She was sitting at the kitchen table, a mug within her curved hand. I slid into the other side and sat, waiting. The oil flame hissed in the Rayburn, and Dan’s tail thumped against the side of his basket.
‘I knew,’ she said at last. She lifted her head, and I saw that she looked more like herself than she had since Annette’s death. The worry lines, the grey skin, had smoothed away. She didn’t have to fight between instinct and loyalty any more, now the truth was known. The truth shall make you free … ‘Oh, not that he’d killed Annette! I’d never have thought of that in a million years. No, I knew about the coven. I think he got a kick out of knowing I knew. He didn’t tell me himself, but he’d look at me, the nights he was going out, and say, ‘I’m just going for a long walk. I’ll leave the dogs behind.’ Then I’d know he was meeting them. Those teenage girls who got a kick out of their stupid ceremonies. And Peter strutting about in that idiotic costume.’
She sighed, and turned the mug in her hands. ‘I can tell you when it started. It was the financial crisis, when suddenly bankers went from being “somebody” in the town, the person you’d ask to be on committees, or guarantee loans, all that, to everyone seeing them as the people who’d ruined the country. He couldn’t bear that. He liked being important. Back in Gloucestershire, we’d been in the county set, so he was Duneton’s son-in-law.’ Her accent mocked itself. ‘You know, nice little place just out of Cirencester, some cousin of the Spencers. He had his own status here: Mr Otway, the manager of Shetland’s largest bank. Then there was the crash, and he lost the status. Oh, he was still a member of the Lodge, and the Rotary, but people didn’t treat him with respect any more. They lectured him about what banks had done to the country.’
She picked up her mug, took a sip of cold tea, made a face, and set it down again. ‘It was all bad timing. Annette went from being Daddy’s princess to the teenage rebel stage, and once she’d left school she wanted a life of her own. And me, well, I’d been the older woman, and he’d liked that. Liked me being in charge of the home. Now he couldn’t bear it. He wouldn’t let me contridict him over anything. He wanted me to give him the respect he wasn’t getting any more, and I just couldn’t do it. His world was falling apart, and our marriage with it.’
‘Then, one night, he saw the coven. He was up walking the dogs, and saw their fire. He went and looked, and told me about it when he came down: “Stupid girls playing at witches!” Then he broke off, and I saw him thinking about it. He was in London not long after that, and then this box turned up with a costumier’s name on it.’ She shuddered. ‘I remember his manner when it arrived – gloating, nervous, and that horrid “I know I shouldn’t do this, but I’m going to” look. I asked what it was, and he wouldn’t tell me.’ She blushed. ‘So, naturally, the next time he went out, I looked. He meant me to. Then, the next full moon, he went out, and when he came home I could smell it all on him, the smoke, and the adrenalin, and the sex. I challenged him with playing the devil, and he just laughed and said it would make a good story for the divorce court, if I wanted to lose my home, and studio, and income. How would I support myself, he sneered, untrained and middle-aged, when young university candidates like Annette couldn’t get a job? And I thought about this house, and the garden, that I’d just started to restore, and my studio, and I was damned if I was going to throw it all up, just like that. I decided to stay. He got a kick out of that too, pretending in front of people what a devoted couple we were.’
‘And then Annette got this idea of being reincarnated,’ I said.
She pushed the mug away, covered her eyes with one hand. ‘If only she’d talked to me about it. I should have explained to her, but I didn’t want to give Peter away. When she was little, you see, we had this old spaniel, Hector. He wasn’t very fond of her, he saw her as a usurper, but she loved him, she’d try to pick him up and pet him. Then he got a septic paw, and Peter was afraid he would bite her. He told her she had to stay away from Hector, and she just wouldn’t listen, and one day he lost his temper and took her by the shoulders, by the throat, and shook her. She almost lost consciousness. I was so angry. I told him if he ever did anything like that again, if he ever laid hands on her, I’d leave him and take her with me, and he’d never see her again. But that was when it started, that fear of having something around her neck. She’d wake in the night, saying she was choking. I suppose that once we came here, and they did witches in school, then that linked up with something in her head and that’s how the reincarnation idea started.’ She stopped, shuddering.
