Mirrorland, page 27
Rafiq turns back around to me. ‘You do that to him?’
I nod.
‘What’s going on?’
I recoil from his voice, I can’t help it. He still sounds like Ross, and I don’t see how that’s possible.
Rafiq moves around Logan, drops down to her haunches. ‘Can you stand?’
Ross looks up at her with his one good eye. ‘I think so.’
‘We’ll get those head wounds seen to down at the Royal,’ Rafiq says. ‘Logan, give us a hand.’
I stand there on deck as they both haul him to his feet. He sways for a few seconds, leans heavily against the washhouse wall of sea and sky. He looks at me.
‘What … what’s going on? Cat?’
Rafiq takes one short step away from him. ‘Ross MacAuley, I am arresting you on suspicion of common-law assault to injury. You’re not obliged to say anything, but anything you do say can and will be used against you. Do you understand?’
Ross’s mouth opens and closes twice. He shakes his head. ‘I haven’t done anything.’ He pushes off the wall, and only Logan’s grip on his arm keeps him from lurching towards me. ‘Cat, tell them! Nothing’s happened. It was just a disagreement and it got out of hand, that’s all. I haven’t done anything!’
I touch my still-burning throat out of little more than reflex, and he inhales sharply, as if he’s only just noticed the marks there. He looks horrified. I wonder if he’s as practised in forgetting what he doesn’t want to remember as I am.
‘I think you have, Ross. In fact, I think you’ve been pretty busy.’ There’s something quite dangerous about Rafiq down here. Her crust is much thinner. She’s angry, but more than that, she’s excited. ‘We were coming here today to detain you for wasting police time and hindering an investigation. We believe the statement you gave us regarding your whereabouts on the day of your wife’s disappearance is false.’
Ross says nothing.
‘I’ve had a very interesting conversation with a Professor Catherine Ward.’ Rafiq gives me a sidelong look. ‘She wanted to follow up on her reply to an email I apparently sent her.’
‘I don’t know who that is,’ Ross says, but the confusion in his voice has been replaced by caution.
‘Well, she knows who you are. Has made, in fact, a statement to the effect that she witnessed you loading your suitcase into your car and leaving Southwark University twenty-two hours before you said you did.’
‘No, I—’
‘We’re currently checking ANPR cameras and CCTV footage, so we will track the timeline of your journey all the way back here, Ross.’ She folds her arms. ‘We also got a warrant to check your phone records on the third; lucky for us, your phone was switched on when PC Thompson phoned at eighteen-thirty to tell you about your wife’s disappearance. And where do you think your phone company’s cell-site dump placed you?’
‘I was just driving.’ Ross looks worried. He’s no longer leaning against either Logan or the wall. ‘I was just fucking driving!’ He points a finger at me. ‘I told her that. Ask her!’
‘I don’t need to ask anyone. I already know you were in Edinburgh.’
‘She phoned me – El phoned me! She asked me to come back.’
‘So, why did you not tell PC Thompson—’
Logan steps between them. ‘He’s got a head injury, boss.’
‘And, like I said,’ Rafiq says, never taking her eyes off Ross, ‘we’ll be getting that seen to down at the Royal.’
‘I don’t know!’ Ross shouts. ‘We were having problems, I told you that. I just needed time to think. I had no time to bloody think! I just parked somewhere after driving through the night and slept in the car. That’s all! I knew it would look bad, I … maybe I panicked. I don’t know. I don’t—’
‘There was one phone call logged to you at seventeen-thirty on the second, but it wasn’t from El. It was from an insurance company based in Newhaven. And when Logan here gave them a ring, they told him it was likely a courtesy callback because you’d completed an online quote enquiry the previous day. And can you imagine our surprise when we found out what kind of insurance it is they specialise in?’
Ross’s face is grey. His whole body is vibrating, and even now, my throat swollen and throbbing, my stomach clenched tight with something like hate, it takes far too much effort not to go to him.
‘Accidental or negligence-based marine insurance,’ Rafiq says. Her eyes shine. ‘Bit of a coincidence, wouldn’t you say? That why you didn’t take it out in the end? Thought even us plods might find that a wee bit too suspicious the day before your wife disappears in her boat?’
‘This is wrong,’ Ross says. ‘You’re fucking wrong.’
