by V Clifford
‘I might have known I’d find you here, Doc. You’ve been holding out on me.’
Viv stutters, ‘Eh . . . No way. I just thought . . .’
Red interrupts her. ‘What, Doc? You just thought if you planted a chicken a hen would grow.’
Viv gapes at Red. ‘What are you on about?’
‘Well it seems to me that you do too much thinking. Got a problem with that mobile of yours? No signal, no battery.’ Red rolls her hand in a gesture of etc, etc. ‘Heard all the excuses.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with my signal or my battery. I just wasn’t ready to call you in until I knew that my hunch was worth following up. Anyway you’re here now, and Johnny and I think . . .’
Johnny frowns. ‘Count me out of that . . . I don’t think anything that she does.’ Johnny thumbs in Viv’s direction.
Red looks from one to the other. ‘And here was I thinking you were a team. Okay, Doc, out with it.’
Viv glances up at the window and Red follows her eyes.
‘You think she’s in there?’
‘Yep. But I was just thinking . . .’
‘That’s what I mean, Doc, you’re way out there with all that thinking.’ Red indicates to the horizon with both hands. ‘You’re thinking that she might not be alone.’
‘Exactly.’
‘And that whoever she’s with might not take kindly to us interfering.’
Viv smiles and nods, ‘Exactly.’
Red smiles. ‘See you and me, Doc, we’re of one mind.’ Red indicates to some of the uniforms to go round the back. ‘Hope there isn’t too much of a fight; they’re crying ‘diplomatic immunity’. Murder doesn’t really count in their world.’ She grimaces. ‘But it does in mine.’ She looks at Viv. ‘And I’m guessing that it does in yours as well.’
Viv nods. ‘Can I do anything?’
Red snorts. ‘You mean you’re going to listen to whatever command I give? I know you. Why would I bother?’
As Red assesses the garden and the boundary walls, another car pulls up. She glances at her watch. ‘Marconi. That didn’t take him long.’
Viv turns and steps away from Red’s side in an attempt to become invisible. She flushes as he throws her a ‘what are you doing here’ look, but he soon refocuses on the task at hand and ceases to pay her any attention.
Red speaks to Marconi her gentle lisp increasing. ‘We think she’s inside but we’re not sure if she’s on her own or with someone.’ She stretches forward and presses the bell. They hear the sound echoing on the inside but no movement comes in response. Viv wanders off to the side of the house and through another tall iron gate. She finds a side door and tries the handle. It gives slightly. Although it isn’t locked it has been barricaded by something heavy. She puts her shoulder against it but can’t shift it. She beckons to a PC who, not realising he’s doing wrong, comes to help. Between them they make it move about two inches. Viv returns to the front of the house where Johnny is standing with his arms crossed watching the upstairs window. Viv beckons him. If his muscle won’t shift it nothing will.
Red spots Viv and Johnny skulking round the corner of the house and shouts, ‘Oi! What are you two up to?’
Viv concedes. ‘There’s another door. It seems to be open.’
‘You can’t just go opening people’s doors. There’s a procedure.’
At this Marconi returns from checking out the back from the opposite side. He takes command. ‘Sandra, you go and see if you can gain entry.’
Red gives him a questioning look.
Mac responds immediately. ‘Of course I’ve got a warrant. Now get going.’ His tone becomes grave. He really means business. ‘Viv, you stand clear with Jonathan over there.’ He points toward the gate. ‘Don’t move.’
She pulls a face but he ignores her. She shrugs and wanders toward the gate with Johnny at her tail. ‘I think we’re probably done here. If she’s in there, there’s no way she’s getting out unless she’s clamped to one of them.’ She nods back over her shoulder. Just as Viv goes towards the gate there’s a commotion behind her and Johnny jumps clear of a hooded body running at full pelt into Viv’s path. Although Viv’s instinct is also to jump clear, and as if she’s in an Ealing comedy she sticks her foot out and the body goes head over heels onto the garden path. It scrabbles to regain its footing but Viv leaps on top and pins it down. The figure may be small but it puts up a significant fight, which has Viv dredging up tactics that she hasn’t used for some time. No sooner has she knelt on the girl’s arms, than they are surrounded by uniforms. Mac stands a few feet back. He gives his first comment. ‘I might have known there was no chance of this concluding without you putting your oar in.’
