by M. B. Shaw
‘Are you sure?’ Iris’s disappointment was genuine. They’d only just begun talking and now already she’d scared him off.
‘Quite sure. It was a pleasure to meet you, Iris.’
He kissed her on both cheeks, gallantly but not warmly.
‘I hope you find… whatever it is you’re looking for. Goodbye.’
Damn it, thought Iris, watching him go. What just happened?
* * *
She woke early the next morning to find a package outside her hotel room door. After a few moments’ confusion, she ripped off the paper and realised with joy that it was her replacement laptop. Later she would take it to the Apple Store on Via Alberto Lionello to get help setting it up. Syncing her phone was just about within Iris’s technological capabilities, but ‘the cloud’ and how it worked was still a total mystery. Ian used to do all that stuff when they were married. Now it would have to be Paolo from the Genius Bar.
After another too-short shower, Iris changed and headed down to breakfast. She had a lot to do today, aside from the Apple Store. Number one on the list was tracking down Paola Contorini’s grave, which she was determined to visit before she left Rome. Number two involved going to the public records office to see if she could find any old addresses for Paola. Perhaps, by knocking on doors, Iris would stumble across someone who’d known Beatrice’s mother during those tragic last years of her life. Surely she would have confided in someone about her daughter’s disappearance and what had happened in Venice? Or perhaps shared her claims about Massimo Giannotti and the rape? It was important to get to the bottom of that.
Sitting at a table by the window directly overlooking the famous fountain, Iris ordered coffee and pastries, with fresh orange juice and a mouth-watering assortment of home-made jams. It was all ambrosially delicious, but she’d barely got through a quarter of her first cinnamon twist when three uniformed carabinieri appeared in the doorway and promptly marched over to her table.
‘Mrs Grey?’
‘Yes?’
‘Polizia di stato.’ One of the men, presumably the most senior, flashed his ID. ‘There’s a problem with your tourist visitor status. You need to come with us.’
‘A problem with my what?’ Iris looked up, baffled. ‘Are you sure you’ve got the right person? I’m here on holiday from –’
‘We know why you’re here.’ The steel in his tone was unmistakable. ‘There are problems with your papers, Mrs Grey. We have orders to escort you to Fiumicino.’
‘You’re deporting me?’ Iris pushed her plate aside. ‘You can’t do that.’
But even as she said it, one look at the men’s faces told her that they could. There would be no time for lawyers or phone calls. No time for anything. Someone – Massimo Giannotti? – had stitched her up.
The senior officer smiled thinly. ‘We appreciate your cooperation, Mrs Grey. You have ten minutes to pack.’
* * *
Iris leaned back in her cramped seat as the easyJet flight juddered up into the blue, still reeling from the events of the last few hours. Without doubt, this had been one of the most surreal mornings of her life. From the immigration police showing up at her hotel, to being bustled into the back of an unmarked car, then whisked through the airport on some sort of super-charged fast track, past every line and desk and checkpoint, handed a ticket and deposited on a plane to Luton, the whole thing was like a bad, chaotic dream. And now here she was, heading home, not even sure whether or not she’d officially been deported, and if so what for.
She couldn’t wait to tell Haley about this. So much for giving the Italian police a chance. Whatever their motivation was for kicking her out of the country, it sure as hell wasn’t a burning desire to get justice for Beatrice Contorini. Like everyone else, it seemed, the local police wanted the two women buried beneath Jock MacKinnon’s bothy to stay buried, metaphorically if not literally.
If it hadn’t been for Milo and Sam Sam, they would be, Iris reflected, imagining the two dogs’ fluffy faces on an Interpol most-wanted poster and smiling to herself. Thinking about the dogs made her think about Kathy, and the frightening attack in Venice which she’d been so adamant must not be mentioned to Jock. What was that about? Who had broken into their apartment, and why?
Despite all the progress she’d made, not least in establishing who Beatrice was, Iris couldn’t help but feel that her Italian ‘jaunt’, as Greta put it, had ended up posing as many questions as it had answered.
Pulling the paper sick-bag out of the seat pocket in front of her, Iris whipped a biro out of her handbag and jotted down some notes on the back of it, while the thoughts were still fresh in her mind.
