Disorder (Sam Keddie thriller series Book 1) (5 page)

Chapter 11

Sussex 

‘If you are what you say you are – a therapist – then you’ll know that, as a recently bereaved daughter, I’m out of my mind with grief; capable of acting in ways that I cannot be held responsible for.’

   Looking at the woman before him – her eyes blazing with anger, hands wrapped tightly around a shotgun – Sam had no doubt she was telling the truth. ‘I
am
a therapist,’ he repeated. ‘Your father’s therapist.’

   ‘Prove it,’ said Eleanor Scott.

   They were standing in one of the farm outbuildings, an old stable block with a floor strewn with straw, the air tainted with the smell of manure. Eleanor Scott wore an over-sized overcoat – perhaps, thought Sam, her father’s, and an attempt by her to stay close to him. Above this dense, protective layer her face, despite raging eyes, seemed fragile and delicate – pale skin etched with fatigue and sadness.

   ‘He came to see me for a session the day before he died,’ said Sam, immediately regretting his choice of words.

   Eleanor said nothing, which made Sam even more edgy. Right now, she had every reason to hate him. He briefly considered mentioning what Scott had said about her, but as quickly decided against it.

   ‘All I can say is that he looked a shadow of the man I knew from the media. He talked about something that was haunting him day and night.’

   The shotgun dropped a fraction.

   ‘Your father talked about being in a deep pit – one he was never going to get out of.’

   Eleanor’s eyes had begun to well. Sam knew what he needed to say now to finally remove the threat of a shotgun being fired into his stomach. It was cheap but, Sam was confident, guaranteed to wrench at the heart of a bereaved daughter.

   ‘He was frightened.’

   Eleanor was crying now and the shotgun hung limply by her side.

   ‘I’m so sorry about your father,’ Sam said. ‘I’m also sorry for marching on to your property like this. But I couldn’t think of any other way to get in contact with you. I knew you wouldn’t talk to me on the phone in case you thought I was some prying journalist.’

   Eleanor looked up, her eyes wet with tears. ‘So why have you come?’

   ‘Something about your father’s death doesn’t add up,’ said Sam. ‘And I have to find out what.’

Chapter 12

Sussex 

They were sitting at the kitchen table, the surface scattered with unopened mail and piles of newspapers. Clearly Eleanor had been ploughing through them, reading both the good and bad stuff about her father. It was understandable. As long as he continued to be talked about, he was alive to her.

   Around them, the room looked like it hadn’t been cleaned for days, with muddy boot prints across the floor and a sink stacked with unwashed plates and pans. But the place had an undeniably homely feel to it. A dog – an elderly chocolate Labrador – was curled up in front of an Aga. Photos of Scott, Eleanor and Wendy in happier days – a fading snap of a family holiday from Eleanor’s teenage years, the three of them in swimming costumes on an empty beach; another of Eleanor in mortar board and gown flanked by her grinning father – were pinned to a cork board.

   Sam couldn’t help but contrast this domestic scene with the home of his childhood, a sterile, cold house in an isolated rural spot in Wiltshire. In the absence of his father, who’d died shortly after he was born, Sam’s mother, a scientist who worked at the MoD, dictated life for her only child. The home was wholly lacking in human touches, or warmth of any kind. It was a building he had revisited countless times in his own therapy – and one which he hoped never to see again.

   He could see Wendy Scott, the Minister’s widow, through an open doorway. She was sitting in what looked like a specially adapted armchair and a carer was helping her to drink from a beaker with a spout.

   ‘Keep your voice down, by the way’ said Eleanor, her tone still brittle. ‘Mum may look gaga but she’s not – and I don’t want her hearing what you say.’

   Eleanor took a sip of her coffee. She was, Sam reckoned, in her early thirties, slender with a mass of unbrushed, shoulder-length brown hair. She was attractive, in an unconventional way, with a trace of freckles across the smooth skin of her cheeks and straight nose, and a dimple beneath her full mouth. Tired eyes – the irises a deep, dark brown – flickered inquisitively in his direction. Sam noticed – as he frequently did of his clients – that at the end of Eleanor’s long fingers, the nails were bitten and the skin raw.