As Viv dusts down her trousers she looks up, incredulous. ‘Excuse me. I wasn’t the one who let her escape.’
Mac throws up his arms. ‘Okay, okay.’ He turns to Red. ‘Who did?’
One side of Red’s face is swollen and she raises a length of pipe. ‘Even my skull couldn’t get the better of this pipe.’ She looks sheepish. ‘Thanks Doc, she was just too quick.’
Viv looks concerned. ‘Is that okay?’ She points at Red’s face.
Red nods briefly and turns to Ruthie. ‘Assaulting an officer isn’t going to help your cause.’ Ruthie’s response is to spit in Red’s face. Viv, horrified, steps forward but Mac has already given the nod to get Ruthie cuffed and into the car. Viv scrabbles about in her jacket, takes out a packet of tissues and hands one to Red.
Red declines the offer. But when Mac hands her what looks exactly like a tissue she accepts it, wipes her face then bags it. ‘Not nice, Doc, but useful.’ Mac takes the bag, folds it and puts it in his inside pocket.
‘Think positive, Doc. That’ll save me hassling her for a DNA sample . . . ’preciate the thought, so thanks all the same, Doc.’
Viv heads through the gate and Johnny skips to keep up with her. Viv glances into the police car where Ruthie sits defiant with her arms crossed, and a look on her face that could turn salt into stone. Flanked by two officers twice her size she won’t be going anywhere anytime soon.
Johnny, clearly on an adrenaline high, says. ‘Oh, my God! That was so disgusting. Can you believe that?’ He glances towards the police car. Then he turns to Viv and sighs. ‘Come on, I’ll give you a lift.’ He beckons her towards his car.
Distracted, Viv says, ‘No. No, thanks. The walk’ll do me good.’
Johnny continues. ‘Look Pete’s no angel . . .’
This gets Viv’s attention. ‘Go on.’
‘Well I just mean he’s added fuel to the fire. If he hadn’t led Ruthie on . . . and . . . Och, no point in going over all Pete’s misdemeanours. He’s got a wicked streak, for sure, but he’d never kill anyone.’
Viv nods, hearing the lack of conviction in Johnny’s tone. Having been on the receiving end of Pete’s wrath she sensed he was capable of much worse.
The walk home over the Meadows gives her time to reflect on the machinations of the last few weeks. How off the mark she’s been. Not once has she thought of a schoolgirl being tangled up in this story, let alone the cause of it. It was all very well to ‘get there in the end’, but what a lesson. If only she’d been less . . . naïve. The sun peeked out from behind a cloud and threw a shaft of light through the trees and across her path. She turned her face upward, pushed her hair back and for a few steps enjoyed hopeful warmth. What was the point in going down the ‘what if’ route? There was always so much more to learn. But now she checks her watch, time for lunch with Sal.
Finding Tess
Chapter One
Friday. Viv Fraser woke with her arm draped over the smooth latte-coloured shoulders of a young man she’d met ten hours before. She cursed under her breath, stealthily rolled onto her back, and manoeuvred toward the edge of the bed. A hint of streetlight prised its way through ill-fitting curtains, and she glanced back at his serene face. Viv stretched her hand towards almond shaped eyes where a wisp of hair was caught on long dark lashes.
The eyelids twitched and Viv withdrew her hand. She tiptoed through to the next room, retrieved her jodhpurs, a shirt and one sock from the polished wooden floor.
Viv ruffled her hair, unable to see any sign of her underwear and quietly groaned at the memory of the previous evening. She spotted her second sock peeking out from the side of a large cushion but when she lifted it she unearthed nothing more. Resigned to go without, she pulled on her jodhpurs and socks then slid through into a large square hallway, which doubled as a study. She prayed that the vision left in bed remained lost in slumber. A black anglepoise lamp sat on one side of a scuffed partner’s desk; to the right of this lay a stack of books, each with a sheet of A4 sticking out. Viv spotted her own recently published work with its bold black title on a white background. Unable to resist, she glanced at the notes wedged in the introduction. She whispered, ‘Not bad!’ and replaced the paper, keen to make her departure. An oak coat-stand wobbled as she reached for her tweed jacket. The echo of wood on wood made her even more anxious to be gone. Her leather boots stood like sentinels at the front door. She hauled them on, thinking at least things had been orderly at the beginning of her visit. She shrugged into her jacket and gently closed the door behind her.
