by Penny Grubb
Aunt Marian laughed. ‘Really Annie, what a thing to say about Mrs Watson. No, you see, she spotted him hanging about near the guesthouse and said what a shifty sort he was. And her nephew said he knew him. Of course he didn’t. He just meant that he’d seen him, but we got all the details from him. And he’d seen him over in town, and of course if he’d been in town, he couldn’t have been this side of the mountain at the guesthouse looking for Charlotte’s tapes.’
‘But why did Mrs Watson suspect him at all? Just because she doesn’t like his looks?’
‘No, no, of course not. He was Charlotte’s young man. He was the one who called round for Charlotte. Not that I ever met him. He didn’t come round again, but after you left, she took to slipping out without telling anyone. I saw them together in the distance, down by the shops. You saw yourself, he’s a shifty sort.’
He certainly looked more the type to do a moonlight than Charlotte. Annie wondered if they were still together, and remembered her conviction that she would see Charlotte again. It would be ironic to bump into her here with Aunt Marian in tow.
She still hadn’t told her aunt what she’d learnt about the crash victim, Julia Lee. It would save till after supper.
The cooking smells that greeted them made Aunt Marian sniff appreciatively and whisper to Annie, ‘You can say what you like about Mrs Latimer, but she can cook.’ It was clear that Aunt Marian’s mind was at work as they settled themselves round the kitchen table. Annie’s father carried the heavy dish from the oven and put it in front of his sister-in-law.
It occurred to Annie, that if Mrs Latimer was here, she would have commented on the unsuitability of game pie on as hot a day as today, at the same time that she drooled at the meaty aroma released as her aunt cut into the pastry. No wonder mealtimes had always been such tense affairs. Her sniping, Mrs Latimer flouncing. Her father in the middle with gritted teeth waiting for the next attack.
Aunt Marian made her first incision into the pastry before she spoke. ‘Now, do you think we should tell Margot?’
‘Annie’s friend Margot?’ her father said, surprised. ‘Tell her what?’
‘About the car crash.’
Annie explained the link between Charlotte and Margot, and added, ‘But it wasn’t Charlotte, Aunt Marian. Dad says they’ve ID’ed her. It’s someone else.’
‘I’m sure you’re wrong. It must be Charlotte. If it isn’t her, why did she come back and break into the house?’
Annie and her father exchanged a glance. ‘A minor point, Marian, but wasn’t the break-in after the crash?’
‘Yes, it was the day that … Oh, I see what you mean. She couldn’t have been there as well as … I see … So it must have been her young man … except for Mrs Watson’s nephew of course …’
For a few moments, the only sounds were munching, the clinking of cutlery, and birdsong drifting in on the evening breeze. Aunt Marian’s brow furrowed as she thought things through. ‘So who was she, the woman in the car?’
Annie’s father pondered the question, then said, ‘Don’t go spreading it all over the place, Marian, we haven’t traced any relatives yet. Her name was Julia Lee.’
‘Julia Lee!’
‘Don’t tell me you know her, Marian?’
Both Annie and her father looked up.
‘No … No, I suppose not. It’s a common enough name, isn’t it? The one I’m thinking of died years ago.’
‘Not ours then. A pity. We could do with getting a handle on her.’
‘Then it must have been the young man,’ Aunt Marian said, knife and fork poised over her plate. ‘The break-in, I mean. If it wasn’t Charlotte, it must have been him.’
‘Not unless he was in two places at once,’ Annie pointed out. ‘Mrs Watson’s nephew, remember? And anyway, it could have been Charlotte, couldn’t it, like you thought at first? If she wasn’t in the car, she could have done the break-in?’
Annie’s father shot her a don’t-encourage-your-aunt look. Annie winked.
‘I suppose so. But look, he’s only a bairn, Mrs Watson’s nephew. No one’ll take much notice of him. And Charlotte was so nice.’ She turned to Annie’s father. ‘I’m sure you can pin it on the young man. We can keep Mrs Watson’s nephew out of it.’
Annie’s gaze met her father’s. Fleetingly, he raised his eyebrows and sought heaven with an upward glance. Without comment, he carried on with his meal.
