“I apologize on behalf of my sister.”
I had no answer to that and just made noncommittal gestures.
Mairi took Anna off her breast and laid her on her lap, bouncing her lightly. “I was the one keen to have a babe, not Colin, but nobody told me it would be like this. She won’t leave me alone, and I haven’t had more than two hours’ sleep at a stretch for two days.”
I was about to placate her with platitudes about how things would get easier, but her eyes were full of misery.
“I think you just need some help with practical things.”
Wrong thing to say. She burst out in anger, “I was counting on my sister, but you’d as well hold the wind in your bonnet as get Lisa to commit to anything. You heard her. She should have been here on the weekend. I needed her. I wanted to get the apartment all ready. Look at it, it’s a bloody pigsty. I had to serve in the bar.”
Poor little Anna was getting a rougher bounce. Mairi wasn’t through yet.
“Do you want to know the reason she wasn’t here?”
“I, er... ”
“I’ll tell you. It’s because she’s been having an affair with a married man. Some big-shot politician from London. He’s got three children, not to mention he’s a lot older than she is. She swore to me it was over.”
As a private citizen, this was more than I wanted to know. As a police officer with antennae quivering, I wanted to pursue it.
“Maybe she was telling the truth. She could have been anywhere.”
“You don’t know my sister. Lying is second nature to her. I don’t think she even knows she’s doing it half the time.”
There was no answering that, but I certainly wondered about the implications, even if Mairi was speaking out of sibling anger. I decided it was time to get out of here, and even though I felt twinges of guilt at leaving Mairi alone, she assured me she was going to sleep and that Colin would be in soon. I went to my own room.
There was a piece of paper slipped underneath the door. A note from Gill.
“Sorry I won’t be able to meet for dinner. I have to drive over to Ness to meet with some of the locals. They are up in arms about the proposed relocation of a convicted pedophile and I need to field it. I’ll ring you later.”
I was surprised that even in Lewis this hugely problematic issue was occurring. Does serving a sentence for your crime clean you of all sins? And perhaps more important, will you offend again? I was also disappointed about dinner, but cancelled appointments were par for the course with police officers. It wasn’t surprising that cops tended to huddle together, and the marriages that survived the strain of the life were usually the ones where both spouses were working officers who understood the realities of the life. Firefighters had irregular hours, adrenaline rush alternating with the utter tedium, but they are the poster boys of an adoring public. My buddies on the other hand, often have to deal with such unreasoning hatred from the ignorant that it takes your breath away.
Why do it then? Why join the police? Because no matter what, even if it’s never put into words, you believe in the power of order. Nothing can happen in a lawless state except more crime. No country can function without law and order; anarchy is the shark that devours the fish, especially the little fish. Oh sure, there are some laws that we think are stupid and we have to enforce them, and there are always guys (and a few gals) on the police force who are assholes and who like to throw their weight around, but mostly we know, even if it’s never expressed in so many words, that without us, nothing could thrive. Go check out what Sir Thomas More had to say about that.
So that’s my spiel, thoughts floating in the recesses of my mind while I decided what to do about dinner. The Duke didn’t stretch to room service. You had to show up in the dining room or forget it. Frankly, I didn’t fancy sitting down there and having to deal with Colin MacLeod. I was being hit with stabs of the lonelies, an unpleasant state that was no doubt intensified by the grey sky and chill rain that was promising to fall for forty days and forty nights. I looked out the window at the masts bobbing in the inlet. The street below was deserted except for one car that drove slowly by, the tires swishing on the wet road. I pressed closer to the window to see if I recognized the car, but I didn’t. I wondered what Paula was up to. In her time it was one o’clock in the afternoon. I also allowed my thoughts to sniff at my mother, all cozied up with her new paramour.
That did it. Time to get out of this room. I hadn’t changed out of what I had to think of as my funeral clothes, so I snapped open my suitcase, pulled out a wool sweater and my fleecy jogging pants, and changed my clothes. That done, I was warmer and in slightly better spirits. I’d noticed a pizza place just around the corner from the hotel, and the notion of gooey melted cheese was comforting. Pizza it was then. I could bring it back here and have a quiet evening at home. What fun!
