‘Yes,’ said Sergeant Wilson. ‘When you’ve been at this as long as I have, you’d be surprised what makes sense.’ He read over what he’d written, then shared a look with the PC. ‘Surprised you haven’t mentioned the wife,’ he said. ‘Kim.’
‘He abused her. Did she tell you?’
‘Not deliberately. But it comes off her.’ He looked over at the PC for corroboration and nodded when it came.
‘Well, he really did,’ I said. ‘He gaslighted her about that stupid nightie for one thing. He hung it in her wardrobe and then he went mental and shouted at her, asking where it came from. She was really frightened of him.’
‘Anything physical?’ he said.
‘Does shoving count? He shoved her over on the ground as soon as they got out the car on Friday. I saw it. She fell over hard enough to graze her hands.’
‘Shoving counts,’ Wilson said. ‘Of course, it depends if we can get her to give a statement.’
I thought about the little speck of gravel in my trouser pocket. I could prove that Sasha knocked Kim about. Kim would be a fool to admit to it while the question of a motive for his murder was in the air. ‘But even if she wanted to string him up,’ I said, ‘she couldn’t. He’s a great big guy and she’s normal-sized. Anyway, why would she harm Jennifer? That makes no sense. Ignore me.’
‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I’m not going to arrest Mrs Mowbray because you saw her getting shoved.’
‘Good,’ I said. ‘Because this is nothing to do with her. It’s all from their childhood. Secrets and old leftover hurt. It’s hard to explain.’
‘Any joy?’ He nodded at my phone.
‘I can’t find it,’ I said. ‘I must have deleted it.’
‘You didn’t need to do that, Ms Weaver. There’s no need to worry about handing over evidence.’
‘What?’ I said. ‘You think I sat here and deleted it right now? Under your nose?’
‘Has anyone else been near your phone?’
It was one of those moments when you’re suddenly peering over the edge of a high cliff. I had felt it before. When I saw my boyfriend’s phone left out of his sight and so busy downloading something that it hadn’t snapped back behind his password, secret from me, like it usually did after ninety seconds. I could have walked away from the edge then, like I could right now.
That time, I jumped. I pulled up his emails, then his texts, then his photos. What I saw – as I plummeted down – was Rebecca in his inbox, and Bex in his shortcuts, and photos of the same grinning, freckled, wholesome redhead in his photos, who looked as if the name Becky had been invented for her.
I was right on the crumbling edge again now, grit and gravel spraying out from under my feet and spinning away down the cliff, out of sight. This time, I stepped back. There was an explanation for the photo being gone, but I closed my mind to it.
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘Just one of those things.’
‘Well, that’s all been very helpful,’ said Wilson, dismissing me. ‘Unless there’s anything else?’
‘I’ve got a photo of the cake I made.’ I enlarged it and showed him. ‘That freaked him out for some reason.’
‘“There’s no love like your love,”’ Wilson said. ‘From the song?’
I shrugged. ‘That’s what was ordered.’
‘Anything else?’
I pretended to think about it. The one thing I hadn’t told him was that I’d taken the time, after seeing Sasha, to clean my kitchen. I couldn’t say it because it made no sense. I was telling myself the times in Kim’s evidence wouldn’t match mine. Then I’d come clean. Right now, I couldn’t tell him, because I didn’t understand it myself. It sounded crazy.
‘If you’d like to rejoin the others,’ he said, ‘I’ll be there soon.’
* * *
But it was gone six by the time he was ready to give his summary. The PCs were still searching the house and it was unnerving to hear the faint sounds of doors and drawers. It was hard to keep in mind who it was, when the thought kept washing over me of Sasha’s ghost, Jennifer’s too, rummaging and rattling.
‘A box up the chimney,’ Sergeant Wilson said. He was standing in front of the fireplace in the dining room, all of us ranged around the table with coffee cups and brandy glasses and the remains of scratch meals. ‘A mysterious hamper. A nightgown hanging in a wardrobe. A paper party hat, soaked in aftershave, spiked to the wall with a chef’s knife, a dead wild rabbit with its mouth stitched shut, and finally the drowned body of a female tied by one ankle to a weighted lobster creel and the hanged body of a male.’ He looked up from his notebook and gave us all a sharp, clear look, before going on. ‘The box seen by all present except Mrs Kim Mowbray, and also by the absent Ms Jennifer Mowbray, but not by the absent Mr Sasha Mowbray. The nightgown seen initially by Ms Weaver, then by Mr and Mrs Mowbray, then by all present and by Ms Mowbray too. The party hat, again Ms Weaver saw it first and then everyone saw it. The rabbit was seen by all. That about right?’
