Dead Secret

by Deveney Catherine

  But if I am honest, he is not only ridiculous but frightening. He has power that is nothing to do with status. I am here to find out that Da didn’t murder my mother. What if he tells me that he did?

  “You knew who killed my mother at the time?”

  “No doubt about it.”

  “So why couldn’t you prove it?”

  “Bad luck.” He shrugs. “Sometimes it happens. But it was Joe Connaghan. I was certain of that.”

  A wave of nausea rises in my stomach.

  “I’m sorry,” he says stoutly. But he isn’t. He isn’t sorry in the least.

  “We just never managed to make it stick. No body, you see,” he says, shaking his head. “If we’d found the body, we’d have got him. We sent some divers into the loch but it was too expensive to continue for long. Two more days,” he says bitterly. “That’s all I asked for, but they pulled the plug. Two more days and I’d have got him. I’m sure of it. For years I waited for that body to be washed up, but he was smart enough to do the job properly. I’ll give him that.” He pushes back a lock of white hair that has flopped forward onto his forehead. He talks like I have no connection to Joseph Connaghan.

  “James Cory…” It’s all I can manage to stutter out.

  “Ach…” he says impatiently, shaking his head. “James Cory! That was all nonsense. I feel sorry for the man.” He puts his hand up as if to stop me speaking, but I haven’t said a word. “I know, I know,” he continues. “He shouldn’t have been playing away from home and James knows he was in the wrong about that. But he was hounded at the time, and you know there are some people who have never let it go, even to this day. I’d like to help him if I could, clear up the question mark that’s hung over him all this time.” He looks at me keenly. “Did your father ever…?”

  “Why were you so sure?”

  “About Connaghan?” His eyebrows shoot up. “It was obvious. The day Kathleen Connaghan disappeared, she and James Cory were seen leaving the Stables bar, three miles outside of Inverness. We had a positive sighting to back up James’ timing, and then nothing. That was around one-forty. James Cory was back in his office at two. Around one-forty-five, Joe Connaghan went missing for two hours. He was late for his afternoon appointment at Brady’s Garage. He never had a satisfactory explanation of where he was for that time.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Said he drove out of Inverness alone to think.”

  “And…?”

  Simons looks at me as if I have to be stupid not to see the truth.

  “He had no alibi, no witnesses, nobody who saw him. Some coincidence. The day his wife goes missing, he does too?”

  “But I read once that the last person seen publicly with a victim is nearly always the murderer…”

  Simons shakes his head.

  “Not this time. The timings… look at the timings.”

  Simons doesn’t take his eyes off my face the whole time he talks. Scanning, calculating. The sun has shifted position slightly, is shining through the window like a spotlight, directly into my eyes. I lean on the arm of the chair, using my hand to shield me. It feels like Simons is closing in on me. When did I become the quarry here?

  “Then Connaghan turns up in an emotional state that afternoon, an hour late for his appointment…” continues Simons.

  Why does he keep calling my father by his surname and Cory by his first name?

  “Who said he was in an emotional state?”

  “Jim Brady at the tyre garage. Said Connaghan was shaking and agitated when he was looking at the books.”

  Every word of Simons is punching me in the guts, winding me. I want him to stop. There is a panic bubbling inside me; a physical bubble that makes me want to cough. A terror that Simons is going to say something that will make me know for certain Da is a murderer. What would the words be that would convince me? I don’t know. I don’t know what they are. But I want to run in case he says them.

  Simons looked at me shrewdly. “Connaghan said the reason he was upset that afternoon was that he had gone out alone with the intention of committing suicide.”

  He said he knew he was losing Kathleen; it was only a matter of time. So he had gone up to the loch and fitted a pipe to the exhaust and switched on but couldn’t go through with it. Said he couldn’t do it to his kids. Though of course, as it turned out, one of them wasn’t his kid.

  Simons knows the impact he’s having. I can see it in his eyes. He senses blood. I clench my teeth tight together to stop the trembling in my jaw. Suicide.

  Oh Da.

  Something on the inside of me melts, like everything solid is liquefying, running into a river of no shape, no substance. So much unknown inside my father’s heart. So much I never guessed.

  “I didn’t believe him,” says Simons, watching me still. “I think Kathleen went to meet her husband that lunchtime after she left the Stables. I think she finally told him they were through, that she loved James Cory. Connaghan couldn’t handle it. He suggested they take a drive somewhere quiet to talk. Then he killed her and put her body in his boot before dumping her in the loch.”

  His grey eyes are pinning me back in my seat, fastening me to the lump of floral cushion at my back. I look at the way he is sitting forward in his chair now, the sausage skin round his middle tighter than ever. He didn’t agree to see me to help me, that’s for sure. He is using me more than I am using him. I came here thinking it might solve things for me. Instead, he wants me to solve things for him. He hopes I will unwittingly say something that will help clear up the Connaghan mystery that has endured for almost twenty-five years. A final feather in his fraying old cap. And the added benefit of helping an old friend. ‘James’.

  Simons clasps his hands over his knees and looks intently.

