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- Herausgeber: Allison & Busby
- Kategorie: Krimi
- Serie: DI Kelso Strang
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
When DCI Kelso Strang hears that an old friend from his police college days suspects there is corruption in her local station at Halliburgh in the Borders of Scotland, he sends her undercover so they can act before a major scandal erupts. What he doesn't expect is that this will have to take a back seat to an extraordinary series of events that unfold as revenge for a long-concealed and ugly secret takes its tragic course. Just as the situation becomes critical, the Beast from the East roars in bringing chaos and Strang can do nothing but rage and wait for the thaw.
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Seitenzahl: 488
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DEVIL’S GARDEN
ALINE TEMPLETON
For Archie, with fondest love
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
They left at first light, just as the thin, fiery streaks of dawn edged the great peaks of the Dolomites behind them. It was still too dark to see the terrifying drops on either side as the battered taxi negotiated its way round hairpin bends on the road leading down to the valley floor.
The two women sat in the back in silence. One stared straight ahead; the other, as the road twisted, glanced back each time at the village clinging precariously to the heights, where in the huddled houses lights were starting to appear like stars on the darkness. It dwindled into the distance until at last it disappeared as if it had been a mirage. A place where secrets could be left to disappear in the same way.
Further down the road, another woman stood looking out of the window to watch the new day arrive and saw the taxi pass on its way, though she didn’t know what she was seeing, barely registering it with her mind on what lay ahead. From the bed behind her, her husband’s voice spoke.
‘Excited, love?’
She could tell he was smiling. A little shudder ran through her, but she said, ‘Oh yes, excited,’ though to her ears the words sounded as hollow as a cracked bell.
CHAPTER ONE
It was a sharp February day with a low sun; on the horizon the Eildon hills looked softly smudged against a bleakly grey sky. There was snow lingering in the ditches and behind drystone walls, a sign of more to come. They were still forecasting hard weather ahead.
Cassie Trentham stared blankly out of the window of the big black car as it swept into the drive of the Borders crematorium at Melrose behind the hearse carrying the mortal remains of her brother Felix.
Felix – an ironic name for a tortured soul. Her own, Cassandra, fitted better. Like the priestess, she had warned him and warned him and had suffered the helpless agony of seeing her warnings ignored. They’d been so close – little more than a year apart – yet there had been nothing she could do.
But then when he was at his lowest ebb she’d managed to coax him back to live with her here − in safety, as she had thought; she’d actually been sure she had saved him and the dark days were behind them, so the shock of his death had been devastating. She wouldn’t have believed it could happen if she hadn’t learnt from bitter experience that addiction breeds an uncanny talent for deception. However hard it might be, she had to accept that she’d been wrong.
She turned her head to glance at her mother. Anna, impassive, was coolly elegant as always in a black collarless coat with a grey silk scarf at the neck. Her make-up was flawless and there wasn’t a hair out of place in her glossy angled bob. Was she feeling anything at all? Grief? Guilt?
She should be – guilt, anyway. In Cassie’s eyes she was to blame for what happened to Felix. It had always been clear that Anna’s children bored her. Absorbed in her own literary world she had given them money to make up for lack of love or even interest – money to leave her alone, really. Money that had subsidised Felix’s quest for perdition in Edinburgh. And he had found it.
Cassie’s throat constricted. She coughed, looked at her watch, changed her position; anything to distract herself and stop the tears coming. It would never do to be photographed sobbing when she emerged from the car. That would be bad for the dignity of The Brand. Because there they all were. ‘Private funeral’, the notice had said, but even at this early hour they were lying in wait: journalists making notes, cameras poised, someone holding a fuzzy microphone. Not that it would be headline news; just a snippet at the soft end of the national bulletin if it was a slow news day, the local programme if not, and a short paragraph on an inside page of the dailies.
They’d come anyway, along with a contingent of people from the town who would probably claim they had come to ‘support’ their famous neighbour and ‘show respect’, but their eyes were gleaming with prurient curiosity.
The cars stopped and the doors were opened for them. Anna got out and walked to the door of the chapel, through the blitz of flashing bulbs and machine-gun rattle of shutters as if she hadn’t noticed that they were there. As she went inside, the storm abated and Cassie, walking behind, heard a nearby reporter say into a microphone, her voice dripping with synthetic sympathy, ‘And here is Anna Harper arriving along with her daughter to mourn the loss of a son and brother …’ Cassie turned her head to give the woman a furious glare and had the satisfaction of hearing her stumble over her words.
The media would have been feeling cheated anyway that no famous literary names or actors who had starred in the films had appeared. Anna had seen to that – or rather, Marta had. She’d have done her ‘scorched earth’ act to protect Anna’s privacy, like she always did when that was needed.
Marta Morelli – housekeeper, secretary, close friend and handmaiden to genius – was waiting for them now, square and sturdy, as she stood with the celebrant in the blessed quiet of the chapel vestibule. Despite the expensive tailoring of her black dress and jacket, she still looked like an Italian peasant woman with her greying hair scraped back, though she was younger than Anna. Today her olive skin was grey-looking and she had dark shadows under her brown eyes. Beside her Anna looked ageless, Cassie thought, as they were escorted into the chapel.
There were no more than a couple of dozen people there who had survived her mother’s exclusion process: her agent, her publisher, some others Cassie didn’t know. None of her own friends had been asked and none of Felix’s either, though she didn’t mind that considering the company he had kept.
Nor their father. Had Anna even told James Trentham? If she had, would he have come from Los Angeles for the first time in fifteen years, now when it was too late for him to have any relationship with his needy son? No, Cassie didn’t mind his absence either.
They took their place in the front row. Anna folded her hands in her lap – elegant hands with slim fingers, the nails painted in a suitably muted pink – then sat entirely still throughout the short service, expressionless.
