When the Devil Drives

by Christopher Brookmyre

  ‘Jeez,’ said Jasmine, ‘and I thought Darius lived in the middle of nowhere.’

  ‘Bugger being her postman,’ Fallan agreed.

  It was a handsome, mostly wooden building, a Scandinavian-style structure on two storeys, flanked by timber balconies and walkways. The road passed what Jasmine deduced was actually the rear of the property, as it had been built facing the loch. As they approached, Jasmine was assured to spot a four-by-four parked at the near side of the house, meaning someone was home. Then as the Mondeo rose over another undulation in the track, Jasmine saw her, pruning a bush where the edge of her property met the road.

  The woman glanced up at the sound of the vehicle’s approach, turning to face it once it became apparent that it was coming to a halt rather than passing through. Jasmine found it amazing that there could be anywhere beyond here that they might be on their way towards. In her case, it was definitely the end of the line.

  Fallan parked the Mondeo in the passing place adjacent to the rear of the house, next to a large cylindrical oil tank, another indicator of their remoteness. No gas mains way out here. The back garden was very expansive and there was plenty of room behind the four-by-four, but the long driveway was only one car’s width, so Jasmine guessed Fallan didn’t want to make the woman edgy by boxing in her vehicle.

  She walked slowly towards them as they got out of the car, almost as though she was heading them off before they reached her property. The shears in her hands looked pretty threatening to Jasmine’s eyes, but only because she had watched The Burning a few nights ago, Fallan having mistakenly picked it up along with his Russell Darius collection.

  ‘Can I help you?’ they were asked. The tones were firm and polite, Jasmine detecting disguised apprehension. This house was probably Hamish Queen’s first phone call after Jasmine’s meeting with him at the Playhouse. That was why she hadn’t rung ahead.

  ‘We’re looking for Veronica Simpson.’

  The woman narrowed her features in concentration, as though Jasmine had asked for someone who might live at the next house, another five miles into the beyond.

  ‘That’s you, isn’t it?’ Jasmine added, making it sound like she might have some doubts. She didn’t, but she was playing nice. To begin with.

  The woman shook her head, but it wasn’t a denial.

  ‘Yeah, sorry,’ she said, like she was coming out of a daze. ‘It’s just nobody’s called me that for a very long time.’

  Jasmine noted the accent: soft hints of New Zealand, diluted in a region-neutral Scots.

  ‘We’re actually interested in what you called yourself before that.’

  She gave Jasmine a puzzled, almost amused look.

  ‘You mean Saffron?’

  Jasmine glanced past her for a moment, to where the loch was shimmering at the foot of the gentle slope beyond the house.

  ‘No,’ Jasmine said. ‘I mean Tessa.’

  Fallan proved the keenness of his reflexes, responding in a twinkling to cover the ground between them as Tessa Garrion collapsed. It was not some theatrical swoon; more like a sudden draining that began in her head and worked downwards. First her mouth made this wavering, stroke-like expression, which was perhaps Fallan’s cue to move, a fraction of a second before her legs went.

  Jasmine had planned to pre-empt any denials by taking out her phone and displaying a screen-cap from Darius’s rehearsal video: a shot of Tessa and Saffron side by side. It proved everything: who she really was and who she really wasn’t.

  Tessa’s reaction indicated it wouldn’t be necessary.

  Fallan set her down in a faint-recovery position, resting her head gently on the grass and beckoning Jasmine to elevate her feet. After a few minutes they let her climb slowly upright and made sure she was steady to walk.

  ‘You’d better come inside,’ she said.

  They helped her through the hall and down a broad pine staircase into a split-level open-plan room with vast double-glazed panes affording a stunning view down to the loch. There were toys lying scattered around the floor, evidence of a recent family visit. Jasmine logged the photos on their way through the house and around the big public room: shots of the same person as a schoolboy, as a rangy teen, in graduation gown, wedding portraits, as well as several collages of what she took to be the grandchildren.

  Tessa rested herself delicately upon a sofa, putting her feet up as Fallan directed, then he went off to fetch her a glass of water.

