Trick of the Dark

by McDermid, Val

  'I know this is maybe going to sound like a strange question. But apart from the phone call, was there anything about what happened that day that seemed unusual to you?'

  Eric frowned and munched another biscuit while he thought about it. Calum chewed on a fingernail. 'No,' Eric said at last. 'They were just really, really unlucky.'

  'Except one thing was lucky,' Calum said.

  'What do you mean?' Eric said. 'It was a perfect storm. All the crap came at them together. I don't see how you can say they got lucky.'

  'I didn't say that. I said one thing was lucky.'

  Charlie decided it was time to step in. 'What was that, Calum?'

  'It was lucky the knife wasn't in the backpack, wasn't it?'

  5

  Sunday

  Sunday morning was infinitely better than the one before. Thanks to some deft footwork, Charlie had avoided Lisa until last thing in the evening. Maria had returned to the hotel at lunchtime, bubbling with delight at the beauty of the landscape. Meanwhile, Charlie had managed to book a table for dinner at another hotel whose restaurant was said to be in the top twenty in Scotland. After lunch, they went for a walk up Glen Brittle, following in the footsteps of Jay and Kathy ten years before. Even though they barely climbed a few hundred feet, they had a sense of the challenge and the grandeur of the Cuillin ridge. 'I can see how people want to come back again and again,' Maria said. 'Places like this, they get under your skin.'

  'We'll come back another time,' Charlie promised. 'When all this is behind us and I'm practising again. We'll rent a cottage and walk in the mountains and eat fabulous meals and sleep like babies.'

  Maria laughed. 'And they say romance is dead. I was thinking we could make mad passionate love in front of a roaring fire.'

  Charlie put an arm round her and hugged her. 'That too.' She wished she could have spoken without ambivalence, but until she could resolve her feelings for the two women in her life, Charlie would have to resign herself to that.

  When they got back to their hotel room, Charlie sprawled on the chaise longue and revealed her plans for the evening. 'It's quite near so we don't have to set off for an hour or so.'

  'We could go down to the bar for a drink.'

  Again, that ambivalence. Charlie longed to see Lisa, but the stress of being in the same room with her and Maria was impossible to negotiate with equanimity. The bar for a drink was the last thing she wanted, with the prospect of Lisa and Nadia returning at any minute. 'No, I'll be driving and I want to save myself for some really good wine with the meal. Besides…' Charlie stretched to reach her backpack. 'For some reason, I've been avoiding this. But I think I've got to the point where I have to deal with it.' She pulled a book from her bag and waggled it at Maria. 'Unrepentant, by Jay Macallan Stewart.'

  Maria pulled off her sweater and began to undo her trousers. 'I know why you've been avoiding it,' she said.

  'Why? And by the way, I meant it. I need to read, Maria. And you're distracting me.'

  Maria poked her tongue out at Charlie. 'This is not for your benefit. If you're going to read, I'm going to soak my weary muscles in the bath. The reason you've not buckled down to Jay's book is very simple.'

  'I thought I was the psychiatrist round here? What's the reason?'

  Maria slipped out of her trousers. 'You're scared you'll like her.'

  'You think?'

  'I do. Because if she charms you with her misery memoir, you're going to struggle to carry out Corinna's mission to split up her and Magda. You know it's true.'

  Charlie, who hadn't really considered why she was finding lots of excuses not to read Jay's book, couldn't fault Maria's reasoning. It was reassuring to be known so well. 'You could be right,' she said.

  By the time Maria emerged from the bathroom, Charlie was midway through Jay's early years, notable for the quantity of drugs that seemed to have flowed through the bodies of her mother and a succession of hopeless boyfriends. It was a disturbing narrative of a downward spiral seen through the uncomprehending eyes of a child. Jay's mother Jenna had started off as a nice middle-class girl who had been carried away by the spirit of the sixties. The Isle of Wight festival in 1968 had changed the path of her life, swinging her out of the gravitational field of Home Counties suburbia into the orbit of musicians, artists and writers.

