Without the lighting effects and the music and the swaying crowds, the nightclub looked grubby and depressing. The three bare bulbs which were the only daytime illumination in the blacked-out warehouse cast enough bleak light to show the detritus from the night before but did nothing to break up the shadows in the corners.
The young cleaner, holding a black plastic bag for the rubbish, looked round with a sort of helpless distaste. She hated the job, hated the disgusting things she had to clear up, hated the smell of stale sweat and stale alcohol – wicked, forbidden alcohol – and the empty, silent place scared her, as if the evil things that went on here could contaminate, even at one remove.
The boss scared her too. If he was in a bad mood he’d yell at whoever was in his way, though sometimes he was all cheerful and would say things she couldn’t understand, but if he was smiling she would smile too. The best was if he ignored her completely, the worst was when he was obviously giving her an instruction and she had no idea what it was. He had never actually struck her but he often looked as if he might.
She wished she didn’t have to work here. She wished she could stay in the cramped room that was all the home she and her husband had, even if it was dark and very cold, and even if when he wasn’t there she cried most of the time for her mother and her sisters back home. But he told her that if they were to be safe she must do what Mr Drax wanted, just the way he did.
So she came each afternoon and tried to withdraw into the shadows when Mr Drax was around and now, when she heard the door of the office upstairs open and close and rapid footsteps descending, she did just that, instinctively pulling her headscarf further round her face.
As he went past her he looked grim, his eyes alight with anger. He didn’t so much as glance in her direction, just stormed across the dance floor and disappeared into the lobby beyond. A moment later the whole building reverberated with the noise of the front door slamming.
Gemma Napier was sitting on the edge of the huge kitchen table swinging her legs. Vivienne Morrison was listening to her daughter’s account of the surprise visitor as she made tea for her impatient grandson. She had been pretty as a girl and now with her fair hair fading gently into grey she was still a sweet-faced woman with a gentle manner.
‘Oh dear, that poor little soul – no, bashing your spoon on the table won’t make it come any quicker, Mikey, and watch … the sausage is hot,’ she said, setting the bowl down in front of the child. ‘I remember Marnie, of course. A funny little creature – I was always rather sorry for her. And her mother was definitely strange. You hardly ever saw her at the school and if you spoke to her you always got the impression she wished you hadn’t. I suppose it explains why Marnie seemed a bit – well, awkward or something.’
‘It wasn’t that, she—Oh hi, Dad!’
Michael Morrison came in and beamed around his family, but it was his grandson he went to first, ruffling his hair.
‘Hey, big guy! How’s my best pal? Have these ladies been looking after you properly?’
Mikey, his face smeared with baked beans, looked up. ‘She wouldn’t let me have chocolate.’ He pointed an accusing fork at his mother.
‘Not immediately before his tea, Dad,’ Gemma protested, and Michael winked at her as he said gravely, ‘Dear me, can’t have that sort of thing. I’ll need to have a word with your mum about that.’
‘Cup of tea?’ Vivienne said. ‘Had a busy day?’
‘Oh, the usual. What about the two of you?’
‘I was just telling Mum,’ Gemma said. ‘A blast from the past – this girl I used to know in primary turned up, Marnie – do you remember her? Strawberry-blonde hair, blue eyes – she came round here a lot.’
Her father looked blank. ‘You had so many friends, darling. Can’t say I do.’
‘Well, it was ages ago. She just left suddenly when I was about ten or eleven. I really missed her – she wasn’t like everyone else. Do you know, she can remember absolutely everything that has ever happened to her, just as if it was playing like a film in front of her eyes?’
‘Really?’ Michael was openly doubtful. ‘All right, she might have a good memory, but no one can do that. She probably bigged it up a bit to make herself more interesting.’
‘No, it’s true. It’s some sort of mental condition, she told me. It’s rare, but when there was publicity about one case a while ago a whole lot more people came forward.’
‘That would be useful,’ Vivienne said. ‘Imagine, if you got to the shop and had forgotten what you were meant to get, you’d just look back and see.’
‘She says it’s very difficult to cope with, actually. But what she doesn’t know is what happened when her mother disappeared. She woke up in their cottage with a head injury and no sign of her mum, and then she was taken into care. She’s come back to see if she can find out what happened and I said I’d ask you if you remembered anything about it.’
‘When was it?’ Vivienne asked.
Mikey had finished his tea. ‘Up!’ he said imperiously, holding out his arms to his grandfather.
Michael didn’t seem to notice. ‘Marnie, did you say? What was her surname?’
‘Bruce,’ Gemma said. ‘She left when we were in Year 6, and I know exactly when it was – it was the day after Halloween, and we’d gone out guising together. I was worried when she wasn’t at school the next day because she’d had an epic row with her mum before she left. I got you to take me out to the cottage where they lived, Mum, but there was no one there.’