  She took a sip like it was whisky, cradling the glass in her hands in a way that further suggested she was nursing a spirit. The colour was starting to return to her face, but her hands were still trembling just a little.

  ‘You want to know what happened to Saffron,’ she said, as though steeling herself for this task. Her voice retained its Kiwi traces despite her admission: thirty years of pretending must have hardwired it.

  ‘Ultimately, yes,’ Jasmine replied. ‘But first we want to know what happened to Reginald Sutton.’

  She saw Tessa flinch. It was a mere glimpse in her eyes, like a subliminal message appearing on the screen for a solitary frame, but if you were looking for it, it was unmissable. Then she nodded to herself, resignation mixed with bitterness, a draught she had no choice but to swallow.

  She lifted her head and sat up straight, like a proud matriarch about to direct two generations about their business. When she spoke, Jasmine understood that she was drawing on her pride to get through her humiliation.

  ‘Reginald Sutton raped me,’ she stated, her voice strong and unfaltering, a theatrical proclamation from which she was not shrinking. ‘In his grubby little office in a mews in Ladbroke Grove, he raped me. I thought it was a call-back. I had auditioned for him a few days before, for a thriller he was producing, some Straw Dogs rip-off. The call came from his secretary, so I thought it was above board. She said Reggie and the director would both be there, but when I turned up there was no secretary, no director, just him.’

  She tutted, as though reproaching herself for her naivety over some trivial matter.

  ‘He started off all nicey nicey, or at least his idea of what passed for charm, but he was phoning it in. I wasn’t the first. I doubt I was even just the tenth. He’d been at this for years, and looking back it was almost like he couldn’t be bothered lingering over the formalities. He made his overtures, told me what I had to do to “nail the part”. He was very practised at what he was about, though. He had already cut off my exit so that I couldn’t “make my excuses and leave”, as they used to say.

  ‘I said I wasn’t interested in working for anyone who wasn’t hiring me for my acting abilities. He laughed, told me not to give myself airs. He said that, in many languages, the word for actress and the word for whore are one and the same. He told me better actresses than me had been on his couch at one time or other, and I should start to understand the game if I wanted to get ahead in it. He also said he’d make sure I had no future at all if I walked out without giving him what he wanted.’

  Jasmine could see her shudder in anger, tears appearing at the corners of her eyes.

  ‘I told him he was kidding himself if he thought anyone in the British film industry was going to blackball somebody on the word of a sleazy little nobody like him. That was when he hit me, harder than I’d ever been hit before. He wasn’t even angry, though: that was the thing. I’d just given him his cue. He’d done this so many times before. He told me it would be worse if I struggled, reminded me that nobody knew I was there. He said he’d told his secretary the appointment was cancelled and got her to erase it from the books.’

  She wiped away a tear, but her voice stayed strong, drawing on an actor’s skill to deliver the lines despite how they were making her feel inside.

  ‘I did struggle, but he was strong, and he was brutal. When you encounter that kind of brutality you feel helpless and so scared. Part of me threatened to withdraw into myself, pretend it was happening to someone else and crawl out again when it was over, but as he lay on top of
me, something desperate took over, some kind of instinct that knew I had to get him out from inside me.

  ‘The couch was close to his desk. My hand was scrabbling about and it found something metal. I grabbed it and struck out at him, trying to hit him in the side of the head. I remembered somebody telling me the way to knock someone unconscious was to hit them in the temple. I didn’t hit his temple, though.’

  ‘You hit his neck,’ Jasmine said.

  Tessa nodded.

  ‘I just wanted him to stop. It went right through, so easily. I thought I’d missed him, or caught him a glancing blow and lost my grip. He fell off the couch on to the floor, and it was only when I got to my feet I saw what I’d done. Even then I told myself it must have looked worse than it was. But it was on the news that night that he was dead.

  ‘I was so scared. I was twenty-three years old and I was facing life in prison if I got caught. I didn’t believe my plea of self-defence would win me much mitigation, not in those days. This was a year before a judge fined a rapist two thousand pounds because of his victim’s “contributory negligence” in hitch-hiking wearing a short skirt.’

