Dead Secret

by Deveney Catherine

  “Miss Connaghan,” he says. “I heard you were in town.”

  As I thought, there is little that is not passed on in this town.

  “What can I do for you?” he says, and I can see immediately the way he wants to play it. Conflict avoidance. Talk like he is simply a stranger, a man who knows nothing about me. Not like the man who screwed my mother while she was married to my father. Not like the prime suspect in her murder.

  “You knew my mother, Kathleen.”

  “A long time ago.”

  “I want to know what happened to her.”

  He gives a hint of a laugh as if I’ve said something ridiculously childish. He pulls his chair in closer to his desk.

  “A lot of people would like to know what happened to her.”

  “Including you?”

  “Including me.”

  He doesn’t ask me to sit down but I sit anyway, looking him in the eye across the desk.

  “You were the last to see her alive.”

  “I don’t think you’ll find you can prove that. Always assuming she’s dead, of course.”

  “What?” I look at him incredulously.

  “Always assuming she didn’t take herself off to some exotic place and build a new life for herself.”

  I despise him for that.

  “Twenty-three years and no postcard?”

  I look at his tanned skin and wonder how many sunshine holidays he’s been on in the last twenty-three years. Skin gently warmed by shafts of sunshine, the cold trickle of guilt warmed to blood temperature. How many years did it take for the thoughts to stop, the intrusion to end, his head to come back under his own control? Mother’s bones in the stiffening earth.

  A pulse beats in Cory’s neck.

  “You don’t believe she’s alive. You don’t believe that.”

  He shrugs. “Some people did.”

  “The police treated it as a murder inquiry. It has never been closed.”

  “Yes, but they never found a body, did they?”

  “No, very difficult to have a prosecution if you don’t have a body.”

  He tilts his head to one side, like he’s considering an object: a painting perhaps, or a vase.

  “You are very like her,” he says suddenly and smiles. Cold affability, bleak as winter moorland.

  “I know. My father told me.”

  “How is Joe?” he says smoothly.

  “Less well than you. Dead.”

  He looks startled. “I didn’t… When?”

  “Last Friday.”

  “I see.” I think he knows better than to say he is sorry. He sits very, very still. It is hard to fathom what is going on inside his head but I guess he is relieved. “You haven’t said you’re sorry yet. About my father.”

  “I don’t think I can win in this conversation, do you?”

  I shrug. “Seems to me you make a habit of winning in everything.”

  He was alive wasn’t he? On that score alone he was winning. Da never even got his three score and ten. And as for Mother…

  The phone on his desk rings. He glances at it with irritation before picking it up.

  “No calls just now please, Shellie.” He breaks off, listens. “I see. Yes, put him through.” I lean forward to his desk, pick up a photograph. His two daughters, I assume. His eyes catch mine. A warning.

  “Nice,” I say, the sarcasm a thin filling in a thick sandwich of sincerity.

  “Hello, David,” he says. His eyes flick away. “Yes, I know. She’s here.”

  David Carruthers? Bastard. He believed in me last night. I know he did. But some time after he left me, when I was no longer there to remind him of who I was, he stopped believing and now he’s warning Cory. Who did he know – Rebecca Connaghan or James Cory? He knew James Cory. The corruption of familiarity. Well, it doesn’t matter. None of it matters.

  “Okay, I will. Thank you David. Regards to your mother. Yes. Yes. Bye.”

  “Son of an old friend,” he says pointedly.

  “Important to have friends you can trust, people in your life who you know are on the level.”

  A blink, a slight hesitation, but no verbal response.

  “My father was never very good at all that networking stuff. But he was a friend of yours wasn’t he, Mr Cory?”

  Cory shifts slightly in his seat.

  “He was an employee of a friend of mine.”

  “But you socialised sometimes.”

  “The odd occasion. I didn’t know him well.”

  “No, I don’t suppose you did. You were too busy getting to know his wife.”

