by JD Kirk
“So, to be clear, you’re saying you don’t know what Fergus Forsyth looked like?”
“Yeah,” Clyde sneered. “That’s what I’m saying.”
Logan side-eyed Ben, who picked up on the signal and opened the folder he’d brought in with him. “I’m going to show you a photograph of Fergus Forsyth now, Mr Lennon,” the DI said. “I’d like you to take a moment to look at it before responding.”
The slow shhhkt of the photograph being slid across the table seemed deafening in the hush of the interview room. He could sense Tyler and Hamza on the other side of the mirror, watching with breath held to see if his theory was right.
He hoped it wasn’t. He hoped he was wrong. He really did.
But, he wouldn’t be. He wasn’t.
The email had all but confirmed it.
“What the fuck is this?” Clyde demanded, eyes snapping up from the picture on the desk. He repeated the question immediately, his voice rising to a shout. “What the fuck is this?! What are you showing me?”
“Do you recognise the person in that photograph, Mr Lennon?” Logan asked.
“Yes! Of course. But that’s not him. He’s not Fergus!”
“That’s Fergus Forsyth, Mr Lennon,” Logan insisted.
“Bollocks it is!” Clyde spat. He slapped his hand down on the photograph, covering most of the face.
“Then who is it?” Logan asked. “Who is the man in the photo?”
“That’s Kenny,” Clyde bellowed. His voice cracked and he spread his fingers, unmasking enough of the face so that he could look into its eyes. When he spoke again, it was in a whisper. “That’s my son.”
“Bloody hell,” Hamza said, his voice low to reduce the risk of it travelling through the glass. “That’s mental. So Fergus was at it with his own step-mum and… what? Half-brother?”
When he got no response from Tyler, he gave him a dunt with an elbow.
“What?” Tyler asked, rousing. “Oh. Aye. Crazy stuff.”
“You alright, mate?” Hamza asked.
Tyler nodded, a little too keenly. “Aye. Aye, grand. Grand.”
“Not having cold feet, are you? About the wedding?”
“No!” Tyler said, a little too loudly.
Both detectives stepped back and waited for any sign that they’d been heard. Other than the briefest of dirty looks from DCI Logan, they seemed to get away with it.
“No, nothing like that,” Tyler continued more quietly this time.
“Good, because you’ve got no idea how much time and effort has gone into that bloody speech,” Hamza told him. “And then there’s your stag night. I’ve got it all figured out down to—”
Tyler motioned to the glass. “Maybe we should…”
Hamza leaned back a little, thrown off-balance by this uncharacteristic display of a work ethic.
“Oh. Aye. Yeah. Good point,” he said.
“We’ll talk later,” Tyler told him, as they both turned their attention to the glass, and watched events playing out in the adjoining room.
“Yeah,” said Hamza, his gaze flitting sideways for just a moment. “We’ll do that.”
Clyde Lennon’s earlier aggression had been replaced over the last few moments by a sort of stunned confusion. Had he not been sitting, he’d likely be wandering around in circles, Logan imagined, not quite sure where he was going, or what he was supposed to be doing when he got there.
But, he was answering their questions. That, right now, was all that really mattered.
“Like… I don’t know. Before Bennet was born. So… how long’s that? Eighteen years? Maybe twenty since I saw him last,” he said. He picked up the photograph. “He was just a boy.”
Once Logan had made the connection, the resemblance had been… not obvious, exactly, but definitely there to see. There was some similarity across the eyes, and the shape of the nose. The shape of the hairlines were similar, although age meant that Clyde’s now started further back on the head.
Fergus looked like Bennet, too, if you were paying attention. Again, it was mostly the eyes, although something about the shape of the head matched, too.
No wonder Lana had instantly thought him so familiar.
“We tracked down his previous employer,” Ben said. “The headteacher there was new to the school, and so he didn’t recognise the name Fergus Forsyth. Some of the other staff, did, though. Apparently, Kenny changed it about a year after his mother passed away. Officially, like. Driver’s licence, passport, the full thing.”
