She went home with a relatively clear conscience.
All was familiar, warm, dry and homely. Even the Range Rover seemed pleased to be home. Minka seemed happy to see her. Pippa was genuinely ecstatic, fawning around her in a crouch and singing a dog song. June made at least pretence of pleasure, though Honey’s return would put an end to her monopoly of all the privileges of surrogate motherhood. As Honey had hoped, there was a white rectangle placed in the geometrical centre of the desk in the study. She would have liked to open the envelope straight away but she was tired, she had been cold and she felt less than fragrant. She took a cup of tea upstairs and enjoyed a shower and a change into fresher and less formal attire. When she came down again, much refreshed, the usual time for their evening meal was only an hour or so distant, so she felt quite justified in pouring herself a medium-sized gin. The only bottle of tonic seemed to have gone flat so she mixed her drink with an assortment of fruity mixers. The result turned out to be delicious but she was sure she’d never quite manage to repeat it.
She had run out of excuses for delay. She carried Minka off to the study. June’s displeasure was marked by a clashing of pans from the kitchen.
If there had been any pleasure of anticipation it had been stretched past breaking point. As she picked up the envelope, she realized that she had been procrastinating because she knew that what was to come could only be a harrowing read. These would be the last words from a girl who had suffered but did not know that she was about to die.
Honey picked up the outer envelope. It had taken very little time for the junk mail marketers to put the girl, under her alias of Harriet Benskin, on their lists. She was invited to buy plants at a garden centre and to attend a symposium on timeshare holiday homes. Below a free sheet of useful local numbers and addresses there was a second envelope, which had been postmarked Inverness, addressed to Harriet Benskin in a familiar hand and endorsed: ‘To await collection’. The stamp seemed to have been steamed from some earlier correspondence and glued in place using flour and water, but it had been accepted. Honey, carrying Minka, went for her bag and found a pair of paper gloves. She settled with the baby on her knee and slit the envelope.
Inside were several sheets of typing paper, closely written on in the same hand and clipped together. But at least, Honey thought, it was a clear hand, as quick to read as poor type.
*
If all is well, I shall burn this. Or perhaps use it as the basis of a novel. But whoever gets their hands on this should know that this is the second part of the story. Part One is or was in an envelope taped to the back of the rather bland and totally mystifying picture in the hallway of the YWPA hostel in Edinburgh. Read that first if you can.
I had been left in the care of a man they called ‘Jimmy’. I still don’t know his real name. Given the circumstances, such caution seems excessive. He sounds Glaswegian, and every man in Glasgow is addressed as ‘Jimmy’. His manner was noncommittal and unemotional. I had the feeling that I represented a parcel and he was the postman. I found this disquieting, as if he were a gaoler, although he didn’t keep a close guard on me. I gained the privacy to finish off Part One of this biography by insisting, with my tongue firmly in my cheek, that no man was going to watch while I packed my more intimate garments. Believe it or not, and to my amazement, he took this seriously, looking abashed, and waited out on the landing.
Later, I could have run away if I’d wanted to but I had nowhere to go and I had arrived of my own free will. Jimmy carried my meagre luggage out to a Volvo, large and nearly new; it had less than 10,000 miles on the clock. I wasn’t given a chance to speak to anybody. As I left the room I gave a carefully anxious glance at the dressing table, where I had deliberately disarranged Dotty’s papers slightly. He took the hint and went into the room to check that I hadn’t hidden a note among the papers, which gave me time to hide Part One behind the picture. As soon as I settled in the – very comfortable – passenger seat, we were off.
Jimmy was and is a thickset man with, as I have said, a strong Glasgow accent, but like most Glaswegians, if you disregard the occasional slang, he speaks English that is no worse than that of the common man from any other part of Britain – in fact, probably better. He was almost certainly good looking once except for the port wine stain that covers most of one cheek and part of his forehead, though I never saw it until later. I saw him notice the similar stain beside my eye and thought that there was a slight softening of his attitude, though I couldn’t guess why. His face looks battered, as if most of the bones had been broken at one time or another, and he has a scar down the unstained side from ear to chin. He is altogether tough looking but, studying his features behind the scars and the stain, I’m sure that he must have been good looking, almost handsome, before he got knocked about. He is neatly but not expensively dressed and looks and smells clean. His luggage, I noticed, was three times mine and took up a large suitcase and a smaller one. There was also a carton of food. He seems to have total self-confidence and yet he’s terrified of girls. He told me later that he was brought up in a large family of all sisters with a strict mother and no father. Even the cat, he said, was female. I suppose that that could do it. Followed by a rejection or two, it could certainly have that effect. He handled the big car confidently and I soon managed to ignore the liberties he took with the Highway Code. He was a good enough driver, and familiar with that car, to get away with it. I just hoped that we would not meet up with any other drivers with the same determination to grab the right of way.
