“Here, you go, Ma’am. Cheers.”
My order seemed to have come up sooner than that of the lads, but the woman gave me a wink. Suddenly her expression changed. She was glaring at the kids behind me.
“Put out those fags this minute. Catriona MacRae, I’m going to tell your mother when I next see her. You too, Angus. Do you think I’ve gone blind? Put them out.”
One of the boys and a girl had lit cigarettes and were drawing on them with self-conscious style. Sheepishly they complied. The woman shared a “what’s-the-youth-of-today-coming-to” look. I grimaced, paid up, and left with my pizza.
Coral-Lyn and the minister had progressed to the coffee-or-tea stage. She was still the one talking, as far as I could see, and he had pushed his chair back a little further. As I passed, I saw her reach over and place her hand on top of his. There was something sexually predatory about the gesture. He seemed rather stunned by this move, and he left his hand where it was. I walked on. What was she up to and how had Andy managed to get out of her clutches for the evening?
The pizza turned out to be delicious, and I wolfed down two slices as soon as I got back to my room. The television had decided to show static, but I didn’t feel like going in search of somebody to fix it, so I switched it off. What to do? There was no radio, and I’d come away in such a hurry that I hadn’t brought anything to read with me except my notebook and handouts from the conference. I read through those for the next hour, finished, and still had a lot of time to spare. I could have started to write down what had happened since I’d “found” Joan, but it felt too hot still, like a burn that needed to cool down for a while. I had no idea where we’d go from here. Our relationship seemed to have undergone a seismic change, but I was almost afraid to count on that. It was a most peculiar feeling to know that I had blood relatives by the score in this very spot. I might even have already met some of them without knowing it, but I had to wait for Joan to lift the embargo before I pursued that angle. On the other hand, given what she’d said, maybe I also had an entire tribe of “red Indians” on my father’s side that I had yet to meet.
Those thoughts were agitating, so I brought myself back to the usual source of mental stability, work. I took out a fresh piece of paper and wrote at the top: “What Happened to Tormod MacAulay?”
I was bugged by the unanswered questions in the case. Oh, that’s another typical characteristic of police folk: we can’t stand having a lot of questions but no answers. They become like mosquito bites on your back; you’re always trying to get to that itch. Besides, tackling the whole situation in this way made me feel better, pushed the loneliness back into the cupboard.
There was no proof that MacAulay had died other than by natural causes, no forensic evidence (thank you Dr. MacBeth). But I did have the famous or infamous gut feeling that cops the world over swear by. There were, shall we say, small irregularities that bothered me.
QUESTION #1: Why did Joan and Sarah go to see MacAulay, and why was Sarah so upset?
I didn’t buy what Joan had said about it being a business matter. There was no indication that Tormod had changed his mind about selling to the Norwegians and was reneging on his deal. The answer seemed pretty obvious to me.
Mrs. MacNeil had described Annie Stewart, Joan’s stepmother, as being barren as a board throughout her marriage. Then, coinciding with Joan being sent off to boarding school, Annie conceives. Joan had made an interesting choice of words when she said, “Sarah belonged to my stepmother.” Parents raising their errant daughter’s child as if it were their own was quite a common story. I’d bet my new hat this is what Annie MacAulay/Stewart had done. Even in such a close-knit community, you can get away with that kind of deception if you’re determined enough, especially if the subject involved can conveniently be out of town. I’d say it was highly likely Sarah was Joan’s child, conceived when she was a mere teenager. That would certainly account for her disgrace and her subsequent disavowal of her own family, described by Mrs. MacNeil as far too self-righteous. If that was the case, then who was Poppa? Come on, that’s easy. Surely, it was Mr. Tormod MacAulay who would “make it up to her,” meaning to Sarah, and who immediately after Sarah and Joan left, had phoned his lawyer to add a codicil to his will. I’d bet this was the “ghost” that Joan had to lay to rest. Sarah, meet your real father. Tormod, meet your daughter.
