Inhuman Remains (2 page)

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Authors: Quintin Jardine

Tags: #Fiction, #Crime, #Mystery & Detective, #General, #Scotland

BOOK: Inhuman Remains
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I had most of the day to wait; I bought a big floppy hat and a huge pair of sunglasses that covered most of my face, and spent it looking at the Niagara Falls, and thinking.
What was there to think about?
Are you kidding? Plenty.
First, had I done the right thing in committing what was probably a federal offence by leaving the scene of a fatal air accident? If I was certain that Oz had staged the crash, shouldn’t I have stayed right there and denounced him?
A quick glance at that morning’s
Buffalo News
was all it took to convince me that I’d done the right thing. As far as the media were concerned, Oz was a victim himself. Rescue teams were searching for his body as well as mine. I knew damn well that when he surfaced there would be a wave of public relief. I knew also that if he had sabotaged the plane . . . and the media were already alluding to suspicious circumstances . . . there was no way it would ever be traced to him. If I spoke out, I’d be a mad woman, a bitter and twisted ex-wife, with a track record of trying to harm him. Not a soul would believe me and I would still be in his sights.
No, much better to go along with playing dead for a while.
I was confident that I wouldn’t be traced to the car lot in that New Jersey town, the name of which I still don’t know, simply because nobody would be looking for me there. The riskiest part would be getting into Canada, but since the press seemed to be calling me ‘Mrs Blackstone’, and I was travelling on my Primavera Phillips passport, I reckoned I’d get through without leaving a trace.
The second big consideration was what to do next. My dad and my sister would be in agony, I knew. Was it right to allow that to continue? Much as I hated it, I told myself I had to, for a while at least, if I was to keep Oz off my trail. The word ‘stoic’ could have been coined for Dad, but Dawn was flaky. If she knew I was alive, she’d never keep it to herself . . . and she, Miles and Oz were still close. Then there was Tom, but at that stage I couldn’t bring myself to think about him.
Finally, I asked myself the toughest question of all. What was I going to take from the experience?
I looked back over the time since I had met Oz, and thought of the person that I’d become, that he had helped to make me. It didn’t take me long to realise I was having trouble blaming him for trying to bump me off. In his shoes, I’d have been tempted to do the same thing. Whatever happened, as the Niagara’s white water thundered down I promised myself that I would emerge from the wreckage of my life as a better person, as the daughter David and Elanore Phillips had raised, not the woman she had been for the best part of a decade.
Crossing the border wasn’t a problem. The Canadian immigration people looked at my passport and thought, ‘Tourist,’ as they took my entry card and filed it with the rest, where no American FBI investigator was ever likely to look.
I spent the night in the smallest hotel I could find in Toronto, to lessen the chances of being spotted. Next morning I went back to Union Station and bought myself a transcontinental train ticket for Vancouver. It seemed like a good place to kick off my new life, for a couple of reasons. My time with Oz, and our divorce, had left me very well fixed financially, thank you, and most of my money was stashed there, invested through a private bank. And so were some other items, in a safe-deposit box, chief among them being my two extra passports.
In the brief period when I was married to Oz, I’d applied for a passport as his wife and had managed, by a discreet lie, to hold on to the one it was supposed to replace, the one I was still using. But I’d done more than that. I’d obtained another, as Janet More, the birth name of my predecessor, the first Mrs Osbert Blackstone. She was dead, and it was before the days of biometrics, so it was easy. Why did I do it? Because I was a devious, cunning bitch, always looking for an advantage, and thought that I might find it useful some day. That was how being with that guy made me think.
I checked into a hotel in Burrard Street, and holed up in Vancouver for a week, hanging around Granville Island and Stanley Park, breakfasting in Starbucks (I like Starbucks, okay?), dining in the Sandbar, Joe Fortes and Earl’s, and reading every newspaper I could find. When I was sure that my disappearance had lost its news value, I booked a flight to Las Vegas in Jan’s name, and rented an apartment through an Internet agency. Las Vegas, you ask? Trust me: it’s one of the best places in the world to hide. The population changes all the time as the casino hotels fill up and empty, fill up and empty, weekend in, weekend out. If you need to, you can be truly anonymous there.