Vivienne was frowning in an effort at recollection, but Michael shook his head. ‘Complete blank, I’m afraid. I can’t remember anything about it.’ He picked up his mug of tea and went to the door. ‘I’ll be through in the office – a couple of things to finish off.’
‘Granddad!’ Mikey, ignored, wailed in indignation. ‘I want up!’
But for once his grandfather didn’t even seem to hear what he had said.
The slamming door of Grant Crichton’s Mercedes E-Class as he parked it outside his house alerted his wife to her husband’s return from work, and the vigour with which it had been slammed sent her to the window to look for storm signals. Yes, he was upset about something; his bushy brows were drawn in a straight line and the corners of his mouth were firmly turned down as he came to the front door.
It might be one of those evenings when he sat in simmering silence and bit her head off if she asked any questions, or it might be one where he wanted to expand at large on the stupidity, dishonesty and plain bloody-mindedness of everyone in the entire world, with particular reference to those who had come into contact with him that day. As Denise went to fetch the decanter of Scotch and his favourite crystal tumbler, she decided that she felt an evening out with one of her girlfriends coming on, whether the girlfriend could make it or not.
‘Hard day, dear?’ she greeted him tentatively.
Grant sat down heavily in his lounger chair and grunted.
Silence it was, then. ‘I’m just going to put the supper on. You take your time.’ She whisked out of the room.
She took a bottle of Chablis out of the fridge and poured herself a glass, then picked up the phone. ‘Sue? Fancy a drink later? Good – half past eight, then?’
Crichton finished his whisky in two mouthfuls then went across to pour himself another, larger one. He’d barely noticed his wife, lost in his own thoughts as he’d been all afternoon. He’d postponed a meeting and refused a couple of important calls, to his secretary’s annoyance, but he hadn’t been able to think about anything else since that poisonous woman’s phone call this morning.
He was a very proud man, a man accustomed to being in control, to getting his own way, and the humiliation of being told that his son’s killer might be obtaining secret satisfaction from his agony, might even be laughing at it, was a painful attack not only on his feelings but on his image of himself.
He had been inclined at first to pooh-pooh Lorna Baxter’s story, but then she’d been so convincing about the resemblance. The picture of the little girl with the golden curls and the neat pixie face with bright-blue eyes rose before him yet again.
At the trial she had seemed confused: the story she had told was inconsistent, at times contradictory. But there had been a coldness in those blue eyes and her defiant attitude – even rudeness, sometimes, to her questioners – had never suggested a hint of remorse. It looked now as if for her, and her hell-spawn daughter, what she had done had been a source of pleasure, not regret.
Of course, part of his rage was directed at Shelley who had brought this upon them with her pathetic little annual ceremony, its only purpose to direct attention to herself. This wasn’t an expression of grief; real grief was suffered internally and silently. Who knew that better than he did himself?
There was nothing to say that this was the first time Kirstie Burnside’s daughter had done this either – just the first time she’d been spotted. Perhaps even a disguised Kirstie herself had come on a previous occasion, taking a delight in this demonstration of her lasting power to make them suffer? Crichton writhed at the thought.
He topped up his glass again as he tried to decide what he should do. Lorna Baxter was clearly high on the drama of it all, trying to persuade him to get up a mob to go round and scare the girl.
He couldn’t deny that was tempting. Perhaps, at last, he could find out where her mother was. It offended him that she could have a whole new life, at the taxpayers’ expense, protected from the consequences of what she’d done. He’d even employed a private detective once to try to track her down, but it had been good money for nothing. The man had claimed the trail was cold but Grant suspected that he’d been warned off.
What he certainly wasn’t going to do was get involved in any Baxter initiative. Her prying avidity was disgusting and he’d made his distaste plain. She had definitely taken offence – as if he cared!
He could take it to the police – by a distance the most sensible option. He’d been a Justice of the Peace himself at one time, and this girl’s behaviour was pretty much a textbook case of conduct likely to provoke a breach of the peace. Crichton was ready to breach it himself, right now.
The other thing he could do was drive over to Dunmore and take Anita Loudon by the throat. According to Lorna Baxter, she was in on this. She had been one of the child witnesses at Burnside’s trial and Lorna claimed that she knew more about it than she’d said at the time. If all these years she’d been facilitating Kirstie Burnside’s spying – he took an incautious gulp of whisky and choked, painfully.
He dabbed at his streaming eyes. Sort out Anita, that was the first thing. And if what Lorna had said really was true—
Denise opened the sitting-room door and peeped round it tentatively. ‘Supper’s ready. But I can keep it hot for you, if you want to finish your drink.’
‘No, no, I’ll bring it with me.’ Crichton stood up, lurching a little as he did. He wasn’t drunk enough to think it was reasonable to get behind the wheel of a car, so Anita would have to wait.
