No Cherubs for Melanie (29 page)

“Such as?”

“A suicide note.” He ran his finger down the list of exhibits as she peered over his shoulder. “There was no suicide note,” he said, very pointedly.

“Do suicides always leave notes?” she breathed, leaning over his shoulder, her breath smouldering in his ear.

“Usually. Not always, admittedly, but usually. But this was no spur-of-the-moment, chuck-yourself-under-a-truck suicide. She could have lynched herself on that chandelier any time, she had plenty of opportunity to think about it. So why not leave a note explaining why?”

“Maybe there was a note,” Samantha replied with a gush. “Think about it, Peter. What would she have written?” She answered her own question without giving him a chance to get his breath. “‘You bastard, Martin. I saw you drown Melanie and I can't live with that knowledge any longer.' And,” she continued, the puzzle already solved in her own mind, “what do you think Gordonstone would have done with the note if he'd found it before Edwards arrived?”

“Chucked it on the fire,” Bryan suggested, catching up.

She nodded. “Wouldn't you?”

“In his place? You're damn right I would.”

“So how long did he have before Edwards arrived?”

Peter Bryan leafed through the slender file and located Edwards' statement. “That's interesting… He was off duty at the time — he says so.” He recited Edwards' words: “‘I was off duty in the vicinity of
L'Haute Cuisinier
restaurant when I heard an appeal on the radio for assistance.'” Bryan shuffled a couple more papers. “He must have been very close. Look,” he said as he pointed to two places in the file, comparing Edwards' time of arrival on the scene with the time the call went out. “According to the control room log he got there in two minutes flat.”

Samantha looked puzzled. “So Gordonstone only had two minutes to destroy the… No!” she cried in frustration, “He could have found the suicide note before he dialled 999. He had as long as he wanted. He could have found the body, searched until he found the note, burned it, then phoned.”

“Let's see what he has to say,” replied Bryan, scanning Gordonstone's statement and throwing out snatches aloud for Samantha's benefit so she wouldn't have to read over his shoulder. “Went out at eleven… Staff locked up… Got home about ten past one… Had been drinking with friends.”

“Which friends?” asked Samantha. “Who?”

“Doesn't say,” he continued, “…Found wife hanging from chandelier.”

The identity of Gordonstone's friends niggled Samantha. “Why didn't Edwards ask? Surely that was important,” she said. “They were Gordonstone's alibi.” She hung onto Bryan's shoulder as they both reread the
statement, searching in vain for information about his drinking partners.

“He didn't really have an alibi,” concluded Bryan eventually. Apparently, he hadn't needed an alibi; the self-appointed officer-in-charge, Detective Inspector Edwards, had taken him at his word and embraced his account of the discovery of his wife's body. A story later accepted by the coroner.

“It doesn't prove she killed herself, though, does it?” Samantha said, implying by her tone that her father's postulation about murder could be correct.

“No. It doesn't,” replied Bryan, shaking his head. “Gordonstone could have been home by one, murdered her, and called the police ten minutes later. It only takes a minute or two to kill someone; it's much faster than giving birth.”

Though not as fast as conception, thought Samantha, recalling her very brief encounter with Mr. Wrong.

“So what have we got?”

“The lack of a suicide note is definitely suspicious, and unless Gordonstone's ‘friends' can back up his story he would certainly be in the frame. But it's been ten years. It might be a job to find them now, and I doubt they'd remember exactly what happened.”

“We've also got to find Dad,” she reminded him, then remembered the videotape her father had asked her to view. “Oh. I nearly forgot. Dad said something about a videotape of the night Gordonstone was murdered. He said it was on the tele…” Her voice tapered as she realized the folly of even asking. “OK. Well we had better get back to my place just in case Dad has called.”

He hadn't called… He couldn't call. Margaret had shot him on Thursday.

Following the shooting, Margaret stomped around the clearing angrily, bursting twigs like firecrackers. “I told you not to come.” Bo pranced delightedly, thinking the shooting was a huge game.

“I warned you,” Margaret continued, making no effort to help Bliss as he fought to stem the flow of blood from his leg.

