by Manda Scott
‘Sure about what?’
‘Sure about what happened to Malcolm. She didn’t believe that he died by accident. She wanted to get you to find out what happened, but she didn’t want to call you until she’d got as much information as she could.’ Caroline spun the folder towards me. It skidded across the floor and came to rest against my foot. ‘Everything she found is in here.’
I let the stuff lie where it was.
‘What did the medics tell you?’ I asked. ‘About Malcolm?’
‘That he died at work. He’d been in working over the weekend and they found him at his desk when they went in on Monday morning.’
‘Was there a post-mortem?’
‘Of course. The report said that he’d had a heart attack. Stress. Overwork. All the usual medical bullshit. He was working an eighteen-hour day and a seven-day week in a job that he hated without enough money to finish the project. It didn’t seem completely unreasonable at the time.’
It never does with medics. Overwork goes with the job. If you don’t hit the bottle, something else will crack in the end. Except that Malcolm didn’t seem the type to crack.
I looked across at Caroline. She was chewing a tail-end of hair, looking at me as if I was the only hope left.
Some hope.
‘So why didn’t Bridget believe it?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know.’ She shook her head. ‘She did at first. She would have believed anything, I think. We were so stressed out with organizing the service and then trying to find you . . .’ She bit her lip, stopped and changed direction. ‘It wasn’t until afterwards that we had the time to think. Then she started asking questions . . .’
Quite.
It is, after all, what lawyers are trained to do. It’s just that most of them don’t die as a result.
I took my mug and went to sit on the back step, looking out towards the pond and the fields beyond.
A young kestrel fought a thermal, trying to keep position over the muck heap, then closed its wings and dropped twenty feet in fewer seconds. It missed the mouse and flicked upwards again for a second try.
If I had a camera here, I could do something useful.
The dog pushed past me and came to sit at my feet. Caroline followed and stood leaning on the doorpost at my side, the folder hanging loosely from her fingers. All three of us watched the bird make another fruitless stoop. Two-nil to the rodents.
I took the folder from her hand and held it on my lap. ‘So what did she find?’ I asked.
‘Nothing.’ Caroline shook her head, her eyes still on the bird. ‘That’s why we didn’t call you.’
I opened the file and flicked through the contents. There was a long, printed letter from Malcolm from a year or so before. When I knew him, he used to write once a fortnight, but Bridget, as a matter of general policy, never kept the letters. Something about not acquiring unnecessary clutter in her life. This one must have escaped the weekly clear-out. I ran my eye down the page and my name jumped out. I didn’t stop to read it in detail.
Underneath the letter was a list of journal references written in Bridget’s fine, angled script, detailing her brother’s most recent publications and a list of the names, home addresses and academic positions of his close colleagues. None of the names was familiar, but then I had been out of medical academia for a good eight years, more than enough time for all the relevant personalities to change.
I read the reference list and tried to understand where Malcolm’s work had taken him in the past few years. Somewhere into the stratosphere of high-tech molecular biology, a long way beyond my understanding.
Lastly, there was the scruffy note that had come with the basket of bantams. And the bantams had gone.
I looked up at Caroline. ‘Have you found the hens yet?’
‘No. They’re gone. They were locked in the shed, Kellen. Someone had the key. The door’s still locked and they’re not there. Whoever murdered Bridget took the hens too.’ Her voice frayed at the edges. She sat down carefully on the edge of the stone water-trough by the back door and kept her eyes fixed on the hawthorns beyond the pond.
I stood up and put my hand on her shoulder. ‘What makes you sure it was murder?’ I asked.
She didn’t turn round. ‘Instinct,’ she said shortly. ‘I wasn’t sure about Malcolm, but I’m bloody certain about Bridget. Heart attacks don’t happen in pairs. Not this pair anyway.’ Her eyes flickered at me and then back to the pond. ‘You don’t have to stay if you don’t believe me.’
‘I know.’
I don’t have to stay even if I do. I’ve kept away for the past four years. There’s no real reason to change now.
