by M. B. Shaw
‘Yet you invite him round for Christmas? Why would you do that, if he really did hurt you as a child?’
Ariadne gave Iris her best, most saintly smile. ‘Because I’ve forgiven him, of course. I’m terribly good at forgiving.’ She positively radiated benevolence. ‘People say that about me and it’s true. But what my father did … well, forgiveness or not, things like that leave a mark, don’t they? The pain gets passed on.’
‘You’re talking about Billy,’ Iris said softly.
‘I couldn’t love him.’ Picking up a tea towel, Ariadne twisted it round and round between her fingers. For the first time since they’d started talking, she sounded guilty. ‘I adored Marcus when he was born, but as soon as I saw Billy, it was as if all the fear and anger and pain came rushing back. I wanted to hurt him right from the beginning. I fought those urges, of course. I did try. To be fair, to be maternal, to see what other people saw in him. Dom, especially. But sometimes I … slipped.’ She looked up briefly, but failed to meet Iris’s eye.
Upstairs, in front of the screen, Jenna wept silently. For her own misjudgement of Billy but also for poor Marcus. She would have to show him this footage eventually. Or the police would. How would he survive, knowing that he’d missed every sign, that nothing – nothing – he believed about his family was really true? All these years Billy had been telling the truth. Ariadne had hurt him.
‘I think Billy told Dom at one point,’ Ariadne continued to Iris, ‘but I convinced Dom he was making it up. I had to!’ she said miserably. ‘He might have left me if he knew the truth. I couldn’t have survived that.’
Upstairs, Jenna checked the monitor screen, ensuring its red ‘record’ light was still flashing in the top right-hand corner.
‘There are many things I regret in my life, believe me,’ Ariadne said, standing up and holding out a hand for Iris’s empty teacup. ‘But killing that greedy, grasping bully Marcus Feeney isn’t one of them. So…’ She carried the dirty tea things over to the sink. ‘Now you know.’
‘Now I know,’ repeated Iris.
‘You do realise that I’ll deny every word of this if you go to the police?’ Ariadne said casually, not in anger but merely as a statement of fact.
‘I do,’ Iris acknowledged, getting to her feet and glancing just for a second at the baby-monitor camera perched on the top shelf of the kitchen dresser. Please God let Jenna have recorded all this. ‘I suppose this is goodbye, then?’
Ariadne turned round, drying her hands on a tea towel before extending them to Iris. ‘Yes, I suppose it is. You’ll be on a train to Scotland soon. Well, take care, Iris Grey. And thank you, for uncovering the truth about Graham. He wouldn’t be locked up if it weren’t for you.’
And he wouldn’t have killed Dom in the first place if it weren’t for you! Iris thought, incredulous that even now Ariadne didn’t seem to have made this connection. Graham had killed Dom because he blamed him for his brother’s suicide. But there was no suicide! The only person responsible for Marcus’s death was standing in front of Iris now, smiling beatifically, looking for all the world like a kind, artistic country widow, pottering harmlessly around her kitchen, content to live out her days in this beautiful, lonely, secret-crammed house.
‘Goodbye, Ariadne.’ Iris shook her hand, then allowed herself to be pulled in for a kiss on the cheek. Like Judas.
Ariadne turned away, back to the dishes. ‘Goodbye, Iris.’
* * *
Upstairs, Jenna hit ‘stop’ and then ‘save file’. The footage was long and took up several megabytes of memory. While she waited for the file to upload, a creak behind her made her jump out of her skin.
‘Marcus!’
The door swung open. Marcus stood on the threshold, staring at her. He had the strangest detached look in his eyes. Suddenly Jenna felt afraid.
‘How long have you been there?’ she asked, her heart hammering.
‘Long enough,’ said Marcus.
He moved towards her, walking slowly. Instinctively Jenna shielded the screen, her precious evidence. There was a ding, followed by a written message, ‘Upload complete’.
Marcus extended his arms and then rushed at her in a frantic lunging movement. Jenna panicked and let out a small, frightened shriek.
‘Marcus, no!’
