by M. B. Shaw
‘Jock never stopped punishing me for what Alice did to him. That was the irony of it. And he never stopped punishing Rory and Emma for not being Mary. For being alive, when the daughter he’d loved so much was dead. But what did we ever do wrong? Tell me that. What did any of us ever do wrong, to deserve the way he treated us?’
It was a question Iris couldn’t answer.
She stayed for a further twenty minutes, asking Fiona for any specific memories she had of strangers being up at the castle, male or female, or any unusual incidents she could remember. Other than the occasional faceless agricultural workers and their families, migrants whose presence on the estate Fiona confirmed, but whom she didn’t know, there was nothing.
Iris was about to leave, and was about to thank her, when Fiona suddenly stopped her.
‘This probably isn’t relevant. But there is one thing I’ve just remembered – I don’t know if you’d call it an “incident” exactly.’
‘Go on,’ said Iris.
‘Well, we had an au pair girl, an exchange student, I suppose you’d call her, who stayed with us one summer when Rory and Emma were teenagers. Isabella, I believe her name was. Pretty little thing, but lazy as hell, and she barely spoke a word of English. She was connected in some way to one of Jock’s Italian friends. I can’t remember his last name, but he was a nasty piece of work. Pots of money, absolutely no morals. Anyway,’ Fiona smoothed down her skirt disapprovingly, ‘I think this Isabella was friends with his daughter, which was how we ended up hosting her. I remember she was supposed to live with us for the whole summer and help out with the children and around the house. But then one morning, all of a sudden, poof!’ – she made a disappearing gesture with her hands – ‘she was gone.’
‘Gone?’ said Iris.
‘Back home. Jock sent her packing without any explanation. Drove her to the airport and that was that. A few days later, I got a telephone call from her father in Rome, screaming blue murder, accusing us of mistreating Isabella, or some such nonsense, threatening to take Jock to court.’
‘And did he?’
‘No,’ said Fiona. ‘We never heard another peep out of him after that. But the whole thing was just strange and a bit unpleasant.’
* * *
After she left Fiona’s flat, Iris walked back to her car, her mind racing. She thought it unlikely that the fiasco with the exchange student had anything to do with the bodies in the wood – the girl, Isabella, had arrived safely back with her father in Italy, after all – but the story still bothered her. Something about it, some small detail that she couldn’t pinpoint, niggled at the back of her mind, like a loose thread caught on a nail that kept pulling her back to look again.
More immediately relevant – and worth repeating to Stuart Haley – were Fiona’s comments about Edwin Brae. About Pitfeldy’s former gillie being violent, a wife beater and, according to Fiona at least, a misogynist. Conveniently, Edwin was now too unwell for anything he told the police to be considered admissible as evidence. Even so, the very idea of DI Haley sitting down for a chat with him had been enough to send Jock MacKinnon into a flat-spin panic, and even to begin his campaign to have the Girls in the Wood investigation shut down.
What was it Fiona had said again, about Jock and Edwin?
They were always keeping secrets together, like little boys.
Were the little boys still keeping secrets? Iris wondered. Or was Jock now keeping Edwin’s secrets for him by proxy, the same way that he fought Angus’s battles? There was definitely something odd about the close ties between the MacKinnons and the Braes.
Thinking of ‘close ties’, Iris’s thoughts drifted back to the Doulton figurine on Fiona’s dresser, and her casual mention of ‘Eileen’ returning it to her. Something about the castle housekeeper had been troubling Iris ever since the Halloween party, when she’d seemed to materialise magically at various important moments. Perhaps she was imagining it. But Iris left Fiona MacKinnon’s flat wondering just how close Eileen Gregory was to her former mistress.
* * *
By the time Iris got back to Murray House, darkness had fallen and the lights of Pitfeldy harbour twinkled brightly against the cold, black sky. Leaving her bag by the door, Iris changed into tracksuit bottoms and slippers, lit a fire and put the kettle on, before deciding she’d rather have wine instead and opening a bottle of Tesco’s Finest Argentine Malbec. Grabbing a tin of shortbread biscuits on her way from the kitchen back into the living room, she curled up on the sofa and flipped open her laptop. She was about to update her Facebook page when she noticed two new voicemails on her phone.
