The Woman on the Cliff

by JANICE FROST

  “She was genuinely besotted with you, if that’s any consolation.”

  “Besotted? That’s not the word I’d use. There was something deeply disturbing about that young woman.”

  The memory of Elspeth standing over Moira, scissors in hand, flashes into my mind. Her denial that she’d cut Moira’s clothes to shreds. Lucy’s recent assertion that Elspeth was the culprit. The thing that bothers me most is the calm assurance with which Elspeth lied to all of us — even me, her closest friend. It makes me wonder what else she’s lied about throughout our friendship. So, instead of contradicting Andrew, I find myself nodding in agreement.

  “Can you believe she gouged out Moira’s face from a photograph she found in a drawer in my office at the university? We all know what kind of person does that sort of thing, don’t we?” Andrew lowers his voice to a whisper. “A psycho.”

  A little shiver runs through me. Psycho. That’s not a word you want to hear in connection with a woman who has held your baby daughter in her arms, played with her and, worst of all, been left alone with her.

  For a moment, I’m distracted, remembering an incident when my daughter was two years old, Elspeth left in charge of her for a short period of time, the tragedy that might have ensued . . . But now isn’t the time to dwell on this. I need to stay focused on Andrew.

  I want to believe he is being melodramatic, that all of this is sour grapes because he thinks Elspeth took advantage of his grief over Moira.

  I take a sip of my coffee, feeling conflicted. Andrew’s grief over Moira would have had to be genuine for him to be susceptible to Elspeth’s deception, wouldn’t it? Elspeth had preyed on his vulnerability. That made her a manipulative and scheming individual. But a psychopath? Hardly. Anyway, Andrew was an economist and a historian, not a psychologist.

  A little voice whispers in my head. There you go again, giving Elspeth the benefit of the doubt.

  I take another sip of my coffee. The alternative is that Andrew is lying to me. Leaving Innes’s spy theory aside, what if he killed Moira by accident, in a lover’s tiff? His grief would still be genuine, wouldn’t it? I blow on my coffee, glance at him over the rim of my cup. He’s looking at himself in a mirror hanging on the wall opposite. Andrew Kelso is a vain, self-centred man and a weak one. But is he also a murderer?

  “I tell you what, if the police hadn’t got to that Brogan character first, who knows . . .” His voice trails off. He shakes his head.

  I’m already off script, so I clear my throat and ask him outright. “Have you ever considered that maybe it wasn’t Stuart Brogan who killed Moira?”

  His eyes narrow. I can almost feel the surge of blood in his veins, his elevated heart rate. He shrugs, as if to indicate that the thought has never occurred to him or that if it has, he dismissed it instantly. It’s a good act, except his whole body has gone rigid with tension.

  His recovery is swift. “The police got the right man. Brogan confessed, didn’t he? And he had a motive. He was enraged when he found out Moira was seeing me. You were there that night when he came to your house on North Street. You saw him attack me.”

  This isn’t the time to challenge him, but I do say, “Actually, no. That was Lucy. But I’m sure you’re right. The police got their man.”

  “I cared about Moira, you know,” Andrew says. There is the slightest pause. “More than she cared for me, I suspect. I don’t say that just because she cheated on me with Brogan. She never asked more from me than I could give. And here’s the thing . . .” He gazes wistfully into the mirror, seeing, perhaps, not the mawkish ageing man in the reflection, but the tragic victim of a doomed affair. “I loved her. If she’d asked, I would have given up the world for her. My career, my wife, my child. Everything.”

  Bullshit. I don’t believe him for a nanosecond. Even if he didn’t kill Moira, he’s too self-centred for such an assertion to be true.

  Again, spy theories aside, I can’t think of any motive he might have had for killing Moira. Plus, how could he have afforded to pay Menzies off? Unless he’d had something on the man, but that seems unlikely, given that before Moira’s murder they hadn’t known each other from Adam. As a young man on the brink of a career in academia, Andrew Kelso would have lacked the resources to bribe anyone.

  “Wasn’t Elspeth seeing your friend Piers Thornton at the time when you were sleeping with her? Didn’t you introduce them?”

