by M. B. Shaw
‘Isn’t it?’ said the nurse. ‘His son did it. He did all of these, believe it or not.’ She pointed towards the other paintings, mostly of local landscapes. ‘How can we help you, detective inspector?’
‘Detective? Is it police?’ the old man blurted, visibly distressed all of a sudden. They were the first words he’d spoken, and they sounded simultaneously frightened and angry.
‘It’s all right, Edwin,’ the nurse reassured him. ‘Nothing for you to worry about.’
Haley squatted down on his haunches, so that he and Brae were at eye level. ‘I’m investigating a possible double murder, Mr Brae,’ he explained. ‘Two bodies were found buried under the bothy, up at Pitfeldy Castle.’
‘You mean the Girls in the Wood?’ the nurse piped up. ‘We read about that, didn’t we, Edwin?’ She smiled benignly down at her charge, but his rheumy eyes gave nothing away. In fact, he seemed to be completely absent.
‘I manage the Pitfeldy estate,’ Edwin announced suddenly, with more than a little pride.
‘You used to manage it, Edwin,’ the nurse corrected him gently. ‘That’s right.’
The old man stared at Haley. ‘You’re police, you say?’
‘That’s right.’
Brae’s eyes narrowed. ‘Is it Angus?’ he demanded. ‘Is he in trouble again?’
‘No, no,’ said Haley. ‘Nothing like that.’
‘Because if he is, I swear to God I’ll skin the wee beggar. I will! And I don’t care what the baron says aboot it. Ten years old, he should know better. Jock’s too soft on him.’
‘It’s not Angus,’ Haley assured him. ‘I wanted to ask you a couple of questions, Mr Brae.’
‘Questions? What about?’
‘A few different things. But let’s start with Angus’s mother, Linda.’
Edwin startled, then turned away. Haley watched as the veil came down again: a shroud, falling over the old man’s memory, turning everything to grey.
‘You’ve lost him, I’m afraid,’ the nurse whispered. ‘Try again in a few minutes.’
She was right. As Haley looked on, Edwin visibly retreated back into his own inner world, a muffled chaos where no one could reach him. The change was so pronounced, it almost looked deliberate.
Perhaps it is? Haley found himself wondering. Perhaps he only remembers what he wants to remember.
‘Mr Brae,’ he tried again, ‘when did you last see or hear from Linda?’
‘What?’ The old man looked up, pained. ‘Who are you, now?’
‘Edwin, do you know what happened to your wife after she left Pitfeldy?’ Haley pressed him. ‘Do you know where Linda is now?’
‘GET OUT!’ The eruption came out of nowhere, and was quite spectacular. Tea and biscuits flew everywhere as the wizened old man jumped out of his seat like a jack-in-the-box, his liver-spotted arms flailing around wildly and balls of spittle like tiny silver drops of mercury spraying from his shrivelled lips. ‘You get out of here, you bastard. Go!’
‘Edwin!’ The nurse stepped forward in horror. ‘Edwin, you stop this at once. Calm down, please. Calm down, and sit in your chair.’
Still shaking with rage, the old gillie did as he was told.
‘I’m so sorry,’ the nurse said to Haley. ‘I don’t know what’s got into him. But I think you’d better go. Maybe try another time,’ she whispered under her breath as Haley stood up. ‘In an hour or two he’ll have forgotten this ever happened.’
Outside in the car park, Haley reflected on his brief encounter with Edwin Brae. A number of things were bothering him about it, but right at this moment those things were tangled together in a giant, swirling, unhelpful mess.
Clearly, the mention of his wife had brought on a state of profound agitation. Haley didn’t doubt the reaction was genuine. He just wasn’t sure how to interpret it. One thing he knew for sure was that Edwin’s outburst had very effectively brought their interaction to a close, and he found himself wondering if that had been the old man’s intention. Something made him suspect that Angus’s father and Jock MacKinnon’s childhood friend was a lot smarter than he looked. Haley had had a string of questions, not only about Edwin’s missing wife but also about the illegal foreign workers, nameless men and women to whom Edwin had turned a blind eye while he ran the estate. Now, thanks to the old man’s tantrum, he was leaving without an answer to any of them.
