Chapter Fifteen #2
He still could not believe Stevie had plunged into the burning building.
Evidently she was more capable of physical bravery than anyone else, maybe because she had already suffered enough injury for a lifetime.
Stevie was special; special to him and to Kim.
She had had a tricky upbringing and now, despite each and every disaster, she made her way in the world without complaining.
Wrong – she made her way in the world with constant complaint, a beautiful barrage of expletives thrown ahead of her advance, like smoke and shells laid down by troops in World War One.
When he saw Kim and Stevie walking towards him, Kim looked unsettled, trapped in her own thoughts. He waited until she sat down.
‘You okay?’
‘Life,’ said Kim.
Stevie, apparently unbothered, said: ‘I asked your security guy what’s going on and he doesn’t know. No one does.’
‘I forgot how nice the view was from here,’ Kim said wistfully.
Had he imagined her unease? ‘The studios are the floor below,’ said Edward. ‘So they have their priorities right. Food then programmes.’
‘Then donkeys,’ said Stevie.
‘There aren’t any donkeys in the building at this point.’
‘She’s joking, Edward, although I know it’s a sore point,’ said Kim. ‘So tell us what you found.’
‘In the forest? I need you guys to make sense of this.’
Stevie tapped her knife and fork on the table. Right-left-right-right, left-right-left-left. A drummer’s paradiddle. ‘You might have to stop, Stevie,’ said Edward. ‘Hotel snooty about drumming.’
‘Isn’t this your place?’
‘Long story but we share it with the hotel. For example, those six guys over there’ – he pointed at a family in the plusher dining area, two elderly, two middle-aged, two children – ‘are nothing to do with the radio station. About to walk the coastal path, I guess.’
‘So go on,’ said Kim impatiently.
‘I just have this,’ said Edward. Carefully, he reached into the backpack on the bench beside him. As he did, Stevie said: ‘By the way, can you two come to my wedding?’
This was not on the menu. Edward looked up from the bag. Kim looked across at Edward. Classic Stevie, derailing them. He could hardly blame her for it. His head was so full of thoughts about the forest and what he had found – what he thought he had found – that he was forgetting everything else.
Kim said, ‘Your wedding to Roddy?’
‘There aren’t any others I’m planning! I know you don’t like him, Kim—’
‘I saw him pull your hair.’
The three of them went silent. The contents of Edward’s bag would have to wait.
‘Just now?’ asked Stevie, her voice quieter.
Kim addressed Edward. ‘I waited for Stevie outside. Maybe I got it wrong. He came around the car, grabbed your hair and pulled you out, and you were snatching at his hands, or so I thought.’
‘So you thought.’
Edward said, ‘He didn’t, did he?’
They were at a crossroads. Kim wasn’t sure. Only Stevie could confirm it. She seemed to think for a moment, and make a decision.
‘Show us what’s in the bloody bag, Edward. My hair isn’t important.’
‘He pulled it!’ Kim raised her voice.
‘He was just helping me out of the car! He put his hand under my arm is all!’
Kim put her head in her hands. ‘I’m messing everything up.’
‘We’ll be at the wedding, Stevie, and we can’t wait,’ said Edward, for some reason feeling cross with Kim.
The two women were silent. Edward pulled from his bag a delicate piece of white silk with something wrapped inside it.
The object suddenly caught the attention of Kim and Stevie, as if they had transferred all their upset into a moment of acute focus.
‘A classy hankie,’ said Stevie. ‘It looks nice.’
‘It’s Wendy’s,’ said Edward.
‘The killer’s cloth,’ said Stevie.
‘Stop it,’ Kim hissed.
Edward said, ‘I have to be careful.’ He unfolded the material. Folded within was a tiny brush on a plastic stem, surrounded by black streaks like charcoal. Now he laid it out on the table. ‘Don’t touch. What do you call that thing?’
‘It’s one of those mascara brushes,’ said Kim. ‘I can’t remember what they’re called.’
‘Mate of mine was a make-up artist and that’s a spoolie,’ said Stevie.
‘Right. So anyway, I went to the site of Dr Wrigley’s death. Wendy had a fit of the vapours and sat it out. She was about a hundred yards away doing panic breathing. I found …’ He stopped. ‘Wait, let me show you.’
He pulled out his mobile but the battery was flat.
‘Bollocks. The boss took all my charge, ringing me and shouting,’ said Edward.
A quizzical look crossed Kim’s face.
‘I’ll tell you about that later,’ he said.
‘For now – okay, look at this spoolie and the soot marks. I photographed the tree where – I’m sure it was the tree – where Dr Wrigley’s body was found.
He was dead with his legs around it. Shot through the chest. I found, at chest height, a hole in the tree.
I’m thinking, did someone miss him first time and fire the bolt into the tree?
So I went to Wendy to see if she had a pen or something I could push into the hole.
