“I’ll phone Blacksmith’s and see if they can do sandwiches and sausage rolls after. I can do that from up here.”
“I’ve done it,” says Sarah.
“Sorry.”
“When are you coming back?”
“I’ll stay a day. Maybe two,” I say vaguely.
“You’ll make the funeral, then,” she says with a dry edge that isn’t like her. I nearly tell her not to be stupid but I suppose she has a right. A right to be angry.
“Shameena phoned you. I told her you were away. She said if you got in touch, to tell you to phone her.”
“Did you tell her about the funeral arrangements? Is she going to sing?”
“Yes. I’ve arranged with Father Riley for her to sing at the end of the service, like you asked. Before the coffin is taken out.”
Before the coffin is taken out. It could be any old corpse in a box we were talking about. But what else can we say?
“I’m going to see Father Riley tonight. Let him know.”
“Yeah, remind him she’s a Muslim singer.”
“Oh shut up, Becca.”
“Listen, Sarah?”
“What?”
There is a child having a tantrum outside the box. She keeps trying to sit on the pavement and her red-faced mother is hauling her up off the ground, trying to drag her along the street. I put one finger in my ear and try to choose my words carefully.
“I just want to say that I came to Inverness, well, because… you know we lived near here once and it just felt like coming closer to Da… it was spur of the moment.”
There is silence. I am not sure if Sarah is crying. She is probably thinking it is a journey we could have made together some time. After the funeral. I wait for her to speak but she says nothing.
“I’ll see you later, Sarah.”
“Okay,” she says and I hear her sniff. The receiver is halfway down when I hear her call.
“Becca?”
“Yeah?”
“Drive carefully.”
“Will do,” I say. I put the phone down with relief, shove open the door and breathe deeply.
CHAPTER TWO
The hottest June in years. An oddity. A freak of nature. The sun roasts me cruelly like a stuffed pig on a spit, skin sizzling like crackling. It finds every hidden corner, bores through my eyes to the very sockets; creeps, stealthy as an intruder, through the hair on the back of my neck, leaving angry red fingerprints on soft, white, skin. And the heat that isn’t absorbed into my body thuds like a dead weight onto dust-baked pavements, bounces back dully into a wall I am constantly walking into. There’s a dampness over the bridge of my nose, and in the pit of my arms, and down the length of my spine, and everywhere else is sucked dry, dry as roasted sawdust.
It’s a fifteen-minute stroll to cross the river and walk up through the town to the library. In this heat, even a short walk is draining. I am tired out with lack of sleep but also with hay fever. It feels like my body is using every scrap of energy to fight an intruder. One minute my eyes and my nose stream, like a tap turned on full; the next my defences slam shut, and the pipework round my body simply blocks. Nothing flows.
It’s a relief to finally find the library, hidden off the main street, tucked in a quiet square next to the bus station. Once through the swing doors, the quiet hits, refreshing as gentle rain. The serenity makes it feel cooler in here than it really is.
I get impatient with libraries normally. The worthy, preachy, po-faced silence of them. Sarah and I used to go to the library every week as kids and she loved it, tucking her feet under her in the bean bags laid out for kids, snuggling down happily in the cocoon of silence. It made me feel like I’d been buried alive. I snatched the books and left, taking them to the park in the summer, lying on the grass with my jacket under my head, a world at my feet and another in my hands. In the winter I’d run a bubble bath and lie for hours, turning the hot tap with my toes when the water cooled, until the water was up to my neck and the book pages had the water marks of a lapping tide.
But today, the silence seems like a hiding place. I walk through to the reference library, an enclosed, old-fashioned room tucked away at the back of the building, where all the back copies of the local papers are stored. The Highland Herald. The Inverness Focus. If I started school in Glasgow, and had my fifth birthday at Auntie Peggy’s shortly before that, we must have moved from Lochglas sometime during my fourth year, not long after Sarah was born. If I start there, and work my way back, I should find something.
