by Val McDermid
Through the window, I caught the occasional glimpse of Jazbo, white-coated, moving between tall fridges and countertops. Once or twice he emerged from the rear of the shop with trays of barm cakes neatly wrapped and labelled, depositing them in the chill cabinets round the shop. I figured he was good for a few hours yet and headed back to the office before the traffic wardens came out to play.
I was back just after two. I kept cruising round the block till someone finally left a meter clear that gave me a clear view of the exit from the alley behind the sandwich shop. Jazbo emerged in his hot hatch just after three, which was just as well because I was running out of change. I stayed close to him through the city centre, then let a bit of distance grow between us as he headed out past Salford Quays and into the industrial estate round Trafford Park. He pulled up outside a small unit with Gingerbread House painted in a rainbow of colours across the front wall. Jazbo disappeared inside.
About fifteen minutes later he emerged with a supermarket trolley filled to the top with computer-game boxes. I was baffled. I’d had my own theory about where the packaging was coming from, and it had just been blown out of the water. I hate being wrong. I’d rather unblock the toilet. I let Jazbo drive off, then I marched into Gingerbread House. Ten minutes later I had all the answers.
Fintan O’Donohoe looked impressed as I laid out my dossier before him. Jazbo’s address, photograph, phone number, car registration and place of work would be more than enough to hand him over to the police, gift-wrapped. ‘So how’s this guy getting hold of the gear?’ he demanded.
‘First thing I wondered about was the shrink-wrapping. That made me think it was someone in your despatch unit. But you were adamant it couldn’t be either your mum or your auntie. Then when I found out he worked in a sandwich shop, I realised he must be using their wrap-and-seal gear to cover his boxes in. Which left the question of where the boxes were coming from. You ruled out an inside job, so I thought he might simply be raiding your dustbins for discarded gear. But I was wrong. You ever heard of a charity called Gingerbread House?’
O’Donohoe frowned. ‘No. Should I have?’
‘Your mum has,’ I told him. ‘And so, I suspect, has Jazbo’s mum or girlfriend or sister. It’s an educational charity run by nuns. They go round businesses and ask them for any surplus materials and they sell them off to schools and playgroups for next to nothing. They collect all sorts – material scraps, bits of bungee rope, offcuts of specialist paper, wallpaper catalogues, tinsel, sheets of plastic, scrap paper. Anything that could come in handy for schools projects or for costumes for plays, whatever.’
Fintan O’Donohoe groaned and put his hands over his face. ‘Don’t tell me . . .’
‘They came round here a few months ago, and your mum explained that you don’t manufacture here, so there’s not much in the way of leftover stuff. But what there was were the boxes from games that had been sent back because they were faulty in some way. The disks were scrapped, and so were the boxes and manuals normally. But if the nuns could make any use of the boxes and their contents . . . Your mum or your Auntie Geraldine’s been dropping stuff off once a fortnight ever since.’
He looked up at me, a ghost of an ironic smile on his lips. ‘And I was so sure it couldn’t be anything to do with my mum!’
‘Don’t they say charity begins at home?’
Homecoming
Oblivious to any echoes, filmic or literary, Miranda Bryant said that she would buy the flowers herself.
Peter had made the offer sincerely, willing to take on part of the burden of organising their first dinner party in their new city. But he was relieved to have avoided any disruption to a day he would spend with women who paid him large sums of money to change what they saw in the mirror. He knew he did his best work when there was nothing external to distract him.
Miranda knew that too. She liked the rewards his work had brought them and so she’d been content to set her own ambitions to one side. There was no room in their marriage for two highflying medical careers. Instead of the neurosurgery she’d once dreamed of performing, she’d specialised in dermatology. Plenty of opportunity for parttime work and no call-outs at night or weekends. Plenty of opportunity to make sure Peter’s life ran smoothly.