But instead of grabbing at the iPad or trying to hurt her, he collapsed into her arms, knees buckling, as his entire body gave way to deep, soul-racking sobs. Crumpling under the weight of him, not to mention her own relief, Jenna also sank to the floor. For a long time they remained there, holding each other.
At last, cried out for the moment at least, Marcus asked her, ‘What will you do? Will you give it to the police?’
His voice was heavy with loss and despair. But there was also acceptance there. Resignation. Defeat.
‘I have to,’ Jenna said, as kindly as she was able. ‘We have to.’
‘I know,’ Marcus agreed numbly.
He turned to his wife and gazed at her across the chasm of distrust and unhappiness that had somehow grown up between them since Dom died, willing it to disappear. Jenna gazed longingly back.
For the last few months they’d both bravely papered over the cracks. Now, there could be no more dissembling. Marcus’s ‘perfect family’ had never existed. Instead, like a bright, shiny apple riddled with maggots, the Wetherbys, once cut, had proved themselves rotten to the core. And Marcus’s beloved mother was the most rotten and spoiled of them all.
Marcus still loved Jenna and he needed her now more than ever.
Yet at the same time he knew he could never forgive her for being right all along.
Chapter Thirty
Two months later
Iris sat in the comfort of her first-class seat, admiring the hazy beauty of the Northumberland landscape as the intercity train from London King’s Cross thundered towards Edinburgh. A few steps away, in the luggage compartment that divided first class from the rest of the train, two tattered suitcases carried all that Iris had chosen to bring with her from her old life, besides her painting paraphernalia and treasured doll’s house, which she’d had sent on ahead to Pitfeldy Castle, where her next commission awaited her.
She’d persuaded Jock Mackinnon, the laird who’d hired her to produce a portrait of his new young American wife, to delay the job until late August. After Ariadne Wetherby’s spectacular arrest in May for the murder of Marcus Feeney, Iris had found herself plunged once again into the eye of a media firestorm, at the same time that life began imploding at the Mill. Somebody had leaked the story of Iris and Jenna’s baby-monitor ploy to record Ariadne’s confession and the papers had gone wild for the idea of two women ‘sleuths’ solving a decades-old crime and in Jenna’s case turning in a member of her own family.
Poor Jenna! It was bad enough for Iris, being rung up by idiotic twenty-year-olds from Glamour magazine and asked how it felt to be a ‘real-life super-detective’, as if Dom’s death were some sort of comic-book story. But for Jenna, who’d had to stand by and watch helplessly while a devastated Marcus put the Mill up for sale, as civil lawsuits from the extended Feeney family began pouring in, demanding their slice of the Grimshaw pie, the last two months had been a living nightmare.
She and Marcus were staying together. ‘We have to,’ a desolate Jenna had told Iris. ‘We have two children and now Lorcan as well. He’s barely spoken since they took Ariadne away. God, I hope we did the right thing. Do you think we did?’
‘Absolutely,’ Iris had assured her. Despite all the awful consequences, for Lorcan and Marcus and for poor Billy, who’d suffered a complete nervous breakdown after Ariadne finally admitted mistreating him and was now once again in residential care, going to the police was the only thing they could do. ‘Even Marcus felt that, remember?’ Iris reminded Jenna. ‘An innocent, brilliant young man was murdered and we knew his killer. We knew the truth. We had to act, Jenna.’
‘I suppose so.’ Jenna had sighed sadly. ‘I just wish it weren’t so hard.’
Iris wished so, too. Then again, unlike Jenna, Iris knew how much harder it was to know the truth and not act. How the consequences of that inaction could ripple out for ever, in never-ending circles of pain and guilt and loss.
As the train rattled on, Iris let her mind drift back …
1988. The little house on Bigley Street.
The day she learned the truth about her sister, Thea.
The day she learned what ‘evil’ truly meant.
The day that changed everything.
‘Tickets, please! Any new tickets.’ The conductor’s nasal Scottish voice cut through the peaceful atmosphere of the carriage like wire through cheese. He’d already seen Iris’s ticket, so he passed her by, nodding an acknowledgement as he bustled over to some recently boarded passengers a few seats along.