I looked at the spider’s webs, wet with dew, strung out between the reeds of the pond and remembered a promise I made a long, long time ago. ‘But I have to say goodbye first.’
Once a long time ago, I stood in the kitchen doorway and promised that I would come back and say goodbye.
It was three o’clock in the afternoon of Saturday, 21 October. The rain hammered, unrelenting, on the window. Neither of us wept.
I carried out the final suitcase to the pile on the porch. Caroline was there, somewhere in the background, helping me pack. She helped me with everything then.
Bridget sat by the fire, watching me go, Tan at her feet and the cats ranged about her like a bodyguard.
‘Are you going to say goodbye?’
‘Not yet. I’ll come back later.’
‘When?’
‘I don’t know. Later.’
‘You will say goodbye, Kellen?’
‘Of course. Just not yet. It’s too soon.’
Later. Not now. Later, I will come back and say goodbye. I promise.
And this is later and I still haven’t said goodbye and it is still too soon.
It felt strange going back in daylight. Upstairs, the house still echoed with the awkward silence that goes with death. Even the floorboards creaked more quietly.
I let myself into the bedroom and stood just inside the door, getting my bearings and trying to let go of the odd sense of unreality that had hit the night before. The room looked much as it ever did. The only difference was the bed. None of the men had thought to touch it after they’d lifted her body and so the duvet still held the shape of her, like a thumbprint on soft clay, and the dip in the pillow still showed where they’d lifted her head. The rest of the bed was as smooth as when it was made. Whatever happened to Bridget Donnelly, she hadn’t moved from the moment she lay down.
Nasty.
But I’m not here to start looking for answers. I’m here to ask questions.
I took my eyes off the place where she had been and let my gaze drift upwards until her eyes caught mine.
There’s a black and white print on the wall behind the bed, centred over her pillow. A high-contrast, grainy shot pushed hard to make the most of the late evening light and hand-printed on the big enlarger in the darkroom we set up in the attic.
It’s the best shot I’ve ever taken of Bridget. She’s sitting on top of the grave mound near the cairn in the beech wood. One knee is pulled up to her chin and her head is cocked to one side as she smiles down into the lens of the camera. Her smile is warm and relaxed. Her eyes are alive with the spirit of the time and the place. Her whole body radiates a vibrant, ethereal energy.
Nobody could possibly believe that this woman was ready to die.
Except that somebody did. And I don’t know who or how or why. And if I want to find out, I am going to have to go through this kind of thing again and again and again. I am going to have to start searching the diaries and reading the letters and talking to the friends I haven’t seen or spoken to since the day I left. I am, in fact, going to have to do all of the things I haven’t got around to in the last four years and which I really, really quite definitely don’t want to do.
Or I could just walk out, go home and let somebody else sort it all out.
I looked up at the print again.
It’s
her eyes that catch the soul and hold it. The sharp, ironic, intelligent eyes of a woman who loves. The eyes of a woman who doesn’t give up.
She was never one to give up easily, Bridget.
Downstairs, Caroline was still sitting on the kitchen step with the dog.
I slid past her and walked across the yard, listening to the crunch of her feet on the gravel as she followed me across. We reached the barn together.
‘Are you leaving?’ she asked.
‘No.’ I hauled the door open. A warm wash of horse breath flowed out over the pair of us. ‘I was going to help you feed the horses. I thought they might need it by now.’
‘And then you’ll leave after that?’
I lifted the lid on the feed bin and breathed in the smell of bran and pony nuts. The smell of home.
Caroline was watching me, holding her breath.
‘No,’ I shook my head. ‘I’m staying. And I’ll do what I can to find out what happened.’
She smiled then. Almost a real smile. It rose up as far as her eyebrows and then turned sideways into a frown. ‘Are you going to tell me why?’
I smiled back. It felt real.
‘Because I promised I would.’