Rafiq shakes her head. ‘D’you remember that anonymous phone call I questioned you about two days after El went missing? Well, yesterday, two people actually came forward to make official statements alleging that you were hurting El—’
‘What? Who?’
‘I can’t tell you that,’ Rafiq says. But I think of Anna’s determined grief, the long black line of mascara from her left eye to her temple. And Marie’s dismissive smile when I threatened to report her if she didn’t leave us alone.
Rafiq pauses, then reaches into her pocket. ‘We’ve also got a second warrant to search this house.’ Her voice drops, softens. ‘So I’ll ask you just once more, Ross. Do you know what happened to your wife?’
‘Boss,’ Logan says, ‘we can’t do this, not until he gets seen by a doc. You know that.’ And then closer, under his breath: ‘We can’t fuck this up now.’
‘He knows,’ I say. As loud as I can, even though it hurts. It hurts more to look at Ross, but I do that too. Because now, surely, even he can see the writing on the wall. Red and stark and bloody. ‘He knows. Because he killed her.’
‘No!’
Rafiq turns, cocks an eyebrow at me. ‘Do you have any proof of that?’
‘The kayak in the shed. And I found a chest inside Blue—inside the bedroom at the end of the corridor upstairs.’ I swallow before I remember it’s a bad idea – the pain is momentarily so bad it eclipses everything else, even the burn of Ross’s horrified gaze. I raise my head, look back at him without faltering. ‘I found your Treasure Trophies.’
‘Cat.’ Rafiq turns me towards her.
‘I think it’s a drain plug,’ I say. Sorrow washes through me, leaving me emptier still. ‘And a hole saw.’
Ross makes a sound somewhere between a shout and a moan, and I close my eyes as Rafiq thunders back up the stairs.
‘What are you doing, Cat?’ His voice is broken, as hoarse as mine. ‘How can you—’
‘Ross, I’d advise you to stop talking.’ Logan’s expression is pained. ‘For your own sake.’
Rain drums against wood. Pain is everywhere now, not just in my throat, and I have to numb myself against it: the fear, the horror, the regrets that are growing – too fast for me to think of anything else. Think of El. Not him. Think of El.
When Rafiq comes back, I’ve stopped shaking. She marches over to me, ignores both Ross and Logan.
‘Is there anything else?’
I can hear the flat, echoless rhythm of police boots against mosaic tiles. The groan of the landing, the scream of a dusty black door. I stand on the Satisfaction and look up into the dark of Mirrorland’s alleyway, my thin sips of breath getting thinner as I think of us battling storms and brigantines. Looking up, always up. Towards the screams of splintering wood and dying men, the bellows of cannon and musketoons, the roar of the squall.
I reach into my jeans pocket for the letter El wrote to me, hold it out to Rafiq.
She pulls some latex gloves out of her coat. Opens the letter, reads it, takes a sharp inhalation of breath. And when someone shouts down from the summit of Mirrorland, ‘They’ve found them, ma’am,’ something a lot more savage than relief lights up her face.
Ross makes a sound that’s half gasp, half moan.
‘Don’t look at him, look at me,’ Rafiq snaps. But her eyes are shining, shining. ‘Is there anything else?’
‘He’s been drugging me.’ My voice is less than a whisper now. I point towards the glass of wine on the corridor floor. ‘I think he drugged El too.’
‘No!’ Ross shouts. When I look around, I see that Logan’s actively having to restrain him now. ‘She’s lying!’
But I don’t cringe from him any more. Not even from his shouts, his curses. I hear the spin and click of handcuffs. Logan’s grunts of effort as he tries to drag Ross back towards the Shank.
‘It wasn’t me! I didn’t kill her! I loved her. Tell them, Cat. Tell them, you lying bitch! It wasn’t me. I didn’t do anything! I loved her! I loved you!’ His eyes trap mine one last time. ‘I let go!’
My fingers press hard against my throat, so that the pain is all I can feel or see or hear. And when I open my eyes again, Ross is gone.
‘It’ll be okay,’ Rafiq says, and her voice is kind. She pulls my fingers from my throat. The arm she puts around me is still and sure and comforting.
‘I know,’ I whisper. Because in Mirrorland, anything – everything – is possible. In Mirrorland, you are safe. Fear is never to be feared, horror is only make-believe, and escape is inside every bone and vein and breath and brick. And all it asks for in return is one thing. Only ever one thing. That you have to be brave.