The hotel had a stand of spare umbrellas for the guests, so I grabbed a tartan one and went to get my pizza. On the way, I passed by a café, currently almost empty of customers. However, sitting together near the window were Coral-Lyn Pitchers and the Reverend John Murdoch, Lewis’s eligible bachelor. She was leaning across the table and he was leaning back in his chair away from her. Body language that was very revealing. I saw him nod in a sympathetic, pastoral, sort of way, but Coral-Lyn was obviously agitated, gesticulating with her hands, and aiming all that intensity at Mr. Murdoch. I would have made a large wager on what she was talking about and I didn’t envy him. I couldn’t hang around outside the window, although I sort of wanted to, so I continued on to the pizza shop.
There was a middle-aged, cheerful-looking woman behind the counter, who was waiting patiently while three gangly teenaged boys were trying to decide what toppings to get. Behind her, a wiry dark-haired Asian man, the first I’d seen on the island, was stretching pizza dough on his hands, then tossing it around in the air.
“Hurry yourselves, lads. We’ll be closed and in our beds before you decide,” said the woman.
The inside of the shop had a delicious smell to it and was warm and cozy. No wonder it was obviously a favourite hangout for the local teenagers. Another group of lads and lassies was sitting by the window devouring hot, high-cholesterol slices, the staple diet of youth.
The lads opted for pepperoni, bacon, and mushrooms. I dropped the bacon but went for the same, and I watched them as they sloped off to a table to wait for their order. To my eyes, the local Hebridean teenagers were astonishingly wholesome. There was not a piercing in sight, and the hair fashion for the girls was shoulder-length and straight, with natural colours. The boys had short-cropped hair, and ordinary non-jean pants. Two of them were still in school uniform, which was a white shirt and a tie under a plain burgundy wool sweater. I’d long ago passed the great generational divide, and I willingly admit I found most of the North American teenagers that I encountered lacking in manners or good taste. These kids had spoken politely to the server and they were chatting to each other in normal voices, no shrieking and certainly no ubiquitous “f” word. How refreshing. Perhaps if I’d asked them, I would have discovered they all yearned to escape this sober island for the delights of tattoos, body piercing, and ear-shattering music, as well as the availability of controlled substances. For myself, I wanted them to remain in their innocence as long as they could.
“Here, you go, Ma’am. Cheers.”
My order seemed to have come up sooner than that of the lads, but the woman gave me a wink. Suddenly her expression changed. She was glaring at the kids behind me.
“Put out those fags this minute. Catriona MacRae, I’m going to tell your mother when I next see her. You too, Angus. Do you think I’ve gone blind? Put them out.”
One of the boys and a girl had lit cigarettes and were drawing on them with self-conscious style. Sheepishly they complied. The woman shared a “what’s-the-youth-of-today-coming-to” look. I grimaced, paid up, and left with my pizza.
Coral-Lyn and the minister had progressed to the coffee-or-tea stage. She was still the one talking, as far as I could see, and he had pushed his chair back a little further. As I passed, I saw her reach over and place her hand on top of his. There was something sexually predatory about the gesture. He seemed rather stunned by this move, and he left his hand where it was. I walked on. What was she up to and how had Andy managed to get out of her clutches for the evening?
The pizza turned out to be delicious, and I wolfed down two slices as soon as I got back to my room. The television had decided to show static, but I didn’t feel like going in search of somebody to fix it, so I switched it off. What to do? There was no radio, and I’d come away in such a hurry that I hadn’t brought anything to read with me except my notebook and handouts from the conference. I read through those for the next hour, finished, and still had a lot of time to spare. I could have started to write down what had happened since I’d “found” Joan, but it felt too hot still, like a burn that needed to cool down for a while. I had no idea where we’d go from here. Our relationship seemed to have undergone a seismic change, but I was almost afraid to count on that. It was a most peculiar feeling to know that I had blood relatives by the score in this very spot. I might even have already met some of them without knowing it, but I had to wait for Joan to lift the embargo before I pursued that angle. On the other hand, given what she’d said, maybe I also had an entire tribe of “red Indians” on my father’s side that I had yet to meet.