There are hard copies of old newspapers, bound in leather, going right back to the nineteenth century, but the librarian says I have to view the ones I want on microfilm. The filing cabinet drawer slams shut as she takes out boxes of film and loads the first into the machine for me. I sit watching as each page is thrown up onto the sloped white desk, like an art easel, in front of me.
The world of twenty-five years ago is a curiosity. It is like standing on the outside and looking into the glass bubble of another world. I can hold it up to the light, examine the shape of it, and the colours of it, like a curio. But it must stay enclosed. I can knock on the window, but I cannot enter that world. Adverts for cars that look like East European imports now. Adverts for shop sales, for styles long gone: an old lady’s dress with floral print, the kind Peggy would wear; a chic winter coat with fur collar and cuffs, and a full skirt. It tugs some vague cord of recognition inside me and I look at it curiously… the fur collar, perhaps. Was that like the one Mother wore, the one that trapped her perfume in the collar?
Pages and pages of local weddings. I suppose Mother smiled like that, the day she married Da. Like the world, and everything in it, was hers. Did they make their promises without the shadow of disappointment looming over them, or did she know already? Did he? Her words ring out in my head. Words from her letter to Da. Doesn’t just a little part of you wonder about for ever?
The handle squeaks as I turn the film faster and faster to try and get to more news pages, whirling past the inconsequential screeds of advertising hype, the listings and theatre reviews, until the text blurs into solid black columns as it spins. There are stories of local feuds and small businesses and cats stuck up trees. By April, I could tell that when the story of my mother’s murder hit the Highland Herald, it was going to hit in a big way. And it did.
Even though I am looking for it, it is still a shock. The text spins. Stop! My heart skips a beat. There she is, my mother, looking out laughingly from a picture on the front page of the paper. I wipe my clammy hands down the sides of my jeans.
It is front page, but a small story to start with. Small town, small-town view. Friday July 7th.
LOCHGLAS ELDER’S DAUGHTER MISSING.
The daughter of a well-known local businessman and Free Church Elder, Donald MacKenzie, has gone missing from her secluded Lochglas home. Kathleen Connaghan, who gave birth to her second child just six weeks ago, has not been seen for two days, after leaving her eldest child, Rebecca (4), at play group. Police confirmed the missing woman’s car was found abandoned on the outskirts of Inverness…
The stories went on for months, exploding into huge headlines, shrinking into side columns as the story ebbed and flowed.
July 14th: WHERE IS KATHLEEN?
July 21st: KATHLEEN COME HOME, PLEADS HUSBAND
As the weeks went by there was speculation of every kind. Kathleen Connaghan was suffering from post-natal depression. Kathleen Connaghan was in debt. Kathleen Connaghan had stolen money from her father’s shop and disappeared abroad with a new lover.
By July 28th, in the absence of juicy new angles, it was a struggle to keep the story afloat. There was a small update on an inside page but on August 7th, the story was back with a bang. KATHLEEN CAUGHT IN LOVE TRIANGLE. Twenty years had made a difference to newspaper coverage. It seemed gentler than today’s tabloids. More formal, more restrained. But even then they liked a good sex scandal.
My eyes scoured down the story.
Missing Lochglas wo
man Kathleen Connaghan was having a long-running affair with local businessman James Cory and was due to meet him on the day she disappeared, her closest friend has revealed. Housewife Jackie Sandford claims the thirty-two-year-old married mother of two had secret lunchtime liaisons with the businessman who owns Inverness firm Cory Construction.
“Kathleen was ready to leave Joe for James Cory,” Mrs Sandford confirmed yesterday. “She was besotted with him. The day she disappeared she told me she was meeting him to try and sort out their future.”
Mrs Sandford, who also lives in Lochglas, says she’s speaking out because she now fears her missing friend is dead. “Kathleen wouldn’t just leave her children like this. She wouldn’t stay away this long without getting in touch. I didn’t want to say anything at first but now I am frightened we are never going to see her again. Somebody knows where she is. They’ve got to do as I am doing and speak out. We have to find out what happened to Kathleen.”