  It had probably been quite cool to begin with, Charlie thought. But the drugs became more important to Jenna than anything else, and gradually, the quality of her company diminished. The rock stars and published poets and exhibited artists had moved onwards and upwards and she'd fluttered downwards. By the time Jay had been born in 1974, Jenna had been living in a squat and working on a stall in the fledgling Camden Market.

  They'd moved from place to place, from city to country and back again. From the few photos, it was clear that Jenna had been a beauty, even ravaged by the drugs. Jay's childhood milestones had been the succession of different men and different places to live. She'd never been enrolled in school but nobody ever came looking for her because Jenna had never registered her birth. Jay recounted one conversation she'd overheard in which the latest boyfriend had been berating Jenna because she didn't get child benefit like the other mothers in the caravan of travellers they were with at that point. 'That's a small price to pay for freedom,' Jenna had said. 'My child can float free in the world. She has no shackles to the state.'

  Because nothing was ever constant, because drugs are unpredictable, because Jenna would do almost anything for the next fix, Jay saw more than any child should. She knew about going to bed hungry. She knew about watching her mother being beaten by men. She knew about women being forced into sexual activity they had not consented to. And somehow, in the middle of all that, she taught herself to read. She learned not just how to survive but also how to protect herself. She knew kids who were sexually abused. She watched the predators single them out. And somehow, Jay learned how not to be the one who was chosen.

  Charlie found it all too credible. There were moments where her professional experience kicked in and she understood that Jay was ascribing to herself judgements that could only have been made in hindsight. Like claiming to have recognised at the age of only seven that what she had was not freedom but a prison of ignorance.

  I spied on other children. Sometimes it was easier than others. We lived for a while in a caravan on the edge of a wood somewhere in Somerset. Jenna's boyfriend was called Barry and he worked sometimes in the pub in a village nearby. I followed him one evening when he was walking through the wood to work so I learned the way to the village. Because the wood came right up to the edge of the houses, spying was easy.

  Their lives were obviously very different from mine. They wore the same clothes every day to go to school. I couldn't understand that. Sometimes I wore the same clothes for a few days at a time, but not every single day. And other kids called me names for it.

  Whenever these children came home, someone gave them a drink and something nice to eat. They didn't have to scavenge or settle for whatever they could find. And they looked like they just took it for granted, as if there was no question about that being how it should be.

  They got to sit and watch TV by themselves, which meant they got to choose what they wanted to see. Sometimes there were two or more rooms with TVs in. I was used to having to put up with whatever Jenna and the boyfriend wanted to watch. And sometimes their choices were incomprehensible to me. Especially the porn, which none of the kids I spied on ever watched.

  I should remind readers that, back in the seventies, porn was a very different experience. For a start, adults had pubic hair. You never really saw an erect penis either. There was a lot of soft focus, terrible muzak and acting that even I recognised was desperately bad. Compared to what you can see on terrestrial TV now, never mind the internet, it was pretty innocuous. Still, I probably shouldn't have been watching it.

  It was fascinating stuff, Charlie thought. Literally fascinating. You couldn't stop reading because you wanted to kno
w where Jay was going to take you. She had the knack of pinning her extraordinary experiences to the stuff of ordinary life. There were enough of these tangents to make the reader feel that this peculiar life could almost have happened to them. The counterpoint to that was the way she constantly contrasted her life with mainstream middle-class experience. It had the flavour of Craig Raine's famous poem about the Martian writing a letter home. The reader clearly understood that Jay had spent a lot of her early life trying to make sense of things that had no correspondence in her own world.

  'How is it?' Maria had asked.

  'I'm not sure whether I like her, but it's impossible not to admire her. The squalor and chaos of her early years make you want to weep for her. She didn't just survive, she's built a life that would have been unimaginable to her as a child. I can't wait to get on to the transformation.'

  'You mean when she went to Oxford?' Maria said, throwing her towel over a chair and strutting naked across the room to put on fresh clothes.

