‘Talk to me?’
Fiona sprawled on the bedroom carpet, staring up at him.
Dominic Tate looked terrible. Also, he stank like an unwashed animal – of sweat and damp clothes, his sneakers filthy and stained, his eyes wild and bloodshot. If she had had to conjure up the picture of a deranged murderer, Dom Tate would have fit the bill.
His hands were still raised – a gesture almost of supplication, at odds with his wild appearance.
‘Dom,’ she said, swallowing, trying to keep her voice even, but incapable of leaving the question unasked. ‘What have you done to Madison?’
‘Nothing!’ he wailed. ‘I don’t know where she is! I swear to God! On my little boy’s life, I don’t know!’
Fiona blinked, in the midst of everything still astonished that she had the capacity to be surprised by how despicable he was. You have kids? she wanted to hiss. Pretty sure Mads didn’t know that.
But no, no. It was irrelevant right now. It was merely a reminder that she had to remember, no matter what, that he was a compulsive, manipulative liar.
She mustn’t believe a single thing he said.
Somehow she had to calm him down, persuade him to leave, before Iris arrived. Who knew what he would do if he felt threatened?
Oh no, what if he hurts Iris? We’re alone out here. We’re …
She tried not to look in the direction of her jacket where her phone nestled. It might as well have been on the moon.
Instead, she focused on him, despite her loathing and dread. ‘Dom, they found Madison’s car in the sea.’
‘I know they did! It was on the news here. I swear to God I had nothing to do with it!’
‘Dom,’ she said again, her mouth dry, aware that she was treading a very thin line here, ‘you must know you’re going to have to hand yourself in to the police. They’re going to want to talk to you …’
‘DON’T TELL ME WHAT TO DO!’ he bellowed suddenly, his teeth bared. She shrank back against the carpet. He loomed over her as she cowered on the floor, his finger pointing into her face. ‘This is ALL YOUR FUCKING FAULT!’
Fiona fell silent, paralysed with fear.
He had begun to pace back and forth in front of the bedroom door. She watched him, a cornered animal.
‘I mean, it looks bad …’ he trailed off. ‘I’m not thick. I know how it looks.’ He was shaking. ‘I should never have come back here. This was such a fucking mistake …’
Fiona did not speak, terrified of angering him any further.
‘I should have stayed away like I promised. Oh fuck,’ he said, dropping his head into his hands, his shoulders heaving. ‘Oh fuck. Oh, Madison. Madison.’
He seemed about to weep.
She swallowed. ‘What do you mean, you promised?’
‘What?’ He raised his head, peered at her.
‘You promised not to come back here?’
He blinked at her, as if she’d confused him. ‘I was staying here.’
‘You were staying here? In this house? With Mads?’
‘Yeah.’
Her face must have made an impression on him.
‘Don’t fucking look at me like that! It’s true. I was going to come back after you’d gone. She said I had to stay hidden. That you’d never understand.’ His eyes turned cold, and he stilled. ‘You’re not very understanding, apparently.’
All of this story was palpably untrue, though she was unsettled by the realisation that Dom appeared to know of her arrival. An idea shot through her mind, then, and with it, a tiny cinder of hope. ‘Wait – why did you come back now? Did you hear from Mads?’
He shook his head miserably, but there was something taut and suspicious in his expression, as though she was laying a trap for him. ‘That was just it. I didn’t. After Wednesday night she stopped answering the phone. I just got these texts – these texts that weren’t like her. All … I can’t describe it. Just not … her. At first,’ he said, and that coldness was back in his grey eyes. ‘I thought it was you, trying to give me the runaround.’
Fiona merely stared at him, her spine crawling. When he focused on her, all of his jittery, anxious animation stilled into menace.
She stirred again, aware that she had to get off the floor, out of this vulnerable, subservient position.
The moment had passed, though, and he was back into his story.
