Chapter 48
I watched the car take Jasmine away, back to the airport in Inverness, from where she’d be flying home. First class, of course.
Beautiful or not, I had no intention of coming here ever again.
I went back into the house and found Holly in the kitchen.
I wasn’t sure where Charles was. Still in bed, probably.
We’d all spent most of yesterday talking to the police, a pair of detectives from Inverness interviewing us one by one.
Me, Holly, Charles, Jasmine, Miranda, Brenda and Avril.
Also yesterday, an ambulance had come, able to get here now the roads were clearer, and taken three bodies away: Lewis, Morag and Zack.
CSIs had collected evidence. People from the village had come to watch from a distance.
There was a whiff of schadenfreude in the air.
But also sadness. Morag had been loved by everyone around here.
She was a daughter of this peninsula. Brenda was its matriarch.
In the kitchen, Holly was making tea.
‘Do you want one?’ she asked.
‘I need coffee. I’ll do it.’ I took the cafetière down from the shelf. ‘Have you seen Miranda this morning?’
‘Yeah, she’s taken Watson for a walk.’
‘You didn’t want to go with her?’
She cradled her mug of tea. ‘I wanted to talk to you.’
We’d hardly seen each other since Susan had turned up at the pub, days ago. And we hadn’t had a moment alone, just the two of us.
‘We need to talk about the big question,’ she said.
‘We do.’
‘How are you feeling about everything?’
I put my coffee down and looked at her. The sun was coming in through the window, dancing on her hair.
‘It’s complicated,’ I replied.
Really fucking complicated.
Charles, Jasmine and Brenda sat around one of the pub tables, hurriedly thrashing out the details of the deal before the police arrived, while Holly, Avril and I listened in.
These were the details:
Charles promised to sign over his house in Applecross to Avril.
Her mum had been looking after this place for nearly two decades and in that time its value had skyrocketed.
Avril would be an instant millionaire. On top of that, he would create a trust fund for her.
Although he wouldn’t ever publicly admit to being her father, he would treat Avril as if she were Lewis’s daughter and she would be included in Charles’s will along with his other grandchild, Miranda’s son.
Charles also agreed not to proceed with his facial recognition app, even though he argued it would make the company far more valuable. Jasmine wouldn’t allow it to be used against women the way it had been used against her.
Next, Charles agreed to a divorce from Jasmine, after they had negotiated a lump sum in lieu of ongoing alimony, an amount that sounded impossibly large to me. The money would be transferred as soon as he got back to Birmingham and Jasmine would file for divorce as soon as she got home.
In return, Charles would get their silence.
This would be the official story: Zack killed Samir and Morag.
He murdered Samir because he wanted the app for himself and Samir was threatening to take it to another company, and he had killed Morag because she had threatened to tell the police what she’d seen.
The story would be that after I had found out about this, Zack had tried to kill Charles, who shot him in self-defence.
‘And what about Lewis?’ Holly asked.
‘He fell,’ said Brenda. ‘An accident.’
‘Just like Jimmy,’ said Charles.
They looked at each other without speaking.
‘And I hid in Brenda’s shed for twelve hours.’ Jasmine broke the silence. ‘Only making myself known right at this moment.’ Jasmine gestured at the gathering. ‘That’s why we’re all here. You rushed here to make sure I was okay.’
She turned to me. ‘Obviously you won’t be able to make your documentary. None of this can ever come out. But everyone involved tonight needs to be bought in. Avril?’
‘Do I have a choice?’
‘Of course you do. This deal isn’t going to go ahead without your approval. You’ll be rich.’
She stepped away from the window. ‘Gran?’
‘I know it’s unfair, love. That your mum won’t ever get proper justice. But the money … This will make your life so much better. I think it’s what she would have wanted.’ Also, it would keep Brenda from facing any consequences for killing Lewis.
Avril went quiet.
‘Come on,’ Charles snapped. ‘The police are going to be here any second.’
‘There’s one more thing I want,’ Avril said.
‘What is it?’
‘The arts centre. I want you to start developing it again. To go through with all the promises you made back then.’
‘That will cost a fortune.’
‘I don’t care. I want you to do this, for Applecross. For all the jobs it will create. The money it will bring here. And I want you to call it the Morag Hamilton Arts Centre.’
‘What about you two?’ Jasmine asked. ‘Holly? Patrick? Are you prepared to keep quiet?’
There was a long pause, before Holly said, ‘I don’t know.’
Charles opened his mouth, but Brenda spoke over him. ‘Come on, hen. Do it for me. For Avril.’
‘This is really what you want? You don’t want Dad to go to prison for killing Jimmy?’
‘There’s no evidence, is there? And there never will be.
Even if you testified that you saw him, he can keep denying that he did it.
’ She sucked in a breath. ‘I’ve lost both my Morag and my Jimmy.
Avril is all I’ve got left now. I’m doing this for her.
And she’s your sister, Holly. If I can agree to all this, you can, too. ’
Finally, Holly nodded. ‘Okay. Okay. Fuck.’
‘That just leaves you, Patrick?’
I looked at Avril, and thought about how much easier the money would make her life.
And how amazing the arts centre would be for this community.
But it all felt wrong, and not because of the documentary I’d never be able to make.