  'No. That's where it ends. I'm talking about before that. Her mother went from hapless junkie hippie to born-again Christian. And not just any old Christian. She plunged head first into one of the more repressive sects of evangelicals. Clearly someone who was hopelessly addicted to addiction. Heroin or Jesus, didn't seem to matter much.'

  'Woo-hoo. That must have been some transition. If you want, I'll do the lion's share of the drive tomorrow, then you can carry on reading.'

  'I could read it aloud if you like,' Charlie offered, marking her place with a hotel postcard and putting the book away. Maria did an impression of Munch's The Scream. 'OK, I was only joking. You can have Joan Osborne and Patty Griffin all the way to Fort William.'

  The restaurant had lived up to its online reviews. They both chose a stew of local seafood to start with and exclaimed over its richness and the depth of its flavours. Venison followed with spiced beetroot and lemon thyme mash. When she tasted the meat, Charlie actually groaned aloud. They finished with cheese and Maria kept making small moaning noises as she savoured each morsel. 'I wish I was still hungry so I could eat it all over again,' Charlie said.

  They'd planned to go straight to their room when they returned to the hotel but that was when Charlie's luck ran out again. As they walked in the door, Lisa emerged from the ladies' toilets. A radiant smile lit up her face. 'How lovely to see you both. We thought we'd missed you. We're in the bar. Come and have a drink?'

  Charlie said, 'No, thanks,' as Maria said, 'That sounds nice.' They looked at each other and laughed.

  'Seven years and we're still two minds with but a single thought,' Maria joked.

  'I'm really tired,' Charlie said. 'I just want to go horizontal. Sorry.'

  'That's OK,' Maria said. 'I want a brandy, though. Why don't you go on up and I'll get myself a drink and join you?'

  Charlie, with visions of Lisa snagging Maria and drawing her into late-night conversation, said, 'It's OK, I'll wait for you, we can go up together.'

  'I'll keep you company while Maria's getting served,' Lisa said quickly.

  'What about Nadia? Won't she be wondering where you are?'

  'I'll tell her,' Maria said over her shoulder as she headed for the bar.

  'You look delicious this evening,' Lisa said. 'Good enough to eat.'

  'Don't,' Charlie sighed. 'I feel like I'm on a rollercoaster. I can't cope with having both of you under one roof.'

  'I'm sorry. I thought you might enjoy the frisson of knowing I was near.' Lisa looked contrite. 'I see now I misjudged things. But I'm not sorry that I've had the chance to see you.'

  Charlie gave her a beseeching look. 'Please. I can't do this now.'

  Lisa gave Charlie a sad-eyed look, the kind of up-and-under that Princess Diana always used to such effect. 'I understand. Believe me, I know how hard it is to resist.' She flashed a smile. 'So how did your pursuit of the mountain rescue team go? Did you manage to uncover new evidence that eluded the police and the coroner all those years ago?'

  Charlie made a wry face. 'Much safer ground. Actually, they don't have coroners in Scotland. And as it happens, I did find out one or two things that seem suggestive.'

  'Really?' Lisa said, with the appearance of genuine interest. 'You found the smoking gun?'

  'If I was Sherlock Holmes and you were Watson, I would say something like, "There was the curious incident of the phone call to the rescue services from the hotel." And you would say, "What about the phone call to the rescue services from the hotel?" and I would say, "There was no phone call to the rescue services from the hotel."'

  Now Lisa looked bemused. 'I'm sorry, you've lost me.'

  'There was something odd about the phone call that set off the rescue alert for Jay and Kathy. The source wasn't what it purported to be.'

  Lisa's mouth quirked in dismissal. 'What's that supposed to mean?'

  'I don't know. Then there's the convenient matter of the knife.'

  'Do you have to be so cryptic?'

  Charlie laughed. 'Yes, I do have to be so cryptic because it's fun. But then, you know that. You are the queen of cryptic. The knife is significant because when Jay dropped her backpack, she lost every single piece of equipment that might be useful, including her sat-phone. All except her knife, which luckily was in her jacket pocket.'

