The Back of Beyond

by Doris Davidson

  Dougal took up the explanation. ‘Gwen, I can see by your face what you think, but it wasn’t like that. We stuck to the rules and slept in different rooms, but we had all our meals together, and sat together in the evenings, remembering things Marge used to say and do, and … we gradually began to feel closer to each other. I suppose it was inevitable, really, two lonely people brought together by one vulnerable little boy. We still sleep in separate rooms, Gwen, we haven’t done anything wrong. We were hoping and praying you’d come back, because we want your blessing on us getting married in another six months or so. It’s the only way it would feel right for us.’

  She looked down at her hands, uncertain of how she felt. It seemed awful that Dougal was thinking of taking a second wife so soon, yet … why shouldn’t he? He was a decent man. He hadn’t jumped straight into bed with another woman, and if he did feel the need of somebody else, he couldn’t do better than Peggy. Gwen lifted her head again, and her heart went out to the two people waiting so anxiously for her verdict. She had been on her own for months now, yet she had always cherished a faint hope that she could go back to Alistair one day. They didn’t have that – Alf and Marge were gone for good.

  The thing was, if Peg was wrong about Alistair, it would be difficult to live where she would see Nicky every day. She would have to keep her distance, be an aunt not a mother … which was probably just as well. If Alistair ever did want her back, he wouldn’t want Nicky thrown in.

  ‘Dougal,’ she began, ‘don’t think I’m against you two getting married. It’s just I’ll have to get used to the idea – it’s been quite a shock on top of …’

  ‘We discussed it night after night,’ Peggy said, quietly, ‘and we’ve decided to put both houses on the market and move to another district altogether.’

  ‘Either that,’ added Dougal, tentatively, ‘or … my mother’s getting on now, and I’d like to see her and my sister again. Once we sell up here, we could easily afford a holiday in America for the three of us, and there’s always the chance I could get a better job and settle over there. What do you think?’

  ‘It’s up to you.’ Gwen’s throat had tightened. She was happy for Nicky that Dougal was including him in their plans, although, if they remained over there, she would never see her younger son again, and her last sister would be lost to her, as well.

  Seeing how their news had affected her, Peggy said, ‘Leave it just now, Dougal. She still hasn’t got over Marge.’

  ‘None of us’ll ever get over Marge,’ he said sharply, ‘but you’re right. It’s too soon for us to be making definite plans.’ He paused, then said, ‘Peg, did you remember to phone Alistair?’

  ‘Yes, just after I phoned you, and he said he’d get here as soon as he could. They’ve all missed you, you know, Gwen.’

  ‘David and Leila probably have, but I’m not so sure about Alistair.’

  ‘He’s had time to cool down and think,’ Peggy said hastily, to avoid the subject being dragged up and dissected again. ‘I’m almost sure he wants you to go home.’

  ‘I’ll believe that when he tells me himself. Being a prisoner of war changed him, you know. The old Alistair would have been shocked at what I did, but he’d have got over it. This Alistair broods over things, and …’ She broke off with a sigh. ‘I’ll just have to wait and see what happens.’

  The phone call put Alistair into a state of flux. He didn’t know whether to be glad or sorry that Gwen had materialized again. He had been out of his mind wondering if she was all right, yet he couldn’t forgive her. She apparently wanted to come back, but it was all very well for her. She wasn’t the one who had been betrayed. It wasn’t her heart that had come within a hairsbreadth of being ground to dust. She wouldn’t have to cope with nightly images of her spouse making love with somebody else.

  What worried him more than anything, though, was the fact that David had felt driven to write to his mother. If the boy missed her as much as that …?

  ‘Who was that on the phone?’ Leila was looking at him in some concern.

  ‘Your Auntie Peggy. Did you know David had written to your mother?’

  ‘Where did he get her address?’

  ‘God knows.’

  ‘What are you going to do, Dad? Are you going to let her come home?’

  He gave a doubtful shrug. ‘Do you and David want her home?’

  ‘Of course we do. Don’t you?’

  He avoided her eyes. ‘I don’t know, Leila, and that’s the truth. She … no, I still can’t speak about it, not yet and especially not to you.’

