The Lost Sister (19 page)

“There are some places where you simply feel safe.”

That had been Kathryn Brown's response when we asked her where her sister was.

My first thought was the she was answering her own question, not even listening to what we asked. Sometimes, during our talk, she would become distracted, drift off into a place where I don't think either myself or Susan could follow her.

“We were close when we were girls,” she said. “When we were eight or nine it seemed as though we would always do everything together. We were sisters. Inseparable.”

A sadness washed over me as she spoke.

Elaine's family had always been close. Mother, father, sister; all of them inseparable in a way that had always made me jealous. Even after her death, they rallied around each other in a way that I felt I could never really be a part of.

I was an only child whose parents had died too young. Who had allowed himself to play the role that other people expected of him: distanced.

Not unfriendly, but never allowing anyone to get that close.

My all too brief sessions with the counsellor following the accident that killed Elaine touched on my anger, withdrawal and need for revenge.

And my childhood, of course.

Counsellors, psychologists, psychiatrists all have this strange fixation on what they call
formative experiences
.

My sessions were marked by resistance, anger and impatience. Didn't stop the bastard trying, right enough.

“You seem resentful.”

He had no right to make judgements on me. His own ground rules were:

No judgement. No blame.

I guessed they were the kind of rules that only apply to everyone else.

Later, I'd try and apply the same rules to my investigative work. Ensure I was unbiased, uncompromised.

Of course, I was every bit as hypocritical as the doctor. Whenever those rules become inconvenient, it's easy to just throw them away.

“Resentful?”

Every session, I was one wrong word away from walking out the door. Forcing myself to stay because I thought I wanted back on the Job, back on the force. When I made the decision to leave the police, I'd give up on the sessions, too.

The word
mandatory
holds a great deal of power.

“Were you resentful of her family?”

We'd been talking about Elaine. Why I hadn't talked to her family since the accident.

He pressed the issue. The way he always did. “They're very close-knit. Would sacrifice anything for each other if they could.” He paused, watching my reaction. I was careful not to give him anything. Looking back, though, my emotions were likely lit up like a fucking flare. “Your words. Not mine.”

“No.”

“So tell me about your family.”

“Nothing to do with this.”

“I know your parents died young.”

“Define young.”

He was holding back his outburst. No judgement? He couldn't help making them, the arrogant bastard. “Were you close?”

“They were my parents.”

“Doesn't tell me much.”

“You mean, were we like Elaine's family?”

He didn't give me an answer.

Two could play at that game, right enough. I still believed he had no business asking about my life, my inner thoughts.

What could he tell me that I couldn't tell myself?

Aye, maybe these days I have a few better answers to that question.

“You won't tell me?”

I shrugged. “Nothing to do with why we're here.”

When Kathryn Brown talked about her family, it made me think about the Barrows. Close knit. Taking the kids on vacations even when they were old enough to move out on their own. The whole clan sharing a house in the middle of the French countryside every year, like nothing had changed between them. Even though they had their own lives, they could still go home.

The abiding rule of my life had always been:

You can never go home again
.

I had nowhere from my past I wanted to revisit. Nowhere where I felt safe, where I would want to return when I wanted to hide. How could I hope to understand a woman like Deborah Brown?

It was no wonder that I had believed Wickes when he talked about Deborah's obsession. To anyone else, it would have seemed natural; an extension of her close-knit upbringing; a need for family that anyone else could empathise with.

I hadn't seen that. Hadn't considered it.

Wickes had talked about how we were the same. Burns had said similar things. And I was starting to wonder whether I really had more in common with these thugs and monsters than with anyone close to normal.

The sun had set by the time we pulled off the main roads. I drove slow on what were little more than dirt tracks, focussed on what was ahead. The headlights didn't seem to slice through the darkness so well.

The fog was falling along with the temperature. We hit pockets of white that reflected the full beam of the headlights back on us.

The car was forced down to a crawl.

I hit the interior light so that Susan could read the directions.

She kept looking out the windows, squinting slightly, “I hate the country.”

“Really?”

She gave a little laugh, killed it quick. “I'm a city girl at heart. Streetlights, you know? Marvellous invention.”

I still couldn't quite get over it; “
City
girl?”

“Dundee's a city.”

“Hardly New York or LA. Not even Edinburgh.”

“The city with the small-town heart. Isn't that one of the slogans the council tried out a few years ago?”

“Some shite like that,” I agreed. Since the late nineties, Dundee had been constantly trying to reinvent its public image. The problem was that until you spent any time in the city, old prejudices and half-truths stuck in your mind, coloured your view of the place.

What you saw from the outside was faded old buildings and empty factories, a downtrodden and desperate population trapped by the industries of the past that had left the city behind decades earlier.

It was a phenomenon, how only when you lived in the place did you discover another side. As though Dundee was desperate to keep itself hidden from outsiders. Seeing the true face of the city was something reserved for those who were prepared to take the time to understand it.

“The point is,” Susan said, still craning her neck to look out for any landmarks and turnoffs, “that I like streets. And buildings. And signposts. Out here, everything looks the same. There's nothing to tell you where you are. One field is pretty much the same as the next.”

We hit a curve in the road. The headlights spun, caught a sheep who was standing by a barbed wire fence looking out at us with curiosity, maybe having been awoken by our approach. Reflecting back the glare of the bulbs, her eyes took on a supernatural-looking sheen. I felt a shiver.

What was the old saying?

Aye, like someone had walked over my grave.

“Next turn off,” said Susan.

“You're sure?”

“On the right.”

She might have injected just a little authority into her voice.

It would have helped.

The building, as I had pictured it in my head, was a bright and sunny place. The front garden was well maintained – maybe with a few vegetable plots the girls would have tended when they were young – and there was an air of life and beauty to the structure that emanated from the brickwork itself.

Maybe I was just glomming onto Kathryn's childhood memories.

It had been years since anyone had come to the wee bothy out in the middle of nowhere. Kathryn told us how she had come up once since inheriting the building to check on its structural integrity. When she could find the time, she said, she was considering tarting the place up, selling it on.

“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.

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 way.

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?”