I had lost track among the counts of ‘Mr’s and ‘Ms’s but the rest of them murmured.
‘And that’s everything?’ the sergeant said. ‘Sounds like you all enjoy a wee joke.’ It might have seemed friendly if you didn’t know him but I could hear the scorn in his voice. I felt it too. There was nothing funny about any of it. It was meanness.
Except I couldn’t understand how the box was even mean. Or the nightie either, come to that. The rabbit was horrific and the party hat was creepy as hell, but most of it was just daft.
‘And now we come to the corpses,’ Wilson said, turning over another page. ‘Mrs Mowbray and Ms Weaver both saw the body of Ms Mowbray on the beach down at Knockbreak Bay as the tide was going out. You watched it for approximately twenty minutes and then walked up to it and made sure she was deceased. Her eyes were open and her mouth was stopped by a stone of some kind. You returned to the house to raise the alarm and that’s when you, Ms Weaver,’ he turned and gave me a neutral look, ‘that’s when you entered the staff shower room on the ground floor and saw the body of Mr Sasha Mowbray hanging by the neck, again with his mouth stopped up by some dark object, possibly similar to the stone seen in the mouth of Ms Mowbray.’
He paused, looking at me. I nodded.
‘But as I understand it no one else saw this second body.’ A few of them shook their heads but none so much as muttered. Rosalie looked as if she might faint. Her face was chalk white, except for dark circles under her eyes, and her hands trembled in her lap. ‘After leaving the shower room, Ms Weaver, you went first to the kitchen. Then up the back stairs. You passed through to the main corridor and met Mrs Mowbray.’
I stared at Kim. What had she been doing for all that lost time?
‘Ms Weaver and Mrs Mowbray went one after the other into Mr Ramsay Buchanan’s room,’ Wilson said. ‘While Ms Weaver was still in there, Mrs Mowbray entered Mr and Mrs Paul Buchanan’s room. Ms Weaver, Mrs Mowbray and Mrs Buchanan met on the landing again. It was then that Ms Weaver told the assembled individuals about the hanged man in the shower room. Mrs Mowbray went to see and found no such thing.
‘And, most unfortunately for us, there are no photographs of any of the items or either of the bodies,’ Wilson said, ‘on account of how your phones and computers were missing in an agreed “offline amnesty” from Friday night to this morning, when they reappeared.’
‘Are you deliberately trying to make it sound crazy?’ said Ramsay.
‘Just stating the facts,’ he said. ‘Although there’s one thing that puzzles me.’ I felt the room grow still, each of us sitting up a little straighter, waiting. ‘Mrs Mowbray woke to find a note on her pillow – a note since mislaid, she tells me – saying, “Come to the beach.” Mrs Mowbray said she called for help while ascending the path from the beach after seeing Ms Mowbray’s body for the first time. Only Ms Weaver heard her and responded. Right?’ He looked at Ramsay, then at Paul, and raised his eyebrows. ‘You two, and you, Mrs Buchanan – asleep in the front bedrooms �
�� did not hear Mrs Mowbray raising the alarm? And when Mrs Mowbray came into your room’ – he looked over at where Buck sat beside Peach, holding her hand – ‘and told you that Jennifer was dead and Sasha was still missing, you went back to sleep. As did you, Mr and Mrs Buchanan, and Mr Ramsay Buchanan, who also ignored Ms Weaver’s message that Mr Mowbray had hanged himself. Isn’t that right, sir?’
It sounded, coming out of his mouth, absolutely insane. The morning had been so odd – so stuffed with horrors and so half asleep and still drunk, so spaced-out and unreal – that I hadn’t given a moment’s thought to it. But now, hearing it again, at the end of the long grey afternoon, it was ludicrous.
‘Right, then,’ the steady voice began again. ‘So where were we? The time between Ms Weaver leaving the shower room and returning, accompanied by two other people, was a matter of what?’
Forty minutes, I thought. I looked at Kim again.
‘Five minutes?’ Wilson said. ‘Ten? Ms Weaver was in the back premises or on the upstairs corridor, within earshot of any movement in the shower room, except for a few minutes when she was in Mr Ramsay Buchanan’s room attempting to rouse him.’
