Human Face

by Aline Templeton

  She remembered Harry slapping her and then accusing her of killing Adam – as if she would, whatever he had done – and she remembered her escape, even her own reasoning for taking the bigger, more comfortable car.

  It was after that everything got confused. There was thick mist, and a mountain – surely she wouldn’t have been climbing a mountain? Then Rosamond, something had happened to Rosamond – and now the tears did come to her eyes. She couldn’t remember properly what had happened to her baby.

  Then there was the other memory – a terrible, shadowy figure that had pursued her. That must be nightmare, surely? But then she’d fallen – that was why she was so sore.

  Now she was in hospital, so the police must have found her. She must have been mad to try to run away; perhaps she’d been in shock after what happened. She needed to talk to the police, explain …

  And then Beatrice remembered the other reason she had fled. Her hand began to shake so that she had to set down her cup.

  She should have gone to them long ago with what she knew. That she hadn’t, made her – what was the phrase? An accessory after the fact, that was it. But it wasn’t like that, really. It was just that she hadn’t permitted herself to think what the implications were of what she had seen; it would destroy everything she had lived for if she was forced to believe Adam was so entirely wicked.

  But he was, wasn’t he? And because Beatrice had so determinedly shut her eyes, another innocent girl had died. Worse than that, while she was upset, she’d told Vicky things she shouldn’t have and even though she’d taken it all back when she realised the implications for herself, she didn’t trust Vicky not to tell the police.

  Even before all this she’d half thought she might confide in the nice inspector. She’d be wise to take her chance to explain everything, before they came to accuse her.

  And she could ask for protection from Harry. He’d always scared her; he was so aggressive, such a bully. She wasn’t going to tell the police what she suspected – indeed, knew in a sort of way, if she’d allowed herself to admit it – because that would involve her, but Harry wasn’t to know that. And she didn’t have the slightest doubt that if he thought she was a danger to him, something would happen to her. Just as it had to Adam.

  The next time the nurse looked in, she said, ‘Please can you get a message to the police that I want to talk to Inspector Strang urgently? It’s very important.’

  Strang opened the curtains the next morning with some anxiety. Everything hinged on the weather; nothing could happen if the storm they’d been talking about had come in more quickly than expected. At least he hadn’t heard the wind blowing.

  There was condensation on the pane and as he rubbed it away he realised it had got very much colder overnight. The sun was barely up, the dawn sky showing fiery streaks of red and purple and the still sea a muddy blue-grey. Each blade of grass along the verge on the road below was distinct, defined by hoar frost, and the outline of the hill above the Lodge on the farther side was crisp as an etching.

  He gave a sigh of relief. They had got a boat to assess the site late yesterday and there should be nothing to stop them getting a diver down today; with the price of hand-dived scallops there was no shortage of experts around.

  Fiona Ross was lying in wait for him as he came into the dining room. ‘What a tragic, tragic thing,’ she said, eyes gleaming with prurience. ‘That poor, poor girl! Who could have believed a thing like that about Adam? He was here quite often, you know, and always the gentleman. And of course, he must have been remorseful, or he wouldn’t have killed himself, would he?’

  It had been, Strang thought, naive to imagine that it wouldn’t be common knowledge by now. ‘Mmm,’ he said, his voice discouraging.

  Impervious, Fiona went on. ‘Will they manage to raise the body today? We had a couple of the coastguard lads in last night and they were saying they were hoping there’d be’ – she hesitated delicately – ‘well, enough to bring in. Where would you be taking it? I wish I could say we’d make a room available but you know – the guests might not like it.’

  ‘There won’t be any need for that,’ Strang said curtly. ‘I wonder if you could bring me toast and coffee quickly, please? As you can imagine, I have a lot to do today.’

  She said, ‘Of course,’ but the look she gave him suggested that in the gentlemanly stakes he came well below Adam Carnegie.

  It was quarter to eight when he finished and stepped outside to see if the police boats had arrived from Broadford. He shivered as the biting air hit him but it was invigorating too, with a sparkling clarity that piqued his throat like the bubbles in champagne. Looking out to sea, he spotted a promising-looking large motorboat rounding the headland at the side of the bay and went back inside to fetch his jacket.

