by M. B. Shaw
Chapter Twenty-five
Aileen Chapman smiled brightly as she cleared away Edwin Brae’s morning tea tray. Aileen enjoyed working at the nursing home. She hadn’t been at all sure about taking her SVQ in Elderly Care after she left school in Buckie. It was her mam who’d pushed her to do it, but four years into her job at Passages, Aileen was so glad that she had. It was hard to describe exactly what she loved about her work. It certainly wasn’t glamorous, or well paid, and the residents could be difficult at times and sometimes downright rude – old Mr Brae one of the rudest of them all. Although, of course, that was the Alzheimer’s, not him. But there were also all the other times, when something as simple as bringing someone a cup of tea and a biscuit or stopping to chat about their families made a visible difference to the old people’s lives. The smiles and the thank yous and the tightly squeezed hands all lifted Aileen more than she could express. And they meant even more when they came from a tricky old bugger like Edwin.
‘You remember you’ve a visitor coming this morning, Mr B?’ said Aileen, setting down the tray to plump up the old man’s pillows. ‘Miss Grey?’
‘The artist,’ Edwin muttered contentedly. ‘My son’s an artist.’
Aileen nodded, delighted he’d remembered. His illness was pronounced. He’d had it since his fifties, the poor devil; so much of his brain was damaged beyond repair, a jumble of plaque and tangles that could make even the smallest act of recall a challenge. But it was also bizarrely intermittent. On the times he did remember things, he could be sharp as a razor, blurting out incredibly vivid details.
‘And that’s still all right with you, is it?’ Aileen asked. ‘You’re not too tired?’
‘Tired? Och, no. I slept like a baby.’ Looking up at Aileen through watery grey eyes, the corners of his thin mouth twitched upwards in what might have been a smile.
‘I’m glad to hear it,’ said Aileen. He certainly seemed to be in an awfully good mood today.
‘Those shortbreads you brought me before were delicious.’
‘A compliment?’ The nurse’s eyes widened. ‘Well, I never. Someone’s woken up on the right side of the bed.’
‘It’s all these young women, coming to see me,’ Edwin Brae chuckled naughtily. ‘Makes a change.’
‘I’m sure it does. Well, I’ll bring some fresh flowers in a bit,’ said Aileen happily. ‘For your guest. Do our best to make her feel welcome.’
The old man was still alert and smiling fifteen minutes later, when Aileen returned with a vase of chrysanthemums and Iris.
‘This is Miss Grey.’ She spoke loudly and slowly, well aware that in the last quarter of an hour Edwin might have forgotten everything. ‘I found her in the lobby.’
‘Yes, yes, I know who it is,’ he grumbled, shooing the nurse away good-naturedly. Once she’d gone, he turned to Iris.
‘Have a seat, Miss Grey. You’re an artist, they tell me?’
‘That’s right,’ said Iris, pleased to find the old man so amenable. He’d refused even to speak to DI Haley, and lots of people had told her that Edwin Brae could be prickly and difficult, including his own son.
‘And you’re working up at the castle?’
‘Yes.’
‘My boy paints.’
‘I know,’ said Iris. ‘I’ve seen some of his work. He’s good.’
‘On the side, mind you,’ muttered Edwin. ‘He has a real job.’
Iris laughed. ‘Art can be a real job, Mr Brae. It is for me.’
‘Aye, but you’re a woman,’ said the old gillie bluntly. ‘Messing about with paint’s no job for a man.’
Deciding for expediency’s sake to let this go, Iris looked around the room, searching for an angle with which to begin the conversation; a subject that wouldn’t threaten the old man, but would hopefully put him at ease before she took the plunge and showed him Beatrice Contorini’s photograph.
‘Is that one of Angus’s?’
She pointed to one of the landscapes beside the wardrobe, a pretty watercolour rendition of a winter moorland, presumably somewhere on the MacKinnon estate.
Edwin nodded. ‘He painted everything in here. Makes me feel close to him,’ he added, with a wistfulness Iris hadn’t expected.
‘Does he come to visit you?’
‘Sometimes.’ The old man looked away. ‘I don’t know. They tell me he comes sometimes, but I don’t remember.’
