The Kiss

by Joan Lingard

  The woman constable is young and soft-spoken. She sits beside Sophie but not too close; she commiserates, asks her how she’s feeling, tells her the scar won’t leave as bad a mark as she fears, but they can’t let whoever did this get away with it, can they, or he’ll just do it to someone else?

  ‘So, Sophie, can you tell us his name?’

  They wait.

  ‘Please, dear, you must.’

  Eventually, Sophie says, ‘Kite.’

  ‘Kite?’

  ‘That’s what he was called.’

  ‘He had a noticeable mark below his left eye,’ says Cormac. ‘Shaped like a kite.’

  ‘Is that why?’ The constable looks at Sophie, who shrugs.

  ‘Suppose. Nobody ever said.’

  The policewoman writes it in her book. ‘Where did you meet this Kite?’

  ‘At the bottom of the Playfair Steps. I gave him some money and we got talking.’

  ‘Did you go anywhere with him? Do you know where he lived?’

  Again, a shrug.

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘In a squat down at Leith.’

  ‘Do you remember the name of the street?’

  Sophie shakes her head.

  ‘If we take you down to Leith could you find it for us?’

  Terror shows in Sophie’s face. ‘I don’t want to go there. Please don’t make me!’

  ‘Was it there that he cut your face?’

  Sophie nods.

  ‘What did he use?’

  ‘A knife.’

  ‘Can you describe it? I’m sorry to have to ask you but I must, you understand.’

  ‘A long thin knife. With a tip. One of his friends held me.’ Here Sophie breaks down and Rachel puts her arms round her. There are tears in her eyes too, as there are in Cormac’s. His are threatening to overflow, like a dam bursting.

  ‘We have to get him,’ says the male constable.

  ‘We do,’ says Cormac, who has murder in his heart. If they hadn’t called the police he would be out there looking for him himself, no matter what Rachel says.

  ‘Why did he do this, Sophie?’ asks the policewoman.

  Sophie lifts her head. ‘He was angry with me. He said I’d set my father on him. He says Dad threatened him.’

  Cormac feels he would choke if he tried to speak. Everyone in the room is looking at him. Is it his fault? He only wanted to protect his daughter, whom he loves. God, how easy it is to do the wrong thing in this life! ‘I told him to stay away from you, that’s all,’ he says to Sophie.

  ‘It’s not your fault, Dad. I know it’s not. I’m not blaming you, really I’m not.’

  ‘She’s right, Mr Aherne,’ says the policeman. ‘We know his kind. Any excuse and they get vicious.’

  ‘He had a terrible childhood,’ says Sophie, who is still crying.

  ‘No doubt,’ says the constable. ‘But he can’t go round cutting up people, making them pay. Are you sure you don’t remember the name of the street in Leith? If we drive you there will you show us? You won’t have to come in with us and we’ll go in an unmarked car.’

  ‘He’d kill me.’

  ‘Does he know where you live?’

  ‘I never told him. I never let him come anywhere near here.’

  ‘That’s something at any rate.’

  They take Rachel’s car since it will attract less attention than a police vehicle. Cormac drives, with the male constable in the front passenger seat beside him, shorn of his jacket. Sophie sits in the back slumped low between her mother and the policewoman. They drive towards the docks and cross the river and a little way along Sophie indicates they should turn off. They are in a street of tenements.

  ‘There! That one, with no door at the bottom. They’re on the top floor. The flat on the right.’ They look up but there is nothing to be seen but two blank grubby windows.

  They drive back to the Colonies and the police leave them, returning to the street in Leith in their own car, but when they break in the door of the flat they find it abandoned. A pile of human ordure has been left on the floor of the main room; in the kitchen, empty tins and milk bottles sit mouldering beside beer and wine bottles and every kind of rubbish imaginable, so the male constable tells Cormac when he comes back to report to them.

  He shakes his head. ‘Beats me how a nice girl like your daughter coming from a decent home could have gone there. Unless she’s on drugs?’

  ‘She’s not. At least I’m pretty sure she’s not, not hard drugs anyway. She might have smoked pot.’

  ‘Well, don’t worry,’ says the policeman before taking off, ‘we’ll be after him, this Kite creature. We’ll get him.’

  But Kite is not so easy to be got. He seems to have vanished into the darkness. Now you see him, now you don’t. He might have been an illusion, but for the mark on Sophie’s face. Cormac keeps an eye open himself. He pounds the pavements, he climbs the Playfair Steps several times a day. Every time he passes someone sitting begging he stops to see if he has a mark like a kite below his left eye.

