Cradle to Grave (14 page)

He’d thrown money at the problem, tried everything from coaxing to threats, and for a time she would cooperate in the latest fashionable rehab before she went back to it again. After the baby died, though, she was beyond reason. His fault, again.

He had no time for his son-in-law – sly, sycophantic little sod – but in a way he could understand why Declan kept Cara supplied. Denied a fix, she would get that look of fury, hatred, even, and however much you told yourself it was the drug talking, it hurt. God, it hurt!

He’d been such a failure as a father, a failure as a husband too, and he was helpless to stop the disaster that was his grandson getting worse day by day. The only thing he seemed to be good at was making money – as if that mattered now. And he’d made it mainly in a way that meant police officers were extremely unwelcome guests. Crozier gave a sigh that was almost a groan.

As he pulled on his waterproof boots, the doorbell rang and he paused hopefully. A rescue party? He heard Pilapil going to answer it and then a brief conversation.

But when he called, ‘In here!’ and Pilapil appeared, he was pulling a face.

‘Buchan,’ Pilapil said, with a tremoring-hand gesture. ‘Wants a word. Shall I get rid of him?’

Crozier considered. ‘Tempting. God knows I’ve had enough today, without that. But I’d probably better see him. Find out what his problem is, will you?’

‘I tried. Wouldn’t tell me. Said he has to see you.’

‘Right, right.’ Crozier pulled on his other boot and went out into the hall.

‘Alick! What can I do for you? Do you want to come into the office?’

‘No. No need.’

The man, Crozier realised, was not just drunk but very drunk. It had been a difficult day, certainly, but even so . . .

‘Look, Alick, the best thing you can do is go back to Maidie, have a cup of tea and a rest, and then come back later. You’ve had an upsetting day.’

‘Upsetting! Aye, you could say! You’ve not had an upsetting day. You’ve not been ordered to go and – and deal with the corpse, just like before. I’m not – I’m not in the bloody army now under your bloody orders.’

It was a shock to realise that the incident, so long ago, had festered in the man’s mind. ‘Alick, we were all having to deal with bodies at Ballymena. I did too, and it haunts me, just like it haunts you.’

‘Aye, but I’d to take the worst – the woman with her head . . .’ Buchan began to shed drunken tears.

‘Look, come in and sit down and we can talk about this. Cris’ll bring us some
strong
coffee.’

Pilapil, hovering in the background, nodded and turned to go as Crozier attempted to take Buchan’s arm and lead him through to the office, but Buchan shook him off. Pilapil stopped, eyeing the man.

‘No!’ Buchan shouted. ‘I’m – I’m not wanting your talk. You’re to take the girl.’

Baffled, Crozier said, ‘What girl?’

‘Landed on us. It’d be nothing to you – have her here. Costs money to feed folk, only you – you wouldn’t know, with your big house and your fat wallet.’

As Crozier still looked blank, Pilapil prompted, ‘I think he means the girl who came in last night and told him about the landslide.’

Buchan turned to look at him blearily. ‘Aye, her. You’ve bedrooms here – rooms and rooms. It’s not right.’

‘No, we don’t, actually.’ Pilapil’s voice was crisp with distaste.

‘I think we may be talking money here.’ Crozier reached into the hip pocket of his jeans. ‘Alick, you perhaps don’t know that the bridge over the Carron has collapsed and we’ve got two police officers here indefinitely. It’s been very good of you to take in this girl and I don’t want you to be out of pocket over it. I’ll pay for her board and lodgings until she can leave. Here’s a hundred pounds for a start.’ He peeled off five twenties from a wad of notes.

With some difficulty, Buchan’s eyes focused on the money. ‘You – you think you can buy everything. Well, you can’t. You can’t buy Alick Buchan, you dirty, rotten bastard!’

Nevertheless, he snatched the notes from Crozier’s hand. Pilapil moved swiftly to open the front door and Buchan lurched out of it. He spat on the doorstep, then headed uncertainly for the jeep, parked in the drive.

