The Day She Died: A Novel

by Catriona McPherson

  “You’re surprised,” the copper told me, once the door was closed at our backs, and I thought again that for someone who was hoping to get people to talk, she didn’t half make a lot of statements and ask hardly any questions.

  “I am,” I said.

  “You don’t think Mrs. King was suicidal,” she didn’t ask.

  “I never knew her,” I said. “Don’t look like that. I told you I didn’t know her the first night you were here.”

  “But you’re surprised anyway,” she didn’t ask again.

  “I’m … ” I could feel her watching me, even though it was full dark with not a single star and no gleam of moon through the thickness of the cloud. “I’m surprised Gus wants to leave it,” I said. “He’s so …

  troubled. I thought he’d want everything investigated right to the last little thing. He’s in such a mess, you know? I’m just surprised he’s ready to let it go.”

  “Troubled and in a mess,” she repeated. “Of course he is.”

  “Of course,” I agreed.

  “He said as much to us,” she said. “Can’t believe she’s gone. Can’t believe she’s really dead. It’s the funeral’ll sort that out for him. Not an inquiry. That just keeps things in the air, hanging on.”

  “I suppose so,” I agreed.

  “So you don’t really know anything,” she told me. “You don’t actually have any information you need to share.”

  “No,” I said. “You’re right. Can I ask you something?”

  “It’s very common,” she told me.

  “I haven’t asked you yet.”

  “To be unable to accept that someone has died, I mean,” she told me. “If you love them.”

  “Oh yes, of course. I know. Like Elvis and Diana.” I could feel her staring at me. But it’s true. There’s never a conspiracy about someone nobody cares two hoots for. A worldwide belief that some day-time soap star who died at ninety actually didn’t die till ninety-three. And of course I hadn’t said the other name to the copper, the big one. Jesus, Diana, and Elvis, I really meant, like I’d tried to tell my mother once too. “They didn’t want him to be dead, so they just said he wasn’t,” I had explained. It hadn’t gone well, and the more I tried to convince her that I didn’t mean any harm the worse it got.

  “It’s like the ultimate good review!” I’d said. “Hung from a cross? So what! Holes all over you? Granted. Starved? I’ll give you starved. Bled white? Since you mention it, yes. Bunged in a cave with a great big boulder over the door? I believe so. But dead—no way. Or if he was, he’s alive again now. Glory Hallelujah! I’m not calling them stupid. He was their friend and they loved him, but come off it, Mum! If you got like that about one of your friends, I think two thousand years later people should be ready to let it go.”

  And then she’d started in with the prophecies and the sure and certain hope and the life everlasting—which was why we’d been talking about it in the first place, her going on about how her mum died and who was to blame, and me asking why it was blame if death was the start of the good bit. Why not credit? If the Bible was true, then death was great and murder was a helping hand.

  I blinked and peered through the dark to the faint gleam of the woman copper’s face.

  And what about suicide? It wasn’t throwing away God’s greatest gift at all, was it? Not if the greatest gift came after. It was just kind of … impatient and sort of greedy. Except not even the happiest of the clappiest actually saw it that way. And those cults that off themselves by the thousands? Even the Brethren think they’re nutters as well as sinners. Which they shouldn’t, actually.

  “So,” said the copper, “ask me.”

  I blinked and refocussed on her. “Do pregnant women really kill themselves a lot?” She breathed in sharply. “My friend at work said yes, but it’s just so horrible.”

  “Mrs. King wasn’t pregnant, was she?” said the cop. “Was she?” An actual question.

  “Gus didn’t tell you?”

  “I can’t discuss Mr. King’s statement with you,” she said, back in charge of herself again.

  “Isn’t that a reason to do a full PM?”

  “It’s Mr. King’s decision.”

  But then what had they meant by her lifestyle? I thought they meant her running around and getting knocked up.

  “Can I ask you another question?” I said.

  “I really can’t discuss it with you.”

  “No,” I said. “This is something completely else. You know Becky’s friend, who went away?”

