Guilty Parties

by Martin Edwards

  Chop-chop-chop-chop.

  I nearly peed my pants when I heard the key go in the front door. A second later Simon was in the kitchen, all leery drunken smile and great broad shoulders filling the door frame.

  ‘Alright darlin’.’ He breathed, then nodded at us. ‘Boys.’

  Mum didn’t turn round and she didn’t say anything. She just carried on cutting up onions.

  Chop-chop-chop-chop.

  ‘What’s that, then?’ Si crossed the room in one great stride and gestured towards the chopping board. ‘Give us some, I’m starving.’

  One second his hand was outstretched, the next it was on the floor.

  Mum got eight years inside for manslaughter and we spent the rest of our childhood in a children’s home. We had a lot of time to talk about what we’d do when we got out. A lot of time.

  ‘I got your text.’ Gavin strolls into the living room, two white 2.5 litre plastic cans of muriatic acid in each hand. He looks at me and grins. ‘Good day at work?’

  ‘Yeah.’ I lean back in my armchair and put a cigarette between my lips. ‘Most satisfying.’

  He sets the cans down in the middle of the living room then sits down on the sofa. ‘There’s some more in the van.’

  ‘Burn out a few tree stumps today, did you?’

  ‘Not as many as I thought. Hence the surplus.’ He raises an eyebrow. ‘We couldn’t have it going to waste could we? Not when it’s so good at dissolving troublesome crap.’

  ‘Nope.’ I flip open my lighter and click it alight. ‘Want me to take it up to the bathroom ready for the cleaner?’

  ‘In a bit, I think she’s—’

  Gav’s interrupted by the living-room door swinging open. A small, blonde-haired woman steps into the room carrying two buckets loaded with cleaning equipment. She places them on the floor in the centre of the room, next to the cans of acid and surveys the two of us, shaking her head.

  ‘The cleaner, indeed,’ she tuts. ‘Have some respect. I thought I brought you two up better than that!’

  Gav and I share a look. ‘Sorry, Mum,’ we chorus.

  ‘Well?’ She holds out a hand. ‘Money first, cleaning afterwards.’

  Gav reaches into his back pocket and pulls out a roll of notes. ‘A hundred and fifty quid,’ he says as he hands it to her, ‘same as normal.’

  Mum pockets the cash and shakes her head. ‘We need to put the deposit up. You’ve had some right dirty bastards to stay recently. In the bath, is he?’

  I nod. ‘Want me to help you carry the stuff upstairs?’

  ‘Nah,’ she flops onto the sofa next to Gavin and reaches for his cigarettes, ‘finish your fag first. Lighter?’

  I throw my lighter over. My brother snatches it from the air and turns it over in his hands. ‘New?’

  ‘Nah,’ I watch as he runs his thumb over the chrome and gold-effect and the ‘Born for Style, Born to Ride’ etching on the front. ‘It’s one of my collection. I’ve got loads.’

  ‘Then how about you give one to me, you tight bastard?’

  ‘We don’t share. Remember?’ I say and we both laugh.

  DIRECTOR’S CUT

  Aline Templeton

  Aline Templeton grew up in the fishing village of Anstruther, on the east coast of Scotland. The memories of beautiful scenery and a close community inspired her to set the Marjory Fleming series in a place very like that – rural Galloway, in the south-west of Scotland. She read English at Cambridge and now lives in Edinburgh.

  I saw a ghost today. A ghost in broad daylight on Oxford Street, in the middle of the Saturday crowds. I stepped into his path.

  ‘David!’ I cried. ‘But you’re dead.’

  His eyes met mine – those cool eyes, grey-green like the sea, the eyes I remembered so well that even in my dreams I always saw their curious flecks of brown and gold around the iris.

  He smiled his mocking smile. ‘I know,’ he said, then turned away, swallowed up in a moment by the crowd.

  I wanted to run after him, take hold of his arm to spin him round and make him face the lies and deceit.

