Death on a Longship

by Marsali Taylor

  ‘Where’re you going?’ Anders asked, as I started walking up to the car.

  ‘Busta House.’ Anders was part of this too; he needed to be there at the finish. ‘Will you drive me?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I left the car behind the skip.’

  ‘I will get it.’

  We were doing Favelle’s last journey in reverse. She’d stumbled down to the jetty on the gravel slope we were walking up now, to fall unconscious on the deck and be left there by Gibbie. She’d gone past Magnie’s car, parked where Anders had drawn mine up. It took us less than a minute to drive around the corner to the standing stone, but it must have taken her far longer, alone and in pain, her vision blurred. She’d staggered along this dim road between grass verges without any friendly arm to support her. I almost expected to see her white-faced ghost hauling herself out of the ditch by the standing stone. Here, Kenneth had waylaid her and talked to her of wind turbines and the environment. She’d stalled and promised anything that would get him to go away and leave her to her desperate enterprise: sleeping with a stranger in the hope of a child like Charlie.

  The car bumped along the mile of road to Busta. I wondered if she’d had any misgivings as she’d walked briskly along here towards Stormfugl where she was to meet Anders. Was she naive enough to think her reputation would rise above the scandal, if he decided to kiss and tell? Yes, I thought she probably was. I didn’t think she’d have minded about Ted, either. She’d have told him the child was his, and maybe he’d have believed it.

  Poor Favelle, going to an accidental death. I hoped she hadn’t seen her killer’s face.

  We parked above the House of Commons gargoyles, gaping their distorted beaks in pitted faces. I drew Anders through the car park and down between trees to what had been the main gate, a tall double entrance of iron curlicues that opened on a flagged path leading past the Long Room. The official front door faced the beach where the video tapes had burned in the night and the stone jetty the bicycle had been thrown from. I tugged Anders down a little, so that we’d be below the first wall of the terrace, and we came silently up to the house. Through the window I could see the heads turned attentively forwards. DI Macrae must be standing at the fireplace end, below the portrait of Thomas Gifford of Busta, to lay down the law.

  I eased the front door open and heard Ted’s voice. ‘Are you, Lieutenant, linking this latest outrage with the earlier sabotage?’

  ‘It’s probable they are connected, yes.’

  ‘Perpetrated by somebody who is out to stop the film? The person who sent the letters?’

  I nodded to Anders to follow me, and slid into the Long Room. If Thomas Gifford had come back, he’d have known his salon, for it was lit only by firelight, as I’d hoped, and still furnished in eighteenth-century fashion. There was a polished half-moon table and a mahogany bookcase at this end, and occasional tables and half a dozen easy chairs at the other, old-fashioned chairs with wide, curled arms and upright backs. The air breathed lavender, beeswax, old books; the parquet was slipper-smooth under our feet. Family portraits still glowered down on the present-day visitors: Thomas and his wife, Madam Busta herself, the termagant who’d stolen poor Barbara Pitcairn’s son and set her ghost haunting.

  Nobody turned to look at us. They were all focused on the far end of the room, with DI Macrae facing them in front of the amber light of the peat fire glowing softly in the hearth. He had one elbow on the white Adam mantelpiece, entirely at home, the other hand gesturing as if he’d just made a point. His face was towards Ted, a metre from him in one of the curved-arm easy-chairs. Ted sat very upright, his head tipped back to show off the moulded nose and strong chin. Behind him was Mr Berg, wary and watchful, with his pinstripe suited lawyer on an upright chair at his elbow. Opposite Berg was Michael, the Cavalier poet in his ruffled shirt, dark hair gleaming against the pale brocade. They were sideways on to us. Between us and them were half a dozen rows of upright chairs: the cameramen, the make-up and costume girls, the set design people, the runners. DI Macrae’s eyes flicked up as we came in, and his mouth straightened, but he didn’t speak.

  Immediately behind Michael was Elizabeth’s platinum-smooth head, the only one that was turned to a different angle. She didn’t care what the police had to say. Her gaze was fixed on Ted.

  It was Ted who was speaking. As we arrived he leaned forward. ‘I find that more plausible than that my wife had a personal enemy. Everyone loved her. Your investigations, your interviews, will all bear that out.’ He repeated it like an elegy: ‘Everyone loved her.’