  “Did your father ever say anything about what happened to your mother, about the…”

  “Nothing,” I say flatly, not even waiting for him to finish. I am past caring if I sound rude. The smell of fish seems to have seeped in here from the hallway. It’s creeping under the door, oozing through the pores of the walls. The room is hot and stale, the direct heat on my face from the sun unbearable. My left cheek feels hot and pink, like it has been slapped. I stand up.

  “I have to go now.”

  “No, don’t go yet,” he says quickly. “You’ve only just got here. We can talk some more.” He smiles benignly. “I’ll make you a cup of tea. Mary will be back shortly and…”

  “That’s kind of you, but I really have to go. I don’t have long. Time is short before I have to get back to Glasgow.”

  “Leave me your number,” he urges. “I can keep in touch… let you know if anything…”

  I pull a pen from my bag, tear a scrap of paper from a notebook, and scribble it hastily.

  “Goodbye,” I say quickly, holding out my hand to shake hands. As his hand stretches out, I see a glint on his finger. A gold ring with a blue background and a pattern in the centre. A capital ‘G’. It seems familiar. I’ve seen a ring like that before. Where?

  “Just one thing before I go,” I say, opening the door. “What made you rule out James Cory so completely? What made you so certain?”

  “There was no evidence,” says Simons, and he shrugs. “And anyway, I had known James Cory for years. Golf club,” he says, nodding to the buggy in the hall.

  Was everyone in this bloody town in the golf club?

  “You stuck up for him because he was a friend?”

  Simons’s face hardens. I see the shutters closing over his eyes, the flush of anger in his cheeks.

  “I’ve been in the force a long time and I have never, ever helped a guilty man,” he says. “I just didn’t believe James Cory was the kind of man to do something like that. I knew him.”

  Knew him? What does he mean ‘knew him’? Who knows anybody in this world? I mean really knows them. Knows what’s right deep inside them; knows what colour their guts are when they are turned inside out. Did he really know Cory? Did I know Da?r />
  “Maybe you didn’t know him as well as you think,” I say. “My father was not a murderer.”

  As I step out, a small grey-haired woman with a tired perm walks up the path, a shopping bag in each hand. She smiles at me wanly.

  “James Cory did not kill Kathleen Connaghan,” says Terry Simons quietly at the door. “And that’s the truth.” The grey-haired woman looks surprised as I walk past her without a word.

  The truth? Is it? Whose truth? There are too many extra pieces in this puzzle. Bits which look as if they fit, but don’t. Bits which distort the picture when you try to get a clear view. They’re all there in front of me: sharp-edged, smooth-edged, regular and angular. Right now I have no ideas which bits are part of the proper picture, and which bits are simply red herrings.

  I got off with one of my hotel managers once. Little more than that. Some heavy flirting, a quick snog over the filing cabinet in his room. I suppose I was a bit flattered he picked me out, and anyway, I fancied a quiet season. It was one of the perks of being the boss’s bird in a hotel. Fewer early shifts.

  It didn’t last long. On one of our first dates he took me out with some mate of his and his lady friend. Couldn’t stand her. She was a smug little puss, delicate and dainty as a kitten when she was with her man, always preening and purring. She’d hang on his arm, and rub her leg quietly against his under the table, and smile like there was cream dripping off her whiskers. It was a different story when there were no men about.

  Anyway, he was called Craig, my hotel manager, and he was unimportant, completely unimportant. But after I leave Terry Simons, a mental picture suddenly drops into place. The ring. Terry Simons’ ring. That’s where I remember it from. Craig used to wear one. And this long-forgotten conversation drifts back into mind.

  We were in the pub, the four of us, and he and his mate started talking about some guy from a nearby town. He had done well for himself in cash and carry and had just opened up another outlet, moving into some new premises locally.

  Craig’s pal said he’d met him at a local Chamber of Commerce meeting. And then Craig, thinking me and the puss weren’t listening, says quietly, “Is he on the square?” Oh yeah. “A regular attender,” his mate says, and it was like the two of them were talking in some kind of code. I caught Craig’s eye and looked at him quizzically, but he just looked a bit discomfited and changed the subject.

  “What was all that about?” I asked him later.

  “What?”

  “That ‘on the square’ stuff. What does that mean?”

  He shook his head dismissively, tried to sound light.

  “It’s nothing. It’s… just an expression. It means being in the Masons.”

  His late father was a Freemason. In fact, the ring Craig wore was originally his dad’s. And the ‘G’? Stood for God, apparently.

  “But you’re not a Mason are you?”

  “It’s just a business thing,” said Craig, a bit defensively I thought.

  I burst out laughing. “Oooh,” I said, sidling up to him on the couch and running my hand lightly along his leg. “I bet you’ve got the knees for the rolled-up trouser legs, brother Craig.”

  I don’t remember what he said. But I do remember he didn’t laugh back.

  CHAPTER SIX

  I turn on the radio as I head across the Kessock bridge toward Lochglas. There is a pop track on the radio, with a classical piano and soaring strings. I like the combination, turn up the volume as I cross the bridge. The early evening light is fantastic out across the water, the sunshine dulled with a touch of haar. I turn the volume up and up and up, the piano notes filling the small space of the car, the heavy bass thumping like a heartbeat, until it feels that there is so much energy in here it will explode, and the car will lift from the road.