We left Edinburgh through Barnton and went over the Road Bridge. When I asked where we were going, he began, ‘See you, Hen,’ and then he shrugged. ‘It’s no me joab to tell yeh,’ he said, ‘jest ta keep ye oot o any hassle, but, man, you’ve eyes in yer heid.’ That was true enough. I’ve lived my life in a small part of Scotland but I was taught geography at school and the roads are well posted. He seemed to know his way around. We went through a corner of Perth and got on to a road that went on and on, escaping from suburbia and getting into wilder and wilder country, with bits of dual carriageway and big, bald hills. Inverness was somewhere up ahead and the distances to it were getting smaller and smaller.
After an hour on the main road (the A9 it said on the signs) I came to a belated realization that, if I were the victim of an elaborate plot to dispose of me permanently, I had made it foolishly easy for the plotters. A few minutes later, however, he turned off the main road and pulled in to the parking space beside a rural pub. Again, I was reassured. Surely he would neither have bothered to feed me or have allowed us to be seen together so publicly – and in front of the security camera of an adjacent post office – if his intentions were hostile.
*
The car must have been full of fuel when we set off because I noticed that it was still over the quarter. The daylight was fading and he switched on the car’s lights. We brushed past Inverness and crossed another bridge, almost the clone of the Edinburgh one. From the signposts I could see that we were pointed towards the absolute north and if we went too far we’d fall off the edge into what I think would be the Pentland Firth, but only a little way past the bridge he turned off suddenly to the left and turned off again to the right and when we cleared some houses we were running along the shore, almost in the water, with Inverness on the other side of the Firth and the land rising on the right with some fields and a lot of trees.
I had read about the countryside and had even seen it from the windows of trains and buses. On our way from Edinburgh we had mostly travelled between those big round hills. Now that I was to make its acquaintance at close quarters, I studied the passing scene with greater interest. This was more like the sort of scenery that I had seen from the bus windows nearer home. There was a tranquillity about the fields and hedgerows which pleased me and no animals seemed to be in a hurry to go anywhere. After the bustle of city life and the stresses of the last few days, I thought that I could come to terms with it. Tranquillity shouldn’t be boring if y
ou have an active brain. Being of an analytical turn of mind, I looked more deeply into the scenery and thought that I could detect a relationship between the natural features and the pattern superimposed by man, like the printed pattern on well designed clothes. I could not yet understand it, but I knew that it was there.
Jimmy kept referring to some handwritten instructions and a roughly drawn map. We passed one or two scattered houses and a caravan park. Then he swung right and we bumped uphill on a very rough track between trees and a hedge. We came to rest at last in front of a small cottage that, even in dusk and moonlight, looked better kept than its surroundings.
I was halfway relaxed, because it had seemed a long way to bring me if they meant to do me a mischief. I tensed up again, because this might have been a good place for dirty work – he could have knocked me on the head and dumped my weighted body in what I found out later was the Beauly Firth. I looked around for a weapon to use if he came at me with violent intentions, but the log beside the door was too heavy for me to handle and the car’s tools must have been locked in the boot.
I was wasting my adrenaline. Perhaps I was being paranoid, fleeing when nobody pursued me. He took the key from a hiding place beside the door and let us in. There were two bedrooms and he gave me the better one, which wasn’t even very damp. It seemed that cooking was my responsibility, but that seemed a small price to pay for safety and a cash reward. The bungalow smelt musty, as though it had stood empty for several weeks. I guessed that it was kept for letting in the summer. He made sure that water and electricity were turned on and he turned up the heating.
I had lived my life until then in towns where water came out of the tap, electricity out of the socket and whatever went down the drain vanished magically and forever. With so much around me that was new and strange, I began to take an interest in what made it all tick. From the sound that accompanied any running of the taps, I guessed that the water was pumped from a well.
The bungalow was clean and devoid of personal trappings, which confirmed that it was kept for letting; indeed, the card of a letting agent was pinned up in the kitchen. The bookcase contained mostly books about bird species, so it was a fair guess that the tenants were usually birdwatchers. I had heard that such eccentrics existed. I suppose that it could make an interesting pastime, though the ability to say, ‘There goes the lesser spotted doogle-whiffler,’ may be overrated. There was no telephone, not even any telephone outlets, so presumably any tenant was expected to have the use of a mobile phone and the single overhead line that arrived via a row of poles must be the electricity supply.
Unpacking, I decided that the box of supplies had been purchased by a woman. A man might have bought the basic foodstuffs but would have been unlikely to have thought of the condiments and would surely have forgotten washing powder. I stowed the perishable food in a fridge that was already cooling down. A wall cupboard contained a small safe with an electronic lock and neatly handwritten instructions for programming the lock to my own choice of combination. I stowed my money in it and set the combination to my date of birth.
Outside, there was a strange smell in the air, which I identified at last as being a combination of wild nature, sea air and an absence of pollution. The constant noise of traffic had been replaced by the occasional sound of a distant car and the cry of what Jimmy said were gulls overhead.
After we had fed and washed up, I was less certain about feeling safe. This time, however, it was not the threat of being disposed of on behalf of the rule-bending MP, but the likelihood of Jimmy thinking he could take advantage of a vulnerable young woman in the middle of nowhere.
I had palmed a sharp vegetable knife from the kitchen and hid it up my sleeve. But we watched a silly programme on a very small TV and I slipped away to bed. There was a lock on the door but no key for it, so I lay for a while with the knife near my hand, only hearing the sound of the telly. Then it was switched off. I was still waiting for Jimmy to come and try his luck when I was suddenly asleep, though I didn’t know it.