  ‘Don’t be too hard on her, Dad. She’s been punished for what she did – she must have spent years wondering when the axe was going to fall. She’s not a bad person.’

  ‘I know that, but … no, you can’t understand, Leila.’

  ‘Maybe I can’t, but … please, Dad, make her come home.’

  He raised his head again. ‘I said I’d go to speak to her, and we’d see what happens. Will we shut up the shop for a few days, or will you two manage to keep things going till I come back?’

  ‘We’ll manage.’

  ‘Just take a note of anything I need to do, and I’ll attend to it when I get back. I’ll have to go and pack a few things, so you and David will have to take the bus home.’

  ‘I bet he would crawl home on his hands and knees if it would bring Mum back.’

  Her trill of laughter was music to his ears; neither she nor David had so much as smiled for some time, and his own heart lightened a little as he went out to his car.

  On his way to Forvit, he decided that he might as well tell Lexie that he was going to see Gwen. Whatever she said, even if she told him he was being a fool, it wouldn’t make him change his mind, but it was best that she knew.

  It proved difficult to speak about personal matters in the shop. He was forced to stop each time a customer came in, and he had only got as far as telling her how David had worked out where to contact his mother, when they were interrupted again.

  This time, it was Detective Inspector Roddy Liddell who walked in, his face so grave that they both knew he had something seriously bad to impart. ‘I’d advise you to shut the shop, Lexie,’ he began, then looked at Alistair. ‘I’m glad you’re here, too. She’s going to need somebody and I’ll have to get back after I say what I have to say.’

  Noticing that the blood had ebbed from Lexie’s face, Alistair took it upon himself to walk across to the shop door, turn the key in the lock and push down the snib. ‘What is it? Has there been a new development?’

  Liddell was already shepherding her through the connecting door to her house, his arm protectively round her waist, and all thoughts of going to London flew out of Alistair’s mind as he followed them. Whatever the ’tec had to tell Lexie, he appeared to be quite sure that it would knock her for six.

  In the kitchen, Liddell sat on the sofa with her, taking her hand between both of his, but Alistair, waiting to hear the bad news, remained standing.

  ‘I wish I didn’t have to do this,’ Roddy said, after a moment. ‘And I don’t know where to begin.’

  ‘It might be a good idea to begin at the beginning.’ Alistair couldn’t help the sarcasm.

  ‘Yes, of course. Yesterday, my sergeant and I went to the address in Inveraray given by Mrs Chalmers. The man who answered the door denied that he was Tom Birnie, but we took him in for questioning anyway.’

  With both his listeners’ attention riveted on him, he told them of the long hours of questioning before the man made his fatal slip and his interrogators knew for certain that he was the man they were after.

  An important question occurred to Alistair. ‘If he hadn’t shot himself in the foot, so to speak, would you have let him go?’

  Liddell gave his head a firm shake. ‘No, I was one hundred per cent positive that we had the right man and we’d have kept on and on at him until he did crack. He gave the game away by naming Forvit, which we had avoided mentioning, so we brought him up to Aberdee
n to get his full statement, and believe me, once he started, he didn’t want to stop. He boasted about all the young girls he had seduced – that was the word he used, but we did get him to admit that in most cases it had been rape – and then he came to Nancy Lawrie. I’ll read a bit of my sergeant’s notes. He’s good, got it almost verbatim.

  ‘I’d actually grown quite fond of the girl, but when she collared me one day and said she was in the family way and what was I going to do about it, she got me on the raw. I thought she was trying to trap me and I got really angry. I said it wasn’t mine, and I could take no responsibility for it. She had got herself into the mess and she could bloody well get herself out of it.’

  At this point, Lexie spoke for the first time. ‘Nancy said he promised to marry her when his wife divorced him, though he never did, but he got her a room in Edinburgh.’

  The detective nodded his agreement with this. ‘That came later. At first, she was so upset by the doctor’s attitude, and scared that her parents would find out, that when your father asked her why she was crying, she burst out with the whole sorry story.’

  ‘Yes, she told me all that, and Dad went to Tom Birnie and threatened to tell his wife what he’d done if he didn’t support Nancy and the child.’