Impervious, Cassie thought as she struggled with her own composure. She didn’t believe Anna was experiencing any deep emotion of any sort.
She was wrong. Inside the carapace of Anna Harper The Brand, Anna Harper the woman was very, very afraid.
Kelso Strang was standing at the farther end of the living room drinking his breakfast coffee, looking out of the window at the view over Newhaven harbour and pretending not to hear his niece.
Betsy was finishing her breakfast. ‘Want Unkie to take me to nursery today,’ she demanded again.
His sister Finella was having her usual morning panic about assembling packed lunches and collecting up papers she’d been working on to shove in her briefcase. She said wearily, ‘No, Betsy. Unkie’s too busy.’
‘No he isn’t,’ her daughter pointed out with ruthless four-year-old logic. ‘He’s just standing there. I want Unkie to take me.’
Kelso sensed his sister’s hopeful glance in his direction but ignored it. It wasn’t good for Betsy to get away with being a monster because they couldn’t face the hassle of taking her head on. He took his mug across to put in the dishwasher, then began to clear the plates from the breakfast table. If he left Fin to stack it there’d be no room for the supper dishes tonight.
He hadn’t expected to still have house guests all this time later. When Finella left her partner Mark and she and Betsy had turned up so unexpectedly on his doorstep, he’d thought it would be a week or two, a month at most, before her lawyer could get Betsy’s father out of the Morningside flat and them back in.
But that was before Mark was arrested on a charge of embezzlement. Finella had seen it coming; he hadn’t been clever enough to cover it up and it had been pitifully obvious what he was doing. Kelso had even gone round to warn him that he wouldn’t get away with it but only got sworn at for his pains.
Now, of course, there was no Morningside flat any more. Their parents had rallied round, offering Finella a home with them in Perthshire or help with rent for a flat in Edinburgh so she could go on with her work as a solicitor. But Finella, always so calm, so reliable – stalwart, indeed – had buckled under the strain.
‘I couldn’t bear to go home to them,’ she had said pitifully. ‘Mum’s all right but Dad blames me for all of this.’
Kelso didn’t try to deny it. Major General Sir Roderick Strang had found so much to disapprove of, even before things fell apart – his daughter’s choice of Mark in the first place, and then her carelessness in failing to get respectably married before she had a baby – and it was hard to imagine him keeping his opinions to himself as details emerged at the trial.
‘Well, he’ll be glad now that you weren’t married,’ was the best he could offer.
‘It’s very good of them to say they’ll help me rent a flat, but – but I just don’t think I could cope.’ She gave a watery smile. ‘Sounds feeble, I know, but Betsy’s been so confused and unsettled, I just dread upsetting her all over again. You saw her when Mark said he was coming to take her out and didn’t turn up. I didn’t know what to do.’
Oh yes, he’d witnessed Betsy’s bewildered distress and been seized with a murderous rage; if he could have got his hands on the rotten bastard at that moment he’d have been the one up on a charge. With Finella so upset herself, it had needed Kelso to soothe the poor little thing with cuddles at first and then distraction – or bribery, to call it by its proper name. He could see what was coming.
There were tears in Finella’s eyes. ‘Oh I know, it’s an awful cheek. But you’ve been wonderful and I just don’t know what I’d do without you. Betsy adores you and I know you love her too. You wouldn’t mind if we stayed just a bit longer, would you? Just till we find our feet again?’
‘No, of course I don’t mind.’ What else could he say? But it shocked him to realise quite how much he did mind.
He loved kids. He and Alexa had been on their way to having their own, before the accident that had killed them both and left Kelso with a scar down the side of his face as a memento. The emptiness of the house – an old fisherman’s cottage on the shore at Newhaven in Edinburgh – had oppressed him at first, but in time he had come to relish it as an oasis in his stressful professional life. Having been an army sniper he had always been comfortable enough with his own company, and being DCI of the Serious Rural Crime Squad was a maverick job that could mean being sent solo anywhere in Scotland to direct operations at the local level where there was only a scaled-down CID.
Your own child is one thing; someone else’s child quite another. He’d never felt inclined to create a shrine of any sort, but in the little yellow-painted bedroom, so hopefully prepared as a nursery, there had lingered if not quite a ghost then the gentle spirit of the child who had never been. Now it resounded to Betsy’s cheerful chattering and her toys lay so thick on the ground that you could hardly see the carpet.
And when he had come home after being away on a job to find that Finella had emptied out all the kitchen cupboards and reorganised them, he’d had to get out of the room so that he wouldn’t explode.
‘It’s much easier for breakfast now,’ she had said happily to his retreating back. ‘Much more logical. I can’t imagine why you would want to have the coffee in this one, and the cereal right along there at the other end.’
Because that was where my darling Alexa put it, he said silently and savagely to himself in his bedroom. It was ridiculous to find tears in his eyes over something like this. When was the last time he’d actually cried? But he had so little left of Alexa now, and yes, cereal at the far end was illogical. He’d said that himself but she’d ignored him; leaving it where it was had meant that now when he wanted cereal he’d often thought of her with a little smile. Bit by bit, the house was being scourged of the past he and Alexa had shared.
He put the cereal packet back in its sensible place on the shelf below the coffee. Betsy was scowling now, the big blue eyes stormy. ‘Mummy, I said I – want – Unkie – to – take – me,’ she whined.
It was Finella’s turn to become absorbed at the far end of the room. Kelso could perfectly understand why she ducked confrontations. Having got away with far too much recently, Betsy had become adept at escalating a whine into a full-blown tempest of tears, which would leave everyone exhausted apart from her.
With an inward sigh, Kelso said, ‘Why don’t you ask me, Betsy?’
The storm clouds vanished and she beamed. ‘Please, Unkie, will you take me?’