But still, Joan’s feelings about all of this were obscure. She said, “No, I didn’t like Tormod,” but was adamant he hadn’t molested her. But he must have. I did a quick calculation of numbers. When she went off to boarding school she was just fifteen, which would make him twenty-nine. Fourteen years difference wasn’t a lot when you were both adults, but it was a huge gap when you were barely out of childhood. Not to mention, you called him “Uncle.” She’d had me three and a half years later, when she was living in Canada. She’d only just arrived, mind you, and I could have been conceived before she left. However, gut feeling again, I believed her when she said Tormod wasn’t the sperm donor and my biological father.
Which brought us right smack dab against the strange gap of those unaccounted-for hours. She said, “I didn’t like Tormod.” Was she being literal and did she mean “I didn’t like him. I hated him?” I thought that the hypnosis session had brought back more than she was letting on. Had she returned to Tormod’s house after the accident? Who knows... groggy from the bang on the head, all stirred up emotionally, had she killed him? If so, how? (Back to lack of evidence again.) Frankly, even though her evasions and half-truths were as numerous and as dodgy as Hebridean sheep, I didn’t think so.
Question answered.
QUESTION #2: Can we believe the accuracy of the time given by the MacLeans?
If the time they gave was right, the car they saw couldn’t have been Joan’s. Who was it then?
No answer.
QUESTION #3: What happened after Joan and Sarah left? Who cleaned up? Why did they clean up?
Lisa said Tormod never tidied up after himself but, even if he did, surely he’d know where the glasses and plates lived, no matter what Gill said about genetic programming. And was this the kind of thing a man would do after going through the kind of scene Joan had described. Lisa said there were two things missing. One was the cushion from the bedroom chair. The other was a piece of woven fabric that she said should still have been on the loom. The fabric could have been sent somewhere, but surely not the cushion.
No answer.
QUESTION #4: Why was Andy’s bicycle in the shed?
According to his fiancée, Andy visited his granddad every day except on the weekends. Didn’t he need his bike to get around? As far as I know he didn’t have a car. They seemed to use Coral-Lyn’s rental. I hadn’t noticed that the bike had a flat tire or anything like that, although I hadn’t been paying close attention at that moment. Why was it left there, then? Usually you do that if you ride over one way and return by another means.
Possible answer: Andy had biked over to visit his grandfather as usual, and he was the person who had walked into the house....
Wait a minute.
I flipped to the verbatim notes I’d taken during Joan’s hypnosis session. She didn’t say “somebody has come to the door,” she said “somebody has come in.” Different. Even in this friendly, everybody-knows-everybody-else island, surely you knock on the door when you go visiting. Except for sisters, who feel free to walk in unannounced... and grandsons.
Which meant Andy had not told the truth when he said the last time he saw his uncle was on Thursday. Or rather, when Coral-Lyn had said that for him.
QUESTION #5: Why lie about it?
Answer could be trouble.
The real-estate shenanigans were vitally connected to Andy. As of last week, he thought the house was going to Miss Pitchers’s daddy. What if he’d come back to the house that night after Sarah and Joan had flown off, and learned from Tormod that he’d been gazumped? He could have driven there, possibly with his fiancée, and it was their car th
at the MacLeans had seen.
Possible answer to the car sighting, but not to the bike in the shed and no answer at all to question number three and the identity of the tidy freak.
QUESTION #6: Did Andy kill Tormod, thinking that, by the terms of the original will, he would get the house anyway?
He couldn’t have known that, in fact, Tormod had left his entire estate to Lisa.
Answer: highly unlikely.
Andy was truly grief-stricken when I saw him. I just couldn’t see him as the murdering type. I know that, after the fact, there are always people saying about the worst murderers, “He was such a nice man.” I don’t buy that. Premeditated murders are never committed by nice people. The cracks always show somewhere. However, it was possible that, on hearing that he might not acquire the house, Andy had exploded in a fit of rage and killed his grandfather. But I doubted it. And neither could I see Coral-Lyn doing that. Besides, that question was totally hypothetical, without any forensic evidence. And there was no sign of obvious trauma to the body.
