The Woman on the Cliff

by JANICE FROST

  The journey seems to take longer than last time, when I had Izzy for company. This time I don’t stop in Edinburgh. I’ve hit the evening rush hour and am obliged to join a tediously long queue of traffic waiting to filter on to the bridge.

  I have Innes’s postcode on my satnav, but it still takes me some time to locate his house, which is not in the village itself but near the cliffs and reached by a single-lane track.

  It’s almost dark by the time I arrive, but I can just make out Innes’s house, a white-washed stone cottage. A dog barks when I knock on the door. Bronn. I realise that I am excited at the prospect of seeing him and Innes again.

  Innes appears at the door, one hand on Bronn’s collar, restraining the dog from jumping up on me. “It’s okay,” I assure Innes. “Dogs will be dogs. Let’s just get it over with.”

  “Are you sure?” Innes laughs, and I nod. I prepare myself for Bronn’s unrestrained welcome. His tail thumps against my legs. Slobbery kisses wet my face and hands. Eventually he calms down.

  “Where are your bags?” Innes asks.

  He accompanies me to the car and retrieves my suitcase from the boot. I hope he doesn’t think from the weight that I’m intending to move in for good.

  He lugs my case upstairs to a pretty bedroom. It has a feminine feel.

  “I hope I’m not pinching your daughter’s room.”

  Innes looks wistful. “This was Greta’s room. She’s married now. She and her husband live in Glasgow. I’ve put you in here because of the view, although it’s a bit bleak this late in the year.”

  I cross to the window. At this time of the evening, in the encroaching darkness, the sea is merely hinted at by a swell of liquid blackness at the end of Innes’s garden but it looks close enough to touch. I imagine I can taste salt in the air of the bedroom.

  “Actually looks quite beautiful on a sparkling summer’s day,” Innes assures me.

  “It looks beautiful now,” I say, smiling.

  “Right.” Innes sounds doubtful. “Well, come summer you’re going to be really impressed.”

  There’s an awkward silence. Innes clears his throat. “I’ll leave you to unpack. When you’re ready, there’s a nice pub in the village. I thought we could eat there. As long as you don’t mind a brisk ten-minute walk in the cold?”

  I’m still wearing my winter coat, and I hold up my arms to show how I can barely move for padding. Bronn gives me an apologetic look and follows Innes from the room.

  Innes’s cottage is a bit remote, lonely even. It must contrast sharply with his years of city living in Glasgow. His description of the view as ‘bleak’ could equally apply to the location. He seems to have no neighbours. It makes me wonder if the pub really is just ten minutes’ walk away.

  Innes looks surprised when I come back downstairs after only ten minutes. I shrug. “There wasn’t much to unpack. It was mostly books.” I think of the dresses and wonder if I should have changed. A walk to Innes’s local in the cold doesn’t seem to warrant it.

  We strike off along the cliff path, Bronn bounding on ahead, a darting silhouette in the moonlight. Innes has brought a torch and he shines it on the path to light our way. The pounding of the sea makes conversation challenging. I have to shout to be heard, and strain to catch Innes’s words before they are snatched away by the howling wind.

  As I suspected, the ten-minute walk is more like twenty. I imagine Innes striding alone along this path, his long legs devouring the distance at twice the pace. At last, he veers off the path and we turn a corner. Ahead I make out lights, rooftops, and the sound of a wind chime tinkling somewhere not too far away.

  “The village,” Innes says. “You can’t see it from the road you came on. There’s a pub, a wee shop, and a scattering of houses.” His voice booms. He’s forgotten to stop shouting now that the noise from the sea has abated.

  The pub is brightly lit and welcoming. I’m not sure what I imagined it would be like, but it exceeds my expectations. Innes nods at a couple of people at the bar and selects a table in a secluded corner. There’s not a great deal of choice on the menu. Innes recommends the fish and chips, and I’m happy to go with that. We’re in a fishing community, after all.

  Bronn stretches out under the table. Innes goes to the bar with our order and I sit quietly, thinking of Izzy, who is only a few miles along the coast. I wonder what she is doing.