“You didn't say you were going to shoot me.”

She sounded almost apologetic. “I wasn't going to; I didn't want to.”

“Like you didn't want to drown Melanie,” said a stranger's voice from inside him.

She started turning away. “I didn't drown her.”

He could feel the bullet — it was huge — a missile deep in his thigh, grazing the bone. “Aagh,” he cried as it moved under his probing.

“I saw them together. I saw him kissing her…” she stopped and stared up through the leafless spokes of a maple tree at the clear blue sky, as if searching for a word or an image to complete the phrase.

He felt himself becoming woozy. “Losing blood,” he said, recognizing the symptoms.

“She teased me. ‘This is what Daddy does,' she said.”

“Help me,” he muttered drowsily.

“‘Like this,' she said.”

“The blood… stop… help.” He was fighting the grogginess.

“‘Stop it,' I said. ‘Don't.' ‘It's nice,' she said. ‘I like it.' But she didn't mean it. She was just getting at me.”

“Margaret…Please, I'm dying.”

“‘Shut up, or I'll smack you!' I told her.”

Bliss was reaching out to her. “Margaret…”

“But she kept on and on. ‘I'll tell mum,' I said.”

“Marg…”

“‘Mum knows,' she said.”

The light was dying. “Please…”

“I watched them — I saw them together — I saw what they did.”

Bliss's eyes glazed and closed. Night descended. His struggle was over.

“Even after she'd gone, he still didn't want me.”

She glanced at Bliss with the realization that his sagging body had ceased to move, then sat cross-legged against a trunk, head slumped, gun by her side, recalling the times following Melanie's death when she had slipped almost naked into her father's bedroom late at night on the flimsiest of pretexts.
“Dad… I'm too hot, or too cold. I'm scared of the dark — of thunder — of ghosts,”
or,
“I feel sick. Will you cuddle me?”

“Go to bed Margaret,” he would say coldly. “You'll be all right.”

“I wanted to scream, ‘Love me, Dad,'” she said to Bliss, as if he could still hear. “‘Why won't you love me like you loved Melanie?' But he didn't want me; he wanted Melanie back. He didn't want me. He called me a whore.” Her voice rose in a crescendo of anger. “After what he'd been doing to Melanie, he called
me
a whore! He wouldn't even hit me. I wanted him to.”

She pleaded with the unconscious Bliss. “Do you understand? I wanted him to hit me. To hit me and do with me the things he did with Melanie. ‘Do it to me, Daddy — do it to me like you used to do it to Melanie.' But he never did.”

Suddenly conscious of the surrounding silence, Margaret lowered her voice to a whisper. “Even you didn't want me,” she mumbled, then she stood and drifted soundlessly into the inert forest.

Although it had died, the forest's resurrection was only a season away. Bliss's resurrection came much sooner; a matter of hours not months. Bo's tongue stirred him as it rippled across his face like a warm wet flannel, but full awareness was still way over the horizon as he lay on the wet leafy ground, drifting through a misty, unreal landscape trying to get his head around everything that had happened,

A warm salivating sensation in his mouth made him retch and he turned his head and vomited. Margaret, who had been standing close by, moved discreetly away; he saw her through a gummy haze, gun in hand, urging Bo to her side. With an inexplicable feeling that it might be safer to appear unconscious until he got his act together, he lay still again, struggling to remember what had happened, but the events were as nebulous as if they had occurred in a trance. He vaguely recalled falling asleep as Margaret was speaking, but her words were as faint as a barely remembered dream, although the message “I didn't drown Melanie” seemed to stand out, like the headlines on a newsagent's billboard.

So if she hadn't killed Melanie, what had happened to her sister? Nothing, he thought. That's untrue: she was murdered by her father, as you have always known. Removing the images of Melanie's face from the photographs was merely Margaret's way of dealing with the loss.

I'd make a good psychiatrist, or is it a psychologist, he thought, running through the scenario in his mind. Unable to protect Melanie from her father's abuse, Margaret protects herself from the guilt by eliminating any trace of her sister's image.

But a niggling thought persisted. What if she did do it?

