The Woman on the Cliff

by JANICE FROST

  “Well, we could have said that he and Moira knew each other. Didn’t you ever wonder whether Piers acted on his obvious . . . attraction to her?” Elspeth flinches when I mention this. Not all water under the bridge, then. “The police never had a chance to question him.”

  Elspeth frowns. “I’m not sure where you’re going with this, Ros. The police didn’t need to speak to Piers, or anyone else for that matter. Stuart Brogan killed Moira. End of story.” She gives me one of her penetrating looks. “Is it Innes Nevin who’s got you in a tizz about all this? He was only a PC when he worked on Moira’s case. What the hell did he know about anything?”

  It’s not what Innes knew then but what he knows now that concerns me. Out loud I say, “What if Stuart Brogan was innocent?”

  “Ros, that’s . . . ridiculous!”

  “Why is it? He hanged himself before the case could be properly investigated. Forensic science was in its infancy in those days. Think how differently a case like that would be investigated now.”

  Elspeth is shaking her head. The look she gives me is condescending.

  “And you probably don’t know this, but all the notes and evidence relating to the original investigation into Moira’s death were later destroyed in a fire.”

  Now Elspeth laughs out loud. It makes me want to shake her. “You really have been talking to Lucy, haven’t you? That’s just the sort of nonsense she would have spouted. Seeing conspiracies where there are none. I’m surprised at you, Ros.”

  “I don’t think Piers killed Moira,” I tell her, “but the police should have been made aware of him as a potential suspect.”

  “So, who else do you suspect? Andrew Kelso? Me?”

  “Ros?” Innes is standing in the doorway. The sound of his voice makes me start. I wonder if he can sense the tension between Elspeth and me. “It’s getting late,” he adds. “Time to go?”

  “I’ll tell Izzy.”

  I go upstairs to the spare bedroom, the one Izzy and I slept in the last time we stayed. As I suspected, she has fallen asleep on one of the beds. It seems a shame to wake her but I’m angry at Elspeth, and I don’t want my daughter spending another night under her roof. I don’t want to stay in this house a moment longer.

  “Izzy.” I give her a shake. “Wake up. It’s time to go. We’re driving back to St Andrews, remember?”

  Izzy stirs and groans. “Okay,” she says, yawning. I wait while she goes to the bathroom. The door to Elspeth and Duncan’s bedroom is ajar. I can hear Elspeth talking downstairs. I think again of the time I woke in the night and found Elspeth in Moira’s room, brandishing a pair of scissors like a weapon. The memory makes me shudder.

  We go downstairs. Elspeth, Duncan and Innes are still talking in the kitchen, so I go to collect our coats from the cupboard in the hall, where Elspeth usually hangs them when we visit. I put mine on and stick my hand in the pocket, searching for the lip balm I keep in there, but instead my fingers close around an unfamiliar object. Puzzled, I pull it out. It’s a pen. There’s some writing on the side.

  Edinburgh University — Department of History.

  I’m wearing Elspeth’s coat. And she’s lied to me about Piers.

  * * *

  “It doesn’t necessarily mean she’s been in touch with Thornton,” Innes says when I tell him about the pen. It’s one in the morning and we are back at Innes’s cottage. All the way back to Edinburgh, I’d been itching to tell him what I’d found in Elspeth’s coat pocket, but I couldn’t talk about it in front of Izzy. We dropped her off at her hall an hour ago, collected Bronn from a friend of Innes’s who’d been looking after him and driven here.

  “I know, but I saw some just like it in a desk-tidy on Thornton’s desk this afternoon,” I say. “That client she claimed kept her late at work? What if it was Piers? He could have contacted her after our visit and asked her to come and see him.”

  “It’s one of those pens they give out free at open days and the like. She could have picked it up anywhere.”

  “Yes, I know. But — department of history? It has to be more than a coincidence.”

  “Hmm.”

  Why am I so eager for the pen to have originated in Piers’s office? Wouldn’t that suggest that Elspeth was mixed up in Moira’s death somehow? Surely this isn’t an outcome I’m hoping for? But is it becoming one that’s unavoidable?