With an effort, Iris dragged her thoughts out of the painful past and back to the present. Unearthing the truth about Dom’s murder, and Marcus Feeney’s, had brought pain enough of its own. Most of that had been borne by the family, by Lorcan and Marcus and Billy, and poor Jenna. But Iris had suffered, too.
Facing the truth about Graham had not been easy.
Blindsided by the news of Ariadne’s confession to his brother’s murder, Graham had intensified his letter-writing campaign to Iris, begging her to come and visit him – just once – and to tell him exactly what she knew.
‘You were there. I wasn’t. Please, Iris. Give me this peace at least. I need the whole truth.’
Perhaps foolishly, Iris had given in, hiring a car for the day to drive out to the grim East Anglian prison very early one Sunday morning to ensure she made visiting hour.
It was, without doubt, one of the worst hours of her life. Graham looked old and gaunt, his eyes deeply sunken and his skin a sickly, cigarette-ash grey. Grasping Iris’s hands across the scratched Formica table, he fired questions at her almost manically.
What had Ariadne said, exactly? Had she planned to murder his brother or acted on the spur of the moment? How had she covered her tracks? Why hadn’t the police ever questioned her, or followed up on Matthew the neighbour’s evidence? Was she remorseful?
And most of all, again and again and again, Graham asked Iris whether she thought Dom knew.
‘Ariadne said he didn’t. That she acted alone and never told Dom afterwards.’
‘That can’t be right, though, can it?’ Graham shook his head and scratched compulsively at a patch of skin below his left ear, which Iris noticed he had worn red and raw. ‘I mean, she must have said something! In all those years. Even if Dom didn’t put her up to it in the first place, which let’s face it, he probably did, there’s no way she could keep a secret that big for that long without confiding in someone. They were in it together.’ He nodded, desperately trying to convince himself that this assertion was a fact. ‘They conspired together to keep the Grimshaw money and they killed Marcus to shut him up. Don’t you think?’
‘I don’t know, Graham.’ Iris shook her head sadly. She wanted to offer him the comfort he craved, to give the reassurance he was asking for. She wanted to be able to tell him that he hadn’t drugged and drowned an innocent man for a crime he didn’t commit. That Dom had been guilty, too, on some level, complicit in Marcus’s death to a degree that made what Graham had done justified, at least in his own mind and by his own warped, eye-for-an-eye criteria. Because if he wasn’t – if it was all Ariadne’s doing – then that made Graham a monster. It meant that everything Graham had sacrificed – his freedom, his future, Iris – had been for nothing. But Iris couldn’t give him that comfort.
The truth was, she would never know what Dom Wetherby had or had not known about Marcus Feeney’s death. Maybe nothing. Maybe everything. Maybe he had his suspicions but was too afraid to dig deeper.
‘If he hadn’t cut Marcus out of Grimshaw in the first place…’ Releasing Iris’s hands, Graham rocked back and forth on his plastic chair. ‘If he hadn’t been so greedy, and fame-hungry, if he weren’t such a goddamn liar, none of this would ever have happened. Marcus would still be alive. Dom would still be alive. I wouldn’t be stuck in here. I wouldn’t have lost you.’
Graham looked at Iris then with such haunted, desperate eyes, it was just unbearable. ‘You killed a man, Graham,’ Iris said quietly. ‘You murdered him in cold blood. That’s why you’re here. For something you did, not for something Dom Wetherby did. Until you accept that, I don’t think you’ll find any peace.’
Graham shook his head vehemently. ‘No. No, that’s not right. You can’t take it out of context. And besides, I don’t want peace. I want justice. I want justice for Marcus!’
Iris stopped trying to reason with him after that. She listened for another twenty minutes to his self-justifying ramblings, the tortured questions coming in an endless, awful loop. And when the buzzer finally rang to signify the end of visiting time, she kissed him on the cheek and said goodbye, and bolted out of there and into the car park, sobbing for a full ten minutes before she had the strength to get into her car and drive away.
She was crying for Graham and the terrible thing he’d done that he couldn’t face.
She was crying for the man she’d thought he was. The man he could have been, had life taken a different turn.