   Things had moved on a great deal since their initial meeting. The shotgun – Sam guessed it might never have been loaded, but he hadn’t asked – was now lying in an entrance porch and Eleanor had also made him a coffee. But he knew he could still not afford to say one wrong word. She was fragile. He could not distress her any more. So while he’d mentioned her father being haunted by something, he had not revealed the other telling phrase – Scott saying that he’d ‘done something terrible’. He also knew any mention of what Scott had said about his family – ‘
Wendy’s all but lost to me. And I can’t burden Eleanor with this. She wouldn’t understand.’
– was out of the question. This reluctance was not out of deference to his former client – he was already betraying him – but because he knew this information could lead to poisonous, destructive assumptions on Eleanor’s part. And that wouldn’t help him either. The brutal truth was, he needed Eleanor to be thinking clearly.

   No, the only way forward – selfish though it now felt – was to keep the notes to himself and convince her, in the gentlest, most sensitive way possible, that it was worth her getting involved in his search for the truth.

   He started by telling her how, during his last session, her father had been spooked by the sight of a man in the street outside and how his mood had dramatically altered afterwards, going from fear to a calm resignation.

   ‘Of what?’ asked Eleanor.

   ‘I’m not sure,’ said Sam. ‘All I know is that the next day, the same man who appeared in the street turned up at my house to tell me your father had committed suicide.’

   Sam paused, groaning inwardly, hardly believing that he’d been so tactless.

   ‘It’s alright,’ said Eleanor. ‘We’ve seen the autopsy report – and the papers.’

   ‘Right,’ said Sam, struggling to regain his flow. ‘Anyhow, this man then asked me to tell him what your father had said about his work.’

   ‘I’m assuming you told him to piss off,’ Eleanor said.

   ‘After a fashion,’ said Sam. ‘I didn’t like or trust the man one bit. And there was no way I was telling a stranger what a client had told me in confidence. But he was insistent and, had another client not arrived, I think he would have happily beaten me to a pulp to get what he wanted.’

   Eleanor leaned forward in her seat. ‘So then what?’

   ‘He stormed out. But later on someone else tried to break into my place and steal your father’s case notes. When that failed, the same man chased me through a local cemetery with a knife in his hand. Had there not been people around, he’d have got what he wanted.’

   Eleanor combed a hand through her thick hair. ‘So what you’re saying is, these men suspect that you know something about my father – something they deem explosive enough to steal or even kill for.’

   Sam nodded.

   ‘But you don’t.’

   ‘Exactly.’

   ‘So you want my help to work out what this incendiary secret is.’

   ‘I know you have your own grief to work through, Eleanor. I also know I’m trampling all over it by marching in here today. But I just wonder whether we can help each other.’

   Eleanor’s head dipped. He’d upset her. He knew it. When she looked up she was crying. But what came out of her mouth was not what he expected.

   Eleanor turned to look at her mother in the room behind them. Her voice then dropped. ‘Most widows in my mother’s state, with maybe a year to live – two at best – would have given up with this news. But not her. She’s found a new appetite for life. She’s eating and drinking more.’ She leaned forward, as if afraid her words were still carrying into the other room. ‘I know why,’ she said. ‘She’s angry. Angry with my father possibly, but more likely with the Government for putting Dad under unbearable stress. That’s how she’s making sense of it all.’ She paused, looking out of the window at an indeterminate point.

   ‘But you’re not sure?’

   ‘No,’ she said, her eyes returning to the room. ‘I think there’s something else. I mean, I know he was under stress, but I don’t think that unduly affected him. He knew what he’d signed up to.’

   She raised her fingers into an arch and pressed them to her lips. ‘Dad was such a steady man. Not always the most expressive emotionally, but he was always consistently affectionate towards me and Mum. He’d get angry of course – who doesn’t? Normally it was about bullshit in the media, unfair jibes from the Opposition or injustices in the rest of the world, particularly those beyond the reach of his brief.’

   She’d begun gesticulating with her hands, but now they came to rest on the table. ‘He got mad about Mum’s illness too, really mad. But then, despite the pain underneath, he dealt with it in a calm, measured way. What I’m trying to say is that he’d get affected by stuff you’d expect anyone to be affected by, but otherwise it was like he had a really even keel. Until recently, that is.’

   ‘Something changed.’

   ‘A couple of months back, he began acting differently, out of character I guess. This might sound odd, but he seemed to be unusually happy.’

  ‘Most of my clients would give their right arm to be described that way, but I think I know what you mean. As if he were on a high.’