‘So I thought, “No, I’m not getting messed around like this. I’m going over there and that judgemental little bitch Fiona is just going to have to live with it.”’ His eyes narrowed at her. ‘So I caught the ferry over yesterday. I know she said not to, but she should answer her fucking phone, then, shouldn’t she? I’m already breaching my restraining order. I’ve been nothing but nice … I helped her. I came all the way up here, took time off work – you know?’
His gaze searched hers constantly, looking for cynicism, treachery, doubt.
‘Helped her?’ she asked, puzzled.
‘Yeah, helped her.’ He drew himself taller. ‘With her stalker.’
Fiona could not restrain the amazement that flitted across her face.
‘You … you helped her with her stalker?’ she asked, managing at the last minute to make the final word sound less accusatory, less surprised.
‘Yeah. See, she texted me. Out of the blue.’
This was, on the face of it, so absurd, that Fiona could make no reply. She was about to be told some vacillating, self-justifying story, she saw, and that was fine, so long as she didn’t anger him. With any luck, Iris would see him through the undrawn curtains, and know to call the police.
Fiona just had to keep her head.
But there was something in his expression, a hard glint of triumph, as though he knew he was surprising her with knowledge about Madison that she did not have.
It gave her pause.
‘She texted you,’ said Fiona, neutral and straining for calm.
‘Yeah.’
‘Why?’
‘She was all annoyed at first. She said that if I didn’t stop being vile on the internet about her, she would go back to the cops and tell ’em I violated my order.’
Fiona did not speak, waited.
‘I had no idea what she was going on about. None. I thought she was trying to stitch me up, trying to get me to message her back and get me into trouble. So I ignored her at first.’
From his pacing, jittery agitation, it was clear he wouldn’t have been able to ignore her for very long.
‘Apparently it was tweets, and since I knew she went off Twitter and Facebook after the court case, I didn’t get what her problem was.’ He held up his palms, helplessly. ‘And then I thought later, well, maybe she’s thought better of it all.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Maybe she’s looking for a way to make friends, now the dust has settled some – who knows?’
‘Friends?’
‘Yeah, you know. Get back together.’
Fiona bit her tongue against the acid sense of contempt this filled her with.
‘So I texted her back, saying that whatever problem she was having, it was nothing to do with me. Then she sent me this – well, a link to this tweet that got sent to her work’s account, and said, “Well, who sent this? Sounds like you.” And it was pretty nasty stuff. I mean, I know I said some bad things to her earlier in the year when I was angry, like. Only I’d never sent this.’ He held up his hands again, as if appealing to Fiona to see reason. His face was shiny with sweat. ‘I mean, it had been six months! Why would I suddenly be sending this stuff to her work out of nowhere?’
‘What did it say?’ asked Fiona.
‘What did it say?’ He gestured dismissively. ‘It doesn’t matter what it said. Not nice things. Like about throwing acid on her and … look, it doesn’t matter.’ He grew angrier, as if the acknowledgement of the link between this and his previous behaviour infuriated him. ‘It doesn’t matter what it said, all right?’ He was almost shouting, a little drop of spittle landing on his lip.
Change the subject, thought Fiona. Now.
‘So what happened?’ she asked.
He paused, derailed, and then seemed to remember where he was, what he was saying.
‘Yeah. So I said it wasn’t me. But I was – whoever this was, right, was obviously trying to pretend to be me, to get me into trouble, right? But they’d made a mistake. They forgot to switch the location data off on their phone when they sent the first couple of tweets – so I knew it was someone on Orkney doing it. And I was eight hundred miles from Orkney and could prove I was. So I texted that to her, and told her it was her problem and not mine.’
Fiona waited, gripped despite herself.
‘And?’
‘Then she rang me, you know, didn’t text, and we properly talked about things. And she told me, I swear on my son’s life, Fiona, that she’d had a feeling it wasn’t me. That there was someone here who’d got it in for her. Someone who was jealous of her.’
‘What? Who?’
