by Ann Cleeves
“Jonathan did tell you,” George said slowly, “that Robert was murdered?”
“No.” She was very shocked. “He said there was an accident with a shotgun.”
“It was murder,” George said. “The police are back on Kinness this afternoon, asking questions.” He paused. “I shall have to tell them that Robert was on the hill on Monday morning, watching you. You were in the empty croft, talking to someone.”
“No.” Her hands were shaking and she lit a cigarette. “ I told you at the time. I was on my own.”
“You should tell me. It may have no relevance.”
“No.”
As she sat and smoked she seemed to recover her poise. Despite her refusal to answer his questions George knew that he wanted to prolong the encounter. It was as if she had enchanted him, and he were unable to let her go.
“I have a message for you,” he said, “from Jonathan.”
She waited with polite but wary interest. She was turning the wedding ring round and round on her finger, but gave no other sign of concern.
“He says that he will leave the island as soon as he can get another job. Before that if it makes you happy.”
There was no reaction.
“Does he?” she said. “ I think, you know, that it’s a little late for that.”
She was staying at the hotel and excused herself to go upstairs to prepare to go out. She had arranged to meet a friend, a woman she stressed, who taught music at the high school. There was an exhibition of local art in the museum and they were going together. He watched her walk across the lounge, then poured himself another cup of tea from the ample pot. He seemed unable to leave. He was tied to her.
She was away for longer than he had expected, and he felt foolish, sitting by the dirty plates in the empty room. When she came down the stairs at last, she was dressed in a warm jacket and leather boots. She saw him through the open door of the lounge, but she did not approach him again. She waved and went out. He had the impression that she was running away from him.
He waited until she left the building, then walked to the reception desk. The receptionist was a local girl, buxom and saucy, with a round red face. She grinned at him.
“It’s very quiet here today,” he said.
“You’re telling me. I’ve not spoken to a soul since lunchtime.”
It was a great hardship to her, this solitude.
“As it’s so quiet, I suppose you’d remember all the incoming telephone calls received by your guests.”
“I might.” She was curious but suspicious.
“I’m a private detective,” he said confidentially. “It’s a divorce matter.”
She was enthralled. “ You want to know about the lady you were taking tea with?” She had no hesitation now in talking to him.
“Yes. Has she had any telephone calls since she’s been staying here?”
“I’m not here all the time, of course.” She spoke in a stage whisper, although there was no one to hear. “ I was working last night and there were two calls for her then.”
“Did you take the calls yourself?”
“Yes I did.”
“Do you remember anything about them? Were the callers men or women?”
“They were both men.”
“It wasn’t the same man ringing twice?”
“Certainly not.” She was indignant that he should question her competence at information-gathering. She was obviously skilled at it. It was her way of passing the time. “The voices were quite different.”
“In what way?”
“One was la-di-da. Toffee-nosed English. A bit like the lady speaks. The other was local, an islander. Not from Baltasay, though. From one of the outer isles. I’d say he came from Kinness.”
“Would you?” He nodded. “I see.”
“Is that useful?” she asked excitedly.
“Oh yes. Very useful.”
She was thrilled to have helped him.
After he had left the hotel he wondered if he should have paid her for the information. It had not occurred to him. He thought she would feel that she had been adequately rewarded because her afternoon would pass much more quickly and she would have something to chat about to her friends.
What had he learnt? The toffee-nosed Englishman was obviously Jonathan, but who was the other man with the Kinness accent? Perhaps Alec refused to accept that Sylvia was no longer interested in him. That was possible. She was very attractive.
He walked along the quay past the fishing boats, the big oil supply vessels. The town was busy. Children, just out of school, lingered around the harbour, putting off the time of parents and homework. The move to the high school must be hard for the Kinness children, George thought. They had to face the sudden exposure to the bustle and relative anonymity of the small town without the support of their parents. Did they revel in the freedom or were they dreadfully homesick? He remembered Will’s resentment at being dragged back to Kinness. He at least had been happy to leave the island. Wouldn’t everything have been different if Mary had been allowed out to Baltasay, too? She would have had friends of her own age. More stimulating school work. There would have been more to think about than adult secrets.
George walked to the telephone box by the ferry office and phoned the library to find out whether it would still be open that evening. He had, after all, come to Baltasay to use the library, but it was in the same building as the museum and he preferred to wait until Sylvia had finished her visit to the art exhibition before he went there. He did not want her to see him. A soft-spoken, elderly lady told him the library would be open until eight.
He supposed that he should find somewhere to stay. He could spend the night in the hotel, and he imagined for a moment walking into the restaurant with Sylvia on his arm. It was a pleasant image, but he put it from his mind. He needed to be alone. At random he chose one of the cottages by the harbour, which had a bed and breakfast sign in the garden. A big woman with a flowered overall opened the door to him and showed him into a small square room with a window looking out to sea. The bed was old and high and had hard white sheets. He smiled his acceptance of the room. She relaxed, offered him tea, and when he refused, began a lengthy conversation.
