by Jane Renshaw
Damian rolled onto his front, with a suspicious look at the grass before he lowered his face onto his arms.
‘She – she’d tried to stop me. To dissuade me from keeping what I thought was... an assignation... with Hector.’ She could feel her face flushing scarlet. ‘But she was very drunk. I think she was asleep when I left her.’ She got to her feet.
‘Okay.’ Hector slung the rucksack over one shoulder. ‘You started down the path. Were you conscious of anything behind you? Suzanne moving, maybe?’
‘No.’ She walked over to the path. ‘I didn’t look back. I thought I was going to be late – I was hurrying... Do you want me to –’
‘Do whatever you remember doing that night.’
So she lengthened her stride on the path and tried to think herself back. She’d been hurrying, her feet slipping about –
‘I lost the path quite soon.’ Then: ‘Here, maybe?’ The path turned sharply to the left – in the dark, it would be easy to go wrong. She went straight on into the trees and they all trooped after her, ducking under the thicker branches, pushing aside the thinner ones. ‘I carried on down the slope until I found the path again...’
‘It chicanes back round,’ said Hector. ‘If you go straight down here you’ll come onto it again.’
Back on the path, when they reached a place where it dipped down and then curved gradually to the right, she stopped. ‘I think it was here.’
Hector, Fish and Lorna were behind her. There was no sign of the others.
‘No,’ said Fish. ‘A bit further on. It was just past that big pine with the branch sticking out.’ And when they’d passed the tree: ‘Here. Wasn’t it?’
Hector nodded. ‘Yes, I think so.’
She wanted to run – on down the path and away.
But: ‘So you’re walking down the path...’ Lorna prompted her.
‘Shouldn’t we wait?’ said Helen. ‘For the others?’
‘Why?’
She couldn’t think of a reason.
‘Maybe you should sort of half-shut your eyes,’ Lorna suggested. ‘As if it’s dark.’
She didn’t want to.
‘Helen?’ said Fish.
‘Okay.’ She half-shut her eyes, and let her mind free.
She’d had no warning. No sense of anyone being there before she’d felt herself grabbed from one side – from the right. Hands grabbing her – her arm, her head – a hand across her mouth, and being pulled off the path, stumbling against him, a smell of sweat –
‘He smelt,’ she said. ‘Of sweat. Like Rob did.’ She opened her eyes and walked off the path and into the trees. ‘He pulled me in here. His hand was over my mouth so I couldn’t scream. I couldn’t breathe properly – the hand was over my nose too – Maybe I blacked out because I wasn’t getting enough air? And came to later, when he was hitting me –’
No one spoke.
She lay down on the mossy ground. The sky, where it showed between the trees, was searingly bright in her eyes. She closed them.
She’d tried to remember so often: to remember lying here in these woods, and Rob on top of her, punching her – but that wasn’t a memory – was it? It was her imagination filling in the gaps. It was the version of events she’d constructed.
Or was there really something, a memory of a weight on top of her, a knife cool against her skin –
She sat up. ‘I think – he had a knife.’
‘Who’s he?’ said Fish.
‘Rob. I’m sure it was Rob.’
‘But do you actually remember?’ Lorna was standing very straight, her hands locked in front of her. ‘Or are you just guessing?’
‘I don’t remember seeing him. No. But –’
‘The injuries you had were consistent with someone using their fists on you,’ she said. ‘Not a knife.’
‘Yes.’ Helen took a long breath. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t really remember... I just thought...’
‘You must remember.’ Lorna was suddenly on her knees in front of her. ‘There were defensive injuries on you. That means you must have been aware of what was happening to you. That means you must be able to remember. Lie back down and put up your arms – hold them out as if you’re trying to stop me hitting you.’
She lay back and lifted her arms, forearms parallel to one another above her face. And suddenly Lorna hit her, quite hard, just below her wrist and again on the elbow.
‘Lorna,’ said Hector, and pulled her away.
‘You must remember,’ said Lorna.
