The meat had shrunk to the size of a brick, which was bad. Elayne would move chewed-up gobs of it to the side of her plate under cover of her hand and give me sad smiles. And my mum, looking at the chewed-up gobs of meat on Elayne’s plate, would push hers away completely. Then my dad would clap my mum’s dinner between two bits of bread and scarf it down once he’d finished wiping his own plate, and Elayne’s mouth would purse so hard it practically disappeared, for all the world as if she hadn’t started it, pretending she couldn’t swallow my food.
There was an upside. All the juice that poured out as the joint shrank would make both sorts of gravy. And it would drive Elayne spare to be served the gravy she wanted instead of getting to complain.
I divided it into two jugs, making sure to put all the fat in hers. Sometimes when she ate a lot of fat she got evil wind by mid-afternoon and watching her clench and squirm was like a cabaret. I was raking through a cupboard for the Bisto, asking myself how kitchen cupboards could get so chaotic so quickly, when the knock came at the door.
It wasn’t crazy early for Shannon, but that was a copper’s knock.
‘Come in!’ I sang out and, as the door swept open on the squall and bluster outside, suddenly there they were, two of them, enormous in their yellow jackets, jostling for space in the little hallway. ‘Have you found them?’ I said. ‘Have they turned up?’
‘Mrs Lamb?’ said one of them. ‘Mr Lamb?’
Paddy was leaning in the living-room doorway with the tea towel over his shoulder.
‘We’ve put out an alert for them,’ one of the coppers said. Paddy had passed him the tea towel to wipe his face, which was streaming with rain. He ran it over his stubbled head too.
‘You mean you think they’re alive?’ I said. ‘In spite of the note and the will?’
Paddy said nothing.
The cop shook his head. ‘Their car’s in the garage up there. Their passports are there. Their cards. Phones haven’t been used since that last email on Monday.’ He gave Paddy the cop smile that spells trouble. ‘You phoned the house late on Monday, sir. That’s why we’re here. We wanted to ask you about that.’
‘Me?’ said Paddy. ‘I don’t think so.’
I felt as if I’d been turned to stone. That was right. Paddy had dialled the number, hadn’t he? In the middle of the first storm of it all, when we didn’t know what to do and every minute made it too late to do anything, he had dialled the number and heard Lovatt’s voice on the answerphone and he’d hung up again in panic and misery.
‘Was it a long call?’ Paddy was saying. ‘I honestly have no memory of it. Finnie, can you remember what we were doing on Monday night? What sort of time?’
‘We were unpacking,’ I said, hoping my voice sounded even halfway normal. ‘Could it have been when you found your charger at last and plugged your phone in?’
‘It was eighteen seconds long,’ said the cop. He finished with the tea towel, folded it and put it under his arm while he looked in his wee notebook.
‘There you go, then,’ Paddy said. ‘Bum dial, probably. So what now?’ I wondered if they’d resent it, him sounding like it was time to move on, or if they’d assume it was just a lawyer thinking about settling the estate, executing the will.
‘Search me,’ said the other cop, taking the tea towel and wiping his glasses before putting them back on.
‘It’s not illegal to kill yourself,’ his colleague said. ‘Much as we sometimes wish it was.’
‘You do?’ I agreed ‒ but, then, I would.
‘When you’ve scraped some twat off a railway line and interviewed the train driver,’ he said, ‘or tried to get emergency counselling in her native language for some poor cow of a Polish chambermaid who’s just found some other twat.’
‘Right,’ I said. I grinned at him. If this was a typical Simmerton polis, I could enjoy liaising. If we weathered it. If we stayed. If there was even still a ‘we’. ‘Sonsie – Sonia Webb – reckons Tuft thinks that too, you know.’
‘Did you get anywhere with the note and the will?’ Paddy said.
‘Until we find bodies, we’re hanging fire,’ said the speccy cop. ‘Why?’
‘Just wondered if you’d started searching for the beneficiaries yet,’ he said. ‘And what about … I mean, has anyone said anything about St Angela’s?’
‘What’s this?’ said the baldy cop.
I hesitated. How did he not know? Then I realised that if anyone was going to tell the police about wrongdoing at the adoption agency it would have been Paddy, and there was no way Paddy would have opened his gob. Since he’d read that fake will, he’d lost his mind.
‘Mr Waugh didn’t say anything?’ I asked the cops. ‘St Angela’s is the charity Tuft raised funds for and Lovatt acted as lawyer for. And – actually – we found out that the Dudgeons are CEO and finance bod for it, too, and the rest of the board are ghosts. We think it was a scam.’