  Lisa laughed and wagged a finger at Charlie. 'Talk about grasping at straws. All sorts of people carry a Swiss Army knife or something similar in their pocket when they go out walking. It's hardly suspicious.'

  'I never said it was suspicious. I said it was suggestive. It's what you would do if you were planning to stage an accident.'

  Lisa shook her head indulgently. 'I'm beginning to wonder if playing detective has loosened you from your moorings.'

  Charlie gave a sad little smile. 'You were the one who did that, Lisa.'

  Lisa put a hand on her arm. 'And you know that's not a one-way street, Charlie. You know that.' Her voice was soft and seductive and in spite of her determination to stay cool, Charlie's flesh tingled. What saved her was the sight of Maria emerging from the bar with a crystal brandy bowl in her hand. Lisa let her hand fall away without any fuss and stepped back.

  'I told Nadia you were just coming,' Maria said, slipping her free arm through Charlie's and steering her towards the lift. 'Good night, Lisa.'

  As the lift doors closed, Maria giggled. 'Nadia's got a face like thunder. She's not keen on being left sitting alone in a busy bar, not when she thinks she's the trophy girlfriend.'

  'She really thinks that?' Charlie couldn't stifle a laugh.

  'I reckon so. Oh, what it is to be young and full of illusions. She'd better watch her step, that one.'

  'Nadia? Why?'

  'That Lisa. She's not somebody you'd want to mess with.'

  Clever Maria, Charlie thought. Maybe we should do a job swap. 'Well, chances are we'll never have to see them again.'

  And so the evening had ended. They'd fallen into bed, still too full for anything but sleep. Waking with a clear head, the prospect of finishing Jay's book ahead of her, Charlie finally began to see how things might be made to come together.

  6

  They were on the road by ten. As if to make the leaving easier, the weather had changed. Mist and rain covered the landscape in a grey veil, turning the Cuillins into a vague looming presence in the distance. 'Nick's in court tomorrow. I think I should go down to London and talk to him,' Charlie said gloomily as they crossed the ocean back to the mainland. 'We need to make a decision about how much further we can pursue this. And what we do with our pitiful findings. Not a lot, I suspect.'

  'It's not all been wasted,' Maria said. 'You've re-established contact with Corinna and Magda. And we've had a glorious weekend in Skye.' She took a hand off the wheel to pat Charlie's thigh. 'And it's taken your mind off the other shit. This has been the first time in a while when you seem to have let go of what's hanging over you.'

  'Maybe I should start offering it as an alternative therapy,' Charlie said drily. '
Immerse yourself in a wild-goose chase. Perfect for taking your mind off what's oppressing you. Now, put your foot down and drive. I'm going to immerse myself even deeper.' She pulled Unrepentant from her jacket pocket and found her place.

  Afterwards, when I asked my mother why we'd gone to see Blair Andreson in the big tent at Sunderland, the only possible answer was the one she always gave: because God called us. That's probably as far from the truth as it's possible to get.

  By the time the American evangelist Blair Andreson launched his 1984 crusade to the UK, our lives had dipped to an all-time low. We were living in a squalid caravan encampment on the outskirts of one of the big towns in Teesside. I'm not even sure which one. The police and the local residents waged a constant war of attrition against us. I can't say I blame them. I'd probably do the same myself. We were not a romantic New Age camp of people who believed in beautiful things. We were scum. My mother was selling sex to keep herself in drugs. I was running wild with a bunch of other kids, stealing food and money whenever I got the chance.

  We went to the conversion service at Andreson's big top with a couple of other women from the site. I suspect our intentions were criminal. They must have seen a way to make money out of the service, picking pockets or stealing collection plates. I don't know for sure because nobody confided in me. It was a cool afternoon in July but the tent was packed, the air heavy with the smell of too many bodies crammed together. My mother and I were sitting towards the back of the steeply banked seats, letting Andreson's hysterical rhetoric wash over us. At least, I thought that was what was going on. I was completely unmoved by the oratory. I'd far rather have had a lamb kebab than be washed in the blood of the lamb.