Anita was sitting watching Wallander on TV. At least, the set was switched on and she was facing it, but if someone had offered her a million pounds for a summary of the plot she would have had to pass.
She kept going over and over Drax’s response to her account of events over the phone, which despite all her preparation beforehand had been rambling and a bit incoherent, partly because of the unnerving silence at the other end. When at last she abandoned the attempt to generate a reaction and her own voice trailed into silence, she wondered for a moment if he was still on the line. At last he said, ‘I – see.’ That was all. Then he did ring off.
‘I – see.’ Anita could picture his face as he said that: pale, taut, his lips a thin line and those dark eyes lit with a flame of anger, more frightening for being unvoiced, and she shivered. When he was like that he was totally unpredictable. Sometimes he would do no more than emanate icy rage; on other occasions he would lash out without warning, like a snake striking.
She had only taken the brunt of it a few times, but she’d seen the after-effects on Karen too. Karen would stand up to him, scream and strike back, but after the first time Anita had the sense to go down and lie still. Once she’d got a kicking, but usually he turned away as if he had achieved what he wanted. He’d never mention it afterwards but once his anger was spent he would exert himself to please her. An occasional bruised face was a small price to pay.
The other tactic, the best one, was not to be there when Drax was displeased. She’d managed it this time, but she wasn’t naive enough to think that was the end of it. He’d summon her, or he’d come here, but distance was safety. By then he would have had time to calm down, at least a little. She hoped.
She heard a key in the lock first, then the imperious double ring on the doorbell. She’d bolted the door when she came in and her first thought was not to open it. Anita knew it was him – her breathing shortened; her hand went to her mouth in the gesture of a terrified child.
The doorbell rang again, a long ring this time, along with a knocking on the door. As she sat there, unable to move, she heard his footsteps on the path outside the window and heard his voice, light, amused.
‘Oh, for God’s sake, Anita! I know you’re in there. Don’t be ridiculous! I really don’t want to have to break the window.’
Somehow she got to her feet, went to the front door, shot back the bolts and opened it. Drax had come back to the doorstep and outlined against the light from the street lamps he seemed very tall. With his face in shadow the only definition came from the line of his brows, the glint of his eyes and his smiling mouth, contrasted with the white of his teeth.
He stepped inside, sweeping her into an embrace. Stunned, she clung to him as he kissed her and staggered a little as he released her again, laughing at her confusion.
‘What the hell did you think I was going to do to you? Don’t ever try to shut me out again, though – naughty girl! Got some Scotch? We’ve a lot to talk about.’
He went on past her into the kitchen and Anita followed more slowly, rubbing at her lips, still bruised from his kiss, still shaken by her own instant response to it. His behaviour was confusing; she had heard what he said but when he stepped into the lighted hallway she saw the steel behind the smile and the marks of anger in the taut lines of his face. She resolved to keep her distance until she was sure he wasn’t going to snap.
But as they sat over the whisky Drax seemed to have relaxed. He was sipping it, not downing it with the sort of cold intensity that always meant mayhem. He was lounging in his chair, making encouraging noises as she went through the whole story again, prompting her with questions until he was satisfied that she had told him all there was to tell.
Then he was silent for a moment or two, holding up his hand when she tried to speak. At last he said briskly, ‘Right. To sum up: we don’t know why she’s come, we don’t know who she’s talked to already, we don’t know where she’s staying. Lorna Baxter’s vigilante brigade is on the march. The girl can’t be convinced that anything she remembers is wrong, so she’s difficult to lie to.
‘Suppose we just tell her who her mother was, and that she’d better leave before someone takes the law into their own hands?’
Anita shook her head. ‘She might go away, perhaps. But it won’t stop her trying to find out what happened to Karen.’
She stole a glance at him as she said that, but he was looking into the middle distance. He was frowning, but he had been so understanding that she felt emboldened to say, ‘The thing is, Drax, I’m getting frightened. I’m not young, the way I was; I get panic attacks and if it’s all stirred up again, if they start on the endless questions, I’m afraid I’ll break.’
‘Break?’ He turned his gaze on her and she realised how wrong she had been to think that he was relaxed. ‘Oh no, my sweet, you won’t break – will you?’
Anita swallowed hard. ‘No, Drax, of course I won’t. It was just – oh, me being silly, I suppose.’
‘Then don’t be silly,’ he said, his voice silky, and Anita feeling suddenly cold wondered why she had been foolish enough to think that telling Drax her problems was a wise thing to do.
‘I’ve eaten far too much,’ Marjory Fleming said ruefully as she and Bill went up to bed after Cammie’s celebratory supper. ‘With Karolina pulling out all the stops for the first course and Mum going her length on the puddings, I’m going to have to starve for the next three days.’
