Dead Secret (16 page)

Terry Simons is standing at the window when I see him first. Burly, solid, a strong physical presence that is just on the turn into old age. The broad shoulders are beginning to curl slightly at the edges, like stale sandwiches; the bull neck is collapsing in on itself. He moves freely enough, and yet there is that first,
tell-tale
stiffness. Without the vigour of youth, the bulk of his body is settling into flab. He wears a short-sleeved shirt, white with a thin maroon check that is picked up by a sleeveless sweater in the same colour. The sweater is pulled tight, straining over a burgeoning paunch.

Simons looks like he suffers from high blood pressure, his bruised cheeks stained the colour of port wine. His hands are tucked into his trouser pockets, as if he’s rattling change in there while he looks out over his garden, out to the green fields
beyond
, where the construction companies are moving in to build new estates of semis. The window frames him like a glass cage.

He is waiting for me. I see the little start, the way he moves instantly to the door when he spots me. He had agreed speedily, even greedily, when I phoned and mentioned Kathleen Connaghan’s name. This is no intrusion. Simons is glad to be called out of
retirement
, to be back on police business even for half an hour.

There is the stale smell of fish in the hallway when the door closes. Breakfast kippers maybe, or last night’s cod. The trapped
heat, the feeling that the smell is old – how old? – makes me feel vaguely claustrophobic. Perhaps the smell is so ingrained it is simply part of this hall now, like the peach swirled
wallpaper
and the spindly legged telephone table. There is a sense of a life on view in Terry Simons’ house, but then, I’m looking for clues.
Who lives in a house like this?
A toddler’s musical rolling toy is trapped under the radiator: a grandchild’s perhaps. Or a neighbour’s? Then a golf trolley with clubs. A circular coat stand with a woman’s raincoat and several umbrellas in the base, one a multi-coloured golf umbrella.

“Miss Connaghan,” says Simons formally, standing back and ushering me in with a wave of his hand, like he’s showing a
suspect
into a waiting room. There is something about the gesture that irritates me. A sense of authority. Authority always puts my back up.

“Thanks for seeing me, Mr Simons.”

“Not at all. Not at all,” he says, indicating an armchair for me to sit in. “Glad to meet you.”

We sit with the awkward tension of the just-met. The
armchair
is in direct sunlight, the blinding shafts streaming through the window and hitting the left side of my face mercilessly. I am too ill at ease to ask if I may move.

“You said on the phone you are retired now, Mr Simons. Are you enjoying it?”

“Oh yes,” he says.

I’m not sure I believe him. He sits down, the change still jangling in his pocket, the fingers working it mechanically. A gesture of suppressed boredom that has become habit. When he sits, a roll of fat hangs over the waistband of his grey trousers, the taut jumper strapping it into place like a sausage in a skin.

“Good to have time with the family,” he says.

I am unconvinced. Terry Simons wears an old man’s carpet slippers on his feet, and an old man’s frustration in his eyes.

“But you miss the work?”

“Sometimes. Yes, sometimes I do.”

He clears his throat. I can tell from his accent that he is not a Highlander. The voice is low and slightly guttural, like mine. Hard-edged. Turns out he moved up from Glasgow for
promotion
.

As Simons would say, we ‘proceed to business’ quickly. He is full of that kind of robotic talk, speaks as if constantly giving evidence. “I was proceeding along Springburn Avenue…” That kind of thing. He can’t help himself. Thirty-five years a copper. He has a police chief’s confidence, the kind of
certainty
in his own opinions that simply doesn’t entertain doubt. His homicide clear-up rate as a Chief Inspector was 92 per cent, he says. Kathleen Connaghan was one of the 8 per cent. He makes no allowance for the fact that the statistic he is
discussing
is my mother.

