The Third Sin

Julia was wild that night, her long blonde hair streaming as she danced like a maenad among the trees.

Jen watched her warily. She was high. Well, they all were, all the Cyrenaics, of course, but Julia – oh yes, Julia was beyond that – way beyond. She had thrown off her coat despite the cold and she’d just tripped on a tree root, gnarled as an old man’s foot.

‘You’ll break your ankle, J,’ Jen shouted. ‘Chill, for God’s sake!’

Julia turned. Under the bleached moon her face was all white planes and black shadows, her eyes pits of darkness. She laughed a great, joyous, uninhibited laugh.

‘Chill? How can anyone chill on a night like this?’ She flung her arms wide, embracing the universe, the whirling galaxies overhead. There was an edge of frost tonight and above the angled branches of the trees the black bowl of the night sky was studded with diamonds.

Tonight you could almost hear the music of the spheres, Jen thought, interwoven with the restless muttering of the trees. The rest of the Cyrenaics drifted around her: Connell, Will, Skye, Randall, Kendra. Only Kendra’s husband Logie was missing, running the pub.

Skye was laughing and dancing too, a sprite alive with energy. ‘I’m floating,’ she called. ‘I don’t need to touch the ground!’ Then she stopped, staring up at the sky, a mood swing making her suddenly serious. ‘We’re so small. We’re so – so
nothing.
We’re ants – ants to be stepped on.’ She ground her own small foot into the leaf mould.

Was that what started the first wave of unease among them? Afterwards, Jen couldn’t remember, but her sensory exhilaration began to fade, along with the effects of the last spliff.

‘How come we don’t see this every night?’ Skye tilted her face up to Will who was standing nearby.

‘Light pollution,’ Will said. ‘Too many lights, everywhere.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake, spare us another eco-rant!’ Randall wasn’t high; the cigarette he was smoking was the kind you could buy across the counter but he’d got drunk tonight instead, drunk and belligerent. He was younger than the rest of them and something had definitely put him on edge; perhaps it was Skye, spirits restored, twirling herself into Will’s arms to be gathered into an embrace. ‘What are we going to do now? Just stand around in a wood all night? OK, we’ve seen the Dark Skies effect – who’s coming back to the pub?’

‘Slow down! Just feel the night.’ Connell’s voice came from deep shadow, under a towering Scots pine, on the edge of the group. As usual.

All Jen could make out was the bulk of his darker shadow and the paler smudge of his face: bad, beautiful Connell who didn’t play their little games with anyone except Julia. She felt a stab of pain at the thought. And she could, indeed, feel the night, like invisible fingers creeping about her, chilly, sinister. She gave an involuntary shudder.

Kendra moved across to Will, her brother-in-law, and Skye. ‘Will, you were going to point out the planets,’ she said. ‘I can do Orion, up there – see?’

Will turned away from Skye, his attention caught. ‘The Plough
next, then.’ He put his arm round Kendra’s shoulder, directing her gaze. ‘Look, high up – higher. Got it?’

Randall gave a disgusted snort, throwing down his cigarette and stamping it out. ‘That’s enough communing with nature for me. I’m cold. Anyone coming back to the cars? Skye?’ But Skye twirled away again, throwing him an impish glance over her shoulder.

Jen was cold too, and there was too much going on tonight. She felt the tensions in the group tingling like nettle stings on her skin. If she and Randall left, it might break up the party.
Before something happened.

Why was she thinking that? It was foolish, of course, just the effect of the dramatic surroundings of ancient trees, moonlight and darkness. Even so, she’d be a lot happier once they were back in Logie Stewart’s smartly decadent gastropub.

‘I’ll come,’ she said, then looking round, ‘Where’s Julia?’ It was ten minutes since she’d seen her disappear among the trees.

‘Off to worship the gods of the grove, no doubt,’ Connell said in that dry, sarcastic way he had.

