The Lost Sister Read online

  “Sometimes the past needs to stay in the past.”

  Sing it, sister.

  We rolled in front of the old cottage with its rough stone walls, single-glazed windows that glared balefully out at the night. The rickety front porch looked ready to blow over at the slightest hint of wind.

  A rusty old axe was buried in an oak stump by the front door. I got the feeling no one had touched it for years.

  Christ, happy childhood memories?

  I’d have guessed nightmares, looking at the place.

  But isn’t that what happens as the years pass? Entropy and decay. Nothing remains the same. No memory is sacred.

  The front garden was surrounded by a low pile of rubble that might have once been called a wall. Weeds and long grass had become unkempt and unwelcoming.

  As we pulled up, a dull light in one of the front windows suddenly extinguished itself. As though the house was trying to hide in the dark.

  A beat up looking Ford sat beside the west wall.

  I killed the engine and we sat there for a while.

  Susan said, “She must have heard us.”

  I nodded in agreement.

  “We need to do this now. Take control of the situation.”

  I nodded again.

  Thinking about DI Lindsay sitting at my bedside, telling me how I was a human hurricane; a natural disaster of the worst possible kind.

  What’s the old song?

  King Midas in Reverse.

  I looked at Susan.

  She hadn’t wanted to be here. This wasn’t how she would have done things. She’d been pulled into this by my own greed and my own need to do things that worked out best for me.

  I couldn’t help but wonder if the silence in the car was merely the calm before the storm.

  I opened the door, swung my legs out of the car. Too late now for second thoughts.

  Susan walked with me to the front door. Checked her mobile as we walked. “Another thing about the country,” she said. “The great bloody outdoors.” She shook her head. “No signal.”

  I nodded. We were isolated.

  Susan said, “Have you even thought this through?”

  How do you answer that?

  A smart quip?

  Or pure silence.

  The last defence of the man with no defences left.

  I stopped at the front door; a barrier I did not want to cross.

  Was it too late?

  Could I turn back now, forget about all of this?

  Some things had changed over the last year. I like to think I was a different person than I had been.

  But in the end, maybe not that different.

  Chapter 42

  Deborah Brown was five-two, with close cropped hair that had once been blonde and now edged to white. Her eyes were sharp, ten years younger than her features suggested and punctuated by crows feet and skin that had wrinkled more than it should have on a woman her age.

  You could see the years of worry scored into her face.

  She looked at me with her head tilted up and back. Ready to run. And why not? She had no reason to trust me.

  “My sister called. Said you were coming.”

  Susan stepped out and in front, impatient with my silence. Said, “We need to see Mary. To know that –”

  “She’s all right?” Deborah gave a little laugh and dropped her head. She stepped back and gestured broadly for us to enter. “She’s more than all right. She’s with her mother. She’s safe.” She stood her ground, arms folded. “Just walk away from this. Tell everyone you couldn’t find her. Make up whatever story you want.”

  I said, “You’re protecting her from him, aren’t you? Because you know what he’ll do to her. What he does to everything you ever loved.”

  Her stance softened. Her head dropped.

  I said, “I’ve seen him for what he is. The anger. The hate. All those other things you wish you’d seen right from the start. I can’t imagine what it took for you to leave him. But you can’t do this alone.”

  She laughed at that. “We’re always alone,” she said.

  The croft was small. Four rooms off a main corridor with a rear door leading to an unkempt garden out back. The floors were uncarpeted and the walls roughly painted with whitewash that had cracked in places down the years.

  I expected the smell of damp. Was surprised by how well the building was holding up, despite the shabby décor.

  The living room – where we’d seen the dull light from outside – was large enough, decorated sparsely. The TV was on, tuned in through Bunny Ears to a fuzzy Channel 5. A girl was sitting in an old, sagging armchair and watching the picture intensely as though she could cut through the snow with sheer determination. Next to her sat an abandoned laptop and IPod with headphones.

  Mary Furst.

  She was taller than I expected, her legs longer, stretched out onto a ragged footstool. She was dressed in tracksuit bottoms and a white t-shirt, had her hair tied back in a loose pony tail. Loose strands fell across her heart-shaped face. She looked up as we came in, and I noticed the way her body stiffened.

  Her legs recoiled off the footstool. Ready to bolt.

  She only relaxed when Deborah came in.

  Susan took the lead once again, stepping forward, introducing herself. Asking if the girl was all right.

  Mary looked to Deborah as though for permission.

  I watched the older woman nod.

  Saw something I hadn’t recognised when Jennifer Furst had talked about the girl; a deep and unconditional love that could break your heart.

  I reached into my pocket. Took out the cross I had found at Deborah’s apartment. Walked to the girl, held it out so that the cross dangled between my fingers.

  Mary looked at it. Her face screwed up, as though she was thinking hard.

  I thought I saw a hint of tears in her eyes. But she blinked them away. Reached out, grabbed the cross and threw it away. It hit the far wall and fell to the floor.

  There was silence as though no one knew what to say.

  Finally, I turned to Deborah, “Maybe we can talk?”