She was crying for the future she’d hoped they might have. And crying also with shame. Because for all the intimacy she thought they’d established, the truth was that Iris hadn’t really known Graham Feeney at all. The Graham Iris had fallen in love with was an invention, a fictional character she’d moulded out of her own needs, her own loneliness, her own longing for a fresh start.
Talk about a cliché.
The trip to the prison was a low point. But it was in the past now, over and done, and in the days that followed a new lightness came over Iris, a sort of lifting, which had stayed with her and intensified as the job up north drew nearer. It was time, at last, to leave behind other people’s secrets and sadnesses and to step into her own life, her own future.
Before her lay a blank page, and it was beautifully, dazzlingly white.
‘Any refreshments, madam?’
A chirpy little man with a broad Geordie accent pushed a trolley laden with drinks and biscuits through Iris’s mostly empty carriage. He had an old-fashioned face, Iris thought, like an old-time music-hall performer. A sort of cheeky-chappy, George Formby persona that would have been fascinating to try to paint.
That was something else she’d noticed since saying goodbye to Graham and leaving the Mill for good: her ‘eye’ was starting to come back to her, the desire and instinct to paint, and especially to paint people. To see faces the way that she used to. It felt good.
‘No, thank you.’ She smiled at the man. ‘How long till Edinburgh?’
‘Oh, not long now, ma’am,’ he said cheerfully. ‘A little over an hour.’
Iris turned back to the window, and the picturesque scene outside. It felt good to be travelling light, physically as well as metaphorically. Apart from the two cases she’d brought on the train, and the few things she’d sent ahead to the castle, all her other possessions – furniture, books and paintings from Clapham, mountains of clothes she never wore – were safely stashed in a storage facility somewhere outside the M25, until she figured out what she wanted to do with them.
‘I’d sell the lot if I were you,’ Iris’s agent, Greta, had told her firmly. ‘Storing clothes is the world’s biggest waste of money – you’ll never wear them again.’
For a woman whose life was art, Greta could be disturbingly practical sometimes. Iris thought wryly of her agent’s own enormous London house, stuffed to the rafters with books, pictures and knickknacks of all kinds, but decided not to point this out. Because Greta was right, at least when it came to Iris. A grand decluttering of her life, mind and soul was exactly what she needed.
If travelling light was a novelty, so was travelling first class, and one Iris felt she could easily get used to. Ironically, after such a nightmare year, Iri
s now found herself, if not ‘rich’ exactly, then at least much more comfortable than she’d ever expected to be, now that the divorce settlement had gone through. She already had a new commission lined up, as well as gallerists and collectors beating down her door, thanks to all the publicity surrounding Dom Wetherby’s portrait.
‘Your commission rate’s doubled and your existing work is selling like hot cakes,’ Greta told Iris excitedly. ‘I know all your subjects can’t come to grisly ends,’ she added wryly, ‘but it’s awfully good for business when they do.’
Even Ian had made hay out of the Wetherby/Feeney tragedy. ‘I’ve sold a play on spec based on the story. I wanted to call it Betrayal, but the publishers like Murder at the Mill,’ he told Iris. ‘Bloody philistines.’
Part of her wanted to protest about the moral murkiness of Ian profiting from Dom’s death and his inside track on the story. But then she remembered how Dom himself would have been the first to do the same and make a quick buck out of tragedy in the name of ‘art’ and she decided to let it go. Ian needed some good luck. They all did.
Iris looked at her watch. Soon they’d be in Edinburgh, where she’d have a forty-five-minute wait until her connecting train to Aberdeen. From there it should be another hour in a taxi out to Pitfeldy. Iris had agreed with Jock and Kathy Mackinnon to stay as their guest up at the castle for the first three days, getting to know Kathy, her soon-to-be subject, and the rest of the family before moving into a courtyard house in the heart of the village for the rest of her stay in Scotland. She had the particulars for Heather House in her handbag, dog-eared from weeks of thumbing by Iris, excited at the prospect of a new home, albeit a temporary one.
Looking again at the slightly kitsch tartan interiors, she felt a familiar tingle of anticipation. New places, new people, new paintings, new possibilities. Iris was ready for it all, already intrigued at what the next eight weeks might bring.
