THE SAM BRYSON COLLECTION

by McLean, Russel D; Chercover, Sean

  She sighed heavily. “Is it going to be like this every year?”

  “I hope not,” I said. We were still standing in the hall. I moved in and kissed her quickly. “Go and get changed,” I told her. “Wear something nice.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “Why?”

  “Because you don’t think I’m that daft I wouldn’t try and make it up to you with some half-arsed gesture?”

  She laughed. “Now I know why I keep you around,” she said.

  “Like a scruffy little dog.” She winked at me and. disappeared into the bedroom.

  I went to the bathroom and splashed water on my face. I looked at myself in the mirror and thought I didn’t look too bad at all. As I stood there looking at myself my mobile began bleating. I answered it quickly.

  “Hey, big bro,” Gem said. .

  “Hey, yourself, how are you?”

  “I’m fine,” she said. “Just thought I hadn’t heard from my brother the big, bad PI in a while. Figured I’d give you a call.”

  “Life is good,” I said. “Business fine.”

  “And Ros?”

  I didn’t have to think about it. “Ros,” I said. “Ros is great.”

  “Ah, at least it’s all working out for someone. My advice, though, Sammy, is don’t get married. Too much hassle.”

  “So I heard. I saw Cameron today.”

  “Oh,” she said, her voice quite empty. “How is he?”

  “He got the letter froM your lawyer. He says he’s still in love with you.”

  Her voice softened. “I was still in love with him, even at the end. But . . .“ Her voice trailed off, and I remembered what Cameron had said today in the cemetery, Sometimes, love just isn’t enough.

  I hoped to God that wasn’t true. With Ros and me, some days it seems like love is the only glue we have to keep us from falling apart.

  I said, “How are you doing with it all?”

  “Fine,” she said. “A little lonely; you know, stuck out here in the capital.” Just after she and Cameron had made the decision to split, Gem had taken a new job out in Edinburgh, running a small gallery.

  “You’ll be fine,” I said. “With that famous Bryson charm you won’t be able to move for new friends and acquaintances.” .

  She laughed. “Sure,” she said.

  Ros was knocking on the bathroom door. “You okay in there, babe?”

  “Sure,” I said. Then, to Gemma: “Look. I have to run”

  “Hot date?”

  “Aye.”

  “You’re a day early. For your anniversary. It’s tomorrow.”

  I sighed. “I know that,” I said. “I’m not completely incompetent!”

  She made a clucking noise down the other end of the line and then laughed. We said goodbye and she hung up first.

  Out in the hall, Ros was waiting for me in a white blouse and a long, flowing skirt that reached to her ankles. Her dark hair was loose. She twirled and said, “How’s this?”

  “Perfect,” I told her.

  ***

  I’d made reservations at an intimate little French restaurant down the Perth Road. Dundee is a city of contradictions in many ways. For many Scots it has this reputation as a working-class city a place of grime and soot. Yet these days, it is beginning to build a. new reputation as a small city with a cosmopolitan atmosphere.

  Ten years ago an exclusively French restaurant would have never survived in Dundee. No with scientists and researchers and a soaring student population coming into the city these smart, sophisticated and unexpected places pop up in the most unlikely venues.

  We ate slowly, taking our time Over the food. We talked and we laughed and everything in our lives seemed weightless, somehow.

  Maybe it was the wine, maybe it was the company, maybe it was just something in the air.

  By the end of our meal, we’d both drunk too much wine. The waiter called us a taxi and we went back to my place. We fell together through the front door and stumbled as we closed it behind ourselves. Ros steadied herself against the wall, and I looked at her. I wanted to tell her how beautiful she was, but there was no need for words.

  ***

  The next morning, I woke up early and hopped into the shower. I had a long drive ahead of me, and I knew I needed to get a good start. I made sure I wasn’t pounding about like an elephant, and somehow I managed not to wake Ros.

  As I drove the BMW out of the city I called in to the office Using the hands-free. Babs answered, and said that she’d call me if there was an emergency. I was confident enough that she and Jamie could handle things for a few days anyway.

  I hit the motorway and started rooting around to find CDs I’d discarded about the car. I found a copy of The Clash’s London Calling and slipped that into the player. As the riffs kicked, I let my foot slip onto the accelerator. Beneath me, the car shivered gently and surged forward.

  I arrived outside the village of Bumton as evening was drawing close. It was a picturesque little place, all white-walled houses with wooden beams on the outer walls, large gardens, and roads without markings. I slipped down to the thirty-mile speed limit and kept an eye out for Mr. Sanderson’s residence. It didn’t take me long; the village was small and easy to navigate. It was clearly a centre for commuters to the nearby towns, however, as there was a railway station just outside the village.

