‘Your Andy’s a dark horse.’
‘What do you mean?’ Jane looked up. Green water dribbled between the lid and the pan. She tipped the greens into a serving dish.
‘Well…’ But before Gemma could say any more, the men came in. The footie was over and they were starving. Kevin gave Gemma a little hug of welcome. Jane wondered if he might have been happier with someone like Gemma. Someone with no imagination, from a safe, respectable family and carrying no baggage.
‘I’ll just call Andy.’ Jane stood in the hall between the kitchen and the stairs. Looking back into the room, where Kevin was cutting the meat and Michael was opening a bottle of wine, she thought anyone suddenly peering through the window would think they were a respectable family, with no hidden secrets or anxieties.
Andy appeared at the top of the stairs before she called him. He must have heard the rattle of plates and the voices in the kitchen. He didn’t notice her. He looked into the mirror that was hanging in the upstairs corridor and she saw him prepare himself to meet them. She was reminded of his school play days, when he’d been very serious about getting into character. It seemed that had been good practice for what he needed now.
The meal passed without incident. Michael and Gemma always ate with concentration, their eyes on their plates as if they were scared the food would be taken away from them. Jane thought Gemma would grow fat in middle age, but she would be contented, easy-going. She had expected Andy to be quiet and withdrawn, but he became very bright and witty, telling stories about his colleagues at Mareel, holding court and enjoying the audience. Kevin seemed to be filling all their glasses very often and soon fetched another bottle of wine. Jane told herself again that this was all normal behaviour, but she was almost breathless with tension. In other company she might have been tempted to hold out her glass and ask for it to be filled. She looked down at her plate and saw that she’d eaten very little.
Still the meal dragged on. The pavlova was admired. She cut into the meringue and saw that it was perfect, crisp on the outside but just a little chewy in the middle, and felt a brief lift in her spirits. The crumble was eaten. Gemma and Michael took second helpings.
Kevin was on his feet. He seemed to be enjoying himself immensely. He liked to think of himself as a great family man and would certainly, Jane thought, make a perfect grandfather. Again she saw Sunday lunch after Sunday lunch rolling away into the future, the calendar punctuated by bigger but similar events: Christmas, family birthdays, anniversaries.
‘You lasses go and sit down in front of the fire.’ Kevin was playing with the fancy coffee machine that the boys had given him for his last birthday. ‘We’ll clear this up, won’t we, boys?’
Gemma agreed immediately, although she hadn’t played any part in the preparation of the meal, and Jane found herself sitting on the leather sofa in the living room, suddenly very quiet. Even Gemma had stopped talking. It was almost dark outside and the breeze had dropped. Jane got up to draw the curtains. She hoped Gemma had forgotten that she was going to pass on a morsel of gossip about Andy. It would be pleasant to sit here in the quiet. She felt very tired and she didn’t want any revelations about her son.
But Gemma, it seemed, had not forgotten, and as soon as Kevin had brought in their coffee and left them alone, the girl continued where she’d left off. Her face was lit by a standard lamp and the rest of the room was in shadow. ‘Well…’ A pause to make sure she had Jane’s attention. ‘My Auntie Jennifer saw Andy a couple of weeks ago.’
Jane didn’t say anything. Gemma needed no encouragement, though Jane did wonder briefly how the girl’s aunt would have recognized her son.
‘She was a teacher at the Anderson High before she retired, so she knew Andy at once.’ The explanation. ‘And she said he was a fine boy, and so she couldn’t believe what she was seeing.’
‘And what was she seeing?’ Jane curled her legs underneath her on the sofa, in an attempt to appear relaxed.
‘An argument in the street, just outside the Grand Hotel. Andy swearing and shouting at a man old enough to be his father. Everyone staring.’
There was an overwhelming sense of relief. Jane had thought the story might involve the dead woman. She was aware of Gemma staring at her, expecting her to be horrified that Andy had caused a scene. ‘Do you have any idea what it was about?’ Because Andy was a gentle soul. Even as a child, he’d avoided confrontation.
The girl shook her head. ‘I do know the guy Andy was attacking was threatening to call the police.’
‘It just sounds like he got into a row with some drunk oilie.’ The oilies were convenient scapegoats whenever there was trouble in town.
‘It wasn’t an oilie! Gemma was enjoying herself now. ‘My Auntie Jennifer recognized him.’ She’d been holding on to this piece of the story. She might not read much fiction, but she understood the need for dramatic tension. ‘It was Tom Rogerson, the councillor.’
Chapter Eighteen
Sandy sat at his desk in the police station all morning, burrowing into the life of Alison Teal. He thought Jimmy Perez might be happier now that they had a name for her. Sandy had been hoping to meet Louisa for lunch at some point, but she’d decided to head back to Yell straight from the Scalloway Hotel.
‘It’s not that I don’t want to spend a bit more time with you, but my mother will be missing me and, besides, you might be held up at work.’
At one time Sandy might have been offended by that and seen it as a personal rejection. But he understood that Louisa took her responsibility for her mother seriously. And, after the night they’d had in Scalloway, he wasn’t in the mood to complain about anything. For the first half-hour at work he’d found it hard to concentrate on Alison Teal. He found himself grinning for no reason at all and wondering when he might ask Louisa to marry him. There was a slight awkwardness about that, because Jimmy Perez had not been engaged long when his woman was murdered. Sandy wouldn’t want to do anything to stir up those bad memories for Jimmy, who seemed to have emerged from the worst of the depression; and besides, he felt a strange superstition about it, as if by asking Louisa to marry him, he might put her in danger too.
Alison Teal had a website all to herself. It must have been set up when she was playing Dolly, the housemaid in the TV drama, because the photo was the same as the one Jimmy had found in Magnus Tait’s house. Nothing had been added to it for years; there was no information about recent roles. The website had the phone number of the actor’s agent, but when Sandy phoned it, the call went straight through to an answer machine. It was clearly an office number and the agent wasn’t working on a Sunday. Sandy left a message asking the woman to contact him urgently.
They still hadn’t found any of Alison’s relatives, and Jimmy Perez had told Sandy that was a priority: ‘It’s not just that they might have important information, but we need to inform them of Alison’s death. She might well have parents who are still alive.’ Sandy knew Perez had been thinking of the elderly people in the photo that Sandy had found in the box in Tain. It was obviously one of her treasured possessions. Sandy was distracted again now, thinking that he’d like a photograph of Louisa. A proper photograph, not just one taken on his phone to save on the computer. He turned back to the screen and continued his search.
Through Google he found an in-depth interview with Alison Teal in the Independent on Sunday. He printed it off, because he could tell it would be useful and Jimmy Perez preferred to have paper copies of anything he thought important. The interview had taken place a few months after Alison had disappeared and then been discovered in the Ravenswick Hotel. They’d fixed a date for the disappearance now: it had happened fifteen years ago. The journalist sounded almost like a psychiatrist, in the piece. Sandy wasn’t sure that he’d want such personal information made public and put into a newspaper for folk to read while they were eating breakfast.