And so, for the first time in a long time, I am.
CHAPTER 30
I arrive early. Sit behind the wheel of Vik’s beat-up Golf, watch the car park fill up through a windscreen obscured by rain. My eyes are gritty, sore through lack of sleep and a new kind of merciless grief that sits heavy and strange on my chest. I can’t get rid of it. I can’t pretend it’s not there. It’s taken everything that was sustaining me, keeping me alive throughout the trial and the two months since – my anger, my pain, my need for revenge and justice and closure. And it’s eroded all of it down to nothing. A once-towering cliff ground into powder and washed out to sea.
The prison looks modern, sleek, not at all what I’d been imagining. The slit-windows and dark guard towers of Shawshank maybe. Instead, it’s smooth and curved and no more than two storeys high, matte-beige sandstone and big windows, HMP SHOTTS in grey glossy relief over the revolving entrance door.
I feel nervous, scared, sick to my stomach, but more clear-headed than I have in a long time. It’s been two weeks since I last had a drink. Every morning throughout September, I used vodka to fortify myself for another day of HM Advocate vs. MacAuley in Court 9 of the High Court of Justiciary. Invariably, I’d end up drinking behind closed curtains instead, but some days my resolve would win. And every one of those days – reporters, cameras, stares, whispers, intimate details, Ross – would be followed by long, numb spaces of nothing. Familiar fantasies kept me company in the darkness, and I would become convinced that the trial was just another dream, another place inside the cold stone walls of Mirrorland.
I was drunk on the day the jury of seven women and eight men finally came back with a verdict. The sticky-hot Court 9 hummed and thrummed; my stomach squeezed, my hands shook. I hid close to the back of the court, but, just like all the journalists and rubberneckers on Parliament Square, Ross saw me straightaway. He looked tired, so thin. And I loathed the ache in me, the echo of longing.
I barely heard the jury find him guilty by majority verdict of the common-law murder of El. But I did hear him cry out – once, long and loud; the back of his voice broke on it – before the courtroom erupted into chaos and Rafiq appeared to pull me away from gawking faces and shouted questions.
I close my eyes. I don’t know if I can face this. If I can face him. I think of that terrible cry again. Try to use it to make me feel brave, strong, better. But I’m no good at lying to myself any more. I’ve lost the ability.
I take the letter out of my pocket again. Battered and crumpled because I can’t leave it alone. ‘CAT’ printed in El’s handwriting across its envelope. It came two months after Ross’s conviction. Two days after Vik texted me asking for my new address. I’d used my dwindling savings to pay the deposit and first month’s rent on a cheap bedsit on the edge of Leith, because every new day of square lawns and apple trees, of grey ashlar bricks and Georgian bar windows, copper bells, red doors, and gold light, had become a torture – one that I’d started to crave, to need, to look forward to. Like a toxic love affair. Or a fantasy world of monsters and ghosts. When I first closed the bedsit’s door and sat down on its sagging bed, I cried with relief.
I take the letter out of the envelope, pick up the smaller piece of paper inside before it can fall onto my lap, look down at the Dear Cat and All my love, El, and all the dreadful words in-between. When I first opened it, there was a scrawled note too. She told me not to read it. So I don’t know if it will help or make things a hundred times worse. Vik.
April 3rd
Dear Cat,
This is the last letter I’m going to write to you. I should have written it before now, but I didn’t know how. And now I can’t put it off any longer.
I’ve lied to you. More times than I can count. More times than I should have. But you need to know that it was for you: everything I kept from you, every lie I told you, every time I said trust me, this is the truth now – and it never was.
Trust me. This is the truth now.
I look out at the cars, the people, the blurred beige and grey, open the glove box and push the letter inside. This new grief might be heavy and cruel, but this new sense of responsibility is worse, heavier; a dread no longer silvery but black and thick like cooling tar. I used to think that people whose lives were stuck in limbo carried on only because it was easier. Easier than giving up. Easier than stopping. But now I know it’s because there’s no alternative, no escape. That the tide will come, and all you can do is stay afloat. And wait for it to turn.
I fold up the smaller piece of paper and push it into my jeans pocket. Open the car door and get out. Face those smooth stone walls and high windows.