And so I set up my hopefully temporary home, and began to consider how I could get back into my own life, and into Tom’s. It didn’t take long for me to realise that it wouldn’t be easy. In truth, I didn’t have a clue about how I was going to do any of it.
But as it happened, six months after my ‘death’, all the subterfuge became irrelevant. I’ll never forget how I found out.
I was having lunch in my favourite bar on the Strip; as always the place was busy, full of half-pissed rednecks having fun. Most of the television monitors were showing a country-music video, but there was one that was tuned to CNN. I happened to glance at it, just as a shot of a smiling Oz appeared. I couldn’t hear what the anchorman was saying, but from the look on his face, one thing was certain: it wasn’t a good news story. I left my chilli unfinished, went straight home, and switched on the telly.
They said, after the autopsy, that it was a ruptured aorta, a time-bomb in his heart that had been waiting to happen, the same condition that had almost killed his father a few months earlier. It had caught up with him on the set of a movie, during a stunt that he had insisted on handling himself.
At that moment, I didn’t care what it was: all I knew was that the man who had tried to kill me was dead, that my unforgettable lover, my ex-husband, was dead, that Tom’s father was dead. I cried for two days, and very little of that was out of relief.
Briefly, I thought about getting a flight home to Scotland and turning up at the funeral, which I knew would take place in Anstruther, his home town. Again, it didn’t take me long to abandon that idea; it would have caused a sensation, and been desperately cruel to Susie, Oz’s widow, and to the rest of his very nice family. Also, it might just have got me arrested if it had led to someone finding out that I’d entered the US under a fraudulently obtained passport. So instead I sat tight in Vegas until I saw coverage of the send-off on
Entertainment Tonight.
Next day, I called my father.
At first, he didn’t believe it was me. He thought I was a malicious caller, until I told him that his middle name was Montgomery, spelled like the soldier, not the golfer, and that he had a birthmark on his shoulder in the shape of the mouse that had scared my grandmother when she was carrying him. When he was convinced, he asked me the obvious question.
‘Because, at the time, being dead seemed like my best option,’ I told him. ‘I think that’s what was meant to happen.’
Dad’s a very clever man. He knew what I was saying to him, not least because of the timing of my call. The line was silent for a few moments, and then he said, ‘When your mother was alive, I became rather used to telling her, “Primavera knows best.” I’ve always believed it too. What are you going to do now?’
‘Come home, if I may.’
Two days later, I flew back to Vancouver as Jan More. I burned her passport, very casually, in an open fire in the Sandbar restaurant, and continued my journey as Primavera Eagle Phillips. I kept the Blackstone passport, but I didn’t want to use the name at that point. Dad met me at Glasgow Airport.
On the way back to Auchterarder, I told him the story I’ve just told you, and much more too; I told him the truth about all of my life with and around Oz. He’s a very slow driver, yet I had only just finished by the time we arrived at the great false-Gothic pile that is Semple House.
He dealt with the Dawn situation, thoughtfully and very well: instead of speaking to her, he called Miles, who was in the US at the time, and told him what had happened. Two hours later my sister phoned back; by that time she had calmed down and didn’t give me too much grief over the pain I had caused them. Miles handled the inevitable American aftermath of my reappearance; he’s a powerful guy, with political contacts, and so all I had to do was sign an affidavit, describing what had happened and saying that I had left the scene in a state of shock, a statement close enough to the truth for me to live with.
My reconciliation with Tom was down to me alone; that was less than plain sailing. The newly widowed Susie went ballistic when I called her at her home beside Loch Lomond. I wondered why her reaction was so extreme until, later, she told me that Oz had been so completely shattered by my disappearance that he had barely spoken to her for the last few months of his life. I could guess why that was, but I didn’t tell her, not then at any rate.
‘I suppose you want to see Tom,’ she said, eventually.