Buck was frowning. ‘So where did he go?’ he said. The sergeant didn’t answer, but he nodded in appreciation of the question. Ramsay was frowning too now. Paul had eyes only for his wife. He was holding her hand and watching her as her closed lids fluttered.
Kim made an odd strangled sound. ‘I’m sorry, Donna,’ she said. ‘I’ve got to tell him. I had a shower, Sergeant Wilson. When we came back from the beach. I was just so out of it. And I had a long hot shower before I told anyone anything. I didn’t tell you before now because it sounds so callous.’
‘Don’t be hard on yourself, Kim,’ Rosalie said. ‘It can’t have been that long if you met Donna in the corridor.’
‘I did the dishes,’ I said. ‘Speaking of callous. I’m sorry. I don’t know why I did them, but I did them.’ I glanced at Wilson. ‘You don’t seem surprised.’
‘I’m not,’ he told me. ‘I’m a wee bit surprised, if I’m honest, that no one else has twigged.’
‘Twigged,’ Kim repeated. It wasn’t a question.
‘The milky eyes were a clue,’ Wilson said. I saw Kim shiver. ‘But the stones in the mouth are the clincher.’
‘What are you talking about?’ said Rosalie. I was watching Ramsay and I thought I could see the first glimmers of understanding beginning to flicker on his face.
‘It’s hard to hold your face completely immobile if it’s relaxed,’ Wilson said. ‘But if you’ve got something in your mouth to bite down on, you can keep most of the main facial muscles tense. Frozen. Mandible muscles anyway. It doesn’t help with the eyelids, mind you.’
I was still watching Ramsay and I saw the penny drop. He opened his eyes wide and swallowed. It took me a moment longer and Rosalie a little longer still. It was Buck who spoke.
‘They weren’t dead,’ he said. ‘Sasha and Jennifer aren’t dead?’
‘But we saw her,’ Kim said. ‘Tell them, Donna. We looked right into her dead face.’ She stared at me. She saw my certainty start to crack and the cracks spread to her.
‘Her eyes wouldn’t be milky if she drowned,’ said the sergeant. ‘Contact lenses.’
‘She wasn’t dead?’ I said. ‘God almighty, she must have been shitting bricks when we turned her over. We were supposed to see her from a distance, then run away and call the police, right? But we sat there on the dunes and waited for the water to go down and then we walked over and took a close look.’
‘Oh, no, I think you were always supposed to go close,’ said Wilson. ‘To look into her eyes. Or she wouldn’t have bothered with contact lenses at all.’
‘She’s lucky she didn’t die!’ said Kim. ‘In all that cold water for all that time. What a stupid thing to do.’
‘So … you’re serious?’ said Rosalie. Tears were pouring out of her. ‘He’s not dead?’
‘Mr Mowbray no doubt had a harness on.’
‘Is that what your colleagues are looking for?’ Paul said.
‘No. I assume Mr Mowbray took it away with him when he left,’ said Wilson. ‘Well, he’d have been wearing it under his clothes, so…’
‘So what are they looking for?’ said Peach.
‘Drugs,’ Wilson said. ‘I reckoned the kind of person who would pull this might think it was funny to get you all into trouble once the coppers turned up. I reckoned whatever he slipped you last night to knock you out would probably be stashed away in someone’s toilet bag.’
‘I’ll kill him,’ said Rosalie. ‘I will kill him with my bare hands for this. You’re seriously saying this is a giant piss-take? What if I’d phoned our mother?’
‘You won’t be able to kill him if he’s in jail,’ said Peach, grimly. ‘I can’t believe I didn’t see it. We were doped! We were absolutely out of our trees and then we slept through everything.’
‘That’s why no one woke up when I was screaming in the garden this morning?’ Kim said.
‘I’ve never blacked out in my life,’ said Buck. ‘But last’s night’s a blank.’
‘I had dreams last night like nothing I’ve ever dreamed before,’ Ramsay said. ‘I dreamed I was up on the roof. And the thing is, I’ve got a cut on my foot that I’m having a bit of trouble explaining.’
The sergeant was letting us speak. He looked like he was enjoying it. Maybe he was enjoying not having a double murder to solve.
‘Okay, okay,’ Peach said. ‘Let me think. The combination of sleepwalking, not waking when disturbed and possible hallucinations … that doesn’t sound legal. It’s not just a spot of Night Nurse.’