  She stepped back out into the hall. I took that for a yes.

  Before I stepped out, I felt a hand on my arm. Turned and saw Susan, her face set hard, her eyes asking me something.

  But I didn’t know what.

  We talked in the room across the hall. Guessed it was the bedroom. A couple of mattresses thrown down on the floor. Sleeping bags. A space heater running in the corner.

  I looked around, said, “Frontier living.” A joke to break the ice.

  With that cold front on its way, we needed all the heat we could get.

  Deborah didn’t say much. Leaned against a wall and looked at me with those sharp eyes and an expression that made think of an eagle eyeing up its prey.

  I said, “How much of his story was true?” Meaning Wickes. Getting straight to it. How much longer could I dance around the important things in life?

  She laughed at my question. Frustrated rather than amused. The noise bounced off the walls and when it finally snapped off, it left the room feeling even more quiet than before.

  The space heater hummed.

  “He’s a wanker,” she said. “Insane. A killer. A sadist. A twisted…a twisted fuck.” Her refined accent formed the harsh words awkwardly. But they came from somewhere deep inside; an immediate gut reaction to the mere thought of the big, hairy bastard.

  I thought, tell me something I don’t know.

  Later, I’d talk to other people who had been involved. Check the records. Get the full story. Understand everything that happened nearly fifteen years earlier that led to the bloodbath of that cold winter night.

  An investigator’s work makes sense of people’s fractured lives. Weaving everyone’s individual truths and experiences together in ways that might eventually make some kind of sense.

  Sounds grand, doesn’t it?

  A calling.

  Wish I could always see it that w
ay.

  Her childhood may have been idyllic, but as she grew up, Deborah Brown started to hate herself. Her family. Everything around her.

  She didn’t know the word depression. Or at least didn’t understand it could be an illness as much as a transient state of mind. People called her gloomy. Her mother used the word, “selfish”.

  “The phrase I remember hearing all the time,” Deborah told me, “was pull your bloody socks up. Every fucking day. To the point where the words became meaningless. If only it was that simple.”

  She coped as best she could, found an aptitude for art at school.

  “Landscapes,” she said, “Always appealed to me. Must have been halfway through my fifth year, the art class went on a trip across the bridge to Fife,” she said. “We stood at the edge of the road and looked over the water to the city. I loved the painting I made that day. Looking at it later, it would bring back the loneliness and isolation I felt looking across the water at all these buildings and people who lived so close to together. Know what my teacher told me?” She gritted her teeth as she spoke: “Needs…More…Colour.”

  I thought back to the canvases I’d seen in the flat. Greys. Blacks. Stormy skies. Thickening shadows.

  “I used to fantasize about killing myself,” she said. “Dream about the patterns my blood would make. But I never went through with it. Thought it was some kind of growing-up thing, you know? Everyone felt like that even if they didn’t admit it. Better to fool yourself into thinking that than accept the truth: that you’re different. That you’re…wrong.”

  Art college came next. The same teacher who told her she needed more colour supported her application.

  “I loved it,” Deborah said. “But I kept thinking…how can I afford this? Any of it.”

  Then she met Jennifer Furst.

  Deborah’s story tallied with Wickes’s account and the details her sister had filled in for me. It was the emphasis that varied.

  Like I said, ask three different people about the same events, you’ll get three different versions.

  “Do you ever think back, Mr McNee, on things you’ve done? Look at your past and see this person you don’t recognise any more?”

  I didn’t answer her question.

  I didn’t want her to tell me the story she thought I wanted to hear.

  I wanted the truth. Or as close as I could get.

  “Maybe it’s just me. Maybe the things I’ve done…they…I made mistakes. I know everyone does, but mine…I look back on that young woman and I can’t always work out just what she was thinking. It’s frightening sometimes. Because I can’t say why I did everything I did. I can’t understand myself.” As she spoke, she wrapped her arms around her stomach as though to hold herself; a reassuring gesture. Her body was shaking gently, and I could feel sobs attempting to escape between words.

  She told me about her repeated attempts to see Mary. How she started showing up at the Furst house, crashing family gatherings.

  And then finally broke in at night to watch the baby sleeping.

  “In my mind, I couldn’t work out why they would be angry. Even if I was caught…if they could just see me, the way I was looking out for Mary, they’d maybe understand what the girl meant to me. Stupid, right?”

  She wanted me to say it; “Aye.”

  Made her laugh, my agreeing so easily. I got the feeling she’d hadn’t really laughed in a long time.

  “Stupid girl,” she said. “Really had a lot to learn.” She kept reaching up towards her face. I knew what she was doing. Ex-smokers recognise their own. Can see those tell-tale gestures. The need for the release that cigarettes used to provide. All that unconscious play-acting; replicating comforting movements with none of the effects. “I keep wondering where things went wrong. When I reached the point of no return. I mean…was it…when I had Mary? When I agreed to the surrogacy? Or when I broke into their house. Think you can tell me that, Mr Detective? When did I mess it all up?”