‘The mind’s a funny thing.’ It was Fiona’s voice, suddenly near. ‘If you’re in a life or death situation, your system diverts all your resources to your muscles and the fight-or-flight part of the brain and away from the part that lays down memories. That’s why people often don’t remember traumatic events.’
Helen sat up. Fiona was squatting next to her. Hector still had hold of Lorna, who was taking ragged breaths. Behind him were Fish and Norrie.
‘I’m sorry. I don’t remember. I just don’t.’
When Steve and Damian had caught up they continued down the path, at a slower pace to accommodate Damian, although he was very knackie with the poles, only seeming to have problems where the path dropped steeply, when Steve or Hector would help him. At one very steep place, treacherous with scree, his right foot slid out to the side and he would have fallen if Hector hadn’t been holding onto him.
‘Thanks,’ she heard him mutter as Hector half-lifted him down the worst of it. ‘Sorry. Bit of a pain in the arse.’
‘You’re a bloody nuisance.’
Fiona grinned round at Damian, as if to reassure him that Hector was joking. But the look that passed between the brothers had no levity in it.
As they returned to the vehicles Hector’s phone beeped, and he turned away to take the call. ‘Well, it was a long shot,’ she heard him say. And then: ‘... past Rotmachy...’
Fish was saying, ‘So that’s that then. We’re no further forward. Although I suppose we’ve eliminated ourselves from the inquiry. Everyone has someone to vouch for them for the time Helen was attacked.’
‘Well,’ said Lorna. ‘I can vouch for Norrie, and vice versa. Tom, I suppose, can vouch for you. But I don’t know that we’ve established anyone else’s innocence.’
Hector shut his phone, and Helen said, ‘You’re still looking for him. You’ve got them out looking for him.’ But she couldn’t summon any righteous indignation. What was this lie, compared with hers?
‘Oh no,’ said Fiona. ‘Don’t tell me. Hector –’
‘Um.’ He grinned. ‘It’s a fair cop.’
‘Great,’ said Steve. ‘And when your thugs catch up with this guy, who’s probably a perfectly innocent tourist – then what?’
‘My “thugs” will call the police.’
Steve snorted, but Norrie rounded on him. ‘Of course he’s not a “perfectly innocent tourist”! Rob’s back, he’s running around out there –’
‘He’s not Rob,’ said Lorna.
‘Of course he’s not,’ said Steve.
An inimical silence.
Then Lorna looked at Hector. ‘I suppose you were with the torchlight procession up until the time we all heard Tom screaming? I suppose there are lots of people who can verify that?’
Hector shrugged.
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘I was with everyone else for part of the time. For the rest – I was with one other person.’
‘Oh, right.’ Lorna wrinkled her nose. ‘So who was the lucky girl?’
‘I don’t think that’s important.’
‘Oh for God’s sake,’ said Steve. ‘Don’t hold back on my account.’ And as Hector just looked at him: ‘I’m not a complete fool. I know you were with Fi.’
60
With Fi. Fiona.
He’d been with Fiona.
Her stomach spasmed.
All the time she’d been counting down the minutes until they could be together – all the time she’d
been strung up so tight, so aware of him across the fire, wondering what it would feel like when he touched her, wondering what would happen when her whole world changed – all the time, he’d barely given her a passing thought. All the time, it had been Fiona.
Had he held her gaze across the fire? Had their hands brushed as they both reached for another log?
‘What?’ said Fiona, her face blank.
‘The two of you vanished at the same time,’ said Steve. ‘Didn’t take a genius to work it out.’
Everything looked suddenly different – the colours of the trees more intensely green; Fiona’s top startlingly blue, her lips a perfect Cupid’s bow; Hector a tall stranger. As if she was seeing the world as it really was for the first time since that night.
And discovering herself a ghost in it, a spectator, insubstantial and irrelevant.
Fiona said: ‘You knew?’
‘You weren’t exactly subtle about it, were you?’ There was no anger in Steve’s voice. No bitterness. He just sounded very tired. ‘You’re not exactly subtle about it now, you know.’