‘Even if it was f— Night Nurse,’ said Buck, ‘it’s illegal to give it to us, right? Without us knowing?’
‘Except if you were all drinking too,’ said Wilson. ‘It might be hard to argue that you didn’t take drugs for a laugh. Bit of coke, couple of mollys. And then downers at the end of the night.’
‘We’re not your usual clientele, Sergeant,’ Rosalie said. ‘I’m a lawyer.’ Wilson gave her a hell of a look and she blushed.
‘But why?’ said Kim. ‘Why, for God’s sake? Why not just have a nice weekend instead of creeping everyone out and buggering off?’
‘Oh, my God,’ said Peach. ‘And leaving one last little joke behind him, actually.’ She was pointing at the mantelpiece. We all looked over and we all saw it at the same time.
I had listed those five things half a dozen times for the sergeant, sitting in the study with him and the PC listening. And I had sat while he listed them again for us all together. The hamper, the box, the nightie, the hat and the rabbit. We had all forgotten that there were six. We’d forgotten the picture.
‘Jesus Christ,’ said Paul. He stood up and went over. I couldn’t have stood if someone had put a gun to my back. My legs were boneless lumps of putty. ‘Jesus H. Christ. They’ve gone.’
And they had. The photo of the party was a strange composition now. Paul and Ramsay stood oddly far apart, no Jennifer between them. And Peach and Buck flanked an empty fireplace. The little table of presents was there but Sasha had vanished.
‘Sergeant Wilson,’ said Rosalie. ‘Do you need to carry on with this? If we’re happy to leave it, can we leave it?’
‘Well, there’s the rabbit,’ he said. ‘But since the body’s gone there’s no way of telling if it was killed or if it died of natural causes. The carry-on in the wee back room there and down at the beach are not crimes.’
‘Giving us drugs is,’ said Peach.
‘But, like I said,’ Wilson was looking at the floor, ‘it would be pretty hard to make it stick. All of you friends and family and all of you drinking as well. If any of you have ever been cautioned for possession – or worse – it would be even harder. I’m averting my gaze, by the way, so I don’t catch anyone’s eye. But it would be your word against his and you’ve all got cause to hold a grudge after the pranks.’ He looked up again. ‘And you’d ha
ve to come with me now to the hospital and have blood taken. We can do that, of course. But if I were you, I’d let it go.’
‘What about me?’ I said. ‘I’m not a friend or family.’
‘But you’re the only one besides me who woke up,’ Kim said. ‘Maybe you didn’t take the stuff. Or not as much. What did we eat less of than the rest? You and me.’
‘Honestly, Donna?’ Wilson said. ‘I’d let it go.’
I took no persuading. I didn’t want The Breakers mentioned in a police report on a drug crime.
‘Right,’ said Rosalie. ‘Good.’ She stood up and gave Wilson a bright smile. ‘We’ll let you get back to your family, then, Sergeant. Sunday evening after all.’
‘I won’t say no to that,’ he said. ‘Mrs Mowbray, you’ve got my card. If anything else occurs.’
‘They’re not dead?’ Kim said. I was glad. I needed one more reassurance too.
‘They’re not dead. Trust me. I’ve phoned Gartcosh. We’ve got both indexes flagged for the ANPR and—’
‘What does that mean?’ said Kim. ‘What does any of that mean?’
‘They’re looking for Sasha and Jennifer’s licence plates on the national data base,’ said Ramsay. He shrugged in response to Sergeant Wilson’s sharp look. ‘Once a nerd.’
‘It shouldn’t be long before we’ve got news for you.’ Wilson gave Kim a warm smile and left. Paul followed him to the door, made sure it was closed, then turned back to face the rest of us.
‘I’m not saying he’s wrong. Wilson. But we can’t leave it, can we?’
‘No,’ said Ramsay. ‘It’s time to unlock the box.’
‘Unstitch our lips,’ said Peach.
‘Time to break our solemn promise,’ said Rosalie. ‘And bring someone back from the grave.’
Chapter 18
1991
This time she’s floating. She looks like a star from the way her four white limbs and the long streak of her pale hair are spread out as she lies, quite still, on the surface of the high-tide calm. I shrug out of my pyjama bottoms and wade in, pulling my T-shirt down and tucking it into my knickers as if it can protect me from the sharp morning cold of the water. I feel the ache of it deep inside me, as the waves wash up my body.
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