Jen’s eyes went back to him. She didn’t really like him – not
like
, no – and she wasn’t sure that any of the others did either, apart from Julia, but he got the stuff for them. And did Julia like him – or was the relationship built on need not inclination? Julia was getting in deep these days.

‘Come on then, Jen.’ Randall put his arm round her shoulders. ‘Let’s leave these morons to gape. I left a bottle in the car.’

She could smell the drink raw on his breath; you always could if you’d been inhaling rather than drinking yourself, and she wasn’t sure how much she wanted to find herself alone with a Randall who had something to prove to Skye and had declared his intention of getting drunker still. She was beginning to feel spooked, though, and she allowed him to sweep her along.

They went in single file along the narrow track they had followed to the clearing until the broader forestry track that cut a swathe through the trees opened up ahead of them.

An owl hooted, another owl answered and twigs crackled in the depths of the forest as if people were walking beside them unseen. Jen drew a little closer to Randall’s tall, broad-shouldered silhouette, glad now that she wasn’t alone. It was a relief when they turned downhill and she could see Will’s 4x4 parked lower down the slope.

The sound that reached them, a horrible sound, a sort of choking, gurgling cry, froze her to the spot.

‘Dear God, what was that?’ Jen could feel blood draining from her face.

Randall looked pale too in the moonlight, but he said only, ‘A rabbit, probably. They scream, you know, when the stoat gets them.’

‘Yeah, I guess,’ she said, but when she turned back he followed her. She didn’t break into a run, not until she heard the voices calling, ‘Julia! Julia!’

They reached the clearing again. The others were all there together, Connell in the middle shouting, ‘Julia! Where are you, you silly bitch!’

‘Have you seen any sign of her?’ Kendra demanded.

Randall shook his head. ‘What was that noise?’

It was Connell who said, ‘Some animal, I guess.’ But he went on, ‘I think we’d better just check on Julia, though, in case she’s got lost. The way she was going on, she could have tripped and knocked herself out somewhere.’

He was sweating, Jen noticed with an almost clinical detachment. What had he given Julia tonight? And, more importantly, where was she?

‘Fan out.’ Will took control, directing them out on different angles. ‘Don’t go too far and get lost yourselves.’

The cries began echoing all through the forest: ‘Julia! Julia!’ Jen
found herself shivering convulsively, with cold and with nerves. She had to force herself to move on through the multiple paths ahead, avenues of trees that beckoned then withdrew the invitation in a snarl of brambles and nettles, straining her ears for a cry of, ‘I’ve found her!’ that didn’t come.

Slower, slower. She was putting her feet down very deliberately now but even so she almost trod on her.

Julia was lying across a path, little more than a track, splayed out on her back, her top pulled off one shoulder as if she had been too hot. Her teeth were bared in a grimace and her face was suffused and sweaty. In the relentless moonlight her eyes gleamed, wide and glassy.

Jen didn’t have to touch her to know she was dead. But with a shudder of revulsion she bent to pick up the limp arm. It was hot – scarily hot – but there was no pulse and she dropped it again as if it had burnt her fingers. Then she screamed.

Later, it all came back to her in flash frames. Connell, grim-faced, being comforted by Skye. Will, a policeman himself, unable to look his colleagues in the eye. Kendra, who had summoned her husband, clinging to him in tears. Randall, looking like a scared teenager, explaining to his mother on the phone. Then later, Julia’s mother, small but dignified, holding herself upright despite her stick, her sternly handsome face rigid with the determination not to break down here.

Jen had been the last to give her statement; the others had gone, and when Mrs Margrave’s eyes swept over her it felt like a scorching flame. Until then, Jen had felt detached and emotionless, as if she were viewing the dramatic events from behind a pane of glass; now she burnt with shame.

In her heart of hearts, Jen had somehow always known that their relentless pursuit of pleasure would end badly. Baudelaire’s
Les Fleurs 
du Mal
had been their literary bible and now they were seeing the flowers of evil indeed. And from somewhere a voice from that older bible came murmuring, ‘The wages of sin is death.’

