Dead Secret (25 page)

I should have known that Peggy putting her arms round me and saying, “Glad you’re back dear,” wasn’t the end of it. That was for show. For Sarah.

She arrives at seven, not eight, while Sarah is in the shower. Charlie is with her, looking tense and uneasy. He has on the dark suit he used to wear for the office, and a white shirt with a black tie, but he’s put on a few more pounds since retirement and it all looks tight and uncomfortable. The jacket barely meets round his ample middle and his face is pink, like his tie is tied too tight around his collar. Peggy walks right by me and into the living room, but Charlie hugs me. He doesn’t say anything but he pats my shoulder. I look at him and he raises his eyes in Peggy’s direction. He’s very expressive, Charlie, without ever actually saying anything. I sometimes wonder if you added up all the words he’s ever spoken, how many pages he’d fill.

Peggy is looking out the window when I walk into the sitting room, her shoulders hunched and tense. Her body has
developed
that wizened look of old age, some time when I wasn’t looking.

“Want some tea, Peggy?” I ask.

She doesn’t sit but she turns from the window.

“Where did you go when you went north, Becca?”

Silence. Charlie sits down heavily in the armchair, his eyes darting unhappily from one of us to the other.

“Inverness.”

“Nowhere else?”

I nearly say no but suddenly I’ve had enough of secrets.

“Lochglas.”

Peggy looks stricken, like someone fired a bullet straight into her belly. She looks at Charlie and he nods his head, motioning to her with his hands to calm down.

“Sit down, Peg,” he says quietly. “Come on now.”

“You know?” Peggy says, looking straight at me.

I nod. She falls into the sofa, like her legs can’t support her own body any more. She has lost weight in the last few days, and her face seems angular and fox-like and I feel a surge of affection for her. Peggy had been short and sharp and nervous all through our lives, but she is tender too, and I have loved her for that. But I have never loved her more than now, because now I understand the extent of her loyalty to Da in all those years.

“What are you going to do?” she asks. “We have to talk
quickly
before Sarah…”

“I don’t know,” I say honestly, and her face crumples. She is too old for this, I think. I sit beside her on the sofa and take her hand.

“How did you know to go to Lochglas?”

“The bureau.”

“I knew it, Charlie,” she says, looking accusingly at him.

“Peggy,” I say softly, but she can’t look at me.

“He tried so hard to protect you,” she says.

“I know.”

“He didn’t want you to know. He didn’t want you to carry this in your life. It was such a terrible burden for him, trying to keep it secret.”

“A terrible burden for you both.”

I stroke her hand. It is so thin and fragile. I can feel the raised veins on the surface. They spread hard and blue like a skinny little bird’s claws under the skin.

“Joe, oh Joe,” she whispers, rocking back and forward in her seat. “Joe…”

I hold her now while she rocks. “Peggy, please don’t get
upset
,” I murmur against her head.

“He deserved so much more. Joe was worth more. I warned him from the start about Kath. I saw what she was. We all saw what she was. But not Joe. He just couldn’t see it. She had him on a string and she dangled him this way and that. He was a fool where Kath was concerned.”

“Peggy,” says Charlie warningly.

“She was a tramp.”

“She was Becca’s mother,” says Charlie firmly.

“Didn’t she love him at all?” I ask. The question isn’t anything to do with Mother. I just want to be reassured that Da knew love, however briefly.

“She loved herself,” says Peggy.

“Peg, that’s not fair,” protests Charlie. “She did love him in her own way.”

“Sure, for five minutes.”

Charlie sighs and loosens the tie round his neck, undoing the top button of his shirt.

“What was Da like when… How did he cope when she, you know… disappeared?” I ask.

Peggy’s eyes shoot from her lap up to my face.

“Your dad didn’t lay a finger on her, Becca.”

“No, I just mean, what happened that day?”

“She just never came home. Joe phoned me around half seven that night. I remember because Charlie had worked late and we had just finished the dinner and were sitting down to watch
Coronation Street.
Weren’t we, Charlie?” she says, and Charlie half smiles.

“Then the phone rang,” she continues. “It was Joe but I couldn’t make out a word he was saying. Poor Joe.” She shakes her head. “He was in a terrible state. Sarah was bawling in the background and he was trying to mix formula milk. He was crying and
saying
Kath hadn’t come home. He didn’t know what he was doing.”

“Did you know about Cory then?”

“Oh, I knew all right. I had gone up there when he first found out about Cory and… and the baby. Kath had gone off into a fancy hotel for a week and I came to help with you. Cory paid for the hotel, of course. Said she needed some time to think, but I thought he wanted to get her on her own and convince her to have an
abortion
. Joe told her to have the baby and he would be a father to it. He would clean up her mess as usual.” She shakes her head bitterly.