  Chapter 43

  The first Deborah Brown knew of Wickes was a phone number scrawled on a piece of paper.

  A friend had given it to her, telling her in no uncertain terms that she was in trouble. That this man could help her.

  And she needed help. She knew it, then.

  She needed a white knight.

  Or she was going to die.

  I asked, “How did your friend know Wickes?”

  Deborah shook her head. Her gaze slipped to the floor. She swivelled one foot. A childlike gesture. “I don’t know. This girl, she was in my class. She…I didn’t have many friends, not really. She…she listened. I think he may have done some work for her dad, I don’t know.”

  I let it go. It could slide for now, I figured. We’d get the full story once this situation was under control.

  “I knew that in my heart. That unless someone took me away from everything, I was going to die. By my own hand. Or…someone else’s.”

  Three nights after the incident where she broke into the Furst household and watched their – her – baby sleeping, she was woken from a light sleep by someone banging on the door of her sister’s place. She’d been staying there since leaving the flat she’d been sharing with other art students.

  The reason for the move?

  She told me, personal issues.

  Given the rest of her story, that could have meant anything.

  “Couldn’t have been past nine in the evening,” she said, talking about the banging on the door. She’d been sleeping a lot in those days. For all she slept – and with the black depression that was shrouding her more than ever, she was sleeping a lot – she never felt like she could get enough rest. She was always tired, crawling back under the covers the moment she tried to get up. The world was too much for her. All she wanted was an escape.

  I understood the feeling.

  Wished I could reach out, let her know she wasn’t alone.

  But I wasn’t talking to her as a friend. Not as a confidante or a sympathetic ear.

  I was an investigator.

  Searching for the truth. Couldn’t afford to distort it by throwing my own feelings into the mix.

  Detachment. My professional watchword.

  The one quality I strived for and rarely reached.

  “They were ugly,” she told me. “The two of them. I remember that. One of them had stupid hair, looked like Peter Stringfellow jacked out on steroids, you know?” She laughed at little at the memory. “They told me that I knew why they were there.” And she did, but claimed not to anyway; some tiny part of her hoping they’d believe her, think they’d made a mistake and just walk away.

  Didn’t happen of course.

  The two of them beat her. Hard.

  “They just walked right in. I tried to close the door, but they kicked it back. I remember stumbling back and closing my eyes. Opening them again and seeing this fist right in front of me. Then I didn’t know what had happened until I was on the floor. They kicked me, you know? I couldn’t help but remember when I was six years old and this boy thought it would be funny to punch me in the stomach. This older boy – Gary, that was his name, Gary Smith, I had such a crush on him – he stepped in and grabbed the other boy. Told him, you don’t punch girls in the stomach. It’s wrong. Plain wrong.”

  I remembered being told the same thing when I was young. Among the many sins you could commit – and given Scotland’s Calvinist heritage, the litany of sins were a shared memory we all had of childhood – punching a girl in the stomach ranked somewhere just short of genocide.

  The two thugs beat Deborah hard. Landed her in hospital. A broken wrist, shattered ribs and black eyes you couldn’t disguise with just a pair of sunglasses like they did in the films.

  She lied about what happened, of course. Knew that the attending doctors in the A&E didn’t believe her. But then, she knew what would happen if she told the truth.

  She made Kathryn keep quiet, too.

  “It was our first real fight as sisters,” she told me
. “I mean, we fought over things when we were younger, but this was the first time it felt like maybe there was no way back from what either of us said that night. I’m amazed she ever talked to me again.”

  Say what you like about their methods, the hired muscle had made their point.

  The worst part was that I knew David Burns wouldn’t have given a fuck about the pain Deborah suffered. For all his grandiose talk of being a family man in touch with the people, he was a cold-hearted bastard who wouldn’t blink twice at any atrocity committed in his name.

  But, of course, he wasn’t so cold hearted that he would get his own hands dirty. Oh, no. He was too much of a fucking coward for that.

  Deborah told me she needed air.

  I let her step out the back door. Everything was under control. We had time.

  What was important: Mary was safe. We knew where she was. The ticking clock had turned mute.

  Susan had been standing in the hallway. I didn’t know for how long. She came in when Deborah went out the back door and reached out to place her hand on my arm. She squeezed gently.

  “It’s a mess, aye?”

  I nodded.

  She said, “Mary’s fine. In case you were wondering.”

  It felt like a rebuke, although there was nothing in the way she spoke that came across as vicious.

  I looked at the back door, which sat ajar.

  “I’m glad.”

  “I heard what she was saying.”

  I nodded, kept looking at the door. “She never meant the girl any harm.”

  “But she has to understand –”

  I cut Susan off, waving my hand. Didn’t want to hear what she had to say.

  “You talk a lot about being detached,” she said. “How a good investigator never involves himself in the lives of his clients. How you sit back, refuse to let your emotions get the better of you. Great delusion, Steed. You’re nothing but emotions. Why else did you stick with this case?”

  I pretended that I hadn’t heard. “She’s scared for her daughter, you know.”

  “But scared of what? That business with Burns, if she hadn’t come back –”