  Innes places a glass of white wine in front of me. “It’ll be about ten minutes.” He sits down. “Has your friend Lucy been in touch yet?”

  I shake my head. “I’ll send Cathy Sharp a text tomorrow to let her know I’m in St Andrews. Maybe she’ll prompt Lucy to contact me. I hope Lucy doesn’t still think of me as part of the problem she ran away from all those years ago.”

  “You’d be surprised how often people run away from their problems,” Innes comments.

  I can’t help thinking of my attitude to Doug’s death. Of my irrational belief, even after I’d been shown evidence to the contrary, that he’d somehow survived and was coming back to Izzy and me. I invented all sorts of excuses for his failure to return, even the awful possibility that he just wanted to leave his old life behind. There’s more than one way of running away from your problems, I think.

  I must have let my thoughts show, for Innes seems to be studying me.

  “Are you okay?” he asks.

  “I’m fine. Lucy was the last person to see Moira alive, you know.” I correct myself. “The last of us, I mean, her housemates. She saw Moira talking to a man she didn’t recognise. He didn’t look like a student as he was a bit older. Might have been staff.”

  Innes frowns. “I’ve been going over the case in my head. I don’t remember seeing anything about that. Are you sure?”

  “Yes, she told us after your first visit. I think she was too shocked to remember when you were there, but after you’d gone, we all tried to think when we’d last seen Moira, and we worked out that Lucy saw her last. She was going to contact Menzies and let him know, just in case it might be useful in, you know, working out her movements that day.”

  “That’s news to me.” Innes’s face is set, stony.

  “Maybe she forgot?” There is another possibility. I voice it with caution. “Or, she told Menzies and he didn’t act on the information.”

  Innes turns stiffly away from me and is silent for a few moments. I sense he doesn’t want me to see his reaction, but it’s not hard to guess what it is. I follow my theory to its logical conclusion, knowing it will incense him more. “Because he was already involved in framing Stuart Brogan.”

  Our fish and chips arrive. Bronn looks up, alert with expectation for a few moments, and then resignedly places his head back between his paws. To my surprise, the waiter returns to our table with a bone, and, having sought permission from Innes, gives it to a delighted Bronn.

  Innes is on first name terms with the young waiter, whose name is Josh. He asks after his parents, enquires how he’s getting on with his Highers and his application to study languages at Edinburgh University. All without the slightest suggestion of the anger that I sense is roiling away inside of him.

  When the waiter moves away from our table, I reach for the vinegar and splash it over my chips. Innes passes the salt and I sprinkle it more liberally.

  “I can only guess how that must make you feel, knowing that your colleague was corrupt. But you shouldn’t blame yourself. You were young and inexperienced . . . and . . . and . . . he took advantage of that. You couldn’t possibly have known what he was up to . . .” I stop, remembering how irritated he’d been the last time I tried to convince him it wasn’t his fault. Nothing less than making amends by finding out what really happened to Moira will assuage his feelings of guilt and shame.

  He seems to nod, but maybe he’s just relaxing the tension in his neck. Or flinching. Then he says, “Andrew Kelso still works at the university. He’s Professor Kelso now.”

  “His wife provided his alibi, didn’t she?”

  “
His first wife. Yes,” he says.

  “So, she divorced him then?”

  “Apparently she left him about a year after Moira’s death.”

  “Surprised she lasted so long.” Andrew had been well and truly outed as an adulterer in the weeks following the discovery of Moira’s body.

  “He remarried. Twice. His present wife is half his age. Kelso’s son is older than her.”

  “Celebrities do that sort of thing all the time,” I say, and ask Innes what he thinks about Andrew Kelso as a suspect, considering the new information about Menzies. “Would his first wife stick by the alibi she gave him, I wonder? He could have persuaded her to lie for him, and after Brogan was accused, she’d have had no reason to feel guilty about it.”

  Innes dots tartare sauce over his fish. “Hmm. As I recall, her story was that their baby was unwell with croup the weekend Moira was killed. She alleged that Kelso came home early Friday afternoon and never left the house all weekend. They took it in turns to walk the floor with their sick child.”