  I recall all the times when Elspeth has steered the conversation away from the subject of Moira. I’d always assumed it was out of guilt over the way she’d treated Moira when she was alive. But what if she had a vested interest in ensuring that no one dwelt on the events of that time for long? There’s such a thing as an accessory to murder. Innes’s words seem to have a particular resonance now.

  Innes’s laconic reply is slightly exasperating, but it’s been a long day and there is something else to attend to right now.

  I lead Innes upstairs.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  In the morning, I wake to the aroma of freshly made coffee. Innes appears at the bedroom door, tray in hand. He’s dressed, and his cheeks are ruddy. He’s already taken Bronn for his morning walk. It must be later than I think.

  “Just had a text from Mapleton. He’s got some information for me on the identity of the man in your sketch but he doesn’t want to discuss it over the phone. I said I’d drive over to Glasgow this morning and meet him. It’s probably best if I see him alone but you’re welcome to come along for the ride.”

  The thought of four hours in a car after driving to Edinburgh and back only yesterday isn’t appealing. “No, it’s okay. If you don’t mind, I’ll stay home — I mean, I’ll stay here. Do some catching up. Take Bronn for a nice long walk.”

  “I don’t mind,” Innes says, kissing me on the cheek. He pulls away, beaming. Though he doesn’t comment on my slip, I can tell he’s delighted that I’ve referred to his cottage as home.

  When he’s gone, I sip my coffee and think of my house in Chiswick. It’s never completely quiet there. I wake every morning to the noise of traffic that’s barely muffled by the double glazing. I eat breakfast accompanied by a cacophony of blaring car horns and sirens. I paint with the noise of machinery a near-constant screech in my head. On my street, someone is always having something done. Conservatories, orangeries, new windows, kitchens, bathrooms, extensions . . . Some days the constant noise and activity drives me crazy. Other days it’s a comfort, a reminder that there’s a vibrant, living city on my doorstep.

  Here, it’s so still and quiet that I can hear my own heartbeat, the sound of Bronn’s velvety paws padding across the carpet in the downstairs hall. Is Innes’s little cottage too quiet for me? Too isolated? I realise that I’m picturing myself living here. Waking day after day to stillness and quiet. Stillness and quiet. I think I can live with that.

  I take a shower and go downstairs. Bronn is ecstatic to see me. I slip him a few treats from his special cupboard, though I’m not supposed to. “You’ll get fat if I move in with Innes,” I warn him. He whines at the mention of Innes’s name, and I soothe him by ruffling the thick fur of his nape and letting him lick my face — just this once.

  After breakfast, I take him for a walk along the cliff path and down to the beach where the path levels out. It’s a cold day but not gloomy, as it so often is in winter. The forecast is for unsettled weather later. Now, though, the grey of the sea is daubed with splashes of blue and white. Bronn flirts with the waves at the water’s edge. I look for smooth stones to skim, and laugh at his attempts to catch them. Innes must have done this for him countless times, but Bronn still seems newly astonished when the stones skip over the waves one, two, three times or more — before sinking with a splosh.

  My thoughts turn to the previous day’s interviews with Piers Thornton and Annie Calder. I consider the threads connecting Moira, Andrew, Piers and Elspeth. I recall asking Innes why he wished to know what the conference Andrew attended was about. It had seemed irrelevant, a minor detail. It occurs to me now that these c
onferences and talks were a stage, the place where all these players met and interacted, with Andrew in the lead role. They were never just background.

  Moira often went away with Andrew, sometimes just for a day but occasionally overnight and, more rarely, for a weekend. Like the time they’d gone to Aviemore and Andrew had spent time with his cousin Hans. Moira had been put out, as she had been on that other occasion when he spent time with Hans in Edinburgh. She’d been excluded. Evidently, whatever Andrew and Hans had to discuss did not concern Moira. Nothing odd about that really. It was most likely family matters. Or so Moira had assumed.

  Moira had described Hans as dull and boring. Serious. Old. German. You’d have liked him, she’d said to Elspeth. The implication being that Elspeth was boring and serious. But what if Moira had been suggesting that Elspeth would get along with Hans for another reason? Because of their political views? I have no idea what Hans’s politics were, and I’d just assumed he was from West Germany but perhaps he’d lived in the GDR.

