by Val McDermid
A few minutes later, Sophie returned. She went straight to Lindsay and cradled her head in her arms. “He’s gone,” she whispered. “Poor Lindsay.”
They sat in silence for what felt like an eternity, then Lindsay sighed. “I feel such a complete jerk.”
“I know. There was no way you could have predicted that he’d do that. He seemed so plausible.”
“I know. I was so sure he was telling the truth. It crossed my mind that he might be blackmailing Harry over the murder, and that he was saying it was a woman so his little racket could carry on. But after I’d seen Harry’s performance when he handed over the money, I gave up that idea. Neither of them behaved as if there was a hidden agenda. And I didn’t think Alex was a good enough actor to con me like that. How wrong can you get?”
“But I was sure he was telling the truth, just like you. Then when he pointed to Cordelia like that, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry,” Sophie sympathized.
Lindsay got to her feet and started pacing the floor. “I just can’t believe it’s all gone so wrong,” she said. “I was positive that Alex would give us what we needed. How could I have been such a bloody fool?”
“Stop beating yourself up, Lindsay. You did what you thought was the right thing. It’s not your fault that it went wrong.”
“Who’s fault is it, then? I had to go for the grand gesture, instead of being sensible about it. I should just have taken him along to Jim Carstairs and let him loose on a pile of mug shots. But oh no, I had to be the big shot. And look at me now. Everybody thinks I did it to get even with Cordelia, and they couldn’t be more wrong,” Lindsay ranted.
“I know that, and you know that. It doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks, does it?” Sophie consoled her.
“In theory, no, but in practice, yes. But you know what pisses me off almost as much as that?”
Sophie shook her head. “Tell me,” she said.
“The fact that I won’t be able to finish what I started. I desperately wanted to get Jackie off the hook. But you heard Claire. I’m fired. No one’s going to give me an ounce of cooperation now, are they? And I was so close, Sophie,” Lindsay complained.
“Yes, but it’s not all over,” Sophie said. “You’ve got all the information you were ever going to get via official channels like Jim and Claire and Jackie and Mrs. Maxwell. And there’s nothing to stop you ferreting away at that. You can still find out the truth if you really want to.”
“Oh yes? And who’s going to believe a word I say after that fiasco?” Lindsay objected.
“Well, Jim Carstairs seems to think that all is not lost,” Sophie replied. “All he’s really interested in is his client, you know. I don’t think he’s too bothered about whose toes you might have stepped on.”
“Maybe.”
“Look, I’ve got an idea. You brought all that stuff back from Mrs. Maxwell’s yesterday. Why don’t you put everything that happened tonight on the back burner for now and go through all Alison’s papers? You said yourself that if it hadn’t been for the advent of Alex, the final solution might have been there. Why not give it a try? You could go through all the papers, and I’ll have a look at what she’s got stored on computer disk,” Sophie encouraged.
Lindsay shrugged. “I don’t know. I think I just want to forget all about it. I’d rather get pissed out of my brains.”
“It’ll still be there in the morning,” Sophie said persuasively. She knew Lindsay well enough to realize that the best way to get her to forget the disaster of the evening was to give her something demanding to focus on. “And it’ll look much worse through the eyes of a hangover. Come on, humor me. Let’s give it a go.”
“If you insist,” Lindsay agreed reluctantly.
Sophie got to her feet and grabbed Lindsay’s hand. “Come on, then, let’s go.” She leaned over to kiss her. “It’s not the end of the world, you know. I still think you’re very special.”
They settled down in the study, Lindsay with Alison’s papers and correspondence, Sophie with her computer disks. “Lucky you’ve got the same computer,” Lindsay commented as she watched her lover efficiently working her way through Alison’s computer files.
“Not luck, really,” Sophie said. “Half the world have got Amstrad PCWs. Cheap, cheerful, and designed for techno-illiterates.”
After an hour, they stopped for a break. While Sophie defrosted a carton of chile tomato sauce and Lindsay watched over a bubbling pan of tagliatelle, they compared notes.