‘He’s going to drive!’ Crozier said in alarm. ‘He could be off the road at the first bend.’

Pilapil dangled a key. ‘He was holding it when he came in and he didn’t even notice when I took it off him. God knows how he got himself here. He’s looking for the key now.’

From a window to one side of the front door, they could see Buchan digging in his pockets, then, shaking his head in bewilderment, going off with a limping stagger.

Crozier sighed. ‘I’ll go and talk to him once it’s worn off a bit. That’s all I need.’

Nico Ryan was bored. He’d seen Harry Potter too many times already, so there were no surprises, and his mother hadn’t watched for very long before she drifted away. He wandered out of the house, kicking up stones in an aimless sort of way, then ducked in under the bank of rhododendrons opposite the front door. The purple blossoms were over now and all the dead petals were brown and soggy.

The shrubs grew thickly together and he had made himself a little den underneath, with a rug and some cushions he had taken from the house without anyone noticing. They were all damp and fusty with the rain, but that, mingled with the smell of sodden earth and rotting vegetation, was part of the mystery of his secret place.

Nico liked it because he could watch people coming and going without being seen. It made him feel very strong and powerful, and he enjoyed that. Once he was big and had lots of money and it was his house, not his grandfather’s, he’d tell everyone what to do. He’d be mean to them if he liked and there wouldn’t be anything they could do about it.

He saw his grandfather coming out of the house and crossing the drive, and he screwed his face up into an expression of hate. Granddad had told him off again today. He shouldn’t do that. It made Nico angry just to think about it. He wanted to hit something, throw something . . .

There was a big stone embedded in the earth beside his rug, and when he picked it up, all sorts of little pale creatures started scurrying away in a panic. Diverted, he looked at them, then turned the stone on its edge and brought it down, again and again and again, squashing as many of them as he could.

The encounter with Buchan had upset Gillis Crozier. He liked to see himself as a decent employer, demanding but not unreasonable, and paying wages that were more than fair. The depth of resentment Alick Buchan had concealed all these years shocked him, and he didn’t feel up to negotiating with the contractors yet who, quite reasonably, would try to drive a hard bargain.

The sun was shining strongly now and the sea, far below in front of the house, had silver sparkles so brilliant that it was almost painful to look at it. He headed towards it on a rough track, then stood at the end, lost in thought. A breeze was blowing and the air had a green, grassy freshness as the sodden ground began to steam gently in the warmth.

Perhaps he’d been wrong to give Buchan the keeper’s job when he came back to Rosscarron three years ago. In the army, the man had always been one of the awkward squad, but there wasn’t much employment around here and Crozier had felt sorry for his former comrade-in-arms, invalided out after a careless accident with his own rifle. Sooner or later you must pay for every good deed!

Ballymena, 1976. Crozier remembered the carnage all too well, though he had tried to put it out of his mind. He remembered, too, the sickeningly injured dying woman he had sent Buchan to deal with. But his own job was to bring order out of bloody chaos and there had been no time to consider individual sensibilities. Perhaps Buchan ought to have been sent for counselling, but it wasn’t so fashionable in those days. You got on with the job, shut up about it and tried to forget.

It was probably too late to help Buchan now, and his drunken outburst had created a problem. He could only hope the man would backtrack once the drink stopped talking. Having to sack him would be deeply unpleasant.

Perhaps he’d just sell up here, find somewhere else. Crozier needed a headquarters outside London, but not necessarily here. Choosing Rosscarron had been a sentimental decision and they were rarely sound; it had been in part a desperate attempt to give Cara and her children a healthier lifestyle, but that had failed. Worse than failed.

Yet again Crozier’s mind went back to Kenna Stewart. She had been haunting him all day since he had seen the cottage that had been hers, and the one he had grown up in himself, wiped out by the landslide.