Walking over to the side table by the window, Iris picked up one of the framed photographs standing beside the vase of flowers. There were five or six in all, mostly of Angus in various stages of childhood and adolescence. But the one that caught Iris’s eye looked like it had been taken in the early fifties. It showed two teenage boys, one tall and skinny, the other shorter and more solidly built, standing arm-in-arm beside a lake.
‘That’s not Jock, is it?’ asked Iris, squinting at the familiar features of the taller boy. He was young, of course, and happy, both of which differences made him harder to recognise from the dour old curmudgeon that she knew. But the aquiline nose and patrician curl of the lip gave it away.
‘Certainly is, bless him,’ said Edwin, a big, genuine smile spreading across his sunken face. ‘That’s the two of us at Loch Lomond. What a summer that was.’
‘You remember it?’
‘Oh yes. Jock’s father, the auld baron, took the pair of us up there fishing for a fortnight. I was thrilled to be included. Happiest two weeks of my life.’
He means it, thought Iris, although it felt like an odd thing for a grown man to say, especially one with a child.
‘As boys, you know, we were like brothers,’ said Edwin, warming to his theme. ‘People find it surprising, given our different stations in life. But I tell you, Miss Grey, we roamed that estate like two wee kings. In and out of the woods we were, thick as thieves, hunting and making camps and I don’t know what.’
‘And when you grew up?’ asked Iris. ‘Did you stay close?’
‘Aye,’ said Edwin. But he’d looked off to the side again, the joy of his boyhood reminiscences slowly draining out of his frail body like air being wheezed from a lung. ‘Jock will always be a brother to me. But you know, when you get older, things change. She ruined everything.’
The old man’s expression darkened almost comically.
‘Who ruined everything?’ asked Iris, although she already had a good idea from what Angus and Haley had told her.
‘Linda. That bitch,’ Edwin muttered, his mouth shrinking and puckering into a tightly pursed ‘o’ of hatred. ‘Folks blamed me, but it was her. With her lies and her sneaking around behind my back. She poisoned him against me.’ He jabbed a liver-spotted finger at Iris, as if she were the long-absent Linda Brae, a woman who, by all accounts, had been treated dreadfully by her then husband. And was so afraid, in fact, that she’d run off into the night, leaving her young son behind.
‘What did people blame you for?’ Iris asked. But Edwin didn’t register the question, so lost was he in his old resentments.
‘She made him hate me,’ he ranted on. ‘Encouraged him to disrespect me. To think that taking over as gillie one day was beneath him. All that bloody art nonsense, that was all her. The bitch. She did it to spite me. No respect, I tell ye, in my own house. What was I supposed to do?’
It dawned on Iris that he was talking about Angus now, not Jock. That somewhere along the line he’d lost the thread of their earlier conversation. Or perhaps, in his confusion and agitation, he’d simply conflated Angus and Jock into one person.
‘That must have made you angry,’ she said, feigning sympathy. ‘Not being respected.’
‘Angry? I could’ve fucking killed her.’
Balling his hand into a fist, he brought it down as hard as he could on the side table. It was an impotent, pathetic echo of the violent man he had clearly once been. The rage was still there, and the self-pity, and the entitlement. That deep-rooted belief that as a man he had a right to treat his wife as he pleased and still demand her loyalty. Bu
t Edwin Brae’s physical strength had long since left him. Just like Linda.
‘How did Jock get along with her?’ Iris fished, trying to keep her tone casual in the face of Edwin’s increasingly splenetic outbursts.
He peered at her, confused. ‘Jock? Get along with who?’
‘With Linda,’ said Iris. ‘With your wife.’
‘My wife…’ His confusion seemed to deepen, and his anger to collapse completely and instantly, like sails after a storm. As if something in Iris’s question had inadvertently flipped a hidden ‘off’ switch. ‘No, no,’ he muttered. ‘No, no, no. Jock and I go way back. He’s a good man, MacKinnon. Always been there for the boy and that’s all I’ll say aboot that. What did you say your name was again?’
It was one of the strangest things Iris had ever witnessed, this Jekyll-and-Hyde transition from embittered ex-husband to sweet, rambling old man. Almost as if Edwin’s Alzheimer’s had made him a more decent person, even as it robbed him of his faculties. Deciding that she’d better show him Beatrice’s picture now, while he was calm again and before he grew too confused, she pulled it out of her handbag.