“Those boxes are full of completely irrelevant shit,” Lindsay complained. “Every letter she’d ever been sent from the office, from pay rises to hero-grams from the editor. Gas bills, electricity bills, deeply boring credit card bills.”
“What about the personal papers?” Sophie asked.
Lindsay shrugged. “I’m only just getting to them. There’s a couple of scribbled sheets of paper that seem to be the plot of a novel that she never wrote. There’s a list of feature ideas that she was obviously planning to work on. Nothing contentious there, as far as I can see. Letters from her mother, letters from an old university friend in Canada. There are a load more letters and cards farther down. Maybe they’ll help. What about you?”
“Nothing you could describe as illuminating. She seems to have done quite a bit of freelance work on the side, mainly on the kind of arts features that the Clarion would never use. Letters to friends, mainly of the ‘yesterday I went to the theatre and saw . . .’ variety. A couple of the disks are virtually empty.”
“What about secret files? You know, hidden ones? Judging from her diary, she had a bit of a fetish about secrecy. Would you know if there were any like that?” Lindsay inquired.
“I don’t know . . .” Sophie mused. “I don’t see any signs that she was a great computer expert, so if there were any I’d imagine they’d be easy enough to find.”
“So how would you hide something you didn’t want anyone else to see?” Lindsay demanded, draining the tagliatelle and dividing it into two bowls.
Sophie poured sauce over the pasta while she thought. “I suppose,” she started hesitantly. “I suppose I’d make it into a limbo file.”
“What on earth is a limbo file?”
“It’s a sort of failsafe in the Locoscript word-processing program. Any file you erase goes into limbo—a sort of backup memory. It doesn’t appear in your file directory, but you can still get it back. It’s supposed to stop you accidentally losing stuff, but it’s a handy hiding place,” Sophie explained.
“So did you check Alison’s disks for limbo files?” Lindsay asked through a mouthful of pasta.
Sophie shook her head. “I didn’t think of it. But I will.”
After they’d eaten, they headed back eagerly to the study. Lindsay perched on the edge of Sophie’s desk and watched her as she called up all the limbo files on Alison’s personal correspondence disk. “Bingo,” Sophie breathed. There were four files, each identified by a year.
Sophie pressed the keys to restore the 1989 file to the main file directory, then tried to enter it. At once, a box appeared on the screen saying, “Error in: Edit document. Not a Locoscript document. Cancel operation.”
“What the hell does that mean?” Lindsay demanded.
Sophie frowned. “Well, it means that the document isn’t accessible in this format. In other words, although I’ve brought it back from limbo, it’s not actually a proper Locoscript file. It could have been written with different software, though that wouldn’t make sense. Unless she’s turned it into . . . Wait a minute. I think I know how to get into it.” Sophie’s fingers flashed over the keyboard as she created a new document, then used the “Insert text” command to feed the inaccessible file into the new document. Lindsay watched with a new respect as text quickly scrolled down the screen.
“Amazing,” Lindsay exclaimed. “I had no idea you were a computer boffin.”
“I’m not,” Sophie said modestly. “I just know my way round this machine. I’ve lost too man
y bits and pieces myself not to know how to get things back.” She pressed a couple of keys, and the cursor scrolled back to the top of the file.
Lindsay read the first few sentences incredulously. “Good God,” she breathed. “This is dynamite.”
Sophie nodded, scrolling slowly down the screen. “The woman was poison,” she muttered as the full impact of Alison’s secret file hit her. It was filled with nuggets of information about a wide variety of people in Alison’s circle.
“If she’d been interested in money, she could have been the richest blackmailer in Glasgow,” Lindsay said bitterly. “Jesus Christ! How did she find half of this stuff out? I can’t believe . . .”
Whatever Lindsay intended to say disappeared from her mind as Sophie called up the last page of the file. The first name on the screen was Cordelia’s.
20
The shock hit Lindsay with a sharp stab of physical pain. “No,” she whispered. “It can’t be.”
