I was done with secrets. Really done this time. When the police arrived at Sonsie and Adam’s house – Speccy and Baldy, I was glad to see – I told them everything.
Starting with what was lying on the floor of that huge empty room at Jerusalem.
‘Yes, dead,’ I said. ‘Very, very dead. And no bloody way it’s suicide. Lovatt’s cut to ribbons.’
‘Drink your tea, dear,’ Adam Webb said. He had tried to get a nip of whisky down me but my hangover was still raging so he’d settled for sweet, milky tea.
‘Look,’ I said. ‘I don’t know everything, but I know this. They died in the kitchen at their house. I saw them there. I know! I know! Charge me with it, if you like, but just listen. Then they spent a few days at Bairnspairt – Shannon Mack’s cottage. They were in her bedroom. She burned incense but it was still pretty bad. They left there yesterday to go where they are now. But Shannon can’t have taken them because she can’t drive.’
‘Hasn’t got a licence, you mean,’ said Speccy, grimly.
‘No,’ I said. ‘Can’t drive. Bad eyesight and, anyway, no car. There’s no way she would have set off up that dark road in the low light. I don’t know who moved them but it wasn’t Shannon. I don’t know why she agreed to have them in her house. Or who she agreed with. Paddy.’ I blurted it out. ‘Oh, bugger it all to Hell, it’s my husband, Paddy. It must be. He must have known. He’s Lovatt Dudgeon’s son.’
‘Your husband?’ said Baldy, and shared a look with his partner. ‘Have you had a fight, hen? Have you been under any strain lately?’
‘Look,’ I said, struggling up from where I was reclining on the couch with a pillow under my knees. Sonsie had manhandled me into position, then put such a heavy quilt over me I felt trapped. ‘I know this sounds absolutely bloody mental. I’m sorry. But my husband, who goes by the name Paddy Lamb, is actually Simon Dudgeon. And the little boy in Simon Dudgeon’s grave is really a child called Sean Mack. Lovatt and Tuft killed him.’
The two police pulled back and shared another look.
‘I know!’ I said. ‘But you don’t need to believe me. You can check the DNA. You can test Paddy. And you can test the little boy if you disinter his remains. It’s all true.’
‘Right,’ said Baldy. ‘Well, I know I shouldn’t say it, but when you’ve spent days looking for bodies it’s nice to find out for sure that they’re really dead.’ He tapped his teeth with the pencil he had pulled out to make notes with, notes he hadn’t taken because he didn’t believe anything I’d said. ‘So who sent the email saying they were in Brazil, then?’
‘I have no idea,’ I said. ‘Sorry. No clue.’
‘CID’s problem,’ Speccy said. ‘And they’re going to want to talk to you, hen. We need to get on with recovering those bodies. Get a team in. Get a doc in. Disturb the fiscal on a Sunday.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘There’s a rat eating her neck.’
That got them moving.
‘Can we drop you at home?’ said Baldy. ‘Not leave you here swearing your head off and mucking up the upholstery?’
‘My family’s at the pub,’ I said. ‘With Shannon.’ Although I didn’t know which pub because the text telling me was in my crunched phone on the floor up there.
‘I don’t think—’ Baldy began.
‘Me neither,’ I said. ‘I need to go home and talk to Paddy in peace. Find out what he’s got to say for himself.’
We were halfway there, right through the town and up the Widdershins cut, when I had to ask them to pull over so I could puke in the verge.
‘Sorry,’ I said, when I got back in. ‘It’s not even the bodies. I was hammered last night. I’ve been feeling like shit all day.’
‘Don’t apologise,’ said Speccy. ‘Anyone that gets out this car before they start throwing up is ahead of the game. You’re a lady.’
‘I’ve never heard anyone in a cassock swear so much, except an Irish priest, though,’ said Baldy. ‘You’ve changed my mind about the Church of Scotland today. I thought youse were all like the Webbs there.’
‘The Webbs are okay,’ I said. ‘I’m a bad example.’
Then we were swinging into the Widdershins gate and I scrambled out.
‘Don’t go anywhere,’ Baldy said, before he slid his window up and made the tight turn to drive away. I trotted after him and banged on the roof. The window slid down again.
‘Mr Sloan,’ I said. ‘He needs a Social visit when you get a minute, by the way.’
‘Oh?’ said Speccy. ‘Why are you telling us and not the local authority?’
‘Trust me. Send a family liaison officer round tomorrow.’
Then they were gone.
Paddy was in the living room and I could tell from his face it was a hangover, not a migraine.
‘How did it go?’
I blinked a couple of times, winding back through this nightmare day. ‘Oh! The sermon? Not great but it doesn’t matter.’
‘Not great how?’
‘I was distracted by the sudden thought that Tuft and Lovatt weren’t dead.’ I waved his objections away. ‘So I went for a walk to try to think it through and … Prepare yourself for a shock, Paddy. I found them.’