Two
Caroline had a ride to lead at nine. We had a row over that, which cleared the air if nothing else. I wanted her to stay and help me sort things out; she wanted to escape and pretend nothing had happened for a while. So I told her that she couldn’t possibly take a bunch of schoolkids pony-trekking and she told me that it was the disabled riders, as if that pulled any weight at all. At ten to nine she pointed out that it was too late to cancel and I had to help her groom and tack up six ponies and Balder, her lead horse, in less than two minutes each.
I enjoyed it.
Then, while Caroline spent the morning messing about with horses in the brisk September sunshine, I moulded the portable phone to my shoulder and set about increasing Telecom’s profits for the day by a significant margin.
A brief call to the answer-phone at home with an outline of the problem, a profuse apology and a vaguely estimated return time took care of the wavering domestic front. A second call, this time to the Sauciehall Street Counselling Centre with news of a death in the family, secured me the rest of the week off work. The one advantage of working with bereavement counsellors is that they understand the need for plenty of time off after the death of an ex-loved-one. The various clients are rarely quite as understanding, but I don’t work on reception so that’s not my problem.
Next, I called up the university switchboard and dialled my way through the various levels of hospital administration to reach one Dr Lee Adams, late of the University of Glasgow medical school, erstwhile obstetric surgeon and current University Pathologist in the Department of Clinical Medicine (Strathclyde Area Health Authority).
Lee and I went through medical school together in the dim and distant past, when I still believed in the power of science and she still believed she could buck the system. We were both wrong, of course, but by the time we had found that out, we had forged a partnership that carried us through the houseman’s years and out into the real world beyond. She’s one of those people who’s guaranteed to be there in an emergency. Once in a while, she creates the emergency and then life becomes seriously interesting. Either way, she’s the single most useful person I know in a tight corner and I have trusted her at least once with my life, liberty and vestiges of sanity.
It took five minutes to reach her, but I was put through, eventually, to the depths of the pathology cold room and caught her at the start of clinical rounds, with a dead body lying on the steel table in front of her and a bunch of students hanging on her every word. The conversation was rather more truncated than I would have liked, but we both understood the essentials and she agreed to meet me later after work in the usual bar. She also agreed to conduct the postmortem examination personally, provided I could clear it with the local GP.
No problem.
No problem at all.
The phone pad on the table had the names of the local medical practices, one of them highlighted in fluorescent yellow. The receptionist was well trained to keep outsiders at bay but the Donnelly name proved an effective key and I was transferred after only a minute or two of shocked commiseration. Bridget, it appeared, had been widely known and widely liked, possibly even loved, by her neighbours.
Dr David Kemp, when he finally deigned to respond to the call, sounded exactly the same over the phone as he did in real life and anger did nothing to improve the irritating sinus whine. The sound of it cheered me up enormously. I sat back, put my feet up on the Rayburn and prepared to enjoy myself.
There is a basic technique taught in assertiveness classes known as the ‘broken record’. Find your groove – in this case, ‘I have arranged for Dr Adams to do the post-mortem’ – and stay there. Repeat at any pause in the flow of invective from the other side. Played right, it has its place, although it usually works best against those with a low boredom threshold. Dr Kemp either had a very high boredom threshold or he knew the game and thought he could outplay me.
I kept to my groove. He kept to his, which was that he had already arranged a post-mortem with another colleague and there was nothing I could do about it. My memory of medical law is not wonderful, but I was fairly sure he was talking bullshit and eventually said so.
We were on the downward slide to a particularly cathartic slanging match when there was a crunch of gravel outside the door and a blue police Land Rover pulled up. The man with a heart from the previous night and his dark-haired minion hopped out.
I grinned triumph at the phone and held it out so that he could hear the footsteps on the gravel. ‘It’s the boys and girls in blue, Doctor. I think we could get ourselves a legal ruling on this, if you’d like to hold on for a moment.’
He didn’t. By the time the uniformed duo had come within earshot, the line had gone dead. Very disappointing.
I hung up, feeling smug, and kicked a rock over to hold the back door open. ‘Are you coming in?’
