The Missing Years

by Lexie Elliott

  Laws eyes me carefully, then goes on diffidently, “There hasn’t been time for any analysis on the skull yet, of course. It will take some time to know if it’s even from the same person.” He looks like he’s waiting for me to say something, but nothing springs to mind. He has smile lines, deep enough for the skin to be even paler within them, etched around eyes that don’t look like they have smiled for a very long time. After a moment he goes on. “And Carrie was the only one here when you found the skull?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did you do last night?”

  I talk him through the evening, or a version of the evening. A version of the evening that has Fiona leaving before any skull can be discovered.

  “How much did you have to drink?”

  He manages to make it sound like a casual question rather than an accusation, but nonetheless, I have to remind myself that I’m thirty-four years old and entitled to drink as much as I like in my own home. “A couple of glasses of wine with dinner.”

  “And you say you went to bed at around eleven and it was sometime after three that you found the skull?”

  “Yes.” Another edited detail necessitated by the elimination of Fiona. We thought it best not to edit the time she left in case anyone saw or heard her car.

  He glances at me, and suddenly I have the feeling that his focus has sharpened, though his words are still conversational. “Why were you up? Did something wake you?”

  “I . . .” Yes, something woke me: Fiona, standing at my door. Except that it was my screaming that brought her to the landing, wearing an entirely different T-shirt of Carrie’s. But Detective Laws is waiting for me to speak. “I needed the bathroom.”

  “And why did you go into that room?”

  It’s taking more mental agility than I would have imagined to remove Fiona. “I’m not sure, exactly; I was half asleep. The door was ajar, I think . . .”

  Laws is squinting, like he’s trying to see something. “So you went to the bathroom first—yes? Okay, and then you came out. So you had to turn right to go back to your bedroom”—his hands are gesturing, palms facing each other but twisting from the wrist, as if to show the direction of travel—“which puts you, let’s see, opposite the spare bedroom door?”

  It would do, if that’s what I had done. “Yes.”

  “And you say you think it was ajar?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you didn’t notice it on your way up to bed?”

  “Apparently not.” I hurry on to cover my flash of impatience. “Or it wasn’t open—it’s a drafty house. Old windows, you know. Sometimes doors blow open.” It’s true. The Manse speaks in its own way. Sometimes it shouts.

  “Right.” He falls silent, though I don’t get the sense that he is finished with me yet. I turn and pour my now-cold tea down the sink. “Shame the cameras outside weren’t operational.”

  “You’re telling me,” I say grimly. “They will be by the end of today.”

  “Good. My colleague is going to go over security with you. You really ought to get an alarm system. With zones and a night setting.”

  “Sounds expensive.”

  “Better safe than sorry.” I wonder what sorry looks like in his job, and then I wish I hadn’t. “We’ll need a list of everyone that’s been through the house since you got here.”

  “Of course, no problem.”

  “First the finger bones and now a skull,” he muses. “Have you noticed anything else that’s a bit out of the ordinary?”

  I almost laugh. There’s so much I could say, but how to say it without sounding entirely nuts? “Everything about this house is out of the ordinary, apparently. According to TripAdvisor, at any rate.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It seems the Manse is haunted. Animals fear to tread the very grounds. Strange bangings in the night, the feeling of being watched. And that’s on top of the appalling mobile reception and questionable decor.” He looks at me dubiously. “Seriously. Check out TripAdvisor. It’s educational.”

  “Mmm. But have you yourself noticed anything odd?” He flaps a hand to stave off the next flippant remark that he rightly guesses is on the tip of my tongue. “Other than the bones, I mean?” I can’t tell him about the flies, or the bin bag, or the dead animals, or the person I did or didn’t see in the window, as I have evidence for none of it. And then he will ask Carrie, and Carrie will say I’m overwrought, not sleeping well . . . I shake my head. “Are you sure?” he presses. I can see he’s noted my hesitation. “It seems very . . . personal, this. Certainly for the skull. Are you sure there isn’t someone who has a grudge against you? Or Carrie?”

