She shakes her head. “Too much wine. I guess I forgot. I didn’t even take my makeup off.” Two empty wine bottles are still sitting on the table between us, underlining her point. “Why were you up? And why did you go into that room anyway?” she asks suddenly.
“Fiona woke me up.”
Fiona lifts her head at this and looks at me expressionlessly. “What?”
“You came into my room—don’t you remember?” She’s still looking at me. Not a flicker of emotion has crossed her face. “I don’t know why. But it woke me up.”
Carrie looks at Fiona. “Did you?” she asks hesitantly.
“I dinnae think so,” Fiona says thoughtfully. Her head is tipped, and her eyes are looking off to one side, as if she’s trying to remember. Or imagine. “But . . .” She shrugs. It’s the most expression I’ve seen from her since she stumbled onto the landing after my screaming. “I cannae think why I would have. Granted I’m never the most reliable on this stuff, but usually I actually have the memories, I just cannae tell when they’re from. Maybe with the wine, though—”
“You did,” I insist. “You were wearing Carrie’s T-shirt . . .” I trail off. She is wearing Carrie’s T-shirt, but this one is maroon, not white, and under it she has her own jodhpurs, not black jeans. If she’s playing me, she’s a better actress than Carrie, even.
“Maybe you dreamed it,” says Carrie gently. She’s using the same tone as after the flies incident. My internal screaming grows louder. “You were drinking too. Maybe you—”
“I didn’t dream it,” I say quietly. Carrie flinches. Fiona looks from her to me and back again. I say it again, louder. “For fuck’s sake, I did NOT dream it.”
“Ailsa, calm down—”
“Did I dream the skull? You guys saw that, right? You get that somebody crept into this house—my house—and put a skull, a human skull, in the middle of a bed? You do understand that? So, no, I haven’t been fucking dreaming. She”—I’m pointing at Fiona now, which is incredibly rude, but under the circumstances, I feel a right to throw away certain social conventions—“she came into my room and woke me up, she said it was the wrong time, whatever the hell that means, and then she left. It was freaky enough that I got out of bed to check you were okay, Carrie, if you must know.” I’m so angry I’m almost shaking. Fiona has reached out a hand and placed it on Carrie’s forearm. Carrie won’t meet my eyes. I look at Fiona. “I knew I wouldn’t sleep until I knew where the hell you were, so that’s why I checked that room.” Neither of them are saying anything. “Why did you take an upstairs room, anyway?” And why did you change out of the white T-shirt?
Fiona pauses almost imperceptibly, then shrugs. “No particular reason.” Despite my stare, she won’t hold my gaze. It’s the first thing she’s said that doesn’t quite ring true.
There’s a very long silence. I can’t tell what Carrie is thinking. Certainly what I’ve just said doesn’t qualify as civil. I drop my head and rest my eye sockets on the heels of my hands, blocking out the light. I wish I could block out more, but I have to lift my head. “It doesn’t matter how I found it anyway. The point is that it’s there.” Carrie, Fiona, Ben, Ali, Jamie, Piotr, Glen, Callum, Morag, Jean, the locksmith . . . “Who put it there and when?”
“And who is it?” adds Carrie. “I mean, who was it?”
They both look at me, and I know what they are thinking, because I’m thinking it too, but it’s ludicrous. “It could be anyone. There’s no point in speculating.” My voice sounds brittle. I feel brittle.
“Of course,” says Carrie quickly. She’s pulled her feet up onto her chair and is hugging her knees. If anything, she’s even paler now. Fiona is looking at me with a faint frown, as if she’s trying to solve a quadratic equation in her head. In a transparent change of topic, Carrie adds, “You know, I’ve been trying to remember, and I’m not at all sure that I’ve been in that room since the first day we got here.”
“Me either. Though I suppose Callum might have been in there yesterday.” Of course Callum shouldn’t be on the list.
“I’ll ask him,” offers Fiona.
“Let me know. I’ll call the police in the morning.” There’s very little emotion in my words. I may have run out.
