Bad Blood Page 11

  What he certainly wasn’t going to do was get involved in any Baxter initiative. Her prying avidity was disgusting and he’d made his distaste plain. She had definitely taken offence – as if he cared!

  He could take it to the police – by a distance the most sensible option. He’d been a Justice of the Peace himself at one time, and this girl’s behaviour was pretty much a textbook case of conduct likely to provoke a breach of the peace. Crichton was ready to breach it himself, right now.

  The other thing he could do was drive over to Dunmore and take Anita Loudon by the throat. According to Lorna Baxter, she was in on this. She had been one of the child witnesses at Burnside’s trial and Lorna claimed that she knew more about it than she’d said at the time. If all these years she’d been facilitating Kirstie Burnside’s spying – he took an incautious gulp of whisky and choked, painfully.

  He dabbed at his streaming eyes. Sort out Anita, that was the first thing. And if what Lorna had said really was true—

  Denise opened the sitting-room door and peeped round it tentatively. ‘Supper’s ready. But I can keep it hot for you, if you want to finish your drink.’

  ‘No, no, I’ll bring it with me.’ Crichton stood up, lurching a little as he did. He wasn’t drunk enough to think it was reasonable to get behind the wheel of a car, so Anita would have to wait.

  Anita was sitting watching Wallander on TV. At least, the set was switched on and she was facing it, but if someone had offered her a million pounds for a summary of the plot she would have had to pass.

  She kept going over and over Drax’s response to her account of events over the phone, which despite all her preparation beforehand had been rambling and a bit incoherent, partly because of the unnerving silence at the other end. When at last she abandoned the attempt to generate a reaction and her own voice trailed into silence, she wondered for a moment if he was still on the line. At last he said, ‘I – see.’ That was all. Then he did ring off.

  ‘I – see.’ Anita could picture his face as he said that: pale, taut, his lips a thin line and those dark eyes lit with a flame of anger, more frightening for being unvoiced, and she shivered. When he was like that he was totally unpredictable. Sometimes he would do no more than emanate icy rage; on other occasions he would lash out without warning, like a snake striking.

  She had only taken the brunt of it a few times, but she’d seen the after-effects on Karen too. Karen would stand up to him, scream and strike back, but after the first time Anita had the sense to go down and lie still. Once she’d got a kicking, but usually he turned away as if he had achieved what he wanted. He’d never mention it afterwards but once his anger was spent he would exert himself to please her. An occasional bruised face was a small price to pay.

  The other tactic, the best one, was not to be there when Drax was displeased. She’d managed it this time, but she wasn’t naive enough to think that was the end of it. He’d summon her, or he’d come here, but distance was safety. By then he would have had time to calm down, at least a little. She hoped.

  She heard a key in the lock first, then the imperious double ring on the doorbell. She’d bolted the door when she came in and her first thought was not to open it. Anita knew it was him – her breathing shortened; her hand went to her mouth in the gesture of a terrified child.

  The doorbell rang again, a long ring this time, along with a knocking on the door. As she sat there, unable to move, she heard his footsteps on the path outside the window and heard his voice, light, amused.

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Anita! I know you’re in there. Don’t be ridiculous! I really don’t want to have to break the window.’

  Somehow she got to her feet, went to the front door, shot back the bolts and opened it. Drax had come back to the doorstep and outlined against the light from the street lamps he seemed very tall. With his face in shadow the only definition came from the line of his brows, the glint of his eyes and his smiling mouth, contrasted with the white of his teeth.

  He stepped inside, sweeping her into an embrace. Stunned, she clung to him as he kissed her and staggered a little as he released her again, laughing at her confusion.

  ‘What the hell did you think I was going to do to you? Don’t ever try to shut me out again, though – naughty girl! Got some Scotch? We’ve a lot to talk about.’