‘I’m just going to find the Rennies,’ Bill said. ‘They’re an absolutely lethal combination, the pair of them.’
Karolina Cisek, whose husband Rafael worked on the farm with Bill, played domestic goddess to the Fleming household, aided and abetted by Marjory’s mother Janet Laird, who suffered from a sense of guilt that she had not managed to impart any of the housewifely virtues to her daughter. Their joint feast for Cammie had been a triumph of culinary skill.
Marjory laughed unsympathetically. ‘The penalties of greed,’ she called after Bill as he headed for the medicine cabinet.
She was still smiling as she sat down at the dressing table to take off her make-up. It had been such a lovely evening, the happiest as a family that she could remember for a long time.
Cat had been holding her at arm’s length ever since last year’s disaster but her pleasure at Cammie’s success seemed to have softened her tonight, and she was less abrasive, too, when Janet was around. Cat had always been devoted to her grandmother and with her now approaching eighty, that affection had developed into a touching protectiveness which so far Janet, thank goodness, had shown no sign of needing. She had an active social life and was kept busy, too, with charitable good works for elderly ladies rather younger than she was herself.
Cammie, the star of the show, had been alight with happiness. Seeing his shining face, his mother had felt a pang: how rare they were, those golden moments of unadulterated joy, and how quickly they dissipated. Before long Cammie would be worrying about doing well enough to cement his place in the team.
It had been a golden evening for them all, in fact, and Cat had given her mother a spontaneous hug when she said goodnight, the first for a long, long time. It looked almost as though peace was being declared and Marjory found herself wiping away a sentimental tear along with her mascara.
Shelley Crichton found she couldn’t settle to anything. She had a headache for a start, and she was finding it very difficult to sort out her feelings about all that had happened today.
Janette had told her what to think. ‘You know what Lorna Bruce is like,’ she said firmly. ‘That woman would cause trouble in an empty house and she’s just using you. Anita explained who the girl was, and the only reason you thought she had such a strong resemblance to Kirstie was because she was so much on your mind at that moment. If you saw her now, you’d wonder why on earth you thought that.’
Shelley, still tearful and feeling a little shocked by Lorna’s aggressiveness, had allowed herself to be convinced. But now, at home by herself, she wasn’t so sure.
If Kirstie Burnside really had sent her daughter to gloat, as Lorna had claimed, it was almost as wicked as what she had done originally. They had said at the trial that she had an ungovernable temper, that she had just lashed out, and she was only a child at the time – a child whose own experience of family life had been horrifying, violent abuse. The counsellor they’d arranged for Shelley afterwards had stressed that, and of course she acknowledged the child had suffered – of course she did. In a way. It hadn’t done anything to assuage her grief for Tommy, though, or tempered her hatred or blunted her wish for revenge.
She still had the dreams, dreams where she confronted Kirstie Burnside – sometimes a child, sometimes a woman with a child’s face – and screamed her hatred, until Shelley found there was a knife in her hand and plunged it deep, deep in her heart, and woke up screaming and bathed in sweat.
It had been particularly bad when Kirstie was released after only a few years, and given what the press called ‘a new life’. Tommy couldn’t have a new life to replace the one Kirstie had taken away and neither could Shelley, but there was nothing she could do about it. She’d had to learn about forced acceptance the hard way.
Now, though … The face of the young woman she had seen swam up before her. The light-blue eyes, the goldy-red hair, the neat sharp line of the jaw: no, she hadn’t imagined the resemblance. Kirstie had been a child when last Shelley saw her, but she would have grown up to look like this, the child-woman of Shelley’s dreams.
The thought of it made her feel sick. How could she just pretend it hadn’t happened? Despite what Janette had said, Shelley was becoming more and more convinced that Anita’s story hadn’t been true. Tomorrow she was going to go round again to make her admit it, and force her to tell where she could find the woman.
The girl, she told herself, was probably no more than a cat’s-paw. Anita, though, was someone she’d known for years, almost a friend. They weren’t close but they’d have a chat if they met in a shop, say, and to help Kirstie Burnside get fun out of Shelley’s tragedy was disgusting – treacherous, really. She had felt fury when she saw the girl but now what she was feeling was a sort of cold rage.
Getting worked up like this wasn’t doing her headache any good at all. She needed to calm down, take something for it and go to bed. The violent emotions of the day had left her feeling drained, almost light-headed with the pain and tiredness. If she wasn’t to lie awake all night she needed to put it all out of her head, sleep on it and decide what to do in the morning.
Shelley was on her way upstairs when the phone rang. It was unusual for anyone to call this late, and she was frowning as she answered.
A woman’s voice said, without preamble, ‘Just wanted to tell you you’ve got friends, Shelley. We’ll get rid of her, don’t you worry.’