In a bizarre twist, it emerged that Mrs Connaghan’s husband, Joseph, an accountant with Inverness firm David Carruthers and Co., handles Cory Construction’s accounts. David Carruthers and James Cory, both 35, are known to have been close friends since school days, and played together as teenagers in local band, Tin Whistle. Both are members of Inverness Golf Club.
However, Mrs Sandford says her friend did not meet James Cory as a consequence of her husband’s job. They met through her father, Donald MacKenzie, who owns MacKenzie’s Outfitters in Church Street, Inverness.
“Donald and his wife Marion had a dinner party at their house about a year ago and that’s how James and Kathleen met,” says Mrs Sandford. “Joseph was actually there at their first meeting.”
The affair began shortly after. Mrs Sandford claims the missing woman had tried to end it after a few months, but Mr Cory continued to pursue her. “Kathleen told me that James Cory used to phone David Carruthers and ask him to send Joe to out-of-town firms when he wanted to see Kathleen,” says Mrs Sandford.
The two lovers would meet for lunch or dinner, sometimes even at the Connaghans’ Lochglas home. “James would bring Kathleen gifts, including bottles of vintage champagne. At the start she was careful to hide everything from Joe but she got careless. She was flattered by all the attention. She did love Joe, but she couldn’t resist the glamour and excitement that James offered her.”
Recently, Mrs Connaghan told her close friend that she wanted to leave her husband of nine years and set up home with Mr Cory. “I told her she was crazy. James hadn’t even told his wife Anna about her. I think she was putting pressure on him to tell Anna, but James was never going to rock the boat and leave her for Kathleen. But Kathleen just couldn’t see it. I tried to tell her, but when it came to James she was blind.”
Mrs Sandford even reveals that Mrs Connaghan’s three-week-old baby was not her husband’s. “Kathleen and Joe’s marriage was in serious trouble after the affair started because Joe guessed almost right away and Kathleen moved into the children’s room. Then she got pregnant after three months of seeing James. Kathleen told me that Joe broke down in tears when he heard about the pregnancy but said if she put the affair behind her, he was willing to start again and be a family. Joe was fourteen years older than Kathleen and worshipped the ground she walked on. I know Kathleen felt really guilty and promised she would end it, but two months later she was back seeing James.”
When contacted by the Highland Herald, James Cory refused to confirm the affair or the fact that he was due to meet the vivacious brunette the day she disappeared. “I am sorry, I can’t make any comment,” he said yesterday at the Inverness office of Cory Construction. Joseph Connaghan also declined to comment. Police enquiries continue.
It was only when I finished reading that I realised I had been holding my breath. I exhaled deeply and wiped a tear away. I was crying for Da, and crying for Sarah, and crying for me, and I suppose I was crying for Mother too. Poor, silly, deluded Mother. But it was Sarah that made my heart sore right now. My sister. Except she wasn’t. She was my half-sister.
All those years. All those years of lies. And yet I couldn’t blame Da for not telling her she wasn’t his. How could I blame him?
Jackie Sandford’s story started a frenzy. The gloves were off and endless stories followed. Sordid details of Mother and Cory’s affair. Accounts of how they “made passionate love while her innocent young children slept upstairs”. Speculation from locals that she might have run off with a third man, that she was still alive. And then, in the August, other Cory mistresses came crawling out of the woodwork: KATHLEEN NOT THE FIRST, screamed the front page.
Two months after Mother went missing, there was another angle: NEW POLICE CHIEF APPOINTED TO KATHLEEN MYSTERY. In the absence of progress in the hunt for the murderer, and against a background of allegations about police incompetence, Chief Inspector Terry Simons had been appointed to lead the inquiry and give it a fresh impetus. I took out a small notebook from my bag and wrote his name down. But it was the story about the police questioning both Cory and Da that gave the papers the courage to cut right to the bone. KATHLEEN MURDER: THE HUSBAND OR THE LOVER?