‘I can tell you the next bit,’ I said. I kept my voice soft, as if I was trying to talk a child to sleep. ‘She did that Hallowe’en play with Nate. She told him about the reincarnation idea. He was like your husband; he’d lost status too. He’d grown up his parents’ golden boy, and turned out nothing. He had all these ideas and ambitions, but not the application to make anything of them, so he saw others succeeding where he’d failed. As a child, he’d made himself big by bullying his clever little sister, but he’d ended up having to be grateful to her for getting him a job, waiting at tables and running after a temperamental chef. The teenage girls who used to hang around asking him about occult stuff had gone off to do their own orgies. They didn’t know their devil was Peter; they thought it was Nate. They stopped talking to him about the occult, because they didn’t want to spoil their fun by admitting they knew it was him. Here was his chance to have some fun again.’
But the witches hadn’t liked it. They thought Annette was taking their devil away from them. So they started to hassle her, and they told her they’d put a spell on her dog, make him sicken and die if she didn’t leave Nate alone; but Nate persuaded her he was the only one who could help.
‘Nate told Annette they’d have a session in Scalloway Castle, where the witches had been condemned, and raise the ghost of the witch she’d been. But he wanted to get a hold over her. So he asked her to steal the ash from the museum. It was a little, stupid thing, not valuable, but symbolic. She’d have to take Peter’s keys, betray his standing. Peter’d sneered at Nate, and disapproved of the Hallowe’en play. It was Nate’s revenge.’
‘They were on his key ring,’ Kate said. ‘I worked that out. She couldn’t get at them during the day, because he had them, so she had to take them while he walked the dogs.’
That had been where it had gone wrong. Dan had been ill, so Peter hadn’t been able to take the dogs out on Tuesday night. He’d gone on Wednesday, as usual, and Annette had seized her chance. She’d phoned Nate and told him she’d bring him the ash that night … except that Dan was still a bit shaky, so instead of going the great circuit around the hill, Peter just went through the town, up the back of Fraser Park, round the roundabout, and down towards the castle. He’d arrived at the museum, the dogs padding along behind him, just in time to see Annette coming out out of it, and locking up behind her with what had to be his keys. He’d grabbed her shoulders, like he’d grabbed her when she was little, and she’d gone into shock and died. I didn’t want to think about how he must have felt then, nor to talk about it to Kate, with her white face and ghost-seeing eyes.
‘The keys were in her hand, and he just shoved them in his pocket. He found them there, later – that day I came round, and he was on his way out.’ I remembered his look of surprise. For a moment, he’d forgotten how they came to be there. He hadn’t known, though, what she’d been doing at the museum. He didn’t trust Nate. I think he was afraid she’d been stealing from the museum – money, I mean. He searched her bag and found she’d got £100 in her purse. It was the money for paying off the witches, but he didn’t know that. So he took it, and as soon as he could he went down to the museum to check there was nothing missing from the till or the cash float, or money waiting to be banked.’
He’d have behaved as though he wanted something to take his mind off, and the staff would have been too sympathetic to say anything. He checked the till and the float and there was nothing wrong. It had just been mone
y she’d taken out after all.
‘He put it in our money jar,’ Kate said. ‘I just thought it was useful petty cash, so I gave it to you. I told the police that.’ She frowned. ‘It didn’t get you into trouble? The police didn’t think you stole it from Annette, did they?’
I shook my head. ‘They didn’t know I’ve had it.’ They would probably want it back, for evidence, I thought, with regret. ‘Have you eaten?’
‘I’m not hungry.’