She stood in her immaculate kitchen and began to organise her purchases. Finest Italian artichokes, chargrilled and marinated in olive oil speckled with fragments of herbs; dark red organic Aberdeen Angus steaks with porphyry marbling of fat; transparent slices of pancetta; broad sage leaves with their curious texture; plump scallops, their vivid corals curled like commas round the succulent white flesh. Beautiful, sensual, ready to fill an emptiness.
She reached for a small, sharp, strong knife and slit open a plastic bag, spilling oysters over the granite worktop. She picked one up, running her thumb over the layered shell. So ugly on the outside, so perfect on the inside, they reminded her of what Peter tried to do with his patients. The thought irritated her and she reached for the radio. ‘And this afternoon on Castaway, our guest is an international bestselling thriller writer. She’s published twenty-three novels, translated into more than thirty languages. She’s won awards for her work on three continents, and judging by the quotes on her book jackets, she is the thriller writer’s thriller writer. Jane Carson, welcome to Radio Dunedin.’
‘Thanks, Simon. It’s a pleasure to be here.’
The knife skidded across the uneven ridges of the shell, slicing deep into the base of Miranda’s thumb. For a moment, shock immobilised her. The slit of blood swelled fat and spread, running down the ball of her thumb towards the thin white scar on her wrist. ‘Damn it to hell,’ she said, turning on her heel and hurrying towards the cloakroom where the nearest first aid kit was stowed. She couldn’t believe herself. Just as well she’d turned her back on surgery if she couldn’t even shuck an oyster without bleeding all over the kitchen.
Miranda cleaned the wound with an antiseptic wipe then efficiently closed it with micropore tape. She walked back to the kitchen, rubbing the tape down firmly. ‘Turn off the radio,’ she said out loud. But her hand remained poised, halfway to the switch.
‘. . . goes back twenty-five years to when I was an undergraduate at Girton.’
‘And what’s so special about this record, Jane?’
(a deep, warm chuckle) ‘It reminds me of my first great love affair.’
‘Was that when you realised you were gay?’
‘I’d realised that quite a while before, Simon. But it was the first time I fell in love with a woman who loved me in return. This record reminds me of what that felt like. The intensity, the excitement, the sense of possibility. And of course the desperation and the desolation when it all went horribly wrong.’
‘You like to be reminded of how it all went wrong?’
‘I’m a writer, Simon. Everything is material.’
‘Well, I hate to think what you’re going to make of me, Jane!’
‘Probably a corpse, Simon.’
(nervous laugh) ‘Now you’re really worrying me. But let’s have your first record. It’s Joan Armatrading’s “Love and Affection”.’
The opening notes filled the kitchen, transporting Miranda back to her own youth. She tried to fight it, reminding herself of Noël Coward’s sardonic dictum about the potency of cheap music. But memory was in command now, undeniable. She could feel the thin warmth of spring sunshine, the faint damp of the grass penetrating her clothes, the heat in her skin like fever. Dark against the eggshell blue of the sky, a profile leaning over her, lips parted, jawline taut. Then the sun blotted out by the first kiss. She’d thought she understood desire, but had immediately comprehended her mistake.
Nothing had prepared her for that moment, or for what followed. Everything that had gone before seemed small, quiet, colourless. Love had hit her with an amplification of the senses that left her feeling
unpeeled. Where her lover rejoiced in the awakening, Miranda fretted over what it might mean.
They never articulated it to each other, but each was conscious that they didn’t want to share whatever was happening between them with the rest of the world. It demanded discretion. They met behind the closed doors of their own rooms or else privately in public places. At prearranged times in libraries, apparently by chance on walks by the river, seemingly happenstance attendances at the same parties which they studiously left separately. Their private names for each other echoed their love of secrecy. Miranda was Orlando – Virginia Woolf had been iconic then – and her beloved, The Kid, for reasons more obvious to anyone twenty or thirty years their senior. Not only did this make them feel they had created each other afresh, it also meant that any curious friend picking up a card or note would be none the wiser.