Julia Mantovani – art teacher. Find address.
Names for Haley: Andrei Barbu. Trafficking.
B’s boyfriend?
Massimo Giannotti – Kathy/Pitfeldy connection?
At the bottom of the paper she wrote the name Paola Contorini, her pen making little swirls and curlicues in the letters as her mind wandered.
She never did get to visit Paola’s grave. But she remained very curious. What had happened to Beatrice’s mother after she came to Rome, the city her alleged rapist called home? Had she continued searching for her daughter, believing Beatrice still alive? Or had she merely sunk into a drunken depression and died, broken and defeated, never knowing where it all went wrong, or how her beloved daughter had been torn away from her, and from their home in Venice, and everything she loved?
Ridiculously, Iris felt tears prick the backs of her eyes. It must be the shock of being deported, she told herself firmly. After all, she never knew Paola, or Beatrice, for that matter. It was silly to get so emotionally involved.
A beep from her phone reminded her that she’d forgotten to switch it to flight-safe mode. Picking it up, she accidentally clicked on the new message.
It was from Jamie Ingall.
Hear you’re in Italy, he wrote. Casually, as if he hadn’t disappeared off the face of the earth for the past couple of weeks. Call me when you get back. We shld get together.
‘The cheek,’ Iris said aloud, to the surprise of the old man sitting next to her. Deleting the text, she switched off the phone and thrust it angrily back into her bag.
She knew she had no right to expect anything from Jamie. Things had never been serious between them. But even so, it rankled that he seemed to feel he could drop her and then pick her up when he felt like it, like some sort of toy. Perhaps she’d been out of the dating game too long, but that simply didn’t seem right to Iris.
Feeling unaccountably anxious, and irritated – with herself as much as anything – Iris gazed unhappily out of the window at nothing as the plane flew on.
Chapter Twenty-three
Jock MacKinnon turned up the heat in his Volvo estate and eased into fifth gear as Wagner’s Das Rheingold blasted through the car speakers. It was odd how music affected one. Wagner simultaneously relaxed him and gave him courage, filling his chest with a surge of energy and optimism. It was masculine music, Jock decided, wondering if, subconsciously, that was why he’d chosen it for this drive to the airport to pick up Kathy. Did he need strength for their reunion? One never knew with women.
He’d missed her while she was away in Italy, although it was a longing tinged with anxiety, thanks to her choice of travelling companion. He’d finally managed to get rid of the loathsome DI Haley, thanks heavens, but Iris Grey was trickier. Kathy liked her, and leaned on her in ways that troubled Jock deeply. But the more he tried to prise the two women apart, the tighter Kathy seemed to cling to Iris, like a barnacle on the keel of a boat. That frightened him. He wanted to be Kathy’s boat, the one she clung to, trusted, needed. Try as he may, he couldn’t help but think of Iris as a threat.
With his first wife, Alice, he’d let himself love in that passionate, thoughtless, needy way that young men did. He’d given himself up completely to the wild, reckless co-dependence of youth, and for a while everything was perfect. But then their daughter Mary had died, and Alice h
ad left him, and every single piece of Jock’s heart had been ground to dust, to atoms, to nothing.
The void that was left had lingered for over thirty years, all through his marriage to Fiona and the twins’ childhood. He wasn’t proud of that. But he wasn’t ashamed either, because in Jock’s mind these were simply things that had happened. External forces of nature like an earthquake or a flood or a fire. From time to time emotions would roll like tumbleweed through the vacuum that had once been him. Anger, most often, in its various forms: rage; bitterness; spite. Lust reared its head from time to time. Was lust an emotion? And then, occasionally, softer feelings, like humour, or wonder, or regret. But other than Edwin Brae, and in later years the boy, Angus, Jock had survived the entirety of middle age without forging a single close human relationship. It simply wasn’t worth the risk. Especially not with a woman.
Kathy had changed that. Without even trying she had cracked open a shell deep within him, a brittle core that Fiona had been hammering away at uselessly for decades. Perhaps, Jock reflected, it was because she hadn’t tried that Kathy had succeeded where his second wife had failed. Like Alice, Kathy was independent and strong. Fiona had been soft and weak. She had needed him, and Jock could never quite forgive her for that.