“I told Joe, I told him not to take her back. I said he was being a fool and she would end up leaving him but he wouldn’t listen. He was mad for her. Always had been. She drove him crazy with that separate bed stuff when the affair with Cory took off. It was her way of controlling him, of dangling him on a string.”

I feel my cheeks flush. Charlie glances apologetically at me. Peggy is talking almost to herself.

“There was no question about who the baby’s father was. Joe hadn’t slept with her for months. Hadn’t been allowed to. But
he held on, thinking the affair would fizzle out, that Kath would come back to him. And when she got pregnant, Joe said he could learn to love the baby even though it wasn’t his, because it was Kath’s. But she had to choose between them. He was thrilled when she said they could make another go of it. But she did
exactly
what I told him she would do. Went back to Cory.”

“When he phoned you that night, what did he think had
happened
to her?”

“He thought she’d gone off with Cory. He phoned Cory’s house but Cory claimed he had no idea where she was. I told Joe I’d be up on the first train the next morning. Charlie dropped me at the station on the way to work. I stayed up there for the rest of July and the first week of August. Charlie used to come up at weekends. It was an awful time. It just went on and on and on. More and more stories and less and less news. Your father was taken in for questioning by the police fifteen times over those two months. I suppose Cory was too. And David Carruthers. The police knew about Cory long before the papers did. But they just couldn’t get the lead they needed. Eventually we left and came back to Glasgow but I went back later on that month. Then Joe left for good.”

“On the twenty-fifth of August,” I say. Peggy has her
handkerchief
half to her nose but she freezes in surprise. “How did you know that?”

“There was an article in the library. And I spoke to Kirstin.”

“To Kirstin!” Peggy’s body stiffens. “She’s still there? What did she say?”

“She told me what happened. How she doubted Da. She said she was sorry.”

“Bit bloody late for that.”

“She lost her sister,” says Charlie unexpectedly. Peggy and I both swivel round to him. He’d been quiet so long, we’d almost forgotten he was there.

“She lost her sister,” he repeats gently, looking at Peggy.

“And I lost my brother,” says Peggy. “You saw him, Charlie. You were there.” Her voice begins to shake. “Though you weren’t there the night we came back to Glasgow. I’ll never forget how Joe was that night as long as I live. The state of him.”

They had driven down from Glasgow late at night, the day Da spoke to Kirstin. He couldn’t bear to be there a minute longer, according to Peggy. She tried to persuade him to stay a few days and pack up the house properly but he wouldn’t. He said the house felt dirty and he wanted none of it. He didn’t ever want to see it again and he didn’t want anything from it, or Lochglas, or Kath’s family. He threw some things in a couple of suitcases, put me and Sarah in our pyjamas and lifted us into the car in the dark.

They drove in silence, Peggy says. Until somewhere round Aviemore a song came on the radio. Percy Sledge. It was ‘their’ song – my parents’ song when they were dating. How strange for me to hear that. Da pulled into a lay-by and simply broke. Peggy tried to calm him down but he was inconsolable. Eight years, he kept saying. That’s all he had got out of a lifetime.

“I said he still had a lifetime but he wouldn’t hear of it,” says Peggy. “Not without Kath, he kept saying. It was over. He got a bit hysterical then and stumbled away, over to the bushes. I tried to stop him, but he shook me off, and I saw him leaning against a tree and heard him retching.”

I don’t cry, listening to Peggy. The pain is deep and tearless. It is hard trying to picture Da, controlled, quiet Da, in that state. I
try to imagine what he was feeling. The darkness. The fear. The fear, not just of losing Mother but of being blamed. Of being constantly interrogated by the police. Of being father to two children on his own for the rest of his life. And maybe worst of all, the fear of knowing that he had been given his life’s share of love already. It was over.

“You woke up,” Peggy says. “In the back of the car. Your dad could hear you crying and he came back. He was white and
shivering
, though it wasn’t cold. I hadn’t realised how thin he’d got. He lost two stone that summer. I said to him, ‘Joe, in the back of that car are the women you’re going to have to love now.’”

“What did Da say?”

“He just lifted you up and comforted you, and then he started up the engine and you went back to sleep with the noise of it, the movement.” Peggy sits back on the sofa, puts her head back against the cushion.