I rose and searched in the cupboard for tomato soup, comfort food, poured it into a bowl and microwaved it. There was a packet of cheddar biscuits too. I put them in front of her, found a soup spoon and gave it into her hand, then sat back in my place. She drank half a dozen spoonfuls without interest, then hunger kicked in, and she finished the bowl. The warm spiciness brought the colour back into her cheeks. She laid the spoon in the bowl and took a deep breath, bracing herself. ‘Now I know it was him, I can imagine how it happened. The museum was the last thing he had left, his bit of status. He’d enjoyed it so much, steering the committee, being there at the opening, shaking hands with Queen Sonia of Norway – it was the way things used to be. Then he saw Annette there. This red mist of rage just came over him, and he did what he did before, when she was a child: he went to shake her.’ I remembered that look on her face. Guilt, the shock of being caught. The shock killed her. ‘He hadn’t meant to kill her, but she was dead all the same, and nothing he could do would bring her alive again. He was still half out of his mind with grief and rage, and it was all Nate’s fault. So he decided to take her to Nate’s house, and leave her there, with her hand pointing to the guilty person. He didn’t think about how it would affect me –’ A spasm passed over her face. She took a moment to fight the tears, then continued, her voice steady. ‘The police would punish Nate. He lifted her the way he’d learned in the fire brigade, and carried her down that short passage from the museum to the Spanish closs.’
‘That’s when Kevin’s nan saw him,’ I said. ‘We should have listened to her more closely.’ The Devil, with his horns and his tail, and a misshapen hump on his back, she’d said, and the hounds o’ Hell at his heels. I’d seen him myself, with his ear-flap hat making two horns, and the dog-lead swingling like a tail around his legs, and Dan and Candy following behind him. A man walking his dogs.
But Nate had seen him. He’d known Annette was going to try for the ash – she’d phoned him as she left – and he was waiting for her. He saw Peter drop her in the courtyard. He didn’t know if she’d managed to get into the museum, but if she had, then he was afraid the witches’ ash would lead them to him. He dived out into the courtyard and felt in her pockets, and there it was, a little container of ash. Then he heard someone coming down the close, and got back in again just in time to lurk in the shadows behind the curtain, and watch me find the body.
Kate rose to set her bowl in the sink. Now she had said the worst of it, she could move again. ‘Nate. Poor Nate. Those phone calls, those people saying your computer was upsetting the Microsoft mainframe. Those were Nate, the police said, trying to get hold of Peter. Your policeman explained. Blackmail. Peter went up to the house, and Nate came out with him, and – Oh! they didn’t put it like that of course, just “reason to believe” he might have been involved.’ She turned away from me. Her voice sounded as if she was far, far away. ‘As soon as I heard about Nate’s death, yesterday, I knew. I didn’t want to believe it, but inside me I –’ The bowl clattered from her hands back into the sink. She picked it out, rinsed it, and began drying it, rubbing the cloth round and round as if it was the most important thing in the world. She’d just set it back in the cupboard when the front door bell jangled. Kate jerked her head round. Her eyes were filled with dread. ‘ The Shetland Times has phoned already.’
‘I’ll get it,’ I said, and went through the wood-lined hall, with Peter’s jacket still hanging nearest the glass-paned door, ready for him to reach out a hand and pick it off the hook. Already it looked like something from another time. The outline through the door was a woman’s. She held her hand out when I opened the door.
‘Mrs Otway?’
I shook my head. ‘A neighbour.’ Her suit and briefcase looked more like a lawyer than a journalist. ‘You are?’
She had her business card ready. Kerr and Newby, it read, Solicitors. ‘I’m Peter’s lawyer.’
I stepped back and waved her in. ‘Kate’s through in the kitchen, the door on the right.’ I saw her into the room. ‘Kate … if you’d like, I’ll call back over later.’ We could have a drink together, just before bedtime. If ever a woman needed a goodnight brandy, Kate would, this night, though I didn’t expect it would help her to sleep.
She nodded, and I nodded back, and left them to it.
Now the sky was blazing with stars. The air was crisp on my face, cold and clear as well water in each breath. The police car was drawn up in front of the marina, so I wasn’t surprised to find Gavin sitting below in Reidar’s warm cabin, a cup of drinking chocolate in front of him. Anders was tucked into the opposite corner, with Rat on his shoulder, and Cat on his lap. There was a scatter of lethal-looking hooks on the table, each tied with jewel colours, as if Gavin and Reidar been comparing their lure of choice, and a heavenly smell of some kind of stew. I realised I’d missed lunch.
