The Third Sin Page 2

  ‘And I told you not to! For God’s sake, Philippa, what are you trying to do? Wasn’t there enough trouble before?’

  He pushed back his chair and jumped up to confront her. His pose might have been intimidating if she hadn’t been taller than he was, and she took advantage of that to look down on him pityingly.

  ‘I should have thought you’d have realised by now that there was no point in bullying me, Charles.’

  He struggled for words. ‘Bullying – me bullying you! That’s a sick joke, do you know that? You bully everyone. It comes as naturally to you as breathing. Do you know what they think of you in the village – how often they dive down a side street if they see you coming?’

  The tide of colour rose in her cheeks again. ‘That’s a lie. They’re happy enough to come to the things I arrange. And I can tell you people are really enthusiastic about this.’

  ‘That’s because you’ve offered to host it here. And apart from anything else, that’s a bad idea. One way or another it’s going to run us into expense and with the economy the way it is we don’t have the money for lavish, manipulative gestures.

  ‘I’m not sure why you’re set on this, but any reason I can think of is frightening – playing games with people’s lives. Sometimes I think you’re crazy – power crazy.’

  Philippa gave a silly titter. ‘Power crazy – that sounds very grand! You flatter me.’

  ‘Not really,’ Charles said tiredly. ‘When we were in the nursery we just used to call it wanting your own way, and you’ve never grown past the infantile stage. You want your own way all the time.’

  ‘Why don’t you leave, then?’ she said shrilly.

  He had turned to walk out; he swung back. ‘Because you own half the business and you’d collapse it for sheer vindictiveness. That’s the only reason, believe me.’

  Philippa was left staring at the door he had slammed, feeling for once a little shaken. She was no stranger to marital rows, but she’d never known Charles be – well, vicious.

  She still wasn’t going to pay any attention. He’d get over it. Her hand was shaking, though, as she poured out her coffee.

  Ballinbreck, on the shores of the Solway Firth between Balcary Bay and Abbey Head, was a picturesque fishing village, the haunt of smugglers in days gone by and now generally prosperous enough. The pretty harbour, home mainly to leisure craft, was a draw for tourists to support the small hotel and self-catering cottages as well as a couple of artists’ studios, craft shops and galleries.

  The seventeenth-century houses, harled and whitewashed or colour-washed in a spectrum running from pale cream to deepest blue – with one unfortunate shade of purple – were looking particularly charming in the watery spring sunshine, Jen Wilson thought as she walked along the main street.

  There was a ‘Chocolate and Cupcakes’ fundraiser at the little local school where she taught and her Primary 4 pupils had been high as kites about it for days. Cupcakes were definitely beyond her but she’d made enough chocolate crispies to ensure obesity and dental decay for fully half the school.

  She loved occasions like these. The mums would be out in force today, and the grannies, as well as a number of other people who realised that the home baking on offer would be seriously underpriced, but whatever the motive it brought people together. The village was growing, with a good number of new houses spreading round the back, and charity events were a bridge for the ‘incomers’ to get into the local community.

  The woman who ran the general store and post office had promised an iced and decorated cake to raffle, so Jen went in to collect it, admired it effusively, and was just on her way out carrying it carefully when she all but bumped into Philippa Lindsay, hurrying in.

  ‘Oh – sorry, Jen,’ Philippa said. She didn’t look directly at the other woman, moving round her to pass.

  Jen put a hand on her arm. ‘I hear it’s going ahead – the party.’ Her voice was cold.

  ‘Oh, yes, the party.’ Philippa gave a false, social laugh. ‘It’s proving very popular, giving the village a sort of focus for this year, you know? A lot of people are arranging family visits round about it. Well, you know how it is with the young – it’s more tempting to come and see the wrinklies if you know your friends are going to be there too. And it’s a community thing – you know how sentimental expats are. It’s going to be a shot in the arm for the local economy.’

  ‘Very public-spirited,’ Jen said. ‘What I want to know is, did the fish take the bait?’