Jamie? she wondered hopefully.
In fact, the first message was from DI Haley ‘just checking in’. He knew she’d been to Edinburgh today about the beads. Iris wondered whether he’d be pleased or irritated that she’d decided to go the extra mile and ‘drop in’ on Fiona MacKinnon as well. Hopefully, it would be the former, especially once she told him all the juicy titbits she’d learned about Edwin Brae.
‘Give me a ring when you get a sec,’ Haley had signed off. ‘This is Stuart, by the way.’ As if she didn’t know who he was.
Not for the first time, Iris reflected on what a decent man Stuart Haley was. She sensed a loneliness in his message, a need to connect with another human being at the end of a long working day, that she empathised with profoundly. It was why she wanted to hear from Jamie, after all.
She’d heard around the village that Haley had been fairly recently widowed, a terrible thing to happen at his age. People often compared being widowed to being divorced, although in Iris’s view, there was no comparison. Not that divorce wasn’t God-awful, because it was. But you could still talk to someone after you’d divorced them. Still argue with them or laugh with them or hate them or love them or throw things at their stubborn head. Iris still did all of those things with her ex, Ian, from time to time. Divorced people could do whatever they wanted. They still had choices.
Death took away all those choices. Death was for ever.
Irrationally, Iris felt the backs of her eyes sting with tears. Perhaps these murders were getting to her more than she liked to admit.
She would ring Stuart Haley back in a minute, she decided, after she’d checked the second message. Disappointingly, that wasn’t Jamie either. It was a man’s voice, deep, foreign and unfamiliar.
‘This is a message for Mrs Iris Grey,’ the stranger began, slowly and deliberately, in a thick Italian accent. ‘My name is Antonio Corromeo. Father Antonio Corromeo. I am calling you from Venezia, Italy.’
There was a long pause at this point, as if he were considering whether or not to continue. Iris could hear the trepidation in his long, low intake of breath, before finally he resumed.
‘You are probably wondering why I did not leave a message on your Facebook page,’ he went on. ‘But what I have to say is too private. It is not… for being in public.’ His nerves were getting the better of his English, but he certainly had Iris’s attention. ‘I got this number for you from your agent, Mrs Brun. I am calling you because I recognise the beads from the necklace that you found.’
At last.
Iris held her breath.
‘The young woman they belonged to was a friend of mine. I am very certain about this, unfortunately.’
Iris noticed the sadness in his voice, but also his caution and the care with which he was selecting each word. He was frightened of something – or someone. He was taking a risk by ringing her.
‘I will like to tell you about my friend,’ Father Antonio went on. ‘But this is… difficult to talk about. And perhaps dangerous.’
Bingo! Thought Iris.
‘Mrs Grey, now I am giving you my telephone number. But if it is possible, I am suggesting that we meet. Perhaps’ – Father Antonio cleared his throat anxiously – ‘perhaps, you will consider taking a trip to Venice?’
PART TWO
Chapter Eighteen
‘How perfect is this?’ Kathy gushe
d, gripping Iris’s hand excitedly as the pilot began his approach into Milan airport. ‘The two of us, getting away together like this? Almost two whole weeks of fashion, food and culture. Don’t you feel blessed?’
‘Hmmm.’ Iris nodded, just about managing a smile. ‘Blessed’ wasn’t the word she would have chosen. Partly because it was just such an awful, saccharine, simpering word, and partly because, for her at least, this Italian trip was about more than wedding-dress fittings and gelato. It was, she hoped, about finally getting justice for the Girls in the Wood, whoever they were, or at the very least providing them with the dignity of a name.
Not that she wasn’t pleased to be getting away from Pitfeldy, and the cold and rain and Jamie Ingall’s irritatingly distracting radio silence. Three days in Milan for Kathy’s wedding-dress fittings and some sketching sessions together (a few small details of the portrait still needed work – for some reason Kathy’s chin just wasn’t right) were to be followed by a week in Venice. The plan was that while Kathy shopped, flirted up a storm with handsome gondoliers and ‘did’ St Mark’s Cathedral, Iris would meet the enigmatic Father Antonio and follow up on any leads he might give her.