But now here he was, an old man, by society’s reckoning, beginning again. How strange life was.
Poor Kathy had hurt herself in Venice, it seemed, fallen down a flight of steps and acquired some bruises. Evidently, the accident had rattled her enough to make her want to leave Venice early. And come home to me, Jock reassured himself, pulling into the airport car park.
Perhaps he was worrying too much about Iris Grey. He was the one Kathy loved, and would marry, no matter what anybody tried to do to stop them. The police were already gone from the castle and the murder inquiry was closed. Soon enough the portrait would be finished too, and Iris would leave as well, out of their lives for ever. Then all the bad, sad things would sink back into the past where they belonged, and Jock and Kathy would live happily ever after, in the peace that only Pitfeldy could bring.
* * *
‘Have you seen this?’
Hannah Drummond yawned extravagantly as she held the iPad out to Angus. It was Sunday morning, her favourite time of the week, and the two of them were in their pyjamas at the breakfast table at Keeper’s Cottage surrounded by a sea of Sunday supplements and half-eaten rounds of toast.
‘If it’s got the words “Meghan” or “Markle” in it, I’m not interested,’ Angus groaned, not looking up from the Sunday Times sports section. Scotland had trounced England in the rugby yesterday, so it made good reading for once, and Hannah’s obsession with all things royal was legendary.
‘It hasn’t,’ she said, shoving the tablet under his nose. ‘I’m serious, Angus. You should read it. It’s Iris Grey’s Facebook update, about those bodies. They know who one of them was.’
Angus’s hands tensed, the tendons rising like tiny ropes beneath his skin. Slowly, he folded his newspaper and set it down, taking the iPad from his girlfriend.
‘Beatrice, her name was,’ said Hannah unnecessarily, as Angus read Iris’s latest post for himself. ‘She was a student in Venice, apparently, went missing over ten years ago. How she ended up in Scotland is anybody’s guess, but the Italian police are looking into it. There’s a picture – look – if you scroll down. Angus?’ A note of concern crept into her voice. Something very odd seemed to have happened to Angus’s face all of a sudden.
‘Are you OK, love?’
‘Migraine,’ he whispered through clenched teeth, dropping the iPad and clutching his head in his hands. Moments later he started making a terrible groaning sound.
‘I’ll call Dr Harris.’ Hannah rushed to the phone, looking on in alarm as he slumped forward, pressing his forehead to the table in obvious agony. He’d had migraines before, bad ones, but she’d never seen the symptoms come on like this, from one second to the next.
Perhaps she should have been more sensitive about Iris Grey’s news. Ever since they’d found those bloody bones up at the bothy he’d not been himself. Some well of pain deep inside him seemed to have been stirred to life by the tragedy of these unknown women, like a stone dropped into still water, its ripples summoning echoes of Angus’s own loss, of emotions long buried.
‘Hello, yes –’ Hannah could hear the worry in her own voice. ‘I’m sorry to bother you on a Sunday, doctor –’
Pressing his temples to the wood, barely breathing in case the tiny movements worsened his pain, Angus was only dimly aware of what Hannah was saying. He was grateful to her for trying to help. But he knew there was nothing Dr Harris could do for him.
He had been here before. His suffering would pass when it passed. Until then he was trapped in this throbbing prison, like a foetus in the dark fluid of the womb.
He must accept it. He deserved it. He had brought himself to this dark place, after all, and not even Hannah, with all her love and light, could save him.
* * *
‘My poor baby.’ Jock reached a hand out tenderly and lightly stroked Kathy’s bruised cheek. ‘You must have taken quite a tumble.’
‘I guess I did,’ she sighed, kissing his hand. ‘But I’m OK now. It’s not as bad as it looks.’
They were on the motorway, heading back to Pitfeldy, and the conversation was still a little stilted between them. Jock put it down to the ‘bumpy re-entry’ couples often felt after a spell apart, but he still didn’t like it. There was definitely something subdued about Kathy, a reticence that he wasn’t used to.
‘I missed you,’ he said gruffly, returning his hand to the wheel. ‘So did the dogs. They’ve been looking awfully down in the mouth without you.’