“Would you like supper, then? I’ll be cooking for Jerry, my husband. It’ll be nothing special, but you could have a meal if you wanted. At about half past six …”
It turned out that Jerry worked on his father’s fishing boat. George enjoyed listening to the details of the fishing trips and her domestic life but he began to wonder, after a quarter of an hour, how he could tell her tactfully that he wanted to be alone. Then two children came through the back gate below him, their satchels heavy on their shoulders, knees and shoes scuffed with playground games, and she went downstairs to make hot, sweet tea for them and to cut lumps of sticky flapjack to keep them going to supper.
George sat on the bed, looked out over the sea, and considered the information he had gained that day. He had known for some time that Elspeth was hiding something. She was so tense, so reluctant to discuss her past, and her parents were too protective. Of course she had been recently divorced, but there was something else, too, and her peculiar reaction to the Sikh salesman proved it. Now he had a clue to her secret, and there was a possibility that he could discover what it was. The Woollie Man said that she had been on television. If she had taken part in a chat show or quiz show, there would have been no reason not to admit it. It must, George thought, have been a news item. Nothing else would have provoked that reaction. More specifically she must have been featured on a local news programme. If she was part of national news coverage, the people on Kinness would have seen it. But how can it be relevant anyway? he thought. If Elspeth had managed to keep her secret from the rest of Kinness, surely Mary would never have been able to find it out.
His thoughts returned to Sylvia and her intense shock at learning that Robert had been murdered. Perhaps her secret was more important, and the trip to Baltasay wa
s a wild-goose chase.
Then with a sudden panic he wondered if he had got it all wrong, and if Mary’s talk of a secret was just misleading. There were other tensions on the island. The hostility between the Stennets and Dances smouldered as it had done for generations. There was pressure on land and space. He knew that he was obsessed by Mary’s secret and that the obsession was caused by guilt, because he had not persuaded her to share it.
It was dark. The tide was high and the lights from the town and the boats reflected in the water. He had been on Kinness long enough for the electricity to appear magical. There was a knock on the door. It was opened by one of the landlady’s sons.
“Mum says that dinner’s ready,” the boy said, and he could hardly keep the amusement from his voice because the old man looked so funny sitting there in the dark.
George went to the bathroom to wash his hands, then went downstairs to eat.
He would have welcomed the company of the family—he could hear them talking and laughing in the kitchen to the background of television commercials—but his landlady had laid a table in the dining room for him and he ate alone. So even as he enjoyed the food, theories about the case persisted, and he could not forget it.
His landlady saw him out.
“We don’t lock the door,” she said. “I’ll make you a cup of tea when you come in.”
He walked down the high street towards the library. There were small groups of men talking and laughing. Noise and warmth and men spilled out on to the pavement from a busy bar. He envied the companionable warmth of the people leaning against the bar, and was so convinced that the trip to the library was doomed to failure that he almost gave up and joined them. Why should a library on Baltasay keep copies of mainland papers which were six months old? When he was on Kinness and the Woollie Man with his pedlar’s suitcases and his aeroplane offered the promise of escape, it had seemed quite reasonable. Now the idea was ludicrous. But he walked past the open door of the bar. He was here now and he had to try.
The library was a new building, bought with a grant from an oil company. It was brightly lit, very peaceful, nearly empty. The elderly woman to whom he had spoken on the telephone sat behind the desk. She listened carefully to his request, but as he had expected she could not help him.
“We keep copies of the local paper,” she said, “ for the museum. You’d be welcome to look at those.” Her voice was so soft that it seemed hardly to be human. “ We take the national dailies of course, but we don’t keep them, not for more than a week.”
He said that he would look throuh copies of the weekly local paper, starting three months before and working back, but he knew that it would be no good. The Baltasay Times was a week old by the time it reached Kinness, but everyone took it. If there were any mention of Elspeth in the paper, it would have been noticed and talked about. He needed one of the Scottish papers, based in Glasgow.
The librarian brought the files of the newspaper to him and he sat at a round pine table to read them. The artificial light and the background hum of the central heating reminded him of the office where he had worked before his retirement. The newspapers were a fascinating record of island life and he would have enjoyed giving them more attention, but they contained nothing which interested him.
He took the newspapers back to the desk and the little woman must have sensed his disappointment.
“You don’t want to go further back?” she asked.
He shook his head. He had read copies back to the beginning of the year. For Elspeth’s face to have lodged in the Woollie Man’s memory she must have been on the television very soon before he began his sales tour of the Northern Isles. That, too, would have fitted in with Elspeth’s arrival on Kinness.
It was quarter to eight. It seemed unlikely that there would be more visitors to the library. George felt sleepy, resigned to failure, but he was enjoying the comforting, familiar warmth of the building. Perhaps the librarian wished that he would go so that she could close and have an early night, but she had gone to the trouble of gathering together that week’s national papers for him to look at. He had missed seeing a newspaper on Kinness—no one bothered taking a daily there—so he sat back at his table and prepared to read them.