Damian leant back against Hector’s Land Rover, as if settling down to be entertained.
Norrie said, ‘Jesus.’
‘We didn’t plan it,’ Fiona said. ‘We didn’t mean it to happen.’
‘You know the state we were all in,’ said Hector.
Steve’s lips twitched in a tiny smile, his eyes unmoving on Hector. ‘It didn’t mean anything? That’s your next line.’
‘If you like.’
‘Look,’ said Fish. ‘Don’t you think you three should be having this conversation in private?’
‘Yes,’ said Steve. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘We were just kids.’ Fiona’s mouth contorted around the word.
‘Not any more you’re not.’
‘It never happened again.’
‘Next you’ll be telling me you’re not still in love with him.’
The words dropped into the dead air between them.
Too late: ‘Of course I’m not.’
‘One thing I’ve never understood.’ Steve’s voice was still perfectly calm, but the hands he pushed into his trouser pockets were shaking. ‘Okay so now we’ve got the girls and he’s got Damian and you don’t want to rock the boat – but before – why stay with me, when you could have had him? Why, come to that, did you ever split up in the first place?’
Fiona just shook her head.
‘I’m guessing it was something suitably juvenile – like you caught him smoking a joint, and prim and proper little Fiona Kerr was shocked and disgusted and didn’t want anything more to do with him?’
Hector looked up, at the sky above them, as if for inspiration from the God he didn’t believe in.
‘Yep,’ said Steve. ‘I’ve hit the nail on the head, haven’t I?’
‘It was cocaine,’ said Fiona.
Steve hooted. ‘Cocaine. Yes. Of course it was.’
‘And I’m still shocked and disgusted, actually.’ Her voice was wobbling all over the place. ‘Hector and I – we’re not right for each other. We never were.’
‘And that’s what you’ve been telling yourself for sixteen years.’ Steve took something from his pocket and handed it to Fiona, very deliberately. A car key. ‘I’m going to walk home. I’ll see you there.’
‘But it’s – it must be six miles...’
‘So it’ll take me a while.’
‘Steve,’ said Hector.
‘Whatever you have to say to me I don’t want to hear it. I’m sorry if I’m overreacting – it’s not like it’s a revelation or anything. But right at this moment, whatever you’ve got to say, I don’t want to hear it.’ He turned and started walking, stiffly, away down the track.
He was a ludicrously dignified figure, in the oversize T-shirt and huge walking boots, overweight and lumbering, sweat marks under his arms and down his back.
Fiona just stood, looking after him, turning the car key over and over in her hand. She didn’t look at Hector, and he didn’t look at her.
And now it all made sense.
Of course it did.
The tension she’d picked up on last night – Hector’s contained restlessness all through dinner – it had had nothing to do with her at all.
‘Are you all right?’ said Lorna, but she was speaking to Fiona, not Helen; her eyes sweeping her from head to foot.
A silent banshee scream filled Helen’s head.
Fiona ran. She dropped the car key and ran down the track after Steve, and caught at his T-shirt, and he stopped and said something and then carried on walking. Fiona fell in a couple of paces behind, like an Oriental wife from the 19th Century.
Fish picked up the key.
‘Nice one,’ said Lorna.
‘Oh for God’s sake,’ Fish puffed. ‘A drunken fumble sixteen years ago? Who bloody cares?’
‘Steve seems to.’ Lorna looked from Fish to Hector.
‘Awkward,’ said Damian.
‘Bloody Steve,’ said Fish.
‘I’m sorry the purpose of our coming here has been – rather overshadowed,’ said Hector, whether to Helen or Lorna, or both, she wasn’t sure.
She couldn’t speak and she couldn’t move.
She hadn’t really screamed, had she?
She looked at him, at the man she loved, the man who had stolen her senses away, long ago, and carried her off to Corrachree.
But he didn’t want her.
She had always known that, really.
It’s not like it’s a revelation or anything.
‘Nice deflection,’ said Damian. ‘And I can help you out with that, because I’ve been thinking.’
Hector raised his eyebrows.
