just to prove that it’s your account? And it was his account.’

  ‘I know it seems back to front. But –’

  ‘Why can’t you just leave us alone!’ a woman’s voice shouted.

  Lorna: striding towards them in her sensible black lace-ups.

  Fish’s mouth dropped open.

  Lorna strode right up to Helen until they were face to face.

  Helen stepped back. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘No you’re not. You don’t care about us. About what you’ve done to my family.’

  ‘Oh for God’s sake,’ said Hector. ‘It’s rather the other way round, isn’t it?’

  ‘Is it?’ Lorna was breathing fast, as if she’d been running. ‘Is it, Helen?’

  Fish said, ‘This isn’t –’

  ‘Have you asked her? About what was in that email?’

  ‘Lorna –’

  ‘Ask her. Ask her if she told the truth about Rob.’

  ‘Why would I not?’ Helen was gripping her bag so tight the raised stitching was digging into her palms.

  ‘You hated him.’

  ‘For no good reason, I suppose,’ said Fish.

  Lorna looked from him, to Helen, to Hector. And she opened her mouth and began to cry, like she used to when she was little, without restraint, not trying to stop it or hide it.

  ‘Oh God,’ said Damian, without sympathy.

  Helen opened her bag and found a tissue. She held it out to Lorna, who looked at it as if Helen was brandishing a weapon at her. The sobs had become a wailing noise that sounded on one continuous note, as if drawn from deep within her, from a place where no comfort could reach.

  Hector put his hand on Helen’s back and started to guide her away.

  She shrugged him off and turned back to Lorna. ‘All right. No. I wasn’t telling the truth.’ She didn’t look at Hector.

  The wailing stopped, abruptly. Lorna stared at her, her face frozen in its misery, and Fish’s voice behind her said, sharply, ‘What?’

  ‘I don’t remember what happened. But it must have been Rob. I knew it must have been him. So I told the police I remembered him attacking me. And Suzanne.’

  ‘You lied,’ said Lorna.

  ‘But I’m sure it was him.’

  Silence. Then:

  ‘You bitch, Helen,’ Lorna gulped. ‘You bitch.’

  ‘It must have been Rob. He made Suzanne write me a note, pretending to be from Hector, asking me to meet him – he must have been intending to – attack me, rape me –’

  ‘How do you know that? He made Suzanne write you a note? How do you know?’

  ‘I don’t.’ And now Helen was the one choking on tears.

  ‘Tell me what happened,’ said Lorna. ‘Tell me everything.’

  ‘I don’t remember!’ Helen pushed her hand against her mouth.

  ‘God, Helen,’ said Hector. He didn’t touch her.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear all that,’ said Fish. ‘But you’ll need to go to the police and amend your statement.’

  ‘They’ve been working on a false assumption all this time,’ said Damian, absently.

  ‘A reasonable assumption,’ said Fish.

  Hector shook his head. ‘Once Helen told them it was Rob, they obviously never bothered their arses to seriously consider any other possible scenarios. Did they ever take you through the events of that night?’

  Fish shrugged. ‘Not as such. Asked me if I’d seen Rob, when was the last time I saw Suzanne... But no – they never sat me down and took me through what I remembered, minute by minute, as would be done now.’

  ‘Then – we need to do that,’ Helen got out. ‘And I have to try to remember what happened. I have to.’

  Lorna was still staring at her. ‘Now. We do it now.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘All right.’

  ‘Christ,’ said Fish.

  59

  The air smelt of pine resin and peaty earth; the sharp, clean, sweet smell of the hills in summer, except when they passed what had to be either an animal’s corpse, decomposing somewhere in the undergrowth, or a stinkhorn, thrusting phallus-like from the black soil, reeking of rotting flesh.

  She thought a few times she wasn’t going to make it. Her legs were weak, her heart fluttery-feeling in her chest, the voices of the others coming loud and then distant in her ears. She should have eaten some lunch. But she’d managed to push only a few mouthfuls of soup past the blockage in her throat. She’d told Uncle Jim she’d had a huge breakfast at the House, all the time conscious of Hector’s unsympathetic presence across the table.

  He despised her now.

  Even the stalkers’ path under her feet seemed different. She’d walked it in her head how many times? But she hadn’t remembered it quite right. She’d forgotten this whole section, where it traversed the hill, following the contour, before climbing up to the stone circle.

  Maybe she’d got everything wrong. Maybe it hadn’t been Rob at all.

  Maybe she deserved his hatred.