  He went on past her into the kitchen and Anita followed more slowly, rubbing at her lips, still bruised from his kiss, still shaken by her own instant response to it. His behaviour was confusing; she had heard what he said but when he stepped into the lighted hallway she saw the steel behind the smile and the marks of anger in the taut lines of his face. She resolved to keep her distance until she was sure he wasn’t going to snap.

  But as they sat over the whisky Drax seemed to have relaxed. He was sipping it, not downing it with the sort of cold intensity that always meant mayhem. He was lounging in his chair, making encouraging noises as she went through the whole story again, prompting her with questions until he was satisfied that she had told him all there was to tell.

  Then he was silent for a moment or two, holding up his hand when she tried to speak. At last he said briskly, ‘Right. To sum up: we don’t know why she’s come, we don’t know who she’s talked to already, we don’t know where she’s staying. Lorna Baxter’s vigilante brigade is on the march. The girl can’t be convinced that anything she remembers is wrong, so she’s difficult to lie to.

  ‘Suppose we just tell her who her mother was, and that she’d better leave before someone takes the law into their own hands?’

  Anita shook her head. ‘She might go away, perhaps. But it won’t stop her trying to find out what happened to Karen.’

  She stole a glance at him as she said that, but he was looking into the middle distance. He was frowning, but he had been so understanding that she felt emboldened to say, ‘The thing is, Drax, I’m getting frightened. I’m not young, the way I was; I get panic attacks and if it’s all stirred up again, if they start on the endless questions, I’m afraid I’ll break.’

  ‘Break?’ He turned his gaze on her and she realised how wrong she had been to think that he was relaxed. ‘Oh no, my sweet, you won’t break – will you?’

  Anita swallowed hard. ‘No, Drax, of course I won’t. It was just – oh, me being silly, I suppose.’

  ‘Then don’t be silly,’ he said, his voice silky, and Anita feeling suddenly cold wondered why she had been foolish enough to think that telling Drax her problems was a wise thing to do.

  ‘I’ve eaten far too much,’ Marjory Fleming said ruefully as she and Bill went up to bed after Cammie’s celebratory supper. ‘With Karolina pulling out all the stops for the first course and Mum going her length on the puddings, I’m going to have to starve for the next three days.’

  ‘I’m just going to find the Rennies,’ Bill said. ‘They’re an absolutely lethal combination, the pair of them.’

  Karolina Cisek, whose husband Rafael worked on the farm with Bill, played domestic goddess to the Fleming household, aided and abetted by Marjory’s mother Janet Laird, who suffered from a sense of guilt that she had not managed to impart any of the housewifely virtues to her daughter. Their joint feast for Cammie had been a triumph of culinary skill.

  Marjory laughed unsympathetically. ‘The penalties of greed,’ she called after Bill as he headed for the medicine cabinet.

  She was still smiling as she sat down at the dressing table to take off her make-up. It had been such a lovely evening, the happiest as a family that she could remember for a long time.

  Cat had been holding her at arm’s length ever since last year’s disaster but her pleasure at Cammie’s success seemed to have softened her tonight, and she was less abrasive, too, when Janet was around. Cat had always been devoted to her grandmother and with her now approaching eighty, that affection had developed into a touching protectiveness which so far Janet, thank goodness, had shown no sign of needing. She had an active social life and was kept busy, too, with charita
ble good works for elderly ladies rather younger than she was herself.

  Cammie, the star of the show, had been alight with happiness. Seeing his shining face, his mother had felt a pang: how rare they were, those golden moments of unadulterated joy, and how quickly they dissipated. Before long Cammie would be worrying about doing well enough to cement his place in the team.

  It had been a golden evening for them all, in fact, and Cat had given her mother a spontaneous hug when she said goodnight, the first for a long, long time. It looked almost as though peace was being declared and Marjory found herself wiping away a sentimental tear along with her mascara.

  Shelley Crichton found she couldn’t settle to anything. She had a headache for a start, and she was finding it very difficult to sort out her feelings about all that had happened today.