  “Look,” he says politely, without the slightest hint of anger, “is there something specific I can help you with? If not, I really do have a lot to do. I have an appointment in just a few minutes.”

  “Did you kill my mother?” The question hangs unanswered in the air for a second. I hold my breath. His eyes barely flicker.

  “No,” he says, “of course I didn’t.”

  “Where’s she buried?”

  He says nothing.

  “If she was murdered, who would your money be on?”

  “I’m not a betting man.”

  “My father?”

  He shrugs.

  “Your father’s dead. It’s not for me…” He looks at me shrewdly. “But I’d say he had rather more motive than me, wouldn’t you? It wasn’t me your mother was leaving.”

  “No, but you didn’t want her to leave him, did you? You just wanted to carry on with a bit on the side and not rock your cosy life. What did you talk about that last day?”

  “It’s a long time ago.”

  “Don’t tell me you don’t remember!”

  “We talked about the future.”

  He must have been over this territory a hundred times with the police. But not for many years. Not with the daughter of his mistress. It doesn’t seem to matter. James Cory looks completely in control.

  “So what was the future?”

  “We hadn’t resolved it. We didn’t know.”

  “You mean you didn’t know. She was making it difficult for you, wasn’t she?” I say, leaning across his desk. I cannot get to him, cannot get inside his head. Instead I want to physically enter his space now, invade his comfort zone. “Suddenly your bit on the side was getting complicated because she wanted more. Your wife didn’t know about my mother, did she? You didn’t want her to know.”

  “I don’t think that’s any of your business.” He runs a finger softly round the inside of his shirt collar. But his voice betrays nothing.

  “Did you love my mother?”

  He ignores the question.

  “Did you love her?”

  He sighs impatiently. “I cared about her. I wished things could have been different. But that was a long time ago. Now, I really am sorry to hear about your father and I know that you must be upset… But I don’t think I can be of any further help to you.”

  “Do you wish it was Sarah who had come to see you?”

  “Who?” he says. He looks genuinely puzzled. The bastard really has forgotten her name.

  “My sister.”

  He sits back in his chair, trying to stare me out, but I meet his gaze.

  “I’m sure your sister is charming,” he says, “but I cannot see what possible interest she can be of to me. Now, as I said, I don’t think I can help you any more.” He stands up, walks to the door and opens it.

  I swing round in my chair and look at him. I am in no hurry. I will not be hurried. Cory waits. I look at him and suddenly I cannot believe it. I cannot believe how easily my faith was shaken. How can I explain this moment to you, the significance of it, the way everything changed afterwards. It was an epiphany. It was St Paul on the road to Damascus, an upsurge of faith, of belief, in the absence of any tangible proof that I can hand to others. You will accept me or dismiss me as you will.

  When I look at Cory I realise that I do not know this man, and yet in some primitive place I know every signal he sends to me. Ju
st like I knew every signal of Da’s. I knew things about Da in my heart that I couldn’t see with my eyes. But that doesn’t mean they weren’t real things. Did I know the colour of Da’s guts when they spilled out? I think I did. It’s just that I did what David Carruthers did. I forgot that I knew.

  I knew his dark and his light. His simplicity and his complexity. The only thing I am not sure I knew was his dreams. Perhaps a daughter can never fully know her father’s dreams. I think now that Mother took them with her when she died. I’m not surprised about the days he spent enveloped in that grey mist inside his own head; I’m surprised that there weren’t more of them.

  I walk up to Cory slowly, and things feel clearer than they have since Da left. I put my face right next to his, the way I’d watched the neds on the bus do to Khadim.

  Instinctively he moves back but I move forward again, bringing my face to within an inch of his. I can smell his expensive aftershave; it masks nothing for me. I know the real stench of him. I see the bead of sweat on his top lip. There is a picture in my head of the saliva trickling down Khadim’s face, and I can’t help thinking how it’s the wrong people who get spat on in life. And then I smile at him, and I whisper so close to him that he must feel my breath on his face like the gentlest summer breeze. “I know,” I whisper softly.