‘They’re OK though?’ said Kathy, sounding panicked. ‘I mean, they’re not sick?’
‘Not as far as I know,’ said Jock, fighting down his irritation that she seemed more anxious about Milo and Sam Sam than she did about him. ‘Mrs G’s been keeping them to their normal routine. I’ve just noticed they’ve not been their usual bouncy selves.’
‘Well, I’ve missed them too,’ said Kathy, relaxing a little.
‘And me, I hope?’ Jock couldn’t help himself.
‘Of course, honey.’
Reaching out she put a hand on his leg and squeezed. Jock beamed. It was ridiculous how happy she made him.
‘So tell me more about Italy,’ he said brightly. ‘How was Milan? I suppose you’ve bankrupted me with the dress?’
‘Dresses,’ Kathy corrected him impishly. ‘I got three.’
‘Three?’ Jock spluttered. ‘How many weddings are we having?’
‘Only the one, dearest,’ Kathy cooed, cheering up herself now that the subject had turned to couture. ‘But I wanted something traditional for the service, and then maybe something a bit more flirty for the reception. That’s very common these days.’
‘Is it indeed?’ grumbled Jock, only half-jokingly. ‘That’s still only two dresses. Unless I’ve lost complete control of my senses. Which, of course, I may have.’
‘Not your senses, mi amore,’ Kathy laughed. ‘Only your Amex card. The third dress is for the rehearsal dinner.’
He looked at her blankly.
‘Jock!’ she admonished. ‘Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten?’
‘Course not,’ said Jock, who clearly had.
‘Good,’ said Kathy, ‘because I was actually thinking we might move that forward, to December. I just figured no one’s going to want to get all dolled up for a party between Christmas and New Year. That’s, like, everybody’s downtime, right? When all you want to do is sleep off your hangover and –’
‘Go shooting,’ Jock finished the sentence for her, earning himself a slap on the thigh. ‘What?’ he said indignantly, glad that things between them seemed to be resetting to normal. ‘Just because you’re all save-the-whale and let’s go vegan, doesn’t mean all of our guests will be doing the same. Boxing Day shooting parties are a big deal in Scot
land. That’s a busy time.’
After that, conversation flowed more easily, with Kathy happily chatting away about the wedding, and her dresses, and the stunning antique lace she’d picked up in Venice for a ‘very reasonable’ price. Eventually, as naturally as he could, Jock brought the topic around to Iris.
‘I was surprised she didn’t fly back with you.’
‘Me too, a little bit,’ admitted Kathy, cagily. ‘But, you know, we can’t resume work on the portrait until this heals.’ She touched her battered cheek and eye. ‘So she might as well take the time off, I guess. Plus all artists love Italy, right?’
‘Hmmm,’ said Jock. ‘Did she ever meet up with that priest you told me about? The fellow who thought he recognised a necklace or some such nonsense?’
‘Uh-huh,’ said Kathy excitedly. ‘And it’s not nonsense. I can’t believe you don’t know about this, but then you never go on Facebook and you’re hardly ever in the village…’
‘Know about what?’ Jock interrupted her.
‘The priest was right. The girl he gave the necklace to was one of the victims. Her name was Beatrice Contorini. The Italian police have confirmed it.’
‘I see,’ Jock said stiffly, his eyes glued to the road.
‘Apparently, they’ve taken over the case now,’ said Kathy.
With Iris Grey’s unwanted assistance, no doubt, Jock brooded bitterly.
Sensing his disquiet, Kathy leaned over and planted a kiss on his cheek. ‘You know, honey, I have missed you,’ she said softly. ‘It’s good to be home.’
* * *
Rory MacKinnon gripped his Hermes overnight bag tightly as he stepped out of the castle into the bitter wind and clicked open the boot of his new silver Range Rover Velar.
Gingerly placing the bag in the car, he heard the familiar rumble of his father’s Volvo hurtling up the drive.
Damn it. Rory had hoped to avoid running into Jock and Kathy. The traffic back from the airport must have been better than usual. Half hidden behind the raised door of the open boot, Rory watched as his father got out of the car and walked around to the passenger side to open the door for his soon-to-be stepmother.