  ‘The burning of the longboat certainly suggests that someone is determined to stop the film being finished,’ DI Macrae agreed.

  ‘I shouldn’t have said how much I wanted to finish it,’ Ted mourned. He looked straight at DI Macrae. ‘We get so many crank letters, and these were so vague. I wish –’ He stopped there.

  Michael leaned forward. ‘But if that’s really true, then we must all of us be cleared.’ There was something slightly stiff about his diction that I recognised now. He’d picked up Anders’ English-speaking speech habits. ‘We’ve all worked hard on the film.’ I sensed the wave of relief that ran through the crew, heard the held-breaths let out in a soft rustle. Only Elizabeth remained tense, her whole attention on Ted. ‘It would have been –’

  ‘Will be,’ Ted cut in. Elizabeth leaned forward slightly. He cleared his throat. ‘Will be a feather in all your caps. I said to –’ His eyebrows drew together as he tried to remember, but my name had gone from his memory. ‘I said, ‘You’ll be putting this on your CV in thirty years’ time, and people will say, ‘Wow, you worked on that movie?’ There are shots I’d have liked, but we can reconstruct them or do without. This movie is going to be finished.’ He gave a wintry smile. ‘If, Lieutenant, you can find the person responsible –’

  ‘Ah, yes, the person responsible,’ DI Macrae agreed. He raised his head and looked evenly round the room. ‘Someone who was there to plant the anonymous letters.’ For a moment I wondered if he too had found the answer, seen the face. ‘There to put the fuse under the rock; there to fire the longship. Now that was within the last hour, so you should have no difficulty in remembering where you were, and who with. Thank you for your co-operation. Those of you who have already given your statement to Sergeant Peterson may go. I’d ask those of you who haven’t to stay behind here.’

  Even in that short time the last of the light had gone, and the moon’s rays were trickling in through the windows, falling like cold sunlight on Michael’s face, icing Elizabeth’s platinum hair. DI Macrae nodded to Sergeant Peterson. Her hand was just on the light-switch when the French door at Michael’s elbow opened, and a chill breath of sea air touched the room. Favelle slipped in from the moonlight outside, and stood there, her eyes fixed on us. Her face was the blanched white of old paper, her eyes hollowed and the lids reddened; her lips were bloodless above her pale trouser suit. There was a heart-beat pause, then she moved on silent feet into the room with us.

  Chapter Twenty

  The moment seemed to last forever. We could hear the sea washing on the beach a hundred yards away as we stared at dead Favelle and saw her expressionless eyes look back. That cold sea-breath stirred the red-gold hair and let it fall again. She took a step towards us. A gasping breath, and then Elizabeth gave a high, thin scream, and dropped in an untidy bundle on the floor. Ted didn’t speak, or move, but his eyes stared in wild horror at the apparition, and I saw the blood drain from his cheeks, leaving his face an unhealthy greenish-brown. Michael stared, then gave a little nod. He knew Maree.

  A long instant, then DI Macrae dropped to his knees beside Elizabeth, ignoring Maree. That broke the spell. Even as Ted rose slowly, as Sergeant Peterson’s hand found the light switch, Maree was pulling off the wig and shaking her own dark hair free. The flood of brightness dazzled for a moment, then illuminated the clown-white pallor, the half-circles of dark shading under the eyes and the frosted lipstick. Maman had do
ne a good job. The entrance had caught them.

  Ted was the first to speak. ‘Maree! Where have you been?’ He paused, swallowed. ‘Did you know – you must have heard –’

  ‘I heard,’ she replied, and the words fell like stones thrown into deep water and left a spreading silence behind them. DI Macrae rose slowly, whole body tensed. Maree turned and looked around the semi-circle, right around, a short, intent look into every face. ‘I heard that one of you in this room killed my sister.’ Her gaze went down to Elizabeth, lying open-mouthed on the floor with legs spread in an ungainly sprawl, came forward to Michael and returned to Ted.

  DI Macrae’s glance flicked across to me. I could read his disapproval but I’d banked on his being too good a policeman to let a chance like this slip. He didn’t speak, just watched Maree and waited.