  “No.”

  I kept my sigh really quiet. I didn’t want to piss her off; she wasn’t exactly helpful to begin with. “Gus didn’t mention her? Okay. Well, how do you try to find a missing person is what I wanted to ask.”

  “Is she over twenty-one? Any reason to suspect foul play?”

  Did wads of sequential notes and the most terrified person I’d ever seen in my life count as reasons? “As far as I know, she’s over twenty-one.”

  “You don’t know her all that well then,” the cop informed me.

  “I don’t know her at all,” I said. “Never met her. Gus does, though. Can a friend report a friend missing? It doesn’t have to be family?”

  “Mr. King’s got enough on his plate,” she said. “He wants to get in touch with the hill walker that found his wife, you know. Say thank you. Not everyone would do that.” She sounded less cold and blank when she spoke about “Mr. King.” Could Gus have charmed her? Well, I suppose he’d charmed me.

  “I just thought it would help if we could find Ros,” I said. “She could fill in the blanks. Closure, you know.”

  “Blanks?” she said. “Mr. King has said very clearly he’s satisfied with what we’ve done. And there’s nothing like a funeral for closure, anyway.”

  Which is total guff. The funeral keeps you busy and it’s basically a party, and it’s not till afterwards that you realise the guest of honour is really and truly dead. Or it’s afterwards, anyway, that you start to get that dead means gone, and gone means forever. And that’s when heaven and angels and life eternal count for nothing, and the holiest get just as sad as the rest of us, and that says a lot, if you ask me.

  Maybe the copper was right, though. Gus was better after they’d gone away. He made pancakes for us, tossing them and catching nearly all of them, and he shut the bathroom door and got in the bath with the kids while I cleared it all away.

  When he came back through in his dressing gown with his wet hair in a towel, he sat down in his armchair by the fire and stretched like a cat. “That’s that then,” he said. “Done and dusted. Just the funeral to go.”

  “You didn’t tell the cops she was pregnant,” I said, just like that.

  “Eh?” He sat forward and unwrapped his hair, started rubbing it hard. It would frizz like hell unless he had some pretty posh conditioner on it. Which didn’t seem likely.

  “So why aren’t the police wondering why she did it?” I said. “What did they mean about her lifestyle?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “No, that’s all fine. I told them about her and Ros.”

  “You what?” I knew I was gaping at him, couldn’t help it. “That’s not—That was just Steve at work!”

  He was raking his fingers through his wet hair. It stretched and snapped, and when he had finished there was a cat’s cradle of hairs caught in his fingers. So much hair, his scalp must be throbbing.

  “I had to say something,” he said. “They knew it wasn’t an accident. They saw the note.” He rubbed his hands together and made a ball of hair, threw it in the fire. It hissed and there was sudden stink, like witchcraft. “You showed them the note, Jessie. They were never going to think it was an accident after that.”

  And I dropped my eyes. That was true. It was my fault.

  “Well, there’s one good thing then,” I said. �
��Surely if they think Ros leaving is why Becky … they’ll be willing to try to find her. I asked that Gail—outside—but it has to be someone who knows her. It would have to be you.”

  His hair in the fire was still fizzing. I had to breathe through my mouth to stop smelling it and feeling sick.

  “You asked the cops to look for Ros,” he said. And it was like he’d been taking lessons from Gail, because it wasn’t a question at all.

  “Maybe I should go home for a bit.” I hadn’t planned to say it. It just formed in my mouth and was out before I knew.

  “But they told you it would have to be me.” Like he hadn’t heard me.

  “Or her sister, I suppose,” I said. Maybe he hadn’t heard me. “If she phones again, we could tell her. Or we could phone her back and tell her.”

  “Please don’t go.” He had heard me, then. He leaned forward and picked up the poker, shoved the ball of hair deep into the heart of the fire. The crackling stopped and the smell faded away. “Please stay, Jessie. I’m sorry it’s so tough for you, but please stay.”