  Sergeant Rab Buchanan was waiting for him on the pier when he came out again. He greeted him briefly and gestured him back on board.

  ‘DCS Borthwick will be arriving later on but I want to take the jeep up to the cliff first to see if they’ve started the operation yet,’ he said as they set off across the bay.

  ‘I think they will have, sir,’ Buchanan said. ‘The officer in charge came in last night and said they were hoping to be on station at first light.’

  ‘Good, good. Sooner the better, before the weather changes.’

  ‘There’s a bit of a blow forecast, unless the wind veers. They’ll get as much done as they can today.’

  ‘Hard to say how much that will be. Anyway, I’ve got a meeting scheduled with the super when she arrives.’

  As they drew in to the jetty below the Lodge, the constable who had been on the night shift was waiting for them, poised for departure at the earliest possible moment.

  ‘Morning, sir, Sarge,’ he said.

  ‘All quiet last night?’ Buchanan asked. ‘Good lad. OK, you can be away to your breakfast. I’ll take over.’

  Beaming, he was into the boat almost before his superior officers had left it.

  Strang walked over to the jeep, parked in front of the house. ‘Keys still in it? Good,’ he said.

  Buchanan climbed in, then said, ‘You’ll want these, sir,’ taking a pair of binoculars out of his jacket.

  It wasn’t much more than ten minutes across the moorland and this time Strang knew where to park, carefully avoiding the old tracks. They’d be bringing up the materials to make casts later on.

  There was quite a brisk breeze blowing off the sea and as they came near the edge, Buchanan hung back. ‘I’m just not that taken with heights, if you see what I mean.’

  ‘Oh, I do – don’t blame you. I’m not sure how good I am with them myself,’ Strang said, but when he looked over the cliff the sight of the coastguard rescue boat below took his mind off the sickening drop at his feet.

  They seemed to have got a line round a rocky pinnacle, mooring on the inside of the ridge of rocks. That was good; it would mean that even if a swell developed they could stay in place, and as he watched he saw a diver, sleek as a seal in his wetsuit, slip over the side. He took out Buchanan’s binoculars and focused in.

  The man was under for no more than three minutes when he surfaced again at the side of the boat. He was holding up something that looked like a jacket; he was having a conversation with one of the men in the boat, who nodded, and at a gesture from him another man in a wetsuit came forward and sat on the edge of the boat, putting on goggles and flippers and an oxygen cylinder.

  So what Strang had seen yesterday was more than a random piece of fabric. With a hollow feeling in his stomach, he watched both men submerge again. He lowered the binoculars. He wasn’t sure how much he wanted to see what poor Eva might have become.

  It took longer than he had thought it would. Perhaps the body had caught on something – indeed, it must have, otherwise it would have been swept away.

  Buchanan came to stand beside him, looking down apprehensively. ‘Have they got anything yet?’

  ‘A jacket, I think.’ As he spoke, there wa
s a disturbance in the water and one of the divers appeared, and then the other. They were raising something between them – something pale and grossly bloated with a little floating fringe of hair, sea-bleached to almost white.

  With a queasy feeling, Strang lifted the binoculars to his eyes again. ‘They’ve got her,’ he said thickly and turned back towards the car.

  Human Face, they had called the charity. It was a sick sort of irony that the human face had been only a mask that concealed the monster beneath. It was as well that Adam Carnegie was dead. If he hadn’t been, Strang would almost be prepared to take care of that himself.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  He hadn’t expected to be able to speak to Beatrice Lacey so soon. Her message that she wanted to speak to him ‘urgently’ reached DI Strang just after he came down from the clifftop and he set off immediately for the Broadford hospital.

  According to the nurse who had shown him to the side ward she was in, her blood poisoning had responded well to intravenous antibiotics and as there were no other major problems it seemed likely she would be discharged later. She did have a fair few bruises to show for her adventures; one side of her face was scratched and she had only just escaped a black eye, but Beatrice was certainly looking better than he had expected after the state she’d been in yesterday.