  Across the water, the hills and the sky and the shore are washed with a transparent grey-blue light and the effect is so eerie, so magical, that I think of Da and how much he would have loved it. I don’t know what it is, but there is something in that combination of piano and strings and light that makes my heart swell, and right in this minute I think Da is everywhere here. He is in the mute grey hills, and in the drifting sea of cloud, and in the rays of sunshine that filter through the mist and streak like lightning bolts across the water. He is in the earth and in the sky and in the water. He is in the low, languorous flight of the sea bird across the surface and into the blue horizon. He still exists. He is all around me. Everywhere.

  I remember them then, the words we sang in church as children about our Heavenly Father, as they called him. Words we sang sweetly but without comprehension.

  And each rare moment

  That I’ve felt His presence,

  I shall remember and forever cherish.

  Da.

  I feel euphoric. And then suddenly the music fades and the feeling inside drifts away with the notes, ethereal as the sea haar, and its going leaves me empty. The faith, the belief, the certainty, evaporate. The blue light doesn’t seem warm any longer, but thin and mean and cold. He is gone.

  The unbearable bit of those first days after Da died was not just the shock but the confusion. The certainty one minute that something remained of him, and the certainty the next that he was quite gone. Of thinking there was a soul and then thinking there was none. Of thinking there was a future and then being certain there was only a past. But what was it Da had said to Khadim? There is always a future whether you want it or not.

  By the time I reach Lochglas, I feel subdued and tired, but driven. There are no options here, no side roads, no diversions. There is only straight on. I stop at Spar and look in. Yes, Marion is there in her pink overall, laughing with a customer. I pick up a paper and wait to pay.

  “Hello again,” she says. “Still here?”

  “For another day or two.”

  “The forecast’s still good. Such an amazing spell we’ve had.”

  I nod and hand over the money for the paper.

  “Remember you told me about the couple who owned the house? I was wondering if the murdered woman, Kath Connaghan, still had relatives here?”

  “Well her parents are both dead now but her sister, Kirstin is still here. But if it’s the house you want to enquire about, I don’t think Kirstin will know where Joseph Connaghan is. I don’t think they’re in touch.”

  “Probably not,” I say, carelessly as I can, “but I just thought I’d ask.” I smile. “It’s such a fantastic place.”

  “Fancy being a local then?” laughs Marion. “You’d soon get fed up in the winter, a young lassie like you.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Where does Kirstin live? She’s my only shot.”

  “Second house past the Post Office,” says Marion, handing me the change. “But I know she’s out this evening because it’s WRI night. You’d maybe get her in the morning.”

  Bored in the winter? With WRI on offer? Maybe I’d even learn how to peel a star fruit.

  A bottle of vodka; an old friend. I buy it in the supermarket round the corner from the B & B. It is nearing 10 p.m. but still light, the day refusing to give way, the air still and warm and scented by hanging baskets fixed to the lampposts outside. There is an empty space next to the supermarket car park, rough waste ground with a bulldozer standing in one corner, piles of stone blocks, scaffolding. Wire fencing encircles the ground, and it is only on the way back that I realise I have passed the signs several times without noticing the words that are plastered every few yards on the fencing. ‘Cory Construction’ the notice says. ‘A Highland Council project in partnership with Cory Construction’.

  Back in the room, I undress and sit in my underwear on top of the bed. Even a sheet is too much in these airless nights. I sit with the pillows propped behind me, my knees drawn up to cradle the bottle, pouring two doubles in quick succession, waiting for the alcohol to flood my system. Tonight, it feels as if I could drink the whole bottle and nothing would counteract the adrenalin. It’s only when the third double is being pou
red that I begin to feel that familiar numbing, the soothing effects flooding into my limbs and relaxing them. It is a relief and I reach over for the lemonade bottle, humming under my breath to the music from the radio clock on the bedside table. From the depths of my handbag, which is discarded on the floor and tucked halfway under the bed, comes a muffled beep.

  I glance at my watch. 11 p.m. Sarah? I lean over the edge of the bed, reaching for the bag, giggling slightly as I grab hold of the base to stop myself falling. Close! I heave myself up, chucking out items from the bag until the sheets are covered with discarded papers, a cheque book, a pen and lipstick, and then impatiently I tip the whole thing upside down until a purse and phone fall out in a flurry of crumbs and dust. A text. Withheld number. Click. I stare at the short message, frowning. ‘Go home.’ Who the…? Then I shrug, chucking it on the bed and reaching for the bottle.

  The message comes three times in the next hour. Go home. It is only when the phone beeps a fourth time that I realise I am alert, waiting. The sound makes me jump. ‘Go home, bitch.’ There is only a bedside light on but I suddenly become aware that across the room, the curtains are not closed. Night has fallen now and a thin sliver of moon falls into the room. I throw a wrap over my underwear and stumble across to close the curtains, shutting out the world, the sudden malevolence that darkness has brought. I cross the room and pull the additional snib across the door, then climb back into bed and pour another measure from the rapidly dwindling bottle. From somewhere inside the rumpled duvet, another beep sounds insistently.