Brought to Book

by Anthea Fraser

  He met their eyes challengingly. ‘It was not murder,’ he said, ‘it was an execution, though I appreciated that others wouldn’t view it in that light. I also guessed that Theo, an obsessive diarist, would have written about the affair, and the story was likely to come out in any future biography of him. That could have turned the spotlight on me, and might possibly have pointed to a desire for revenge.

  ‘However, not all celebrities have their biographies written, and though I intended at some stage to acquire the diaries, I assumed there was no rush. I certainly didn’t expect Meriel to instigate one so soon; hence my urgent recruitment of Rick.’

  He smiled slightly. ‘Obviously, you, Ms Parish, were the main cause of my concern. Initially I’d hoped you wouldn’t track me down, and your letter came as a shock; which is why I promptly phoned to head you off. But you wouldn’t be dissuaded, and since you insisted it was Theo’s youth that interested you, I decided it would be as well to find out how much you knew. After our meeting, I concluded it was not much and, rightly or wrongly, felt reassured.’

  With a whir and a rush of water, the dishwasher embarked on its rinse cycle. Rona said expressionlessly, ‘And Meriel?’

  ‘Meriel’s death wasn’t planned, and I regret it. But I was after those diaries, and as you’d told me she was staying with her cousin, I expected the house to be empty. I’d just broken in when she came into the room and, of course, recognized me, thereby sealing her fate. I told her what I’d come for, but she said you had the diaries and had been going through them with your husband. Which was exactly what I’d feared.’

  His eyes held Rona’s. ‘Would I have been in time, or did you already know about Sheena? As I said, you’d given no hint of it.’

  ‘I didn’t know when I visited you; my husband found the relevant passages that same evening.’

  He sighed. ‘Such a small margin. I should tell you, incidentally, that the diaries have been destroyed.’

  ‘No, they haven’t!’ she contradicted involuntarily. ‘I was looking at them only this afternoon.’

  ‘Nevertheless. Your sister had told Rick you were staying at Farthings, and since you’d both been working on the diaries, I concluded that was where they’d be. So I waited till you left this afternoon, and let myself in through the back door.’

  ‘A habit of yours,’ Rona said stingingly.

  ‘As you say. I saw them at once, and since there was a convenient fireplace, I tore the pages out and burned them. All of them.’

  Lindsey moved suddenly, and when she spoke, her voice was clogged with tears. ‘What did you mean about Rob – Rick – developing cold feet?’

  ‘He decided he’d had enough. Went all self-righteous on me. I think it was the dog that did it; he took a great deal of persuading before he agreed to poison it, even though it was never intended the animal should die.’ He flicked a glance at Lindsey. ‘He’d also become more involved with you than he’d intended. So he phoned me – while I was dining with your sister, in fact – and stated categorically that he’d no intention of breaking in anywhere to get the diaries, that he’d had enough of “putting the frighteners on women”, and that sending the wreath was the last thing he’d do for me.’

  ‘But he gave you the key to this flat,’ Lindsey said bitterly.

  ‘Well, not exactly. I was a little economical with the truth. In fact, I took it from his pocket; he doesn’t know I have it. As I say, though, his chickening out at the crucial moment meant I had to cancel my flight to the States and come here to see to things myself.’

  See to things. The words repeated themselves ominously in Rona’s head. Underlying her attention to what he was saying, her brain had been working feverishly. What was he planning for them? He’d been so calm and self-contained – so polite – that she found it hard to convince herself that he meant to harm them, here, in the safe, familiar comfort of Lindsey’s flat. Yet Meriel had died at his hands in her own kitchen.

  But in all conscience, what could they do? Even if they attacked him together – and Lindsey was too shaken to be relied on – he could easily overpower them. Calling his bluff, she decided, was better than this agony of suspense.

  She said quietly, ‘Why have you told us all this?’

  ‘I felt you had a right to know.’

  ‘Like Theo?’

  ‘Like Theo.’

  Lindsey started to her feet with a cry. Rona said, almost steadily, ‘You’re forgetting my husband. He knows everything I do.’