  ‘So you decided to lay low at the other end of the country,’ Jasmine said, filling her in some more on what they knew, ‘and belatedly took up Hamish Queen’s offer to join the Glass Shoe Company.’

  ‘I thought I’d be safe, be hidden, among friends.’

  ‘More than friends, in Hamish’s case.’

  Tessa bowed her head a little, shielding her pain from view.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, swallowing.

  ‘Were you lovers before that?’

  ‘No. We were friends, and there was a spark for sure, but he was married and I respected that. When I first got to Kildrachan I spent more time with Finlay.’

  ‘He told us you were close, but it didn’t come to anything.’

  ‘Finlay was a dear friend and a decent, decent chap. It helped to have the companionship of such a good man after what happened, but it also helped that it was a chaste companionship. There was no physical chemistry there; perhaps that’s why I initially sought him out. But in time I needed tenderness, to be reminded of a lover’s touch so that it might help erase … Well, no, you simply can’t erase that, but it’s like when you hurt yourself and you rub the sore spot. It works by inundating the nerve with sensory information, so it carries fewer pain signals to the brain. I needed to overwhelm the nerves that carried those signals and I was selfish in my need so, despite his wife back down the road, Hamish and I became lovers.’

  ‘Fighters too, we heard.’

  She gave a sad smile, knowing but not regretful.

  ‘It was very overwrought, what went on between us. We’d never have worked out together, even in better circumstances. Both too passionate about everything: about our work, about ourselves, just turned up to eleven all the time. We argued over trivia and we argued over the biggest things too.

  ‘I confessed to Hamish what had happened in London. I only told him by way of letting him know I was going to have to leave, to go abroad. He wasn’t having it; thought it could all be sorted. His father knew great lawyers, contacts in the police, et cetera et cetera. Hamish was used to everything being fixable. He wasn’t the one looking at a murder charge, though. I just felt I had to run, and run a lot further than Balnavon. Hamish begged me to stay, made me all kinds of promises and assurances, which was when I played the trump card of reminding him he was married.’

  She took a long look into the distance, towards the loch. Jasmine could seldom remember ever being anywhere quite so still. She heard the call of a bird that could have been just outside or quarter of a mile away.

  ‘I said no goodbyes, except to Hamish. No farewells meant no need for explanations to anyone. We all knew the production was falling apart, so my leaving wouldn’t be a total bolt from the blue. I planned just to slip away while everybody was … otherwise engaged, and catch the last bus to Inverness. I think I told Hamish I was taking the sleeper south overnight, but that was so that he’d think I was gone by the morning. I intended to get a bed for the night and catch a flight to Heathrow the next day from Inverness airport, then take the first stand-by I could get to the continent.’

  ‘So Saffron did see you getting on that bus?’ Jasmine asked, puzzled by the timeline.

  ‘No.’

  Tessa sat very still for a few moments, and Jasmine thought she detected a couple of false starts before she finally brought herself to speak once more.

  ‘I slipped away as quietly as I could, as I didn’t want to bump into anybody. But as I made my way through the grounds, I heard someone moving among the trees. I don’t know if you’ve been to Kildrachan—’

  ‘Not inside the estate, no.’

  ‘Well, the road winds through some dense woods, very mature, much older than the house. I could hear somebody breathing heavily, from effort. I came off the track and approached very cautiously. As I said, I didn’t want to bump into anybody and I certainly didn’t want to bump into a stranger in the woods at night, but I wanted to see who was there. With the straining and heavy breathing, I was concerned someone might be trapped, or having a heart attack or God knows.’

  She took a sip of water, swirling the glass and gazing down into the clear liquid.

  ‘I saw Saffron. She was only a few yards away, lying on the ground. I thought she saw me, because she seemed to be staring right back, but she wasn’t. Her eyes were wide open, but she was dead. There was someone standing close by, wearing a hooded robe. He didn’t see me and I never saw his face. He had his back to me, bent over, like he was getting his breath back. He was like that for a few seconds, during which I was just frozen; frozen in fear and almost frozen in time. Then he took hold of Saffron by the feet and began – or I should say resumed – dragging her body.