I didn’t care about that. The problem was that justice was not being done here.
Charles deserved to spend the rest of his life in prison.
There was another knock and a female voice that I recognized said, ‘Police. Open up.’
‘What about Samir’s family?’ I said. ‘His parents.’
‘They’ll think Zack killed him,’ Jasmine replied. ‘Which is true. They just won’t know Charles was involved.’
‘They need more than that.’
‘What?’ Charles glanced at the door. ‘Tell us.’
‘You’re going to make a payment to Samir’s parents on behalf of Gravitas. A large payment. Maybe it won’t make them feel any better, but perhaps they could do something in Samir’s name. Something that will help the community or some cause Samir cared about.’
Charles rolled his eyes. ‘They’ll probably spend it on a cruise.’
‘You’re an arsehole. That’s my price. Otherwise, when the police come through that door I’m going to tell them everything that really happened.’
Susan rapped on the door again and demanded to be let in.
‘All right,’ Charles finally agreed. ‘I’m going to be bankrupt.’
Everyone shook hands, and Avril opened the door to let the police in.
The expression on Susan’s face when she saw all of us, including Jasmine, was almost funny.
Now, I still didn’t know if I’d done the right thing. I felt dirty. Contaminated. I had been rushed into accepting the deal, and I was happy that I’d managed to get something for Samir’s family. But wouldn’t the truth be better?
Before this week, I would always have said yes.
But was that an idealistic way of looking at the world?
Jasmine had certainly thought so, and Brenda seemed to agree.
The hardest part of it was knowing I had been forced to make a decision on behalf of Samir’s family.
They would never know what had happened to him, and I was going to have to find a way to live with carrying that secret around.
The only thing that salved my conscience a little was that I’d turned down Charles’s offer to give me a lump sum as part of the deal.
During the meeting in the pub he’d suggested he might be able to fund my next movie.
I’d told him I’d rather never make a documentary again – and maybe I wouldn’t.
Because if I no longer believed in truth, what kind of documentary-maker would I be?
Perhaps I’d be better off with fiction.
All of which led to the big question.
What were Holly and I going to do now?
I was still in the kitchen with her now. ‘I’ll probably never see this place again,’ she said. ‘I wonder if Avril will sell it or move in. Whatever, I don’t want to come back here.’
‘Yeah. It’s not top of my destination list, either.’
She leaned against the counter, facing me. ‘You didn’t answer my question. How are you feeling about everything? How are you feeling about me?’
‘I still love you.’
‘But?’
‘Every time I look at you I’m going to remember this week. All the secrets. The lies. The deal. I want to be able to not think about any of it for a while.’
She nodded.
‘Also, family Christmases would be really awkward.’
There was a long silence, and I thought maybe she was going to say something like, ‘So I guess this is goodbye.’ A stupid part of my brain was trying to come up with an apt movie quote, something to break the tension.
But nothing seemed right. Arnie is not the right person to quote when you’re trying to decide whether you can stay with your girlfriend or not.
‘What if there weren’t any family Christmases?’ she asked. ‘Or New Years. Or anything.’
‘What are you saying?’
‘I’m saying maybe it’s time I cut ties. Properly. I tried it before, when I ran away and went travelling. But this time … I’ll sell my shares. Tell them I don’t want anything to do with them. It’s only Dad and Miranda now, anyway. They’ll be fine with each other.’
‘I couldn’t ask you to do this.’
‘You’re not asking me, though, are you? I’m volunteering.’ She took a step closer to me. ‘I want to be with you, Patrick. I think you might be the only sane person I’ve ever met.’
‘Ordinary. Sane. You keep hitting me with compliments.’
‘They’re honestly the biggest compliments I’ve got. Listen, maybe we can go travelling together. Find some stories for your films. Have a relaxing adventure with no guns or dead bodies or doppelg?ngers.’
‘You don’t think we’d be bored?’
She took another step closer until we were almost touching.
‘This is really what you want?’ I asked. ‘Me, over your family?’
‘Patrick, I have no other way of putting this. My family are a fucking nightmare. I don’t even want to look at my dad any more. Miranda will be a little harder, but, well … She is kind of awful, isn’t she? It’s not her fault. She just never got over Mum’s death.’
I took her hands. ‘How do you think your mum would feel if you didn’t talk to them again?’
‘She’d be heartbroken. But also, I really don’t think she would blame me. The question is, will looking at me trigger bad memories for you every day?’
I thought about it. ‘I’ve got a response, but it’s corny.’
‘Hit me with it.’
‘I was going to say, we’ll have to make good memories to replace the bad ones.’
She groaned. ‘That’s actually nice. Corny as fuck, but—’
She grabbed my upper arms and pulled me towards her.
‘What is it?’
I twisted around, expecting to see Charles with a gun. The movie monster, back one last time.
It was a snake. Brown and red, it zigzagged across the floor.
It looked like it had emerged from beneath the sink, and it sped towards the back door.
The same one we’d found in Jasmine’s bag or a different one?
I’d seen that one in the garden, fleeing into the shrubbery.
Holly crossed to the door and opened it, and we watched as the snake crossed the threshold and made its way out into the world.
The funny thing was, seeing this reptile, I wasn’t scared.
A little old adder?
What was that, compared to Holly’s family?