She had been two years older than he was, small, with fine features, creamy pale skin, bright blue eyes and a personality as vivid as her flaming red hair. In that isolated place they were constantly thrown together; she had treated him like a younger brother, teasing and mocking, and from the age of thirteen he had worshipped her with a sort of bewildered adoration.

When he was seventeen, there had been a heady summer when she had almost taken him seriously. Almost. She was attracted to him, he knew that. She’d even let him kiss her a few times, but she’d only laughed when he talked of love and the future.

‘You’re still a wee boy, Gillie my lamb,’ she had said. ‘I’m a woman now. You’ve a lot of growing to do yet.’

And perhaps he had, but she could have waited instead of going off with a man whose face should have warned her he was no good. When Crozier heard through his parents that she was alone and pregnant in London, he had written to her with a quixotic offer of marriage. She’d stubbornly refused to take it seriously, and, his youthful pride wounded, he hadn’t repeated it.

Then Crozier had joined the army, done well and forged friendships that had got him into the music business when he resigned his commission. He’d made his own mistake with Cara’s mother, now the third wife of a French pop star. He’d long lost touch with Kenna and indeed by then she had taken on a romantic unreality in his mind.

Yet when he had heard on the local grapevine shortly after he bought Rosscarron House that Kenna Stewart had returned to the cottages, his heart had given a foolish leap. Could they be approaching the happy ending to two long, sad tales?

She was thinner than he remembered, and older of course – they were both that – but the hair and the eyes were still the same, eyes that lit with an inner glow when she saw him. He’d been feeling nervous about the meeting, even preparing in his head a suitable speech of welcome for a new neighbour, but it died on his lips when she said, ‘Gillie! My God, how I’ve missed you!’

He had kissed her, on the lips but tentatively, and they had gone on to talk about youth and folly and pride.

‘Still,’ he said at last, taking her hand – such a thin, delicate thing – in his own great paw, ‘we can start again. We’ve got a second chance.’

Kenna’s eyes filled with tears. She had come home, she told him, to die within sight and sound of the sea. Six months, a year, perhaps a little more if she was lucky.

They were together almost constantly after that and she even went into remission for a spell. He was hardly ever in London, neglecting business to be with her. They talked endlessly, about the past and the present. The future was banned.

They both had family worries. Crozier’s were about Cara, heavily pregnant now, after having produced a son with problems, which were never quite openly ascribed to her choice of lifestyle. Kenna was still grieving over the death of her daughter, a single mother, also from cancer, and she was worried about her granddaughter, Lisa, in London.

And from that had come the deadly, disastrous plan. Lisa was working in a day-nursery for a pittance; Crozier’s grandson was being raised by irresponsible parents and an ever-changing succession of foreign girls who couldn’t speak English. The answer seemed obvious.

‘This is a marriage made in heaven,’ he had claimed, laughing.

Hell, more like.

The last time he saw Kenna, death was at her shoulder. She had outlived prediction, but the bright blue eyes, which had sparkled with life and laughter, were dulled now by illness and grief, and huge in her gaunt face. In the small, dark front room she was wrapped up in a soft shawl and a fire was burning, though it was a warm summer’s day.

Anger had deadened his feelings. ‘You knew, Kenna! You knew she had a temper when you wished her on me.’

‘Never with children.’ Her voice might be weak, but she was unyielding. ‘You saw the references she had from the nursery where she worked. You heard what your daughter’s cleaner said in court.’

‘Heard, of course I heard! But I also heard,
after
the trial, about the anger-management course she’d been put on when she was on remand. Do you think, if the jury had known that, they’d have brought in the same verdict? You knew she had a temper, Kenna – you betrayed me, you of all people. I can’t forgive that.’

Kenna bowed her head and was quiet for a long moment. Then she said, ‘You’re angry with me now. It doesn’t mean you’re going to kill me, does it? The jury heard the relevant evidence and she was acquitted.’

‘Oh, yes, I know she was
acquitted
!’ He spat out the word. ‘A clever lawyer, a cleaning woman who had a grudge against Nico because he’s lively and not the easiest child.’