  Janette had told her what to think. ‘You know what Lorna Bruce is like,’ she said firmly. ‘That woman would cause trouble in an empty house and she’s just using you. Anita explained who the girl was, and the only reason you thought she had such a strong resemblance to Kirstie was because she was so much on your mind at that moment. If you saw her now, you’d wonder why on earth you thought that.’

  Shelley, still tearful and feeling a little shocked by Lorna’s aggressiveness, had allowed herself to be convinced. But now, at home by herself, she wasn’t so sure.

  If Kirstie Burnside really had sent her daughter to gloat, as Lorna had claimed, it was almost as wicked as what she had done originally. They had said at the trial that she had an ungovernable temper, that she had just lashed out, and she was only a child at the time – a child whose own experience of family life had been horrifying, violent abuse. The counsellor they’d arranged for Shelley afterwards had stressed that, and of course she acknowledged the child had suffered – of course she did. In a way. It hadn’t done anything to assuage her grief for Tommy, though, or tempered her hatred or blunted her wish for revenge.

  She still had the dreams, dreams where she confronted Kirstie Burnside – sometimes a child, sometimes a woman with a child’s face – and screamed her hatred, until Shelley found there was a knife in her hand and plunged it deep, deep in her heart, and woke up screaming and bathed in sweat.

  It had been particularly bad when Kirstie was released after only a few years, and given what the press called ‘a new life’. Tommy couldn’t have a new life to replace the one Kirstie had taken away and neither could Shelley, but there was nothing she could do about it. She’d had to learn about forced acceptance the hard way.

  Now, though … The face of the young woman she had seen swam up before her. The light-blue eyes, the goldy-red hair, the neat sharp line of the jaw: no, she hadn’t imagined the resemblance. Kirstie had been a child when last Shelley saw her, but she would have grown up to look like this, the child-woman of Shelley’s dreams.

  The thought of it made her feel sick. How could she just pretend it hadn’t happened? Despite what Janette had said, Shelley was becoming more and more convinced that Anita’s story hadn’t been true. Tomorrow she was going to go round again to make her admit it, and force her to tell where she could find the woman.

  The girl, she told herself, was probably no more than a cat’s-paw. Anita, though, was someone she’d known for years, almost a friend. They weren’t close but they’d have a chat if they met in a shop, say, and to help Kirstie Burnside get fun out of Shelley’s tragedy was disgusting – treacherous, really. She had felt fury when she saw the girl but now what she was feeling was a sort of cold rage.

  Getting worked up like this wasn’t doing her headache any good at all. She needed to calm down, take something for it and go to bed. The violent emotions of the day had left her feeling drained, almost light-headed with the pain and tiredness. If she wasn’t to lie awake all night she needed to put it all out of her head, sleep on it and decide what to do in the morning.

  Shelley was on her way upstairs when the phone rang. It was unusual for anyone to call this late, and she was frowning as she answered.

  A woman’s voice said, without preamble, ‘Just wanted to tell you you’ve got friends, Shelley. We’ll get rid of her, don’t you worry.’

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  It had taken Marnie Burnside a long time to get to sleep. The events of the day had formed a sort of continuous strip of scenes – the crazy lady, the attacking dog, the woman who had looked her in the eyes and lied, the luxurious farmhouse kitchen – and all that broke the loop was her own speculation about what she could expect from her interview tomorrow.

  Exhaustion overcame her at last, but the mattress was thin and the covers inadequate for a cold night so that she was troubled by half-wakings and unpleasant dreams. It was during one of the periods of deeper sleep, though, that the noise erupted outside in the quiet street.

  Shocked awake, bewildered, Marnie sat up and tried to make some sense of what she was hearing. It sounded like a dozen metal drums being beaten in a frenzy, with car horns blaring in the background. Then came the sound of angry voices howling some sort of slogan, and bangs and thumping that echoed through the house. Her bedroom looked out onto the street; still not properly awake, Marnie staggered to the window and drew back the curtains.