  Andrew fiddles with the fringe of his scarf. “Piers Thornton? Yes, he was one of my students. A gifted young man. And, yes, I remember introducing him to Elspeth Blair. I thought they would make a good match. They had a lot in common. Of course, I now suspect that Elspeth only agreed to go out with Piers as a means of getting closer to me.”

  “I wonder what Piers is doing now.”

  “He’s a professor of history at Edinburgh University.”

  “You still see him, then?”

  “He’s a fellow academic. We tend to move in very small circles.” He changes the subject. “What is your daughter studying here?”

  Not your course, thank goodness.

  “Geography.”

  “Ah. An all-encompassing subject these days. I hope she enjoys her time at St Andrews.”

  Watching his face closely for any reaction, I say, “Actually, something unpleasant happened to her recently. She was assaulted. Fortunately, it doesn’t seem to have put her off studying here. Quite the opposite, in fact.”

  “I’m so sorry. I hope she wasn’t hurt.” He doesn’t look guilty, but then if he’d arranged the attack or perpetrated it, he’d be expecting it to come up.

  “Minor injuries. She was lucky that a passer-by frightened off her attacker, or who knows what might have happened.”

  Andrew shakes his head. “You must have been frantic with worry.”

  “Yes. The police are looking into it.”

  He nods, glances at his watch. Our coffee cups are empty. I can’t draw out our conversation any longer without seeming suspicious.

  “Thanks for the coffee,” I say. We leave the café together. There’s the inevitable awkwardness on the pavement outside. Moira’s ghost hovers in the air, insubstantial yet forging a powerful connection between us. We make our clumsy goodbyes and walk off in opposite directions.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Innes is as surprised as I was to learn that Elspeth slept with Andrew after Moira’s murder.

  “Neither of them wasted much time, did they? It’s almost funny that he and Elspeth turned to each other in their hour of need,” he remarks dryly.

  “I haven’t really mentioned this before, Innes, but Elspeth and Moira didn’t get on — to put it mildly.”

  I tell him about the tension in our household that arose from the animosity between Elspeth and Moira. I end with the night Moira flirted with Piers, and Elspeth standing over Moira, scissors in hand.

  Innes looks pensive.

  I’m quick to leap to Elspeth’s defence. “Things were different after that night. Elspeth frightened herself. She actually apologised to Moira and got herself referred for help. It turned out that as a child she’d suffered abuse at the hands of an aunt who looked after her a lot when she was little, which is where her misdirected anger stemmed from. Apparently, Moira bore a strong resemblance to the aunt.”

  I’m not quite sure how to interpret the look Innes gives me. He clears his throat. “Don’t take this the wrong way, Ros, but that doesn’t sound very plausible.”

  “You think she lied to me? About the therapy? The aunt?”

  “Again, don’t take this the wrong way, but Elspeth doesn’t seem like the sort of friend you can trust.”

  “Is this because of what she told me about the case in Glasgow?”

  Innes doesn’t answer for a moment. “Partly. But also because of the way she behaved towards Moira. Have there been other times when she’s let you down?” I tell him the story Elspeth more or less invented about Doug’s ex-girlfriend and the baby.

  “You’re not the
first one to question my loyalty to Elspeth,” I admit. “Doug didn’t like her at all.”

  “That’s not surprising,” Innes says.

  “Not just because of the baby thing.” I give a sigh. “When Izzy was about two years old, Elspeth came to stay with Doug and me for a week. Doug didn’t want her to come, but she’d just split up with her first husband and I couldn’t turn her away. Two days after she arrived there was an . . . incident. Our house was burgled and a lot of Doug’s photography equipment was destroyed. The police were called, but of course nothing came of their investigation.”

  “Doug suspected Elspeth?”

  “Yes. The day it happened, he, Izzy and I had gone to see his sister. Elspeth was out too, visiting some museums in London.”

  “Didn’t you think Doug’s suspicions were justified?”

  I think before I reply. “I suppose I wasn’t ready to accept it.”