QUESTION #7: How good a judge of character am I?
Mairi declared that Lisa wasn’t at her school that weekend as she’d said she was. And now she had inherited a property that could bring in money very useful to a struggling student.
I’d seen people lie during an interview so convincingly that I had to go back and recheck the videotape of the robbery, which was incontrovertible. But that was rare. When you’re in this business, you get a very good nose for lies or evasions, which are the law-abiding citizen’s form of lies. I believed Lisa had not arrived at the house until Sunday and was shocked by Tormod’s death. Her sister was probably right about her actual whereabouts. She was shacking up with her sugar daddy that weekend, and she wasn’t telling the truth about that.
Answer: pretty good.
QUESTION #8: Where is Sarah’s briefcase?
Janice had called her into the office at the request of a woman who could have been a prospective client. She’d bring her briefcase.
No answer.
QUESTION #9: If it is true that Joan and Sarah were forced off the road, who was the driver of that car? Who apparently stood over Joan directly afterward?
No answer.
I shoved aside the paper. If all of my speculation about Sarah MacDonald was the truth — and I was convinced it was — I had lost not an aunt, but a half-sister. A blood relative I hadn’t known existed. I wondered what she had been like, other than a habitual drunk, that is. From the way the scene had played out, she must have been distraught at hearing Tormod was her natural father. No wonder he couldn’t let her marry his son. Which suggested he knew the truth about her parentage. Did my grandfather and stepmother know? I suspected not. I was looking forward to hearing Joan’s version of all this. I looked over my notes. It seemed to me there were still bits and pieces of the puzzle that weren’t placed yet, but I felt much better, and I wasn’t about to dash out now and satisfy my curiosity.
I got up and looked out of the window again. Hey, I was in the place of my ancestors. Some of them, anyway. Sondra and her sad story had started to recede from my mind. My boss had been more right than he knew when he said going to Edinburgh might be just what the doctor ordered.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
That night I slept better than I had in months. I didn’t wake up until seven, which was luxurious. I was eager to get going and dressed quickly and went down to breakfast. The gal at the reception desk handed me a note. She was a dark-haired lass, and I wondered if she might be on the cousin side. I grinned to myself. I was in danger of checking out the entire population of Stornoway at this rate.
She handed me a note from Gill, who had phoned to say he was busy today but would like to meet later for dinner. I was just as glad, because there were things I wanted to do on my own. I had a hurried breakfast, exchanged a few stilted words with the German couple, and escaped to my little toy car. Overnight, some kind of body-learning seemed to have taken place and, except for the occasional flinch when I felt I was drifting too far over to the right, I was more comfortable driving. I got myself out of Stornoway with only one missed turn and set off to Duncan’s house.
I’d phoned ahead from the hotel to say I was coming, not wanting to risk finding Joan and him rolling around in bed together. Not to worry. By the time I arrived he was getting ready for the herding demonstration. Over a dozen people this time. The sun was teasing but there was no rain and it was warmer. The sheep were munching away placidly and the dogs were circling obsessively around Duncan.
I went into the house, ringing the bell first. Joan was in the kitchen washing up, but for a brief moment, I didn’t recognize her. Her hair was back to being dark brown and the waves had reappeared.
She saw my surprise and patted her head self-consciously. “I went back to my own colour.”
“Were you hoping blondes have more fun?” I asked.
She gave me a sharp look to see if I was getting at her, but I was deliberately bland. I knew why she’d dyed her hair.
“We all need a change from time to time.”
She turned the tables on me by scrutinizing my own haircut. “You could do with a trim. And in my opinion, you’d look better with longer hair. It would balance out that jawline.”
“I must have inherited it from my father... whoever he was.”
