The Turning Tide (30 page)

Erykah took the bottle and looked at the label. Grant’s. ‘I know it’s not as nice as the stuff you usually drink,’ he said.

‘No, that’s good, that’s great,’ she hiccuped. ‘I could use a couple of Valium too, if you happen have any of those.’

‘Do I look like a man who goes anywhere near a GP?’

‘No, I don’t suppose so,’ she said. ‘Thought you might know the sort of people who could get it.’

He shook his head. ‘I stay far away from that business unless I got no choice,’ he said. Erykah got up and took two glasses from the kitchen. ‘Just water for me, thanks,’ Billy said. ‘I went clean my first turn in the joint and never looked back.’

‘Is that why you don’t deal with drugs?’

‘Part of it,’ he said. ‘It’s been long enough now that it’s not a temptation any more. And what people do themselves, you know? That’s their shout. I can’t judge anyone for the choices they make. Went a long way down that road myself.’ His eyes squinted, as if pushing back an unpleasant memory. ‘But the people who take advantage of someone else’s illness to make money?’ He shook his head. ‘Nah. That’s where I draw the line.’

She poured a generous amount of the alcohol into her own glass, filled his with tap water, then dipped her long fingers in the water and flicked a few drops into her drink.

Seminole Billy watched her. ‘Does that do anything?’

‘Opens it up,’ Erykah said, and buried the rim of the glass under her nose. She inhaled, then pulled it away and swirled the caramel liquid. ‘Brings out the spice, a little bit of toffee.’

‘You make it sound like a dessert.’

‘I guess it is to me.’ Erykah took a mouthful. The fire of the alcohol warmed her throat and made a lifeline right for her heart.

He didn’t say anything after that. She was glad. He watched while she had a second glass of whisky, then a third. They sat in the kitchen, lit by the glimmer of the moon, its reflection on the river shifting as dawn grew nearer. ‘There’s something I have wanted to ask you,’ she said.

‘Ask it.’

‘You really a Seminole?’ she said. ‘You don’t look . . . you know.’ She grimaced. How many times had people said the same thing to her, or something very like it? If he took offence, she would claim it was the whisky talking.

He didn’t flinch. Billy reached in the front pocket of his jeans and pulled out a battered leather wallet. He passed a dog-eared identification card across the table.

Erykah looked at the black-and-white picture for a long time. A boy looked back at her, with rolled-up shirtsleeves and a clean-cut, old fashioned hairstyle. The teenaged Billy was just about recognisable, the close-set eyes especially, though time had changed his face a lot. ‘Is that your name?’ He nodded. ‘Billy Billie,’ she read aloud, and looked up at him. ‘Really? Not William?’

‘Family thing,’ he shrugged. ‘Dad ditched before I was born, Mama gave me a family name.’

‘Were you close with her?’

‘Was.’ He frowned and ran his tongue over his teeth. ‘Things didn’t work out so good; I fucked up a lot when I was a kid,’ he said. ‘But Mama tried.’

‘What’s Florida like?’

‘Like a good woman,’ he said. ‘Hot and wet.’ He seemed to regret the flippant answer as soon as he said it. Billy turned his eyes towards the ceiling and sighed, digging deep for a memory. ‘Sorry. I mean . . . It used to be mostly empty, now it’s mostly not. Used to be all they wanted that cheap land for was orange groves and cattle farms. Now it’s country clubs and sky-high condos on the beach. Lots more people too. Most of ’em not worth a damn. Retirees and drifters. A lot of ’em get down there with no idea what they want to do, and it sucks ’em in. Poor folks looking to make a dollar out of fifteen cents. The ones with money are even worse.’

‘Not exactly what they put in the holiday brochures.’

‘No, it ain’t. Lot of lost people in Florida. Been like that for centuries. Lot of cons. Go on vacation, leave on probation,’ he said. ‘But it’s still beautiful. The way the air feels, the way the wind smells coming off the beach, you can’t take that away.’

‘What did your family do?’

Seminole Billy shrugged. ‘The usual. Truck stop, monkey farm and gator wrestling.’ He looked at her raised eyebrow. ‘I’m not joking.’

‘It must be so different, living here.’

‘Sure,’ he said. ‘The food’s different. I miss a ripe tomato sometimes. And those things that get called grapefruit in your stores? Don’t eat those. That’s not what grapefruit is supposed to taste like. You have one picked fresh off the tree, it’s as sweet as an orange.’ He looked at her face and laughed. ‘You think I’m lying. But that’s the truth. And that’s what I miss.’

‘Do you go back much?’

‘Haven’t been in ten years,’ he said. ‘Didn’t even want to go back that time, either. Nothing to go back for. Had enough of the place.’ He put the card back in his wallet and the wallet in his jeans. ‘Ask me again in a few years, though. Maybe I’ll say the same. Maybe I’ll say different.’

