Dead Secret (21 page)

I looked among the crowd to find Khadim and Nazima. They weren’t on their feet, but Khadim was clapping stiffly and I could see the muscles in his face quivering. Nazima had her dopatta over her eyes and her head bowed.

I want Shameena to silence the nightingale for me on Friday. I am relying on her. Though I am relying on this wine first to get me through another night. Just one more glass. Maybe I’ll sing myself then. I wish I could sing, Da. I wish I could sing to you. But you’ll know when Shameena sings, it’s my song really. My song to you.

A neighbour has been to my door, asking me to turn down
Shameena’s
CD. I was very apologetic. I had not realised how late it had got, how absorbed I had become in the past, in writing down my memories. How far I had travelled from the present. It has been like walking through the wardrobe door into Narnia, like falling down the rabbit hole into Wonderland. Eventually, the visited world becomes so real that you forget where you have come from. Until the knocking and ringing starts at the door. Until the polite apologies spill from your mouth. Those
apologies
make me smile wryly to myself as I close the door. Five years ago, I might just as easily have told the neighbour to fuck off.

Flicking back through what I have just written about
Shameena’s
concert, I can see that you might have questions about Tariq. Perhaps you wonder why he is in my mind so much, why I dreamt of him during this time. (And, I may say, still do.) What does he have to do with my story? There is only one word I can use in answer: everything.

Tariq helped form what I thought love was, helped form me. He shaped my life, just as Da did by his presence and Mother did by her absence. Everything I did after he died was an expression of my hopelessness, just as everything Da did after Mother died was an expression of his. What was that idiotic period with
Father
Dangerous but an expression of my grief, my defiance, my
resentment? My self-destructive need for things to go wrong? I see that now. When I set off for Inverness, my whole identity was in question. Tariq was part of that identity.

Even now, more than fifteen years after he died, I think of Tariq. Yes, I was young and inexperienced. And yes, I admit it, it might have come to nothing. Perhaps my feelings are wrapped up in the nostalgia of teenage infatuation, when every emotion feels so intense and unique to you alone. But I still think Tariq was meant to be the love of my life. I think some of the anger I carry inside me, have always carried, is because people I love always leave me sooner or later. Or perhaps I’ve just been to too many psychology classes in the last five years.

The attraction Tariq and I experienced transcended
everything
that stood in its way. Our skin colour, our religions, our differing cultures and experiences. There was something that was stronger than all of that. I regret almost every man who
followed
him but the only thing I regret about Tariq is that we did not get to prove what we could have been.

Love shapes you, moulds you, influences your behaviour, whether that is for good or ill. Da discovered that and I
discovered
it too. We were both doomed that way. Do you understand where I am going with this? You see, if you think this story is about murder, you are wrong. You are wrong. It may not be a love story exactly, but it is certainly a story about love.

Shameena’s voice is a mere whisper now as I write, but I keep the CD on repeat. I feel a strange superstition that the memories will stop if the music does. Not that I remember much of that drunken night in the B & B, though I certainly remember
waking
up in the morning.

Sunlight through closed curtains. It filters through the dense jungle ferns of the fabric, washing the room in an underwater light, grey and green and rippled with shadow. A breeze finds the crack of open window, slithers through to blow gently on the hem of the curtain, a tiny wave of movement spreading across the mottled carpet. Squinting through half-shut eyes, I watch the waves lap gently on the shore of the wardrobe and then, it seems, the whole room begins to move, undulating softly on a calm sea.

Where is this? Swathed in leafy green fabrics, clean as mint. Rough pine and polished glass and hand-picked daisies in a pottery vase. The room tilts disconcertingly, the bed a boat cast adrift in unknown waters. Where? An empty bottle stands by the bedside, and a glass, with a mouthful of red wine
abandoned
in the bottom. Oh God. I remember. I try to lift myself from the pillows but my head is pounding and I feel sick. I sink back down slowly, glad of the softness that moulds around me. Lying flat, the movement continues but the nausea partially subsides.

I raise my wrist without shifting my head, looking for my watch. The light is brokered by the closed curtains, but it is a light that has grown strong, not the soft, tentative light of a breaking dawn. Nine o’clock! I had meant to be outside the
offices
of Cory Construction by eight o’clock, waiting for James Cory to arrive.

I have played out the scene in my mind a hundred times since standing outside his office yesterday. How he’ll look. What I’ll say. How he’ll reply. I always get the script’s best lines, obviously. Cory walks towards the offices and I step out of a doorway and stand in front of him. He is shocked when I introduce myself, on the back foot. My questions destroy him. He crumbles in front of me physically, morally, disintegrating into the dust of his own lies. He is nothing.