After supper, Aunt Marian initiated a game of Scrabble, which she thought would be fun to play outdoors with some wine.
‘Yes, why not?’ Annie, allowed to participate in the privacy of home, surprised herself by thinking it might be fun too. ‘I just need to check in with the office.’
Dean answered and gave her what sounded like an optimistic summary of new business queuing up. Annie smiled. It was clear from his upbeat tone that he and Casey were getting on fine. Pieternel came on and toned down his account of a suddenly booming business. ‘It’s Casey,’ she said, deadpan. ‘She overheats his chips.’
‘Good news, dear?’ Aunt Marian returned Annie’s grin as she wandered out after the call.
Annie laughed. ‘No, it was just something Pieternel said.’ She decided to bury all ideas of replaying Dean’s words to see what she could make of them, at least for this evening. This would be an old-fashioned family evening.
When the phone rang later, they were all sitting round the garden table, batting at insects, a few minutes into the game. Annie’s father, who had leapt into the lead with ‘analyse’, went to answer it.
Aunt Marian watched him go, then scooped a tiny winged corpse out of her glass and said, ‘At times like these I wish I still smoked.’
Annie had her turn, and Aunt Marian had hers. They turned to the house, to see if Annie’s father was coming back out, and heard his footsteps down the hallway. The front door slammed and a moment later, a car engine revved. Just like old times, thought Annie. No sooner does some family activity get started than he’s called away.
‘I hope it’s nothing serious.’
‘It’s an ill-wind, dear,’ replied Aunt Marian, sweeping her father’s letters back into the bag and putting a line through his score.
The letters’ bag grew lighter, the shadows lengthened and Annie felt certain of victory now her father was out of the frame, until Aunt Marian instigated a new rule. ‘If you insist on that word, dear, I shall deduct the points from your score.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s in the dictionary. It means–’
‘Annie! I don’t want to know. And it won’t be in any dictionary of mine!’
‘You look it up. I bet it is.’
‘You won’t catch me looking up words like that in anyone’s dictionary.’
‘Annie!’
Annie looked round. Her father stood in the doorway, beckoning her in. She hadn’t heard him come back, but the still of the evening had given way to a breeze that rustled the bushes and promised a storm before the night was out.
She left her aunt to re-box the game, and rubbed at her arms as she went into the house. It was cooler than she realized. And darker. She had to squint at the Polaroid her father held out. ‘I don’t like to put this on you, Annie, but I’ve got to check. It seems bizarre … There’s no evidence to point to … Anyway…’ He held out the photo, and she peered at it, puzzled, not understanding what he was saying.
‘That’s Charlotte,’ she said, and remembered her earlier conviction that she was about to see her again. ‘Is it–?’ She felt the prickle on her skin as blood drained, and looked again, taking in the grey pallor of the face, the closed eyes, the unnatural lack of definition of the rest of the shot.
‘The description didn’t fit at all,’ her father said. ‘The Julia Lee who hired the car wasn’t the same woman in it when it crashed. Far too short for one thing.’
Aunt Marian came in as Annie said, ‘So it was Charlotte in that car.’
‘I’ve been saying that all along. You never listen.’ She turned
to Annie’s father. ‘I have all the details for you; I knew you’d want them eventually. She’s Mrs Charlotte Grainger, and I have her parents’ address in my address book.’
He looked at her and for a moment Annie thought his mouth would open without words coming out, but he gave himself a small shake and blinked rapidly a couple of times. ‘You have her parents’ address, Marian?’
‘Yes, I’ll go and get it.’
As her aunt bustled off, Annie turned to her father and said, ‘I hope to God she never meets Dean. She’d blow all his logic circuits.’
Aunt Marian returned and handed across a piece of paper. ‘Here you are. And don’t lose it. I don’t have a copy. Come with me, Annie. I’ve something for you too.’