  Liddell hesitated before saying – softly wary and obviously ready to stop if Lexie’s reaction was too strong – ‘This is when it turned really nasty, I’m afraid. He fooled Nancy into believing that he would marry her when his wife divorced him, but he says he never had any intention of leaving her. It was she who had the money, you see, and he didn’t want to foul his own nest by admitting what he had done.

  ‘Unfortunately, he hadn’t fooled Margaret. She had known for years the kind of man he was and hadn’t been particularly worried because she knew he wasn’t serious about any of them … until Nancy. So she tackled him one night and they’d had a ding-dong row that went on for hours, he said, and was still raging when they went up to bed. She had thrown every bad name she knew at him, and at first he laughed it off, but when she started to say foul things about Nancy, he lost his temper and hit her to shut her up. It didn’t stop her, though, and she kept on, pummelling into him while she spat out more filth and …’

  Liddell glanced briefly at Alistair before he went on, ‘He says he didn’t mean to kill her, but he lost control altogether, and one of his punches knocked her on to the bed and he lifted a pillow without thinking and suffocated her.’

  Lexie rendered speechless by this, it was left to Alistair to say, ‘You can’t suffocate somebody without meaning to, though.’

  ‘No, it was definitely murder, but probably unpremeditated. At any rate, he panicked, and sat for a while wondering what to do, till he realized that the longer he waited, the worse it would be for him to shift her – rigor mortis sets in after so many hours. Of course, it disappears again after about another twenty-four hours, but he couldn’t wait that long to dispose of the body. So he wrapped it in the bedspread, bumped her down the stairs and through the kitchen, but unluckily for him …’

  Liddell’s voice had begun to waver before he stopped speaking, and now he put one arm round Lexie’s shoulders. ‘This is the worst bit for you to hear, my dear, and I should probably have told you this first, but …’

  He looked round at Alistair, who said, ‘Aye, it was my fault you didn’t. But go on, tell us now, for God’s sake. Has this something to do with Lexie’s father?’

  ‘Yes. I’m afraid so. Birnie said that when he opened the back door, Alec Fraser was standing on the step with his hand raised ready to knock. He said he’d come to ask if Margaret was well enough, because she hadn’t turned up for choir practice that night, then, according to Birnie, Alec looked past him and saw what he shouldn’t have seen. A strand of Margaret’s hair had worked its way out at the top of the bedspread.’

  Roddy paused with a sigh. ‘I’ll give you his account of what happened next, if I can find the place. Ah, here it is.’

  ‘Fraser froze with shock, but I couldn’t chance him recovering and running off to report me, so I punched him in the solar plexus and knocked him out. Then I ran up to the bedroom and got the pillow …’

  Out of consideration for Lexie, Liddell stopped there, but she muttered, ‘No, Roddy, I want to know everything. What did he do after he smothered my father?’

  ‘He wrapped him in a sheet and had two bodies to dispose of. He was telling me all this without batting an eyelid, boasting about it, but he admitted he’d had quite a struggle to drag them, one at a time, through the back door. He wondered if he should put them in his car and hide them somewhere miles away, until it struck him that the handiest place would be best, the nearest, the one it would be least likely for anyone to look, even if the police did make a search for them as missing persons. At the other side of the wall was a moor which had been shown on maps as early as the sixteen hundreds, an ideal burial ground, although it needed a Herculean effort to get them over the wall.

  ‘I’ll quote here – “I didn’t bury them in the same grave. I couldn’t have Fraser lying on top of Margaret for all eternity, but I had to get rid of the sanctimonious bastard.”

  ‘That was how he put it,’ Roddy said apologetically. ‘The hue and cry went up next day about Alec Fraser having disappeared, but Mrs Birnie wasn’t missed until one of her friends realized that she hadn’t seen the doctor’s wife for some time and asked him if she was well enough. That was when he put out the story about her going to Stirling to look after her sick mother, the story he’d had time to manufacture.’