  Yet I couldn’t move, afraid perhaps that if I caught up with him, if I touched him, my fingers would go straight through the soft tweed of his jacket, straight through flesh and bone to grasp at nothingness.

  Because as long as I didn’t, I could still tell myself that he was alive and that after all I hadn’t killed him, that somewhere all that warmth and charm still existed.

  I was only in London at all that day because of a family wedding. I got on to the train back to Edinburgh at King’s Cross still shaking, with hours ahead of me to try to make sense of what made no sense at all.

  David – had there been a day in the past five years when I hadn’t thought of him, five years of guilt? And grief – oh yes, grief too.

  As the train picked up speed through the London sprawl I stared out of the window, unseeing, as the life we had known together unfolded in my memory in a series of scenes like a film – a film that began as a romcom and finished as a revenge tragedy.

  He came into my life on a spring wind, a wicked little wind that whipped down a corner and snatched my scarf – Ralph Lauren, silk – from round my neck and flew it like a banner down the Royal Mile. With a cry of dismay I ran after it, making futile jumps as the wind played mocking games with me.

  A man stepped into my path so that I cannoned into him, a big, solid man. It hurt, but I was angry more than winded.

  ‘What the—’ I began, then noticed he was holding my scarf and finished weakly, ‘Oh. Sorry.’

  He was laughing at my discomfort. ‘A simple thank you will suffice,’ he said, then as I put out my hand for it he twitched it out of my reach and held it overhead.

  ‘“Here is a thing and a very pretty thing. What must the owner of this thing do?” Did you ever play forfeits?’

  I had, as a child, and remembered the silly chant all too well but there are few more irritating things than being put in the wrong and then teased. Ignoring the question, I said stiffly, ‘Thank you for catching my scarf. Now, may I have it, please?’

  ‘No, no,’ he said with elaborate patience. ‘That’s not how it works. I’ll explain. I have something you want and you have to pay to get it back. I’m just deciding what my price would be.’

  He was smiling down at me, his grey-green eyes alive with mischief. He was flirting with me and – well, he was seriously buff.

  I said, ‘All right – what’s it to be? Say a tongue-twister, hop on one leg till you tell me to stop?’ As if I didn’t know.

  Even so, the speed of his response took me by surprise. He cupped my face in his hands and kissed me.

  The thing was, it wasn’t like kissing a stranger. It felt as if I’d been kissing him all my life, just not recently, and I’d been missing it.

  As he straightened up to an ironic cheer from a passing hoodie, he said, ‘Wow! Do you always kiss people like that when you’ve only just met?’

  I blushed. ‘Well, not the women,’ was the best I could manage by way of reply but he laughed anyway. That was one of the attractive things about David – he was always ready to be amused.

  He folded the scarf neatly and handed it to me. ‘You’ve definitely earned your scarf. And an introduction. I’m David Lanson.’

  ‘Jennifer Sandeman.’

  He studied my face, eyebrows raised, then shook his head decisively. ‘Not Jennifer. Too stiff.’

  ‘I’m Jennie usually. Or Jen.’

  ‘Still a bit prim. Jeff, that’s better. I shall call you Jeff.’

  Straight out of a movie, right? All the way down to the cute nickname. As Renée Zellweger would put it, he had me at ‘hello’. He moved in a fortnight later.

  He liked my flat. What wasn’t to like about the first floor in Drummond Place with its high-ceilinged Georgian rooms and superb view out to Fife across the Firth of Forth? My parents were dead and I’d been able to buy it outright when I sold the family home in Merchiston, just round the corne
r from J.K. Rowling and Alexander McCall Smith.

  David was renting ‘somewhere on the south side’ he said, just somewhere temporary. He’d very recently been seconded to Edinburgh from London, working for Standard Life. He told me that with a rueful face and I winced: with the financial crisis, there were rumours about jobs vanishing like snow in sunshine.

  It didn’t depress us, though. It was a time of enchantment when Edinburgh, the old grey city I’d known all my life, suddenly became a place of stunning beauty – the famous skyline, the romantic cobbled closes, the elegant Georgian squares – suffused with a secret glow invisible to mere mortals who weren’t crazily, passionately in love.