  When he appeared, she looked flustered and reluctant to meet his eye and for a moment he was afraid that someone had told her about his role in her rescue, but mercifully not. Her embarrassment, it seemed, was linked to a bad conscience.

  And well it might be. She was so keen to purge it that he barely had time to sit down before she began. He listened with a sort of astonished horror to her account of the weak and foolish self-deception that had cost Eva Havel her life.

  ‘It was the time Veruschka went missing,’ she said. ‘I knew they’d quarrelled – I couldn’t help it! They were screaming at each other. She’d found someone else – Murdo John, she said. And naturally Adam was angry – he felt totally betrayed. She was a flibbertigibbet, that girl, very demanding, very headstrong. I never liked her.’

  There was contempt in her voice, a hint of sympathy, even, for Carnegie, but she noticed Strang shifting uncomfortably in his seat and changed her tone. ‘Of course, she’d every right to leave if she wanted. As a matter of fact, I thought she’d be gone when I came back – I’d been in Portree doing an errand for Adam. He’d told me to take an afternoon off, go to the cinema or something, but I’d so much work piling up I didn’t want to, so I came back early. And then—’ She stopped, biting her lip.

  ‘I went to Adam’s flat to tell him I was back – just went round to the French doors when I’d parked my car. He was outside on the patio with the dog – there was a pail of water – he was – he was’ – her voice was so low now that he had to strain forward to hear her – ‘it was covered in blood and he was on his knees, washing it off.’

  An inarticulate sound escaped Strang and she looked up, on the defensive now. ‘Well, I didn’t know! He said there had been a deer, that the dog had chased it and the blood was the deer’s. That’s what he told me. It was only when I realised Veruschka had gone that – well, I wondered. But he said he’d taken her across in the boat and she’d asked to have her cases sent on. And he was the man I loved, the man I had given up everything for—’

  Strang had reproved Livvy Murray for being judgemental, but the words slipped out before he could stop them. ‘So you were determined to believe him.’

  Tears came to her eyes. ‘Yes, I suppose I was. If he was lying about this, then I was – I was nothing. Worse than nothing. It worried me, of course it did, but then time passed and nothing happened and I was able to tell myself I was being silly. Why shouldn’t what he said be true? Then – then when it happened again …You see, I knew Eva had a young man too. I saw him, he was rowing across to her one night, that Daniel Tennant, and they were very lovey-dovey. And she’d been doing some spying as well, going through Adam’s filing cabinet. I don’t know what she thought she was looking for. I wouldn’t let anything wrong go through my books.’

  She paused for a second, then said with a sidelong look at him, ‘Of course, I couldn’t vouch for anything Harry might have been responsible for.’

  Strang could tell she thought she was being very subtle but at the moment he wasn’t going to be diverted. ‘Eva Havel,’ he said. ‘Tell me about her.’

  ‘It was – it was like history repeating itself. I told you what happened when I was coming back.’

  He nodded. ‘You thought you saw Adam when he should have been on his way to Paris.’

  She seized on that. ‘Yes, but then he said he’d caught the plane. So I – I thought I must have been wrong. And the case that was left behind – well, she could just have forgotten it, couldn’t she? That was the thing, you see, Inspector – there was always a sort of reason.’

  ‘So you just fought down your anxieties?’

  ‘Yes.’ She was crying now. ‘I’d told myself he was a good man, a man who did so much wonderful work for the charity – but then when I found out that he was married, suddenly I saw him in a different light.’

  ‘That was important?’

  She wiped her eyes with one finger. ‘I’m not stupid,’ she said. ‘I know I’m fat and plain. But you see, my father was very old-fashioned. He tied up my trust fund so that I could only access the interest, not the principal, until I married. It was just me, you know, because I was a woman. There were no restrictions on my brother, though there certainly should have been.’

  He could hear the bitterness in her voice. ‘So what’s the position with your money?’