“Why? Why would he do that?” Clyde asked. “He loved his mum. She made bloody sure of that. Made sure he’d always pick her over me. Why would he pretend to be someone else?”
“We think it was all done to get at you, Mr Lennon,” Logan explained. “We think Fergus—Kenny—moved up here specifically to target you through your wife. And through Bennet.”
“Bennet? What’s he got to do with anything?” Clyde asked, some of that old fire returning. “He was just his teacher.”
Logan told him the truth of it. Watched the disbelief become horror, then grief, then another surge of rage that saw him twist and wrench at the photograph, trying and failing to tear it in half, before he finally hurled it to the floor.
“I feel sick. I feel sick! I want to be sick!” Clyde wailed.
The solicitor edged his chair away. “I think my client might need a break.”
“No! I don’t want a fucking break! I want to know everything. Tell me everything!” Clyde insisted. “God, I knew it! I fucking knew she was poisoning him against me. Didn’t I say that? That’s what they do, women. They lie, and they twist things, and they make it seem like you’re the bad bastard! I wanted to see him, you know? Tried, time and time again. But she wouldn’t let me. Wouldn’t have it. Bitch moved house half a dozen times so I wouldn’t find them. What sort of life’s that for a kid? Eh? No wonder he was fucking demented! She did this! That bitch of a mother of his. She did it!”
He pulled at his thinning hair and gnashed his teeth, shock and grief threatening to consume him completely. He was breathing like an animal now, his chest rising and falling like his lungs were doubling in size with each frantic inhalation.
“Well, know what? Good fucking riddance!” he spat, kicking out at the crumpled photograph on the floor. “You sick, twisted piece of shit! Good fucking riddance to you! I’ve only got one son now. One!”
Logan and Ben swapped looks. This was it, then. The big moment.
“Aye, Mr Lennon,” Logan said. “About that…”
Chapter Forty-Nine
“Lachlan.”
The young man scrubbing away at the big soup pot in one of the castle’s kitchen sinks didn’t respond at first. It took a second shout before he paid attention, then turned to find his supervisor standing in the kitchen doorway with a large man in a long coat.
“Yeah?” he asked.
“This police officer would like a word.”
Lachlan smiled, nodded, then set the pot on the draining board and slipped both hands into the sink. “Sure,” he said. “Give me a second to get cleaned up.”
He scrubbed his hands, started to dry them on a towel, and carried it with him as he followed his boss and the detective through to a garishly decorated room just off the main foyer. It had been described to him as ‘the small drawing room,’ but it was big enough to hold four couches, six matching armchairs, and a grand piano.
Logan had felt nothing but contempt for the whole place as he’d pulled up outside, and this had only increased as he was being led through it. He hated all its prissiness and pomp, detested how it celebrated wealth and excess, and the way it rubbed it right in your face.
Oh, sure, it was no doubt lovely, if you liked that sort of thing, but he felt about as home in it as a squirrel in a spaceship, and he could almost hear his mother’s voice warning him no’ to bloody touch anything, for fear that he might break it.
It was the sort of place that thought it was better than him.
Then again, it was probably right.
“Are you the fella I spoke to on the phone?” Lachlan asked, once they’d been shut in the room together.
“No. That was a colleague of mine,” Logan told him. He gestured to a scuffed leather couch that probably cost more than his whole house. “Take a seat, son.”
“I’d better not,” Lachlan said. “They go mental.”
“I won’t tell them, if you don’t,” Logan said. He pointed, a little more forcefully this time. “Take a seat.”
Lachlan rubbed his hands around inside the towel, then shrugged and perched himself right at the front of the couch. “Did you get him?” he asked. “Bennet, I mean. Did you bring him in?”
“We did,” Logan confirmed.
“And? Did he tell you what he’d told me?”
“He did.”
Lachlan made a show of exhaling. “Oh. Thank God for that. I couldn’t not say, you know? When he told me what he’d done, I couldn’t not—”
“Cut the shite, Ewan.”
Lachlan froze. Blinked. Swallowed. “Sorry?”