He sat down opposite. ‘Well, Betsy, I can take you. But if I do, I will be in a very bad temper because you know you’re being naughty. I won’t speak to you, I won’t put on the radio so you’ll just have to sit and think about whether this has been a good idea. Or you can go with Mummy as usual and I’m sure she’ll be much nicer.’
Betsy looked comically crestfallen. She shot him a look under her lashes and then got down from her chair and went over to her mother without saying anything, her thumb in her mouth.
It was no fun having to be the bad cop, but it worked. ‘That’s a good girl,’ he said cheerfully. ‘And I tell you what – I’ll even read you a Peppa Pig story at bedtime tonight.’
Finella gave him a grateful look. ‘Now that really is heroic,’ she said. ‘Thanks, kid. And thanks too for—’
‘Aw, shucks,’ he said, and smiled at Betsy. ‘Am I forgiven?’
Still pouting a little but pragmatic, she came across to kiss him goodbye. ‘Two stories?’ she said, with a cajoling smile.
‘It’ll depend how good you’ve been,’ he warned as she set off with her mother.
Kelso looked at his watch and sighed. Time he was off too. It went without saying that he loved his sister and his wilful little niece had a firm hold on his heart, but he couldn’t help hoping that another investigation would come up soon to take him away from Edinburgh. Preferably to the Outer Isles.
As they drove back from the crematorium along the high street in Halliburgh, Cassie Trentham leant forward to the driver. ‘Let me off here, please. I’m not going up to the house.’
For the first time since they had left that morning, Anna Harper had a spontaneous reaction. Her head whipped round to look at her daughter. ‘We have guests coming back. As Chair of the Foundation, you’re a hostess.’ The car was slowing down; she raised her voice to say to the driver, ‘You have your instructions already. Drive on.’
‘Your guests, not mine. I’ve done enough for The Brand today and that’s it.’ Cassie turned to the driver, ‘I’m getting out here whether you stop or not so I think it would be wiser if you did.’
She could see him stifling a smile. ‘Right you are, miss. I’ll pull in further along there.’
Anna said coldly, ‘I’m not going to have an argument with you—’
‘No, you’re not,’ Cassie said with something of her mother’s hauteur. ‘Thanks very much,’ she added to the driver, reaching for the door handle as the car stopped.
Marta, sitting between them, put a hand on Cassie’s arm. ‘This is a very difficult day for your mother, Cassie. Don’t make it worse.’ She still retained an Italian accent but her English was perfectly fluent.
Cassie’s dark blue eyes blazed with anger. ‘A difficult day for my mother? When she’s arranged to have a party while my brother is even at this moment being reduced to ashes? Oh puh-lease!’
‘You know she has a duty,’ Marta said stiffly, but she was speaking to empty air. Cassie had jumped out and was hurrying away. She turned to look anxiously at Anna. ‘Are you all right, cara?’ she said, lowering her voice so that the driver could not hear.
Anna bit her lip. ‘It doesn’t look good. We should be presenting a united front. You know how the press picks up on these things.’
Trying to reassure her, Marta said, ‘It’s only your friends coming back to the house, after all.’
Anna gave her a level look. ‘Friends? You’re the only friend I have. These are potential enemies who must be neutralised before the next gossipy literary party.’ She sighed. ‘I’ll just have to say I could see how distressed Cassie was and I ordered her home to rest. That’s the best I can do.’
Blinded by tears, Cassie stumbled away from the car and heard it move off behind her. How dare Marta talk to her about Anna’s ‘difficult day’? Not that she was surprised. Marta saw everything through the prism of Anna’s wishes.
She was warm-hearted enough: in many ways she’d been more of a mother to Cassie and Felix than Anna had ever been, but it was affection at second hand. Children need to be loved for themselves, but Marta only loved them because they were Anna’s. In any clash of wills – and there were plenty of those – there was never any doubt whose side Marta was on. She might listen to their complaints, might even sympathise, but her advice would always be the same: do what your mother says. By and large, Cassie had. Felix hadn’t.
And look what came of that, she thought.
They’d be arriving back at the house now, ready to greet the ‘mourners’ – and that was a joke. Cassie doubted if any of them had even met Felix and she knew what their immediate reaction had been to the news of his death: damage limitation. She’d actually overheard a publicist saying, ‘Last thing we need just before the launch of Jacob’s Angel.’
By now they’d be accepting carefully judged canapés along with some suitably unfestive, but of course expensive, choice of wine. Marta would be sure to have found the appropriate ones to accompany the hostess’s son’s body being burned.
God, she wished she hadn’t thought of that. She couldn’t get it out of her mind now – Felix, the flames, the smell … She gagged, afraid she would vomit, right there on the street.
She’d turned off the high street into a side street that led uphill and out of the town towards her cottage. A sullen sleety rain had set in now and the rounded hills circling the valley where the little town lay felt oppressive today, as if they were coming in closer, closer.
She was passing the Foundation building on the other side of the road now, closed today of course. It was very stark, very modern compared to its traditional neighbours; there had been a lot of opposition at first but of course Anna had got what she wanted. She always did.
Cassie’s hair was soaking but she barely noticed. Walking with her head down she’d been aware of one or two passers-by glancing at her, but only briefly; the ghouls wouldn’t have had time to get back from the crematorium and now she’d reached the thirty-mile sign she should be safe enough.
After the turn-off it was another steep and very wet half-mile along a narrower road before she reached her cottage, standing on its own in a little walled garden. Today it looked grim but on a sunny day the position was idyllic, looking out over the valley to the gentle hills on the other side. Cassie had been charmed when first she saw it. It was built of old grey stone with a rustic porch and a slate roof and had arched dormer windows like eyebrows that gave it, she thought, a rather fetching quizzical look.
‘Small, but perfectly formed,’ she had said to Felix.
‘Oh bijou, darling, positively bijou,’ he had drawled, and then said, ‘Gilded cage?’