‘What was it like in Scotland? I’m assuming you went up there to get rid of – of the bag.’

‘I thought you only had one question? I counted seven so far.’

‘Sorry, she said. ‘But since all this started I can’t help but wonder . . .’

‘I drove it up,’ he said. ‘Just me. Buster was too much of a risk. If you think he’s easy to spot in London, imagine how he’d stand out anywhere else. The Major gave me the keys to his place. It was being renovated or whatever, but the builders were off for the holidays. Place was full of plastic sheeting. I camped out there, cleaned the body up. Used to know a guy in Ullapool who ran drug boats all up that coast, so I figured that was as good as anywhere to dump him. Place was deserted. Everyone was sleeping off their Hogmanay hangovers. The tide did the rest.’

‘But what about . . .’

‘I know you have a lot of questions. Trying to make sense of it all,’ Billy shook his head. ‘But you gotta stop this. The less you know about it, the better.’

He was probably right. The more she found out about the whole situation, the less she wished she knew. It was enough having to walk away from the train at Euston and the Major’s body as if nothing had happened. But now she was having to do the same to her own husband. Erykah wasn’t sure what kind of a person that made her, but it probably wasn’t a good one.

Billy reached across the table and slid the bottle back, capped it, and put it in her handbag. ‘You need sleep. We’ll figure out what to do in the morning.’ She couldn’t object.

They went to the bedroom with its one bed and Erykah paused. Billy pulled an armful of blankets from the cupboard and laid them on the floor. He took off his leather jacket and rolled it up as a pillow.

‘There’s a sofa – wouldn’t you be more comfortable there than on the floor?’

He shook his head. ‘I’m not leaving you. I did that already today, and you were right: it wasn’t safe.’

Erykah crawled into bed. She was about to go to bed less than six feet from a man who had just admitted murder to her, and he was the only person right now that she trusted even a little bit. The pillow was dented with the shape of a head and the duvet smelled of Nicole. She had never felt so alone in her life. Erykah sobbed in the sheets until they were soaked. When the tears ran out eventually, the whisky did its work and she dropped into a deep, dreamless sleep.

: 29 :

The light came slowly and late. The sky was low with cloud but not raining. Diffuse light brightened the white walls of the bedroom. For a moment she did not remember where she was or why she was there. A few seconds of peace, of feeling both empty and complete, with no regrets, no grief. She reached out a hand to feel who might be next to her in bed only to find the sheets empty. Then the events of the last two days came rushing back, and she remembered why she was in Nicole’s house, what she had seen and heard. She remembered why her throat was dry and cracked and her chest painful from heaving.

Billy must have risen early. The woollen blankets he had slept on were folded on a chair in the corner of the room. Erykah hauled herself to the bathroom, rinsed her mouth and looked in the mirror. Her bloodshot eyes were buried in a puffy face and her frizzy curls sprang out in all directions. She wrestled her hair back into a knot and turned the shower on full. Soon, steam billowed from the taps, filled the room and frosted the windows.

She lathered herself with a bar of soap and washed away days’ worth of sweat and dirt. Underneath her skin felt taut, raw, like a sunburn. The scrapes and cuts across her knuckles stung where she had bit her hand. She turned the temperature up as hot as she could stand it. Maybe it would wash away the hollow feeling in her head and chest, help her figure out what to do.

The men who had been at her house last night were most likely long gone. She could go back, find Rab’s body, and ring the police as if she had been out all night. But then what? Getting the cops involved would only alert whoever was after her to her whereabouts and maybe they were watching the house from a distance.

Or . . . she could go away. Disappear. Take the money and leave London. Billy could get her a passport. She could be halfway across the world in less than a day. Boston? India? It didn’t matter. She would change her name, cut her hair, and fold into the rhythm of somewhere else. Frozen cocktails and fried fish sandwiches on the beach in Florida, sarongs and scuba diving in Thailand. Open a shop. Work in a market. Grow old and wrinkled. Never come back. No reason to. No need.

Tempting as it was, running away would not work. If the secret was big enough to be worth killing her husband over, it was big enough to follow her if she skipped town.

She tilted her face up to the ceiling and breathed the hot steam in deeply. There was no choice she could make that was the right one. Here was the rock. Here was the hard place.

When she was a girl, she had thought the saying was between a rock and a
hot
place. She imagined people crouching between the shadow of a boulder and the gates of hell, her imagination influenced by lurid Breugel prints in the front of a library book about Ancient Greek myths that she had pored over until Rainbow yelled at her that it was time to go to bed.