Those thoughts were agitating, so I brought myself back to the usual source of mental stability, work. I took out a fresh piece of paper and wrote at the top: “What Happened to Tormod MacAulay?”
I was bugged by the unanswered questions in the case. Oh, that’s another typical characteristic of police folk: we can’t stand having a lot of questions but no answers. They become like mosquito bites on your back; you’re always trying to get to that itch. Besides, tackling the whole situation in this way made me feel better, pushed the loneliness back into the cupboard.
There was no proof that MacAulay had died other than by natural causes, no forensic evidence (thank you Dr. MacBeth). But I did have the famous or infamous gut feeling that cops the world over swear by. There were, shall we say, small irregularities that bothered me.
QUESTION #1: Why did Joan and Sarah go to see MacAulay, and why was Sarah so upset?
I didn’t buy what Joan had said about it being a business matter. There was no indication that Tormod had changed his mind about selling to the Norwegians and was reneging on his deal. The answer seemed pretty obvious to me.
Mrs. MacNeil had described Annie Stewart, Joan’s stepmother, as being barren as a board throughout her marriage. Then, coinciding with Joan being sent off to boarding school, Annie conceives. Joan had made an interesting choice of words when she said, “Sarah belonged to my stepmother.” Parents raising their errant daughter’s child as if it were their own was quite a common story. I’d bet my new hat this is what Annie MacAulay/Stewart had done. Even in such a close-knit community, you can get away with that kind of deception if you’re determined enough, especially if the subject involved can conveniently be out of town. I’d say it was highly likely Sarah was Joan’s child, conceived when she was a mere teenager. That would certainly account for her disgrace and her subsequent disavowal of her own family, described by Mrs. MacNeil as far too self-righteous. If that was the case, then who was Poppa? Come on, that’s easy. Surely, it was Mr. Tormod MacAulay who would “make it up to her,” meaning to Sarah, and who immediately after Sarah and Joan left, had phoned his lawyer to add a codicil to his will. I’d bet this was the “ghost” that Joan had to lay to rest. Sarah, meet your real father. Tormod, meet your daughter.
But still, Joan’s feelings about all of this were obscure. She said, “No, I didn’t like Tormod,” but was adamant he hadn’t molested her. But he must have. I did a quick calculation of numbers. When she went off to boarding school she was just fifteen, which would make him twenty-nine. Fourteen years difference wasn’t a lot when you were both adults, but it was a huge gap when you were barely out of childhood. Not to mention, you called him “Uncle.” She’d had me three and a half years later, when she was living in Canada. She’d only just arrived, mind you, and I could have been conceived before she left. However, gut feeling again, I believed her when she said Tormod wasn’t the sperm donor and my biological father.
Which brought us right smack dab against the strange gap of those unaccounted-for hours. She said, “I didn’t like Tormod.” Was she being literal and did she mean “I didn’t like him. I hated him?” I thought that the hypnosis session had brought back more than she was letting on. Had she returned to Tormod’s house after the accident? Who knows... groggy from the bang on the head, all stirred up emotionally, had she killed him? If so, how? (Back to lack of evidence again.) Frankly, even though her evasions and half-truths were as numerous and as dodgy as Hebridean sheep, I didn’t think so.
Question answered.
QUESTION #2: Can we believe the accuracy of the time given by the MacLeans?
If the time they gave was right, the car they saw couldn’t have been Joan’s. Who was it then?
No answer.
QUESTION #3: What happened after Joan and Sarah left? Who cleaned up? Why did they clean up?
Lisa said Tormod never tidied up after himself but, even if he did, surely he’d know where the glasses and plates lived, no matter what Gill said about genetic programming. And was this the kind of thing a man would do after going through the kind of scene Joan had described. Lisa said there were two things missing. One was the cushion from the bedroom chair. The other was a piece of woven fabric that she said should still have been on the loom. The fabric could have been sent somewhere, but surely not the cushion.
No answer.
QUESTION #4: Why was Andy’s bicycle in the shed?