That was irritating. But it wasn’t the only thing bothering him. There were also Angus’s paintings. By his own account, Angus rarely visited his father at the home, and yet his presence was everywhere in Edwin’s tiny room. The old man had brought up his son’s name almost immediately, too, albeit referring to Angus as a ten-year-old boy, one who was often in trouble. Was that true? Haley wondered. He’d also said something about ‘the baron’ being soft on Angus, implying that Jock had played some part in the boy’s upbringing. Which might explain their present-day closeness, and the rivalry between Angus and Jock’s own son, Rory. But it also begged questions of its own. Not least why would Edwin Brae defer to Jock MacKinnon on how to raise his own son, or even involve him in those decisions.
According to Angus, Jock never visited his old friend at Passages because Edwin wouldn’t have known who he was. But that wasn’t the impression Haley got at all. Edwin Brae might be confused about many things, but that confusion came and went. Both his son and Jock MacKinnon still appeared to be very much to the forefront of his consciousness.
They were with him in that poky little room, always. Not as their present selves, perhaps. But they were there all right.
A loud ringing from his mobile shattered Haley’s reverie.
‘DI Haley? It’s Jill Vaisey.’
‘I’m sorry, who?’
‘Jill Vaisey. We spoke earlier? I’m Alice MacKinnon’s dentist.’
‘Oh, yes. Yes, of course,’ stammered Haley.
‘I found the records you were after.’
For a glorious moment Haley’s spirits soared. But only for a moment.
‘I’m afraid the teeth you found definitely weren’t Alice’s.’
Shit.
Shit, shit, shit.
‘Your victim’s teeth were in wonderful condition. But Alice MacKinnon had had several fillings, a crown and one full implant by the time she left our practice. Good dental habits don’t appear to have been a priority in her youth, I’m afraid to say. Sorry I couldn’t be more help.’
Haley could feel the exhaustion creeping into his bones as he got back in his car and made the short drive home to his bungalow. So much had happened today, and yet at the end of it all, he was no further forward identifying the Girls in the Wood than he had been when he woke up.
Things that felt important – the relationship between Angus Brae and his father; Jock MacKinnon’s closeness to the family; the bizarre, mirror-image vanishing of the two ex-wives, Alice and Linda; the link to Shetland – turned out not to have been important in the end. It was looking definitively as if neither body belonged to Alice MacKinnon or Linda Brae. Nor were they listed on any missing persons databases, or at least not the ones that DI Haley had ready access to.
Which left, what? Not much. The migrant angle; a bag full of blueglass beads; and the threatening notes to Jock MacKinnon’s fiancée that Iris Grey had brought him, crude attempts to implicate Jock in the killings. What had the notes made reference to? To the long-dead daughter, Mary. To Jock’s ‘whores’ from the past.
Haley’s thoughts drifted back to Iris Grey. He’d been impressed with her logic in trying to track down the letter writer, and he already knew her to be persistent. He’d read up on Iris’s close involvement with the Dom Wetherby murder case down in Hampshire, and her dogged determination to bring Dom’s killer to justice. It was all rather fascinating. Iris was fascinating.
By all accounts she hadn’t known the famous author for long before he died, in what was initially ruled a suicide. She’d been commissioned to paint his portrait, just as she had with Kathy Miller, and Wetherby had b
een found dead when she was halfway through, drowned in the pond in his own back garden on Christmas Day. Any normal person would have taken their cheque and gone home at that point. But Iris Grey had stayed on in Hampshire, convinced Dom had been murdered and refusing to let the thing go, hammering away at the useless local police and following leads on her own until she’d tied all the threads together and had got a conviction.
Two convictions, in fact. In the end.
In some ways, Haley reflected, Iris would have made a great detective. But in other ways he wasn’t so sure. You needed a tough hide to survive in this job, emotionally, and he definitely had Iris pegged as sensitive, like most artists. Then again, by those criteria, maybe he wasn’t such a good detective himself anymore. Since Jean’s death, he’d found himself caring more. Noticing more. Feeling more. He might not be an artist, but he could cry for Scotland.
Wearily, Stuart Haley stumbled into his bungalow, alone as always, and headed straight for his bed.