‘I want more than that, Susie,’ I told her, as gently as I could. ‘He’s my son.’
As I spoke, I had visions of an expensive legal battle. But Susie’s a good person, through and through, better than I’ve ever been, and she’s a mother too. ‘Come and see him,’ she replied, ‘and let’s take it from there.’
We did. A month later legal custody passed to me, with the proviso that Tom would always be able to visit his half-siblings, Janet and Jonathan. He moved into Semple House with Dad and me, while I considered where our permanent home would be.
The choice, when I made it, surprised even me.
Early in our travels together, when we had only just started on the road to badness, Oz and I,
nouveaux riches
, pitched up by chance in a tiny village called St Martí d’Empúries, just along from the town of L’Escala, a fishing village that’s become a family holiday resort. St Martí goes back to the Greeks and Romans, and maybe even before them. It’s like a snapshot of history, and yet it has moved easily into the twenty-first century, catering for northern European tourists in summer and for Spanish weekenders and expats in winter. We were happy there, until he left me. After that I stayed on for a bit, content on my own, until he reappeared and took me back to Scotland. Of all the places I’ve ever been, St Martí is where I’ve been most at peace with myself.
I took Tom out there for a week, in early summer, before the place got too busy; Mrs Blackstone and her son, as we will always be from now on. He wasn’t quite five then, so I had no school problems in Perthshire. We stayed in a hotel near the village; it opens on to a beach and Tom thought that it was paradise. My friends in St Martí remembered me . . . they never forget a face . . . and welcomed me back. After a couple of days I asked a few of them if anything was for sale. Property there is never advertised; the word is put about, that’s all. Someone told me about the house, that it might be on the market, at the right price, and I bought it, there and then.
That’s a couple of years ago now. Tom’s turned seven and he goes to the local primary school; we speak English at home, but with his pals he speaks Catalan, Castellano or both, and he’s retained the French that he picked up when he was in Monaco with Oz and Susie.
He couldn’t be happier, and neither could I . . . even after all that bloody drama with Frank!
Two
F
rank? Of course, you haven’t heard of him before. He wasn’t part of my back story with Oz. He’d dropped out of my life five years before the two of us ever met . . . not that he’d ever really been in it, not in any meaningful way.
Frances Ulverscroft McGowan was my cousin, the product of a fleeting union between my mum’s older sister Adrienne and a Japanese deep-sea trawlerman named Kotaro whom she met on a winter holiday in Las Palmas. By the time she discovered that she was pregnant, at the age of thirty-six, she was back in London, at the helm of her successful literary agency, and the unfortunate mariner was at the bottom of the Atlantic, his vessel having foundered in a tropical storm. (Or so the story went: Auntie Ade has always been seen as a tiger in business, but in her younger days she liked drink and men, in no particular order. I wouldn’t put it past her to have made up the sailor’s name after the event, having neglected to ask for it before.)
So baby Frances was born without a dad. I didn’t make a mistake there, by the way: his name is indeed spelled in the girlie manner, his birth having been registered by Auntie Ade’s then secretary, a dimwit who paid for the howler with her job. That’s why he was called Frank from the cradle. He grew up without even a surrogate father, my aunt being a firm believer in short-term relationships, sometimes as short as two or three hours. He was seven years younger than me, a lot when you’re a kid. I remember being mildly excited when Mum told Dawn and me about his birth, but he was a messy three year old when Auntie Ade finally brought him to Auchterarder for the official viewing, and so he registered with the pair of us as little more than the sticky thing on the kitchen floor.
After that introduction we all got on with our growing for a few more years, until eleven-year-old Frank was sent north for a summer holiday. I was eighteen by then, just finished school and getting myself ready to embark on my nursing degree, so the job of looking after our cousin fell mostly to my younger sister, but I did spend some time with him. With his Asiatic features, he was an attractive boy, small for his age but advanced in other areas, or so I judged from the way I caught him looking at Dawn in off-guard moments. He was polite, but self confident and glib-tongued, in the way that prep-school children can be.

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