  “Do I sense there’s more?”

  “Something else happened.” I hesitate, and Innes waits patiently. “The day before Elspeth was due to go home, she and I decided to go for a walk on the Thames path near my house.”

  Even now, it’s hard for me to recount this story. It still leaves me with conflicting emotions, as well as a lingering sense of horror at what might have happened. But ever since Andrew told me about Elspeth cutting the face out of a photograph of Moira, it’s been on my mind, demanding attention.

  “I’d forgotten my gloves. I ran back to the house to look for them, leaving Elspeth with Izzy, who was in her stroller. When I caught up with them again, Izzy was missing. Elspeth was frantic. She told me I must have forgotten to strap Izzy in, and that she’d slipped out of her stroller and run off when someone stopped them to ask Elspeth for directions.”

  Innes’s expression is solemn. “Did you remember strapping your daughter in?”

  “I . . . I thought I had, but you do these things automatically, don’t you? I couldn’t swear to it. When I caught up with Elspeth, she was already at the path by the river. When I couldn’t see Izzy, I thought . . . Well, I’m sure you can imagine what I thought. Thankfully, I was wrong. Izzy hadn’t gone towards the river, she’d followed a woman with a dog, and the woman led her back to the path to find us.”

  “What did Doug say when you told him?”

  “I . . . I didn’t tell him. Elspeth had been beside herself with worry, she blamed herself . . .”

  “I thought you just said she’d blamed you for forgetting to strap Izzy in?”

  “Ye-es, but she still acknowledged that Izzy might have come to harm while she was in charge of her.”

  “Hmm.”

  “I didn’t go out of my way to see Elspeth much after that. I think a seed of doubt had been sown. In fact, our friendship didn’t really resume properly until after Doug’s death.”

  “Who got back in touch with whom?” Innes asks.

  “Elspeth called me when she heard. She was very supportive. I suppose I was grateful.”

  Innes doesn’t comment. Instead, he says, “Talk me through Elspeth’s movements again, the weekend Moira died.”

  “She was with me most of that weekend. You don’t seriously suspect Elspeth? You said earlier that there was a sexual element to the crime that precluded the killer being a woman.”

  “There’s such a thing as an accessory to murder.” Innes sighs. I guess he’s wondering why no one thought to mention all this at the time. I’m right. “Tell me about this Piers Thornton. How did he and Elspeth meet?”

  “Andrew Kelso introduced them,” I say.

  “That’s very interesting.”

  “It was a coincidence. They were all at some lecture or other. Piers asked Elspeth to go for a drink afterwards.”

  “What was the lecture about?”

  “I’ve no idea. Does it matter?” Innes’s frown reminds me of what I should know by now. In an investigation such as this, everything is relevant until proven otherwise.

  “I don’t know. Possibly something political to do with the GDR. That was Andrew and Piers’s special area of interest back then.” We exchange a look. If Innes is thinking about his spy theory, he doesn’t mention it.

  He rubs his chin. “How likely was it, do you think, that Moira might have acted on her attraction to Piers? Or he on his attraction to her?”

  “Moira? Unlikely. She probably only flirted with Piers to upset Elspeth. Piers? I don’t know. Are you thinking that Piers killed Moira now?”

  “I’m thinking I wish I’d known that Piers existed twenty-odd years ago.”

  “I’m sorry. This must all be very frustrating for you. Someone should have thought to mention Piers at the time. One of the first things you and Menzies asked was whether we knew of anyone who might wish Moira harm. But, to be honest, Piers wouldn’t have sprung to my mind. He’d only met her once.”

  When Innes doesn’t comment, I add, “Piers wasn’t the man Lucy saw Moira with that Friday afternoon. The sketch I made looked nothing like him.”

  Innes sighs. “If the investigation had lasted even a little longer than it did, all sorts of things would have come to light.”

  It’s some consolation to hear this. “Andrew told me Piers is currently a professor of history at Edinburgh University.”

  Innes does a search on his phone. “Here we go.” He shows me a picture. I stare at it, trying to connect it to Piers. The hair, or lack of it, puts me off at first. The man in the picture has a buzz cut, most likely to hide the fact that he’s practically bald. I recognise him though, despite only having met him once.