Because I can’t put it off any longer either.
*
I try not to look at the receptionist who checks my ID, or at my unsteady hands as I put my phone and bag inside a locker, or at the guard as I walk through the metal detector and consent to a rub-down search. The secure waiting area is upstairs, and I sit down, keep my eyes trained on the neutral carpet. Maybe no one knows who I am anyway, or who I’m here to see.
Ross’s sentencing was big news. It was televised. I watched it alone, in the dark, while reporters banged on my door. The judge’s voice reminded me of Mum’s: high and hectoring, inviting neither opinion nor dissent.
Mr Ross Iain MacAuley, a jury has found you guilty by majority verdict of the callous murder of your wife, Ellice MacAuley. After subjecting her to months, perhaps years, of physical and mental abuse, you decided and then planned, motivated in part perhaps by the realisation that she was intending to leave you, to murder her and pass it off as an accident at sea. I find that showed significant premeditation and cold-headedness. I also find that you believed you would profit financially from her death. You pled not guilty. You have shown no remorse. Against these aggravating factors, I find little in the way of mitigation. Therefore, I feel I must pass a sentence of life imprisonment, with a punishment part of fifteen years for the murder of Ellice MacAuley, and three years for attempting to defeat the ends of justice.
The reporters have stopped hounding me now. The trial, the conviction, have already been all but forgotten. And Rafiq was wrong. No one has made any connection between us and the two twelve-year-old girls found at Granton Harbour in 1998. And no one has mentioned the murder–suicide at 36 Westeryk Road, except as macabre coincidence.
I catch the eye of an old man with yellow whiskers, and when he grins, I look away. The intermittent bang of vending machines turns my headache into a dull throb.
A guard opens a door, beckons us all with a half-arsed finger. ‘Twelve,’ he says to me as I pass him inside the doorway. I find the table, sit down, clasp my fingers together. I don’t want to see him. I never wanted to have to see him again. And yet.
The prisoners file in. I feel Ross before I see him: a trickle of cold against my spine, a flutter in my heart. He stops next to the table, long enough that I have to look up. He looks great. His hair is short. His eyes are no longer bloodshot, the skin beneath them clear. On the day he took the stand, the flesh beneath his cheekbones was sunken, dark with stubble. He was charming, passionate, credible. He cried. Though I’d felt his stare throughout most of the trial, that day he never glanced in my direction once.
‘Hello, Cat,’ he says, and his smile is warm, unsure. ‘It’s good to see you. I didn’t think I would.’ The last is a question, but I refuse to answer it, not yet. I need to be in control of this whole conversation; I can’t let any bit of him in until I’ve made my choice.
He sits down, keeps his smile. When he stretches out his legs, I cross mine at the ankles under the seat of my chair. But when he clears his throat, I make myself look at him. If I can’t do that, I’m screwed before I’ve even started.
‘Why are you here?’ His gaze is too intense. Peat-brown eyes flecked with silver.
I close mine, and they sting. Because I’ve been grieving for him too, I can’t pretend I haven’t. ‘I don’t know yet.’
He leans closer. Close enough that I can smell him. ‘I want – I need – you to know how sorry I am about what happened that night …’ He swallows, and his throat clicks. ‘I’m so sorry that I hurt you, Cat. I’ve thought about it every day, and I don’t blame you for what you said at the trial, I don’t blame you for anything. I promise you I don’t.’
Because I am the main reason he’s here. I am why there was so little in the way of mitigation. I was the Crown’s best witness, and the most damning part of my testimony was not what I’d found or heard, not even the oxycodone and diazepam that they found in my wine glass and my blood – but the fact that Ross and I had been having sex. I endured the telling of that truth, even the snide cross-examination of it by Ross’s QC and then the wider, snider world, because it was so damning. So much of the prosecution’s case was circumstantial: El’s letter, Ross’s false statements, the physical finds, the mobile phone data, camera footage, even the turning up of a will that Ross knew nothing about, in which El left everything of hers to only me. None of it perhaps would have been enough. But her husband – her charming, handsome, grief-stricken husband; YouTube’s wailing widower – shagging her twin sister within days of her disappearance carried a deliciously scandalous weight that would not be moved. Even as I was testifying, I could see the jury members bristling.