  “Well, someone threw a stone at me in the garden one night, though it wasn’t a big stone and it wasn’t thrown very hard, and then there was the newspaper . . .”

  One eyebrow rises a millimeter or two. From him, that’s an enormous reaction. He actually starts to take notes. I hunt for the newspaper whilst explaining both incidents, but it’s not where I left it. Maybe Carrie moved it.

  “Is there anyone with some kind of personal vendetta?”

  “Believe me, I’ve been thinking about it. I haven’t lived here for twenty-seven years, remember, and Carrie has never lived here before—we barely know anyone round here. If the newspaper is connected, I suppose it could be someone who’s targeting me because of my parents . . .” I pull back from mentioning Morag. The poor woman is ill; I can hardly visit the police on her. I splay my hands and exhale heavily in frustration. “But it doesn’t make sense to blame me. I was only seven at the time.”

  “Well,” he says, but he’s still frowning slightly. I can’t tell if he doesn’t believe me or if this is what he does whilst he’s processing. “Maybe someone sees things differently.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “No.” He flips over the cover of his notebook, signaling that our interview is over. “I don’t either, yet.”

  A flash of movement from the back garden catches my eye through the window. I turn to look outside, suddenly terrified that the policeman I can now see poking through the garden—literally poking; he has some kind of long white stick—will find the decaying, Post-it note–adorned raven and conclude . . . conclude what? That I am nuts, most probably. At the very least, that I am to be treated as potentially unstable. I suddenly wonder if I have actually committed a crime. Is it against the law to defile the corpse of a bird?

  “Miss Calder?” asks the detective. “Are you okay?”

  “Yes.” I turn round abruptly with a half-hysterical smile, then quickly dim it on seeing his startled expression. “I mean, as can be expected under the circumstances. Of course.”

  “Mmm.” He considers me thoughtfully. His eyes are blue. A pale ice blue.

  My father is . . . I can’t think about my father. I won’t, at least not intentionally. I know I can’t dislodge him from the edges of my consciousness, the periphery, where the landscape is amorphous and ill formed. But I won’t go there. That way madness lies.

  NINETEEN

  The skull is male.

  Once again, that was immediately obvious to the forensic anthropologist; Laws rang to tell me, in his dry, thoughtful way. I can tell that he’s handling me, managing me, trying to gently nudge me into a corner. He drove me to the police station to have DNA taken: swabs from my cheeks—I can still feel the scrape on one side—and fingerprints too, though there is no physical reminder of that. He drove, asking questions, the same questions again but in different ways. Testing me, always testing . . . And new questions, too, about who we’ve met since we’ve been here, about my parents and who knew them, about how well Carrie and I get on, how much we see each other. I am discovering that his ability to jump topics with a minimum of fanfare is disconcerting. And exhausting.

  Though curiously I’m less exhausted than I have been for a while. Neither Carrie no
r I want to spend a night at the Manse without an alarm, cameras or no cameras, and even in a rush job, the alarm company cannot possibly get one installed any quicker than three days hence, so Carrie has arranged to spend a few nights up in Edinburgh with fellow cast members. For my part, I am staying where I might never have imagined I would: I am staying with Fiona. She and Jamie—and Callum—positively insisted, and one of my splintered selves accepted. The long, low three-bedroomed McCue farmhouse is cramped, with nary a clutter-free surface in sight, but it’s homely and it’s solid and it’s the same all the way through. There’s no version of it that I’d be afraid to find myself in, and the darkness outside is simply nighttime, not a cloak for an ill-defined threat. Callum is sharing his mum’s bed, and I sleep in a narrow single bed with Batman bedsheets and a stormtrooper alarm clock and wake the most refreshed I’ve felt in days. Weeks even. It’s the Manse, I think. The Manse has been leaching my energy, draining my faculties. The Manse has been stealing my very self.

  Everybody is up and moving when I wake, despite it being a Saturday, so I make myself a coffee and then wander outside, cup in hand, to watch Callum playing with Toast in the field closest to the farmhouse. He’s trying to train her on a homemade agility course, which currently seems to involve Callum scrambling over the course yelling, “Look, Ailsa, look!” whilst Toast watches him uncertainly, looking rather bemused.