“We know that’s your real name. We know who you are, son,” Logan told him. He plink-plinked a couple of the high notes on the piano, not taking his eye off the young man in the stained kitchen whites. “You and Kenny were both mentioned on your mum’s funeral notice. We know Clyde Lennon’s your dad.”
“I don’t… I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Aye, you do,” Logan replied. He shrugged. “It came as a shock to your old man, right enough. He had no idea. He knew about Kenny, obviously, but not you. Your mum never told him. Can’t say I blame her, he’s hardly the sort of role model you’d want around for your kids.”
There was a portrait on the wall above the piano of a man who looked almost the size of one. It looked old, no doubt valuable. Logan gave it a nudge with a finger, making it squint.
“Whose idea was it to come up here and bring your dad’s life crumbling down around him? Kenny’s?” Logan asked. “Yours?” When he got no answer, he gave a little wave of his hand. “Doesn’t matter, I suppose. All went wrong in the end, didn’t it? He lost his bottle. He wanted out. But you couldn’t have that, could you? You wanted to follow-through. You wanted to make your dad pay.”
“No.” Lachlan shook his head. “I don’t… This isn’t…” He forced a grin, but it was far too broad, and nowhere near convincing enough. “I’m sorry, I really don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Logan picked up a delicate jar of potpourri, sniffed it, then shook his head in disgust and set it back down again.
“Like I said, Ewan,” the DCI grunted. “Aye, you do. We found Fergus’s motorbike in the shed out back at yours. We have your fingerprints on it.”
“Bollocks, I wiped it all down!”
Lachlan stopped then. He closed his eyes, just for a moment. Something changed about his face, some muscles tightening, others relaxing, his expression shifting as he realised his mistake.
“What happened, do you think?” Logan asked. “With your brother. Did he actually fall for her, like he told her? Clyde’s wife, I mean. Was he really planning to run away with her?”
“I don’t… I’m not…”
“How did he think that was going to work out? Considering what he was doing with Bennet—his own brother. Your own brother. How did he think he could possibly get away with it?”
“Because he’s a fucking idiot!” Lachlan hissed. Panic flashed across his face, and he added, “was,” like his use of the incorrect tense was the incriminating part of his outburst. “I mean…”
“So, that was it, right enough? It was true?” Logan said. “He fell for her. He started out using her to get back at Clyde, but he actually fell in love with her? Jesus Christ. But, you couldn’t allow that, could you, Ewan? Couldn’t have him deviating from the plan. So, you killed him. You killed your own brother.”
Lachlan hadn’t moved from the couch, but his gaze flitted momentarily to the drawing room door.
“And you thought it through, too,” Logan said. “You sent those texts between their phones, made it look like your dad had found out about the affair. You used his workshop. Left Fergus’s body in a place you knew would further point the finger. Planted your own brother’s head in the cistern of his bloody toilet, all so you could punish him.”
“No. No, it’s not like that. That’s not—”
“Bennet came to you today to tell you about his relationship with Fergus. He was scared it might come out. He thought he could trust you. He thought of you like a brother, ironically,” Logan said. “But then, you went to his house, and you attacked his mother. You knew Clyde’s hammer was under Bennet’s bed, so you used that to make it look like Clyde did it. Like he battered his wife.”
“He did batter her,” Lachlan said. “He battered my mum, and Kenny, and Bennet. It’s what he does. It’s what he’s always done. It’s who he is!”
“Oh, we know. And you wanted to get your own back on him. To punish him.”
“No! I mean… I mean…” Lachlan stammered. “He did. Kenny. It was his idea. It was all him. It was his idea to start the affair with Lana. And then, when he realised Bennet was into him, he pushed that, too. It was him who wanted to make Clyde pay. Not me. Not me, I didn’t even know him! I didn’t care.”
Logan dismissed that with a shake of his head. “You cared enough to kill your own flesh and blood, son, so if…”
The penny dropped then. The lad was telling the truth. He didn’t know Clyde. He didn’t hate him enough to want to destroy him, or to kill his own brother.