“We talked then. About what he was going to do. I tried to persuade him to get an accountancy job in Glasgow but for some reason he didn’t want to know. I couldn’t understand it. What was the point of that? I told him he had two kids to
support
and he’d be better paid in his own profession, but he said money was nothing to him. It was a new life he wanted. A new start. He didn’t want anything from the old life. He didn’t ever want to talk about it. I said well, he would have to talk about it because what was he going to tell you and Sarah when you were older? And Joe said, ‘Nothing.’ He was going to tell you nothing.”

She takes my hand this time, and we sit side by side on the sofa, fingers entwined.

“And he never did. He wanted you and Sarah to be happy, Becca. He didn’t want you to carry this. It was bad enough that
you would be growing up without a mother. We knew what that was like, me and Joe. Joe loved Mammy. We both did but Joe…” She stops again, unable to speak for a moment. “On Mammy’s funeral day, he lay on her coffin and told Daddy he wanted to go with her. He was so intense, Joe.”

Her thumb is rubbing little circles on my hand.

“He knew there was going to be pain for you both but he wanted to minimise it, to make it only the pain of not having a mother. Not the pain of having a mother who was murdered. Or the pain of having a father who had never been able to prove he didn’t kill her. I promised him that I’d help. That you would never know from me.”

“But Sarah?” I say.

“He was hers,” she says vehemently, and for a second I am confused and think, illogically, that she means Sarah was
biologically
Da’s child. “He loved her like she was his.”

“Did he ever think about not taking Sarah with him? Leaving her to Cory or to Kirstin?”

“Cory?” spits Peggy. “You think Cory would have claimed her? And if he had, you think your dad would have left her with him? A man like that?” She shakes her head. “Joe felt that Sarah was Kath’s, not Corey’s. He loved Kath and he would love Sarah. Simple as that.”

It isn’t simple, I think, as I look out the window at the trees swaying in the growing breeze. It isn’t simple at all.

Peggy squeezes my hand tight. “Becca, you can’t tell Sarah… Please…”

“I don’t want to tell her, Peggy,” I say. I am confused, unable to think clearly. “But doesn’t she have a right to…?”

“What would be the point?” demands Peggy. She shakes my
hand agitatedly. “What would be the point of telling her that the man she loved, that she’s grieving for, was not her dad really? What’s the point?”

“But it’s about who she is, Peggy, it’s her right…”

“You can’t,” she interrupts.

“People have the right to know where they come from.”

“You
can’t,
” repeats Peggy, and her voice is squeaky with
emotion
. “Don’t you see? It would be like your father’s whole life was for nothing. All the sacrifices. All the pain. Trying to protect you. It would be for nothing. For
nothing
.”

Her voice is getting louder. I can hear Sarah moving about in the room above us. Charlie stands up from the armchair and goes over to the sofa.

“Peg,” he says, and he lifts her to her feet. He puts her head against his chest and she doesn’t resist. Charlie wraps his arms right round her and she disappears into him, crying softly. “Shhh, now,” he says gently. “Shhh. You’ve done what you can, Peg. You’ve done your best. Always done your best. Becca will have to do what she thinks best now. She’ll do what she thinks is right.” For Charlie, it is a long speech.

Sarah comes in the room. She begins to say something, then sees Peggy crying against Charlie’s chest and stops.

“Come on,” I say, and pull Sarah gently from the room. “Let’s go and make Peggy and Charlie some breakfast.”

The roar of the hairdryer is irritating yet also strangely
comforting
. Da is to be buried this morning and nothing should feel comfortable. The noise assaults me, leaving my senses jangling. Then a lighter tone. I switch off. My phone. I scramble for my bag, emptying it out onto the duvet. A call, not a text. I think it’s going to stop ringing before I manage to get to it.

“Hello?”

There is a silence, just long enough to be unnerving, then a voice that is vaguely familiar says, “Rebecca?”

“Yes?”

“It’s David.”

My brain does not move immediately into gear.

“David Carruthers.”

“Hello David.” My voice registers my surprise.

“You got back home safely.”

He sounds strangely subdued.

“The funeral is today.”

“I’m sorry. I… I shouldn’t be phoning but…”

“It’s okay.” I feel alarmed and I don’t know why.

“Rebecca, it was me.”

I sit down suddenly on the edge of the bed, my mind making an illogical leap. For one stupid moment, I think he means it was he who murdered my mother but of course, that doesn’t make sense.

“What was you?” My voice is sharp, rising more aggressively than I mean it to.

“The texts. The Islands.”

“What?

“I’m sorry.”

But…” I turn towards the dressing-table mirror, suddenly catching sight of my own, unguarded reflection, incredulity etched into my face. None of this seems to fit.

“But I got the first text before I met you.”