  A jumble of thoughts and images rattle through my head. Amidst all the ideas about what might have happened to Moira, Innes’s odd theory about the Stasi keeps rising to the top. Moira’s lack of interest in politics had always infuriated Elspeth. She simply couldn’t accept that Andrew could be infatuated with someone who not only failed to share his political views but even occasionally mocked them. Andrew had introduced Elspeth to Piers assuming they would get along because of their similar political views.

  Bronn’s whine makes me realise that I have been standing deep in thought for several minutes, paying him no attention. I pick up a piece of driftwood and toss it into the air. He races after it.

  I picture Elspeth in the small sitting room of our house on North Street holding forth on Marx and Engels, the evils of western capitalism. Moira suppressing a yawn. Andrew sitting in the corner of the room, listening, adding the occasional appropriate remark. Reining Elspeth in whenever she expressed an opinion that was too extreme. He had lived in the GDR for a year, and the experience had moderated his views.

  Or so he’d claimed.

  But what if that wasn’t so? What if, instead of modifying his views, his time in the GDR had reinforced them? And what if Hans hadn’t been his cousin at all?

  I call to Bronn and put him on his lead. We make our way back along the beach and up the cliff path, heading home.

  Back at the cottage, I sip tea and mull over my thoughts. I feel like a person who’s trying to remember a past that was lived in partial darkness but is slowly becoming brighter. There are things I feel I know but I still don’t understand how they all connect. Or why Moira had to die.

  My brain won’t rest. I sit down to do some research on my laptop. I read a series of articles published in the late nineties about how the Stasi’s Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung, or HVA, had recruited British academics as informers. Some were approached while on exchange programmes in the GDR. My heart sinks as I think of Andrew Kelso and his year in Leipzig. Of Elspeth, who also intended to study there but was forced to change her plans by the cataclysmic events leading up to the fall of the Berlin Wall.

  I pull up more articles. Read how faculty staff at UK universities informed on visiting academics from the GDR, putting them and their families at risk when they returned home. How they identified students likely to be sympathetic to the GDR and encouraged them to apply for places on exchange schemes. Particularly those students who might end up working in sensitive areas of the government, or the military, or in scientific institutions. Those who would have access to important research materials and maybe even be able to influence policy.

  At first, it is hard to envision Andrew Kelso involving himself in such activities. Then, as I read more about the personalities of the individuals who had been seduced by the HVA, I realise that he was exactly the sort of person who would have fallen under their spell. Vain. Susceptible to flattery. He would have enjoyed the importance of being singled out from his peers.

  Had Moira found him out? If so, had Andrew killed her and left her on that lonely cliff path because he feared that she might go to the police? It would have meant the end of his career, or worse, a charge of treason. I think of him gazing in the mirror in the café, telling me how he’d loved Moira so much that he would have sacrificed everything for her. In more ways than one, I’d been right in concluding that it was all bullshit.

  I consider calling Innes. He’ll be in Glasgow now.

  My phone rings.

  Izzy.

  “Hi, Mum.”

  “Hi, sweetheart. Is everything okay? You sound a bit groggy. Have you been drinking?”

  “No. I’m sooo sleepy.”

  “Izzy?”

  “Your daughter is unharmed.” A man’s voice. Piers Thornton. “Whether she remains so is up to you.”

  “Piers! Where are you? What have you done with my daughter? Let me speak with her.”

  “I’ll be in touch,” Piers says. “Your daughter is fine. No harm will come to her so long as you do exactly as I say. Firstly, no police. Secondly, I want an assurance from you and your boyfriend that you will desist from asking questions about Moira Mackie’s death. Do you understand?”

  There’s no time for deliberation. Piers isn’t messing about. Izzy’s life might depend on my answer. “Yes. No police. Stop asking questions about Moira’s death,” I say robotically.

  “Good. I’ll be in touch.”

  “Wait! You can’t just—” I’m talking to myself.

  I need to stay calm. I call Innes and am overwhelmed with relief when he answers. He’s no longer a policeman, so technically I’m not going against Thornton’s directive.

  “Innes? Oh, thank goodness. Innes, I think Piers Thornton’s kidnapped Izzy.”

