Fatal Error (24 page)

‘And what about the Friday before?’

‘Let me see …’ said Guy.

‘Was it the same girl?’

It had been a different girl. It was always a different girl. But I couldn’t tell Mel that.

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ said Guy.

‘Do you think I’m stupid? Do you? Do you!’

Mel stared at Guy. Ingrid was upright now, watching her.

Guy was just a little too drunk. The corner of his mouth twitched up. Just a smidgeon. Just enough to send Mel over the edge.

She slammed her glass down on the table. ‘You sit there laughing at me! Treat me like some stupid tart who’ll keep a bed warm for you when you can’t find anything better. Do you ever wonder how I feel? Do you know what it’s like to sit at home, waiting for you to come, never knowing whether you will or whether you’ll have picked up some schoolgirl at the local Burger King?’

‘Schoolgirl?’ said Guy, as though insulted that he had been accused of underage sex.

‘You’re just as bad as your father!’ said Mel. ‘Worse!’

‘I guess you’d know,’ said Guy, quietly. Dangerously.

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘You’d know how I compared to my father.’

‘How can you say that?’

‘How can I say that?’ Guy said, his anger finally rising. ‘You say you don’t like the way
I
treat you. I didn’t seduce your mother. You want respect, but how do you expect me to respect you after what you did with my father?’

‘That’s unfair,’ Mel said. ‘I’ve told you how much I regretted that.’

Guy shrugged and reached for his glass.

‘And anyway, what about what
you
did in France? Your little secret deals? Your cover-ups.’

Guy looked at her sharply, his glass an inch from his lips.

‘Don’t act all innocent, Guy. I know.’

Guy didn’t look at all innocent. He looked shaken. And worried. He put his glass down without taking a drink.

‘Like I said. You’re worse than your father.’ There was a note of cruel triumph in Mel’s voice. She knew she had hit home.

‘Mel,’ said Ingrid, reaching a hand unsteadily towards her.

‘You keep out of this. I saw you falling all over him!’

‘We were only mucking around,’ said Ingrid.

‘You’ve had your eyes on him the whole time, you slut!’ Mel sneered.

Ingrid withdrew her hand. She looked genuinely hurt.

‘That wasn’t fair,’ I said to Mel.

‘I don’t give a shit.’ She stood up. ‘I’m getting my stuff and I’m going to stay somewhere else tonight. And I’ll make my own way back to London tomorrow.’

She stormed out of the bar and up the stairs to her room.

We exchanged glances, stunned. Ingrid swayed unsteadily and looked as if she was going to cry. Guy grinned weakly. I got up to follow Mel.

Guy and Mel were sharing a room. I found the door open and Mel zipping up her bag.

‘Where are you going to go?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know. Anywhere.’

‘But we’re in the middle of nowhere!’

‘I don’t care. I’ll walk all night if I have to. I just have to get away from those two.’

‘You’re imagining things,’ I said. ‘There’s nothing between Guy and Ingrid.’

‘You show me a woman that isn’t after Guy and I’ll show you a lesbian,’ muttered Mel.

‘That’s not true.’

She stood upright, a tear trickling unrestrained down her cheek. ‘I was right about him though, wasn’t I? About last Friday?’

Her eyes were burning, looking straight into mine. I couldn’t lie to her. I nodded.

‘And other times?’

I shrugged. There was no need to nod.

She grabbed her bag and pushed past me down the stairs. She was marching past the front desk when I called after her. ‘Hang on a minute, Mel.’

She paused.

‘They’ll need your key.’

She handed it to me. I asked the manager behind the desk whether there was a bed and breakfast nearby that Mel could go to. I told him she had had an argument with her boyfriend and her room at the hotel would still be paid for. He understood, reached for his telephone, and had a brief conversation with a Mrs Campbell. He directed me to a place half a mile down the road.

‘I’ll walk with you,’ I said to Mel.

I handed the key to the manager, picked up her bag and walked out with her into the dusk. Although it was late, it wasn’t dark yet at this latitude. The birds were noisily preparing for their brief sleep. There was no traffic on the road. On one side was the sea, with the Scottish mainland clearly visible over the sound, on the other a mountain. We trudged along in silence, silence apart from intermittent sniffs from Mel.

She mumbled something.

‘What?’