  “What about her?”

  Innes’s attention shifts from his sauce to me. “What? The jealous wife?”

  “Is that so outlandish? Was she ever considered as a suspect?”

  “There was a sexual element to the crime, which pointed to a male perpetrator.”

  “Oh, yes. Of course.” I sprinkle more vinegar over my chips and dust them lightly with more salt. “I know Moira was killed before DNA testing became routine, but isn’t it the case that you can go back and test old clothes — for example, if you have a new suspect?”

  “That can be done, but it isn’t an option in this case.” I frown and Innes explains, his voice a low growl. “There was a fire. All the evidence from the investigation into Moira’s death was destroyed.”

  I lower my fork, fish still on the prongs. Our eyes lock. “Back to Lucy and her conspiracy theories, aren’t we?” I say. “You’ve got to admit, that’s quite a coincidence, given the rest of what we know.”

  Innes sighs, takes a gulp of beer, stares at a man walking unsteadily towards the gents. I’m sure he’s not going to respond to my remark. He can’t make it up as he goes along. He needs evidence. So, I’m surprised by his next words. “Conspiracy theory isn’t a term I’d favour, but I am intrigued by the coincidences.”

  “How can I help?” I ask. Innes points at my empty glass and asks if I’d like another. I’m already feeling a little light-headed. “My round,” I insist.

  While I queue at the bar, I consider how ill-equipped I am to be a detective. I’ve spent my life in the classroom. What do I know of criminal investigation techniques, except what I’ve seen on television and read in detective novels? There is one element in my favour. I am driven to know the truth about what happened to Moira, and I’m not the sort of person who gives up easily.

  Innes has a question for me when I return from the bar. “How do you feel about accompanying me to interview Stuart Brogan’s sister, Isla Farrell? His parents are both dead. She’s the closest living relative, apart from some cousins who live in Aberdeen.”

  “I can do that. You may need to give me some pointers as to what sort of information we’re looking for.”

  “Good,” Innes says. “I don’t think she’d react well to being approached by me alone. I was part of the original team that investigated the murder her brother was accused of committing.”

  The story had not been picked up by the wider press. I remember a picture of Stuart’s mother and father, Eddie and Maureen, on the front page of the local paper. It was a couple of days after their son’s suicide. The picture wasn’t even a recent one. It showed the Brogans standing in front of their fishing boat, the Merry Mermaid, looking fresh-faced and happy. It had clearly been taken years before and didn’t exactly fit the occasion.

  “Eddie Brogan gave Menzies a hard time.” There was no judgement in Innes’s tone. “He turned up at the police station protesting his son’s innocence. The day after Stuart took his own life, he threw a punch at Menzies. I remember it took two of us to haul him off. Menzies was on the floor.”

  “Eddie Brogan may have had right on his side after all. His son might well have been innocent.”

  Innes’s eyes crinkle up at the corners, but not with laughter. The memory still stings, I can see.

  “Menzies wanted to press charges.” Innes is thin-lipped.

  “You persuaded him not to?”

  Innes snorts. “John Menzies wouldn’t have listened to anything I had to say on the matter. It was the chief who dissuaded him — Callum Gibb.” Innes frowns. “Gibb should have conducted a more vigorous investigation.”

  “Have you spoken with him recently?”

  “Gibb? He’d be an old man now, if he’s alive at all. I doubt he’d even remember Moira Mackie. Still, wouldn’t do any harm to talk to him, I suppose.”

  Something about the way Innes mentions Moira’s name brings a lump to my throat. He cares. It’s not just his sense of pride that’s taken a blow. He cares deeply that an injustice has been done to so many people.

  Innes is a father. Becoming a parent changes the way you see other people’s children. It’s for the families that he wants justice. Even if they’ll never know it’s finally been done.

  This realisation causes me to reassess my own reasons for finding out the truth about Moira’s murder. It’s true I feel a sense of outrage at a killer never having been brought to trial for his crime, at the terrible tragedy of Stuart Brogan’s suicide, the unimaginable sorrow of his and Moira’s families. But uppermost in my mind has been my own curiosity, my desire to know what really happened. I feel humbled by Innes’s compassion.