It wasn’t that he didn’t know who killed her, he says,
scrutinising
my face for a reaction. I look blankly at him, the sun still beating relentlessly on the side of my face. There’s a steel in his eyes that suddenly shocks me, and a cement-like certainty carved into the crow’s-feet lines. He strikes me as vaguely
ridiculous
, a man whose sense of himself became too ingrained, too static, in his job. It happens to people in power. Their jobs entail making judgements, and if they don’t learn to trust their instincts they will be paralysed. But then they come to rely on them too much. There’s no room for indecision, and no room for growth because no one questions them any more.

But if I am honest, he is not only ridiculous but frightening. He has power that is nothing to do with status. I am here to find out that Da didn’t murder my mother. What if he tells me that he did?

“You knew who killed my mother at the time?”

“No doubt about it.”

“So why couldn’t you prove it?”

“Bad luck.” He shrugs. “Sometimes it happens. But it was Joe Connaghan. I was certain of that.”

A wave of nausea rises in my stomach.

“I’m sorry,” he says stoutly. But he isn’t. He isn’t sorry in the least.

“We just never managed to make it stick. No body, you see,” he says, shaking his head. “If we’d found the body, we’d have got him. We sent some divers into the loch but it was too expensive to continue for long. Two more days,” he says bitterly. “That’s all I asked for, but they pulled the plug. Two more days and I’d have got him. I’m sure of it. For years I waited for that body to be washed up, but he was smart enough to do the job properly. I’ll give him that.” He pushes back a lock of white hair that has flopped forward onto his forehead. He talks like I have no
connection
to Joseph Connaghan.

“James Cory…” It’s all I can manage to stutter out.

“Ach…” he says impatiently, shaking his head. “James Cory! That was all nonsense. I feel sorry for the man.” He puts his hand up as if to stop me speaking, but I haven’t said a word. “I know, I know,” he continues. “He shouldn’t have been playing away from home and James knows he was in the wrong about that. But he was hounded at the time, and you know there are some people who have never let it go, even to this day. I’d like to help him if
I could, clear up the question mark that’s hung over him all this time.” He looks at me keenly. “Did your father ever…?”

“Why were you so sure?”

“About Connaghan?” His eyebrows shoot up. “It was
obvious
. The day Kathleen Connaghan disappeared, she and James Cory were seen leaving the Stables bar, three miles outside of
Inverness
. We had a positive sighting to back up James’ timing, and then nothing. That was around one-forty. James Cory was back in his office at two. Around one-forty-five, Joe Connaghan went missing for two hours. He was late for his afternoon
appointment
at Brady’s Garage. He never had a satisfactory explanation of where he was for that time.”

“What did he say?”

“Said he drove out of Inverness alone to think.”

“And…?”

Simons looks at me as if I have to be stupid not to see the truth.

“He had no alibi, no witnesses, nobody who saw him. Some coincidence. The day his wife goes missing, he does too?”

“But I read once that the last person seen publicly with a
victim
is nearly always the murderer…”

Simons shakes his head.

“Not this time. The timings… look at the timings.”

Simons doesn’t take his eyes off my face the whole time he talks. Scanning, calculating. The sun has shifted position slightly, is
shining
through the window like a spotlight, directly into my eyes. I lean on the arm of the chair, using my hand to shield me. It feels like Simons is closing in on me. When did I become the quarry here?

“Then Connaghan turns up in an emotional state that
afternoon
, an hour late for his appointment…” continues Simons.

Why does he keep calling my father by his surname and Cory by his first name?

“Who said he was in an emotional state?”

“Jim Brady at the tyre garage. Said Connaghan was shaking and agitated when he was looking at the books.”

Every word of Simons is punching me in the guts, winding me. I want him to stop. There is a panic bubbling inside me; a physical bubble that makes me want to cough. A terror that Simons is going to say something that will make me know for certain Da is a murderer. What would the words be that would convince me? I don’t know. I don’t know what they are. But I want to run in case he says them.

Simons looked at me shrewdly. “Connaghan said the reason he was upset that afternoon was that he had gone out alone with the intention of committing suicide.”

He said he knew he was losing Kathleen; it was only a matter of time. So he had gone up to the loch and fitted a pipe to the exhaust and switched on but couldn’t go through with it. Said he couldn’t do it to his kids. Though of course, as it turned out, one of them
wasn’t
his kid.