‘I said, I probably deserve it.’

‘No you don’t,’ I said.

‘After France. And his bloody father. I probably deserve it.’

I put my arm around her and squeezed. She needed comfort. She deserved comfort. ‘Not because of that,’ I said. ‘Never because of that. That’s best forgotten.’

‘I try to push it out of my mind. And I can for a while. But only for a while.’

‘I know,’ I said. Remembering Dominique. Her body. Making love to her. The ridiculous euphoria afterwards. And then learning about her death. And the guilt. The guilt.

That week had left its scars on all of us: Mel, me. And Guy.

‘Back there you said something about Guy,’ I said. ‘About his secret deals. His cover-ups.’

‘That was nothing.’

‘It must have been something,’ I said. ‘It seemed to worry the hell out of him.’

‘You’re right, it was something.’ We walked on as Mel gathered her thoughts. Then she spoke. ‘You know why the gardener ran away?’

‘Yeah. He’d killed Dominique. He didn’t want to hang around and get caught.’

‘No.’

‘No?’

‘No. He was paid to run away. By Hoyle and Guy.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I overheard them talking. They were in the dining room and I was just outside.’

‘I remember,’ I said. ‘I found you there.’

‘Did you? I don’t remember that. But I do remember what they were saying.’

‘What?’

‘They were talking about how they would pay the gardener five hundred thousand francs to disappear. Apparently Owen had spied on him having sex with Dominique, and the idea – Guy’s idea – was to tell the police this. Then once he had
gone they would be bound to suspect him of killing her. Especially since the jewellery was missing.’

‘Bloody hell.’

‘Sure enough, that afternoon the gardener disappeared. And the police never found him.’

‘Until this year.’

‘What?’

‘Yeah. Didn’t you know? Actually, I’m not surprised Guy didn’t tell you. They found him a few weeks ago in a dustbin in Marseilles.’

‘How tidy.’

‘So the gardener was the fall-guy to deflect suspicion from the real killer?’

‘To deflect suspicion from someone, certainly.’

‘What about the jewellery case that was found in his room?’

‘Must have been planted.’

‘By Hoyle?’

‘Presumably. Or maybe he arranged for somebody else to plant it.’

‘Jesus.’

The road was empty. It was getting dark now, the gloom was pressing down on the water a few yards away from us. I thought through what Mel had just told me. It all hung together. I had heard Hoyle repeating the gardener’s name; it was quite possible that Mel could have overheard the rest. I remembered Ingrid’s comment as we were leaving Les Sarrasins: the disappearance was too convenient. According to Mel it was Guy’s idea and Hoyle fixed it. Very possible.

‘So they were trying to cover for Tony? Divert the police’s attention away from him and on to the gardener?’

‘That’s what I’ve assumed,’ said Mel. ‘Most of the time.’

‘Most of the time?’

‘Sometimes, just occasionally, at times like now, I wonder.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Sometimes I wonder if Tony didn’t kill his wife. If Guy was trying to cover for someone else.’

‘Himself?’

‘As I said. Sometimes I wonder.’

‘That can’t be right,’ I said. I could believe Tony had killed Dominique. But not Guy. Surely not Guy. ‘You’re just angry with him.’

‘I’m certainly that,’ said Mel.

‘You didn’t tell the police any of this?’

‘No. If Guy was covering for his father, I didn’t want to spoil it.’

‘What about Guy? Have you ever told him?’

‘He doesn’t know I know. Bastard.’

We approached a row of cottages, one of which bore a discreet B&B sign. Mrs Campbell must have been briefed by the manager because she was very welcoming to Mel, even though it was so late. I left her at the door and wandered back to the hotel in the gathering dark, thinking about what Mel had said.

Could Guy really have killed Dominique?

I was confident that Mel was telling the truth about what she had overheard. But not about her conclusions. She was just being vindictive, surely. It was ridiculous to think that Guy had killed his stepmother. Wasn’t it?

I thought about Guy. I had known him for many years. I counted him as a friend. He wasn’t a cold-hearted murderer.

Or had I just fallen under his spell like Mel and so many other women before her? Like Torsten, for that matter. Like all his other friends.

I thought about the flight that afternoon. About the blind determination with which he had flown the aeroplane up that glen, ignoring me, leading us on to a certain collision with the mountain.