“You phoned the office. My mother got the message and I knew I had to do something, the state of her… Rebecca she’s ill. I wanted you to just go away and not ask questions so I sent a text hoping it would unnerve you. Then I phoned you at the guest house to make sure. I didn’t plan to meet you, but…”

He means it. It was him. Fury sweeps over me as the reality sinks in.

“You bastard.”

He says nothing.

“You fucking terrified me at those Islands.”

“Rebecca, I wouldn’t have touched you. You weren’t in any real danger, I promise you. I liked you.”

“You liked me? You
liked
me, you little fucker!” I jump up from the bed, unable to keep still. I am shaking with anger, my hand trembling so much that the phone knocks lightly against the metal of my hooped earring. I am aware of the noise but somehow can’t think what to do to stop it.

“Listen…”

“I should get the police to you.”

“Please don’t. Please… I know I shouldn’t have phoned but…”

“So why did you phone? To be forgiven? Fucking forget it!”

“Rebecca, I phoned to explain but also to warn you.”

Something inside me goes cold. I stop suddenly, in the middle of the room, listening.

“James Cory,” he says.

“What about him?”

“He… I think you…” I hear him sigh in frustration. “Look, I need to tell you this from the start. Please just listen.
Please
.”

“You’d better be quick.” I look at my watch. “You might have forgotten, but I’ve got a funeral to go to.”

He ignores my hostility.

“When you phoned the office looking for my father, I did
really
want you to leave because my mother was so upset about the whole thing being raised again. It had been a terrible episode in my parents’ lives, and she does suffer from mental illness, so she really was in a state that this was all going to be dragged up again. That bit was absolutely true.”

I say nothing. I don’t feel the need to give him any verbal
encouragement
because I’m still furious.

“My father… I told you that he once spoke to me about the whole thing.”

The rain pattering gently against the bedroom window
suddenly
intensifies and I look over at the patterns of raindrops against the glass. So welcome after the heat.

“Rebecca, are you still there?”

“Yes.”

“There was one thing I didn’t tell you.”

“What?”

“It might be nothing.”

“
What
?”

“The week before your mother’s murder, James was in the
process of setting up his office in Glasgow. He and my father had a business trip together round the same time.” He
hesitates
. “My father said it might be completely irrelevant but… well, they were away three days and had gone to the hotel bar each night. On the final night, James said he was having an early night because of the journey next day. My father agreed but found he was a bit restless and decided, on a whim, to go out for half an hour to a small bar near the hotel. He saw James there.”

“So…?”

“It might be nothing, really…”

“David, what are you trying to tell me?

“James was sitting at a table, deep in conversation with a man.”

“Who?”

“My dad didn’t know. It wasn’t anyone he recognised. He said there was something about the way they were talking that seemed a bit odd.”

“Why odd?”

“Nothing he could put his finger on. Just a general
impression
. The way they were sitting. The body language.”

“Helpful.”

He sighs.

“So what happened?”

“James put his hand in his inside pocket as if he was
looking
for something but at that point, the barman asked Dad if he wanted a drink and he got distracted.”

“So he never saw what Cory took out of the pocket?”

“No – if he took anything out. Anyway, when Dad looked back, James caught sight of him. He had the distinct
impression
James wasn’t pleased to see him. The striking thing was how
quickly James got up and left the guy when he saw Dad. It was clear he didn’t want to introduce him.”

“And…?”

“That’s it really. I told you it might be nothing.”

It was hard to make sense of this.

“How did Cory explain the fact that he wasn’t having an early night?”

“He said that he’d had an unexpected call from a business
associate
– something to do with the new office – so he’d agreed to meet this man late on because they were leaving early in the morning to drive back to Inverness. It sounded perfectly
plausible
and my father didn’t think any more about it. He and James walked back to the hotel together, then had a nightcap in the hotel bar after all, before heading for bed. It was only later,
after
your mother died, that Dad found himself wondering again about who the man was.”

I don’t even know why he’s telling me this. Then a bell begins to ring in my head. A newspaper story I read about a man who arranged to have his business partner killed. The attempt was botched but he was later charged with attempted murder. The basis of the prosecution was that he was filmed the week before on a hotel’s CCTV, handing over money in a bar. A hitman. A clean way of killing. A way you get no blood under the
fingernails
, just as Jackie Sandford suspected. But of course, there was no CCTV back then to capture James Cory’s actions.

“Rebecca?”

It was the final piece of the jigsaw.

“I’m thinking.”

“Anyway, my father never said anything to the police.”

“Why not?”

“Because it could have been exactly what James claimed. And because James was his friend and he didn’t want to complicate his position by mentioning something that might have been completely irrelevant.”