  ‘I stayed where I was, perfectly still, barely breathing, and I watched him take her away, slow and laborious, every yard an effort. Saffron always seemed to me like she would weigh nothing: she was so effervescent, so light on her feet. But this wasn’t Saffron any more, just a dead weight, a broken vessel. I knew where he was going, too. There was a well in the grounds, an ancient thing. It was all roped off because part of the upper wall had collapsed and they were afraid someone might fall down it. Hamish had shown it to us so we would know to avoid it, and said his family were planning to have it filled in once they returned from their travels. I knew that was where he was taking her, and I knew she’d never be found.’

  ‘Unless you told someone,’ said Jasmine.

  Tessa nodded numbly.

  ‘I thought I was undone. I would have to come forward with what I’d seen, and by doing so I would deliver my own fate into the hands of the police. And that’s when I realised I had a choice.’

  Tessa’s eyes were glazing, staring without focus. She wasn’t looking at anything in the room or through the window. She was looking at a dead body in a moonlit wood thirty years ago.

  ‘I took her life,’ she said. ‘I cannot deny it, never have done, at least not to myself … I took her life. I saw an opportunity before me, a chance to escape. I became her. I knew I still had to run, but I could run as someone else.’

  ‘So the next day, when Finlay came to Saffron’s house and she wouldn’t answer the door, that was you?’

  ‘Yes. I went straight to her place and let myself in. I’d been there before and I knew she didn’t lock the back door. Nobody locked anything much around there. I was able to sneak into the church hall and take a wig. I put on her clothes, looked out her passport and all the documentation I could find. She had been travelling for years so she had all sorts of official stuff she might need for visas and the like. Even a copy of her birth certificate.’

  ‘Identity theft for the analogue age,’ said Fallan.

  ‘Finlay came around the next day, to say Tessa had left and to ask Saffron if she’d take over her part. I can’t remember what I said, but I told him to go away, said I needed some time alon
e. I faked Saffron’s accent, speaking to him through the door. I had intended to pack up and leave right away, but having spoken to Finlay, albeit briefly, I realised that it would cover my tracks better if more people encountered who they thought was Saffron, to give the impression she was still here for at least a couple of days after Tessa was gone.

  ‘I phoned up the hotel and quit, said I couldn’t do that day’s shift. I think I said it was a family emergency or something. I found her rent book and called her landlord too, though I waited and did it the following morning, so that was one more witness, on still another day, that Saffron was still alive. I was planning to leave later that day. I had a taxi booked, partly so that it was another witness, but mainly so that I wasn’t out there standing at the bus stop when someone I knew walked past.’

  ‘The bus stop being close to the main gates of the Kildrachan estate,’ said Jasmine.

  ‘Exactly. So when the doorbell rang I thought it was the taxi driver come early, but when I opened it, it was a policeman, a young guy. I thought I was ruined, so it was the performance of my life to conceal how scared I was just for those first few seconds until it became apparent that he assumed I was Saffron. He was there to ask about Tessa’s disappearance, as he’d been told Saffron was involved with the theatre troupe.’

  ‘And that’s when you, as Saffron, told Callum Ross that you saw Tessa get on the last bus to Inverness.’

  ‘Yes, but that wasn’t the end of it. Obviously I was rather disturbed to learn that my own leaving was being investigated as suspicious, so I asked him why all the fuss. I learned two things. The good news was that the name Tessa Garrion meant nothing to the local cops beyond this current inquiry, but the bad was that they had reason to suspect something bad had happened and they were holding Hamish for it.

  ‘I took the taxi, as planned, and spent the night in Inverness. I was too late for the last shuttle. I think there were only two a day back then. I got booked on to the later of the next day’s flights; the earlier one was full. I was concerned about Hamish though, as he was obviously keeping quiet to protect me, and if there was suspicion surrounding my disappearance, then it was only a matter of time before police beyond Balnavon started looking for Tessa Garrion. So the morning of my flight, I phoned the police station in Balnavon and spoke to the officer in charge.’