  ‘Quentin is my next of kin. I told him that when Adam married me I would give it all to him, and Adam knew that too. Oh, I know he didn’t fancy me the way he did those girls but they were an interest that would pass. I was prepared to wait for the real, true, for ever love – we were lovers once, you know. I could have had his child. It was just, I didn’t.’

  There was real pathos in the way she spoke. Strang had been wondering about the doll he had found; now, with sudden insight, he understood. He hesitated for a moment, then took pity.

  ‘It seems the call from his “wife” was just a hoax. There’s no record that he was ever married.’

  She had been sitting up as she told her story; now she fell back against the pillows as if he’d punched her. ‘He – he wasn’t?’ she said faintly.

  ‘Not as far as we know.’

  Suddenly her eyes narrowed. ‘Quentin,’ she spat. ‘That phone call – it was him who set it up, wasn’t it? Oh God – he didn’t kill Adam, did he?’

  ‘Not as far as we know,’ he said again.

  Beatrice’s face turned a dark, blotchy red. ‘You’re not suggesting I did it, are you? I didn’t, truly I didn’t. All I did was open the door and the dog attacked me. I could never do something like that – the blood—’

  She seemed ready to turn hysterical. ‘We have absolutely no reason to suppose you did, Miss Lacey,’ he said soothingly.

  She gave him an uncertain look but it calmed her down enough to allow him to say, ‘You will be prepared to make a formal statement on the basis of what you’ve just told me?’

  She blew her nose. ‘Oh – yes, I suppose I have to. But you do understand that I didn’t really know – not know what Adam did. Otherwise, of course—’

  He didn’t think he could take much more of this self-justification. He got up. ‘Thank you, madam. You’ve—’

  ‘There’s something else,’ she said. ‘It’s about Harry Drummond. He killed Adam, you know.’

  Astonished, Strang sat down again. ‘Really? You have proof of this?’

  ‘No, no, of course not,’ she said impatiently. ‘But I know he did. He accused me of doing it to cover up that he’d done it himself. He and Adam were having the most dreadful rows over the past few days. I’ve no idea what they were about – it was perhaps about some sort of business thing.’

  Sh
e was being blatantly disingenuous. ‘Business thing?’ Strang prompted.

  ‘Oh, it was nothing to do with me. But if Harry thought poor Adam was going to get him into trouble, he would be totally ruthless, I tell you.’

  Poor Adam! It turned Strang’s stomach. Now she knew Adam hadn’t deceived her about being married, the two dead girls didn’t matter. But Beatrice was going on.

  ‘The thing is, I’m frightened. Of course, as I said, I don’t know anything at all about anything that Harry and Adam might have done, but Harry – well, Harry might think I did. Wrongly,’ she added hastily. ‘And if he thinks I’m some sort of danger to him, he’ll do to me what he did to Adam. I want police protection.’ Reading a refusal in his face, she said stiffly, ‘Speaking as a taxpayer, I think I’m entitled to demand it.’

  He couldn’t take this any longer. He got up, saying coldly, ‘I don’t think you’re in any danger right at the moment, madam. You’re safe enough here and there are police officers everywhere at the Lodge. I’ll send someone to take your statement. Thank you for your cooperation.’

  After all that it was a considerable relief to get out, and he took great breaths of clean fresh air as he went back to his car. Her self-justification, the distortions to protect herself, the carefully calculated admissions – they were all disgusting.

  Beatrice was a sad, pathetic creature, almost tragic in her delusion that buying Adam Carnegie could ever have made her happy, he thought as he drove back to Balnasheil. But she hadn’t genuinely believed what Adam had told her. She’d known perfectly well what he’d done, twice over, but her selfish romantic obsession had been her excuse for wilfully blotting it out.

  And there was nothing at all romantic about the bloated corpse that was even now being shipped round to the concrete cell at the police office.

  As the police helicopter was making its approach to Balnasheil, DCS Borthwick leant forward to speak to the pilot.

  ‘Can you do a circuit above the cliffs there? I want to see what the coastguards are doing. They were hoping to be out at first light.’