I slept deeply in my soft, double bed and awoke still alone. From the signs, I had been alone all night and had not rolled on to the knife. The cottage was beginning to seem like home, as though everywhere else was distant memory or even a dream.
Jimmy had been complimentary about my cooking, so I made breakfast. His flattery was not aimed at avoiding his share of domestic duties, because he undertook the washing and tidying. Nor was he incapable of cooking, because later he made a very good Spanish omelette.
He had washed on our arrival and that’s when I found out about the port wine stain. He’s sensitive about it. There’s no reason why other people should be so fascinated by facial disfigurements, but they certainly are. I suppose it’s a hangover from primitive superstitions about being marked by God or something. Nor is there any good reason why we sufferers should be sensitive about it, but we are. Jimmy had his covered with concealer make-up but he had washed it off and then he must have found that he hadn’t brought any with him. He asked me if I had any. I had to say that I don’t use the stuff and if I did it would be the wrong colour for him. I have a similar stain – a haemangioma, the doctors call it – but mine’s smaller and there’s no point trying to cover it up because of the raspberry-like growth at the edge of it. So that’s one thing we have in common, marked faces to attract the stares of the rude and inconsiderate.
Chapter Fourteen
A phone call brought Honey back to the present with a jump. This was followed by the homecoming of Sandy, who looked in at the study door. ‘This is getting to be a habit,’ he said. ‘I take it that it’s the second instalment of your dusky maiden’s story.’
Honey nodded sadly. ‘Second and I rather think the last. The story seems to be winding towards its tragic climax. We found her body just about where we expected, in a rental cottage.’
‘That’s too bad,’ Sandy said quietly.
‘It certainly is. The super in command, Largs by name, got my statement and then told me to go and bowl my hoop. He’s a very rugged-looking man with a scowl that you could use to fry eggs, but I liked him in spite of myself. He promised to keep me advised of any fresh developments. I took that with a pinch of salt, because it’s the kind of thing that one says in order to get an unwelcome visitor out of one’s hair, but blow me down if I didn’t just have a phone call from him. The PM report may not be available for a day or two, but rather than risk losing any DNA evidence the pathologist took some quick swabs. He’s of the tentative opinion that she was killed during the sex act.’
There was a tense moment of silence. ‘No comment,’ Sandy said.
‘Very wise of you. Whatever you said would be wrong and I’ve said it all, from “What a shame!” to “What a way to go!” Mr Largs has identified the owner of the cottage, but it seems to have been rented by nominees and he’s still trying to find out who was behind them. In Part Two – this one – she mentions stopping for lunch under the eye of a security camera, so he can try to get hold of the image. Go and freshen up and you can join me.’
She resumed her reading.
*
The kitchen was small, so that wherever I was in it I found myself looking out of the window. It was a bright, clear morning. The view was partly cut off by a hump in the field but, once I had got used to the absence of people and cars and buildings, it was interesting and just as constantly changing as a city street. When I came to notice it, life was mostly represented by the birds. Without thinking about it or looking very hard, I had assumed that there were, at the most, half a dozen different varieties, but with nothing much else to look at I soon realized that there were many hundreds of birds in twenty or thirty varieties, all with different lifestyles. I began to understand why people might enjoy learning about them.
The water stretched about a mile to the hills on the far side and much further to Inverness away on my left. Over the water, large birds flew, often in formation, like planes doing a fly-past. Nearer, there were smaller bir
ds.
The only food that had been left in the cottage was in a large glass jar half full of peanuts. Outside there was what I took to be a bird table and a hanging wire container. Putting together the bird books and the nuts, the penny dropped at last. I put some bacon scraps and crumbs on the table and filled the wire-mesh thing with nuts and I was hardly back in the kitchen before what seemed to be hundreds of birds were squabbling over the goodies – mostly chaffinches, Jimmy said, but there were tits of all sorts. From one of the bird books I managed to identify several of them.
Some day, I told myself, I would be the mistress of a little house like this, far from the crowds and smoke, and I’d watch the birds and know them all by name. It was the first time I’ve ever looked at the future with anything like hope. Until now, it has been enough to have survived with my soul more or less intact.
*
Honey sighed. Sandy, rejoining her in a freshened state, caught the sigh. ‘The girl seems to have been approaching a sort of happiness,’ Honey explained.
‘I understand. It always seems worse when somebody happy gets killed.’
Honey looked at him in surprise. Sandy was not often given to perceptive thoughts about mortality or, if he was, he kept them to himself.
They settled down together and carried on reading.
*
Jimmy was sitting at the kitchen table, reading a tabloid paper that he had brought with him. The purple stain was turned away from me again. Indoors was totally boring; I came back to my room, the one place where I could be alone. He seemed to accept that a girl needed privacy for doing ‘girl things’. I had brought away some plain paper and a good pen and I began to write this instalment of my autobiography. Whether anyone will ever see it I don’t know, but writing it down is sort of cathartic and helps me to see myself in something like a true light.
In Loving Memory Page 10