‘If you’re sure it’s all right.’
Inspector Stewart MacDonald slipped past me into the kitchen with a nod, as if we were one of his regular coffee stops. He looked far more sprightly than he should have done, given that he can’t have had much more sleep than I had.
His colleague followed more slowly, pausing on her way across the yard to talk to one of the cats sprawled under the hawthorns by the pond. She hesitated, standing warily in the doorway as if waiting for the right password to cross the threshold. ‘Is Ms Leader not here?’ she asked.
‘No.’ I fished around in the sink, looking for three readily cleanable mugs among the heap from the previous night. ‘She’s gone out with the horses. We didn’t have time to cancel today’s rides.’
‘Aye,’ said Inspector MacDonald, pausing in his investigation of Bridget’s desk diary, ‘I thought that was her we saw going through the village. The wee lad with the orange jacket on yon grey thing’s not going to stay on top long if she takes them up over the moor.’
Donald James. Caroline told me about him while we were tacking up.
‘It’s all right. She knows. He’s got cerebral palsy. She’ll hold Midnight in at a walk for him when the rest have a canter.’
‘Fair enough. I said she’d be fine.’ He nodded amiably, his mind elsewhere. His eyes were already strip-searching the room.
‘Coffee?’ I offered.
‘Fine. Thanks. White. Two sugars. WPC Philips there’ – he tipped his head back towards the door – ‘takes herbal tea if you’ve got it.’
No calories. Not even stimulants. They get on like a house on fire, you can tell.
WPC Philips favoured him with a look that would have curdled milk at fifty paces and didn’t bother to switch it off when she turned back to me.
Astonishing.
The spark of humanity from the previous night had snuffed out in the cold light of the morning. In its place, I faced
a pair of the most startling green feline eyes. Eyes that flared with a kaleidoscope of compressed emotions. Totally riveting. She didn’t look like that in the bedroom last night. But then, she wasn’t being wound up by her superiors last night.
She caught me looking and the stare transformed into something slightly less dangerous. More of a long-distance iceberg, designed to ward off all comers. Particularly me.
I kept my head out of the firing line and hunted through the pantry until I found a box of fruit tea in the cupboard. A relic from the days when Lee used to be welcome at the farm. I made the lass a mug and offered her a seat by the fire. She accepted both with a trained professional politeness, but she was not, absolutely not, going to indulge in trivial conversation for the sake of it.
Oh, well.
MacDonald took his coffee and made a vague circuit of the room in a discreet but none the less methodical examination of the magazines and the letters, the wall calendar and the desk diary, and the litter of old recipes, vet’s bills and farmer’s invoices that were impaled on the letter spike beside the kettle.
His sidekick and I sat in disconnected silence on either side of the fire and waited until he came full circle back to the breakfast counter, where Ashwood was using Bridget’s leather-bound address book as a pillow. They regarded each other carefully for a moment and then he turned away to sit back by the fire. The address book stayed exactly where it was.
‘Anything interesting?’ I asked.
‘You never know.’
I don’t. But I would be surprised.
‘Upstairs?’ I suggested.
‘Aye,’ he nodded peaceably, ‘good idea.’
The two of them followed me through the narrow hallway to the stairs and we began a detailed tour of the upper floor. The bathroom, the spare room and the airing cupboard yielded in quick succession to the prying eyes. A systematic probing of things personal that were never meant to be probed. I tried to imagine how I would feel watching strangers sift through the trivia of my life and was grateful, for once, that Caroline was not around.
The big bedroom was last and MacDonald, with a degree of sensitivity I wouldn’t normally have associated with an officer of the law, stood back to let his colleague do the work. I stayed with him by the door and together we watched Elspeth Philips, neat in her ordered uniform, straighten the dimpled duvet as she passed the bed. A small, unconscious gesture of tidiness and respect for the dead. Or for the living, perhaps. Her hand hovered by the glass of water on the bedside table and then withdrew as she passed on.