She had flushed. She knew exactly what he meant; Anna was luring her back to take charge of running the Foundation and this was the bribe: her very own home, no strings attached. The thing was, it was an alluring job – liaising with publishers and film-makers, answering enquiries, overseeing the charity side – and the alternative was job-hunting on her own merits with an unexciting arts degree.
She’d let herself be bought and she hadn’t regretted it. She loved the work and if she was honest it had satisfied, too, the craving for her mother’s attention that she still hadn’t managed to kick even as an adult. But if she’d turned it down, she thought now as she unlocked the front door – tastefully painted in Farrow and Ball Dix Blue – she’d have been in Edinburgh with Felix, perhaps might have been able to curb his self-destruction.
It was undeniably charming inside too. Marta had found the interior decorator for her with some skill; somehow the woman had known just what Cassie wanted but wouldn’t have been able to organise for herself and she’d always felt a little buzz of pleasure as she came into the sitting room that now ran right across the front of the house – a calm, welcoming room with big glass lamps on low tables and a couple of squashy sofas with white loose covers and scatter cushions that provided clever accents of colour.
She didn’t feel that now. The whole house was tainted with the memory of Felix’s death.
A couple of men had brought him there from the bus shelter in the village where he’d been found collapsed, comatose, drooling, snoring; the ambulance, they said, was on its way but it didn’t arrive in the half-hour it took him to die while Cassie screamed at him, weeping, as she tried to get some response. Her screams seemed somehow to have permeated the very fabric of the place, even though Marta had seen to it immediately that all visible signs be removed.
Cassie walked straight through to the kitchen at the back, sleek and modern with its polished granite worktops, and extended into a glass conservatory looking out at the hillside rising just behind. The sleet was heavier now and despite the heating the room felt cold and she shuddered. She didn’t know what she wanted – a cup of tea, a glass of wine? Brandy, probably, only she didn’t have any. She hardly had the energy to fill the kettle or open the fridge.
She sank down on to a chair beside the dining table. She could just sit here and cry some more, though she felt dry, shrivelled, as if she’d no tears left. Her mobile was lying on the table in front of her and she picked it up listlessly, by way of distraction.
There had been a number of calls and texts from friends, three from Gil Paton, but she swiped through them all. The last one was from Kate Graham. She hesitated, then clicked on the name and read the text message, which was brief. ‘Here if you want me. Free until eleven.’
Cassie looked at it for a long moment, then texted, ‘Thanks. Yes please.’ She sat staring out at the sleet while she waited for Kate to arrive.
The media packed up and departed and the crowd around the crematorium dispersed. A Ford Fiesta was trundling out in the stream of cars leaving the car park.
‘Lady Muck didn’t seem too upset, did she?’ the driver said acidly.
There were two other women in the car. Her front-seat passenger sniffed. ‘That’s right, Moira. Just looked straight through us when she came out – not even a smile to thank us for bothering to come.’
‘Cassie looked really upset, though, Denise,’ the woman in the back seat said. ‘I thought she was going to burst into tears.’
‘I didn’t say anything against Cassie, Sally. She’s all right – and Felix too, poor laddie. Terrible thing. All that money, and this is where he ends up. Just shows you.’
‘You get what’s coming to you,’ Moira said wisely.
Denise nodded. ‘Right enough. It’s all about money, with Anna. Shoves it in our faces, to show what she’s got compared to us peasants. It sticks in my throat the way we have to grovel just to get a bit of it for the community.’
‘Well don’t take it, then,’ Sally said tartly. ‘She’s a right to do what she wants with her money – she’s earned it.’
A chill descended on the car. After a pointed silence Moira said, ‘Well, I suppose, if you call it earning just to sit down and scribble a load of rubbish. Sally, I’ll drop you off first.’
‘That’s great. Thanks, Moira.’ It would mean driving past Denise’s door but Sally was unsurprised. She’d gone along out of genuine sympathy with the bereaved family and her unhelpful remarks were spoiling their fun. Once they got rid of her they could go back to slagging Anna off as much as they liked.
She was a relative newcomer to the area and had been naively shocked that a nice, friendly wee town like Halliburgh could harbour so much animosity towards someone who was so much their benefactor. The trouble, she supposed, was that Anna gave the impression that she’d bought a fiefdom where she could behave as she chose. Objections had poured in to the plans for her house and the Harper Foundation building which were totally out of keeping with the local architecture but the council seemed to be putty in her hands. There were rumours, too, that a housing development application by a local builder – Moira’s husband, in fact – had been turned down because Anna had felt it encroached on her privacy.
No one expected a world-famous author to base her social life here, but if she’d actually turned up to even some of the events that kept the heart of the community beating strongly, instead of sending a cheque or authorising a grant when asked, it might have been different. But she didn’t; she wasn’t interested in Halliburgh except on her own terms as a country retreat where her money could ensure that her privacy was ruthlessly protected.
Death didn’t respect the power of money, though, and now Sally thought about it, too much probably did every bit as much harm as too little – and being rich and famous was no consolation if it led to losing your only son.
For once she didn’t sigh over the state of the paintwork and the sagging gutter that dripped water on her head as she let herself into her modest semi.
CHAPTER TWO
The cars following the funeral limousine swept through the town in a decorous procession. The stop, apparently to let Anna’s daughter get out, was unexpected. At the wheel of the third car Anna’s editor Janine White grimaced sympathetically as she drew up.
‘Can’t cope with the wake, poor girl? I’m not surprised. She looked as if she was on the verge of breaking down in the chapel.’
As the leading car moved on again her passenger Richard Sansom said, ‘Her mother wasn’t. Not even a decent quiet tear – looked as if she was carved out of granite. Probably he was a liability, given the drug problem. Hard as nails, our Ms Harper.’