She didn't
.

But what if she did? What would you do?

Arrest her
.

You'd look bloody foolish asking her to mend the canoe so you can take her in.

What's the alternative
?

Let her go. What difference will it make now? Melanie's been dead for twenty years. Edwards was right — why dredge up the past? The only one who will be hurt will be you. In any case, you've got no hard evidence, and the only two witnesses are both dead. And, as Samantha had said, a good lawyer would punch holes in anything Margaret herself said, putting it all down to the survival guilt and false memory syndrome of a traumatized child.

He had to agree with himself. The mutilated photographs, especially the one with the coffin, might simply have been her interpretation of what happened, a manifestation of a conscience permanently marred by her sister's death.

Pull yourself together you idiot, he yelled at himself. If that's true, then why did she shoot you?

“I've been shot!” Bliss jerked awake and stared at his leg in disbelief. His trousers had been pulled down to his ankles and a scruffy bandage had been tied around the wound. A ruddy blot was already seeping through the cloth.

“It's the tranquillizer,” she explained as she bent to examine the dressing, realizing he was having difficulty focussing. “It'll wear off in a while.”

Everything was fuzzy; he watched her re-bandage his leg as if it belonged to someone else. Maybe all this belongs to someone else, he thought, looking around, his mind muddled. Maybe I've strayed into somebody else's life.

“I've got the dart out,” she continued. “But it's made a bit of a mess.”

The tranquillizer dart, designed to penetrate the thick fur and tough hide of a bear, had done more than make a bit of a mess, it had carved a crater into his leg the size of a carrot.

Bliss' mind drifted. The vision of Gordonstone thrusting Melanie's cute little face underwater had plagued him for twenty years; it was difficult to dispel even with the stark evidence staring him in the face and burning into his leg. He still found himself excusing Margaret, thinking that she must simply blame herself for Melanie's death. Perhaps she felt guilty that Melanie was the one who suffered at her father's hands. Perhaps she even believed that it should have been her he drowned. But now an alternative notion pounded in his brain,

It couldn't be, he thought. But he vacillated — maybe it could be. The light finally clicked on; Margaret drowned her sister, not Gordonstone. But why?

He felt Margaret's hands working on his leg but didn't need to look at her face to understand. The harelip! Margaret had envied Melanie for being perfect. Margaret had killed her sister because of everyday sibling jealousy. The axe that cleaved a million families; the nick in a child's heart that festers until it becomes an open sore. Two sisters, conceived in the same womb, sharing the same genes, bickering over toys that neither really wanted, squabbling over one-eyed teddy bears and armless dolls, battling over bed-times and boys. Each demanding fatherly attention; Melanie getting more than her fair share.

Bliss succumbed to the effects of the tranquillizer again and floated sleep thinking how easily the petty rivalries of childhood — more often based on perception than reality — could turn siblings, parents, and partners into mortal enemies. Drug-induced dreams washed over his mind, morning turned to afternoon,
and the narcotic eventually wore off. He woke and felt the sting of sunlight as he pried open his eyes. Margaret hadn't noticed him stir; she was lost in concerns of her own, staring off into the future. Bliss contemplated making a grab for the gun, which was idly propped against a tree, but one look at Bo lying protectively by Margaret's side convinced him he would never make it. Closing his eyes again he weighed his limited options and concluded his best bet was to simply forget what he'd discovered — he had no proof anyway. He should just go back. He checked himself; he couldn't go back, she had taught him that. “Life doesn't work in reverse,” she had said. Go home then. He could lie, even to himself if he wanted, it wasn't difficult. All he had to do was stick to the original script she had given him: her father had sexually abused Melanie, then drowned her when he thought he might be caught. It was, after all, what he himself had always suspected.

With the decision made he opened his eyes, praying that the scene had changed; that the real world and normality had returned. He was dismayed to see Margaret checking the bandage again. But he would let her go, he decided. There was no point in doing anything else; she had suffered enough. He'd tell her she had nothing to fear, that he was only interested in her finding her father's killer. And as for the hole in his leg, he could explain that away as a hunting accident.