When she took off her cynical, middle-aged hat, Iris had to admit that it was also quite fun to be going with Kathy rather than by herself. They couldn’t have been more different, and yet Iris was starting to consider her latest subject a friend. She admired Kathy Miller’s confidence, her can-do attitude and her relentless positivity, even if she couldn’t share in the younger woman’s passion for name-brand designers, dogs in baskets, Californian pseudo-spirituality and elderly, cantankerous Scotsmen.
‘Milan is going to be awesome!’ Kathy squealed as the runway suddenly emerged from beneath the low clouds. ‘Wait till you see our hotel. And the place I’ve booked us for dinner? Oh my God, you’re going to die.’
* * *
Iris very nearly did die when she saw the prices. Forty-two euros for a gussied-up plate of parmesan chicken? But after Kathy reassured her that the evening was on her – ‘Well, on Jock, actually, God knows he can afford it, and I’d say he owes us both’ – she relaxed, and began to enjoy herself.
They were well into their second bottle of Brunello, not to mention the second doorstop-thick edition of Vogue Italia bridal, before the subject of the Girls in the Wood came up. Kathy knew about the priest Iris was going to meet in Venice, the one who’d recognised the blue beads, and seemed fascinated by this angle.
‘Just amazing that my little Milo could poop out some beads in Scotland, and someone in Italy recognises them. I mean, what are the chances, right?’
‘I know,’ Iris agreed, savouring her wine in between spoonfuls of ambrosial tiramisu. ‘The Internet’s a wonderful thing.’
‘Milo’s a wonderful thing,’ Kathy corrected her archly, pushing aside her own dessert. ‘It’s my first fitting in the morning,’ she explained. ‘I can’t afford to be bloated.’
‘As if,’ snorted Iris. The very idea of tiny, perfect Kathy being ‘bloated’ was preposterous. Throughout dinner, every waiter in the place had been hovering around their table like officious black bees around a honeypot, drawn by Kathy’s truly extraordinary beauty. Iris had started to grow used to it after all these weeks together, but it was striking how people who hadn’t seen her before, men and women, would stop and stare. Kathy’s was the sort of beauty men killed for, Iris reflected. Poor Fiona never stood a chance.
‘You’re still dead set on this wedding, then?’ Iris asked, emboldened by the vino and Kathy’s companionable mood.
‘Of course.’ Kathy sounded hurt. ‘Why wouldn’t I be?’
Iris could think of a few reasons, but took this to be a rhetorical question.
‘I love Jock,’ said Kathy, fervently. ‘And I don’t believe he had anything to do with those murders.’
‘Even though they were buried on his estate?’
‘So what?’ Kathy responded. ‘The estate’s huge and crawling with people. If your priest recognises the necklace, then chances are the dead women were foreigners. Right?’
‘Maybe,’ said Iris.
‘Probably. My guess is they’ll turn out to have been migrants, in the UK illegally,’ Kathy went on confidently. ‘Maybe they were drug addicts, or hookers, I don’t know. It would explain why no one reported them missing, like you said. Jock would have no reason to cross paths with someone like that. No reason at all. And whoever’s been writing those letters to me knows it.’
‘Why do you say that?’ asked Iris, surprised to hear Kathy bring up the letters at all. She hadn’t mentioned them since the Halloween party, and seemed to have pushed the whole thing to the back of her mind. Iris assumed that as the months rolled by, and the writer failed to make good on any of their threats, Kathy’s fear – and vigilance – were both receding.
‘I’ll tell you why. Because they went out of their way to drop hints about Jock’s past, trying to make me believe there was a connection. All that baloney about Mary, as if Jock had something to hide. D’you think I haven’t heard the rumours in the village, about his first wife ‘disappearing’? About those bodies belonging to Alice and Linda Brae? I’ve heard them all. Only they didn’t belong to Alice and Linda.’ She was starting to sound angry now. ‘They belonged to some random migrants, and you’re going to prove it. This trip to Italy’s gonna change everything, you wait and see.’