Janine gave him a sharp look. ‘Heading up publicity for her you can’t even afford to think that thought. Anna’s just a very private person who doesn’t wear her heart on her sleeve.’
‘Oh sure,’ Richard said, but there was a satirical edge to his voice. ‘I don’t have to believe it to say it.’
Janine frowned as they turned up the hill towards Anna’s house a little way out of the town. She wasn’t entirely happy about Richard, who had recently joined the PR department in Harrington Publishing. He was a self-confident thirty-something, fair-haired, blue-eyed though not as good-looking as he thought he was and hard as nails himself, in Janine’s estimation, but he was extremely efficient and so far Anna had made no complaints – they’d lost two or three people before on that count – and perhaps he’d settle in to it.
‘Why does she live out here, anyway?’ Richard asked. ‘Back of beyond – wouldn’t think it would appeal.’
‘I think the global success of Stolen Fire came as a shock. She actually said in an interview at the time that she was completely thrown by the stress of it all and she’d come here once early on to do an event and just felt that it was somewhere wonderfully peaceful. She’s got that nice little pied-à-terre in Holland Park when she wants a bit of civilisation.’
‘Odd that she’s not launching Jacob’s Angel from there, then. She’s only been to London twice for about ten minutes since I joined the company. The last time it seemed as if she couldn’t wait to get away.’
‘Yes, she’s certainly been more reclusive lately. Working on another book, maybe? We can always hope. You’re staying on here, aren’t you? With the Foundation Writers Retreat on just now she’ll want to be sure you’re on hand and I suppose you can do quite a bit in the run-up to the launch too. Where are you staying?’
Richard grimaced. ‘There’s a pub in the village that isn’t too dire, I suppose. I’m braced for fire-fighting in case someone does a snarky, “How come the woman who embodies the dreams of hope for all the world has a dysfunctional family?” piece.’
Janine shuddered. ‘Don’t even think that.’
Highfield House was just coming into view, its white bulk looming up out of the sleety drizzle. With its sharply art deco lines and expanses of plate glass, it was jarring against the backdrop of a comfortable rural landscape and the soft grey and pink stone of the buildings in the town below. Janine, who had been there before, still found it startling. Richard, who hadn’t, whistled.
‘Wow, that’s giving them the finger isn’t it? Malibu Beach comes to Halliburgh!’
Janine said, uncomfortably, ‘I think there was a little bit of opposition. Here’s the gateway now.’
There had been a police presence at the crematorium and there was a police car parked outside the house, a deterrent to ambitious journalists, but there was no one around as Anna’s car came up to the front door. Janine drove on round the side of the house to a tarmac car park area to stop beside a caterer’s van and a couple of other cars.
As they drew up, Richard said, ‘So – what do we say to her as we go in?’
There was a sort of suppressed excitement about him that Janine found distasteful. ‘You don’t need to say anything much. “Sorry for your loss,” that sort of thing. Just remember you’re talking to a bereaved mother.’
‘If you say so,’ Richard said as he got out.
There were curved steps leading up to the imposing flattened arch of the front entrance. A waiter was acting as doorman, and James Harrington, head of the firm, was already on his way in, followed by the CEO.
There was no sign of Anna or even Marta in the wide hall, minimally furnished with an art deco wooden table in the centre with a Lalique glass sculpture sitting on it and a pair of wooden settles against the end walls. A gallery ran high above along the back, and another waiter came forward to show them up wide, shallow stairs to the sitting room at first-floor level, looking out over the town in the valley below. It was well heated but a fire was blazing in the pale stone fireplace and Anna, a glass already in her hand, was standing beside it as if she welcomed its warmth. Marta was hovering at her side as James went up to greet her.
‘James!’ Anna said, leaning forward to kiss him on either cheek. ‘So good of you to come. Sorry Cassie isn’t here to say hello. I know she was looking forward to having a chat, but she was so upset, poor child, I insisted that she just went home. She and Felix were very close. Do forgive her.’
‘Of course, of course,’ James boomed heartily. ‘Entirely understandable. And how are you, my dear?’
‘Oh—’ Her hand waved away a question. ‘Keeping busy. Now, I did just want a quiet word with you …’ She linked arms with him and drew him to the far end of the big room.
The other guests appeared, pausing uncertainly on the threshold, then forming an awkward grouping beside the window, lamenting the weather that was spoiling the view across the valley. Marta, who had disappeared, came back escorting two waitresses with trays of tiny sandwiches and croustades and glasses of wine.
It was obvious there would be no question of formal greetings. The conversations, stilted at first, gradually fell into the usual pattern of chat and gossip and the volume level rose. After a little while Janine withdrew herself and went across to where Anna and James were still deep in conversation. She hesitated, wondering if James was in need of rescue, though not wishing to butt in, but as she came up Anna turned to include her.
On the outskirts of the group, Richard looked on, his eyes cold and cynical. He had seen Felix Harper consigned to the flames; now he was watching him, with his inconvenient weakness, being buried.
PC Kate Graham checked her phone once she’d finished hoovering and clicked on Cassie Harper’s text. She’d been planning to go to the crematorium where perhaps she could have caught Cassie’s eye encouragingly as she went in, but someone else had been assigned to do the police presence bit – not that any problem was expected, but given Anna Harper’s profile it was always possible.
She hadn’t been at all sure what it was likely to say and she was pleased to be wanted, even if it did mean a dash to finish up here before she went on duty.
Kate was worried about Cassie’s state of mind. When the 999 call came in she’d arrived at Burnside, Cassie’s cottage, before the ambulance did; helplessly watching Felix Trentham die had been one of the most hideous experiences in her professional life. She’d joined in Cassie’s frantic efforts to rouse him, knowing they were pointless, and the scream Cassie had given when she realised they had lost him still echoed in her own dreams. She didn’t dare to let herself imagine what it had done to Cassie.