‘Iris,’ she told him gently. ‘My name is Iris, Mr Brae. I came to ask you if you recognise the young woman in this photograph?’
She pressed the picture into his hands and watched him look at it, intently, for quite a few seconds.
‘Pretty girl,’ he said softly.
‘Her name was Beatrice.’
‘Beatrice. I see.’
‘Do you think you might have seen her before, Mr Brae?’
He frowned, handing the picture back. ‘No, miss. I’ve not seen that young lady.’
Disappointed, Iris slipped the photograph back into her bag. She didn’t like Edwin Brae, not the original version anyway, and she certainly didn’t trust him. But there was no doubt in her mind that he was telling the truth about this. He didn’t know who Beatrice was.
‘OK. Well, thank you for your time. Enjoy the rest of your day.’ Standing up to go, she turned and looked again at the framed photographs clustered together by the chrysanthemums. One, of Angus in Edinburgh, caught her eye. He was in his late teens or early twenties in the picture and standing alone, leaning back against a wall. It was an innocuous enough snap, but something about it was bothering her, and she couldn’t put her finger on why. Some detail she was looking at and yet, somehow, not seeing. Something that wasn’t quite right.
‘Will you bring my biscuits next time, Aileen?’ Edwin called after her, mistaking Iris for his nurse.
‘Of course,’ said Iris, tearing herself away from the picture. It was probably nothing anyway.
Chapter Twenty-six
‘Doesn’t it feel strange to you?’ Kathy asked Iris. ‘Being back here again?’
Lying back against the cushions in Fiona’s old study with her precious dogs at her feet, lithe and lovely in tropical-print leggings and a huge, vibrant yellow Brora wrap, Kathy looked more exotic and out of place than usual in the cold, grey environs of the castle, like a bird of paradise trapped in a rusty cage. Even the attic room’s cosy interiors couldn’t totally dispel the encroaching chill of winter, creeping through the thick stone walls. Frosted, mullioned windows revealed a crisp blue winter sky, flooding the room with the sort of unforgiving light that would have shown every flaw in the face of a less ravishing sitter. But Kathy Miller only seemed all the more glowing and youthful, with her white teeth and glossy hair and with her legs pulled up beneath her like a teenager. All the bruising from the attack in Venice had healed, and Kathy looked for all the world like a bride-to-be without a care in the world.
‘It does feel odd,’ Iris agreed, one brush clamped between her teeth as she reached for a smaller one to finish the detailing on Kathy’s hands. ‘Jarring. Especially after Venice and – everything that happened.’
Kathy stiffened. ‘Yes, well,’ she said briskly. ‘Let’s not go back over all that. It’s in the past.’
Iris raised an eyebrow, surprised by the firmness with which Kathy declared the conversation closed. She wondered how the cover story about falling down the steps had gone down with Jock, and how things had been between them generally since Kathy had got back, but she sensed that it would be a mistake to ask too many questions too soon.
‘I was deported from Rome, you know,’ she said, conversationally.
‘I heard!’ Kathy relaxed, excited by the prospect of some juicy gossip. ‘You should totally sue them.’
‘Sue who? The Italian police?’
‘Sure,’ said Kathy indignantly.
Iris grinned. ‘That’s a very American solution.’
‘Maybe so, but sometimes we Yanks have a point,’ Kathy insisted. ‘And what’s the alternative? You can’t let people just get away with treating you like shit.’ Iris was struck again by Kathy’s gutsiness, that potent mix of resilience and determination that, like her intelligence, ran contrary to the bimbo, gold-digger stereotype that most people in Pitfeldy seemed intent on labelling her with.
‘Like you said, it’s in the past,’ said Iris, with only the slightest hint of irony. ‘And to be honest, I’m more interested in finding out who killed Beatrice, and whoever was buried with her, than I am in long and expensive legal battles.’
‘Any progress on that?’ asked Kathy, reaching down to pet a rather limp-looking Milo.
‘Nothing concrete,’ said Iris evasively.
‘Did you ever track down that guy in Rome, the one that the priest said might have been Beatrice’s father?’
‘Massimo Giannotti,’ said Iris. ‘Yes, I did. He denied paternity. And Paola Contorini’s rape.’
‘Well, duh,’ said Kathy. ‘Not too many guys are gonna cop to an unproven rape charge.’