‘She wouldn’t say. She said she wasn’t sure. But would I look into it for her? I mean, she didn’t ask it like a favour – I knew she still had the hump with me a little.’ He smiled, as if at a warm memory. ‘But she also knew that this was, like, my area of expertise. And you know, I could tell she’d missed me. That old flirty spark was back.’
Oh, Madison, thought Fiona. You idiot. You charmed him to get him to do what you wanted.
But you’ve never quite mastered the spell for un-charming any of them.
‘You looked into it for her?’
‘Yeah. But I didn’t get very far. Whoever it was didn’t make the same mistake twice.’ He shrugged. ‘And in the UK anyone can buy a phone and a SIM, and if they pay cash …’ His face was thoughtful now, matter-of-fact, and she had a glimpse of what he was like in normal life, what most people saw. ‘They can track the phone itself through mobile phone towers, but they have to catch you with it if it’s not registered to you. Anyone can get a burner phone.’
Fiona considered this, stunned. Someone was pretending to be Dom? Here on Orkney? That was an absurd lie, obviously. Obviously.
Wasn’t it?
‘She wouldn’t say who she thought it was?’
‘No. She reckoned it would be more effective if she didn’t “lead me”, if you know what I mean – give me clues. Anyway, I looked into it, and I thought, you know, it would be too complicated to explain over the phone. I needed to see her in person.’
You explained it to me in a couple of sentences, thought Fiona, feeling her face harden, but she said nothing.
‘I decided to surprise her, you know, come up rather than call. I got her address out of someone at her office …’ he paused, as though editing his memories before he offered them, and she sensed that this acquisition of Madison’s whereabouts had involved some kind of fraud. ‘She was so happy to see me – once she got over the surprise, like.’
Fiona schooled her expression into neutrality.
‘I had a hotel booked but they’d made a mistake, and I’d nowhere to stay, and she said no worries, you have to stay here.’ He gave Fiona a defiant look, face flushed, and Fiona recognised it from the court hearing. It was the one he used when he was mixing a lie with truth. ‘Before long we was just like we used to be.’
He smiled at Fiona, both beatific and triumphant.
She glanced away, unable to control her feelings for a second. Oh, Mads, how did you not see it coming? He’s obsessed with you and you gave him an in. Then he was off and running.
If it was true, Madison must have been astounded to see him on the doorstep. Why hadn’t she sent him packing? Was it because, like Fiona, she was here in this remote corner of the world, alone with him, and she hadn’t wanted to get him angry?
Or, once she got over her shock and annoyance, had she been flattered by the attention? Fiona had seen the way he shook when he mentioned her; his desperate, ensorcelled adoration, strengthened rather than vitiated by his rage. For Madison, raised by her distant, unapproachable father, such proofs of love and emotion, however toxic, would have exerted an irresistible call.
She’d unceremoniously dumped Caspar, after all. Could it be because she wanted to take things up again with Dominic?
Fiona might be repulsed by him, but to Madison, Dominic Tate had always exerted a bizarre appeal.
Perhaps he had again, after a year’s break.
It’s certain that fine women eat/A crazy salad with their meat.
Could it have happened this way? Did Madison feel threatened, and contact him?
Or was this some romantic embellishment, some white knight fantasy, and even now he knew where Madison was lying, dead and rotting?
At this thought, it seemed to her that knives were digging into her heart every time she breathed.
He’s a liar, she thought firmly to herself. Never forget that he is a liar.
‘So I ended up staying,’ Dom was saying, ‘and then she told me the landlord had seen me and wasn’t happy. She wasn’t allowed to have any guests, like, and he’d threatened to kick her out and tell her work on her.’
Could Dominic have been the person who Maggie saw on Madison’s doorstep? From a distance he could look similar to Jack.
‘And nobody else knew you were here?’ she asked.
He shook his head. ‘No. I wanted us to go out, you know?’ He glanced at Fiona then, and there was something furtive and vulnerable in him, something pathetic. ‘I wanted to go to the pub and do things, you know, together. But she said that it was a bad idea. Considering all that had gone on.’