One time Rainbow and her friends were sitting around the flat, playing cribbage and smoking pot and talking gossip. Erykah hovered at the edge, hating the acrid smell of the smoke but fascinated by what it did, how it turned women who had once been suspicious of her hippy mother into old friends. Rainbow’s feather and bead earrings fluttered as she laughed. One formidable lady called Joy with the voice of a chain smoker was lamenting her sixteen-year-old daughter, who was pregnant by her boyfriend and refused to discuss it. ‘She’s between a rock and a hot place,’ Erykah piped up, and the women all broke into peals of laughter, like it was the punchline of the funniest joke ever told.

Joy laughed too, but she also rubbed Erykah’s shoulder, seeing the confusion and hurt in her eyes when the grown-ups laughed at her. Joy was from Chicago, but that was a long time ago, and sometimes she brought round buttered grits that she simmered in a slow cooker. Erykah loved and hated the grits: they tasted nice but the texture was so weird, like something you weren’t supposed to eat on purpose.

A rock and a hot place. Even now it made more sense to her than the real phrase. Anyway there was no way out of this situation that she could see.

Erykah sat on the bed and started digging through her bag. The Schofield files were still there. So was the Major’s phone, which was out of power. But it was the same make as Nicole’s and there was a spare charger next to the bed.

All she had to wear were the same clothes she had come in, the same ones she had been wearing since she got on the sleeper in Cameron Bridge. She couldn’t go out in that. Erykah looked at the now ruined bra and decided to go without. She took a jumper, knickers and pair of jeans from Nicole’s wardrobe, as well as the phone charger.

The smell of hot coffee and eggs wafted in from the kitchen. Erykah gathered up her things and shuffled to the kitchen. Billy was standing over the cooker, a blue and white checked tea towel tucked into his narrow waist for a makeshift apron.

In spite of herself, she smiled. ‘You look ridiculous.’

‘Yeah all right,’ he said, and put a plate of eggs and a hot mug of coffee on the table. ‘You need fuel. Eat.’

Erykah knew better than to disobey. She sat at the farmhouse table with her plate and the deciphered papers from Damian Schofield’s office. She looked around at the cottage, the scrubbed pine and whitewashed lime walls as sparse as a showroom. It was mock Tudor outside, but mock Tudor of a vintage old enough to have its own charm. Inside it was middle-class-renovation chic, reclaimed boards and rose-sprigged vintage prints juxtaposed with recessed lighting and slick, polished stone. Nicole lived in the place as if it was a hotel, which Erykah supposed wasn’t too far off the truth.

She cut the eggs and put each bite in her mouth without tasting it. The same few options spun around in her head until she couldn’t make sense of any of it.

Right now no one knows where we are. I could stay here until Nicole comes back
, Erykah thought. And then what? It wouldn’t make a difference to what she would have to face the minute she stepped outside. And she couldn’t take the chance that they might pull Nicole into it as well.

‘Radio?’ Billy said. Erykah nodded and he switched it on.

‘Later this morning I’ll be speaking to Heather Matthews from the Scotland Liberal Unionist Party,’ Diana Stuebner purred through the radio speakers. ‘With the shock death of Major Whitney Abbott this week, can the party survive the death of its highest profile – some would say only – political candidate?’

Billy snorted from the kitchen. Can it indeed? Erykah thought. Surely more troubling was the possibility that a police investigation of the death – not to mention Morag’s on-air meltdown when confronted with the mortuary photos – would turn up facts they didn’t want people to know about.

Yet, without any obvious connection to Schofield and Morag still denying involvement with the party, who would connect the dots? If she had walked into her own house last night, if those men, whoever they were, had killed her, who would know? Schofield had been so careful that the papers were all that was left. The irony was that the steps he had taken to avoid being detected were exactly the things that would probably see his killers walk away scot free.

Billy hovered over the sink, washing up plates, drying them and putting everything away exactly where he had found it. She considered for a moment telling him about the high efficiency, water-recycling dishwasher Nicole had just had installed where the vegetable pantry would once have been, but thought better of it. Leave no trace.

The kitchen window faced the towpath, towards the river. Erykah spotted a hard core of veteran men’s squad rowing past with a coaching launch following close behind. A crackle from the cox box and the men came to a stop, listening for their next instruction.

The crew leaned over their oars again and started to move off. The men’s faces were set in hard lines as they leaned deep into the catch of the oars, their eyes focused only on the back of the person in front of them.

In most other kinds of boats, people faced forward – kayaks, sailing, motor boats. In rowing you did not. You faced backwards and you had to trust. Trust the coxswain steering the craft, or if there was none, your own judgment. In the pair Nicole had been the one setting the pace, but it was Erykah who kept them on the course. Every time you swivelled around to have a look it risked throwing the boat off course, throwing the rhythm of the oars out of sync. You had to piece together your path from glances over your shoulder, from the feel of the water, the signs and sounds around you. There was no way to keep moving forward if you were always looking to see where you were going. The only thing you could see, for the most part, was the past.

‘Billy,’ she said. ‘Can I ask you another question?’

‘Shoot,’ he said, and paused. ‘Not literally.’