Sophie gripped her hand tightly as they read the short entry under Cordelia’s name. The glowing green letters spelt out on the black screen,
Cordelia Brown. What a story! I’d love to see the look on Splash Gordon’s face when she finds out the love of her life has feet of clay. I’ve made some inquiries, and her new book is out in December. And surprise surprise, it’s called Ikhaya Lamaqhawe. Very African! How could Cordelia believe she’d get away with it? I’m going to have some real fun with this, once I’ve worked out the best way to use it. Thank goodness Anisha’s letter got through.
“But what does it mean?” Sophie puzzled. “Okay, it connects Cordelia to Alison, but what on earth is it all about?”
Lindsay sat staring at the screen, as if willing the words to disappear. Eventually, she slowly said, “I guess we’d better find Anisha’s letter.” But she made no move to return to the boxes of papers.
Sophie got to her feet and put her arms round Lindsay. “Just because Alison thought she had something on Cordelia, it doesn’t mean there’s anything sinister in it. You said yourself that no one would ever believe Alex’s evidence. So why are you placing so much importance on it? He probably saw Cordelia there on a completely separate occasion and just got confused.”
Lindsay shook her head. “I don’t know what to think, Sophie,” she said dully. “A couple of hours ago, Cordelia said she’d never met Alison, and I saw no reason to doubt her. And now this! What am I supposed to make of it?”
“Lindsay, you can’t draw any conclusions till you’ve read this mysterious letter from Anisha, whoever she is,” Sophie urged. “Come on, I’ll help you look.”
Lindsay moved like an automaton toward the piles of papers and sat on the floor. Sophie joined her and together they started working through the remaining letters and files from Alison’s boxes. It was Sophie who struck gold. She stared at a slim blue airmail envelope with a Zimbabwean postmark. The sender’s name and address were written on the back in a neat, flowing script. “I’ve found Anisha’s letter,” Sophie said, handing it over to Lindsay.
With a cold feeling of impending disaster, Lindsay pulled out the contents of the envelope. There were several sheets of thin airmail paper covered in the same hand. Lindsay closed her eyes and sighed. “I don’t know if I want to know what’s in this,” she murmured. “You know what I want to do? I want to burn it unread.”
“You can’t stop now, Lindsay. You have to know,” Sophie said gently. “Do you want me to read it first?”
Lindsay opened her eyes and shook her head. “No. You’re right. I do have to know.” She unfolded the pages and started to read. As she continued, her hands began to tremble and her eyes filled with tears. At the end, she dropped the letter to the floor, saying only, “Dear God.”
Sophie picked up the scattered sheets. “May I?” she asked.
Lindsay nodded. “Go ahead,” she said bitterly, getting to her feet. “I need a drink, Sophie.” She stumbled from the room, leaving Sophie alone with the letter. Filled with a mixture of anticipation and anxiety, Sophie began to read.
The letter was dated September of the previous year, weeks before Alison’s murder. My dear Alison, it began.
I don’t know whether you will remember me, but in August 1985 you interviewed me and three other South African women. We were on tour with a protest cabaret, and when we came to Glasgow, you came to see the show and talked to us afterward. I am writing to you because of all the newspaper and magazine articles that were written about us, yours was the best. You painted an honest picture without being sentimental, and the memory I have of you is a journalist eager to tell the truth.
We need your help now. In all honesty, I do not know if you can help us, but I can think of no one else. Some time ago, Joshua Shabala, a good friend of mine, disappeared. No one knew what had happened to him, but we all had our suspicions that he had been taken away by the secret police. As you will know, finding out information about the actions of officials in South Africa is virtually impossible if you are black, but his girlfriend, a young teacher in the townships called Mary Nkobo, determined that she would discover what had happened to Joshua.
Mary was a talented writer. She had already written a play for us to perform. She decided that she would write down the story of her search, which she did in all its details. She called her story “Black Hope.” After a few weeks, it became clear to her that Joshua had been murdered by the secret police in South Africa, and she wrote all she could find out about this too.