She raised her glass in a defiant toast. Iris clinked hesitantly. She didn’t know what she was going to prove, if anything. It was true that the remains didn’t belong to Alice MacKinnon. The dental records had shown that. And as far as anyone knew, Linda Brae was still alive. But as for the rest, Kathy seemed to be placing a lot of faith in a handful of glass beads and the years-old recollections of one Italian priest.
‘I think Rory wrote the letters,’ Kathy blurted out of nowhere.
Iris’s ears pricked up. ‘Rory? When did you come to that conclusion?’
Kathy shrugged. ‘I’ve suspected for a while it was him or Emma. But I don’t think Emma has balls, quite frankly. Rory hates me. And he hates his father. Plus, he has access to my dressing room, my car, my private places. He was there at Halloween.’
‘So were a lot of people,’ Iris pointed out.
‘Yes, but Rory…’ She tailed off, gazing unhappily into the distance.
‘I saw him cornering you at the party,’ Iris remembered suddenly. ‘Right after the business with Angus and John Donnelly. What was that about?’
‘I can’t remember exactly,’ said Kathy, not entirely convincingly.
‘He spoke to me too that night and he was – strange,’ said Iris. ‘I got the feeling he was about to confide in me about something. But then he didn’t.’
‘Well, he wasn’t confiding in me,’ Kathy said bitterly. ‘Just spouting more of his usual hate-filled stuff, about how Jock and I would never be married; how Jock would “see through me” in the end.’
‘Which is funny, don’t you think?’ said Iris. ‘Because the tone of the letters is the exact opposite. They’re all about how you need to see through Jock. “Leave him, before you’re sliced open like a pumpkin. Go home now”. “Ask Jock what happened to Mary”. The writer tries to intimidate you. But it’s Jock whose name they want to blacken.’
‘Maybe,’ Kathy said thoughtfully. ‘Anyway, it doesn’t matter. Rory can go to hell, they all can. I know that Jock had nothing to do with those murders. And I’m going to marry him, and be happy.’
‘Well, here’s to your happiness,’ said Iris, raising her glass with a little more confidence this time. Not confidence in Jock MacKinnon. As far as Iris was concerned, the jury was still very much out on that one. But confidence in Kathy Miller, and her ability to survive and be happy no matter what.
She’d made it through her father’s suicide, after all, and two prior divorces. If she’d made up her mind that Jock was what she wanted, then Iris strongly suspected that nothing on earth was going to prevent her marrying him.
One of these days, she thought, as Kathy signalled for the cheque and a flurry of waiters fell over themselves to bring it to her, I’m going to find out why she wants him.
But for now, Father Antonio beckoned.
One mystery at a time.
Chapter Nineteen
The vaporetto from Venice airport to San Angelo bounced like a skipped stone across the water, making Iris’s stomach lurch. She’d taken the short flight from Milan a day before Kathy, who was due to join her in Venice tomorrow after her final dress fitting. Iris was glad to be alone as a wave of nausea rose up inside her, so violent she was convinced she was about to vomit on the woman next to her. But by closing her eyes and twisting so that she could stick her head out of the window, she was able to ride it out, eventually feeling well enough to open her eyes and take in some of the city around her.
She’d been to Venice before, three times in total, but the wonder of it never faded. This magical city-on-stilts, this accidental masterpiece, propped up on thousand-year-old wooden foundations, pillars ossified by centuries of submersion in salt water, remained a thrill like no other. Every neighbourhood, every bridge, every alley, church, canal and park seemed to burst with beauty, with culture and history and art and romance, with life. Even the smell, that heavy, fetid reek of fish and too-stagnant water, which could become so cloying and oppressive in the summer months, spoke to Iris somehow of the richness of life here; of layer upon layer of creating, trading, eating, drinking and carousing, unbroken through the millennia. And then there were the sounds, that unique Venetian medley of traders’ shouts and church bells during the day, music and the buzz of conversation out in the piazzas at night, and – best of all, from Iris’s perspective – the profound silence of the early mornings, with no cars to shatter the peaceful sunrise and nothing but the occasional seagull’s call to break the soft, whispered birth of each new day.