She had asked to be assigned as family liaison officer. Her approach to Anna Harper had been met with chilly courtesy and the promise that she would contact DC Graham if she felt it would be useful, her manner suggesting that hell would freeze over first.
It was different with Cassie. By then she was back in Burnside and when she opened the door she collapsed into Kate’s arms, sobbing. ‘You tried,’ she said. ‘Thank you. You tried.’ Then they had talked for many, many hours as she ranted about her mother and obsessively went over Felix’s history.
‘I’d almost given up hope. I didn’t even know where he was – he hadn’t been in touch for months. And then, thank God, he was arrested and he was scared enough to get in touch. He’d been sleeping rough, permanently stoned, and got into some kind of trouble and was picked up. It wasn’t anything major – just a fine and a slap on the wrist – but he agreed to come back here. He knew he couldn’t go on like that – he didn’t want to, I know he didn’t. And I thought he would be so safe here. How could there be drugs in a place like this?’
Kate had given a wry smile. ‘These days it’s everywhere,’ she said.
‘But I don’t believe he’d have gone out looking for it! He’d started to enjoy life again – putting on weight, planning to go back to uni. Someone must have done it deliberately, discovered his problem and offered it to him.’
It wouldn’t have been difficult. Everyone in the town knew Felix Trentham was a druggie; there was no such thing as anonymity when you were Anna Harper’s son. ‘I expect that’s right,’ Kate said diplomatically.
Cassie leant forward to grasp her hand. ‘So will you find out who? It was murder. They killed him.’
Kate had made some anodyne reply about investigations being under way but she knew it would come to nothing. Whatever his sister might like to think, the person who had killed Felix Trentham was Felix Trentham.
Cassie had been in shock at the time. Now, Kate thought, it was more as if she was suffering post-traumatic stress – having flashbacks, not sleeping, not eating. The funeral would have been hard indeed.
She hoped Cassie wasn’t going to ask her about progress with the enquiry. The death certificate had been issued, the case had been closed and she couldn’t herself see any reason why it shouldn’t be. It would be hard for Cassie to accept that someone was just going to, as she saw it, get away with murder.
Kate sighed as she put the hoover away, checked that her father’s lunch was laid out ready for the carer and fetched her coat.
‘That’s me away, Dad,’ she called.
‘All right, love. You just take good care of yourself, now,’ he called back as he always did when she went out to work the mean streets of Halliburgh. Kate was smiling as she drove away. He was very uncomplaining, her dad, however frustrating he found his limitations.
She drove up through sleet that was getting thicker by the minute to Cassie’s cottage. It was certainly picturesque, but she wouldn’t choose to live out here in winter when the smaller roads were so frequently blocked with snow.
At the cottage, she tapped on the door and walked in calling, ‘Hello!’ Cassie must be in the kitchen as usual; Kate wondered if she’d ever sat in the front room since that terrible night. She hurried through it herself.
Cassie was sitting slumped in a chair at the table in the conservatory, her face as bleak as the dreary landscape outside. She turned her head and made an attempt at a smile.
‘Thanks, Kate. I’m sorry to bother you. I don’t even know what there is that you can do.’
‘Make a cup of tea for a start,’ Kate said briskly, switching on the kettle and picking up a tin. ‘And there are some chocolate digestives I brought last time – unless you’ve eaten them all? No, I didn’t think so. Right – now tell me about it.’
Angry colour came into Cassie’s face. ‘Would you believe my mother said nothing – nothing? Not a word, not a look, until she tried to make me go to this party she arranged.’
‘Party?’ Kate was startled.
‘I suppose she’d call it a wake. But none of them cared about Felix, Kate. Most of them didn’t know him at all. It was a public relations exercise to protect The Brand.’
Kate had heard all about The Brand, to which everything else had to be subservient. She brought over the mugs and biscuits and sat down, taking a biscuit herself and putting one in front of Cassie. ‘So what are you going to do now?’
Cassie bit into the biscuit, almost absent-mindedly. ‘I suppose I’m going to get up tomorrow and just keep buggering on. What’s the alternative?’
‘Will you be happy to go on working for your mother, after what you’ve said to me?’
Cassie gave a deep, deep sigh. ‘If I resigned the only person it would hurt would be me. She wouldn’t care.’
Anna Harper, as portrayed by her daughter, had no emotions recognisable as human. Kate had felt the icy edge of her personality herself, but Anna had taken some trouble to keep her daughter close. Affection? Expediency? She wouldn’t presume to know.
‘Are you going in tomorrow?’ Kate was concerned. ‘You’re looking shattered. Should you not take a few days off?’
Cassie gave a short laugh. ‘And do what? Sit here staring out at that?’
The sleet was turning to snow, the flakes thicker, dancing a silent ballet against the grey backdrop of hill and sky. She was probably right to keep herself busy, but when Kate left she was still concerned. The problem was she couldn’t think what else to suggest. She certainly couldn’t see Cassie going to her mother so they could grieve together.
The guests had lingered at Highfield House as if no one quite liked to be the first to go. With the leaden sky the light had been fading even before they left and now it was quite dark. The fire in the stone fireplace was dying, just a few smouldering embers in their pile of ash. A basket heaped with logs stood beside it, but Anna Harper made no move to put them on, and though there were several table lamps casting pools of ambient light she had chosen to sit in a corner where no light fell. The floor-to-ceiling windows that ran right across one end of the room with no curtains to mar their architectural elegance were great squares of blackness.
She didn’t turn her head when the door opened. Marta’s voice said ‘Anna?’ and then, ‘Oh, you are there. At first I didn’t see you. And the fire – it is going out.’ She bustled over to create a base of kindling then logs piled so skilfully that they caught at once. ‘That’s better. I know the heating’s on but you always like to see the flames.’ She turned round.