“Aye,” says Fiona, then stops.
Carrie looks across at her. “What?”
“It’s just . . . do you think you could maybe not tell the police I was here?”
“What? Why?”
She has two spots of color in her cheeks and she’s looking straight ahead. “I dinnae have the best history with them. I was into some stuff as a teenager—”
“What kind of stuff?” I interrupt.
“Ailsa!” exclaims Carrie, but I won’t be deterred.
“What kind of stuff?”
“Drugs,” says Fiona succinctly. “I was going through a lot, apparently”—her lips twist ruefully—“and the drugs were . . . escapism. Or so the therapist told me.”
“And you had run-ins with the police?”
She nods. “I got arrested a few times. Possession, never dealing. Breach of the peace a couple of times.” She looks straight at me now. “The police will have to interview Callum, which means they will have to alert the social services.”
“Why will they have to interview Callum?” asks Carrie.
“Because of the bones under your bed,” Fiona says, but she’s still looking at me.
“But we don’t know—”
“Yes,” I say quietly. “I rather think we do now.” And then I remember Fiona’s expression, only last night, when Carrie suggested the bones weren’t human. Fiona has always thought they were human.
“Please dinnae tell the police I was here,” says Fiona quietly. “Please. It just . . . It doesnae look good. The ex-druggie single mum too bladdered to get herself home . . . They’ll tell the social services, and then I’ll be on their list, and then . . .”
“But it wasn’t like that,” protests Carrie. “We’ll tell them it wasn’t like that.”
Fiona shakes her head. “Better to say nothing at all.” She shivers uncharacteristically. “I couldnae bear to lose Callum.”
Carrie’s hand flies to her mouth. “What? You wouldn’t . . . Surely they . . .”
Fiona shrugs. “We were on the list before. Callum rolled off a bed as a baby. The system is stacked against you; you wouldnae believe it unless you’ve experienced it. It took years to get through that.” Her fatalistic matter-of-fact delivery is somehow more effective than any emotional outburst might have been.
“Then of course we won’t,” Carrie says staunchly. “If you don’t want us to, of course we won’t. Will we, Ailsa?” There’s a hard steel underneath her words as she turns to look at me. She repeats herself, softer, but somehow with more emphasis. “Will we, Ailsa?” Her gray eyes are fixed on mine unrelentingly.
“Of course we won’t,” I agree reluctantly, over the memory of Jean’s words: It’s a wonder they’ve allowed her to keep that wee boy at all. I glance at Fiona, and for the briefest of moments I could swear I detect a brief flash of triumph. But her expression sags into one of heartfelt relief and the instant is gone.
“Then you should probably go now,” Carrie says to her. “So that we can say you weren’t here. If you’re okay to drive.” I look at my watch. How can it only be half past two?
“I should be fine now,” says Fiona, and she yawns, then drains her mug. “I’ll go grab my bag.” She looks across the table at me. “I’m sorry, Ailsa.” I lift a hand off the table in faint acknowledgment, though I’m not sure what she’s sorry for. Carrie follows her out of the room to help gather her things.
When she’s finally gone, Carrie and I sit in silence and drink some more tea and the names run on a loop in my head. Not Carrie, never Carrie. Nor can I fathom a motivation that would fit for Jean, the locksmith, Glen or Piotr, and Morag might ha
te me, but she can’t drive, so she couldn’t even get here. It’s becoming a very short list: Fiona, Ben, Ali, Jamie. Or some nutcase stranger I haven’t even met yet. “I’m sorry I lost my cool, Carrie,” I say finally.
She shakes her head. “Don’t worry about it. You were pretty freaked out; no wonder you were a bit . . .” Her voice seems to run out of steam.
“I’m still freaked out, if I’m honest. I don’t know how we can sleep after that.”
“Me neither. Maybe Fiona will have more luck, in a different house.”
“Maybe. Though she didn’t seem that freaked out.” Could it be that she was so calm about the skull because she put it there? The most anxious she had been was when she spotted that I caught a whiff of smoke on the second-floor landing. I expect it will probably irk me enormously later to think she must have been smoking in my house without asking for permission—which I would have refused—but at the present time it hardly seems important.