  I nodded, relieved. I didn’t know what I’d done wrong, but I wanted to make up for it. Even though that felt like ten steps back. It felt like I was sixteen again, like a shitload of grunt work on Caroline’s couch had been blown completely away.

  “They wouldn’t give me the hill walker’s address,” he was saying. “Can you believe that? They said I could write to him, and if he wanted to he could write back to me. A letter! Not even an e-mail.”

  “Will you?” I said.

  He nodded. “I really want to pay him back. Try to anyway. And one day,” he reached out towards me, “one day soon, I’ll find a way to pay you back for everything you’ve done too. Everything you’re doing. I’ll find a way.”

  Seventeen

  Monday, 10 October

  I really needed space to think it through. To try to sort out Ros and the money and Kazek and Gus and the pregnancy and post-mortem and inquest and what anything meant. A long walk along the beach on Sunday would have done it, but Sunday was worse than Saturday for kids and caravans, so I held out for Monday and the prospect of shutting the office door. Dot, though, was in a talkative mood, like a budgie on my shoulder all morning.

  “Father Tommy said there was something wrong right from the start,” she opened with. She had set up her ironing board across the doorway, trapping me in the office so she could talk it all out to me. The corruption poisoning the fairies at the bottom of the magic garden had got into the Scotsman.

  “Monsig just didn’t want to spend our money where it wasn’t needed,” I said. “He’s not psychic. What’s happened anyway?”

  “What hasn’t?” she said. “Embezzlement, backhanders, bribes, gangsters.” She was ironing, and as she pressed down hard on a coat collar, a cloud of steam billowed up and hid her face. If she’d cackled, she could have got cast in Macbeth.

  “In other words, you’ve no idea,” I said. “Gangsters? In Dumfries?”

  “Master gangsters, it said in the paper,” Dot insisted. “I’ll cut it out and bring it in to show you. Investors are leaving like rats from a sinking ship. Of course, Father will never go back on his word. We’ll lose out in the end, just you see. It’s like the end of days in Dumfries this last while.”

  I was trying to compose an e-mail.

  “The end of days,” I repeated. My mother was a big one for the end of days.

  “Two suicides,” said Dot. “Two deaths anyway. Disappearances … ” she trailed off.

  “Who’s disappeared?” I said, wondering if the world was small enough for Dot to know Ros. But she was staring out of the front window. “The end of days,” she said again softly as the door opened and a pair of police in uniform walked in. I girded my loins, squeezed past the ironing board, and went to face them.

  “We are a confidential service, officers,” I said, smiling but speaking very firmly. “You’ll need to speak to Father Tommy Whelan over at St. Vince’s and just between you and me, he’ll make you get a warrant. But since you’re here, what am I saying no to, today?”

  Because it wasn’t the first time—or the tenth either—that the cops would be looking for someone right down hard on their luck and think we’d love to help them. I suppose, to give them their due, one of the reasons to suddenly need new clothes and shoes in a hurry is if you’ve got blood or whatever all over your old ones, but it would take a brass neck to walk into some drop-in clinic dripping with murder blood and ask for a clothing project voucher.

  They took their hats off—trying to signal that they were staying?—and that’s when I recognised the sergeant who’d been in Gus’s house last night. He’d already recognised me. Cops are quick that way.

  “Miss … Constable, isn’t it?” he said. “Long time, no see.”

  The other one—just a youngster, the look of a farmer’s boy round him, red cheeks and gold hair—gave him a sharp look. He hadn’t missed the twist in the voice any more than I had.

  “Unless you’re donating,” I said. I had spied the black plastic bag in the farmboy’s hand. “Not uniforms, I hope. Ho-ho. That could cause some mix-ups.”

  “I wonder if you would cast your eyes over these gents’ clothes,” said the sergeant.

  “What’s your name?” I asked him. “I don’t think I ever caught it.” I didn’t really care, but asking questions and getting people to answer them was something my therapist Eilish had taught me for if I was feeling flustered, and I’d got into the habit.

  “Sergeant McDowall, and this is Constable Anderson.”