‘There you are,’ Reidar said. He poured the last portion from a little saucepan into a mug, added the cream and set it exactly in the centre of the table. Suddenly I realised how awkward this simple act of sitting down was. The settee around the table was U-shaped, with Gavin on one side, Anders on the other. Reidar was standing still, in the centre of the passage, with no indication of where he’d been sitting. Gavin was nearer to me, but the space beside Anders was slightly larger, and Cat was on that side. I could slide in beside either with equal naturalness, and one’d take it as a commitment, the other as a rejection. I longed for Khalida’s neutral engine box steps … and then Gavin moved into the middle section, as naturally as if he’d never seen the hesitation, giving me the whole of the side he’d been sitting on. ‘Have a seat.’
I put my mug on the table, and sat down. His cushion was warm. ‘I went to see Kate on my way home. Her lawyer’s with her now, but I said I’d go back.’
Reidar indicated the oven. ‘I have a stew cooking. You may take her some of that. She will need to eat, poor lady.’
They obviously knew all about it. ‘I went to the shop,’ Anders explained, ‘and the people in the queue were all full of gossip. They had seen you up on the castle roof, and Peter being taken away.’
I looked at Gavin. ‘You knew, didn’t you?’
He nodded. ‘Almost from the start. Ignoring the witch trappings, the people to look at were the victim’s family, so he was right in the frame, and on the spot too. The old lady mentioned dogs, and there he was, walking the dogs. When we found that her death had been accidental, I was certain, and the link with the ash from the museum clinched it. He’d caught her coming out, using his keys, and grabbed her, with tragic results. We could have left it there if it hadn’t been for Nate.’
Least said, shunest mended , was an old Shetland proverb. He couldn’t have told me, of course. I understood that. I’d been too close, working with Kate daily. I wouldn’t have been able to react naturally to Peter, and that would have put me in danger.
‘Will you get the proof you need?’
‘For Annette, no. He was wearing gloves, so there are no fingerprints, and no eyewitnesses now. But we have a simple chain of suggested events which hangs together plausibly, so the jury should take that into account.’ He gave me an apologetic look. ‘Have you spent much of the £100 Kate gave you?’
I shook my head, and fished in my pocket. ‘Evidence?’
‘Make-weight support.’ My envelope went into his sporran. ‘Come along tomorrow and Sergeant Peterson’ll give you a receipt. The bank’s working on tracing numbers, and it can be fingerprinted. It’s the strongest link we have to Annette.’
/> ‘What about Nate?’
‘We have a number of phone calls from Nate’s mobile to his house, all short, all roughly agreeing with the times Mrs Otway thought she’d had phone calls from the Microsoft scam people. Nate’s actor friends agree he could do a convincing Indian accent. Then there are two at times when she was out in her studio, and Otway was in.’
The status Peter had prized so much was gone now. Gavin used his surname curtly. ‘Otway’s admitted to two anonymous phone calls saying “I saw you” but says he knows nothing of what they were about. He would have known it was Nate – who else could it be? And so he went up to see him, the next time he took the dogs out. He knew about the mother’s illness, he knew their father was away. If he went late enough, Nate would answer the door. He’s got a firearms certificate, and a .22 rifle. My guess is that he took his gun with him, pressed it against Nate’s side, and said he’d shoot him if he didn’t come with him.’
I’d forgotten Peter’s rabbit shooting. ‘And Nate didn’t dare risk arguing.’
‘Otway took him down to the skip. Bullets are traceable, and Otway knew that. He hit him over the head with some improvised sandbag, like a sock filled with sand. We found grains of sand in his jacket pocket – harder for Otway’s lawyer to explain than the sand in Nate’s hair, which could have come from the beach.’ His mouth curved in a grim smile. ‘We also found a sock at low tide, at the distance of a good throw from the car park. It had builders’ sand inside, held in by a knot, and it hadn’t been there long. It’s Marks and Sparks, black, sold by the thousand, but it just happens to be the sort that Otway wears. He hit Nate with it, then threw it as far as he could. He tied Nate with the old rope from the skip, accessible to anyone here, threw him over onto the beach, and left him there to drown.’
A Handful of Ash Page 28