  “You’re that way,” a voice calls. I turn to find Jamie just behind me. “The Manse, I mean,” he says. “Just over that ridge there and then down through the woods. If the farmhouse had a couple more stories, you could probably see it from here.” I gaze in that direction and wonder if the police are there now. “Sorry,” says Jamie, touching my arm gently. When I look at him, his mouth is twisted in remorse. “You probably dinnae want to think about that.” Jamie has been incredibly solicitous, though at times I’ve detected a slight excitement within him. I’ve seen it before in my job: the self-important glee at being so very close to the action that can’t quite be hidden beneath proclamations of shock. But for now he says, “Come on up and let me show you my lair.”

  Lair. The word jolts me. “Um, sure.” Jamie’s accommodation is separate to the farmhouse, in a studio-style room above the garage, with its own entrance. I follow him up the concrete steps to his white door, wondering if this is where he took Carrie. It would be child’s play to smuggle her in, if they were inclined toward secrecy. Perhaps that thought has my brain expecting some kind of lurid sex cave, or perhaps his use of the word lair is to blame, but his room is notable for only two things: clinical tidiness and an enormous flat-screen television on one wall. Other than that, it’s exactly as uninspiring as one might expect for a white-walled rectangular space above a garage, even given the large windows at either end. There’s a double bed, and a sofa in front of the telly, and a cube blocked off in one corner that presumably houses a bathroom.

  “This is nice,” I say, out of social convention. Then, looking for something more personal to add, I nod toward the telly. “I bet Callum loves that.”

  “Oh, he never comes up here,” Jamie says easily, from the sofa. “This is my space.”

  “Oh. Right. Do you work from here?”

  “Aye, over there.” He points toward the desk, where a sleek black computer sits watchfully, with nothing but a keyboard on the desk. Either he has tidied up relentlessly in advance of showing me his space, or he and Carrie have absolutely no future together—a man this fastidious couldn’t ever live in Carrie’s chaos. I want to ask him about it—we have a friendship, Jamie and I, that’s independent of Carrie or Fiona, but we haven’t discussed our love lives. I suspect he’s just as private as I am on that score, and why shouldn’t he be? What he does with Carrie or anyone else is his business. “I cannae really risk Callum messing around with that, you see. That’s why I keep him out of here.”

  “I see.” There’s only one picture on the wall, just a small framed photograph. I wander to look at it. “How is it living right by your dad and sister? After all, you could probably day-trade from anywhere.” The photograph is in color, of a very thin woman in her thirties with cascading chestnut curls, Farrah Fawcett style, sitting cross-legged in a garden. It’s a product of exactly the same early 1980s photography that’s in my mum’s albums.

  “I could; you’re right. And it has its moments . . .” He grimaces a touch ruefully. “But I willnae be here forever.” I glance at him again, but he’s not looking at me; he’s looking away, with the same air of suppressed excitement that I picked up earlier. Whatever those plans are, he’s not ready to share them.

  I wonder if they include Carrie. Or perhaps that was just a onetime thing. Carrie is the one I should have asked about it, regardless of whether Fiona was there or not. I should have cleared the air. I can see it now: Fiona wasn’t what stopped me. I was simply too scared to confront her.

  “Is this your mum?” I’m suddenly aware there has been a long silence.

  “Yes.” He leaves the sofa to join me in looking at it. “She was beautiful.”

  “Yes, very.” It’s true, the woman is beautiful, though she also looks as if a stiff wind would blow her over. “What happened to her?”

  “She committed suicide. About three years after that was taken.” He shakes his head on my horrified intake of breath. How could I not have known this? “It’s okay. I was very young, not even a year old. I couldnae possibly remember her. Though sometimes it feels like I do . . .” He is still looking at the framed photograph, his face oddly still, though I can see all the things he’s not saying clamoring in his eyes.

  I put a hand on his upper arm. “I’m so sorry.”