And not Julia’s alone. Connell was charged with drug dealing and culpable homicide and two days later his car was found in the car park by the lighthouse at the Mull of Galloway, a letter to Julia’s mother taped to the steering wheel. Will, sacked from the police force, went off to Canada and Skye, without a word to her parents, left home and vanished.

Randall, the baby of the group, prospered in his job with an Edinburgh merchant bank and Jen, still teaching in the little school at Ballinbreck, nursed her grief and pain and anger and learnt to live with the ghosts.

It was only in 2014, the Year of Homecoming, that the shadows began to stir.

On television it seemed such a cheerful, harmless invitation: the pictured Scots, either bonny or famous and sometimes both, calling the exiles home for a party, for a love fest of mountains and lochs and ceilidhs and pipe bands and whisky – so warm, so welcoming, beaming into homes worldwide in thousands of advertisement breaks.

The Year of Homecoming! Visit Scotland!

‘Where’s the remote?’

At the snarled question Heather Denholm, already stiff with apprehension, began a futile patting around the sofa she was sitting on.

‘I-I don’t know, Donald. You had it last—’

‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ Her partner flung himself out of his chair to turn off the set then stormed out, his face contorted with what you might assume to be anger but she thought could be pain. With this
VisitScotland commercial constantly appearing it was going to be a difficult year.

If it had been her daughter who had disappeared and for two long years she’d had no idea if she was alive or dead, she’d certainly have found the thought of happy reunions with returning loved ones hard to take.

So it was natural enough that he couldn’t bear it – even if it sometimes sounded as if he hadn’t … well, actually
liked
her very much.

The flyer delivered to the doorstep along with a couple of catalogues was on its way to the recycling pile when the headline caught Jen Wilson’s eye.

‘The Year of Homecoming in Ballinbreck,’ it said and she read it with mounting unease: a village party inviting the diaspora to return, held at Ballinbreck House.

A shiver ran down her back. Why, for God’s sake, would you want to do that? Why try to bring back the people who had left, rake up a past that was better forgotten – much better?

She looked at the signature – Philippa Lindsay. Philippa, who liked to refer to herself as the ‘Lady of the Manor’, though with a light laugh to show she was using the term ironically, whose Lady Bountiful moments had been few, far between and carefully calculated.

So what was in it for her? Why would Philippa want to provoke a reunion that would risk opening up old wounds?

Then suddenly, she knew – knew as if she had read the mind behind the message. A fit of rage shook her; she crumpled up the flyer and threw it in the bin, as if destroying it could somehow destroy the thought behind it.

It wouldn’t, though. There would be people in the village with family overseas or in London or even closer at hand, in Glasgow or
Edinburgh, who would welcome the idea of a grand reunion. The Lindsays, for once, would be popular.

If it happened, the seething emotions that had settled to an uneasy calm would break out all over again. She had to try and stop it.

Jen went to her laptop, clicked Create Mail, then hesitated. Could it do any harm? Probably not, though it might not do any good. She tapped out her message, took a deep breath and despatched it.

The speed of the reply surprised her. What it said left her shocked, bewildered and very, very angry.

Logie Stewart looked up from his laptop. ‘That’s Will saying that with all this Year of Homecoming stuff he might pay a visit back.’

‘Oh, really?’ Kendra said. Her voice sounded perfectly calm, her face was tranquil, as if the thought of her husband’s brother coming home was a matter of no more than mild interest.

‘Amazing that he feels able,’ her husband went on, a slight chill in his voice. ‘After all that happened.’

‘After all that happened,’ she echoed. ‘Yes, amazing. Do you want a cup of tea?’

She didn’t wait for his answer before going to make it. As she filled the kettle she found her lips shaping the words that Will had quoted to her all those years ago:
he that would keep a secret, must keep it secret that he has a secret to keep.

It was only words written on a piece of paper, but it had been folded up, put in an envelope, addressed and sent on its way and its seismic effect was starting.

So be it:
Fiat justitia, ruat caelum
– Let justice be done, though the heavens fall …