‘True,’ agreed Iris. ‘I don’t know, though. I didn’t like him, or trust him, but I’m not certain he was lying, at least not about that. The strangest thing was that I happened to mention to him when we met that I was working in Pitfeldy at the moment, and that I’d been commissioned to paint you. And it was weird. Something seemed to click with him.’
‘Click?’ Kathy raised an eyebrow.
‘Yeah. It was almost as if he knew you, or Jock, or he had some connection here. Might you have met him in New York?’
‘I don’t know. I mean, I guess.’ Kathy frowned. ‘The name doesn’t ring any bells, but maybe if I saw him. Do you have a picture?’
‘I don’t,’ said Iris, pulling out her iPhone. ‘He put an end to our little chat before we got to the cosy selfie phase, unfortunately. But I suspect we could dig one up on Google Images. He’s fairly well known in Italy. Let’s have a look.’
As she scrolled through pictures, one of Kathy’s dogs made a disconcerting gurgling sound and abruptly vomited all over the end of the couch.
‘Oh my God! Sam Sam.’ Scooping the tiny creature up into her arms, Kathy held him as his small body buckled and retched violently. When finally he finished, the little dog gave a series of hacking coughs, before slumping miserably back into his mistress’s lap.
‘Poor thing,’ said Iris. ‘How long has he been ill? I was actually thinking earlier that Milo looked a bit peaky.’
‘It’s more than “a bit peaky”,’ said Kathy with a worried shake of the head. ‘They’ve both been so unwell. I saw something was wrong as soon as I got home. Jock took us to see the vet in Buckie.’
‘And what did they say?’
Kathy bit her lip, tearing up. ‘He said he couldn’t find anything wrong with either dog. Nothing specific, anyway. He gave me some vitamin and iron supplements, but I mean, you saw that, right? It’s bullshit. That is not normal.’
‘No,’ agreed Iris, wrinkling her nose as the smell of canine vomit wafted over to her side of the room. ‘No, it’s not.’
‘Is that him?’ Kathy asked suddenly, glancing across at Iris’s phone.
‘Oh – yes,’ said Iris, who’d momentarily forgotten about Massimo. ‘That’s an old picture. It must have been taken ten years a
go, I’d say. But this is him.’
Kathy studied the image closely and for a long time before shaking her head. ‘Nope. Sorry. I wish I could say I knew him, but I don’t think we’ve ever met.’
‘Oh well,’ said Iris. ‘Never mind. It was just a thought.’
She was about to head downstairs when the study door flew open with a bang and Jock burst in, red-faced and panting.
‘I thought I’d find you here,’ he said, glaring at Iris, his body taut with tension.
‘Is something wrong?’ Iris asked coolly.
‘Yes, something bloody well is wrong!’ Jock fumed. ‘And you know exactly what it is. Did Haley put you up to it? Hmm?’
‘Jock?’ Kathy looked at him with dismay. ‘What’s wrong with you?’
He’d been in such a warm, conciliatory and lovely mood ever since she’d got back from Venice, even helping her with the plans for their wedding rehearsal dinner, which heaven knew wasn’t his thing. But around Iris he seemed to become a different person, angry, unreasonable, his entire body wound tight, like a spring.
‘Nothing’s wrong with me,’ he turned to Kathy, making an effort to soften his tone for her benefit, ‘but your “friend” Iris here has been – good God.’ Belatedly, his eyes fell on the pool of dog sick, dripping from the couch onto the carpet. ‘When did that happen?’
‘Just now,’ said Kathy.
‘Christ,’ murmured Jock.
‘I’m really worried about them.’ Kathy’s eyes welled up with tears, and for a moment Jock forgot all about Iris and his anger and hugged her.
‘They’ll be all right, my love,’ he whispered soothingly. ‘The vet said it was nothing serious, and he knows his stuff.’
‘I know, but –’
‘Why don’t you nip downstairs and ask Mrs Gregory to come and clean up the mess? Take the dogs with you. They look like they could use a bit of fresh air. That way Iris and I can have a word in private.’
‘What sort of a “word”?’ Kathy asked warily. ‘I won’t have you being rude, Jock.’
‘Really, it’s fine,’ Iris interjected. ‘I’m sure whatever it is Jock and I can work it out between the two of us. You go and take care of Milo and Sam Sam.’