  At her elbow, Fiona said, ‘Where – have we passed the place yet, where –’

  ‘It was ba
ck there. I think.’ A shiver went through her arms, and she hugged them round herself. She was wearing a long-sleeved T-shirt and jeans. After lunch, they’d gone back to the House to change and drop off Damian. Only Damian had somehow ended up coming with them.

  He and Hector had dropped out of sight, far back down the path.

  Damian’s presence had been yet another source of friction. When Steve and Fiona had pulled up at the end of the track, and Steve had seen Damian all kitted out in walking trousers and boots, sitting on the tailgate of the Land Rover with a pair of hiking poles next to him, he’d blown up at Hector.

  ‘Putting aside all the other reasons why it’s inappropriate for him to be here – There is no way he’s climbing that hill. Not on that path.’

  Hector was putting a pad of paper into a rucksack. ‘Tell him that.’

  ‘It’s not up to me to tell him anything.’

  ‘Um – he is right here?’ said Damian.

  ‘Hector –’

  ‘For God’s sake!’ Hector, uncharacteristically, had suddenly snapped. ‘It’s his look-out, isn’t it!’

  When they reached the stones, Helen sat down next to Fish on one of the long recumbent ones. Steve, sweaty in an oversized T-shirt, walked past them to look down across the clearing and the tops of the trees to the west, and said, ‘Nothing changes, does it?’

  She thought he meant the view – the softening outlines of the Grampians receding to the horizon. Morven and Tom na Creiche and Monadh Caoin. Then Fiona said, ‘That’s not fair.’

  ‘Isn’t it? You think it’s perfectly reasonable to let that boy attend this – whatever it is – and break his neck on that path? Just as it was perfectly reasonable to push Class A drugs on a bunch of kids? Some of them no older than Damian? How old were you?’ He turned to Lorna, who was standing on the other side of the circle.

  ‘Fourteen.’

  ‘Fourteen.’

  ‘You know what Damian’s like.’ Fiona’s voice was tight. ‘Once he sets his mind on something.’

  ‘Oh please.’

  A tense silence descended.

  None of them wanted to be here. Of course they didn’t. They must all despise her. And the childish part of her longed to be poor Helen again, the object of their sympathy and concern, not – whatever it was they thought of her now.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’ve tried so hard to remember –’

  ‘Well try again,’ said Lorna.

  What did she remember?

  Hector, walking round these stones, delivering his performance. His story about Sandie Milne and the Sith. And then the sound of bells, coming jingling through the trees in the dark –

  ‘He must have been here.’

  ‘Hmm?’ said Fish.

  ‘When Hector was telling the story about the Sith. When you were footering about with the bells in the trees – Rob must have already been here. That’s how he knows about the bells. And it must have been Rob who spiked my drink with cocaine.’

  ‘That could have been anyone,’ said Steve. ‘Hector –’

  He stopped as Damian appeared, grinning as he limped past Steve to sit on the stone next to Fiona, and calling back to Hector: ‘Come on, what’s the hold up? I want juice.’

  Hector, unsmiling, tossed a little carton of juice at his brother and dumped the rucksack on the ground in the middle of the circle.

  ‘Let’s just get this over with,’ said Steve.

  ‘By all means.’ Hector turned to Helen. ‘You and Suzanne stayed here by the fire, yes, when the rest of us went off into the trees with the torches? That would have been – some time before midnight?’ His tone was brisk.

  ‘Yes.’ Helen stood.

  ‘Where exactly were you sitting?’

  Steve snorted. ‘What does that matter?’

  Shloook, shloook, shloook – Damian, sucking juice through the straw.

  ‘Come and sit where you think you were.’

  She dropped down onto the grass.

  ‘... And you can make yourself useful and be Suzanne.’

  Damian scrunched up the empty juice carton and threw it at Hector, who caught it one-handed and dropped it into the rucksack.

  ‘Where was Suzanne?’ he asked Helen.

  ‘Here.’ She touched the grass next to her.

  Damian limped across and lowered himself into place, setting the hiking poles down next to him and using his hands to adjust the position of his right leg.

  Steve said, pointedly, ‘Are you all right there?’

  ‘Mm.’ Damian lay back. ‘At least I’m going to make a convincing corpse.’

  ‘That,’ said Hector, ‘is your most offensive remark yet today.’

  Damian raised his eyebrows.

  ‘And that is not a fucking compliment!’

  Damian turned his head to look at Helen, and smile an apology. Close up she could see there was a heaviness about his eyes, about the place on his brow between them.

  ‘Can we just get on with it?’ said Steve.

  Hector folded his arms. ‘You, Fish, Fiona, Norrie and I – we were all up there in the trees. Lorna – where were you?’