  We walked the Pentlands, we sailed the little boat I kept down at Granton on the Firth of Forth. All my friends liked him. ‘He’s not Mr Right, he’s Mr Perfect,’ one of them said with more than a hint of envy. Oh, and the sun was always shining too.

  And despite all that happened afterwards, that’s what still seems like the real relationship to me.

  What happened afterwards …

  The northern train was travelling through lush green fields, but I was seeing a different sort of film now, the kind where dark clouds appear in the sky along with threatening mood music.

  One night, about a month after he moved in, I got back from work to find him sitting with his head in his hands. I knew at once. ‘Oh no!’

  His face was ravaged by distress. ‘Oh yes,’ he said bitterly. ‘The next round of cuts. I’ve lost my job. And now they’re even making difficulties about redundancy because I was seconded. They haven’t even paid my resettlement allowance – I’m broke.’

  His job – that was the one I found out later wasn’t so much a figment of his imagination as a plot device, part of the script he had written for me to follow. And I did, as if he’d handed me the lines to say.

  ‘Darling, it doesn’t matter! You’ll get another job, I know you will, and anyway they pay me a ridiculous amount. It’ll give you time to look around, find exactly what you want.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘You’re an angel, Jeff, but I can’t be the sort of man who takes hand-outs from his partner. Can you imagine? “Can you give me a fiver?” It would be utter humiliation.’

  I am an intelligent woman, an accountant. I told him that I would put my bank account in our joint names. I know these statements are mutually contradictory.

  But for a bit longer, I didn’t hear the eerie shiver of violins in the background. We worked on his CV and he seemed to be as tired as I was at the end of the day from job-hunting. We celebrated when he said he’d got an interview, drowned our sorrows when, yet again, he said he’d failed. I’d offered to see what strings I could pull for him but when I saw his brow darken I realised that this, too, would be an insult to his pride.

  ‘I have to stand on my own feet, be my own man – don’t you understand that? It’s hard enough already …’

  He bit his lip and turned away. I apologised, of course, smoothed his ruffled feathers. But I talked to a few useful people anyway and pressed his CV on them, reckoning he’d be so pleased if it came to a job that he’d forgive me.

  What was it that first triggered suspicion? I realised his enthusiasm for job-hunting was waning, that he wanted to talk about it less and less, then I came back one day for some papers I’d forgotten and found him lying on the couch watching porn. We were both embarrassed; he was angry. Spying on him, he called it.

  Crying, I protested my innocence as if I’d been at fault, and I rationalised it afterwards: it was just an unfortunate fact that men watched porn and as for just dossing about at home, I knew from talking to friends with partners in the same position, and from many magazine articles, that men who lost their jobs got depressed and gave up. So we never mentioned it again and I went out of my way to be particularly sympathetic and understanding.

  But after that, I started subconsciously noticing things, things that would come back to me later when the truth started to emerge – like the way the elderly woman who lived in the ground-floor flat behaved towards me. We’d always been friendly in a casual sort of way, stopping for a brief chat when we met in the hallway, doing the odd neighbourly favour for one another.

  On a couple of occasions, she’d dived into her flat when I appeared, once when it looked as if she’d been intending to leave it. On the occasion when we met face-to-face she responded only politely, looking embarrassed. I couldn’t think of anything I’d done that would have upset her and when I asked David if he knew of anything he looked blank. Very blank.

  Then there were the contacts I’d used to ask about a job for David. Nothing came of it; I told myself that it was just the financial climate but hoped that perhaps I might meet one of them at some meeting or other and be able to ask about it casually, without it feeling like pressure. But the time I saw one of them, he was at the other side of the room and by the time I got across to him he’d vanished.

  The relationship wasn’t quite as idyllic as it had been either. When we were out with friends he was still the David I’d fallen in love with, charming and fun; at home, though we didn’t exactly quarrel, I began to have the uncomfortable feeling that the only reason we didn’t was because he was keeping his irritation under strict control. I noticed for the first time that he had thin lips and when he folded them into a rigid line, they would disappear completely and his eyes would go cold as steel.