  Philippa’s thin lips tightened. ‘I don’t know what you mean. If that’s your attitude, you don’t have to come.’

  Jen held her gaze steadily until Philippa’s eyes dropped. ‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘You invited me. I’ll be there.’

  She walked away.

  April 2014

  Eleanor Margrave had smelt bad weather all day. After a bitter March of relentless frost and snow it had turned sultry and today the air felt thick, oppressive. A headache was gripping her skull like a vice.

  It was late afternoon when she heard the first dull moaning of the gathering storm, a complaining wind from the south-west, muttering and grumbling. Looking out from the sitting-room window of Sea House across her strip of garden to the Solway Firth, narrow at ebb tide and muddy-brown under low, sullen clouds, she could see the scrubby trees above the shoreline starting to sway as the wind rose, then to bend and twist.

  The spring tide would be turning now down the estuary, racing over the sand flats with the driving wind, faster than a horse could gallop, according to local legend. She wanted to listen for the roar of its arrival but when she tugged at the handles to raise the sash window with her rheumaticky hands it had no effect.

  Even with the window shut, though, she could hear the rushing waters now and when she craned her painful neck to look west, there was the line of surf with its cloud of spray encroaching on the sand flats with menacing speed. She sat down to watch; it thrilled her, just as it had thrilled her when she’d been taken down to see it as a child, being given dire warnings about its dangers.

  The first fat spots of rain slammed on the windowpanes and even as the low breakers started to cover the shore the wind noise rose with the storm screaming in from the Irish Sea. Though it was only six o’clock the light went rapidly and she found herself sitting in darkness. It had turned cold again and the bleakness outside made her melancholy.

  Eleanor got to her feet and limped slowly into the hall that ran from the front to the back of the house. With a door at each end, the draughts were fierce on a night like this and she shivered as she crossed it. The Aga kept the kitchen cosy, though; ever practical, she had pretty much lived here during the cold spell but she’d been pining for the long light evenings in the sitting room watching daylight fade to a glimmering gold on the sea outside, trying once more to capture even a hint of its glory on her sketch pad.

  Sighing, she made her supper and ate it in the chair by the stove off a folding table, watching the small TV set up in one corner. They were advertising the Year of Homecoming extensively now and she watched with a small, cynical smile. In the run-up to the vote on independence for Scotland, no heartstring was to be left untugged.

  At least the headache had cleared and the warmth eased her painful joints. She found herself nodding over the killer Sudoku she tried to do every night, to prove to herself that her brain was still working, jerking awake with a ‘Tchah!’ of annoyance each time.

  She was dozing when the peal of thunder broke directly overhead and she woke in a panic, convinced the ceiling was falling down – something to do with her dream. She sank back in her chair with a gasp as the room lit up with a lurid flash of lightning and seconds later heard another, just as loud.

  The old house had withstood storms for two hundred years and Eleanor loved them. She always watched the moods of the sea from her window as if they were dramas with a celestial cast played out for her especial benefit and it looked as if tonight they were lining up for a spectacular. She
went back to the chair in the window of the sitting room, picking up a throw from the back of the sofa and wrapping it round herself

  The son et lumière was, she judged, more or less at its height with forked lightning flickering every few moments and the crashing rumble of one thunderclap barely fading before the next took its place. The sea below her was tossing, white-capped, under hissing sheets of rain, but the tide had turned again and the shallow waters were making their slow retreat.

  Gradually, the intervals between strikes grew longer, the rumbling fainter as the electric storm moved on. Show over. She yawned, ready for bed now; satisfied, replete almost. Storms were always cathartic, as if wildness outside somehow purged the emotional storm that had raged within her ever since Julia’s terrible decline into drugs and death.

  As she got up she caught a movement out of the corner of her eye, just to the left of the house. She turned her head, peering into the darkness, but could see nothing. A trick of the light, perhaps, a shadow thrown by distant lightning flickering behind a waving tree. She folded up the throw and put it back neatly over the arm of the sofa, but she felt a little unsettled. It was almost midnight; she had no near neighbours and with the nearest house quarter of a mile away, no one could have a reason to be about in weather like this. No good reason, anyway.