  “Yes, I’m confident that’s him. Don’t you think we should go to the police with all this?” I say, hoping Innes isn’t offended by the suggestion. “With what we’ve managed to find out, wouldn’t they reopen the investigation? Particularly when they learn that Menzies confessed to framing Stuart Brogan. They could question Andrew Kelso and Piers Thornton.”

  Innes is silent for a few moments. I suspect he wishes we were closer to finding out the truth ourselves. He sees this as his case, the one he never had the opportunity to solve because he was new at the job. It’s the one blemish in an otherwise perfect professional record. But he’s a civilian now. There are limitations to what he can hope to achieve.

  “Hmm. I only have the Canadian wife’s word that Menzies made any such confession. There is the documentation relating to his life in Scotland, but that doesn’t prove anything other than that he wished to start a new life, leaving all the old baggage behind. True, a person’s identity isn’t usually thought of as baggage . . .”

  Innes ponders a moment. “If there were another investigation, you and your friends would be questioned. Elspeth would be of particular interest, especially in light of what you’ve told me about her rather extreme behaviour towards Moira, and her relationship with Kelso. We should also bear in mind that Stuart Brogan may yet prove to be guilty.”

  “None of us would object to being questioned,” I say. “Moira’s death affected all our lives.”

  It is true. We were students. Our lives were carefree and uncomplicated but for the pressure of deadlines and exams. We were young, and the future stretched ahead of us, distant and full of promise. Moira’s death cast a long shadow over that future.

  As we’d said that night at the Witchery, it signified the end of innocence. Long before Doug’s senseless death, I had come to the realisation that safety is an illusion. What happened to Moira had already shown me that evil doesn’t discriminate, and may reside as comfortably in this pretty seaside town as out in the wider world. I give an involuntary shudder.

  “Okay?” Innes asks.

  I nod, uncertainly. “Do you ever fear for your children, living in a world such as this?”

  “All the time,” he answers softly.

  “You must have seen some terrible things in your professional career.”

  “Aye. I’d be lying if I said they hadn’t affected me.” He takes my hand. I feel a charge run through me. “But I’ve also se
en the good in people, and that’s what keeps me sane.”

  A simple philosophy, but there’s no arguing with the sentiment.

  I smile and step closer to him. Our first kiss is shy, hesitant, but heat flares between us, making us breathless and driving away any lingering doubts. Bronn is stretched out on the carpet near the log burner. He raises his head, lowers it again, yawns disinterestedly.

  “Let’s go upstairs,” Innes suggests.

  * * *

  I am awakened by the jarring sound of my phone’s ringtone. Startled, I look around at the unfamiliar surroundings. And then I remember where I am. In Innes’s bedroom. We’ve had the most amazing sex and must have fallen asleep afterwards. The phone’s urgent ringing denies me the satisfaction of luxuriating in the memory of it.

  “It’s Elspeth,” I mouth to Innes, who’s rotating his neck, perhaps to relieve a crick. Innes points a thumb at his mouth, miming drinking, and I nod. He goes downstairs to make coffee and, I hope, something to eat, because I realise I’m starving.

  “Hi, Elspeth.”

  “Hi, Ros. I’m just calling to see if you’re okay after your upset over Innes Nevin.” More than okay, no thanks to you.

  “I’m fine, thanks for your concern, Elspeth.” I know she’ll pick up on the edge of sarcasm in my voice, but I don’t care.

  “So, you’re still in St Andrews then?” Elspeth texted me the day she went back to Edinburgh, inviting me to stay with her on my way back to London.

  “As a matter of fact, I am.”

  “Oh.” A short silence ensues. “Tell me you’re not back with that man, Ros.”

  “If by ‘that man,’ you mean Innes Nevin, then, yes, we’re together.” Out of sheer devilment, I add, “In every sense of the word.”

  “Well, I hope you know what you’re doing, Ros. I thought you’d be more circumspect in your dealings with him after what I told you.”