  Roddy waited for a moment to see if Lexie wanted to say anything at this point, but she seemed to have sunk into some kind of morose reverie, so he went on, wanting to get it over. ‘The day after the murders, Birnie was called in to attend to your mother, and he went back that night with the excuse that the two of you needed something to help you to sleep. What he gave your mother had her out like a light in minutes, he told me, so he took you through to your room, Lexie, gave you the same sleeping potion or whatever, and waited to see if it took effect. Of course, we know now that he was easily aroused by young girls’ bodies, and as you took off your clothes it occurred to him how he could get his revenge on your father for interfering in things that didn’t concern him.’

  Only then did Lexie give a start and her eyes darkened as she exclaimed, ‘It was the doctor that raped me?’

  ‘Yes, it was Tom Birnie, adulterer, seducer, rapist and murderer … and liar, of course. Accomplished liar. You weren’t the only one, Lexie, just one of many.’

  ‘That doesn’t make much difference to me, though.’ She made a loud gulping noise and then muttered, ‘No, I’m wrong. It does make a difference. I can think of my father as a decent man now, after all the years of hating him for what he did to me.’

  ‘You can be proud of him,’ Liddell pointed out. ‘He wasn’t afraid to do what he felt needed to be done. He did what he could for Nancy Lawrie, and if he’d arrived at the doctor’s house half an hour earlier, he’d likely have tried to help Margaret Birnie. As it was, he didn’t even get a chance to accuse her husband of murdering her.’

  ‘Everybody always said Alec Fraser was a gentleman,’ Alistair put in here. ‘People could hardly believe he’d run off with anybody, never mind a girl like Nancy, but that was how it looked, and I’m glad his name’s been cleared at last.’

  Lexie released a shuddering sigh as Liddell got to his feet. ‘Don’t leave me, Roddy.’

  He bent down and kissed her brow. ‘I have to, Lexie, my dear. I’ve overstayed the time I was allowed, as it is.’

  ‘She’ll be all right,’ Alistair stated, firmly. ‘I’ll stay with her … all night if necessary.’

  ‘Thanks, I hate having to go like this, but my Super wants me back right away. I’ll come back as soon as I can, Lexie, but I can’t promise any definite time … or day, even. There’s still a lot of work to be done before we get things properly tied up.’

  ‘I understand, Roddy.
’ She was plainly trying to keep her voice steady, but she couldn’t disguise its slight tremor. ‘I’ll see you when I see you.’

  She controlled herself until his footsteps faded, and then the floodgates opened. ‘Oh, Lexie,’ Alistair begged, ‘please don’t cry like that. I know how upset you must be, but it tears me apart hearing you …’

  She stretched out a hand and pulled him down beside her, and he had no option but to take her in his arms – not that he didn’t want to, because he felt more genuine love for her at that precise moment than he had ever done before. Over the past few weeks, too, he had found himself recalling, with deep fondness, the evenings they had spent together in the shadow of the tower when they were young … before her father … before she thought Alec had abandoned her. Not only that, it had just transpired, she had thought that it was shame at raping her which had made him leave, and that wasn’t true either. But it explained her peculiar behaviour. That was why she’d been like she was, why she had suddenly started fighting him off after making him believe she wanted him to make love to her, after she’d succeeded in making him desperate for it. But it was no wonder she had changed. Being raped at sixteen would be bad enough, but thinking it was her own father …

  How could any doctor, in a position of trust, take advantage of young female patients like that? It was … despicable, though that word wasn’t really strong enough, and there was no excuse for it. And then, to top it all, he had killed his wife in a fit of rage, also an innocent well-meaning man … Christ Almighty! How low could a human being sink?

  It dawned on him now that Lexie’s almost hysterical sobbing had eased. ‘Do you fancy a drink to steady you?’ he asked her.

  She drew in a long, quivering breath. ‘I’ll go through and get a bottle of brandy from the shop. Roddy and I finished one the last time he was here.’

  He let her do it. It was something to occupy her for a wee while, but it gave him, unfortunately, time to imagine what she and the ’tec had got up to after finishing off a whole bottle of brandy. Had she let him go all the way? But maybe the bottle hadn’t been full when they started? He sincerely hoped not, for even if Lexie wasn’t a young girl any longer, she had kept her figure. Of course, she hadn’t borne any children, so it had been easier for her than for Gwen, whose waist was thicker than it had once been, and her breasts more flabby.