‘If someone wanted to hire you, to find a couple of men, I mean . . .’

Billy wiped his soapy hands on a tea towel. ‘Oh no. You’re not thinking of going the eye-for-an-eye route, are you? Because what I cost for that kind of job, you can’t afford.’

‘Maybe,’ Erykah said. ‘I don’t know. He was my husband. What am I supposed to do?’

‘Sure, he was your husband,’ Billy said and crossed his arms over his chest and leaned back against the counter. ‘Just twenty-four hours ago you were telling me you weren’t sure if you ever loved him.’

She looked away. It hurt to hear it laid out plainly like that. But it was true. How many times in the last weeks – the last years – had she wished Rab was gone? But this wasn’t the way she’d wanted it to happen. Not like this.

‘Hey, it’s OK.’ Billy said. ‘It’s normal to feel everything at once right now.’

Erykah nodded. ‘Sure. Yeah.’ Her fingers stretched and twisted the cuff of her sleeve. ‘I feel as though I ought to be doing something,’ she said. ‘Instead of sitting here.’

Billy walked over and sat down in the chair next to hers. ‘When someone hits you close to home it’s easy to do something rash,’ he said. ‘I’ve never been much for quiet contemplation, but you need to take this one step at a time.’

‘I don’t even know what the first step
is
,’ she said.

‘A good offence is the best defence, you know? But what you’re thinking about is base revenge.’

‘You don’t believe in revenge?’

‘Not on a personal level, not unless I’m getting paid,’ Billy said. ‘You know what Marcus Aurelius said in
Meditations
? It is best to leave another man’s mistake where it lies.’

‘Marcus Aurelius, huh?’ Erykah said. ‘You make it sound like a Bible verse.’

‘Well, it is a good book.’

She rubbed her fingertips on the smooth waxed wood of the table. ‘I can’t just let him lie there,’ she whispered. ‘I could phone the police and report it anonymously.’

‘Woman, you know as well as I do there ain’t no such thing as anonymous,’ he said. ‘Not when it comes to murder.’

Erykah nodded. The police were definitely better at tracking calls now than they had been when Grayson was arrested. And if that happened there was no way the press would ever leave her alone afterwards. She would be fair game for the rest of her life.

The Major’s mobile buzzed and vibrated on the table, alerting her that it was now fully charged. Erykah picked it up and scrolled through the messages. A flurry of missed calls from the previous morning, then nothing.

‘That your new burner?’ Billy asked.

‘Ah . . . no. It’s the Major’s phone.’

‘You didn’t tell me you had that,’ he said. But it was appreciation, not accusation, in his voice.

‘Can’t go revealing all my secrets now can I.’ The Major must not have used the mobile to contact many people. The list of numbers stored on the phone was short.

‘Livia,’ she said. She flipped through Schofield’s notebook. ‘Look, look here,’ she pointed at a number scrawled on the paper in her own handwriting, where she had noted down the last person to ring his office phone. ‘Same number. One of Schofield’s colleagues said Livia was a radio journalist, but I rang
LCC
and they had never heard of her. I think it’s the woman you met the night you got Schofield’s body,’ she said.

‘You didn’t call this number?’

Erykah shook her head. ‘I didn’t want to risk it until I had some idea what might be on the other end.’

‘So do it now,’ Billy said. ‘Find out.’

‘Are you joking?’

He reached across the table and punched the buttons. The phone rang a handful of times then went through to voicemail. Erykah leaned in, the better to hear if there was a personalised message.

‘Sorry, I can’t take your call right now,’ a voice said. It was familiar . . . who was that? Erykah and Billy jumped back at the same time as they realised. He dropped the phone like it was hot and it clattered on the kitchen table. Erykah reached across and switched it off before the answerphone started recording.

‘Is that who I think . . . ?’

‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘It is.’ And if that was the case, then Erykah wasn’t the only one who was in immediate danger. But she was probably the only one who knew about it.

She had got it wrong. Completely wrong. But maybe – just maybe – there was a large enough window to make it right. She stood up from the table. ‘Get your jacket and let’s go.’

‘What’s up?’ he asked.

‘First, get Buster to meet us at the house,’ she said. ‘Tell him to bring cleaning supplies. You still have those Union Jack bags in the back of your car?’

‘Sure do,’ he nodded. ‘If you’re thinking what I think you’re thinking – is that what you want?’

What did she want? Erykah couldn’t have said, exactly. Things she thought she wanted a week ago were now long gone. Never mind the things she thought she had wanted twenty years ago. A simple answer might be to say she wanted a quiet life. But no matter what she did, trouble had a way of finding her. You can try for quiet all you like. The universe might just have other plans.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Can’t go to the police with this.’

‘Let them think it was a robbery,’ he said. ‘Millionaires get knocked over all the time. And you two weren’t exactly discreet about your home address.’