  I told myself to grow up, join the real world. The first heady stage of being in love was like drinking champagne and eating caviar – wonderful at the time but sooner or later you had to build a relationship on something closer to a cup of tea and a piece of toast. It took time to adjust for both of you, that was all. And it didn’t help that there was still no sign of David finding a job.

  So when, at a seminar on tax legislation, I saw Henry Jamieson, one of the people I’d sent David’s CV to, I made a beeline for him. He was a friend, not merely a contact, and he owed me a favour anyway from way back so I did wonder why he hadn’t so much as called in David for interview, just from social obligation. There was nothing wrong with his CV – he had good qualifications and good experience too.

  ‘Henry!’ I hailed him. ‘Haven’t seen you for ages. How are things?’

  He shied like a startled horse. ‘Oh – Jennie. Good to see you. How’s business?’

  ‘Fine, fine. Look, I just wanted to ask you, did you take a look at David’s CV? I know times are tough, but just an interview …’

  He didn’t meet my eyes. ‘Well, you know how it is,’ he flannelled. ‘There wasn’t anything going and I didn’t want to, well, you know, raise his hopes.’

  I felt suddenly cold. ‘You’re lying, Henry. What is it?’

  ‘No, nothing,’ he protested weakly.

  I took him by the arm and drew him aside. ‘There’s something you’re not telling me and I’m getting a sort of sick feeling that it’s something important. You’re my friend, Henry. Tell me.’

  He broke into a light sweat but he told me at last. David’s CV was bogus throughout, an elaborate fiction that didn’t check out at any point. No wonder he hadn’t wanted me to pull strings – and I had handed it out to half-a-dozen people who were now either hugely embarrassed or laughing at me. It was probably all round Edinburgh by now.

  The film goes blank at this stage. I don’t know how I got back home, but when I arrived I rang the doorbell of the flat below.

  The owner looked embarrassed when she saw me and it took a few minutes to persuade her to tell me what had been going on. Women going up to the flat, most days. Different women, and a lot of noise.

  Somehow I thanked her and got myself up the stairs. I had no idea what I was going to say to David.

  He wasn’t there – and then I remembered that we were sailing that evening down at Granton, and joining some friends in the local for drinks first. We’d agreed to meet there.

  There was something I had to do first, though. I logged on to my bank account.

&nb
sp; I had always, I’m afraid, been careless about my own money. I’d never known what it was to be short and money on a small scale bored me so I was delighted when David took that over, making sure the bills were paid and that the balance in the current account was transferred to the deposit if it became too high. There was a lot in there too, since with the state of the markets I’d pulled out of investments.

  There had been a lot in there. It had been removed cautiously, a bit at a time, nothing to arouse suspicion, and now most of it had gone. When I checked, the credit cards were maxed out as well.

  He’d directed every move I had made since the day we met, and this was the nude scene – where I had been presented naked to the world’s pity and scorn and stripped of my self-respect.

  I felt physically sick, then pure rage took over. I had no legal comeback, of course. I’d handed the keys of the safe to a conman and I couldn’t complain that he’d helped himself.

  Once he’d cleaned out the lot, was he just planning to disappear? I wasn’t going to let that happen. He was going to pay for it and for once it was me in the director’s chair. As I drove down to Granton, I didn’t know quite what I was going to do, but I was icily determined that he wasn’t going to get away with it.

  David was in the pub already, propping up the bar with some of his mates – my mates, really; he’d taken over my friends as well as my bank balance. He greeted me with a kiss and put his arm round my shoulders.

  I couldn’t help but stiffen. He looked down at me quizzically. ‘Something the matter?’

  ‘We’ll talk later,’ I said and pulled away, then struck up a conversation with someone else about the state of the tide, aware that he was watching me. It seemed a long time, though, before we all trooped down to the boats, laughing and talking.