  “What? Jesus! Are you sure?” I explain about the call. My voice breaks. I take in great gulps of air.

  “Ros.” Innes’s voice is calm, measured. “I need you to be calm.”

  I give an edgy laugh. I remember reading somewhere about studies proving that telling someone to be calm has the opposite effect. Maybe so, but Innes’s tone, if not his words, help quell my turbulent thoughts.

  “Okay. Sorry, sorry. I completely lost it there. I’m okay now. What do we do? We can’t go to the police.”

  “I’m coming back. Right now,” Innes says.

  “No. You have to keep your appointment with your colleague, especially now. The information he gives you might help us find out if the mystery man is Hans, and just who this Hans truly is. And it might help Izzy.” There’s no basis for believing this, but Innes’s silence suggests that he agrees. “Okay, but, Ros . . . You have to contact the police. Whatever Thornton said, you must.”

  “No! Not yet! You’re police. You can work out what to do.”

  “No, Ros, listen to me—”

  “No! We have to wait. At least until Thornton contacts me again. He needs to know he can trust me. Please, Innes, don’t tell anyone yet. I’ve lost so many people in my life — I can’t lose Izzy.”

  Reluctantly, Innes agrees to give it a few hours. “You shouldn’t be alone at a time like this.”

  “I’ll call Lucy.”

  “Alright. One more thing.”

  “Yes?”

  “Don’t do anything rash, Ros.”

  “I won’t. I . . . promise.”

  We say goodbye. I’m not concerned about breaking my promise to Innes. What I intend to do next isn’t rash, and it isn’t stupid. It’s necessary. I can’t just wait around doing nothing. Not when my daughter’s life is at risk.

  I grab my coat, telling Bronn I won’t be long. He regards me with mournful eyes. Time has no meaning for him, he only knows absence.

  Outside, the weather has changed. The sky is heavy and overcast. As I walk towards my car, it begins to rain.

  I don’t have much of a plan. I don’t even know where Andrew Kelso’s office is exactly, but he’s a professor in the department of history. It shouldn’t be difficult to track him down.<
br />
  I park outside the School of History. It’s midday now and there are students about. I ask one of them where to find Professor Kelso’s office. There’s scant likelihood of him being there but when I knock on his door, I hear him say, “Come in.”

  Andrew looks up from his PC. He doesn’t seem surprised to see me, which causes me a moment’s concern. Surely, I should be one of the last people he’d expect to see standing in his doorway this morning? His greeting makes me more uneasy. “I’ve been expecting to see you again.”

  He doesn’t invite me in, but I enter anyway and close the door behind me. “Oh. Why’s that?”

  “You weren’t exactly subtle when you bumped into me the other day. It was obvious you had some hidden agenda. And I heard from my ex-wife again last night.”

  Again. So, Annie did contact him after Innes spoke with her the first time. It sickens me to think that the man before me could be the person responsible for the attack on my daughter.

  “It seems that you and ex-Detective Nevin have been harassing her.”

  “That’s not the word I’d use. But that’s not why I’m here. Piers Thornton has my daughter. I expect you know that already though, don’t you?” Andrew stares at me. His surprise seems genuine.

  “Alright,” I say. “It’s time to stop playing games. This is to do with Moira’s murder. I believe you know more than you’ve ever admitted about what happened to Moira Mackie. And there are facts that have come to light recently that no one could have guessed at during the original investigation.”

  Andrew doesn’t speak. He’s waiting to hear how I can back this up.

  “Detective John Menzies,” I say, surprised to hear that I’m whispering, as though I’m the one who needs to be discreet. I watch Andrew closely because I know he’s probably been telling himself not to react, whatever I might say. But I see immediately, in the slight narrowing of his eyes, that Menzies’s name is not what he was expecting to hear.

  “Who?”

  I give a heavy sigh. “You know perfectly well who John Menzies is — or was. What you probably don’t know is that he died a couple of months ago. In Canada. His widow was kind enough to contact Innes Nevin to tell him that Menzies — or the man she knew as Bob MacDonald — confessed on his deathbed that he helped frame Stuart Brogan for murder.”