  It was a mistake. The sight of her seemed to inspire the group below to howling frenzy. They were holding pots and pans that they were beating with spoons and there were cars parked across the street, headlights blazing, as the drivers leant on their horns.

  Marnie recognised the fat woman who was beating on the front door as one of the witches in Dunmore and shrank back out of sight with her heart pounding in terror. Was she still dreaming? Was this just another nightmare? She could make no sense of it at all.

  She could hear now what they were chanting, though: ‘Come – out – and – face – us! Come – out – and – face – us!’ On and on it went, on and on, as the noise intensified until she cowered into a corner and covered her ears, sobbing.

  When the door to her bedroom opened, she almost fainted with terror. But it wasn’t one of the mob from outside; it was the familiar figure of her unpleasant landlady wrapped in a tartan dressing gown. Her face, too, was pale with shock in the orange light from the street lamps, but she had unerringly placed the blame on her guest and was spitting venom.

  ‘What’s this all about? I never heard such a thing in the whole of my life. It’s you, isn’t it? What have you been doing?’

  ‘I don’t know! Nothing,’ Marnie whimpered.

  ‘You needn’t think you’re going to stay skulking in here until they start breaking my windows. They’re saying they want you to go out and face them so you’d better get on and do it.’

  ‘No! No!’

  The woman advanced on her, seizing her by the shoulder to pull her up just as the sound of a siren rose above the pandemonium outside. As suddenly as it had started, it stopped; there was the sound of car doors being slammed, of engines revving and then there was only the siren and the flashing blue light of the police car.

  The landlady released her grip. ‘Lucky for you,’ she said coldly. ‘Now you’d better away down and explain to them what this is all about. You’re out of here, first thing tomorrow morning. And don’t come looking for your full Scottish breakfast.’

  Anita Loudon woke around seven. Drax, sprawling diagonally across the bed, had forced her into a cramped corner and she was stiff and unrefreshed.

  She lay for a moment looking at him, seeing the signs of middle age in the slackening around the jawline and the greying strands in his hair. She never noticed them when he was awake: his constant, edgy vitality gave him the air of youth which she knew she had lost long ago. She needed her sleep these days.

  With infinite caution she slid out of bed. Drax stirred slightly and she froze: he never took kindly to being disturbed, and anyway, she didn’t want him to see her the way she must be looking now. He turned over, sighing, and she quickly sorted out clothes for the day then slipped out of the room, closing the door quietly behind
her.

  The bathroom mirror was relentlessly well lit. She shuddered at what it reflected back at her and ducked into the shower, as if hot water could wash away the bags under her eyes and the crêpey skin of her neck or even the thinning lips.

  Sooner or later, though, she would have to come out. At last she gritted her teeth, faced the mirror again and began an extensive repair job.

  When she’d finished, or at least done all she could, she listened outside the bedroom door for a moment but there were no sounds of movement, just heavy, regular breathing. She didn’t fancy breakfast; she made herself coffee and sat with her thoughts, looking out into the garden through which Marnie had made her escape.

  Anita had no idea what the day would hold. She was due at work in the dress shop at half past nine; if Drax got up before that and he’d made plans involving her, she could phone in sick, but since he hadn’t mentioned it last night, she’d better carry on as usual.

  Would he be here when she got back? There had been so many occasions when she’d come home in hope then spent the evening in tears but now she hoped he’d be gone. He’d been in a strange mood last night and he’d made her feel – alarmed. Yes, that was the word.

  She’d been so frightened, anyway, and she’d made the mistake of confiding her fears. She’d realised, too late, how angry it had made him, but he hadn’t lashed out. It wasn’t like him. That was scaring her even more.

  And now that Marnie had made her think of it, what had happened to Karen? She’d asked Drax once and all he’d said was that she’d left and he’d lost touch with her – but she never knew when Drax was lying to her. She gave a little shiver.