  She was not by nature nervous, and anyway, you couldn’t afford to indulge your imagination when you lived in this sort of isolation. She’d just go and check that the doors were locked then make herself a cup of tea and take it up to bed with her—

  The knocking on the front door was alarmingly loud in the silent house. She stood in the hall staring at its unrevealing back in fright.

  After a moment, it came again, louder, more imperative.

  She would be crazy to open it without knowing who was there, she thought, suddenly conscious of her frail body, her brittle bones. Even if she went to an upstairs window and looked down she wouldn’t be able to see because there was a porch over the doorstep. She could pretend she wasn’t here or hadn’t heard – but then would they just break in?

  There were keys in all the doors leading on to the hall. She could lock these, retreat upstairs, call the police on the phone at her bedside, but it could take half an hour or more for anyone to reach her. And what if they cut the phone line? There was no signal for her mobile here.

  Her heart was fluttering. When she went to lock the nearest door, her hands were shaking so that it was a struggle to turn the key and when the beating on the door began again she jumped so that she knocked it on to the floor. This time, though, she heard the sound of a woman, a child, even, wailing desperately.

  Eleanor was no fool. There were criminals who wouldn’t hesitate to use a decoy to gain entrance, and even women who were evil themselves. But you could die of exposure on a night like this and there was no other shelter. She switched on the outside light, fixed the chain across the door then very cautiously opened it.

  The figure on the doorstep was small and slight – and alone. A woman – a child? It was hard to tell. Not threatening, anyway, and clearly distressed, with a livid bruise on the left cheekbone. She was wearing a thin jacket and jeans and she was shockingly wet, dripping as if she had come straight out of the water. Her hair, plastered to her head, was long and curling; as Eleanor released the chain to admit her she saw that her eyes, wide with distress, were as grey-green as the sea itself.

  A mermaid, she thought, like the little figurine that had sat on her mantelpiece since a visit to Copenhagen twenty years before. She waved her inside.

  ‘What on earth’s happened to you? You’d better come through to the kitchen, where it’s warm.’

  The girl glanced up at her blindly; she was shivering so much that her teeth were chattering loudly enough to be heard. There was no colour in her face and for a moment Eleanor thought she might even collapse, but she made for the Aga as if with an instinctive response to its heat, huddling against it like an animal.

  ‘I’ll get a towel,’ Eleanor said, retreating. She was glad to have a moment to collect herself.

  Had the girl really come up out of the sea, after a shipwreck, perhaps? Boats came to grief sometimes in these tricky waters – but no, if she’d waded out just now she would have been filthy with sandy mud, and she was only wet. Been walking for a long time, then, while the storm was on?

  Under the kitchen light it had been clear that she was older than she’d looked at first – late twenties, early thirties, even. It was also clear that she was in shock and at risk of hypothermia. She’d have to stay the night, until she was fit to contact her family or friends.

  Yes, Eleanor knew her duty but it was with a certain reluctance that she set about fetching towels and bedlinen from the airing cupboard and turning on a radiator in one of the spare bedrooms. The girl would need to get out of those wet clothes too, so she took a thick pair of pyjamas out of her chest of drawers, gave a longing glance at her own cosy bed, and switched on the immersion heater for a bath.

  When she got back to the kitchen, the girl was standing as she had left her. She didn’t seem to notice that her clothes were steaming; she was still shivering and still looking blank.

  ‘What you need is a brandy,’ Eleanor said, handing her a towel and going to the larder. There should still be brandy left from mince pies at Christmas and though it was a year or two old it shouldn’t actually have gone off. ‘I think you should get into a bath as soon as possible too but the water won’t be hot enough just yet. Sit down and drink this and I’ll make a cup of tea. I know I could be doing with one.’