  He’ll have moved on, say the police, who are fairly certain he’s nowhere around in the city. They have circulated his description to other forces and talked to one or two people who knew him and they say he has gone south. Cormac hopes he’s gone to hell. He has always been amazed how people from his homeland who have had close relatives blown to bits by terrorist bombs have managed to say they have forgiven the perpetrators of the crimes. He wonders if his mother with her strong Christian values would be able to forgive Kite if she were to see the raw wound he inflicted on her granddaughter’s beautiful face. He decides not to test her. When they go at Easter they will have to think up a story for the wound that will distress her less.

  They have other worries. Rachel talks to Sophie who admits that she did have sex with Kite. (How could she, with that young thug? Cormac is beginning to think he understands less now than he did at twenty.) She swears though that they always used protection. This is something that Rachel herself dinned into her but she takes blood samples from her, anyway. And drugs? Sophie says that she did only ever smoke pot though others in the squat were into harder stuff.

  ‘It could be worse,’ says Rachel.

  ‘We are reduced to thinking so,’ says Cormac. ‘We have been wretched parents.’

  Rachel will not agree. ‘We did our best,’ she says. ‘You have always liked to take the sins of the world on your back. Please don’t take this one on!’ She blames this tendency on his Catholic upbringing, he knows, but that is too facile.

  Davy goes to stay with Rachel, Sophie comes to live with him. The scar, when the dressing comes off, looks livid. She will never be able to forget the sadistic young man who left his mark on her; every time she looks in the mirror, brushes back her hair, smoothes cream into her skin, she will see it and remember him and the flash of the thin, cruel blade. This is the cruellest thing of all: to be condemned to remembering him. As the scar firms and its edges knit together Cormac sees that the slash was not random; it has the shape of a kite, so even in the heat of the moment – or was he dead cool? – his action was deliberate and executed according to design.

  Sophie wakens in the small hours with nightmares and he sits on the edge of the bed and holds her hand until she quietens. He has bad dreams himself during this time in which he is running frenziedly up endless flights of steps, and high above him, always out of reach, going higher as he goes higher, keeping the same distance between them, floats a kite, a black kite. As he surfaces he hears it laughing. He has to leave his bed and go to the window and push it up and stand there for a few minutes breathing in deeply, inhaling lungfuls of the damp night air coming off the river. He smells rotting vegetation. And, in his ear still, he hears the mocking laughter.

  Gradually, as the days go by, and then the weeks, the dark dreams lessen for them both. The blood test has proved negative. Sophie stays at home in the evenings unless it is to go to the cinema or theatre with him. But soon she will go out again with her
friends, she must. She is nervous about going into the centre of the town though one evening he persuades her to come with him. He will take her to the little French bistro in Fishmongers Close off the High Street that they have been to before. She clings tightly to his arm as they walk up the hill to Princes Street and then take the path beside the galleries that leads to the Playfair Steps.

  ‘Look,’ he says, halting her a few yards from the steps, ‘there is no one there.’

  There never is in the evening, after dark, especially in midwinter, with cold skies overhead and the freezing ground beneath. But she is able to walk this way, and although she shivers a little, her step on the stairs is firm. In the restaurant she drinks a couple of glasses of wine and becomes a little tiddly and he is happy to see her laughing again. The young put things behind them more quickly, he thinks. He hopes.

  When he opens up the shop in the morning he sees the plain white envelope lying just inside the door. It has been delivered by hand and he knows that hand. He lets his shopping fall at his feet and picks up the envelope. Carefully he slits it open. He takes out a card of a painting by William Gillies of his garden in the village of Temple under a winter moon. Cormac was always keen that his pupils should know Scottish artists every bit as much as they did international ones.

  ‘I have been accepted by the Slade,’ she has written. ‘I thought you would like to know. I hope you will be pleased. Thank you for helping me to get there. Clarinda.’

  He feels a flush of pleasure. After he has locked up in the afternoon he goes out and buys a card, a vibrant still life by Caddell, one of the Scottish Colourists.

  ‘I am delighted by your news. It is well deserved. Congratulations! With very best wishes, Cormac.’ He wishes that he could send her a bouquet of flowers but that might be misinterpreted by Mrs Bain, who has caused sufficient trouble in his life.

  His nightmare ended unexpectedly, on a wet and windy afternoon. The weather in the streets was so debilitating that he came home early from his peregrinations round the town. He was wondering what to do with himself when the phone rang and his lawyer said, ‘Good news, Cormac old man! The case against you has been dropped. Congratulations.’

  He had to ask the lawyer to repeat what he had just said.

  ‘The claimant has dropped the charge.’

  ‘Clarinda has?’ He felt stupid.

  ‘Pity she didn’t do it before it went this far. Almost to the wire. Put you and your family through hell.’

  ‘What happened exactly?’

  ‘Apparently she walked into the police station one day and told the duty officer that none of it was true. She’d been lying. She could be charged with wasting police time – not to mention everyone else’s – but I shouldn’t think they’ll bother. These young girls! Anyway, Cormac, you’re off the hook.’