  Her left hand slipped into her pocket and brought out the envelope I’d handed her that day at the Hams. It was white with a typed address, just the way I’d described it to DI Macrae, as Ted had confirmed the envelopes he’d found had been. Maree looked at it, turned it over in her hand. ‘This is what killed Favelle. This is what made her go along to the longship.’ She opened the envelope, drew the letter out. The lawyer made a movement of protest, as if to take it off her, and was stilled by Berg’s hand lifting.

  It was a lengthy letter, almost a whole page of A4, but she read out only one sentence of it. ‘We confirm, therefore, that the subject is unlikely to be able to father children without IVF procedures.’

  The letter Dad had found in Maree’s pocket, testing an anonymous man’s sperm. No wonder he’d been so angry, so unwilling to explain himself to the police. The letter had said he was infertile.

  I’d been sure Ted hadn’t known about the letter. There hadn’t been time. I’d put it into Maree’s hands, and she’d given it to Favelle. A quick read, then it was thrust into Maree’s pocket. It wasn’t a letter to leave lying around the set.

  He recognised that it was talking about him, though. He must have known he couldn’t father children, although he hadn’t admitted it to Favelle. Maree had told me he’d just insisted that she was at the high point of her career, there would be plenty of time to have a family. He moved forward now, taking the letter from her to read it. She continued as if he hadn’t moved.

  ‘You’d told Favelle you’d been tested and everything was fine. After two years of trying she didn’t believe you, and she got her own test done. That was the result.’ Now she turned to look at Michael, then down the room at Anders. She took a deep breath, ready to mix lies with truth, as we’d worked out, up in Yell. Maree wasn’t going to let Favelle be dragged down with her murderer. ‘She was upset about it – she couldn’t sleep, so she came to talk to me. That’s what she was doing on the road, visiting her sister.’

  The directors all these years ago were right; she wasn’t the actor her sister had been. I hoped the accusation to come would override the lie.

  ‘You didn’t expect her to be out. I was the one who ran every evening. All you had to do was come up behind me on your cycle, stop, hit me hard on the back of the head. Problem solved.’ She took a step forward, so that she was standing over Ted. ‘You meant to kill me, and instead you killed Favelle. You. You killed her.’

  Then there was pandemonium as the lawyer leapt to his feet with vehement protests, and Mr Berg advised Ted to say nothing, anyone could see Maree’s head had been turned by the loss of her sister, and Ted himself just stood there with the letter in his left hand, shaking his head gently and smiling at Maree. ‘Maree, honey, this has been an awful shock to you, so I’m not going to even try to believe you mean that.’

  But his back was rigid, and he didn’t ask the natural question, ‘Why? Why would I want to kill you?’

  I’d heard the answer to that too, floating down from the green field by the standing stone. I’m going to tell her. She has the right to know. I saw him working out that Maree had come back, ready to tell the truth about that conversation, then he smiled again. ‘Honey, we sure were worried about you.’ His eyes went across the room. ‘Michael, I’ll leave you to talk to Maree. Try and get her to lie down, maybe take something.’

  Michael came forward, hand stretched towards Maree’s elbow. She jerked away from him, suddenly uncertain. ‘It’s true! Doesn’t anyone believe me?’

  DI Macrae stepped in then. ‘I think, Ms Baker, it would be better if you came and talked to us in private. These public accusations help nobody.’ His face was grim. ‘You too, Ms Lynch.’

  He paused to murmur something to Sergeant Peterson, and she and the other officer moved smoothly to where Ted was already in discussion with Mr Berg and the lawyer. I hung back to make sure they were all leaving the room together.

  DI Macrae wasn’t happy with us. ‘If you had information then you should have come to the police, Ms Baker.’ Then he cut to the important bit. ‘Have you any proof whatsoever that your brother-in-law was responsible for your sister’s death? Can you explain why he wanted to kill you?’

  ‘I told him,’ Maree said simply, ‘that I was going to have a baby.’

  Not anonymous letters, as I’d guessed and Ted had pretended; it had been much more important news. Maree was pregnant. It was her freedom from being Favelle’s stand-in. She wanted a life of her own.