She gave me the spoolie and the silk hankie. ’
‘She’s just the type to have the tool you need,’ said Stevie. ‘So primped and organized.’
‘I like her myself,’ said Kim.
‘I wrap the brush in the silk and push it into the hole. It comes out streaked with soot. What does that mean?’
‘Soot?’ Kim repeated, touching the material.
‘Isn’t that just tree shite?’ asked Stevie.
‘Smell it,’ Edward said.
Kim asked, ‘What was the hole for?’
‘I thought I was going to find a broken bolt in there. The killer shot one, missed, hit the tree, shot Dr Wrigley with the second? But it’s not that. A crossbow bolt wouldn’t blast a hole in a tree and go so deep you can’t see it. This was drilled out.’
Stevie held the handkerchief up to her face.
She lifted her eyepatch, offering a brief glimpse of the milky pupil and the scarring on the lid.
But she said, ‘I know it might sound mad, but I have a bit more close-up sight with this eye now, you know. It seems to operate like a magnifying glass. Let me smell this.’ She held the silk over her face.
‘Powder.’ Her voice was muffled. ‘It’s a smell like caps, do you remember caps? ’
Kim put in, ‘Of course. From toy guns.’
‘I thought the same,’ said Edward.
‘I’m remembering something Wendy told me. The doctor’s hobby was making fireworks.’
Edward looked at Kim. ‘Oh! So he would have had some of that powder, surely?’
Stevie now had the whole of the handkerchief over her face. ‘I love the smell of napalm in the morning,’ she said, making the others laugh. She removed the silk quickly. The soot now streaked her cheeks, making her look like a Victorian urchin.
Edward said, ‘I still have no idea what happened here.’
Stevie snapped her eyepatch back into place. Before she could open her mouth, Kim said: ‘Wait. I think I know.’
The others both turned to her. Gingerly, he passed her the soot-marked silk and she took it by a corner.
When she held it up against the light from the window – the big glass panes were reflective, or the seats and metal tables in the hotel’s canteen area would melt on a hot day – the black marks seemed to form a shape like a silhouette, the ghost of a man’s face.
Finally, Kim said: ‘My mum has a new boyfriend. I think we should go and see him.’
Stevie said, ‘What the hell would he know about sooty handkerchiefs?’
Edward cocked his head. ‘He has some weird kind of hobby, right?’
‘They don’t think it’s weird. He’s one of these historical re-enactment fellas. Putting on medieval battles,’ said Kim. ‘My mum has started getting into the whole scene. She’s even been trying to source an iron helmet. He has an injury in his throat from an accident.’
‘Okay, frankly I’m baffled,’ began Stevie, ‘but I can’t go today because I have a hospital appointment this afternoon.’ The other two looked at her enquiringly. ‘Routine, folks.’
‘On a weekend?’
‘That’s what the card said. It’s just—’
She was interrupted by a man who approached carrying a lunch tray. It was William Scott, the newsreader, posh-sounding, broad and with a lantern jaw that sprouted stray hairs the shaver had missed.
‘Is it Pirate Day?’ he laughed.
‘Sorry what?’ said Kim.
‘The day when everyone dresses like a pirate and goes “aye aye me hearties”. The eyepatch on this lady …’
Edward was on his feet in a fraction of a second, the sound of his chair shooting backwards on the lino making everyone else stare.
‘You wouldn’t laugh about that if you knew what had happened to her,’ he said, shoving his own face into Scott’s.
‘You public school weirdo. Go and read the news in a silly voice.’
Kim flinched and Edward realized she had probably not seen anger like that in him before.
She had been married to a violent man who could catch fire in an instant, and his own flash of temper may have upset her.
He felt a pricking of his skin, his guilt appearing as goosebumps.
He sat back down immediately. She said, ‘Ed, Ed, he didn’t mean it—’
‘Oh I think he fucking did,’ said Stevie, not helping. The newsreader turned and exited. ‘But I like “Go and read the news in a silly voice”. That’s God-tier stuff. I’m having that line.’
Kim was silent as Scott slunk away. Then she asked, ‘Do you need the newsreaders to like you?’
‘To do my show? Not really. But he’s the sort who’ll complain. I didn’t hit him, did I?’
‘We can say he hit you,’ said Stevie, making Edward laugh. ‘Oh God,’ he murmured. The meeting had lost its focus. Then Kim’s phone beeped with a text.
‘Everything okay?’ Edward asked.
‘It’s Colin,’ she said, reading the message. ‘My office deputy, or near as. He wants advice on the couple who want to buy the penthouse. Although …’
‘Although?’
‘It’s that strange duo. They may be a lot of things, but they aren’t boring.’
‘Use his line, “Go and read the news in a silly voice” – that’ll sort it in a second,’ said Stevie. ‘Fucking genius that. Go on, Kim, type it before we forget it.’