Chapter Twelve
The next morning, Kathy was still at her dressing table, blending the minimal make-up she always wore for her sittings with Iris, when Jock burst in.
‘That’s it,’ he muttered furiously. ‘That is it! I want that man fired. I mean it. I’m going to speak to Will Roebuck this morning and put a God-damned stop to this farce.’
‘Who’s Will Roebuck?’ Kathy walked over to him, loosely tying the belt on her peach silk Agent Provocateur dressing gown so that a hint of cleavage was still visible.
‘He’s the chief constable, that’s who. DI Haley won’t know what’s hit him.’
‘Ah. Haley.’ She sighed softly. Over the course of their year together, Kathy had learned to remain calm in the face of Jock’s rages. The storm usually passed more quickly that way. ‘What’s he done now?’
‘I’ll tell you what he’s done,’ seethed Jock, unable at that moment to be distracted, even by his young fiancée’s killer body. ‘The jumped-up little oik has been harassing Edwin Brae. Grilling the poor fellow about his ex-wife, and God knows what. As if he hasn’t been through enough.’
‘How do you know he saw Edwin?’ Kathy asked gently, pressing herself into his back as she snaked her arms around his chest.
‘Angus told me,’ said Jock, taking a single, deep breath and allowing himself to be embraced. ‘The Johnnies at the home rang him last night. Told him Edwin was in a terrible way.’
‘Well, I’m sorry to hear that,’ murmured Kathy, ‘but I’m sure DI Haley must have had his reasons.’
Kathy herself was torn about Haley. She knew that Iris liked him, and on the whole she trusted Iris’s judgment. But at the same time, she suspected Iris shared some of the policeman’s prejudices, particularly when it came to Jock, and that as a result she was blind to the way that Haley picked on him. All of which made her feel doubly protective of the man she was soon to make her husband.
Tightening her grip around him, she closed her eyes. Despite his age there was a solidity to Jock’s body that had always comforted Kathy, and brought back cherished memories of her father, long-dead recollections that stirred back to life deep under her skin. Jock was yin to Kathy’s yang in so many ways, hard to her soft, cold to her warm. He gave her something that her last husband never had, something that was hard to put into words, but that he expressed perfectly with his body, and the lean, unyielding physical strength that always felt protective, never threatening.
‘You know, honey,’ she said now, entwining her slender fingers with his, ‘from what you’ve told me, Edwin probably won’t even remember it happened. I bet he’s fine this morning.’
‘Maybe,’ Jock grumbled. ‘But that’s not the point. This bastard Haley’s up to something.’
‘What if he is?’ said Kathy, releasing him. ‘He can’t hurt you. Can’t hurt us.’
Turning around, Jock took her in his arms, gazing down into her loving eyes with deep gratitude. It was a source of unending wonder to him that this heaven-sent woman, this girl who could have had anyone, had chosen him. And not just chosen him – rescued him – from Fiona and the brittle, loveless marriage that he’d come to accept as normal, an inevitable consequence of growing old and becoming set in one’s ways.
Of course, intellectually he recognised that he hadn’t behaved well with Fiona. He’d been a damaged man when he’d met her, having never fully recovered from the twin tragedies of Mary’s death and Alice’s abandonment. Fiona had tried her best to put him back together. But he’d repaid her kindness with cruelty, selfishness and relentless infidelity. The resulting resentment on Fiona’s part became a poison that ran to the very roots of their union and ultimately made a split inevitable. But it was Jock who had caused it. Jock who was to blame, as his children never ceased to remind him. Especially Rory.
With his head, he knew it. But emotionally, he couldn’t face what he’d done, couldn’t cast himself as the villain. Now, thanks to Kathy, he didn’t have to. It was all about ‘chapters’ and ‘growth’ and ‘moving forward in love’. She saw only good in him, and he loved her for that more than he had ever loved anyone.
‘I adore you,’ he told her, sincerely. ‘You’re wonderful in every way.’
‘How about my babies?’ she replied teasingly, looking across at Milo and Sam Sam curled up adorably together in their basket. Jock’s intolerance for Kathy’s dogs had become something of a joke between them. ‘Are they wonderful too?’