Miranda loved it when they went to the cinema or the theatre. Not that she was particularly interested in film or drama; even then, she had had little interest in the fictive world, preferring the hard edges of science and philosophy. What she loved was the gradual descent into darkness, when The Kid’s hand would creep across her thigh and enclose her fingers. Even more, she loved the opportunity secretly to study The Kid, too absorbed in whatever was unfolding to sense Miranda’s scrutiny. Even now, as the dying strains of Armatrading’s voice faded on the radio, Miranda could picture that intent profile, lips slightly parted as if ready for the next kiss. Watching The Kid in the variable dark, now there was joy.
‘It’s a time machine, music like that.’
‘You’re so right, Jane. It recreates the memories any castaways would want to take with them to a desert island. Now, after Cambridge, you went to America to do a postgraduate degree in creative writing, didn’t you? Why America?’
‘Back then, there weren’t many creative writing courses here in the UK. And I also wanted to put as much distance between me and Cambridge as I could.’
Miranda too suddenly wanted some distance. She hurried across the kitchen to the French doors that led to her courtyard garden. Fresh herbs, that’s what she needed. The sharp darkness of rosemary, the bright fragrance of basil, the creeping insistence of thyme. The herbs of her married life.
For almost twenty years, Miranda and Peter had basked in sunshine in Cape Town, their lives gilded with security and success. But latterly, they had both felt drawn back to the cooler climate of their youth. Living in exile was all very well, but the soul eventually craved more familiar tastes and smells. Miranda knew she pined for something, and thought it was home. Edinburgh had seemed like the answer.
Their first two months had kept her too busy to test the hypothesis. Moving into a new home, buying furniture and art, discovering the best restaurants, trying to assimilate twenty years of missed cultural life, negotiating a life without servants; it had challenged Miranda and invigorated her. But there had been no space for reflection.
And now it was upon her, memory’s insistence could not be eluded so easily. There was, there could have been, nothing predictable or assumed about the pattern of their love. It was up to them to make it up as they went along, and The Kid was never short of invention. The Kid loved to play games. One week, they’d decided to eat nothing but white food. The challenge had been to make it exciting. They’d started with the obvious; white bread, cottage cheese, natural yoghurt. Miranda had thought she’d done well with vanilla ice cream till The Kid pointed out that college kitchens had no freezers and they’d have to eat it all at one sitting. And then, with a huge grin, had proposed how they might make that more interesting . . . Miranda blushed at the memory, her skin tingling. The Kid had also won the contest, with a meal that had seemed impossibly exotic in 1978 – prawn crackers, white asparagus and a Boursin. So much more exoticism than Miranda’s tightly conformist background could ever have accommodated. No wonder her mother had hated The Kid on first sight.
Miranda snipped the herbs, lifting them to her face and inhaling deeply. She wanted to banish the distant past, replace it with more recent memories, recollections that would anchor her to the life she had now rather than the life she might have lived. She deliberately turned her thoughts to her dinner party and their guests. An advocate and her banker husband. A medical insurance executive and his girlfriend who did something with a charity for disabled children. One of Peter’s colleagues and his wife. Who was, it appeared, nothing more than that. Unbidden and unwanted, Miranda thought how The Kid would have jeered at such a lineup. ‘Cheap,’ she muttered, walking back into the kitchen.
‘So what made you turn to the crime thriller instead of the literary novel you’d studied in America?’
(a dark chuckle) ‘The desire for revenge, Simon. There were people I wanted to murder but I knew I’d never get away with it. So I decided to kill them on the page instead.’
‘That’s pretty scary, Jane. Why on earth did you want to murder them?’
‘Because I blamed them for breaking my heart.’
‘You wanted to murder your girlfriend?’
‘No. I wanted to murder the people who broke us up and nearly destroyed her in the process. But in a way, that’s irrelevant. What motivates writers is almost always irrelevant. It’s what we do with it in the crucible of imagination that matters. We transform our pain and our frustration into something unrecognisable.’
‘So if these people you wanted to murder were to read your books, they wouldn’t recognise themselves?’