Both the outer and inner gates of the Victorian lift glided apart then clunked reassuringly when she drew them together. Viv pressed G and the ancient mechanism rumbled into action. Her eyelids fell as she recalled the persistent journey of the young man’s soft mouth; their ambitious, searching tongues. She shuffled her feet, to rid her loins of the memory. The taste in her mouth was a rude reminder of how unkind the night’s booze had been to her gut. With her forehead rested against the cool tinted mirror on the back wall of the lift carriage, she sighed again and whispered, ‘Damn, damn, damn’ as it crept towards ground level.
Leaving the gates slightly apart she strode out through a heavy mahogany door onto Moray Place and enveloped by the dark unnerving silence of the morning checked her watch. It read ten to six, in reality it was only half past five. Had she looked back she’d have caught a shadow behind the curtain at the top floor window. Oblivious, Viv buttoned her jacket up to her chin and set out at a jogging pace, for once impervious to Edinburgh’s magnificent Georgian architecture, up to Charlotte Square, across Princes Street to the bottom of Lothian Road, then left along King’s Stables Road trailing the high wall of St Cuthbert’s church graveyard marking the western boundary of the Old Town. Moss had fallen from the top of the wall and lay in little piles on the pavement. Viv imagined tortured ghosts jostling for territory, scrabbling to rejoin the outside world.
Fifteen minutes and she was back in her tiny flat in Edinburgh’s West Bow. Beneath a torrent of near scalding water, Viv attempted to wash the night’s casualty down the drain. The nauseating words, ‘I have always admired you from afar’, echoed in her ear. She blew out a stream of water, groaned, added a dollop of shampoo to her scalp and scrubbed. Viv Fraser regarded guilt as one of life’s overused accessories: a loud decorative way of avoiding action. But what was she to do to limit the damage? The seductive almond eyes belonged to a student. She squeezed her eyes closed and shook her head wishing the catastrophizing would cease.
Viv was seeing, or at least lunching with, someone. Or was she? She, like most, could hoodwink herself into or out of anything. What had possessed her? She’d already deluded herself into believing that the cocktails were responsible. A conversation about ‘Freud’s Women’ couldn’t have been that seductive, even if the guy had quoted from her book more eloquently than she could herself. They had argued about it, but as the night progressed a small frisson of sexual tension had cranked up a few notches.
She rubbed her hair with a towel, threw it into the laundry basket, and padded through to the sittingroom where the gentle face of Sal Chapman floated into her frontal lobe. Then Viv pressed play on her answering machine and her belly lurched as Sal’s voice echoed out across the room. ‘Hi Viv, sorry to ring so late. I’ll try you again if I get a spare minute. It’s crazy here. Wall-to-wall discussion panels. Blokes boring for Britain. Speak soon hopefully.’
‘Shit!’ Viv hadn’t expected to hear from her. The next message, from Margo, sounded anxious, her request totally uncharacteristic. Viv was intrigued but didn’t ring either back and justified her delay with, ‘far too early’.
After industrial strength coffee and a scan of her emails, Viv headed out to visit her first client. It was an April morning, fresh with a nip in the air, and no sign of the promised rain. She found her car, squeezed into a motorcycle bay, with a ticket on the windscreen. Blaspheming, she ripped it off and tossed it onto the passenger seat. As she drove west out of the Grassmarket towards the Forth Road Bridge, she felt grateful that she wasn’t in the opposite lane, where cars sat nose to tail with their lights dipped: a sign of dark skies to the north.
The turn-off before the Bridge was signposted to Kirkliston MOD base. At the end of the slip road she turned right, passing back over the top of the motorway. After continuing for a couple of miles, on one of those country roads with so many dips that oncoming drivers appear out of nowhere, she finally indicated left and entered through the highest, most ornate gates in lowland Scotland.