  Triumph. It does not matter that it is won and lost in a blink. The momentary flicker of fear that flits across his eyes in that fraction of a second is more satisfying than any gobful of saliva trickling down his smooth bastard face.

  CHAPTER THREE

  One last visit. The tiny chemist shop in Lochglas is dark and old fashioned and smells vaguely of lavender soap and TCP. I knew they’d stock Yardley. They have an entire shelf. Soaps and talcs and perfume and thick, creamy hand lotions fragranced with lavender and sandalwood and violet and geranium. Smells of yesterday. I can only buy English Roses in a gift pack of perfume and hand lotion. I take it to the counter. An elderly lady with white, permed hair and an overall smiles at me and takes the box, carefully removing the price.

  “That’s a nice one,” she says, “isn’t it? Twelve pounds ninety-five, please.”

  It is cheaper than a bouquet. I take the perfume out and put it in my bag and throw the rest of the box into the back seat of the car. I drive back towards Inverness. I go past the bay but do not stop, do not glance towards the loch or wonder if Mother is in there. An act of faith.

  I head for a little-used car park on the outskirts of town. The car park Cory Construction were working on when my mother was murdered. It was to be part of a shopping centre that never materialised, my landlady had told me. Phase one for a non-existent phase two. The shopping centre was moved elsewhere. Public money gone to waste. There were whispers of corruption, jobs for the boys. It stands, not a white elephant so much as a grey concrete one, dumped in the mire of its own dirt and excrement. With the shopping centre being built in a different area, the car park stands away from the heart of the city and is little used. It is only two storeys high and spray-painted graffiti, red as blood, stains one side. I park on the second storey and lock the car. Is she really buried here, encased in hundreds of tons of rubble and concrete? My mother?

  I walk down a flight of stairs, lit by a flickering fluorescent strip light. The stairs are filthy, a collection of cigarette butts and crisp packets and flattened beer cans that echo in the stairwell when kicked. It is no place to die. No place to end up. I try thinking of her, not having a conversation the way I do with Da, but just thinking of her, trying to feel her round me. Despite everything, the memories that have come back over the last few days about Da, there has been nothing more about Mother. She isn’t Mum or Ma or Mummy; she is just Mother. In my head, there is still only the feel of a fur collar and the vague scent of roses. I couldn’t say I love her. I don’t know her well enough to love her, though I certainly know some of her weaknesses. But I feel a vague… tenderness, maybe. The beginning of a love, or the end of one.

  A door bangs and there are footsteps on the stairs above. I stand to the wall to let a man pass me. I hear him whistling as he reaches the bottom and another door bangs. I go right to the basement, as close to the foundations of the place as I can. It stinks. There is an empty whisky bottle on the ground and beer cans and dark patches of liquid gunge on the floor. I take out the perfume bottle from my bag and click open the top. I put my finger on the spray and walk quickly through the basement and out into the stairwell again, spraying till the mechanism chokes and the bottle is empty. Somewhere inside me, I say goodbye without using the word. It is finished. Then I throw the bottle into the corner with the whisky bottle and the cans and leave, the sickly sweet scent of roses mingling with the acrid stench of old beer and stale piss.

  Crisps in the car, no time for lunch. Licking the tang of salt from my fingers, the faint, damp smear of fat on the steering wheel. Da’s car, tinny with the vibration of speed.

  It’s a race against time to reach home, to be there for Pa’s body being brought into the church. The shell of him. The remains, as Father Riley would say. I am not sure if I bring his spirit with me or leave it behind in the bay of Lochglas, blowing through the deserted house, whistling through the gaps in the jagged glass.