Anna was sitting on a cream leather sofa with a glass in her hand and Marta frowned. ‘You are drinking all day, cara. How many pills did you take?’
‘Not enough.’
Marta sighed then went over to the drinks cupboard, which was standing open, and poured herself a glass before she came back to sit at the other end. ‘You managed.’
‘I got through it, yes. But Marta,’ her voice was thick with tears, ‘Cassie thinks I didn’t love him. I did, you know I did!’
‘Cassie’s upset. She doesn’t really mean it.’
‘Oh yes, she does, and I know why. I’ve been an odd sort of mother. It’s just that when I’m writing, I’m possessed, as if somehow I’m being forced to write, and I get so absorbed that the books are more real than reality. Real people seem sort of – faded, I suppose, compared to the characters. Real people are, well, out there, whereas they’re in me, part of me, all the time.’
‘I know, I know.’ Marta reached across to pat Anna’s hand. ‘You do what you must do. You were given the gift for a purpose and right from the day when Stolen Fire was published, you have been changing people’s lives, right across the world. How many of your readers have written to thank you? Hundreds – thousands, even! And your children – they have wanted for nothing.’
Anna looked at her, mouth twisted in a cynical smile.
‘Wanted for nothing,’ Marta repeated firmly. ‘But they could not have everything. They wanted all of you – that’s what every child wants – and they couldn’t have it. What does he say – the writer you like? You march to a different drum?’
‘Thoreau,’ Anna said. ‘Oh yes.’ She took another sip of her wine.
‘Anyway, it was all right today, do you think?’
Anna sighed. ‘I hope so. They seemed to accept Cassie not being there.’
‘That was natural – she is a girl who has lost her brother. They were sympathetic.’
‘It’s just we can’t afford scandal, Marta – not right now with so much attention on the book coming out.’
‘Not scandal. Just tragedy.’
‘Yes.’ Anna shifted in her seat. ‘It’s just … well, you know. With this hanging over us …’
‘It’s gone quiet these past two weeks,’ Marta said. ‘We don’t even know what it is all about – we are only guessing. And here we have good security.’
‘Yes of course, it could be anything and we’re just hypersensitive. But whatever it is, how did he know we were here? How did he even know my personal addresses? The last note came here, right after we left Holland Park. I feel he could be watching us at this moment. I feel trapped – it’s like being imprisoned. And how can you go to the police when you’re a criminal yourself? Did you look at the crowd at the crematorium this morning?’
‘Of course. No one seemed strange, but then I don’t know what I look for. Not even if it is him or her.’ Marta leant forward to look the other woman in the face. ‘Anna, you always said you didn’t know. Now, I have to be sure – was that really true?’
‘Oh yes,’ Anna said heavily. ‘You remember – they’d said it would be best, given what I fed them about the father having got custody and taking it away. And I certainly didn’t want to know.’
Marta sighed. ‘Yes. They were right, I think, but now … Could a woman be so cruel, ruthless, like a man would be?’
‘Why not? “More deadly than the male,” you know. And probably more subtle too.’
‘I suppose, maybe. But we must not be frightened into being stupid. It is all about money, I think. Blackmail. You have money. Pay him to go away.’
‘But there’s no contact! How can I, when all we get is these notes, with no way to get back to him? He doesn’t mention money.’ She looked up to meet her friend’s eyes. ‘“You know what you have done”, and then all the guilt and atonement stuff. Perhaps he is just a random religious nut, but I don’t think so and neither do you. He means to frighten us, and he does. I’m afraid, Marta – I’m so afraid!’ Anna drained her glass and got up to refill it.
Marta got up, determinedly practical. ‘If you drink any more you will not be more brave, you will just be ill. You need to eat. I will make you an omelette, yes?’ She didn’t wait for an answer before she went downstairs to the kitchen.
Anna took her full glass and went to stand by the window, looking out. All she could see was her own reflection and beyond it the reflection of the lamps in the room, dancing on the darkness. Was he, or she, out there looking in? She shuddered, suddenly feeling vulnerable, a target in this lighted room, and fled back to her shadowy corner.
She heard Marta’s footsteps coming back up the stairs, quick footsteps, her shoes clicking on the polished wood floor. Too soon to have made the omelette. With sudden foreboding, Anna swung round.
Marta’s face was pale. She was holding out an envelope addressed to Anna Harper, in block capitals and black ink. ‘On the hall table,’ she said. ‘I only noticed it when I switched the lights on just now.’
Anna took it, though her hands were shaking so much she had to take two attempts to slip her thumb under the seal. She drew out the note inside and Marta came to stand beside her so that they could read it together.
It was computer-printed on ordinary paper, as usual, and it was brief, as all the notes had been. Just two words.
‘Payback time.’
CHAPTER THREE
Kayleigh Burns took an anxious glance at her watch and gave a final polish to the gleaming black marble surface beside the sink in Anna Harper’s kitchen. She undid the strings of the smart black and white-striped linen apron inherited from the previous cleaner, which tied twice round her slim waist, and went to put it away in the cleaning cupboard. It swung open to a fingertip touch and she hung it on the hook below the label marked ‘apron’ in Marta’s firm script.
She gave a final glance round to make sure nothing marred the pristine surfaces: no garish bottle of cleaner, no blue rubber gloves carelessly left out to spoil the chilly purity of the black and white room. It was a kitchen meant for cooking in, not for being the cosy hub of the house, and Marta was apt to behave as if someone had goosed her if she came in and found something out of place – dried up old bat! She wasn’t sure how Anna would react; she wasn’t entirely sure that Anna had ever been in the kitchen. Not that she was ‘Anna’ to Kayleigh. Presumably she was Mrs Trentham, though Marta always referred to her as Ms Harper. Kayleigh hadn’t as yet really had occasion to call her anything.