  The girl was dabbing at her hair with the towel but she looked at the glass as if she had never seen one before and took a moment to grasp it. Eleanor took her by the arm to urge her into the chair beside the Aga. Her passivity was quite alarming.

  ‘Now tell me what’s happened,’ she said gently. ‘Did you have an accident?’

  She got no answer. The girl was still staring at the brandy; it was a moment or two before she put it to her lips, swallowed and shuddered, then took another sip.

  At least the convulsive shivering was subsiding. Suddenly it occurred to Eleanor that she could be foreign, failing to understand what she had been asked. There were a lot of middle Europeans in the area now; she tried German, without result, then French, then miming.

  ‘Eleanor,’ she said, patting her chest, then ‘Your name?’ pointing. When there was no response, she pointed to the bruise, now spreading in vivid glory. ‘Accident?’

  It seemed more as if the girl was disconnected than as if she didn’t understand. As Eleanor made tea, she kept up her attempts to communicate, but without success. The most she got was a shake of the head at a plate of biscuits, but the girl drank the brandy and the mug of tea. It was only when Eleanor turned back from making a hot-water bottle that she realised she had begun to cry silently.

  There was no point in asking her questions. ‘It’s time you were in bed,’ she said briskly. ‘Come on.’

  The girl got up and followed her. She had a canvas rucksack that had been set down at her feet; it was still soaking wet but when Eleanor suggested she left it by the range to dry she shook her head violently, clutching it to her and holding on grimly.

  ‘Fine, if you want to keep it with you. But you’d better empty it and spread out your things to dry – it’s soaked through.’ Feeling ruffled – did the girl think she was going to steal something? – Eleanor took her upstairs, pointed out the bathroom, the pyjamas, the bedroom, put the hottie in the bed then left her and went back downstairs.

  She’d have to try again in the morning to find out what this was all about, once the girl’s shock had worn off a bit and she wasn’t so tired herself. There really was something very strange about her and she remembered her own fanciful reaction: that here was a mermaid come ashore.

  It was only as Eleanor was dropping at last into an exhausted sleep that she remembered the fairy tale: the mermaid was dumb. In exchange for her human legs,
she had given her voice.

  It was a beautiful morning after the storm, though wrack thrown up into the narrow garden below Sea House bore witness to its power. Eleanor got up with the burden of her unwanted guest hanging over her: she really must find out where the girl had come from – and where she would be going to, as well. She’d done her duty in succouring the distressed but she certainly wasn’t issuing an open-ended invitation to stay. It was still early, though, so she got dressed as quietly as she could. After what had clearly been an ordeal last night the girl needed all the rest she could get.

  But when she came out of her bedroom the door to the spare room was standing ajar. The curtains were open, the room was empty and the bed was tidy, with the flannelette pyjamas neatly folded on top. There was no sign of her visitor.

  Eleanor sat down heavily on the bed, her knees suddenly weak. Would she go downstairs to find her credit cards and her car gone and the house ransacked? The saying ‘Sooner or later, one must pay for every good deed’ was ringing in her ears as she hurried downstairs as quickly as her creaking joints would let her.

  But downstairs everything was in its usual place. It was as if her unexpected guest had been a figment of her imagination – or perhaps, she thought with a nod to fantasy, had merely vanished into sea foam. That a mermaid in legend was famously an ill omen she put firmly out of her mind.

  The onrushing tide that had played with the car as if it were a dinky toy, tumbling it over and over as it swept it far up the Firth, retreated slowly. The car settled on its side, then with the next tide, less violent, rolled on to its roof. At last, abandoned on the sandy flats, it settled into the soft silt.

  Inside it the man’s battered body, unrestrained within the car, settled too, settled and stiffened.

  CHAPTER THREE

  May 2014

  Was there anything, anything at all, more enjoyable than sitting in a pavement cafe on the Rive Gauche on a sunny Saturday morning in spring, people-watching through the thin blue haze of smoke from a Gitane with a knock-your-socks-off espresso on the little zinc table in front of you? If there was, Louise Hepburn couldn’t think what it would be.