According to his fiancée, Andy visited his granddad every day except on the weekends. Didn’t he need his bike to get around? As far as I know he didn’t have a car. They seemed to use Coral-Lyn’s rental. I hadn’t noticed that the bike had a flat tire or anything like that, although I hadn’t been paying close attention at that moment. Why was it left there, then? Usually you do that if you ride over one way and return by another means.
Possible answer: Andy had biked over to visit his grandfather as usual, and he was the person who had walked into the house....
Wait a minute.
I flipped to the verbatim notes I’d taken during Joan’s hypnosis session. She didn’t say “somebody has come to the door,” she said “somebody has come in.” Different. Even in this friendly, everybody-knows-everybody-else island, surely you knock on the door when you go visiting. Except for sisters, who feel free to walk in unannounced... and grandsons.
Which meant Andy had not told the truth when he said the last time he saw his uncle was on Thursday. Or rather, when Coral-Lyn had said that for him.
QUESTION #5: Why lie about it?
Answer could be trouble.
The real-estate shenanigans were vitally connected to Andy. As of last week, he thought the house was going to Miss Pitchers’s daddy. What if he’d come back to the house that night after Sarah and Joan had flown off, and learned from Tormod that he’d been gazumped? He could have driven there, possibly with his fiancée, and it was their car that the MacLeans had seen.
Possible answer to the car sighting, but not to the bike in the shed and no answer at all to question number three and the identity of the tidy freak.
QUESTION #6: Did Andy kill Tormod, thinking that, by the terms of the original will, he would get the house anyway?
He couldn’t have known that, in fact, Tormod had left his entire estate to Lisa.
Answer: highly unlikely.
Andy was truly grief-stricken when I saw him. I just couldn’t see him as the murdering type. I know that, after the fact, there are always people saying about the worst murderers, “He was such a nice man.” I don’t buy that. Premeditated murders are never committed by nice people. The cracks always show somewhere. However, it was possible that, on hearing that he might not acquire the house, Andy had exploded in a fit of rage and killed his grandfather. But I doubted it. And neither could I see Coral-Lyn doing that. Besides, that question was totally hypothetical, without any forensic evidence. And there was no sign of obvious trauma to the body.
QUESTION #7: How good a judge of character am I?
Mairi declared that Lisa wasn’t at her school that weekend as she’d said she was. And now she had inherited a property that could bring in money very useful to a struggling student.
I’d seen people lie during an interview so convincingly that I had to go back and recheck the videotape of the robbery, which was incontrovertible. But that was rare. When you’re in this business, you get a very good nose for lies or evasions, which are the law-abiding citizen’s form of lies. I believed Lisa had not arrived at the house until Sunday and was shocked by Tormod’s death. Her sister was probably right about her actual whereabouts. She was shacking up with her sugar daddy that weekend, and she wasn’t telling the truth about that.
Answer: pretty good.
QUESTION #8: Where is Sarah’s briefcase?
Janice had called her into the office at the request of a woman who could have been a prospective client. She’d bring her briefcase.
No answer.
QUESTION #9: If it is true that Joan and Sarah were forced off the road, who was the driver of that car? Who apparently stood over Joan directly afterward?
No answer.
I shoved aside the paper. If all of my speculation about Sarah MacDonald was the truth — and I was convinced it was — I had lost not an aunt, but a half-sister. A blood relative I hadn’t known existed. I wondered what she had been like, other than a habitual drunk, that is. From the way the scene had played out, she must have been distraught at hearing Tormod was her natural father. No wonder he couldn’t let her marry his son. Which suggested he knew the truth about her parentage. Did my grandfather and stepmother know? I suspected not. I was looking forward to hearing Joan’s version of all this. I looked over my notes. It seemed to me there were still bits and pieces of the puzzle that weren’t placed yet, but I felt much better, and I wasn’t about to dash out now and satisfy my curiosity.
I got up and looked out of the window again. Hey, I was in the place of my ancestors. Some of them, anyway. Sondra and her sad story had started to recede from my mind. My boss had been more right than he knew when he said going to Edinburgh might be just what the doctor ordered.