In reality, it is going to be me on the back foot. Now I have to get through receptionists and appointment diaries and office protocol. Shit. I sit, then lie across the bed, moving my legs
without
raising my head, shuffling to the edge, feet feeling for the rough, sack-like surface of carpet beneath. In the bathroom, I put the toilet lid down and sit tentatively, leaning against the cool, white tiles of the wall, reaching for the sink awkwardly, running water into a glass. I force myself to drink glass after glass. A dull thump beats in the centre of my head.

My phone beeps. A text. ‘Go home. Please.’ Oh fuck off, I think wearily throwing it on the bed. Whoever it is has turned polite. No more ‘bitch’. Even says please. Nutter.

Later, in the dining room, my landlady brings food to
fellow
guests at the next table. A large white dinner plate with breakfast cast adrift in the middle: a single slice of white edged bacon; an egg that glistens with fat like well-oiled flesh in sun
cream; a sausage burst in the middle and arched like a bow; an undercooked half tomato. I smile weakly at her.

“Just orange juice and toast this morning, thanks.”

She clears the other tables while I scrape a little sweet lime marmalade on dry, brittle toast. Her fifteen-year-old
daughter
wants to be an actress; I get a blow-by-blow account of her performance as Sandy in the school production of
Grease
. The details float outwards, upwards; light and inconsequential as dandelion chaff. Inside, I am with James Cory watching him shrivel. Shrivel over and over and over again. The landlady chats on. She doesn’t know. There is nothing about me that tells her. Infidelity. Betrayal. Murder. Secrecy. We are strangers, all of us.

I don’t get to Cory Construction as planned. I lie on the bed after breakfast, waiting for the waves of nausea to recede. When my phone rings, my heart skips a beat and I glance nervously at the screen. Number withheld. This continual phone intrusion is unsettling, as if the cold breath of a stalker blows the hairs on my neck with his whispering, yet I cannot see him. A flash of anger erupts inside me that someone thinks they can scare me in this way, but still my fingers tremble slightly as I press ‘Accept call’. I say nothing, waiting for the caller to speak first.

“Rebecca?” An older woman’s voice. For a moment I think it is Peggy and am torn between relief and a wish that I had not answered.

“Rebecca Connaghan?”

The voice is too frail to be Peggy.

“Yes?” My voice is sharp, almost hostile with unease.

“This is Jackie Sandford.”

The surprise makes me unable to process an answer. I become aware of the television playing softly in the background and run my hand over the rumpled duvet looking for the remote control.

“I got your number from my brother, James Sandford.”

“I… I don’t know your brother.” I sit down on the edge of the bed, switching off the television. “Do I?”

“You phoned him looking for me.”

The memory comes back of the Highland telephone directory and the two Sandfords listed: Angus and James.

“But he said you weren’t connected.”

She ignores this.

“I don’t want you to tell anyone you have spoken to me.”

Her voice sounds a little weak, but determined. There is something else mixed in. Anxiety, perhaps even fear. Her age… the idea that she should still feel fear… it makes my back prickle.

“Where are you? Can I come to see you?”

“No. I live a long way away.”

“Where?”

She senses the urgency, my eagerness, and retreats suddenly.

“I can’t tell you that.”

Everything has been so strange the last few days, so
unnerving
, that I suddenly wonder for a minute if this is a trick. Is it really Jackie Sandford? I wait for her to speak again, unwilling to frighten her off with persistent questions.

“Rebecca…” She says the name fondly, with a hint of
nostalgia
. “I wish I could meet you but…” Her voice falters. I am listening acutely to every signal. “Your mum and I… We were close… for a while.”

That phrase ‘for a while’ alerts me but I cannot hold on to the thought long enough to work it out.

“I remember you as a little girl,” she is saying now. “I looked after you.” She does not laugh and yet I sense amusement. “You were a thrawn wee thing.”

An unexpected rush of emotion. Memories of days of which I have no recollection prompt a yearning I had no idea I even felt. A yearning for a kind of innocence before the ugliness. I
want the world restored, made whole again.

“Do you know what happened to my mother?”

“You haven’t promised yet.”

“Promised what?”

“That you won’t say you have spoken to me. I can’t risk it.”

“Why not?”

“That will become obvious. But you have to promise me.”

“I don’t have any choice then.”

“I’m sorry.”

Her voice holds genuine regret.

“How do you know I will even keep my promise?”

“I don’t.” She sounds suddenly exhausted. “I have to trust you. For Kath’s sake.”