Paddy stared at me. ‘Alive?’ he said at last.
‘You know they’re not alive,’ I said. ‘You need to stop trying to fool me. I’ve already called the police to go and see to the bodies and I told them – the police – what happened on Monday night. I didn’t tell them you went back, but only because I forgot. I’m not covering for you any more. I’m done. I’m out. If that means we’re over, we’re over.’
‘Where’s everyone else?’ Paddy said. ‘Have they gone back to Edinburgh?’
‘Are you trying to work out if you’ll be interrupted while you finish me off too?’ I was almost completely kidding. ‘Well, I’m sorry, but they’re out for lunch in a pub in town there. With Shannon. So I wouldn’t.’
‘You don’t think much of me, do you?’ Paddy said.
‘I think you’re lying to me. I just don’t know what about.’
‘I could swear on a Bible,’ Paddy said, looking around as if he expected to see one.
‘I bet you could,’ I said. ‘Are you working with Shannon?’
‘Shannon? I met her less than a week ago.’
‘Mr Sloan? It’s his area of expertise after all.’
‘Finnie, what are you talking about? I moved here for a good job. A great job. And not a bad job for you. Okay, I got talked into living in this cottage and I steamrollered you. But when we got here last Saturday it was to start a new life together, you and me. It went off the deep end pretty fast and I’ve been clinging on by my fingernails ever since. It would have been good to think you were in it with me. I shouldn’t have crapped out of seeing the bodies on Tuesday. I know I should have told you they’d gone when I went back for that bloody cactus. I get all that. I really do. I shouldn’t have been so fired up by the will. I get that too. I disappointed you. And – at least – I should have thought about my mum instead of myself when everything started coming out yesterday.’
It was the first thing he’d said that really meant something to me.
‘But I didn’t know he was my dad and I didn’t know he was going to kill himself. Honestly, Finnie. I swear I didn’t know.’
‘He didn’t kill himself,’ I said.
‘Jesus! Why nitpick now? I didn’t know Tuft was going to kill him and then herself. Is that better?’
‘No one killed themselves. And neither one of them killed the other. Tuft couldn’t have done what was done to Lovatt’s body. And he couldn’t have done it to himself.’ I squeezed my eyes shut but the tears seeped out anyway. Had I really wanted to find them at the graveyard? Had I really wanted to see them again to drive away the vision in the kitchen? If I could get that vision back now I’d be happy for the rest of my life. The black butterfly on Lovatt’s back instead of the octopus jumble of his face? The blood in her mouth instead of the rat on her throat?
‘He couldn’t have done it to himself,’ Paddy said. ‘But she could have. Of course she could. A sharp enough knife, and if she was lucky and didn’t hit a rib. Why not?’
‘I’m not talking about what killed him,’ I said. ‘I’m talking about what was done to his body. His face was slashed. So much hatred it must have taken.’
‘Sounds like a wife to me,’ Paddy said. ‘Don’t look at me like that. That’s what they say. It’s only crimes of passion that make people try to obliterate each other. Hit jobs are clean kills.’
He was talking as if this was a movie, some designerviolence fantasy.
And he was wrong too. ‘Setting fire to people is a pretty good way to obliterate them,’ I said. ‘And that wasn’t passion.’
A look of such pain crossed Paddy’s face then, the like of which I had never seen, and he caught his breath in a sob. ‘That wasn’t to obliterate them,’ he said. ‘He loved them. His wife and his little girl. He wanted to save them pain. He must have killed them painlessly. I need to believe that, Finnie. The fire was to hide the fact that the boy wasn’t me.’
‘Right,’ I said. ‘Right enough. The little boy wasn’t you.’
Then a shiver passed over me, as if I’d been doused in ice water. I’d made a mistake earlier when my mind had spun away from my words during the sermon. ‘We lie and do not act in truth,’ I said.
‘What?’ Paddy frowned at me.
But I didn’t answer. I was thinking better now – clearer and sharper – and finally it all made sense. Lovatt hadn’t just pretended once before that someone alive was dead. He had switched a body. One boy for another. Now I knew why that image from the kitchen wouldn’t leave me. The bright red cuts in her hands and the knife in his back.
‘The black butterfly,’ I said.
‘What?’ said Paddy.
He’d done it again. That old man had his face cut to ribbons not out of hate, not from passion, but to hide his features in gore so dreadful no one would look for long. He was the same age and height and weight as Lovatt Dudgeon and he was wearing Lovatt Dudgeon’s clothes. No one – not cops, not lawyers, not friends and neighbours – no one would doubt who it was. No one would call for forensics to prove it. The fiscal would save the public purse the price of a post-mortem. But Lovatt Dudgeon – just like Simon all those years ago – was gone.