His hatred was reserved for someone else.
“Bennet,” Logan said, and Lachlan’s eyes narrowed at the sound of that word. “Your brother was out to punish Clyde, but you weren’t. You wanted to punish Bennet. You hated him. He got to have your dad, warts and all, and what did you get? Bounced here, there, and everywhere around the country. A dozen addresses in as many years. He got to have the life you didn’t, and even though he was miserable in it, you were jealous of him.”
Lachlan opened and closed his mouth, snapping his bottom teeth against the top like a piranha chewing its food. “He had no fucking idea what he had,” he muttered. “He had no clue how good he had it. Money. A nice house. Both parents.”
“Jesus Christ, you said yourself, the poor bastard was getting knocked around.”
“What, and you think we weren’t?” Lachlan cried. “You think we didn’t get slaps from her boyfriends, or people she brought home, or… or… fucking touched up by creepy old men because she’d shot all the rent money up her arm? You think that was better?”
He launched himself to his feet, every part of him now shaking with rage and burning with the shame of it.
“You don’t know! You have no idea the shit we went through!” he spat. “There was this one place we stayed, way back, when I was four, or five, or… I don’t know. Kenny slept on this horrible, manky couch in the living room, but I had to sleep in her bed with her—in her bed.”
He looked past Logan at one of the room’s big bay windows. It was dark outside now, and three different versions of himself stood shoulder to shoulder in the panes of glass.
“Every night she’d have a different guy come in,” he hissed, “and every night she’d tell me to look away, to cover my ears, to be a good boy, to shut up, shut up, shut up, you little shit, and just stop fucking crying!”
He whipped a hand out from under the towel, and pointed to the door with the kitchen knife he’d stashed there, his face all screwed up with rage.
“And… what? Bennet thinks he has it bad? A couple of slaps? A few fucking raised voices? He has no appreciation of what he had. He has no idea what it’s like to suffer! Not like I did! Not like me!”
For a moment, Logan was lost for words. He couldn’t imagine it. Wouldn’t. Couldn’t stomach the thought of it. Was it any wonder the poor bastard had ended up like this?
The old floorboards
creaked beneath the detective’s feet, and Lachlan brought the knife around to hold him at bay.
“Fucking stay there! I mean it!” he warned. “Yes. You’re right. I wanted to hurt Bennet. I wanted him to feel like I had. I wanted him to lose everything. His dad. His mum. His whole fucking life. Everything.”
“And Fergus—Kenny—just got in your way,” Logan said. “So you killed him.”
Lachlan ground his teeth together, pushing back against his emotions. “He shouldn’t have changed the plan. We were meant to be a team. We were meant to have each other’s backs. He was meant to be my big brother.”
Logan attempted another shuffled step closer, but the floorboards betrayed him again and a warning look flashed across Lachlan’s face, forcing the detective to stay rooted to the spot.
“I’m sorry, son. I really am. I can’t imagine what it was like, going through everything you did. Living with that. There’s only one person who could possibly understand, and… well, he’s no longer with us, is he?”
Tears raced each other down Lachlan’s cheeks. The knife shook, the point swaying in a figure of eight in front of Logan’s face.
“He… I had to. He wasn’t going to let me… He was going to…”
“Give me the knife, son,” Logan urged, holding a hand out. “Give me the knife, and we can talk. That’s all. We can just sit here and we can talk.”
“Oh, fuck off! You just want me to put it down so you can arrest me!”
“I am going to have to arrest you. I won’t lie to you about that. But, I mean it, son. We can talk,” Logan insisted. “We can take some time, and we can just talk.”
“Don’t lie! Don’t lie to me! Everyone always fucking lies to me!”
Lachlan lunged, thrusting the knife forward, the blade glinting in the twinkling glow of eight gaudy wall lights that probably cost more than Logan made in a year.
Logan didn’t move quickly. He didn’t have to. He’d been waiting for that moment since before they’d entered the room, the knife nowhere near as well hidden by the towel as Lachlan had clearly thought it was.