  Scott smiled, and for the first time she saw the hint of cruelty in him. ‘Rest assured, I have not forgotten him. There’s a little surprise awaiting him at Farthings. Faulty wiring – always dangerous.’

  Rona stared at him whitely. ‘And – us?’

  ‘Unfortunately,’ he answered calmly, examining his fingernails, ‘you’ll shortly be involved in a car crash. A fatal one. Preparations have been made for that, too. And without the diaries, there’ll be nothing to link me to either of these tragedies. Or, of course, to Theo’s death.’

  As he stopped speaking, Rona caught a faint sound above the dishwasher’s machinations, and, glancing through the doorway, made out a shadowy form on the landing. She tensed, hands clammy and heart thumping. Perhaps Rob was not, after all, on his way to Scotland, but here to see through their plans.

  Scott was watching her with a faint frown, and as he turned to see what had claimed her attention, the figure erupted into the room with a blood-curdling yell, knocking against his chair and sending it and him crashing to the ground. It took Rona several heart-stopping seconds to realize that it was Hugh – Hugh who, now astride Scott’s prone body, was holding the point of a knife to his throat.

  ‘Get help!’ he yelled at them over his shoulder as they sat frozen, staring at him.

  But before they could move, help miraculously arrived – in the form of clattering footsteps on the stairs and large, uniformed figures filling the sitting-room. Within minutes, Hugh had been relieved of the knife, Scott was being led away and Lindsey was sobbing hysterically in her ex-husband’s arms, while Rona, limp as a rag doll, sat on the arm of the sofa watching the drama unfold before her.

  When a measure of calm had been restored, one of the remaining constables surveyed them dubiously. ‘We’ll need you all down at the station,’ he told them. ‘You, sir, might be charged with threatening behaviour and being in possession of an offensive weapon, though from what these ladies say, it seems you came to their rescue. And we still have to ascertain the involvement of the other gentleman. Extra cars will be here shortly, to conduct you to the station.’

  ‘Talking of cars,’ Rona said hoarsely, ‘one of those outside has been tampered with – I’m not sure which.’

  He looked at her uncertainly, and she went on, ‘There’s also some dangerous wiring at my husband’s house that’ll need looking at. I – think it’s been rigged to kill him.’

  The constable turned to his colleague with raised eyebrows. ‘Never a dull moment here, is there?’ he remarked. ‘Makes a change from the usual Saturday night drunks.’

  It turned out that it was not Hugh, but Richard Sinclair, who had summoned the police. He hadn’t remembered till he reached the airport that he’d not returned the key to the flat, and when he felt for it and found it gone, he guessed immediately what Scott was planning.

  ‘I couldn’t let him do it,’ he told the police, who’d met his plane at Edinburgh and escorted him to the station. ‘God knows, I’ve enough to answer for, without that on my conscience.’

  The background story had come out bit by bit during the course of his questioning. ‘I loved my sister,’ he had said, ‘but I was shocked when I learned the baby wasn’t Scott’s. Perhaps, with hindsight, I shouldn’t have told him, but it was to stop him blaming himself for her death. I couldn’t know he’d set himself up as some kind of avenging angel.’

  At a later interview, he’d admitted to having suspicions when Harvey died soon afterwards, but sworn he’d not known th
e truth until six weeks previously, when Scott had told him about the biography, and what might come out of it.

  ‘He insisted I was implicated in Harvey’s death myself,’ Sinclair stated, ‘since if I’d not told him about the affair, Harvey would still be alive. It didn’t make sense, but I knew if he went down, he’d take me with him. He’d changed so much since my sister died – become hard and implacable and impossible to reason with.’

  He had gone on to describe the arranged meeting with Lindsey Parish, his deliberate wooing of her and the stalking of her sister, his main point of interest. He was quite open about his harassment campaign – the knocking on her door, the note, even the poisoning of her dog. It was as though he couldn’t wait to get it all off his chest, take his punishment and wipe the slate clean.