‘So, you left …’
‘Yeah. On Sunday last. You were coming up on Friday anyway so I couldn’t be here. She said she’d call me when you went back.’
‘Did she say what she needed me to come up for?’
He shrugged. ‘I only know what she told you that night.’
‘What?’ Fiona was confused, thrown. ‘What night?’
‘When she rang you last week. You remember – you were in Cambridge. I think you were in the bath at the time. She said to come up.’
Fiona could only stare at him for a long moment.
‘You were here? When we had that conversation? You were here in this house?’
‘Yeah, of course I was.’ He offered her his thin, unpleasant smile, which was somehow worse than his rages. ‘You were a complete fucking bitch to her, as I recall. Going on about it being “term time” and being “too busy”. She always said that you were all about your career.’ His eyes were flinty in that instant. ‘You made her beg for you.’
Fiona did not answer. This was at once so accurate and yet so unfair she had no reply. She felt sick.
She had made Madison beg. It was true.
He gave her a mocking shrug.
‘But you don’t know what she needed me for?’ asked Fiona.
‘No. Moral support, maybe?’ He smiled again. He was enjoying her discomfiture, her despair. ‘She was going to tell the others, her work pals, that you were coming up to see the metalwork.’
She was terrified, she was furious, she was grief-stricken, but, as she realised with a little jolt, she was also thinking. Yes, he’d heard their conversation that night. She remembered how evasive Madison had been when she’d talked about him, and she remembered how surprised she’d been when Madison wouldn’t directly accuse him.
Yeah, he’d been in the room with her, all right.
Such an enormous number of emotions moved through her then that she was paralysed. Rage, grief, fear, and yet one was first and foremost, one pricked her sorest, one tipped in poison – betrayal.
Her words, when she spoke, felt like powdered glass in her mouth.
‘So you left Langmire a week ago today, and then you came back yesterday. And she was missing.’
His smile faded. He must have been recalling that he had nothing much to smile about.
‘Yeah. I wanted to talk to Madison and thought I’d get her after you’d gone to bed. I had the key …’
‘She gave you a key?’ asked Fiona incredulously.
‘Yeah,’ he said, his eyes meeting hers, that high colour appearing in his cheeks. Selling in the lie, like he had in court.
‘But straight away I could tell something was off. Your car was here and hers was gone.’ He slapped a meaty hand to his chin. ‘I mean, I was angry, like, because she wasn’t properly speaking to me, but I knew I couldn’t do anything stupid. If I … if I lost my temper … So I had to keep calm.’
‘What did you do?’
‘I had the key, so I just … I peeped inside. I didn’t come in this room,’ he added quickly, in the face of Fiona’s dawning horror, the memory of being woken in the night by the sounds of someone in the house. ‘I didn’t come in the bedroom, I swear, I could see through the window. I just saw you asleep, your face like, because the moon was out. It was really bright. And I didn’t understand, ’cos this was Mads’ bed and she told me you’d be staying upstairs when you arrived.’ He shrugged again, a big, theatrical gesture – so what would you do if you were me? ‘I just nipped up the stairs, to look for her. And of course there was no sign. Bed was stripped. All her shower things gone. None of her clothes there. Then I think I heard a noise downstairs, so I just left.’ He sniffed, added by way of afterthought, ‘Sorry if I frightened you, like.’
You aren’t sorry, she thought. You despise me.
But she did believe, unrepentant and committed liar though he was, that he was telling her the truth about that night.
She believed Madison had sent him away on Sunday because she’d been expecting Fiona to come, then, after Wednesday, Madison’s texts had started to arrive.
And unlike Fiona, Dominic Tate had known, with the restless, obsessive ear of an infatuated, narcissistic lover, that he was no longer communicating with the real Madison. As Fiona should have known, but didn’t – because she was too caught up in her own drama, her own sense of martyrdom at having to drop everything and come up here.
Her shame was complete. Dom had known Madison better than she had.
Of course Dom had come back to Orkney, looking for her, to demand an explanation.