“Cool head in a crisis,” yawns Carrie. “A good quality.” She glances across at me. “Are you . . . are you starting to come round on her?”
“Yes,” I say. “A bit.” And Carrie smiles. I’m not lying, exactly; it’s just that I’m still splintered. There’s the Ailsa who had a nice dinner with Fiona and Carrie, who appreciates Fiona’s forthright company, and then there’s the Ailsa who can’t do that. The Ailsa with a list of names in her head, the Ailsa who watches.
* * *
• • •
The police are here.
They’ve been here all morning; three of them, picking through the Manse, poking into rooms, as if they half expect the rest of the skeleton to leap from a closet and dance a jig, headless and one-handed. The bones from under the bed are human, so very human in fact that it apparently took the forensic department mere seconds to identify them as such. And so, I don’t actually have to call the police after all, because they turn up at my door before I even have the chance.
It’s a Detective Chief Inspector Something-or-other who’s evidently in charge, which he signals by leading the conversation on the doorstep. He’s a tired-looking man in an ill-fitting gray suit, perhaps a little shy of six feet. He starts to explain what department he’s with or some such detail, but I interrupt. “We found more.”
“More?”
“Bones. Well, one more, to be exact. A skull.”
He scratches his chin with a thumb. “You found a skull in your house.” The weak morning sunlight finds some freckles on his nose.
“Yes. Last night.”
“Right,” he says faintly. Then, “Where?”
“In one of the spare bedrooms.” I step back. “You’d better come in.”
“I would think so.”
And so I explain, and then I show the detective and his two underlings the bedroom, where we all stand in silence in the doorway for a moment and appreciate the macabre art that is presented by the sharp white of the skull grinning from its pride of place on the navy bedspread.
“Someone put it there, guv,” comments one of the underlings. “Like, on purpose.”
His boss surveys him with the merest hint of an eyebrow raise. “No kidding,” he says shortly.
“This used to be my bedroom.” Standing here, surveying the space, I’m suddenly sure of it. My small single bed was against the wall over there. I could see the door without moving my head on the pillow . . . Now that I understand the geometry of it, other pieces of furniture are growing in my mind. There was a chest of drawers, and a toy box, and—
“Miss Calder?” The detective is watching me quizzically.
I shake myself. “Sorry. It is . . . real, isn’t it?” I’ve had all night to think. One of my more hopeful scenarios involved this being some kind of prank, the skull merely a prop. But Carrie, Fiona and I had looked at it carefully after our post-discovery tour of the Manse. It looked very real to us.
The detective turns and looks at me with eyes too washed-out for the color to be distinguishable. “We’ll see,” he says. “Would you mind perhaps waiting in the kitchen while we go through some standard procedures?”
I leave them to it, suddenly extraordinarily exhausted. My guess was right: neither Carrie nor I could sleep after Fiona had gone. I’ve already been up for hours and it’s not even half past nine. At least I used some of that time to shower and dress, so I was clean to greet the police officers. Sometime later I’m leaning against the countertop in my oh-so-yellow kitchen nursing a lukewarm cup of coffee when the detective comes to find me. “Miss Calder? I wondered if you could perhaps go over again how you came to find the bones?”
“Which ones, Detective . . . ? Ah, I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten your name.”
“Laws,” he says. “Do you want to sit?”
“No, I’m fine.” I feel simultaneously beyond exhaustion yet awkwardly restless. I don’t want to sit.
He stays on his feet, too. “Shall we start with the first find?” I sigh. “I’m sure you’ve been through this before—”
“Twice actually. Three times if you count when I actually handed them in yesterday.” He spreads his fingers, palm upward. I’m not sure what the gesture is meant to convey. “The fourth time is a charm, I suppose?” When he doesn’t react, I launch into the same explanation I’ve given before, and he listens without looking at me or taking notes in the notebook he has at the ready. He’s probably only a few years older than myself, but he’s a faded man, I find myself thinking, with his pale skin and lean face and the faintest of red hints in his nondescript hair.