My mother’s name is almost a whisper.

“I promise.”

“Thank you.”

There is a slightly awkward silence before I plunge in.

“I read the old newspapers… the stuff you said about my mother having an affair with James Cory.”

“Yes. James was furious with me…”

“You said she was going to talk to him about their future the day she disappeared. Are you certain about that?”

“Yes. I tried to talk her out of it. I told her not to take things to the brink because he would never leave his wife. She was risking everything.”

“How did you know? That Cory would never leave his wife, I mean.”

There is silence, and for a moment I think we have lost
connection
.

“Jackie?”

“Because I…” She stops. I know she is distressed even though I cannot see her. I can feel it. “I just… I just knew him.”

“You sounded like you were going to say something else there.”

“Did I?”

“How did you know?”

She does not answer.

“How did you know?” I coax, more softly.

“Because I had an affair with him too.”

In the silence I cross to the window. The light is pure and bright and penetrating. I think of Lochglas, the small village across the bridge. A tiny, godforsaken backwater. Peaceful, you’d think. But that beautiful little spot, where the sun’s rays hit the sheltered bay like bands of polished gold, has the same tarnished ugliness as everywhere else. People are people and wherever they gather there is love and jealousy and betrayal and
confusion
. And turning from the window, putting my back to the spotlight, I know I must include myself in that.

My mother never knew, she tells me. And Jackie wasn’t seeing Cory at the same time. In fact, he dumped her for my mother.

“I thought, stupidly, that I was the one. I wasn’t married at the time and I thought he would leave Anna for me. But the truth was…” Her voice trails away. “The truth was what it always is in these matters,” she concludes quietly.

It fascinates me, that little shard of bitterness in her voice. All these years later. The rejection of it still hurts.

My mother had fallen into the same trap.

“She thought, just as I had, that he was going to leave Anna for her. She told me that she was going to speak to him the day they met for lunch, the day she went missing.”

“But maybe she didn’t speak to him. We’ll never know.”

“But we do know. I spoke to her.”

“When?”

“After lunch.”

My heart skips a beat at her words and I cross back over to the bed and sit on the edge before my legs give way. She spoke to my mother after lunch. My mother and Cory were seen leaving the restaurant together, but the call to Jackie Sandford proves Cory did actually leave her. Kath was still alive when he went and she called Jackie Sandford shortly after. Cory was back in his office at 2 p.m. It couldn’t have been him.

My voice sounds alien even to me as I stumble out questions. High and strained.

“What time? What time did she phone you?”

“About five minutes after James left her. She was on a high about what had happened over lunch and wanted to talk. There was only me. She was sort of laughing but I could tell by her voice she was shaking a bit, you know that way you get when you are sort of excited but sort of scared at the same time. She said James had been angry at first but everything had ended well.”

“Angry? What was he angry about?”

“Kath had talked to him about when he was going to leave Anna and he was making the usual excuses. She pushed things a bit and in the end he agreed.”

“What do you mean she pushed things?”

Jackie Sandford sounds tired.

“It’s complicated.”

“I have time,” I say, but she doesn’t reply. “If you do?” I add.

“I’m not very well,” she says.

Oh God, don’t let her hang up.

“Please.”

“I can only talk to you this once. I can’t do this again.”

“You won’t have to. I promise.”

“Wait a minute.”

I hear a door creak as it opens and she says something in a low voice. There is the sound of water running. A glass being filled? A muttered thanks. I can hear a voice, high, concerned. Don’t get upset, the voice is saying, then it becomes too muffled to hear before rising again in pitch. Mum, sit down! Yes, yes. Just a little longer. A shuffling. Another creak of the door before it closes firmly. The receiver knocks against a table.

“Are you still there?”

“Yes, I’m here, Jackie.”

“Like I said, it’s complicated…”

Jackie tells me Cory’s business had been doing well at the time. Maybe too well. He had picked up a lot of council
contracts
and people were talking. Cory was a Mason – and so were the chief executive and the chief planning officer at the council. My mother had told Cory she knew enough about the contracts to create a stink and drop him in it.

I close my eyes momentarily. What the hell had my mother been playing at?

“Why did she want someone who had to be blackmailed into being with her?” I ask.

“She didn’t see it like that. She said she was just persuading him to do what he really wanted anyway,” says Jackie. “She was giving him a reason to keep her sweet. She kept laughing. I’m not sure how much she’d had to drink that lunchtime. But she said men like Cory were fascinated by her. They liked her manipulations. It excited them, she said. But she really got James wrong because
he
was the one who always had to be in control. I told her she was being silly but she wouldn’t listen. She said she was going to phone Joe right there and then to tell him that she’d made up her mind.”