“And might not…”

“And might not,” Carruthers agrees, his voice subdued. “
Anyway
, before I met you…”

“That’s the bit I don’t get,” I say belligerently. “You actually met me… We talked… We walked by the river… Christ, I nearly…”

“That was real.”

“How can it have been real when the next night you terrified the life out of me?”

“Rebecca, listen! I did that for a reason. Please try to… Before I met you, I contacted James and told him you were in town. We were old family friends and I thought you were just some
nuisance
who was going to open old wounds and stir up something that our families were glad to put behind us. I just wanted you to go away. But there was something about James’s reaction that… well, it unnerved me.”

“What?”

“I don’t know. Just an instinct. There was something not right. That’s all I can say, Rebecca. Something that combined in my head with the story my father told me. I know that my father wondered about that incident, in his later years especially. And then I met you and I began to think, what if James had been involved? What would he do to you? I wanted you to go home, but I knew you wouldn’t. You’re not the type to back off. I could tell that.”

“For fuck’s sake, David! What did you think Cory was going to do to me?”

But even asking the question makes me shiver suddenly. The silence that follows scares me.

“I needed you to go home,” David says eventually.

I sit back down on the edge of the bed. We both know what James Cory is capable of. David Carruthers had told me he didn’t believe Cory was capable of murder. But his actions
suggest
otherwise. When the chips were down, he followed his instinct. “Rebecca…?”

“What?”

“I said, can you forgive me?”

There is action, and there is motivation, and sometimes one is wrong and sometimes both are wrong. But, however wrong David Carruthers got the action, he has taken a huge
emotional
risk in phoning me, a risk that shows that he believes in me more than Cory. That moment at the river… Perhaps it had been real after all.

“Why did you phone today? Why did you tell me all this?”

“Because… because I didn’t like the idea that I had frightened you and that you might think you were still under threat. I
wanted
you to know you weren’t in real danger, that there wouldn’t be any more texts, and that nobody would follow you home.”

Shit. That hadn’t even occurred to me. “But I also want to make sure you leave this now, that you don’t go near James again. And yes, I admit that’s partly for my mother’s sake.” He pauses. “But it’s for yours too.”

“Is Cory… Do you think he…?”

“No. I think he thinks that you’ve gone and that it’s over. It
is
over, isn’t it?” There is an appeal in his voice.

I suppose it is, but I don’t answer.

“Another thing,” he says.

“There’s more, David? I’m not sure I can handle it.” Sarcasm is my default setting. I can’t help it.

“When I phoned and you were in James’s office…”

“Yes.”

“I had only called again to tell him I’d met you, that I didn’t think you would be sticking around. I wanted him to think you were just a grieving daughter up here on a passing whim. I didn’t want him near you. I told him you’d seen Terry Simons and were beginning to see that your father was most likely the guilty one.”

“What did he say?”

“That he was glad you had realised the truth.”

I smile grimly.

“Oh, I realised the truth all right.”

“I told him you were going home, tried to make out you were no threat.”

“And was I? A threat?”

“Yes, I think you probably were,” he says slowly. “Did you find anything else out after we met?”

He sounds curious. But can I trust him? Maybe this is all a ruse. Maybe Cory is making him phone to find out what I know.

“I found out what I already knew. My father did not kill my mother.”

“That’s good, Rebecca. You have peace then. But you can’t prove it, so please leave it now. Let it lie. Don’t come back here.”

“Not very friendly of you, David,” I say mockingly.

“I want you to be safe.”

I feel weary suddenly. The early rise. All the emotional
tension
. The ordeal still ahead. I let myself fall backwards onto the bed and stare at the ceiling.

“I wish…” he says.

“What?”

“I wish things could be different. That I could see you again.”

For a moment, I realise how easy it would be in other
circumstances
to build something in the north. The little threads that might amount to strong connections. My aunt Kirstin and her family. David Carruthers. The possibility of another life. But he is right. It can’t be pursued.

“Yes,” I agree vaguely. It is tempting, but maybe I have
finally
learned some sense. I don’t add an invitation to contact me when he is next in Glasgow.

I glance at my watch and sit up again.

“I have to go.”

“Good luck,” he says. “And I’m sorry. Really.”

“Goodbye, David,” I say.

For a moment after I hang up, I lie still on top of the bed,
listening
to the rain. There is something about David Carruthers that reminds me of Father Dangerous. He liked me enough to take a serious emotional risk. But not quite enough to be truly courageous.

The memories are rolling to an end. The song Shameena sang at the funeral is coming up again on the CD, and this time I will
finally
switch off when it finishes. I do not know how many times I have listened in the last few weeks, but I know it will be some time before I listen again.