‘Not only would they not recognise themselves, Simon, they wouldn’t recognise the situation. What appears on the page seldom has any visible connection to the event that triggered the writer’s response.’
‘That’s amazing, Jane. Now, your next record is Bach’s sixth Brandenburg Concerto. Can you tell us why you’ve chosen it?’
‘Two reasons, really. I first discovered Bach when I was at Cambridge, so like the Joan Armatrading, it also takes me back in time. But perhaps more importantly, it’s a canon. It revolves around itself, it reinvents itself. It’s complex, and it’s perfectly structured. In its beginning is its end. And that’s exactly how the plot of a thriller should be. You could say that by introducing me to Bach, my first girlfriend also taught me how to plot. It’s a lesson . . .’
This time, Miranda’s hand reached the switch and clicked the radio off in mid-sentence. While the beef was marinading, she could buy the flowers. She walked up the hill, wondering yet again how Queen Street Gardens stayed green under the blanket of traffic fumes that choked the city centre. It was a relief to enter the fragrance of the florist’s. She drank in the heady scents and the underlying aroma of humus as she checked out the array of blooms. Among the mundane domestic chrysanths and carnations were flowers that were exotic for Scotland but which provoked a sharp stab of nostalgia in Miranda. So many mornings she’d sat on her verandah looking out at those very flowers growing in her own African garden. Things had been easier there; there had been nothing to provoke such ambushes of memory as she’d endured that afternoon.
She made a mental list of what she wanted then wove her way past the aluminium buckets to the counter at the back of the shop. As she approached, the low background mutter resolved itself into Radio Dunedin and Miranda faltered.
‘Jane, it’s been a pleasure having you here this afternoon.’
‘Even if I do turn you into a corpse?’
‘I suppose that’s better than being ignored. My guest this afternoon has been thriller writer Jane Carson, who’s appearing tonight at the Assembly Rooms here in Edinburgh at seven o’clock. She’ll be reading from her latest novel, The Last Siberian Tiger, and I can promise you a real thrill.’
The florist gave Miranda an inquiring look. ‘Can I help you?’
Miranda cleared her throat and pointed to a bucket of yellow calla lilies. ‘I’d like a dozen of those,’ she said.
The florist nodded and made
for the bucket. ‘They’re lovely, aren’t they?’
‘Yes. I’ll have three of the strelizia too. And a couple of bunches of alstromeria.’
Back home, Miranda carefully arranged the flowers in the elegant crystal vases she’d chosen for the dining-room. Like a sleepwalker, she prepared the food, every movement precise and ordered. She checked the white Burgundy was sufficiently chilled and decanted the red to allow it to breathe. Everything was perfect. Everything was ready. This was her life. This was what the world expected of her. Always had. And she had almost always delivered.
Her fingers strayed to the scar on the opposite wrist. She checked the clock. Half past six. Peter would be home at any minute. Guests at seven for seven thirty. The opening movement of Bach’s sixth Brandenburg Concerto circled her brain like a tightening noose.
Miranda Bryant took a last look round her perfect kitchen and reached for her coat. She opened her front door and walked out into the Edinburgh evening.
Heartburn
Everybody remarked on how calm I was on Bonfire Night. ‘Considering her husband’s just run off with another woman, she’s very calm,’ I overheard Joan Winstanley from the news-agent’s say as I persuaded people to buy the bonfire toffee. But it seemed to me that Derek’s departure was no reason to miss the annual cricket-club firework party. Besides, I’ve been in charge of the toffee-selling now for more years than I care to remember, and I’d be reluctant to hand it over to someone else.
So I put a brave face on it and turned up as usual at Mrs Fletcher’s at half past five to pick up the toffee, neatly bagged up in quarter-pound lots. I don’t know how she does it, given that the pieces are all such irregular shapes and sizes, but the bags all contain the correct weight. I know, because the second year I was in charge of the toffee, I surreptitiously took the bags home and weighed them. I wasn’t prepared to be responsible for selling short weight.