“Did she?”

“I don’t know. I never spoke to her again.”

“You never said this in the papers.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I told you, James was furious when I told a journalist about their affair.”

“And why did you? Tell them, I mean.”

“Because nothing was happening. The police were
interviewing
the same people over and over and getting nowhere. I knew there had to be more publicity, another twist to the story to keep the pressure on…”

“On who?”

She doesn’t answer the question directly.

“On whoever killed Kath. So I gave a little bit more of the story each time, hoping that it would prompt something, some kind of new lead.”

That was true. I had noticed in the library that Jackie
Sandford’s
story had unfolded over the course of several articles.

“Why did you stop?”

“I moved.”

“Because of what happened?”

“James…”

She stops abruptly.

“What? What did he do?”

“It was hard to prove.”

I wait. There is the sound of a glass being placed back on a table.

“When I first spoke,” she continues, “he got in touch and told me to keep my mouth shut because I wasn’t helping to find Kath’s killer. All I was doing was ruining his reputation.”

“But you ignored him?”

“At first. But then everything started going wrong.”

“What do you mean?”

“The Masons, Rebecca… How much do you know about them?”

“Very little.”

“About as much as most Masons know, then,” she mutters.

Every so often there is an acerbity to Jackie Sandford’s tone that moves her out of the linen-and-lavender, old-lady category. Maybe that’s what my mother liked about her. From what I’ve heard about her, I doubt Kath would have turned into linen and lavender either.

Jackie suggests I do some research online. Masonic secrecy and corruption is well documented now. The fact that in those days, senior Masons who reached the ‘top’ third layer had no idea there were another thirty-three secret layers above. But most Masons, she says, thought they were buying into a benign organisation that had brotherhood at its core. If a Mason died, for instance, brother Masons would sometimes secretly ensure – through a Masonic bank manager – that his debts were paid off for his family.

“A kind of Christianity?” I ask.

“A kind of mafia,” she retorts. “Oh, the values it expounded sounded decent. Look after your brothers, all that. But any
organisation
that looks after its own at the expense of others runs the risk of corruption.”

“But what did that have to do with you moving away?”

“They’re everywhere.”

“Who?”

“The Masons!” she snaps, irritation breaking through the
fatigue
in her voice. “Sorry,” she mutters. “I’m in a bit of pain.”

Before I can ask what’s wrong with her she has launched
into an explanation of the power of the Masons as a national network. Bank managers, judges, chief executives, senior
policemen
, the major utilities… It’s the most powerful secret society on earth, she says. And if a group of Masons come together and unite against an individual, they can make that person’s life hell.

The first thing that happened was her
electricity
going off. She didn’t realise what was going on to begin with. The electricity board said it was a recurring fault they couldn’t locate. Then they claimed her bill hadn’t been paid, before suddenly ‘finding’ the paperwork. Next her bank refused to honour a cheque,
saying
she was overdrawn. It got sorted out but it was never fully explained.

It all sounds so implausible that I begin to wonder about Jackie Sandford and how reliable she is. But she has story after story. A top judge who reached the pinnacles of British
Freemasonry
then decided it was incompatible with his Christianity and spilled the beans. A businessman who had a dispute with a Mason and found himself taken in by a Masonic police chief to be questioned on charges of pornography.

“What happened to him?”

“He committed suicide.”

“Oh God…”

“And I can understand why. The pressure gets to you. It was bad enough for me at the start but after the second newspaper interview, all hell broke loose. It wasn’t just constant
interruptions
to my electricity and water supplies, which would be off for days and miraculously come back on again an hour or two before workmen arrived. It was the police. They continually stopped me when I was out in my car to run checks on the
registration
, or to check the insurance, or to examine the tyres. It was
harassment. I had to disconnect the phone because it would ring constantly but there would be nobody there when I answered. Then there was a break-in at my house. I was a nervous wreck in the end. I couldn’t take any more.”

I know what she means. The anonymous texts to me in the last few days have been nothing compared to what she endured but the effect has been insidious, creeping through me in the way cold seeps into you unnoticed, until suddenly you are
freezing
and unable to get warm. The first text barely touched me. But then it built up. A gradual sense of fear when the phone buzzed. A weakening of control. An uncharacteristic
helplessness
. You get gradually worn away, the way the surface of rock gets eroded under the relentless crash of waves. So yes, I
understand
Jackie Sandford’s eventual breakdown. But there was one thing I didn’t understand.