  Off the hook. He felt as if he’d had one in the back of his neck all these months and that he’d been dangling, like a carcass in mid-air, feet grazing the ground.

  ‘Thank God,’ said Rachel, when she came in and heard the news. She collapsed into a chair. ‘What a relief that is! We can return to normal life again. You’ll be able to go back to work.’

  Archie rang the following morning. ‘I’m so pleased for you, Cormac. We all are. As for Miss Bain! I don’t know how she’s going to show her nose in here again.’

  ‘Oh, well,’ was all that Cormac could think to respond.

  ‘Your job’s still open, needless to say.’

  ‘It’s too late, Archie,’ he said. Too much had happened. He’d been to hell and back and much as he had enjoyed his teaching he knew he could no longer walk through that door. And another school, given a choice of applicants for a job, might decide to play safe and go for the other person. After all, there usually has to be some kind of fire to give off even a faint puff of smoke.

  ‘But what will you do?’ asked Archie.

  ‘Make sandwiches,’ he said as a joke.

  He drops the card he has just written to Clarinda in a letter box and continues along Henderson Row to Stockbridge. He could cut down Saxe Coburg to the Colonies but he does not. Part way along Hamilton Place he goes into an alleyway where there is a small colony of studios that are rented out to artists of various kinds for reasonable rents.

  When he arrives home he prepares their meal and opens a bottle of wine. He feels he has something to celebrate. He pours himself a glass while he waits and drinks it standing at the window watching the street. He then pours another and turns down the rings on the cooker.

  The phone rings. It’s Sophie. ‘Dad, I’m going to be a bit late. OK? I’m going to eat at Tilda’s. See you later,’ she says.

  ‘See you later,’ he repeats when the phone has gone dead. He sighs.

  He finishes the wine of course and eats some of the food, leaving the rest to congeal in the pots. She comes in just before eleven, not too late. Her cheeks are flushed and her hair and clothes look clean. He is thankful for that at least. One has to be thankful for small mercies, he reflects wryly. It was one of his mother’s most frequent sayings.

  ‘Sorry about that,’ says Sophie, casting a look at the abandoned pots. ‘I should have phoned you earlier.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ he says.

  She makes hot chocolate and he accepts a mug though he is not fond of the drink.

  ‘How was your day?’ she asks.

  ‘I’ve put my name down for a studio.’

  ‘Are you going to start sculpting again, Dad? That’s brilliant!’

  ‘I’m thinking of it,’ he says cautiously.

  She smiles. ‘What are you going to start with?’

  ‘Not sure.’

  ‘You always said you’d do the aunts one day.’

  ‘The O’Malley sisters.’ He smiles now. He can see them ranged in front of him, their eyes fixed on him, expectantly. ‘You know,’ he says, ‘I might just do that.’

  If you enjoyed The Kiss, read on to find out

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  ENCARNITA’S JOURNEY

  It is 1920 and the beautiful village of Yegen, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, awakens to a new year and two events that are to change the pueblo for ever: the birth of Encarnita, a beautiful dark-eyed girl; and the arrival of the British writer Gerald Brenan and his string of artistic and literary visitors, including Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey and Dora Carrington.

  Growing up in Yegen, and taught English by Brenan, the beautiful Encarnita longs for the world outside the small pueblo – the stories Brenan and his friends tell her spark her imagination. And so begins her long journey, from the Sierra to Edinburgh, where eighty years after her birth, she will have one last story to tell.

  AFTER YOU’VE GONE

  Willa is a polite and respectable young woman, trying to cope with the tedium of her life whilst her husband is away on a year-long cruise with the Navy. Living with a controlling mother-in-law only serves to fuel her sense of claustrophobia. Her only escape is to submerge herself in books, and at her local library she meets Richard, a charming and intelligent young writer who shares her passion for reading.

  As their relationship blossoms, it begins to change Willa’s life. Despite her initial reluctance, she allows herself to enjoy the taste of a different existence, yet all the while struggling with the knowledge that Tommy’s steady progress will eventually bring him back home …

  About the Author

  JOAN LINGARD is the acclaimed author of over forty books for both children and adults. She was born in Edinburgh and brought up in Belfast, the inspiration for many of her novels, including the compelling Across the Barricades. She was awarded the MBE in 1998 for Services to Children’s Literature. The Kiss is the result of a long-standing personal fascination with the painter Gwen John.

>   By Joan Lingard

  The Kiss

  Encarnita’s Journey

  After You’ve Gone

  Copyright

  Allison & Busby Limited

  12 Fitzroy Mews

  London W1T 6DW

  www.allisonandbusby.com

  First published in Great Britain by Allison & Busby in 2002.

  This ebook edition first published in 2013.

  Copyright © 2002 by JOAN LINGARD

  The moral right of the author is hereby asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All characters and events in this publication other than those clearly in the public domain are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent buyer.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 978–0–7490–1347–9