  I parked on the street outside Sandersons house and watched it carefully. The garden was kept neat and tidy, but was bare in comparison to others in the area. I guessed, even though he had a small garden shed, he wasn’t really the green-fingered type. The small wooden structure was there for storage and maybe even just appearance.

  I waited five minutes before getting out of the car. I tugged at my suit jacket and ran a hand through my hair. It wouldn’t do any good to appear at his front door looking like a discarded sack of potatoes.

  I walked up the path and rang the doorbell. It sang a succinct and pleasant tone. After a few seconds, the door opened a few inches and Mr Sanderson peered out at me. “What?”

  “Mr Sanderson,” I said. “My name is Samuel Bryson. I’d like to have a word with you.”

  “What are you selling?” His voice was plummy and educated, with just a hint of Dundonian roughness lurking below the surface.

  I smiled. “Nothing. This is a personal matter.”

  “I don’t know you.”

  “I’m just asking for five minutes of your time, Mr Sanderson.”

  “You’ve got two,” he said, opening the door. “And if you haven’t convinced me by then, I’m throwing you out on your arse!”

  He opened the door and I finally got to see him at his full height of six feet. He looked down at my five six with suspicion; I’m sure he still thought I was here to sell him something.

  Inside, the main hallway was decorated sparsely. A few paintings – mostly landscapes and country scenes—hung from the walls. A staircase jogged up to the second level of the house. At the base of the stairs sat an antique telephone table.

  I followed Sanderson through to the living room. Again, it was decorated sparsely with a soft, brown carpet, a comfortably lived-in sofa, and a small TV tucked in a corner. A foldaway table lay tucked against one wall and a portable tape player perched on the windowsill, playing Celtic folk music at a soft volume.

  I pulled out the 1 975 photo from my breast pocket and showed it to Sanderson. He tried to hide his surprise, but was too taken aback to be convincing. “Where’d you get this? he asked, his voice trembling, his face set hard.

  “You were Mr. George Darren?”

  “Where did you get this?”

  “Sir I ask you again . . .“

  He let the photo drop to the floor. He raised his hand to his forehead as though he felt faint. What little colour he had drained from his face. “Oh God,” he said, his voice little more than a strangled whisper.

  “I was hired to find you,” I said. “By a Mrs Elizabeth Archer.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don�
�t . . .”

  “In 1975 she would have been Elizabeth Cooke?”

  “Jesus,” he said. “You don’t half know how to punch a man when

  he’s down.” He stumbled over to the sofa and threw himself into its limp embrace. “She told you …? I mean, why did she hire you to find me? You here to give me the once-over, son?” He sat up straight, offered out his wrists. “Kill me, maybe?”

  His reaction took me by surprise. I raised my own hands in protest. “No,” I said. “You were engaged to marry her. When you left, she says her world fell apart because she couldn’t work out why you’d run off It took her a long time to love anyone again and now that her husband’s dead, she wants answers. She needs to know why you...”

  “Engaged?” said Sanderson. He laughed, a short bark with no humour. “We went out a few times. She was a prude, son. She wouldn’t let me touch her, kiss her, even.”

  I thought about Mrs. Archer in the office, how she’d made out like they’d had this grand love affair; “Like a whirlwind,” she’d said.

  “I don’t understand,” I said to Sanderson.

  “I’m an old man,” he said. “When you’re young you don’t think you’ll ever grow old, but it happens. When I was young I thought I’d be young forever or I’d die one day before I got old, before any- thing I did could catch up with me.” He hunched forward in the sofa, his head bowed. “Do you know something, son, no matter what you do the past always catches up with you. These last few years, I’ve been paying the piper, son. There’s one last payment before I’m finished.”

  “One last payment?”

  He looked up at me. “Elizabeth,” he said. “What I did to her was inexcusable. And is it an excuse to say I was sick? Because that’s what they told me when I was in prison, you know. That I was sick, mentally unbalanced, that I had something wrong with me chemically.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said. I took a step closer to him. He still didn’t look up. “She told me you were engaged to be married, that you were in love, that you ran out on her.”

  He shook his head. “In love? At the time I would have said I was. But she wasn’t in love with me. And that thing I called love, it turned to hate. She kept ignoring me, leading me on, and then ignoring my advances at that last vital second!” Finally, he looked up at me, and his sunken eyes seemed to have fallen deeper into his skull. “I raped her,” he said, his voice choking, the words barely audible. “I don’t care what she told you, son. I raped her, and then, like a coward, I ran away. I thought I could escape responsibility for what I had done. But like I told you, you can’t escape that kind of responsibility. The piper collects on his debts.”

  ***

  He told me everything. And at first it all added up to Mrs. Archer’s account. They met in a Dundee pub one evening. She was so stunning, so beautiful, that he knew the moment he set eyes on her he just had to have her. So he talked to her, asked her out, and was charming enough that she said yes. The first time they went out together, they took in a movie, Jaws, he remembered, and then they went for a drink. They both enjoyed the movie, although she complained it was a bit more frightening than the films she liked to watch. At the end of the evening, when he’d tried to kiss her, she’d moved away and said she didn’t think it would work.