The air went dead around her. “Don’t start with me, Christine. I’m not up to it.”
She did, in fact, look exhausted, and the bruises on her face were like dark shadows. Of course, I felt guilty at my jab.
“How are you feeling?” I asked.
“Okay. How’re you?”
“Good.”
“I hope they’ll have settled the accident by the time you leave.”
I saw on her face how much she wanted me to stay, because she was afraid.
“How did you feel after the interview with Gill yesterday?”
“I was relieved, really. Your officer friend was very nice. He put me at my ease.” A pause to find the chink. “But that’s his job isn’t it? He’s trained to appear sympathetic.”
I nodded. “Yes, he’s the family liaison officer.”
Joan scrubbed at some more dishes and stacked them in the draining board. I took up a tea towel and started to dry. There were no wine glasses, I noticed. Just mugs, all with a border-collie design, and plates.
“It would help your case if we could find the person who was at the crash site. They could verify that you weren’t driving.”
She snorted. “They’ll never come forward. It was their fault we went off the road.”
“Don’t forget Sarah had been drinking. That was a factor.”
Joan slumped and concentrated on wiping off the counter. Tears had welled up in her eyes, and she tried to wipe them away with the end of her plaid scarf, which she was wearing again.
“How would we even find that other driver?”
“The police can put out a notice asking for anybody who saw a car on the road at that time to come forward.”
She shrugged. “The road was deserted. Nobody was out.”
The door opened and Duncan came in with one of the dogs.
“I’m leaving Nic inside. She’s after limping again. Good crowd today.” He took a look at Joan and immediately glared at me as if it were my fault. He asked her in Gaelic if she was all right, and she dragged up a smile for him, which elicited a quick peck on the cheek. It was all very chummy and familial. Then he breezed out again.
Nic ran to the window, rearing up on her hind legs to watch him. Joan clucked at her.
“Come on, Nicky. Come and have a bicky.”
The dog got down, limped over to her, and sat down expectantly.
“That’s my girl.”
Joan was so comfortable in this kitchen. I’d never seen her quite like this. In spite of her fatigue, there was a relaxation in her face and body that I didn’t remember seeing before. She caught my eye.
“I know we have a lot to talk
about, Chris. And we will, I promise. Just give me a couple of days.”
“That’s fine. And in the meantime, I wondered how you would feel about some more exploring of what happened on Friday night. ”
“Using hypnosis you mean?”
“No, let’s just talk, go over what you do remember. More might come back to you.”
“Good. I don’t want to do that trance thing again. It was too upsetting.”
“Okay. Can we have a cup of coffee first?”
“I think he has some.” She opened the cupboard doors. “We both drink tea. Yes, here we go... but it’s instant and probably stale at that. You know how fussy you are.”
“Tea will be fine then. I drink it black, remember?”
I was the visitor, the almost-stranger that she was accommodating.
Nic walked over to the door and lay down, her nose to the crack. I could hear Duncan’s voice coming through the megaphone. While Joan filled the kettle, I went to the window to watch the dogs do their tricks. From here, Duncan cut a good figure. Tall and muscular, he was every inch the trusty shepherd with his crook and his tartan trousers and tweed hat. He wasn’t the usual type Joan had gone for in the past. Those men were typically low-end guys with low-end jobs — and attitudes to match. Joan and Duncan had been childhood sweethearts, but I wondered how long nostalgia would sustain the present reality of what they had both grown into. And how long was the “new” Joan going to be around?
“Here you are.” Joan put the teapot and a mug on the table and we sat down.
“I particularly wanted to go back to what you said about somebody coming to the house. If it was a neighbour, they may have seen you leave, and they could verify that Sarah was driving.”
“You’re talking as if you don’t believe me.”
“No, no, that’s not true. I do believe you. But from the court’s point of view, it would help to have a witness. Can you recall anything more? Do you think it was a man or a woman?”
Does Your Mother Know? Page 24