   ‘Exactly. And I’d seen enough people in his state to know what was happening.’

   ‘Which was?’

   Her voice became even quieter. ‘He was in love.’

   ‘With another woman.’

   ‘Yeah. We all knew of politicians whose marriages had been destroyed by life in the Commons – the long hours, all that time away from home. But theirs had survived. They had a bond. They loved each other.’ She sighed. ‘Or at least they had. Her illness seemed to change all that.’ She smiled at a memory. ‘They’d always been great communicators. If you could have heard the conversations around this table. They were always talking – about politics, the arts, all sorts of stuff. I remember one debate that went on all night, about Hitchcock.’ She smiled. ‘Mum said he was a misogynist but Dad, who was a massive fan, defended him to the hilt.’ Eleanor’s face darkened. ‘Her disease shut all that down. And he seemed to really miss that regular communication with her. But just when I thought it was beginning to take its toll, he changed.’

   ‘He met someone?’

   ‘That’s my guess. It was my birthday and he took me out for dinner in London. I assumed he’d put on a good front for me, but this was different. He was almost unrecognisable. The only way I can describe it is exuberant.’

   ‘And this lasted till when?’

   ‘A week or so ago I saw him for the first time in ages. He’d been working incredibly hard on something at the Ministry. He came down for the weekend and seemed not just tired, but utterly spent, like the light had gone out. I tried to draw out what was up, but he was closed down.’

   ‘You think the relationship had gone badly wrong?’

   ‘That was my conclusion.’

   Sam paused. He was aware his next comment would seem selfish and insensitive, but he had to ask it. ‘But why would this Government employee be so anxious about me finding out?’

    Eleanor shrugged, seemingly unperturbed. ‘The fact that my dad may have been having an affair hardly seems of significance.’

   ‘No.’

   But then a thought crossed Sam’s mind, one which coloured the whole business. ‘I guess that depends on who the woman was.’

Chapter 13

Docklands, London

As the journalist who’d broken the Scott suicide story, Tony McNess was feeling rather pleased with himself. He’d been called in by the editor that morning and congratulated. The paper’s sales had gone through the roof. They all knew that, when the headline was salacious enough, all those who’d normally turn their noses up at a paper like theirs happily bought a copy.

   The same people – the ones with good educations and jobs and nice houses – were also capable of acting in ways that did not reflect the respectability they loved to portray.

   Take the woman who’d called this morning when McNess had returned to his desk in the news room. She was clearly middle-class, but that hadn’t stopped her asking, up front, exactly how much she’d get paid for giving him information about Charles Scott. Now that the truth was out about his death, she clearly thought it was open season on the poor bastard.

   McNess mentioned the figure which, depending on the strength of her information, she could expect to be paid. Unsurprisingly, she then agreed to spill the beans. She went on to describe how, around two months back, she’d been in a restaurant in Suffolk with her husband, when she’d seen Scott at the table next to them. She said she could not forget the way he and his female companion had been acting.

   Scott’s fellow diner was, the source guessed, about ten to fifteen years younger than the Minister, a woman with long, mousey brown hair – elegantly dressed and nicely made up. She and Scott were clearly besotted with each other but were trying desperately not to show anyone else. This is what had made their behaviour so memorable. Their eyes rarely broke off contact all evening while their hands continually inched across the table towards each other, only to suddenly retreat when they realised what they’d been doing.

   As their meal neared its conclusion, they became less restrained.  Scott’s foot began caressing the woman’s legs under the table, while the woman repeatedly and, in the source’s opinion, inappropriately, stroked her neckline as if anticipating the Minister’s hand doing the very same thing.

   ‘So they were definitely shagging?’ asked McNess.

   The woman paused, as if suddenly confronted by the grubbiness of what she was involved with, then confirmed: ‘I think they were definitely having – or about to have – a sexual relationship.’

   ‘And if I get together some images of women who might have known Scott and match your description, you’re happy to try and identify her?’

   The woman said she was.

   McNess confirmed he’d be in touch, then called off. He was, as he liked to put it, fucking cock-a-hoop. If he could confirm that Scott was having a little extra behind his dying wife’s back, that would add a whole extra dimension to the story. Had he been in love? Had that relationship collapsed, leaving Scott bereft and, ultimately, suicidal?

   McNess grinned. This story was going to run and run.