  All the same, when he called her again, she said she’d come out with him, but she also said nothing was going to happen. This time they had dinner. And again he tried to kiss her. When she moved away again, he said, something in him snapped. Maybe it was something that had always been in him, he didn’t know. But when it snapped, he lost sight of what was right and wrong. No woman had turned him down before. He was loveable, he was charming, he was sexy. And she was turning him down! He shout- ed at her, said things that would haunt him later in life. But the words wouldn’t bum into his mind as clearly as the sensation of grabbing her, throwing her against a wall, and punching her so she’d shut up. She’d tried to protest, but she was stunned into paralysis by the sudden violence of his actions. The next morning, when he woke up, he realized what he had done and felt the weight of it in his chest, like it was going crush his heart and leave him dead. He didn’t know what to do, how to deal with it. He knew that Sooner or later the police would come looking for him. Elizabeth Cooke was a smart, intelligent girl. He knew she would go the police, that she would tell someone what he had done. He packed his bags and sneaked of the boarding house where he’d been staying.

  He’d heard from a friend of his that it was easy to disappear. All you needed to do was get your hands on someone else’s birth certificate. He went to the Balgay graveyard and searched for a man who had been born the same year as he had. He found Charles Sanderson, a man who had died two years earlier in a car accident.

  At the Registrar’s office he had got his hands on Sanderson’s birth certificate, and then he took the first train out of Dundee. With a bit of work, he managed to build up a new identity for himself in the Borders, taking several odd jobs here and there. After a while he even began to believe that he had escaped the consequences of his actions. He began to believe that he was a free man, free from the guilt and free from the terrible events of I 975.

  But as he told me, the past always catches up with you. That beast inside of him, the one that had unleashed itself so suddenly in 1975, had not died after that night. There were others, other women, and with every one, the guilt lessened. He became less afraid of the consequences, more certain of himself, convinced that what he was doing wasn’t wrong.

  The piper came to collect, which Sanderson later realized was inevitable. Sanderson attacked a girl, and she fought back. She hurt him, she humiliated him, and then she reported him to the police. He was an old man then, and it took that defeat to bring it home. He was old, he was frail, he was pathetic. His time in prison was spent feeling sorry for himself, beating himself up over everything he’d done. He’d sunk into a state of clinical depression, and it was only good grace and the watchful eye of the prison wardens that prevented him from ending his own life. He underwent a course of rehabilitation and when he came out, he tried to resume some kind of life. He started work again as a salesman, but after a few years he knew his time had come. He retired, and now he spent his days watching the television and drinking to try and forget everything he’d done.

  I had to ask myself why Mrs. Archer wanted to find him, now. After all these years, what was it that finally convinced her she needed to confront this man who had become something less than anyone could have imagined.

  I knew the answer and I knew that I wouldn’t be able to live with the consequences if I told her where he was. He’d paid for his crime, I thought, just by living so long. Looking in his eyes you saw the pain and the regret and the self-pity that consumed his life.

  I thought that was punishment enough and I thought that it would do Mrs. Archer no good to confront him after so long. If she was willing to lie to me so completely to track down this man, then God only knew what she planned to do when she finally found him.

  I wasn’t worried for Sanderson. I was worried for Mrs Archer.

  ***

  I left Sanderson’s house at midnight. I drove out past the small railway station on the outskirts of the village, and pulled onto the motorway. I noticed my phone—still in the hands-free holder— showed several missed calls, all from Jamie. I punched redial and waited.

  When he answered, he sounded bleary.

  “Sorry to wake you,” I said, “but you called several times, so I guess it’s important.”

  “Aye,” he said. “Sam, I just thought you’d like to know that Mrs Archer’s on her way down.”

  “What?”

  “Aye, look, I didn’t see the harm. She came round and she was so desperate to know if there was any progress, and…”

  I swore violently.

  “Okay, I messed up,” said Jamie.

  “Aye,” I said. “You really did that. He wasn’t her fiancé, Jamie. He raped her.”

&nbs
p; “‘What?”

  ‘And now, for whatever reason, she’s decided she wants revenge. It’s all I can think of, the only reason she’d want to track this wanker down!”

  “Jesus!” said Jamie. “I knew it was a mistake, but she just looked so..

  “Don’t apologize,” I said. “Doesn’t bloody do anything. How is she getting down?”

  “By train.”

  I was already on the motorway. I started looking for an off ramp. I thought I could get back and maybe try to clean some of the mess up before it got even worse.

  “Do you know when she was leaving? What train she got?”

  “No,” said Jamie. “Shite, hold on!”