‘Makes sense,’ said Speccy. ‘We were wondering what they had to run away from, however it is they’ve run. A long con’s exactly the sort of thing that makes folk consider suicide. Surprised you never mentioned any of this, Mr Lamb.’
Paddy was staring at me as if I’d stripped to my knickers and given them a lap dance.
‘I’m still going through the papers,’ he said, in a strangled sort of voice. ‘I’ll need to get some advice from the Law Society about what to do with them. I can’t just turn over confidential documents, but Finnie’s right. There’s a lot of irregularities need looked into.’
‘Confidentiality doesn’t trump criminal investigation,’ said Baldy. ‘Have you got these papers here? We can take them away with us and hand them over to Financial.’ He was patting his jacket pockets. ‘Got any evidence receipts on you?’ he asked his partner.
‘In the car,’ Speccy said, jerking his head.
‘They’re at my work,’ said Paddy, which was a total lie. Both bulging briefcases were right there beside the couch where he’d put them when we cleared off the table to set it and I knew he was working not to glance at them. His face was frozen and his eyes, trained on the cops’ faces, were beady. But either they couldn’t read him because they didn’t know him, like I did, or they couldn’t read him because they weren’t detectives. For one reason or another they bought it.
‘No point getting you to open the office on a Saturday when you’re obviously busy,’ Baldy said. ‘Someone’ll drop round on Monday morning. None of this is going anywhere, is it?’
‘No,’ Paddy said. ‘And anyway, from what I’ve seen, there’s no criminality. My wife should have picked a better word than “scam”. There’s certainly no embezzlement.’ I started to protest and managed to bite my lip, ending up letting out no more than a squeak. ‘If I come across anything that hints at where they might have gone, to do whatever they did, I’ll get straight back to you.’
The coppers seemed to be satisfied with that. They put their hats back on, Velcroed their hi-vis jackets shut and went on their way.
‘What the hell, Paddy?’ I said, as soon as the door was shut behind them.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Contradicting you in front of them. I know.’
‘Not that!’ I said. ‘Who cares? I meant what the hell are you doing lying to the police? They’ll see for themselves on Monday when you hand the stuff over.’
‘But it’s true,’ he said. ‘I was up last night going through it all again. It didn’t make sense to me that they would be so careful in some ways – faxing through my forms, getting your signature on the will – and so reckless in others. Why make sure and have an heir if your estate’ll be frozen and all your assets confiscated for financial wrongdoing?’
‘And?’ I said. The two lots of gravy were cooling and congealing and the clock was against us. ‘What did you find? Why didn’t you wake me?’
‘Small print,’ he said, ignoring the other question. ‘The logos and banners were all St Angela’s.’ He went over to the couch and started scrabbling through some of the files in one of the briefcases. ‘Look.’ He held an elderly deed-of-covenant certificate. It was a photocopy of a photocopy, the print thick and fluffy, ghosts of paperclips and staples visible in the top corner. ‘See what I mean. This is all headed up in the name of St Angela’s, but the small print lays out a commitment to donate’ – he squinted at the form – ‘no less than eighty-six per cent, after admin costs, to a charity supporting adoption and fostering in Scotland or overseas. Which is what they did. St Andrew’s usually and one or two others. It’s all above board, Finnie. Not just deeds of covenant. The receipts, the accounts, any wee contracts they had to draw up for liability and all that. The whole bit. And they managed more than eighty-six per cent most years. Especially recently, when all the admin was done online with downloadable forms.’
‘When did you see all this?’ I said, heading back to the kitchen. I wanted to shake him, but I had to keep on with getting the table ready.
‘Last night, like I said. I sat up.’
‘And why didn’t Abby notice it?’ I walked back through to the living room with the salt and pepper to put near my dad’s place. He’d douse everything before he took a bite but, to spare my feelings, he’d choke half of it down before he asked for ketchup.
‘I think she was the same as me. The shock of the news stopped her scrutinising the documents as thoroughly as she should.’
‘Right,’ I said. ‘Right, of course. So what does it mean? Is it an answer to anything? Because it strikes me as just another layer of mystery.’
‘How?’
‘Embezzlement makes sense!’ I said. ‘Stealing money and then hopping it to Brazil, or stealing money and then killing yourself when it all catches up with you. Both of those make a horrible kind of sense. But this is crazy.’
‘But that’s good.’
‘How is “crazy” good?’
