‘Indeed,’ she said. ‘Do your records show who acted for the company in the acquisitions?’
The grey woman nodded. ‘Watson Forbes, Solicitors, of Falkirk; a small firm. I was surprised. I don’t usually see their name involved with corporate work.’
‘Thank you very much, Miss Brittle,’ said Skinner, rising from the desk. ‘You’ve given us what we were after. We’re very grateful.’
‘We are here to serve,’ said the elderly lady, fixing him with a sudden gaze so perceptive that it almost made him start. ‘I can’t imagine what this is about. But it must be very important, to demand the personal attention of a Deputy Chief Constable.’
They walked side by side from the building, in silence, and down the steps to their waiting car. As Skinner opened the back door for his assistant, a slow smile spread over his face. ‘A right cunning old bird that was,’ he muttered.
He stopped, his hand on the roof of the car. ‘Pam, drop me off at Fettes, then head on out to Falkirk and find this Watson Forbes firm. See what they can tell you about their mysterious client. Meantime I’ll speak to my pal the Fiscal and get entry warrants for these three properties. I’m sure I can find grounds under the Companies Acts.
‘Once I’ve taken care of that, I’ll be going out to Gullane. I’ve been bidden to meet with my daughter, and I can only hazard several guesses as to what it might be about.’
71
He was waiting for her, watching from behind the curtains of his darkened bedroom, as she drove up the Green, and as her headlights swung off the road and turned towards the cottage. She was five minutes early.
He had opened the front door, beneath its welcoming light, before she had even switched off the engine. He looked on as she pulled her long coat tight around her, and climbed out of the car, more awkwardly than usual. He watched from the doorway, as she took a holdall from the boot. He stood back in surprise as she walked up the path towards him, but without looking at him, then swept past him, into the hall.
He had no time to register details, only his own surprise. He followed her into the living room.
Alex dropped the bag in the centre of the floor, threw off her coat in a single sweeping motion and turned towards him. He gasped in surprise and stood frozen in the doorway.
‘Hello, Bob,’ she said, in an accent that was not her own. She was wearing the black dress, the tight thrusting bra, the high heels. Her hair was teased, and her make-up was applied perfectly. She stood and faced him, the dress riding up her right thigh as she bent her knee, slowly, rubbing her foot against the back of her left calf.
And then she was Alex again.
‘You wanted me to get to know my mother, Pops. I did. Both sides of her.
‘I read the diaries. In there I found my mum, and your wife. But I found someone else too: a woman you didn’t know existed. The woman who wore this dress, these shoes. .’ She pulled up the dress quickly, revealing the catch of the suspenders and the top of the stocking, ‘. . this underwear.
‘You put all these things in the trunk, Pops, but you didn’t know what they were for. I guess you remember her wearing them, but you never for a second understood why she did.’
She walked across to the doorway and hugged him, briefly, as he stood there, bewildered. ‘My mum loved you, Pops. And she loved me, and she loved her job. All that was very clear, all the way through. But there was another side to her that only her diaries knew about. Only the diaries and the men.
‘There was another person inside her: a bad, wanton person, one that she kept hidden from you all your life together. She suppressed her for as long as she could, but gradually her urges took a stronger and stronger hold of her. If she were here today, I think she’d say that she was compelled to do these things, and that she couldn’t stop herself. But there was more than that to it; there was the danger too. She seemed to love that.’
She led him into the living room, and tugged his arm until he sat on the couch beside her. His face was dark, disturbed.
‘Myra. . I can’t call that part of her Mum. .’ said Alex, ‘realised from the start that she had a power over men. She even thought she could use it to snare you, when you were both sixteen, only she fell in love with you. You were strong; without knowing it you kept her devilment in check for years. But Myra’s wanton side was strong too, and it couldn’t be suppressed for ever.’ She paused.
‘She had affairs, Pops.’ Her voice dropped to a whisper. ‘Not long-term, not serious — until the end — but quick, dangerous liaisons. Gradually, the more dangerous they were the better they became. The other Myra spent her life searching for the ultimate sexual excitement, and risk had to be associated. She was addicted to it. It’s all there, Pops, in the diaries. I’m sure that simply keeping them, under your nose, with the possibility that you might get curious and pick one up, was the biggest risk of all. Yet she did it. She knew you too, obviously, and was confident that you would respect the only privacy she asked of you.’
Alex looked down at her clothes. ‘This dress I’m wearing, these clothes, were a weapon. Pops, some nights while you were working late and someone was babysit-ting for me, she’d get dressed up in them and go to a hotel in town, one of the good ones in the city centre, looking for a man on his own. For her, it was easy.
‘My University friends and I, we laugh about it. We call it sharking. Pops, in terms of sharking, Myra was a Great White.’ She paused. ‘After a while, just to add to the thrill, and the risk, she got round to taking money. Fifty pounds, sixty, a hundred pounds once.’
Bob sprang to his feet. ‘No!’ he exploded. ‘Fantasies, girl, that’s all these diaries are. The fantasies of a woman with. . with. . an imaginary friend, to act out her bad thoughts.’
Alex stood up too. She dropped her head slightly and looked at him from beneath hooded eyebrows. ‘Oh no,’ she said quietly, a smoky edge to her voice. ‘I wore these clothes, Pops. I went out in them. I became Myra.
‘And I was overwhelmed by what I could do, by the power I had, by the danger I could put myself in, and by the sheer depth of the thrill it made me feel.
‘I went out to a hotel in Glasgow, Pops. I met a man, an American. I pulled him, just like that. He’d have given me three hundred quid, for me to take this outfit off. I took myself, almost literally, to the bedroom door. I said okay, sent him up ahead of me in the lift, then I jumped into a taxi and I got the hell out of there.
‘I was terrified, Pops.’ Tears welled up in her big blue eyes and ran down her cheeks, through her make-up, destroying her mascara. ‘Not by the man or anything about him, but by me, and what I could do.’
She pointed to the bag on the floor. ‘The adventures in those diaries are not fantasies, believe me. They may have begun that way, but Myra acted them out, every one of them.’ She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand.
‘Now I have to get out of these clothes. Because they scare the life out of me.’ She strode from him, quickly, through to her bedroom. When she reappeared in five minutes, she was Alex again, in sweatshirt, jeans, and flat shoes, her eyes clear, her face scrubbed clean, her hair bouncing in its usual shape.
‘I’ve left them through there, Pops. I don’t want them. When you’ve read what’s in those diaries, I think you’ll want to burn them.’
She stepped up to him and hugged him, as she had when she was small.
‘When I had finished,’ she said, quietly, ‘I didn’t know what to do. Should I keep them to myself, should I leave you with your memories of your Myra? Or should I show you what was in them, and risk breaking your heart?
‘I called Sarah this morning, to ask her advice. She chopped me off. She said she was the last person I should talk to, and hung up the phone, more or less. I couldn’t talk to Andy; that wouldn’t have been right, telling him and not you, and anyway, I’m not ready to come clean with him about all of my weekend. Maybe I never will be.