  By contrast, Scott Mackintosh had maintained an unbroken silence during interrogation, neither confirming nor refuting the charges against him, and in truth there was little they could prove. Without the diaries, as he himself had said, no evidence existed of his wife’s affair, since her friend’s comments were inadmissible as hearsay. No one had seen him in the vicinity of Spindlebury at the time of Harvey’s death; even the lethal rewiring at Farthings could not be laid positively at his door. There was therefore a sense of guilty relief when, one morning, he was found hanging in his cell. Justice had, after all, been done.

  The salient points of Sinclair’s statement filtered through to Rona and Max via the good offices of Archie Duncan as the after-effects of those traumatic weeks continued to be felt.

  One of the most obvious was that the destruction of the 1997 diary had finally put paid to the biography. Without its back-up, only a handful of people would ever know Theo hadn’t written the two masterpieces attributed to him, and it would be impossible to write an honest account of his life without revealing it. Rona’s publishers had accordingly and with regret terminated the contract, though they’d generously allowed her to retain her advance, which helped in some measure to assuage her frustration.

  It seemed Hugh’s unexpected presence at the flat had resulted from his learning that Rona, in his mind uncomfortably linked with the dead woman, would be spending the night there. He’d therefore set himself to keep watch, and been rewarded in due course by Mackintosh’s arrival. He had watched in puzzlement as he bent down for several minutes beside Lindsey’s car, and in amazement when he thereafter let himself into the flat, apparently with a key.

  ‘I knew it wasn’t the guy I met last time,’ he told them, ‘and I couldn’t think why, if he was walking in as bold as brass, he’d been messing about near the car. Fortunately he left the door on the catch – no doubt to make it easier to get the pair of you out when he was ready – so I crept up the stairs and listened for several minutes, hardly able to believe my ears. When he started talking about a car accident, it dawned on me what he’d been doing outside. So I slipped into the kitchen, armed myself with a knife, and made my entrance.’

  ‘In a marked manner!’ observed Rona. ‘I’ve never been so glad to see anyone.’

  The fact that Hugh was still intermittently on the scene was due more to the balm he administered to Lindsey’s battered self-esteem than to any resurgence of her love for him.

  ‘I made it incredibly easy for Rob, didn’t I?’ she’d said bitterly to Rona. ‘Practically throwing myself at him like that. Don’t try to deny it – you warned me at the time. God, how gullible he must have thought me! But I’d been so desperate to meet someone, and he was so charming and attentive.’

  ‘I know,’ Rona had sympathized. ‘Don’t blame yourself.’

  ‘Whereas,’ Lindsey continued, ‘all he wanted was to know what you were up to, and my babblings kept him gratifyingly up to date. He’d obviously no real feelings for me at all.’

  ‘That’s not true,’ Rona objected. ‘Scott said he’d become fonder of you than he should; that’s one reason why he backed out. And he probably saved our lives by phoning the police, remember.’

  ‘It was Hugh who saved us,’ Lindsey said stubbornly. ‘Rob just scuttled off to Scotland without a word of goodbye. How did he think I’d feel, when I found he’d gone? He didn’t know at that point what Scott was planning.’

  It was useless arguing with her, and eventually Rona gave up trying. Her main concern was that Hugh’s hopes were not being unfairly raised.

  Almost the only good news in all this was that the two invalids in Rona’s life were progressing well, though Gus’s recovery was considerably faster than Tom’s. In fact, though her father was home again, he was taking longer than expected to get his strength back, and it was unclear how long he’d be on sick leave. Privately, Rona wondered if he’d be offered early retirement, and if so, how he’d react.

  ‘It’s frightening to think,’ she observed, as she and Max walked in the park one April Saturday, ‘that if Scott hadn’t taken his sabbatical, they would all be alive today – he and Sheena, Theo and Meriel. Theo would never have had writer’s block, and Greg Nelson’s books wouldn’t have seen the light of day.’

  ‘And you and Lindsey wouldn’t have come within a whisker of death yourselves,’ Max returned dryly. ‘Well, let it be a lesson to you of the danger of poking your nose into what doesn’t concern you. If nothing else, it should ensure you steer well clear in future.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Rona replied, ‘I’m developing quite a taste for it!’ And, picking up the ball, she hurled it for Gus across the undulating expanse of grass.