“And Callum is Callum McCue?” he asks. There’s a hint of a lilt in his voice but he’s not Scottish. Welsh, I would bet, if I had to pick.
“Yes.” I know it’s futile, but I try anyway. “You won’t have to speak to him, will you? He’s only seven. I bet he’s been having nightmares anyway without having to relive it all over again.” All I can see is Callum’s pinched white face, full of determination and dread.
He looks at me properly for what feels like the first time. “You’re fond of him, then.”
“I challenge anyone to meet Callum and not end up a fan.”
He smiles. There’s no wattage in it, but the intent is there. “We will need to speak to him, I’m afraid, but don’t worry, we have staff trained for this. They know how to tread gently.” I don’t say anything, though I rather doubt the staff are trained to deal with the fury of Glen if they upset his beloved grandson. Like a coward, I was enormously relieved when it was Jamie who came to collect Callum after his fateful discovery. Detective Laws considers my expression for a moment, then goes on. “You said it’s your sister that’s using the master bedroom?”
“Half sister. Yes.” There didn’t seem any point in her missing her rehearsal; I convinced her to head off to Edinburgh this morning. In truth I’m hoping the work will take her mind off all of this.
“We’ll need to speak with her too.” He pauses. “Which half?”
I must be tired; it takes me a moment to work out what he means. “Oh. Same mother.”
“Karen Innes, the painter.” It’s not a question.
“Yes.”
“I hear she died recently. My condolences.” I still haven’t worked out the socially acceptable response, so I incline my head and fold my lips in what I hope reads as gracious acknowledgment. Though maybe I ought to double-check that in the mirror sometime. He leaves a respectful pause before continuing. “I suppose that makes your father Martin Calder?”
It can’t be merely local knowledge, since he’s not from here. He’s done his homework. “Yes.”
“He’s still missing, correct?”
He knows it’s correct. I don’t bother to confirm it. “Is this relevant?”
“Would you be willing to give a DNA sample for our investigations?”
“I . . . What?” Now I’m staring at him, at his bleached eyes se
t in skin that seems paper-thin, marked with faint crow’s-feet. He’s lost weight recently, I note with one part of my brain. Perhaps he’s been ill. Perhaps he’s still ill. But another part of me is computing his DNA question. “You think the bones . . . You really think it could be my father?” Hearing it out loud doesn’t make it any less ludicrous.
He shakes his head. “I don’t think anything. But we do have some bones of a person unknown found in the last known address of a missing person. I’d be thought stupid if I didn’t at least consider it.”
“So, what, you think he’s been, I don’t know, under the bed for twenty-seven years?” I shake my head in disbelief. “With cleaners and rental tenants merrily passing through the building? It’s just not feasible.”
“Well, no,” he concedes, “obviously not under the bed the whole time. Or on top of it . . . But like I said, I don’t think anything.”
“That’s not feasible, either.”
My deliberately caustic tone earns a small lift of the corners of his mouth. “It’s not helpful if we alight on a theory too early. It leads to a fixed mind-set, and then crucial clues can be overlooked.” He raises his shoulders in the smallest of shrugs. “Or so the procedures manual says.” It’s possible that there’s a very dry sense of humor lurking within Detective Laws.
“How long before you know?” I ask abruptly.
He doesn’t have to ask what I mean. “It takes five to seven days to get the DNA results back. Depends on how busy the lab is.” He pauses, and fixes me with those pale eyes. Pale blue, perhaps. It’s hard to tell. “We’ve been told to expect the finger bones to be those of a male, though. It’s not an absolute confirmation, by any means, but men tend to have longer, thicker finger bones.”
“Oh,” I say faintly. I try to think of something else to say, but my head is filled with my father’s skeleton, scattered throughout the rooms of the Manse as if in some kind of macabre Easter egg hunt. I’ve never imagined a version of my father’s life that could have led to that.
The Missing Years Page 24