Elspeth’s face stared out at him immediately and he was astounded. The paper was only four days old. She was on Kinness then. How could she be making news? He looked back at the paper, afraid that he might be mistaken, but it was certainly Elspeth, staring straight at the camera, her hair dragged from her face.
It was the Scottish edition of a daily paper. The headline above the photograph read: CHILD ATTACKER NOT TO BE RELEASED. The article was a report of an appeal judgment. Gordon Bain had been sentenced to five years’ imprisonment in the previous March for ill treating his son. He had appealed against his sentence and the article reported that the appeal had been dismissed. The newspaper seemed to have run a campaign after the original case, calling for an inquiry, and had interviewed doctors, social workers, and teachers at the time of the trial. Now it was using the appeal to renew the campaign.
It was at this point that Elspeth was mentioned. “Mr. Bain’s wife Elspeth was found not guilty in March of assaulting her child. It was said by a psychiatrist for her defence that she had no recognized mental illness but that she was under her husband’s domination. However, it was admitted that she did nothing to prevent Mr. Bain inflicting horrific injuries to the boy. It was only when a violent blow to the head rendered six-year-old Ben unconscious that she took him to the hospital casualty department and revealed what had been happening. We find it most disturbing that on his discharge from hospital little Ben was returned to his mother’s care. We contacted the social services department today to ask what steps were being taken to supervise Mrs. Bain’s care of her child. We were given no adequate reply.”
Once he knew, the thing become obvious. He remembered the boy, Ben, the white, worried, old-man’s face, the old-fashioned deference when he spoke to adults. Molly always said that battered children were unnaturally polite and well behaved. No wonder that Kenneth and Annie had made every effort to protect Elspeth, to prevent her secret from becoming public knowledge. The stigma of being involved in a court case was bad enough, but this was a hundred times worse. Families and children were very important on Kinness.
It occurred to him then that Will must have known what Elspeth had been going through. George remembered that he and Will had been sitting together outside the hall when Elspeth had run out of the Woollie Man’s sale in such distress and that Will had followed her. Will would have been on Baltasay during the trial and may have seen a report of it there. He hoped that Elspeth had been able to talk to Will. She needed to confide in somebody.
It was eight o’clock and the librarian hovered beside his table. She wanted to go home, but she did not want to seem to hurry him. He handed the newspapers to her, but the words of the article remained with him.
“Were they any help?” she asked hopefully.
“Oh yes,” he said politely. “ Very helpful.”
She walked with him to the door and saw him out into the street. How could she do it? he thought, seeing again the white face of the boy and the photograph of the woman in the paper, her hair pulled back, her face naked and exposed to the camera. How could she allow her child to be maltreated? The angry adjectives of the gutter press returned to him—she’s evil, wicked, he thought. Molly would have said that it was wrong to judge. He did not know all the facts. He wished that Molly was with him to explain.
He walked down the high street to the bar he had passed. Inside it was noisy and rough. It made no pretence than to be other than a place to drink. It suited him. He stood at the bar and drank one large scotch after another until closing time. Then, as straight as a sergeant major, he walked back to his landlady’s cottage. He opened the door quietly, and by the time his landlady heard his footsteps on the stairs and came from the kitchen to offer him tea, he was in his own room.
Chapter Twelve
George woke the next morning with the image of Elspeth’s face. He had drunk himself to sleep but he could not forget it. There were household sounds—a grate being riddled, pans, a gurgling cistern. He got up. The weather had changed. There was low cloud and drizzle and he could not see the harbour.
Downstairs the landlady was surprised that he was up so early. He accepted tea from her, but no breakfast, paid her, and left.
The police station was a square building of grey stone near to the quay. It would have been the harbourmaster’s office or a chandlery. It was like all the other square grey houses in the street. At the desk a policeman was reading a newspaper and seemed surprised to see him, too.
“I’d like to see Inspector Johnson,” George said, naming the officer who had come to Kinness.
The constable took his name and asked him to wait. He returned almost immediately and showed George up some stone stairs and into an office.
Johnson stood up and held out his hand. He was clearly ill at ease and embarrassed.
“It’s good of you to come in to see me, sir,” he said. “We missed you on Kinness yesterday.”
He motioned to George to sit down. The next words came out all together.
“I hope I didn’t seem rude when we met on the island,” he said. “I didn’t know who you were then, you see. I read your textbook on interviewing techniques when I was at training school. Very useful I found it.”
George ignored the flattery. He wanted to say that the fact that he had once worked for the Home Office should make no difference. The policemen had known the facts and should have made a sensible and logical reconstruction of events. It’s a pity you didn’t take more notice of my chapter on “listening to witnesses,” he wanted to say. But that would not have been constructive.
“As you seem to have been checking the background of your suspects,” he said, “you’ll know about Elspeth Dance.”