Thurza Weston, otherwise known as the Countess of Newhall, kept the same appointment at 10am on the last Friday of the month. The stately home came courtesy of her husband, Toddy, the Earl of Newhall, who everyone regarded as ‘a lovely man’. An Etonian, whose drinking hadn’t aged him well, Toddy was probably bullied as a boy and didn’t see anything wrong in continuing school traditions at home. Viv, having once had to stand between Thurza’s already swollen cheek and his attempt at a second punch, was less than enthusiastic about him.
Viv skipped up the front steps and was greeted by Roy the head guide. He tipped the cap of his gaudy and now too large uniform exposing a balding head peppered with age spots. ‘How’s my young lovely today then?’
‘Great, Roy. And yourself, how’s that knee?’
‘Doing away m’dear, doing away. You’re expected.’ He nodded in the direction of a side door marked ‘Private’ in bold gold letters. The sign wasn’t enough to deter public curiosity so there was a rope with a larger sign dangling from it, also saying ‘Private’. But even this was insufficient, and a security lock with a number pad had been installed six months ago.
Viv typed in the code and entered the sacred domain of some of Scotland’s senior aristos. She crossed the hallway, toeing a dog bone off the crested rug onto the flagstone edge. Above a panelled dado rail hung Toddy’s collection of nineteenth- century Scottish landscapes. Beattie Brown’s Falls of Dochart took a prominent position. Viv loved it. The unremitting force of peaty water roaring down a gorge, backed by peaks of high hills obscured by a foreboding sky could make her reach for a sou’wester.
She heard the anxious but overly upbeat voice of Thurza coming from the kitchen. Viv smiled, knowing that this could change in a trice, but continued her advance. Thurza, an American, had told Viv of her early elocution lessons. A governess had been employed to ensure Thurza had an accent more English than Ishiguru or any English person Viv’d ever known. The heiress of a corrugated paper manufacturer, with mills and factories spanning the east coast of America, Thurza had, like many before her, exchanged dollars for a title which allowed her to masquerade with British gentry who, while regarding her as a fake, never refused her lavish entertaining.
Although Thurza and Viv had had a bit of a rocky start, Viv soon got the measure of the bored intelligent preppy, besides Americans love anyone who rises through merit. Viv’s conversation went some way to softening Thurza’s defences, and once she’d experienced the consistent quality of Viv’s haircuts she became her greatest evangelist.
Mabel, Thurza’s very cute, but over-fed and under-exercised, Border terrier, waddled up to Viv and sniffed her kit bag. Viv bent and tickled her chin just as Thurza said goodbye, tossed her phone onto the worktop, and grabbed a packet of cigarettes. ‘My stepbro
ther,’ she, pointed her thumb at the telephone. Then with a dramatic change in her tone, ‘God! Am I glad to see you. This white tie do we’re hosting tonight is such hard work. You’ve no idea . . . ’ She stopped, seeing Viv’s raised eyebrows.
Viv held up her hand and laughed, ‘Spare me the histrionics.’ She began pulling the essentials of her trade from her case. ‘You’ve got an army of runners; all you have to do is chill out, turn up looking bonny, and keep smiling.’
Thurza laughed and unable to find her lighter, stuck the end of the fag onto the hotplate of the range. ‘D’you mind?’ She drew in a lungful of nicotine, the question completely rhetorical. Viv shrugged and continued sorting out her scissors, brushes and combs.
Thurza pulled a chair out from beneath a long rectory table strewn with magazines, letters and the general scraps of the life of a modern countess, available for all who cared to see. ‘Have you heard . . .?’
Viv shook her head. ‘You’re incorrigible. Even if I had . . . I wouldn’t give you ammunition.’
‘No. No, it’s too recent for you to have heard it.’
Viv put her hands over her ears and started clicking her tongue until Thurza brushed away an imaginary interloper and plonked herself on a chair. ‘You’re no fun.’ They giggled.
Viv arranged her large green gardener’s sheet on the floor, plugged in her dryer above the worktop, and wrapped a gown round Thurza’s shoulders. ‘You wearing it up or down?’
Thurza looked nonplussed. ‘I don’t care.’
Only people who really care say that they don’t. Viv lifted the back of Thurza’s long blonde hair off her neck, and piled it on top of her head, instantly taking a decade off a sagging jaw line.