Annie followed her aunt into the hallway. ‘Here.’ Her voice a whisper, her eyes alight with excitement, Aunt Marian pushed a scrap of paper into Annie’s hand. ‘That’s Charlotte’s flat. She’d only just moved in. Her parents are elderly; she hadn’t even told them. I want you to go to her flat before the police find it. She might be an al Qaeda agent and if they find it first, we’ll never get to know.’
‘OK, leave it with me.’ Annie shared a conspiratorial nod with her aunt, thinking that she’d pass this to her father at the first opportunity. Then she read the address and paused. Charlotte’s flat, just off Tottenham Court Road, wasn’t so far from Margot’s offices. For no reason, she thought of that off-centre fax in the Buenos Aires file, then about the high pass; how easy it would be to push a car off the edge. It didn’t sit comfortably with Charlotte’s tale of a friend-of-a-friend; someone faking a death … She wondered about Lorraine. There must at least be a nub of truth in the story of Lorraine’s accident because her father knew about it.
She fingered the scrap of paper. Maybe she would pay a surreptitious visit to Charlotte’s London flat before she passed on the address. What harm could it do?
Chapter 11
‘I’ll get Aunt Marian away down to Mrs Watson’s as soon as she’s had her breakfast,’ Annie told her father the next morning. ‘She seems quite happy now. And I’ll be here for the night before I go back. How’s your inquiry going?’
He gave her a look of exasperation. ‘Customs sniffing about, all looking to blame each other. They still don’t know where the van went to.’
Annie smiled and nodded. It wasn’t what she wanted to know, but listened as he told her again of the incompetents who had lost the vehicle temporarily, before it had been found burning. To show she’d been following the story as it unfolded, she murmured, ‘Some old smugglers’ trail, wasn’t it?’ thinking that once again the past had reached out to bend the present.
‘Oh no,’ he spoke with disdain. ‘Now it’s mountain tracks they want to know about.’
‘Oh well, I expect they’ll sort themselves out. What about the leg in the loch?’
‘Nothing new. They’ve done all the clever forensics, DNA and what have you, but none of it’s any use without someone to match it against. And how’s your case? What will you do about the Watson woman’s missing guest now?’
‘I’ll make a few discreet enquiries and see if Mrs Watson can put a claim on Charlotte’s estate.’
‘Would she want to?’
‘Hell, yes. She’s out of pocket. You know what she’s like.’
After breakfast, Annie set off with Aunt Marian to take her back to Mrs Watson’s. As they drove through the village, her aunt waved to Mr Caine. Annie shot her a curious glance. Charlotte’s death seemed hardly to have made a dent yet she’d known Charlotte far better than any of them. Annie had talked to Charlotte, laughed with her, just a short while ago. She couldn’t mourn someone she’d known so superficially, but there was a nasty reminder of her own mortality in the loss of someone her own age. A reminder too that she was now older than her mother had been when she died.
A scrap of paper sat in her pocket with Charlotte’s address on it.
The promised thunderstorm had petered out and it was going to be another scorcher. The air was oppressive, with a feel of building pressure. Hot-faced tourists wandered about looking strained, their children fractious. The exception was a group by the jetty. The shrieks and laughter floated into the car. Aunt Marian laughed suddenly. ‘Look at that little tyke with the football! He’s pretending he’s fished out a severed head.’
Annie didn’t want to hear wild theories about Freddie Pearson’s catch, so said at random, ‘Who was the Julia Lee that you used to know?’
‘I didn’t,’ her aunt replied. ‘It was the woman on Charlotte’s tape.’
‘What?’ Annie turned to her aunt in disbelief. Why hadn’t she said? Her father needed to know this. ‘But the woman on the tape was called Lorraine.’
‘Yes, but Julia Lee was the one Lorraine said she’d seen. The old friend she hallucinated.’
Annie thought back to the disjointed story Charlotte had told … Lorraine … she hallucinated an old friend … ‘Are you sure it was Julia Lee?’
‘I think so, dear. You see, I never listened to the tapes. I’m going on what Charlotte told me.’
‘And this Julia Lee was who exactly?’
‘She was the drug addict Lorraine knew.’
‘Who’d died years ago?’
‘That’s what Charlotte said.’