‘No they are not.’ Jock grinned. ‘Look at them, sprawled all over each other, like some ghastly Hallmark greetings card.’
‘You love them really,’ Kathy cooed.
‘I bloody well don’t. Let’s not forget, if it hadn’t been for those mutts sniffing around my bothy, none of this would be happening.’
Kathy gave him a curious look. ‘You don’t mean that.’
‘I do,’ said Jock with feeling.
‘But honey, two innocent women were killed up there,’ Kathy chided him.
‘How do you know they were innocent?’ Jock clapped back. ‘We don’t know the faintest thing about them.’
‘We know they existed,’ said Kathy, who was beginning to find the conversation less amusing. ‘And that someone murdered them. If Milo and Sam Sam hadn’t found those bones, no one would ever have discovered them. Their killer would never be brought to justice. Doesn’t that bother you?’
‘Only because it bothers you, my love,’ said Jock, adopting a slightly more conciliatory tone. ‘What bothers me is that bastard Haley. You assume he’s looking for justice for those women because that’s what you’d be looking for. Because you’re a good person, Kathy. But this has nothing to do with justice, my darling, and everything to do with envy. Class envy, and the politics of hatred,’ he fumed, his dark mood returning. ‘It’s a witch hunt, and yours truly is the sodding witch.’
Kathy looked troubled, but Jock was on a roll.
‘Angry, insignificant little men like Haley don’t care who they trample over, just as long as they get the likes of me locked up, and justice be damned. But he picked the wrong enemy this time.’
Taking Kathy’s face in both his hands, he kissed her tenderly on the mouth. ‘You watch this space, my angel. I’m going to shut that man down.’
* * *
Iris was still in her painting overalls when the doorbell rang. Deep in concentration, she was rearranging the first floor of her dolls’ house, adding some new bedroom furniture and, in pride of place, an exquisitely carved set of library steps that she’d ordered from a specialist dealer in Holland and that, finally, had arrived this morning. Since she’d got to Pitfeldy she’d been so busy, between working on the portrait and Kathy’s letters and settling into Murray House, she’d barely had any time to indulge her hobby. But this evening at last, after a long and gruelling session up at the castle with Kathy, she’d opened an expensive bottle of Brunello, and a less expensive but equally delicious bar of Cadbury’s fruit and nut chocolate, and settled down to focus on her beloved dolls. No
thing, absolutely nothing, relaxed her like creating these tiny rooms, imagining and staging an endlessly varied litany of domestic scenes in which she, Iris, was both writer and director. Or, as her ex, Ian, used to say, ‘God’.
‘You just like playing God,’ he would tell her, only half jokingly. ‘You can dress it up as artistry all you like, my dear, but I see through you.’
Occasionally, Iris admitted, Ian could be quite insightful. Just not about himself, unfortunately.
Please be a delivery, she thought, getting up as the door buzzed a second time. Or anyone else I can get rid of quickly. All she asked for was one solitary evening with her dolls. And please don’t be Mrs Rivers, she added, with rising panic. Her landlady’s impromptu visits were well intentioned but they’d been known to take over an hour. Now that Iris came to think of it, she wasn’t sure that anyone else had ever rung the doorbell at Murray House in the time she’d been there.
Putting on her best, ‘this had better not take long’ expression, she pulled open the door.
‘Have I come at a bad time?’ Jamie Ingall hovered nervously on the doorstep. He’d debated the wisdom of showing up at Iris’s place, especially dressed as he was in oilskins, having come straight from the boat. But if they were ever going to have a proper date, he needed to do something. Much to his disappointment, Iris hadn’t called since he’d given her his number at the Fisherman’s Arms, all those weeks ago – which put the ball firmly back in his court.
‘No, no,’ she stammered. ‘Not at all.’ But everything about Iris’s face and body language suggested otherwise.
God, he was good-looking, standing there on her doorstep, smelling of herring and seawater (which, oddly, wasn’t nearly as bad as it sounded). ‘Well, I mean actually, yes, sort of,’ she corrected herself hurriedly, remembering the dolls’ house paraphernalia scattered around the room behind her. She told herself she was no longer ashamed of her hobby, but at the same time she absolutely did not want Jamie to see it.