“Why would sane people go to those lengths to support Cory?” I ask.

I don’t understand about organisations. Rules. Authority. I couldn’t join an army or wear a uniform. It’s all I can do to smile when the police stop me for routine checks when I’m driving. Instinctively, I want to tell them to piss off. That’s what uniforms do to me. But even I can sort of see why an army or a police force might be necessary. But a secret society? What for?

“I’ve had plenty of years to look into it, Rebecca. Plenty of time to reflect. There’s a bit in the Masonic handbook that says you have to conceal all the crimes of your brother Masons. And should you be summoned as a witness against him, you must always be sure to shield him.”

“So what charges were Cory’s ‘brothers’ trying to shield him from – corruption or murder?”

“That’s the question. That’s what I was trying to find out at the time. But the truth is I got so scared I had to get out. I didn’t dare say any more. I married, changed my name, and moved away.”

“But all these years later… surely…”

“My family…”

“Are you frightened still?”

“Not of that,” she says softly. “Not of him. But my family… It’s simpler just to make sure.”

“Jackie. Did…?”

Suddenly I cannot get the words out. They are stuck in my throat. Da. My Da.

“I know what you are going to ask.” She is suddenly gentle, compassionate.

“I don’t know, Rebecca. I can’t pretend to know. But I know your father was a good man.”

“You said she phoned you after lunch.” Despair fills me. “She was alive when he left. How could Cory have killed her?”

Jackie is quiet for some time.

“But we don’t know what happened after that. Nor before it,” she adds cryptically.

“Before it? What do you mean?”

“Maybe James had it all planned. And if he did… well, he wouldn’t get his hands dirty.”

I don’t understand what she means at first.

“James didn’t cut the electricity supply personally,” Jackie says. “He didn’t interfere with my water. He didn’t break into the bank and temporarily change my account details. James doesn’t do things himself. He hires people to do it for him. Just like he hires a gardener.”

Oh my God.

“You mean he hired someone to kill her? A hit man? Round here?”

“Don’t get taken in by the picture-postcard landscape,
Rebecca
. People are people. You know when you turn over a rock and all sorts of insects scuttle around underneath? When you have money, you know which rock to turn over.”

A voice in the background. A woman. Come on, Mum, she’s saying. This isn’t doing you any good.

“Just a moment…”

The receiver is taken from her.

“Hello?” The voice is firm.

“Yes.”

“This is Jackie’s daughter. I’m sorry, but she really has to go now. She’s getting exhausted. She’s not well, you know.”

Her voice is accusing, as if I should know better.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I didn’t know…”

“She has cancer.”

“Oh… I’m sorry… I hope she… she… Please give her my thanks. For speaking to me, I mean. I am grateful. I am very grateful…”

“I’ll tell her.” The voice softens. “I’m sorry. She told me about your mum. She wanted to speak to you. Insisted, in fact. But she’s not up to this.”

“I understand.”

I put the phone down. The room is full of sunlight but I feel enveloped by darkness. The way Da used to get. Surrounded by shadows. Sucked of energy. I understand now. I lie down again on top of the bed. How long does Jackie Sandford have left? It saddens me to think of an adult lifetime lived – all those years my mother has been lying cold in the earth. Her generation is
dying out. How long before the truth dies too?

For the first time, I find myself imagining what my mother felt at her killer’s hands. Perhaps she is becoming more real to me in an odd kind of way. Strange questions invade my mind. What was she wearing when she died? Had she dressed up for her lunch with Cory? Lipstick? What colour? Pink? Plum? Red? Orange? What colour?

When I was a little girl, I used to sit at Peggy’s dressing table with a pot of old discarded makeup she gave me to play with and draw a shaky Cupid’s bow of lipstick round my mouth, smudged, artless, a tangerine kiss that exploded outside its
edges
. But what was my mother’s colour? And why does it matter? It doesn’t and yet it does. Like the paint colour in Da’s dingy old hall. My mother would not have known her preparations that day were final. Is it less cruel, I wonder, to die at the hands of a stranger than someone you thought you loved?

The information from Jackie Sandford settles into my brain slowly. My frustration builds. Her call took me by surprise. I had no planning, no time to think. The unasked questions seem so obvious now, with the benefit of hindsight. But there is one thing I can check myself. In the afternoon I go back to the
library
to look at the local papers again. At one point, she had mentioned an investigation into allegations of council
corruption
in the awarding of contracts. If I can find mention of that, it will not only confirm she is telling the truth, it will tell me what happened in that investigation.