Annie mulled things over as they continued down the coast road. Dead women don’t hire cars. At any rate, when they do, it should be looked into. She would listen to the tapes herself before deciding if her father needed to know.
Aunt Marian dozed once they left civilization behind, leaving Annie with her thoughts that should have focused on Pieternel, Dean and the business but that kept rerunning Charlotte’s last drive over that pass in a hired car … and the address of Charlotte’s flat in London.
Annie parked outside the guesthouse and hoped the car wouldn’t tarnish the image her aunt had painted of her successful city-businesswoman niece.
Mrs Watson hurried out, ignoring Annie and rushing to Aunt Marian’s side, her eyes bright with excitement. ‘Ach, there you are. I’ve tea ready in the kitchen. Have you found Charlotte?’
‘Well, we have, but we haven’t solved the mystery yet. Annie, would you take my things up to my room, dear?’
Aunt Marian was bursting with news. Annie picked up her aunt’s case as the two women gossiped their way down the corridor.
Once upstairs in her aunt’s room, and secure in the knowledge that no one would emerge from the back kitchen until long after the tea was cold in the pot, Annie went systematically through cupboards and drawers until she found two audio cassettes, labelled in an unfamiliar hand, lying next to the limp form of the old straw doll. She picked one up and clicked it into the radio/cassette.
It started mid-interview. Someone was going over Lorraine’s story with her. Lorraine herself did little more than say yes and no, as the interviewer outlined what had happened. Annie knew nothing about counselling, though she’d had an idea that it was the client who was supposed to do the talking. The story that unfolded was the same she’d heard from Charlotte.
‘You didn’t go nearly as far as you first said, did you?’
‘No, I made that up.’
It all sounded pat, as though they were following a script. The woman who might or might not have been called Julia Lee remained a mystery, just referred to as a friend.
‘What made you think of this friend?’
‘I’d taken some stuff. It made me think of her. I used to get stuff for her.’
‘And why did you run? Was it because the memories of what had happened to her started to haunt you? You thought you were slipping down the same path she’d taken?’
‘Yes, that’s it. You can tell him it was just like that.’
‘And that tale you made up, that was just to cover up how silly you’d been?’
‘Yes, that’s right. I felt foolish.’
A reprimand underlay the interviewer’s words. Lorraine’s tone was mechanical. The tape quality was ba
d, the words scratchy and not always clear.
Annie tried to tune into Lorraine’s voice. This was no counselling session. Or was it? What did she know? Margot’s acolytes would be sure to use unconventional techniques.
She checked the labels on the tapes. If the reference numbers made any sort of sense, she’d started with the second one. She swapped it for the first. Maybe this would contain that tale you made up. Get as close to the source of the story as you can. One of the basic rules.
On this tape there was no hint of Lorraine reading a script. She was traumatized and sobbing. The interviewer’s tone was sympathetic as she reassured Lorraine time and again. ‘Just take me through it, step by step. Any time you need to stop, we’ll stop. Just try to relax. It’s completely confidential.’
‘I set off up the path. The cinder track where people park at the bottom.’
Annie knew just where she meant.
‘What made you decide to go up there?’
The question, innocuous enough, startled Lorraine into convulsive sobs. It was a while before the interviewer coaxed her back to coherence, but then immediately knocked things back again by asking if she’d ‘taken anything’.
‘No! No, I swear I hadn’t. I know what you think, but …’
Once again the sympathetic voice nudged her back to the story. ‘Nothing you say goes outside this room. Just take it step by step.’
‘Then I climbed up off the track. There’s two stones, and a tree with a V.’
Two stones and a tree with a V. No wonder Charlotte had had trouble, but Annie could identify the exact spot. These hills were a part of her. She could climb that track with her eyes shut.
Lorraine was describing her scramble through the undergrowth towards a higher track, when Annie heard voices in the hall. She clicked off the machine and removed the tape. Aunt Marian didn’t need to listen to this woman sobbing her heart out.
‘I fancy a walk into the hills before I go back to Dad’s,’ she said, as her aunt entered the room. ‘It’s such a nice day. I haven’t been walking round here in ages.’