In addition to her routine cleaning, the caterers had left her with all the clearing-up to do, though she obviously hadn’t been considered worthy of the honour of handing round drinks to the guests. There hadn’t been that many of them but from the sound of it they’d enjoyed themselves all right – lots of chat and even laughter, empty bottles and hardly any canapés left over for her to finish off.
Anna hadn’t been exactly in pieces, then. That figured; Kayleigh hadn’t seen any sign that she’d been devastated when it happened, either. Cold-blooded, she’d been. Showed what sort of mother she was, caring so little about her child.
It made Kayleigh think about her own son. She glanced at her watch again. She’d been hoping to get back to the flat before he got home from school. She was running late; Jason, her partner, was always irritable if Danny interrupted his writing schedule and if Danny found that she wasn’t in he was likely to go straight back out again. She was worried about the company he was keeping; he was a big boy for twelve and some of the kids he ran around with were years older. She knew all too well the sort of stuff they were into and the thought of Danny getting drawn in scared her rigid.
With a last glance around the big room that under the LED task lighting looked as sterile as an operating theatre, Kayleigh hurried out. It fell into darkness behind her as she pressed the switch but as soon as she stepped outside the security lights came on.
There was a soughing wind now and the soft, wet snow was falling fast. It wasn’t lying, though; the tarmac on the area here at the back where she parked her elderly Fiat was glistening black. She drove down to the electric gate and got out to key in the code. The gate swung open obediently and she drove off down the hill. As she took the turn on to the road the car slid just slightly and her heart missed a beat; the road surface was greasy under the worn tyres she couldn’t afford to replace and if she wrote off the car she’d lose her job and that would be a disaster. She got it back without mishap, though, and parked it outside the flat in a side road just off the high street.
‘Hello!’ she called as she let herself in, brushing a few snowflakes off her hair.
There was no reply and her heart sank. She knew not to expect a response from Jason if the writing was going well but by now Danny should be home. ‘Danny?’ she called, going along to open the door to his bedroom. It was empty, if you could describe as empty a tiny room so crammed with random objects. She was forbidden to tidy it, but she picked her way across to collect up the dirty glass and plate with toast crumbs from the top of the pile of stuff on the table by his bed.
In the galley kitchen, almost comical in its shoddiness compared to the one she had just left, a jar of Nutella stood on the chipped red Formica surface with a knife still stuck in it alongside a half-empty two-litre bottle of Irn-Bru with the cap left off. She sighed as she screwed it on again and put it back in the fridge. She couldn’t see the Nutella lid but she washed the knife and put it back in the drawer, her stomach knotting with tension. She should have left earlier but Marta Morelli would be on her case if there was so much as a mug on the draining board.
Where was Danny? There was often a gang of them that met up round the bus shelter and once or twice she’d actually braved his fury and gone down there to fetch him home, but apart from that Kayleigh wouldn’t begin to know where to look for him – and surely they wouldn’t be outside on a night like this?
She hesitated. Was there any point in disturbing Jason to ask if Danny had spoken to him? It would certainly put Jason in a bad mood and he was unlikely even to have seen him. Then she heard him opening the door of their bedroom where he had fitted up a corner as a workspace.
‘Oh good!’ she said. ‘Jason, have you seen Danny?’
He looked at her sardonically. ‘Not, “Hello, love, have you had a good day?” No, I haven’t. I heard him come in and I heard him go out again about ten minutes ago.’
‘Oh. Well, I expect he’ll be back when he’s hungry.’ Kayleigh managed a smile. ‘So – how was your day, then?’
Jason shrugged. ‘Got a bit done. But more to the point, how were things at Anna’s palace?’
‘Busy. People came back after the funeral and I’d a lot of clearing up to do—’
He made an impatient sound. ‘I meant, how’s she taking it? Quite a humiliation for the Queen of Perfection to have to admit to a crackhead son OD-ing. What was she wearing?’ His tone was unpleasant.
‘I didn’t see her.’
‘Of course, with you working below stairs, you wouldn’t. Didn’t come and give you a twirl once she was ready to go? I wondered, you see, if she’d go deep black for mourning or a defiant bright red to pretend it was a service of thanksgiving – unlikely that, I suppose, since she must be pissed off as hell that he did it just before the big launch we’ve been hearing so much about. Do you suppose he did that deliberately, to spoil her fun? She certainly asks for it.’
Kayleigh knew all too well why Jason was bitter. It was a grievance he rehearsed so regularly that she could have recited it in unison with him. The local paper had interviewed him when his debut novel came out and, clearly taken with the notion of two great novelists in one small place, made an unfortunate reference to ‘a young Anna Harper in the making’. The review that had appeared in the Sunday Times the following week had been pitiless and the fortune the book was going to make him had never materialised. Having read The Dark Hunger herself, Kayleigh was fairly certain that it hadn’t been going to anyway – there had been no other reviews – but Jason claimed that Anna had the critic in her pocket and that he’d been a victim of the Harper curse. Her reaction to anyone setting even a tentative toe on her territory was reputedly brutal and he had just been unlucky.
It was all the more surprising that he’d applied for a place on one of the Harper Foundation’s Writers’ Retreat weeks – not only that, but for this particular one, where Anna Harper gave her once-a-year masterclass. It had, of course, been heavily oversubscribed but local applicants usually got preferential treatment. And maybe Anna had felt a bit guilty about that review, but if she thought this would soften him up, she’d another thing coming.
Kayleigh had thought too that he’d object when she announced she’d got the job at Highfield but he’d only said, ‘Might as well get something out of the old bitch,’ and it certainly paid better than anything else around here. She was permanently skint, though he always seemed to have money for whatever he wanted to do. His only reply to Kayleigh’s suggestion that he should get a job was, ‘I have one already. I’m an author.’