  Sarah and Peggy are waiting. The anger hidden in a smile, a tear, a pained embrace. Three women, a triumvirate of grief. For the moment, the rest waits. The rapprochement breaks weakly, the watery light of a false dawn.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  I was shaking, Da. I hated being that close to him. I was so close I could smell him. I could see his Adam’s apple. I could almost hear him swallow. But I couldn’t let him know I was frightened. And I shook him, I think I really shook him. I saw it in his eyes. The funny thing is, I wasn’t lying when I said I knew. I did know.

  Do you know that feeling when you’ve lost something and you keep looking and looking for it but still you can’t see it? You check the same places over and over. You get angry and frustrated and you think it’s never going to turn up and you can’t even think of anywhere to look any more. And then you look in one of the places you looked first and suddenly, miraculously, the thing you’ve lost is there after all. Right under your nose. And you can’t quite believe it because you looked there, you really did. That’s the way I feel now, Da. I was looking for something that I had all along, something that was never really lost.

  You know what I like? I like the fact that I can never prove you didn’t do it. It is almost religious, my faith, a belief in something I can’t see, something I can’t prove. The truth is that it is not impossible that you killed Mother. Terry Simons says you did it. James Cory, naturally, says you did it. Kirstin never said, but she thinks you did it. She thinks Mother is in the loch. And you know, even for me, it would not be so difficult to comprehend the leap from love to hate. They are intimate friends, love and hate. At first, you think how could a man ever make love to, and murder, the same woman? But then you see that perhaps it can be part of the same process, the same outpouring, the same passion. Love and hate and jealousy and possessiveness. It is in those tragic photographs that appear in newspapers: husband and wife, murderer and victim. Here at a child’s birthday party, there at a family wedding. They smile in those photographs, smile like they are the happiest families on earth.

  So it is not impossible. But if you ask me what I believe, rather than what is possible, I cannot believe you killed Mother. I do not believe it of you for the same reason Terry Simons won’t believe it of Cory. He knew Cory, he said. Well, I know you. But my knowing is sharper, wiser, truer, than theirs. I have to believe it.

  I can’t prove it. How can you prove someone didn’t do something until you prove someone else did? And I won’t waste a second of my life proving anything about Cory. People have tried for over twenty years to prove who did it. And he’s not having twenty years of my life. He’s had enough of what is mine already. When I looked at him today, I knew one thing for certain. If you had killed anyone, you would have killed
him.

  You know, Da, when you hear a song that you really like and you play it over and over and you play it just once too often? That last time you play it, you don’t enjoy it, and the next time you hear it, it has begun to get on your nerves. And then finally you hear it and you wonder why you ever liked such a song. The lyrics are clichéd and the tune’s trite and it might have dazzled you for a while with its clever catchiness but really, the whole thing is worthless. That’s the way I feel about the idea that you killed Mother. How could I ever have seriously thought it, considered it? I’m sorry. I’m sorry I doubted you.

  But there’s something more, Da. It is not just that I do not believe you killed her. It’s that even if you had, I cannot believe your whole life would be defined by it. Do I believe in God? I don’t know. But I believe in redemption. These last few days, I’ve tried to imagine how I would feel if you killed her. I’ve rolled the idea round in my mouth, trying to taste it, like wine. Da killed Mother. Then I spat it out and waited to see what taste was left. It has taken a few days, but it is not as I expected; there is no bitterness, no rancid residue.

  Murder is evil, I know that. But I’ve tried to think about evil, about what it is. Is it one, solitary action? If you had killed her, you would have done an evil thing. But it wouldn’t have made you an evil man. There’s a difference. You wouldn’t be a mass murderer, a man set on doing evil all his life, a man who took pleasure in it.

  What about Cory? Is he a normal person who did one evil thing, and then simply went back to normality? One thing’s for sure: he certainly did go back to normality. He held onto everything in his life. He didn’t pay. His marriage, his business, his position: nothing changed. You shed your life and he kept his. Burrowed deeper into his success. That’s the way money works. People see nice white fingernails and they think you couldn’t have done anything dirty with fingernails like those. What was it Father Peter said… repentance and penance? Cory? I don’t think so.