  He had put the bin bag up on the table where the belts and bags were laid out and he pulled out, first, a big sheet of thick polythene and then an armload of dark fabric, smelling of mould and damp and something worse than either. He started spreading them out.

  “What’s this in connection with?” Dot said.

  “A gentleman met with an unfortunate situation,” said McDowall, “and we’re trying to identify him. We wondered if maybe he was one of yours. He looked your sort.”

  I turned over the trousers. Jeans. Fancy stitching on the pockets but no logo. Impossible to say. Same with the jersey—hand-knitted, no labels. The t-shirt was from Primark, so it could be. The underpants were brown and cream nylon y-fronts, definitely nothing to do with me. The young copper was hauling another item out of the bag and this did look familiar. Thick and sturdy, the fake leather shoulder patches flaking. My mind flashed on the memory of Kazek flapping his arms to say how warm his coat was, and I didn’t hide it quick enough, felt my face turning pale.

  “What?” said Anderson. “You recognise this, do you?”

  “Oh Jessie,” said Dot. “Do you?”

  “No,” I said. “Not really.” But his words were echoing in me—an unfortunate situation. If ever anyone looked like meeting with one of them, it was Kazek. I had to know. “How long have you had these then?”

  All three of them were staring at me.

  “Why do you ask?” said McDowall.

  “Just … ” I scrabbled for an answer. “They don’t smell too good.” It was true; they didn’t.

  “Nearly a week,” said Constable Anderson, getting a dirty look from the sergeant for his trouble. “River water, you know.”

  A week. Not Kazek then. I let my breath go and felt the colour come back to my face. McDowall was glaring at the constable, but Dot was still watching me.

  “River water?” she said. “A week? Is this the poor soul that came out of the Nith at the Whitesands?”

  “Poor sod,” I said. “Maybe if he hadn’t been wearing such a big thick coat he wouldn’t have sunk.”

  “That’s an odd word to use,” said McDowall. “Why not say drowned? If you know something about this, Miss Constable … ”

  “I really don’t,” I said. I was watching Anderson’s hands. He was rootling about
in a plastic bag he’d had in his pocket. He took out a crucifix and half a dozen of those rubber charity bangles and laid them down.

  “We don’t do accessories,” I told him. I lifted one of the bangles, a pink one.

  “It’s not in English,” said McDowall.

  “Polish.” I didn’t mean to say it out loud, but when I looked up again all three were staring at me.

  “Are you sure you’ve nothing you want to tell us, Miss Constable?” said McDowall.

  “There’s this,” I said, praying it was the right thing. If only Dot had left me alone to think, I might know. “I tried to tell what’s her name, Gail, last night. There’s a Polish person missing. Her name is Jaroslawa Czerwinska; she was Becky King’s best friend and she disappeared a week past Saturday. She hasn’t gone home and no one knows where she is.”

  “Saturday,” he repeated, frowning at me. “This incident took place on Tuesday.”

  “It was the drowning!” said Dot. “Oh, the poor man.”

  “So it’s hard to see how they’re connected,” McDowall went on.

  “I never said they were,” I told him.

  “Except we have connected them, haven’t we?” said McDowall. “Mrs. King went in the Nith on Tuesday and this man came out, and you know both of them, it seems to me.”

  “I didn’t know this guy,” I said. “First I knew was watching the frogmen like everyone else.”

  “You’re sure of that?” said McDowall. Anderson was putting the clothes away again.

  There’s a crucifix on the wall. I went over and put my hand on it. “I didn’t know the man who died in these clothes,” I said. “Never met him, don’t know anything about him.”

  “Well, there you are,” said Dot. It seemed to be good enough for young Anderson too. Only McDowall looked unimpressed, like he knew how many times I’d lied on Bibles to save my neck when I was wee.

  “Again, I can’t help noticing that you said died, Miss Constable, while your colleague here said drowned.”

  “And it’s a small town,” I said. “I bet loads of people know Becky King as well as this guy.”