Simons knows the impact he’s having. I can see it in his eyes. He senses blood. I clench my teeth tight together to stop the trembling in my jaw. Suicide.

Oh Da.

Something on the inside of me melts, like everything solid is liquefying, running into a river of no shape, no substance. So much unknown inside my father’s heart. So much I never guessed.

“I didn’t believe him,” says Simons, watching me still. “I think Kathleen went to meet her husband that lunchtime after she
left the Stables. I think she finally told him they were through, that she loved James Cory. Connaghan couldn’t handle it. He suggested they take a drive somewhere quiet to talk. Then he killed her and put her body in his boot before dumping her in the loch.”

His grey eyes are pinning me back in my seat, fastening me to the lump of floral cushion at my back. I look at the way he is
sitting
forward in his chair now, the sausage skin round his middle tighter than ever. He didn’t agree to see me to help me, that’s for sure. He is using me more than I am using him. I came here thinking it might solve things for me. Instead, he wants me to solve things for him. He hopes I will unwittingly say something that will help clear up the Connaghan mystery that has endured for almost twenty-five years. A final feather in his fraying old cap. And the added benefit of helping an old friend. ‘James’.

Simons clasps his hands over his knees and looks intently.

“Did your father ever say anything about what happened to your mother, about the…”

“Nothing,” I say flatly, not even waiting for him to finish. I am past caring if I sound rude. The smell of fish seems to have seeped in here from the hallway. It’s creeping under the door, oozing through the pores of the walls. The room is hot and stale, the direct heat on my face from the sun unbearable. My left cheek feels hot and pink, like it has been slapped. I stand up.

“I have to go now.”

“No, don’t go yet,” he says quickly. “You’ve only just got here. We can talk some more.” He smiles benignly. “I’ll make you a cup of tea. Mary will be back shortly and…”

“That’s kind of you, but I really have to go. I don’t have long. Time is short before I have to get back to Glasgow.”

“Leave me your number,” he urges. “I can keep in touch… let you know if anything…”

I pull a pen from my bag, tear a scrap of paper from a
notebook
, and scribble it hastily.

“Goodbye,” I say quickly, holding out my hand to shake hands. As his hand stretches out, I see a glint on his finger. A gold ring with a blue background and a pattern in the centre. A capital ‘G’. It seems familiar. I’ve seen a ring like that before. Where?

“Just one thing before I go,” I say, opening the door. “What made you rule out James Cory so completely? What made you so certain?”

“There was no evidence,” says Simons, and he shrugs. “And anyway, I had known James Cory for years. Golf club,” he says, nodding to the buggy in the hall.

Was everyone in this bloody town in the golf club?

“You stuck up for him because he was a friend?”

Simons’s face hardens. I see the shutters closing over his eyes, the flush of anger in his cheeks.

“I’ve been in the force a long time and I have never, ever helped a guilty man,” he says. “I just didn’t believe James Cory was the kind of man to do something like that. I
knew
him.”

Knew him? What does he mean ‘knew him’? Who knows
anybody
in this world? I mean really knows them. Knows what’s right deep inside them; knows what colour their guts are when they are turned inside out. Did he really know Cory? Did I know Da?

“Maybe you didn’t know him as well as you think,” I say. “My father was not a murderer.”

As I step out, a small grey-haired woman with a tired perm walks up the path, a shopping bag in each hand. She smiles at me wanly.

“James Cory did not kill Kathleen Connaghan,” says Terry
Simons
quietly at the door. “And that’s the truth.” The grey-haired woman looks surprised as I walk past her without a word.

The truth? Is it? Whose truth? There are too many extra pieces in this puzzle. Bits which look as if they fit, but don’t. Bits which distort the picture when you try to get a clear view. They’re all there in front of me: sharp-edged, smooth-edged, regular and angular. Right now I have no ideas which bits are part of the proper picture, and which bits are simply red
herrings
.