‘Because it doesn’t make any sense. It raises so many questions. And, as long as there are questions to be answered, there’s a chance the answers will make everything clear. Everything.’ He was sounding manic again. ‘And there’s something else.’
I waited.
‘Like I said, I was going through papers last night. Papers I hadn’t looked at for years. Adoption papers.’ He waited, staring hard at me.
‘Wait,’ I said. ‘Your adoption papers?’
‘I found them years back and made copies. The name didn’t mean anything then, of course, but it jumped out at me this time. Do you see?’
I had to swallow before I could speak. ‘St Angela’s handled your adoption?’
He smiled at me but I couldn’t smile back. My head was swimming. ‘It’s nearly lunchtime,’ I said.
‘Yeah, sorry. We’d better get on with—’
‘Paddy!’ My voice was a shriek. ‘I’m not talking about the bloody gravy. How could you find that out last night and not tell me till now?’
‘Sorry,’ he said, so calm I wanted to scream. ‘I shouldn’t have waited. But now you know, what do you think?’
‘Okay,’ I said, heading back to the kitchen because, despite what I’d shrieked at him, I needed to crack on. And all of this would be easier to say if I wasn’t looking him in the eye. ‘So this couple met after one of them had lived through a massive tragedy: the death of his wife and their two little children. They moved to the town where the deaths occurred and set their lives up as if they were dedicated to preventing any such thing ever happening again. They’ve spent the whole twenty-five years they’ve been married fundraising for real adoption charities – except in a pretty underhand way – and pretending to take care of the legal side of a fake adoption charity that they’re using as cover. Except that this fake adoption service has actually overseen at least three adoptions: Shannon’s and Sean’s. And then yours. Sean disappeared. Shannon tracked Lovatt down and was more or less given a house. You were headhunted to join his practice. Your wife was headhunted to join the fundraising organisation. The Dudgeons immediately kill themselves, making it look like murder and putting us in line for a major inheritance, except that the will is a piece of crap. The fake charity is wound up. The new partner is given free rein. Oh, and maybe they didn’t kill themselves because someone’s moved the bodies and said they’ve gone to Brazil.’
‘There’s two things wrong with your round-up,’ Paddy said. He was taking plates out of the cupboard to warm in the oven. If we gave Elayne a cold dinner plate she wouldn’t even get as far as chewing her meat and spitting it out again. She’d just push wrinkles into her congealing gravy and shudder.
‘Oh?’ I thought I’d done a good job.
‘One: the will’s only a piece of crap if you won’t confirm that you witnessed it.’
‘Wrong,’ I said. ‘You can’t confirm a lie, Paddy. You can only shore up a lie with another lie.’
‘And that’s your problem, is it? So holier-than-thou all of a sudden?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Look, I can’t suddenly say I witnessed the signature of someone I’ve been going around saying I’ve never met. The plan went wrong, Paddy. I get that it’s infuriating, when you can see a good wedge slipping through your fingers, but the plan went wrong. We weren’t supposed to go back. We weren’t supposed to see them. And they weren’t supposed to be moved. Obviously I was meant to go to work on Tuesday morning saying we’d been round there for dinner and signed a lot of papers and then when the will was found … Bob’s your uncle.’
‘Only you forgot your bloody bag!’
‘What?’ I was staring at him. ‘That was an accident. Because I’d had some wine and I had things to carry.’
‘And then you had to go snooping inside the house!’
‘I was worried about them!’ I said. ‘There had been those noises of someone crashing around in the trees.’
‘It was a deer.’
‘It had a torch!’ I shouted. ‘I was worried because all the lights were on and the door was open but they weren’t answering the bell. Oh, no! That’s my dad’s car.’
We had both heard the growl of his engine as he pulled up and we both saw the sweep of his headlights across the front windows.
‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ Paddy said. He sounded like a kid who’d broken an ornament. ‘I’m sorry I blamed you. I just don’t know what to do.’
‘Really?’ I said, going to the front door. ‘It seems fairly obvious to me.’ I threw it wide and opened the golf umbrella that was sitting on the step. ‘Shannon’s mum and birth mum are both dead. Her brother’s missing. She was a kid. You were a baby. Lovatt’s dead. Tuft’s dead. There’s only one person left who could answer any of our questions about adopting through St Angela’s.’ I stepped down and held the umbrella up as the passenger door of my dad’s car opened. ‘Elayne! Welcome! Come away in out of this weather. I’ve got something I want to ask you.’