Cory, according to the paper, was due to meet Kathleen at one o’clock that day. He left his office at ten to one. By this time, Cory was giving the papers quotes, admitting he did meet Mother but saying he left her at quarter to two, having arranged another tryst for the following afternoon. He denied Mother was putting pressure on him to leave his wife, Anna. In the newspaper picture, Anna looked like a Tory politician’s wife: attractive in an upper-crust kind of way. Neat blonde. Stiff permed curls. Pale and a bit bloodless. She circled his arm with both of hers like a human handcuff and smiled a cool, pallid smile that suggested Cory would pay for the rest of his life for her humiliation. FRESH START, said the headline. Not for Mother there wasn’t.
But where was her body? The papers didn’t say, of course. Not directly. But they made sure they mentioned Cory’s big project at the time of Mother’s disappearance. Made sure they mentioned his hands-on involvement in the early stages of the project, when the concrete was being poured into the foundations of the building. The implication was obvious. If Cory killed her, chances were that right now, Mother was lying under several tons of concrete in the foundations of a multi-storey car park.
Da’s work schedule for that week, the reports said, showed he was working alone the afternoon she died, driving to a project out of town. According to a spokesman for the company he was visiting, he arrived an hour late for his appointment. He could have detoured. He had time to kill her. They both had.
CHAPTER THREE
I don’t go looking for the church. I come out of the library and walk round and round the town in a daze until my feet are sore, ending up down by the river watching swans. Graceful, elegant swans who mate for life. I have walked by the building several times, a traditional stone-built church with a spire. Then I walk back and walk in. There are a handful of people waiting for confession before morning mass.
I sit in the confession queue, mechanically moving up a seat as each person in front of me disappears inside the confessional. I tell myself I don’t really intend going in. There is time to leave. I haven’t been to confession since I was fourteen.
But part of me wants to talk to a priest. The old Catholic part, that I thought was long buried, rises from the dead and tap dances inside my head. My turn next. I can skip out the side when I get to the first seat. Instead, I open the confessional door, close it, stand in the dark.
I can hear a newspaper rustle from behind the grille as I close the door. A slight movement behind the black curtain. Now there’s a thing. Does the priest only stop doing the crossword if you have an interesting enough confession?
“I’m not here for confession,” I say. There is a short silence, a rustle. I can hear a sniff, the kind of sniff when you are trying to breathe through a blocked nose.
“Okay,” says the priest. The voice is young, nasal. I detect a note of interest, a h
int of playfulness. “What shall we do instead then?”
I smile in the darkness, in spite of myself. You think your world’s crashed and within a couple of hours you can smile. What is that? Resilience or shallowness?
“I’d like to talk to you if that’s okay. Ask you something.”
“Fire away.” There is another sniff, a small gasp of breath. I know how he feels.
“You’re a hay-fever sufferer,” I say, kneeling down in front of the curtain like I did when I was a child. I couldn’t very well stay standing at the door.
“How did you know that?”
“I’m a clairvoyant.”
“You won’t need me then.”
“I thought confession was about the past, not the future.”
“I thought you weren’t here for confession.”
Smart ass. I like him. Sarah says I make decisions about people too quickly but I say it’s primeval instinct and some people have lost theirs. When you were standing on the savannah millions of years ago, a stranger was either friend or foe and you needed to make up your mind quick.
“So,” he says, gently. “What are you here for?”
I stare into the curtain, my eyes growing accustomed to the dark. I can pick out a shadowy outline behind the partition.
“I’ve just been told… just discovered… that my father might have murdered someone.” How strange those words sound together. I can hardly believe I am hearing them, saying them. “I don’t know what to do.”
Bet that unblocked his nasal passages. I try to imagine his face on the other side. Is he shocked? Have his eyebrows shot up, his mouth opened slightly? How often do priests hear talk of murder in confession. Once in a lifetime? Twice? Never? If I hadn’t wanted to kneel in front of the grille, I could have sat on the chair that was positioned on his side for those who preferred to see the priest. I suppose I could have watched his face. But then he could have watched mine. Miss Edwards, who was into the ‘new’ confession at school, recommended that we girls just face the priest and “talk to him like you’d talk to God”. She was barking, Miss Edwards.
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