But in our country, asking too many questions is a dangerous path to take, and Mary too was arrested. Her manuscript was smuggled out to Zimbabwe by the same friend who is taking this letter. Mary had left instructions that if anything was to happen to her, the manuscript should be sent to an English writer, Cordelia Brown. She chose this woman because she had enjoyed her work, and when she had written her a letter to express her admiration, this Cordelia Brown had written back a very encouraging letter to her. Mary felt she could trust her. Now Mary too has disappeared without trace and we fear that she has been murdered by the police.
Now this “Black Hope” manuscript appears to have gone missing. We have written to Cordelia Brown several times but we have had no reply. A white sympathizer in Johannesburg has tried to telephone, but all she ever gets is an answering machine, and her messages have not been returned. I am turning to you in the hope that you can help us trace Mary’s book, for hers is a story that must be told to the world. She was very reluctant to show her work to anyone over here, for our protection, she said. But I had read a little of the book, and I know that its dramatic power and force will strike a blow against the white supremacists who keep my people in chains.
I know you lead a busy life, but I beg you to help us make sure that Mary and Joshua have not died in vain.
The rest of the letter consisted of instructions to Alison on how to make contact with Anisha and her friends to report any progress.
Sophie could hardly believe her eyes. She turned back to the first page and hastily read the letter again. Then she picked up her copy of Ikhaya Lamaqhawe. No wonder Cordelia had caught so authentically the flavor of life in South Africa, she thought bitterly. Hastily, she got to her feet and dashed out of the study. Lindsay would never need her more than she needed her now.
Sophie found Lindsay in the lounge, carefully sliding a glass into a paper bag. “What are you doing?” she asked, bemused by the seemingly bizarre behavior.
“This is Cordelia’s glass,” Lindsay explained calmly. “Jim will need to compare her prints with the thumbprint on the glass in Alison’s flat.”
Sophie almost panicked at Lindsay’s coolness. She had expected rage, hurt, tears, and recriminations. Not this studied calm. She struggled to find words that would give Lindsay the support she needed. “You think Alex was right?” she asked cautiously.
“Looks like it, doesn’t it?” Lindsay said bitterly. “There’s only one explanation for that letter, isn’t there? Cordelia was so desperate to have another lite
rary success that she stole a dead woman’s work. She must have thought that she was the only person who knew about Mary Nkobo’s manuscript. You’ve read Anisha’s letter—Mary hadn’t shown anything other than small excerpts to anyone over there. And when Cordelia found out that somehow Alison had uncovered her deception, she panicked.” Lindsay let out a long, shuddering sigh. “I can’t take it in, Sophie. Cordelia as Alison’s killer? It had never even crossed my mind. I was so convinced it was either Claire or Ruth.” She carefully put the bag down on the table then threw herself down on the sofa.
Sophie crossed the room and joined her, but Lindsay shrugged out of her embrace. “Please, Sophie. Just leave me alone. I know it’s daft, but I really don’t want to be touched right now.”
Sophie let her go immediately, but stayed on the sofa next to her. “You couldn’t be expected to guess,” she tried. “There was no reason on earth why you should connect Cordelia to Alison’s murder.”
“No reason on earth except for her guilt, you mean?” Lindsay raged. “Jesus, doesn’t everything just fall into place when you get the key to it? The entry in Alison’s diary about the political hot potato, you remember? She was hoping for some originality between the sheets! No wonder Cordelia wanted to ‘help’ me investigate the murder! No wonder she wanted to get me into bed to distract me, then drag me back to London. And I stupidly thought she was doing it to protect Claire!”
“There was still no reason for you to suspect her,” Sophie argued, desperately wanting to help Lindsay but not being certain how to do it.
“Of course I should! I was the one person who knew damn well that she hadn’t written a word of that book when I left last May. The time scale was all wrong. I should have known there was something fishy going on. And if I hadn’t run off to Italy in the first place, none of this could ever have happened.” Lindsay’s face was like stone, her eyes cold and dead, her voice dull and flat.