  Ted had known what it would do to Favelle. She’d longed for a baby to the point of madness. The knowledge that Maree had succeeded where she’d failed would have pushed her over the edge. Maree had to go.

  ‘Favelle wanted a baby,’ Maree said. ‘All these yummy mummies all around her, in every paper – that’s what she longed for, so much that nothing else mattered. She almost had a nervous breakdown over it. They hushed it up, then she tried to steal a baby in a trolley at a supermarket. The mother turned away to get something from a shelf and when she looked back the baby was gone. They stopped Favelle at the door, and the baby wasn’t hurt or anything, but it sure gave us all a fright. That was just before the filming of The Sea Road started. There should have been a child in that, and Ted cut the part. We were all so scared, you know –’

  ‘But you’d have had to tell her,’ I said, ‘about your baby. Yours and Dad’s.’ I thought of the conversation I’d overheard. It’ll tear her apart – and Maree’s reply, I’ve got to tell her.

  ‘I told Ted. I guess that was when he decided I’d got to go. Only –’ Her voice shook.

  DI Macrae nodded. ‘Okay, that’s motive. What about the anonymous letters?’

  ‘There weren’t any,’ I said.

  He raised his brows at me.

  ‘None of the film crew had heard anything about them,’ I said. ‘Not even Michael, and if Maree had really known then he would have known too. Just Elizabeth, and she knew there was something wrong about them. No envelopes, no postmarks, just Ted’s story. Those two he showed us could have been printed yesterday – have you got a test that can tell? I bet they’re no older than two days old.’

  ‘Explain why,’ DI Macrae said.

  ‘Like Maree said, after she’d told him about her baby, he decided she had to go. But he wanted to be clever about it. What we were all meant to think, when Maree was found dead, was that someone was trying to kill Favelle. The classic set-up, that the understudy had been killed by mistake for the star.’ My head was aching; I hoped I was being clear enough. ‘So he wrote some anonymous letters. He told Elizabeth they’d started a while back, and left one for her to find. Stars like Favelle often have stalkers, so that was plausible. But he didn’t want Favelle to feel threatened, so nobody else knew. Okay. Then the next step. The rock.’

  ‘A dangerous trick for throwing dust in our eyes.’

  ‘Well, yes and no,’ I said. ‘That was what made me think. If it was a real saboteur, it was a stupid way to try to sabotage a film. For a start, there was no certainty you’d hit anyone, let alone anyone important, although Ted made a good case for making out that it was aimed at Favelle. But it was Ted himself who made sure that it wouldn�
�t harm anyone. He kept everyone down at the beach until he knew it was about to fall, just to make sure the actors weren’t too close. To make doubly sure he gave Favelle Anders to take care of her, with his seaman’s reactions. Anders wasn’t supposed to be in the film at all. At that point Ted and Favelle should have been walking up towards the old house, arm in arm. Ted placed himself ahead, so he could see the rock going. Once I thought about it, I even remembered that he shouted before the rock moved. There was the bang, then he yelled, ‘Clear set!’ He’d been expecting it.’

  We’d looked at it the wrong way round. The anonymous letters that Favelle never saw, the falling rock that didn’t hurt anyone. They’d been meant to look like attempts on the star, so that when the understudy died it would be a mistake.

  ‘He organised himself a nice alibi,’ I said, ‘up on Ronas Hill. James and Michael worked the cameras, and he was director, roving between them, and taking footage with the hand-held. He had his fold-away bike in the back of the minibus.’ One of his first films had been as a long-distance cyclist, and he’d done all the stunts himself. He’d have done the ten miles between Ronas Hill and Brae in unexpectedly little time. ‘As soon as it was dusk, he took it out, pedalled fast to the Busta road, and waited with a stone in his hand for Maree to come along on her evening run.’

  He just hadn’t known that Maree had quarrelled with Dad and gone to Yell; that Favelle had taken advantage of his absence to go to Anders.

  ‘Then,’ I said to DI Macrae, ‘he saw you searching Khalida. Well, I’d no motive to kill Favelle. You were arguing that I’d meant to kill Maree – that I’d made the same mistake that he had, killed the star for the understudy, and he had to stop you thinking along those lines. He produced the letters, then he came to set me up.’

  ‘To set you up?’ Maree echoed.