  “What should we say to Isla Farrell? I’m new to this game.”

  “What game?”

  “Playing detective.”

  Innes smiles. “I’m new to it too.” I shoot him a puzzled look. “Being a private detective. I never had to think up excuses to interview people before. All I had to do was show my police ID.”

  “I can’t think of a single reason why we’d be asking questions about a murder that took place more than a quarter of a century ago. Unless we were reporters, of course. Somehow, I don’t think a member of Stuart’s immediate family would want the muck on him raked over again. Especially if she still believes in her brother’s innocence.”

  We ponder the problem for a few moments. Finally, Innes says, “I think we’ll have to go along with telling her a version of the truth.”

  “About Menzies?”

  “Perhaps leaving that bit out.”

  “But how . . .?” I’m interrupted by Josh the waiter, who asks us if we’d like to try the spotted dick and custard for pudding. We both decline.

  As soon as he’s out of earshot, Innes says, “Here’s what I propose. I’ll introduce myself as Innes Nevin, one of the police officers who worked on the Moira Mackie investigation. I’ll be honest, tell her I’ve retired and that I’m writing a memoir of my time on the force. So far, so true — memoirs apart. I’ll explain that I’ve been haunted for years by her brother’s suicide because I witnessed a lack of rigour in the way that John Menzies conducted the investigation. Hopefully, she’ll draw her own conclusions from that, and think I’m suggesting I can help prove her brother’s innocence. Or at least cast some doubt on the findings of the original investigation.”

  I’m quiet for a moment. “We’d be giving her false hope . . .”

  “Does that make you uncomfortable?” Innes spears me with his intense, blue gaze. Everything about this makes me feel uncomfortable, but if I’m going to let that bother me, I might as well quit now. Go back to London, take my house off the market, carry on as though what Innes told me about Menzies that day on the beach is simply an apocryphal tale that he made up as an excuse to get my phone number.

  So, I say, “No. I’m okay with it.”

  “Good.”

  “So, what’s my role? With Stuart’s sister? How are you going to explain my presence?”
/>   Innes thinks for a moment. “Would you be offended if I introduce you as my PA?”

  “Hmm.” I let him stew for a couple of seconds before assuring him, “No, that’s okay. As long as you don’t call me your secretary.”

  Innes widens his eyes in mock astonishment. “What do you take me for?”

  “Seriously, I meant it when I said I wanted to help. I only wish I’d known Moira better. I think she thought of me as a friend, a confidante even. But . . .”

  But Elspeth wouldn’t have stood for that. I’d deliberately not grown any closer to Moira than the bounds of my friendship with Elspeth had permitted. I regret it now.

  “Kelso and Brogan. Was she serious about either of them?” Innes asks.

  “She was attracted to each of them for different reasons. Both were physically attractive, though their looks weren’t similar. Nor were their personalities. Andrew was suave and seductive, Stuart brooding and testosterone-fuelled. Moira referred to him as her ‘bit of rough,’ the brawn to Andrew’s brain. As for serious, maybe she believed herself a little in love with Andrew, but not in the purest sense of the word. Moira liked sex. She liked men. She was simply making the most of being young and free to have a good time.”

  I say this now without any hint of disapproval, though at the time I’d felt a slight sense of moral opprobrium at her behaviour, a vestige of my Catholic upbringing, which I renounced as a teenager.

  I think of Izzy and wonder at the romantic adventures that lie ahead of her. I’m pretty sure she had sex with a boy from school whom she dated for about six months. She never discussed it with me, which hurt me a little, as I’d always made it clear that she could talk to me about anything. But I understood her reasons.

  Innes shows that he is perceptive. He’s caught on that my thoughts have strayed. “How is your daughter settling in?”

  “Well, as far as I can tell, she’s making friends, enjoying her lectures, keeping up with the workload. So far, so good. She’s also been looking for a job, just a few hours a week to help keep her debts from soaring.”