Chapter Thirty-Five
The yellow box stood in the centre of the kitchen table. Euan was filling the kettle, waiting for her to join him before he began the search. She thought it would be a complete waste of time, but didn't know how to tell him. In the brief glimpse she'd seen of the essays upstairs there'd been nothing relating to a film.
'Did Catherine have a school bag?' The thought had come to her suddenly. 'I mean, kids don't have satchels any more, but there must have been some thing she'd carry all her books in. Wouldn't the stuff she'd been working on most recently be in there?'
'It must be somewhere. Just a moment. I'll look:
He disappeared. He was gone for so long that Fran wondered if she should go to find him. At last he returned with a leather bag which looked very like an old-fashioned child's satchel, but which had been painted green, with a huge yellow flower stencilled on the flap. 'I'm sorry about that. I couldn't find it. In the end I phoned Mrs Jamieson.
She'd tidied it away in one of the cloakroom cupboards: He sat for a moment looking at it. 'I remember when Catherine bought it. Before we moved. It was from one of the little secondhand shops in the Corn Exchange in Leeds. I thought it was a bit of tatty nonsense, but she spent nearly a day painting it up.'
He unbuckled the flap and began taking out the contents an item at a time. There was a plastic Simpsons pencil case, three envelope files, a shorthand pad, a box of tampons and a few scraps of paper. His breathing was very laboured. Fran looked at him, was about to ask if he was feeling ill, but she could tell from his face that he probably wouldn't even hear her. He opened the pencil case. He tipped out a fountain pen, a couple of biros and some coloured pencils. A fine pen for drawing. Then he lay the shorthand pad in front of him and lifted the cardboard front cover.
At the top of the page was written in Catherine's fine hand English Assignment: Non-fiction/documentary.
Film? Check that would be OK.
Below, in spiky letters large enough to cover the rest of the page: FIRE AND ICE.
'That was what she was going to call it,' Euan said.
'Of course.'
'Isn't it a poem?'
'From Robert Frost. Just a minute.' He disappeared from the room but this time came back much more quickly. 'The book was on the table in her room downstairs. I'd seen it there.' He riffled through the pages until he found what he was looking for.
'It's a good title,' Fran said. She thought it would be a brilliant title for a painting as well as a film, had in her head again the ravens in the snow, with the big red ball of the sun behind them. 'What else is there in it?'
She reached out to take the notebook from him, but he set it back on the table out of her reach. 'Perhaps we could go through it together later,' he said. 'The idea that there might be something important in there is an incentive.
A reward for going through the rest of her files. We can't afford to miss something. You do understand?'
She wasn't sure she did understand such control, but she nodded and lifted a pile of paper from the yellow box.
She could tell how hard he was finding it to hold himself together and didn't want to push him over the edge. She started with detailed notes and three essays on Macbeth. It would be, she supposed, a sort of education. An hour later she had read everything in front of her. Besides Macbeth, she had struggled through Catherine's history notes on the Counter Reformation and psychology essays about gender stereotyping and peer pressure.
Her Shetland film was mentioned nowhere. Only an obscure visual reference showed that she was thinking about it all the time. In the margin of a set of notes and an essay plan there was the same recurring doodle. The first time Fran had dismissed it as an attractive pattern with no representational significance. When it was repeated she looked more closely. The design was so similar to the first that it looked like a logo. It showed an eight-sided crystal superimposed on a tongue of flame. Fire and Ice.
She showed it to Euan. He scrabbled back through his own pile of papers and came up with three more examples of the same design. 'I'd missed them altogether,' he said. 'I don't have your visual imagination, obviously. I was concentrating on the words.'
'Did you find anything?'
'No: he said slowly, reluctant to admit defeat. 'Nothing.'
'Wouldn't anything she was working on recently be in her bag? In the notebook which had the title or one of the envelope files! She was starting to lose patience with him. Why didn't he just look in the more obvious places? Was he waiting for her to go, so he could look at them by himself?
'Perhaps,' he said. He looked up from the table. 'Or perhaps I'm deluding myself and we'll never find out why she died!
She stretched out and scooped up the scraps of paper which had been crumpled in the bottom of the bag. The first was a ferry ticket. She gave it to him. 'She took the roll-on roll-off to Whalsay just before Christmas. Did she have a friend there?'
'I think I remember that. There was a party. Some lad from school, she said. I can't see that it has any significance!
'Then there's this. A supermarket till receipt! She stretched it out on the table, stroked it with her thumb to flatten it.
'Safeway's in Lerwick. Dated the day before her body was found. Did she do any shopping that day?'
'Not for me! He took it from her, frowning. 'None of those items turned up in the house. She wouldn't have bought sausages or the pie. She was practically a vegetarian and certainly never ate processed meat!
He turned the paper over. Fran saw writing on the back, but from where she was sitting couldn't make out what it said. He slid it along the table to her. 'Look what's scribbled on the back. It's Catherine's writing!
Fran read: Catriona Bruce. Desire or hate? 'What does it mean?'
'It's a reference to the same poem! He picked up the anthology again and read out loud, his voice shaking as if he'd suddenly aged,
'From what I've tasted of desire/I hold with those who favor fire./But if it had to perish twice,!1 think I know enough of hate/'To say that for destruction ice/Is also great..!
'What is Catherine saying then?' Fran had forgotten her irritation with him. She was hooked by the puzzle.
Suddenly this had little to do with the reality of two dead girls. 'That Catriona was killed because someone desired her or hated her? Those emotions must lie at the root of most violence. And what does it have to do with the film?'
'Surely there's a more fundamental question! He sat upright in his chair. His voice was clipped, almost academic. 'Why was she interested in Catriona Bruce at all? I'd never heard of the girl until Catherine died. I think I knew that a family called Bruce lived here once, but not that the daughter had gone missing. Had Catherine discovered something about the girl's disappearance? If so, that might provide a powerful motive for her murder!
Fran sat looking at him, trying to grasp the enormity of what he was saying. It seemed absurd to read so much from a scribbled note, but he was right.
'Can we look at the rest of the notebook now? The other files from her bag?' She realized, too late, that she must sound very eager. He mustn't think she was treating his daughter's death as a game. She turned to Euan, hoping she hadn't offended him, but a noise outside had caught his attention.
'A car,' he said. 'It must be the Bruce family. I Wasn't expecting them just yet! He slipped the receipt into the notebook, pushed them both into the green leather bag and went to open the door. She put Catherine's books and essays back into the plastic box and stuck it under the table.
Chapter Thirty-Six
Kenneth and Sandra Bruce had expected the house to be the same as they remembered it and it was so different that they seemed lost. They wandered into the big room, looking around them like unsophisticated visitors to an art gallery, not sure exactly what response was expected of them.