  ‘I don’t know about timings, but –’ She came into the circle of stones. She had scraped her hair back into a scrunchy, and her white face looked naked, exposed. ‘While everyone was still gathered round the fire, I decided to walk down to the phone box on the road and call Dad to come and pick me up.’

  ‘On your own?’ said Fiona.

  ‘Yes. I’d asked various people if they’d drive me back, but no one was sober enough. I had a little torch I’d brought with me – and it was only really dark under the trees. I got as far as the track, but then I saw Rob’s car.’

  ‘You’re sure it was his?’

  ‘Of course I’m sure. I knew he hadn’t been invited, but I wasn’t surprised he was gatecrashing. I decided to go back and find him. I thought if I caught him before he’d had a chance to drink too much, he could drive me home, and then come back to the party. But when I got to the fire, there was no one here. I could see the flames of the torches in the trees. Helen – you weren’t here. Neither was Suzanne.’

  ‘So that must have been just after midnight?’ said Hector.

  ‘I don’t know. I followed the torches, hoping Rob would be with the rest of you. But he wasn’t. I never found him.’

  ‘You asked me if I’d seen him,’ said Fish.

  ‘But you hadn’t. No one had.’ Her voice cracked.

  ‘I remember you – uh – getting a bittie blootered,’ said Norrie.

  ‘Someone gave me a bottle of something. The rest of the night’s just a blur. I remember clambering down the hill with Norrie and those girls; and sitting in a car... Then I woke in the morning in my own bed at home. By then everyone had realised that Rob and Suzanne were both missing – and I told the police about seeing his car on the track. By then it was too late. To be of any use. And then you told them he’d attacked you –’ She turned to face Helen.

  ‘Okay,’ said Hector. ‘We can take the rest as read. Fish?’

  Fish was looking at Helen too. ‘You know it was Tom and I who found you?’

  She nodded.

  He walked across the grass, back towards the path. ‘We were going back down to the vehicles for some booze that got left behind by mistake.’

  ‘Tom had been meant to carry it up,’ said Hector. ‘I made him go back for it – a crate of beer, I think it was.’

  ‘And Tom said it was too heavy for one person, so I went with him.’ Fish walked a little way down the path, and stopped. ‘Are we going to go back down to where we found Helen?’

  ‘In a bit,’ said Hector. ‘Tell us what happened first.’

  ‘Well,’ said Fish. ‘We’d taken one of the torches with us – of the flaming variety. It was a bit of a bugger because it kept knocking against the branches of trees. So we were going pretty slowly. Because of that, and the fact we were smashed and could hardly walk in a straight line... If we’d been goi
ng at a normal speed I don’t suppose we’d have spotted you.’ He came back up the path and stood looking at Helen. ‘I saw something light-coloured through the trees, on the ground. It was your top. You were wearing a light-coloured top...’

  ‘Yes.’

  He’d been carrying around this memory of Helen Clack lying there in her light-coloured top all these years. Strange to think that they all featured in each other’s versions of that night, but never as quite the same person.

  ‘I thought at first it was literally that – someone’s shirt or sweater. But as we got nearer we saw it was a person. Someone passed out drunk, was my second assumption – until I saw the blood. And your face – it was in quite a state. It was obvious you’d been – assaulted. Tom lost it, screaming that you were dead – but I could see you were breathing – I tried to get you to hear me, but you were unconscious. Meanwhile Tom was screaming blue murder, literally –’

  ‘Bringing us all running,’ said Steve.

  ‘You arrived first, I think,’ said Fish. ‘I remember you checking her airways or something – I was so relieved that you were there and knew what to do.’

  Steve grimaced. ‘I hadn’t a clue.’

  ‘We carried Helen down the path...’ Hector turned to Norrie. ‘While you followed behind –’

  ‘I ended up with Lorna and Perdita and that other quine – she’d lost a shoe, and Lorna was in a gey state, and Perdita would suddenly take off running – by the time we made it to the track end you and Steve and Fiona had got Helen into a Land Rover and were starting off for the hospital. I was relatively sober, so I took Fish in my car and we followed. I say relatively sober – I doubt I’d have passed a breathalyser. We left Lorna and Perdita and her friend with the others at the track end.’

  ‘I remember sitting in a car,’ said Lorna. ‘I suppose someone realised Suzanne was missing, and started a search. And then some of the men from the Estate got here, and eventually the police... Someone must have taken me home at some point.’

  Silence.

  Helen said, ‘Right. So now it’s my turn.’ She looked at Damian lying on the grass beside her. ‘Suzanne – when I last saw her she was lying face down...’