Did I really know Guy?

Then I remembered something. The footprint outside Dominique’s window. Guy’s footprint. Unlike Mel, unlike the French police, probably unlike Patrick Hoyle, I knew it hadn’t been put there by Guy on his way to bed. So how the hell had it got there?

The police had had a theory. That’s why they had arrested Guy. What if their theory was correct?

I stopped and looked out over the sound. It was dark now. I could hear the wavelets lapping against the shore a few yards in front of me. A solitary car drove past, its headlights briefly illuminating the ruffled surface of the sea before plunging it into an even greater darkness. I could hear the engine for a full minute after it had passed me.

I had fallen under Guy’s spell. I had known it was happening: more than that, I’d been happy to let it happen. I had had more fun in the last couple of months than any time since I started work. The drinking, the late nights, the chasing women. We were only young once, so we may as well enjoy it: that was Guy’s motto, and I was embracing it. His life seemed so much more colourful than mine. I coveted it.

Or did I? I remembered the bus journey back from France when I had realized that the lives of people like Guy weren’t all they were cracked up to be. I had forgotten that lesson. Guy’s father was a bastard, I knew that. Was Guy turning into a bastard as well? He might ignore the way he was treating Mel, or claim that she deserved it, but that didn’t mean I should too. His acting career was going nowhere. His life was going nowhere. Did I really want to join him on that journey?

When I reached the hotel I looked into the bar, but it was empty, apart from the manager. I thanked him for finding Mel somewhere to stay and went up to bed.

I checked my key. Room 210. Deep in thought, I walked down the landing, put the key in the door and opened it.

Three things hit me.

First, room 210 wasn’t my room.

Second, Guy was lying on the bed in room 210 locked in a deep embrace with a girl.

Third, the girl was Ingrid.

I stood there stupidly. For some reason the question that most puzzled me was why wasn’t I in my own room. I looked at the key in my hand. I must somehow have mixed up the keys: passed my own to the manager when I had left the hotel with Mel and kept hers.

Then I looked at the two figures on the bed. They were both still mostly clothed. Ingrid sat up, dishevelled, bleary eyed. Guy looked stricken.

‘Davo. It was just a bit of fun. We weren’t doing anything.’

I looked at Ingrid.

‘Why?’ I said.

Without waiting for an answer I turned and left the room, shutting the door behind me. I ran downstairs and grabbed my own key from behind the desk in the hallway. I remembered the number clearly now: room 214. I climbed the stairs two at a time and opened the door, although my hands were shaking so much with anger I could barely hold the key steady enough to insert it into the lock.

‘Davo! Davo, wait!’

I turned to see Guy approaching me down the landing.

‘Davo. I’m sorry, OK?’ he said, following me into my room.

‘Piss off, Guy.’

‘It was nothing. It means nothing.’

‘I’m quite sure it meant nothing to you.’

‘Or to Ingrid,’ Guy said.

‘Yeah. Well, it means something to me.’

‘Oh, come on. It’s not like you were going out with her or anything. You told me you weren’t even sure you wanted to try.’

‘So that makes it OK, does it?’

‘No, no it doesn’t. I’m sorry. I said I’m sorry.’

He smiled that Guy smile. Just for a second I felt like saying everything was all right. He could forget it. But only for a second. Then the anger returned. I wasn’t going to let him charm his way out of trouble again. Suddenly I wanted to pin him down.

‘What happened in France, Guy?’

Guy scowled. ‘Not again. It really would be best to forget all about France, Davo.’

‘I can’t. Mel told me about the cover-up. She says she overheard you and Patrick Hoyle talking about paying the gardener Abdulatif to disappear.’

‘That woman has a serious problem with her imagination,’ Guy said dismissively.

‘I know she overheard you two talking about him because I caught her at it. Until tonight I didn’t know what you said. Now I do.’

Guy closed his eyes and sighed. ‘You’re not going to let this go, are you?’

‘No,’ I said firmly.

‘OK. You’re right. We did discuss it. Owen told me he had seen Dominique with the gardener and we talked about telling the police. It seemed a good idea because it would put the gardener under suspicion. Then I thought it would be an even better idea if he scarpered. So Hoyle paid him off. And he did an excellent disappearing job.’

‘Until last month.’

‘Until last month.’