  “I wonder . . . Sometimes I wonder how different things would have been if she lived.” It almost sounds like he’s talking to himself.

  “Same.” Jamie is the one looking at me now. “With my dad, I mean. If he had been around . . .” I close my eyes and tip my head back, half laughing at myself. “It feels so . . . unfair.”

  “Unfair.” He repeats my word, as if testing it, to see if it fits. “Unfair. Aye, that it is.”

  * * *

  • • •

  The farmhouse is welcoming, and its occupants, too, but I’m conscious of not wanting to crowd their space, so mid-morning I head to the hotel leisure club. I didn’t think to bring my trainers and sports kit from the Manse, and I’m not sure if the police are finished there yet, so I buy myself a swimsuit and goggles from the shop. There’s a revolving rack of Karen Innes artwork reproduction postcards right next to the till. I find myself turning it slowly whilst the woman rings up the purchase, looking at each of the three sides in turn, seeing not the postcards but the actual paintings themselves, the enormous scale of them, the time and the energy they took. I see my mother, her hair scraped back haphazardly, paintbrush in one hand, utterly absorbed in the canvas. She could have been in a different world. I suppose that was the point.

  “Are you after one of them postcards, too, hen?” asks the cashier.

  “Oh no, they’re not really my thing,” I say hastily.

  “Me neither. All too modern for me. I like a nice landscape. You know where you are with a nice landscape.”

  I smile and pay and try to imagine my mother painting a nice landscape. It’s impossible.

  When I get to the pool, it’s entirely empty. I sit on the edge with my lower legs in the water, adjusting the new goggles. The water is cool, but not unpleasantly so, though it still makes me gasp when I finally slip in. I used to be on the school team, but it’s been a long time since I’ve swum; it’s almost a surprise to me that I remember how. It’s more of a surprise how much I enjoy it: the cool caress of the water along my body, the stretch of my muscles as I reach forward to catch the water. It feels clean and fresh and pure, and it makes me feel like I could be that way too. I’m aware of someone else, a man, entering the water, and swimming laps rather quicker than I am, b
ut we keep to ourselves; there’s no need to interact. And then we happen to have both stopped for a breather at the same end at the same time, and our polite nods turn to surprise. “Detective!” I say at exactly the same time as he says, “Ailsa!”

  “I think under the circumstances you could probably call me Bryn,” he says with a mild hint of drollery. He’s standing in the waist-deep water, his goggles pushed up on his forehead. I can’t avoid noticing his lean muscle, how his collarbones extend like a broad beam placed atop his torso. His pale shoulders are copiously dusted with freckles. I realize he’s the same man that I watched swim before, when I was looking for Glen.

  “Are you a member here?” I sink myself to my chin in the water, absurdly self-conscious.

  He nods. “I swim here two or three times a week. You?”

  “I’ve just joined. First swim.”

  “Then welcome,” he says. There’s more of a smile in his eyes than I have ever seen before, as if the water has refreshed him, woken him up.

  “Thanks. Actually I’m nearly done.”

  “I won’t be too far behind you.” He seems far more at ease than I. “Do you have time for a coffee afterward?”

  I pause with my hands on the goggles on my own forehead. “Should I? Is this official?”

  He shrugs equivocally. “Look, if it’s a bad time—”

  “No, it’s fine. I’ll see you in the café.”

  “Perfect. Whoever gets there first can order. Mine’s a flat white.”

  “Black Americano.”

  By the time I’ve settled my goggles, he’s already off, eating up the yards with his long limbs. I swim two hundred meters more, then climb awkwardly from the pool and scuttle for the changing room, feeling as if his eyes are on me, even though I can still hear the steady turnover of his stroke.

  I’m conscious of not wanting to tarry in the changing room, but he still beats me to the café; I find him sprawled in an armchair at one of the low coffee tables with the best view over the valley, peering at his phone. He’s not dressed in a suit but in dark jeans and a turtleneck sweater. It makes an extraordinary difference. I can’t help but view him as I would if I met him in a pub, say, or a coffee shop. I am meeting him in a coffee shop. I wish he was in the suit.