‘About the sequence of events, after Rob killed Suzanne – if we assume that’s what happened. The accepted version is that he drove down to Kirkton for the bike, put it in the boot, then dumped the car on the Hill of Saughs and made off on the bike – having disposed of the body either before or after going to Kirkton. Yes?’ It was like he was talking at the end of a tunnel. Such a long tunnel that his lips and his words, by the time the light and sound waves reached her, weren’t quite in sync. ‘But why go to Kirkton? If it was just a bike he wanted, he could’ve nicked Melvin Bain’s easily enough from just up the road. At least I’m assuming Mr Bain kept a bike in that shed back then too?’
‘Oh aye,’ said Norrie. ‘In that same sheddie by the roadside. Track to the house is that rutted.’
‘And he’s recently put a lock on the shed after his bike was stolen,’ said Damian. ‘Which I’m assuming means that, sixteen years ago, it wasn’t locked.’
‘I imagine not,’ said Hector.
‘And everyone knew about Mr Bain and his bike. Rob would have known.’
‘Yes.’
‘So why did he have to go all the way to Kirkton? Why run the risk? The only relatively populated place for miles?’
‘Maybe it didn’t occur to him to get Mr Bain’s bike.’
‘Or maybe Mum’s right,’ said Lorna. ‘Maybe it wasn’t Rob who took the bike at all.’
‘Or maybe there was some other reason for him to go there,’ said Damian. ‘And taking the bike was secondary.’
Fish shook his head. ‘What other reason could there be?’
‘Maybe to enlist his mother’s help?’
Lorna’s lip lifted. ‘Oh yes, very likely. He could have called her from the phonebox, couldn’t he, rather than running the risk of going home?’
‘True.’
Hector was frowning. ‘Willie Duff... Helen and I were looking at his gravestone earlier. He died what, a week, ten days previously? When was he interred?’ He turned to Lorna. ‘It wasn’t the next day, by any chance? There wasn’t an open grave lying ready and waiting on Midsummer’s Eve?’
Lorna shook her head. ‘No. At least, yes, a grave had been dug for Willie Duff. His funeral was scheduled for the next day, but it was postponed because of all the police activity round our hou
se, and in the kirkyard and the church – and because obviously Dad couldn’t take the service – they had to draft in another minister. The grave was one of the first places the police looked. I know that for a fact, because I watched them from my bedroom window. They were down in the hole poking about.’
‘And when did your family realise the bike was missing?’ asked Damian.
‘A few days later. It could just have been a random theft. One of the searchers could even have taken it.’
Hector said, ‘When was Willie Duff’s funeral actually held? The day after?’
‘I think so. What does it matter?’
‘Did the police examine the grave again on that day, before Willie’s coffin was put in it?’
‘I don’t think so. Why would they?’
Norrie shook his head. ‘It’s not like he was going to hang on to the body for two days before disposing of it and making off.’
‘Isn’t it?’ Hector appealed to Fish. ‘Isn’t it actually rather common for psychopaths to keep the bodies of their victims a while?’
‘It happens.’
‘Or maybe – well. Maybe when he took her she was still alive.’
Someone said something else after that, and another person answered, and the conversation continued as the trees swayed and Helen put out a hand to steady herself but there was nothing, just air, and then Norrie was catching hold of her. And then she was sitting on the grassy bank, and Lorna, in another universe somewhere, was berating Hector.
‘That’s her cousin you’re talking about, and my brother?’
‘Yes – I’m sorry.’
Helen took a long breath. ‘We should tell the police. They could – look, couldn’t they? In Willie Duff’s grave?’
Fish pushed out his lips. ‘No way would an exhumation order be granted on the basis of this kind of wild speculation. We’d need a hell of a lot more than that.’
61
Something had woken her. Noises, from through the house.
She got up, pulled on her cotton robe, and looked out into the dark passage. Right at the other end of it, on the other side of the landing, light spilled from two half-open doors – the one at the end which used to be, and presumably still was, the door to Hector’s room; and the one next to it on the right.