But did he find her in the end? And where?
Did he do something to her?
‘What did you think had happened?’ asked Fiona, forcing herself to sound neutral, unthreatening. ‘When you found she wasn’t here yesterday?’
‘I dunno.’ He scratched his head, looked shifty now. ‘How should I know?’
‘But you must have thought something, Dominic.’ She sat forward, met his gaze. ‘Did you think she was with another man, perhaps?’
‘No!’ His eyes widened. She’d hit a nerve. ‘But maybe I … I thought maybe she’d given you her phone, told you to pretend to be her, like.’
‘What are you talking about?’ Fiona asked, mystified.
‘Well, you’ve got involved before. I’ve got to tell you, Fiona, me and Mads used to talk all the time about how very interfering you are.’ His words were tight now, bitten off. That surge of underlying rage was visible again. ‘I mean, it was you that persuaded her to put up those cameras in her flat and get me into trouble. It was you that made her take me to court. You wouldn’t even talk to her for me. If you hadn’t gotten all mixed up in things that are none of your business, Madison and me would have sorted things out months ago and things would never have … wouldn’t have come to this.’
She stared at him. So, was it me that stalked her? Slashed her tyres? Me that posted messages saying she ought to be raped and have her head cut off?
‘Dom, you need to go to the police.’
‘I … I dunno.’
‘What else are you going to do?’
He glanced at her then, and his gaze was flat, expressionless. It seemed to Fiona, in a moment of pure horror, that a thought, just now a mere seedling, had begun to grow in his mind.
Fiona was an inconvenience.
It would be good if Fiona was not here.
She needed to stamp on this seed, before it blossomed into action.
‘Dom, this is serious. You need to …’
‘I didn’t do anything wrong! I’m not lying!’ He was growing red again. ‘I have all the texts, all the messages!’
‘Yes, I know. I’m sure you do,’ she said, dropping her voice so it was silky, honeyed – the voice Madison had doubtless used on him. ‘But you have to go to them, Dom. You have to show them the messages …’
‘But they won’t know I’ve ever been here … not if you don’t tell them.’
‘Of course they know you’re here. They know that right now. You’re the very first person they will look for,’ she said, trying to keep her voice soft, light. ‘They know there was a restraining order. They’ll have CCTV – they’ll know you were on the ferry, they’ll know you were on the island …’
‘But …’
‘You and I both know she never gave you a key to this place.’
‘No, she did,’ he interrupted, almost stammering. ‘She …’
‘No, she didn’t,’ said Fiona, with such decisiveness that he fell silent. ‘I’d bet a thousand pounds on it. You borrowed hers and had one cut for yourself. And in a tiny place like this, someone is going to remember that. Don’t you want to be the one that tells the police what you did and why, rather than them finding out?’
‘I …’
‘It’s only a little island. There’s nowhere to hide even if you wanted to, and no way to get off without being caught. You don’t want to be caught, do you? You want to volunteer.’ She fought to find the right words, the ones that would appeal to him. ‘You want to walk in a like a man.’
He was mute, pale. She had made an impression upon him.
‘You need to go and explain everything to them, the way you explained it to me. You need to give me that key …’
‘STOP NAGGING ME!’ he yelled. His face was screwed up in an agony of indecision. ‘Stop going on! I get it! I get it!’
Outside, there was the sudden purr of Iris’s Taurus approaching.
His face whipped from her to the window and back again.
‘Who’s that?’ he snarled. That menace was back.
She opened her mouth to speak, to deny, but suddenly his hard, furious fist was curled in her sweater, jerking her towards him. His breath was hot and stinking in her face.
‘You fucking bitch. Did you tell anyone I was here?’
‘No … I didn’t know you were here!’
‘Who is it?’
‘Madison’s boss. She’s taking me back to Stromness …’
He glared at her for long seconds, while she held her breath. His frantic desperation was a palpable, living thing.
Then he flung her back against the floor. ‘Get rid of her. Get rid of her or I will.’