‘And I suppose you are going to hand it to me now,’ I say to her, ‘as one does in all good stories, so that I will have a treasured memento of the mother I never knew.’
— Well I lost it actually, she says carelessly. On a train. Or a bus. Who knows? Pass me an Abernethy.
So. Then I took what money I could find in the house, took the diamonds, sitting carelessly in the sideboard drawer — I was very calm — I was thinking that I could sell them when we ran out of money. Of course, I never did for fear I would be discovered. I packed baby clothes and made sandwiches, I even took a Thermos of tea. It was almost as if we were setting off on a great adventure. Then I drove away in Effie’s car — I had a vague idea how to drive it, I’d sat next to her a few times and there was no traffic around. I stopped in a passing-place to feed the baby, put her to my breast and milk came. It seemed like a miracle, a sign, but I’ve read of such things since.
‘So, you were a seventeen-year-old schoolgirl who’d just killed her sister who was really her mother and you were breastfeeding a baby who wasn’t yours on a deserted Highland road in the middle of the night.’ I wonder if there are any words that can adequately cover this situation. The ones that spring to mind — absurd, surreal, grotesque — don’t really do, somehow.
— Then I drove to a station and waited on the platform with the milk churns and caught an early train over the border. We went to London where we were anonymous and then to Brighton. I saw the name ‘Andrews’ above a butcher’s shop and thought it ordinary enough and — well, you know the rest.
I kept track of things in the newspapers — I could hardly go to a police station and protest my innocence over two murders when I was guilty of the third — they still hanged people then. So I went on the run.
And now, Nora says, Effie turns up alive after all these years. It makes no difference, of course — for I meant to murder my mother and intention is everything. Another slice of Battenberg, Mr Petrie? she asks, as regal as a duchess.
‘Call me Chick,’ Chick says, ‘and yes it was Moira, and yes, she did leave me.’
— What a cow, Nora says cheerfully and Chick says, ‘How did you know?’
I know what happened to Effie because she told me, just before I fell off the quay of the Victoria Dock. I didn’t understand then what she was saying, but I do now.
Further down the bank a man had spotted her being swept down river. He had parked his car next to the water in preparation for running a length of hose pipe from his exhaust to the inside of the car and removing himself from the planet for good. He was a rep from Peterborough — ladies’ shoes — and was married to a woman he hated but felt he couldn’t get divorced from because they had three small children and a huge overdraft. He was a coward and thought it was just easier to die than cope with his wife’s wrath, although he didn’t feel very cowardly, having his last cigarette and contemplating the Highland scenery by night, he felt downright brave when he thought of what he was about to do. At that moment, as if to call on the hero hiding inside him, he saw something drifting down the river and with some difficulty, and not without getting his trousers soaked, he managed to haul in his salvaged naiad — Effie. Still alive (and enticingly naked), she was a water-baby, after all, and once she was on the bank she coughed up a great deal of river water, some pond weed and a couple of small fishes —
— Really?
‘No. And so she came back to life. And he drove off with her — blah, blah, blah.’
— Blah, blah, blah?
‘It was like a sign for both of them. A fresh start. A re-birth. They went to Rhodesia together, set up a business which was very successful, he died a year ago and she came back to lay things to rest. Atonement, maybe. And she saved me from drowning so perhaps in the grand cosmic design of things that cancels out trying to drown me in the beginning.’
— I doubt it.
‘And she was looking for you. So perhaps she wanted to make amends.’
— So where is she now?
‘Wouldn’t she have gone to see Lachlan?’ I ask. ‘And what happened to him anyway?’
‘Dead,’ Chick says, ‘a few weeks ago.’
— I hope it was a prolonged and painful death, Nora says, taking another of Chick’s cigarettes.
‘Aye, I believe it was,’ Chick says. ‘I was working for him,’ he explains to me —
‘Is everything to be tidied up and explained in this part of the story?’
— Yes.
‘He employed me,’ Chick continues, ‘to find his daughter. You,’ he adds to Nora in case she’s forgotten, which is highly unlikely. ‘And the bairn,’ he says, looking at me in an odd way. ‘Maybe his conscience got to him, but I think he wanted to make sure his money was kept in the family. No other heirs,’ he says to Nora, ‘just you and the bairn. It was coincidence that he picked my name out of the Yellow Pages.’
— There’s no such thing as coincidence, says my airy-fairy non-mother, draining her cup and glancing at her leftover tea leaves.
‘So you were following me?’
‘Maybe,’ he says with just a hint of contrition in his voice.
This has been as strange a maze as ever man trod but thankfully we are approaching the promised end. We are done with Effie and Lachlan; they belong in a whole book of their own and there is no more room for them here.
‘Well,’ Chick says, ‘there’s one wee thing.’ He takes a cutting from the Courier out of his pocket. He has circled a small article with a sub-headline that said ‘Mystery Woman’, which he proceeds to read in his own fashion ‘. . a certain William Scrymegour . . . no direct relation to the famous prohibitionist, Neddie Scrymegour nor to the great Alexander Scrymegour wha’ bled wi’ Wallace, blah, blah, blah . . . an elderly gentleman who fought with the famous Fourth Battalion Black Watch . . . Battle of Loos . . . wiped out, blah, blah, blah . . . rented a flat . . . Magdalen Yard Green . . . poor sleeper . . . amused himself . . . early morning hours . . . Tay through his binoculars . . . the weather this particular morning . . . damp and foggy, blah, blah, blah . . . morning train from Edinburgh due over the bridge in seven minutes . . . knew the timetables off by heart . . . raised his binoculars . . . struck by extraordinary and unexpected sight of a woman walking out along the rail bridge . . . wearing a red coat of some kind . . . well on her way to Fife . . . reached the high girders . . . climbed up onto the edge of the parapet . . . perched like a bird . . . stood up . . . on the edge . . . executed a magnificent dive into the water, blah, blah, blah, didn’t re-emerge. The Edinburgh train whistled and appeared out of the mist . . . on time, Mr Scrymegour noticed . . . extensive search of the Tay . . . no body found . . . no-one had reported a friend or loved one missing and the case had been closed, blahdy, blahdy, blah. End of story.
‘Of course, the interesting thing,’ he says when we have all digested his strangely cooked story, ‘is that the day the “mystery woman” dived off the bridge was the day before you fell in the dock.’
— Oh, no ghost stories, Nora says with a shiver, I really can’t abide them.
— We still have another loose end, Nora says, and who better to tie it up than our detective.
‘Me?’ Chick says.
— Yes, Chick, Nora says, and to do that you must tell us your story.
‘How?’ Chick asks, looking suddenly worried. ‘I’ve told mine, remember — I found the bodies. The old guy was dead — and so on.’
— I know everything, Chick, Nora says softly, and I mean everything.
Chick sighs, like a man who knows he’s up a blind alley with his back against the wall and a knife at his throat.