‘The way things were, I didn’t feel uncomfortable about sleeping with Willie.’ She grinned, suddenly with a strange, mischievous look in her eyes. ‘Except…’ She flushed again and glanced at me.
‘Yes?’ said Prim.
‘Tell you later,’ she said, looking meaningfully in my direction once more. ‘You nearly let on about Willie’s big Willy, didn’t you.’ I was bursting to say it, but I resisted. ‘Let’s just say there was a physical problem,’ she added. I coughed on a sip of tea. Prim shot me a ‘Shurrup’ look.
‘It was fun at first,’ Dawn went on. ‘But Willie’s obsessive. Pretty soon he was telling me he loved me and everything. That made me nervous, but I thought it’d wear off. It didn’t though. One day he turned up on the doorstep of your flat with a suitcase. He said he’d left Linda and was moving in with me. I didn’t know what to do. I mean if I’d chucked him out he’d have had nowhere else to go, but … well, to tell you the truth, nice as he is, when we got down to it I found out pretty soon that physically, I don’t really fancy him.’
‘Bloody great,’ said Prim. ‘The guy turned you off, but you let him shack up with you. And in my flat. A bit of a bloody nerve that, wasn’t it? Having it off with another woman’s husband in my flat. Private eyes at the door and all that.’
‘Oh come on,’ said Dawn, defensively. ‘His wife wouldn’t do that:’
Prim shot me another ‘Shurrup,’ look, but I decided that it was time to get into the discussion. ‘When was the last time you saw him?’ I asked, as casually as I could.
She looked blankly at me. ‘A couple of weeks ago,’ she said. ‘I left him in Ebeneezer Street when I went off filming. I told him he’d have to find somewhere permanent to live. I didn’t say I wouldn’t be coming with him, but I tried not to make him think that I would.
‘He just said not to worry, that everything would be sorted out soon.’
‘You didn’t go back to Edinburgh on Wednesday?’
‘No. I came here, to see Mum and Dad. The thing is, I really fancy Miles too, and I want to clear the decks. I thought I’d ask Dad to go to see Willie, to say I want out, and to ask him to be sure to move out of the flat before I got back.’
Prim snorted. ‘That’d be really nice of Dad. Have you asked him yet?’
‘No, I haven’t plucked up the courage. I don’t suppose you’d …’ And then something struck her, something very obvious.
‘But hold on. You’re back, Prim. So you must have been to the flat. Wasn’t Willie there? Have you chucked him out already?’
Primavera shook her head. ‘Sit down, Dawn,’ she said quietly. Her sister obeyed. ‘Yes, I’ve been to the flat, and yes, I’ve seen Willie. So has Oz. But he was dead. He was murdered. On Wednesday night, the police say.’
The girl’s face went ashen. She hid it with her hands and slumped backwards, collapsing into the soft cushions of the big armchair. I thought that she was crying, but she wasn’t. She was too shocked for that. It was Prim who was suddenly in tears. She rushed across the room, and threw her arms round her sister. ‘Oh Dawn, I’m sorry, but I’m so relieved. We didn’t want to think it, but we were afraid that you might have had something to do with it, or that you might be in danger too. That’s why we’ve been looking for you.’
I felt helpless, so I got up and put my arms around them both. ‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘It’s okay, Prim. We’ve found her now, and she’s going to be all right.’ I drew her to her feet and held her against me. In the armchair, Dawn took her hands from her ghost’s face and looked up at us.
‘Do the police know who did it?’ she said, huskily.
I shook my head. ‘No. The guy in charge is going to want to talk to you. Was Willie in touch with anyone? His wife, for example?’
‘Not as far as I know? But I haven’t seen him for two weeks, remember.’
‘Did he tell you about the money?’
‘What money?’ Prim and I looked hard at her. She was an actress, but I couldn’t imagine that anyone could fake that sort of astonishment.
‘Did Willie send you to Switzerland to open a bank account for him?’
She gave a soft gasp. ‘Oh, that. Yes. He said he wanted to hide as much of his money from his wife as he could. He said she’d be suspicious if she found out that he’d gone to Switzerland, so he asked me to do it. I flew to Geneva and opened the account, then flew back on the same day.
‘The account’s in a bank called Berners: it’s one of these cloak and dagger things. Withdrawals can only be made by two people, each carrying half of a fiver. The account number is the same as the number on the banknote. The bank took a photo of it. When I got back I gave the two halves to Willie.’ She pulled herself up in the chair.
‘But why did you ask about money? Did Willie use the account? Did he transfer his cash out there?’
I smiled. ‘I don’t know about his cash, but he transferred nine hundred thousand of his firm’s money out there. I was hired by the senior partner to recover it. I went to see him on Thursday, to get the fiver back. He was dead when I got there, and when Prim arrived. That’s when we met.
‘We’ve been a bit busy since then,’ I added.
Dawn sat there staring up at us as she fitted the pieces of the story together. By now I was quite certain that Prim’s sister was just a touch slow on the uptake, but eventually she got there. ‘Do the police think I killed Willie for the money?’
‘The guy who’s leading the investigation, Mike Dylan, he doesn’t know about the money. And that’s the way I want it to stay. Black and Muirton want to keep that part of it quiet. But if Dylan ever does find out about it, and about you opening that bank account, then yes, he’d fancy you for it right away. So let’s hope you can prove where you were when Kane was killed.’ Dawn gulped. Her mouth dropped open slightly. Prim looked at her anxiously.
‘So,’ she said, ‘when did you get here on Wednesday?’
‘About two-thirty in the afternoon.’
‘And were you with Mum and Dad all day after that?’
‘Yes. Dad had an order to dispatch that day for a customer in London. I helped him box it, then we went to the station in Perth and put it on a train. That would have been around nine in the evening.’ She paused. ‘Hey, I signed the dispatch slip, and it has the time on it!’ Her face lit up with relief.
‘After that we came back home and had supper with Mum. I told them all about the film. We sat up until about one in the morning.’
It was my turn to grin with relief. I mean, you don’t fancy even the outside possibility that your girlfriend’s sister might be a knife-wielding maniac, do you? ‘Dawn, that’s brilliant,’ I said. ‘Dylan won’t be able to lay a glove on you.’
‘Should I go to the police?’
‘I don’t know. Let’s think about that one for a while.
‘One thing though. Just remember, if and when you do see Mike Dylan, don’t mention a word to him about the bank account. If he should ask you about it, look blank, then tell us.’
She nodded. ‘Okay. What about the fiver? Who’s got that?’
I looked at Prim. Prim looked at me, and shook her head, imperceptibly. ‘The important thing, Dawn,’ I said, ‘is that whoever killed Willie doesn ’t have it. They couldn’t find it at the time, but they sure as hell want it now.’ I thought some more, and as I did, there was a loud creak from the hallway. Prim drew a finger across her throat in a ‘Keep your mouth shut!’ sign, then rubbed her face quickly with her hands to clear away the traces of her earlier tears.
Looking at Mum and Dad Phillips in their churchgoing clothes, I had a sudden strange feeling that Prim, Dawn and I, the three of us, were time travellers, who had taken a flip back sixty years. Mum was dressed in a long brown velvet dress with a fur stole and a funny, shapeless wee hat that sat on top of her head like a cowpat. Dad wore a heavy black suit, with a jacket so long that it was almost a frock coat. He wore, big round glasses, and a gold watch chain hung across his waistcoat. His high shirt collar was starched stiff, and secured by a brass stud which showed just above the knot of his striped tie. I guessed that he was in his early sixties, his wife maybe five years or so younger. Each was probably around the same age as their clothes.