seem desperate to get on with it. Probably there’s no physical evidence to find. But deliberately driving a man to the point where something snaps and he blows his head off, that’s cold premeditated murder in my book. But it wouldn’t surprise me if it turned out that somehow my stepmother was actually in the study with him, pulling the trigger. How could she have managed it when she’s got an alibi putting her six thousand miles away? I don’t know. Perhaps she’s a witch as well as a bitch. Nothing would surprise me about Kay. Yes, she could be a witch. There’s certainly something dark about her, and it’s pretty plain to see she’s got you magicked, Superintendent.
No. Scrub all that out. I don’t want her getting away with anything because they say I’m making absurd accusations.
Here’s the physical facts as I know them. I hope some of them aren’t too physical for you, Superintendent.
To start with, it has to be clear to anyone who knew my father and knows my stepmother that she’s an unscrupulous grasping cow who married him partly for his money but mainly so she could lead him on to sell the business to those Yankee pirates she works for. That oily bastard Kafka will be up to his neck in this. Ask yourself where she headed as soon as she realized I was on to her and wasn’t letting her back into Moscow House. Straight round to shack up with Kafka, that’s where.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Let’s go right back.
I was fourteen when my mother died, Cress-that’s my sister Cressida-was eleven and Helen, that’s my other sister, was only three. Mother had Helen late and she was never the same after the birth, physically or mentally. It was a hard time for Dad in so many ways. Problems at home, plus he was fighting to keep the firm afloat while all around him other businesses were sinking like stones under the recession. When mother died, it must have seemed like he’d hit the bottom. His sister, Lavinia-that’s my Aunt Vinnie-moved in to look after us. She did her best but she wasn’t really up to it. Birds are her thing. She treated us like fledglings, saw we were kept warm and fed on a regular basis, but that was it. She spent more time in the garden than in the house. Which wouldn’t have been so bad, being treated like young birds I mean, if she’d followed it through and kept off the predators. But when the witch-bitch turned up on the scene just over a year later, all that Vinnie saw was her best chance of getting out of Moscow and back to her country cottage, which is like an open aviary.
You’re looking impatient, Superintendent. Let’s cut to the chase. Manufacturing business was in a bad way generally, but in the jungle of international commerce, one firm’s disaster is another firm’s opportunity. Show signs of weakness and you can guarantee there’ll soon be buzzards floating overhead waiting to snack on your juiciest morsels. Ashur-Proffitt in the States was the main buzzard with its eyes on Maciver’s. God knows why they fancied us, but fancy us they did and nothing was going to stop them. OK, we were in a bad way, but there was still hope. I mean, look what’s happened since. The place is booming, isn’t it? If Dad had hung on, found a bit of extra finance somewhere, he’d have been round the corner and Maciver’s could have been one of Maggie Thatcher’s big success stories.
But Dad was vulnerable, his mind wasn’t really on the job, and those Yankee bastards soon sussed out the best way of making sure that’s the way it stayed. I’m not saying they planned it from the start, but I don’t doubt they did their homework on Dad’s personal life pretty thoroughly and soon as someone noticed he was paying as much attention to their top man’s PA as he was to their balance sheets, they hit the button.
Did she play hard to get or was it a tit-flash job from the start? I don’t know. I’ve only seen her in the latter mode. That surprises you, Mr Dalziel? It surprised me. All I saw at first was this skinny foreigner with a funny accent that my crazy father wanted us to accept as a substitute for our lovely mother who was hardly cold in her grave. That was bad enough. I didn’t believe it could get worse. I had no way of knowing from those first meetings when she was so unremittingly nice to me and Cress and so droolingly gooey over little Helen that here was a sexual predator, completely out of control, thinking of nothing but satisfying her own depraved needs.
No point shaking your head at me like that, Superintendent. I’ve got a witness. Me!
Almost from the first moment she came to Moscow, she started flaunting herself at me. She never missed a chance to give me a show. I’d go past her bedroom and the door would happen to be wide open and she’d be lying naked on the bed, smiling at me. Or she’d come out of the bathroom in her robe and it wouldn’t be fastened properly. I didn’t know what the hell was going on. I was completely confused. I was only fifteen when they got married, for God’s sake. Still a minor. Doesn’t that make it sexual abuse? That’s a crime, isn’t it? You can go to jail for that, can’t you? You’ll have to investigate that, won’t you?
Saying anything when Dad was alive was always going to be hard. In the end I did it, but maybe I left it too late, maybe I did it the wrong way. Some things you’ve got to stand up and shout out loud to the world, no matter who it hurts. Well, he’s gone now, he’s beyond hurt, and it’s all that bitch’s fault and now I’m ready to stand up in any court in the country and tell them the truth about her.
Let’s try it out on you for a start, Mr Dalziel, and see how you like it.
The first time, I was having a shower when suddenly the door slid back and it was her. She was naked. I started to ask her what she wanted but she stepped in beside me and put her arms round me and kissed me. It was disgusting, she was like an animal. I thought she was going to eat me alive. I felt like a mouse when a cat’s got its teeth into it! The more I resisted, the closer she seemed to wrap herself around me till it seemed I could feel every bit of her. The trouble was that, though I knew it was terribly wrong, I was a healthy adolescent and I spent a lot of time dreaming about girls like most boys do at that age. I’d had no experience beyond a bit of heavy snogging at parties. This was the first time I’d been up close against a naked female, and while my mind was saying No! my body was reacting the way you’d expect. I got hugely excited. She put her hand down to get hold of my prick and as soon as she touched it, I came. She held on for a bit, then said, “That was a waste, wasn’t it? Still, there’s always next time.” And she left.
I’ve never felt so guilty about anything in my life. It felt like it was all my fault. Or if not all, at least fifty per cent. Maybe it was because of the pleasure I’d felt. I was convinced that God was going to punish me. I didn’t know what to do except keep out of her way as much as I possibly could. And from then on I always made sure the bathroom door was firmly locked, and my bedroom door too. I was too ashamed to try and talk to anyone. Except Cress. She never liked Kay from the start, you see, and I needed her to help me in keeping guard against her in case she tried anything again.
But she didn’t, not at first anyway. What she did was worse. She acted like we had some private understanding, giving me secret smiles, brushing up against me, that sort of thing. But she never actually came on to me in the same blatant fashion, mainly of course because I never gave her the opportunity.
So time went by, years, till I might have begun to think I’d imagined it all if it hadn’t been for the way she kept up this we’ve-got-a-secret thing. Plus I could see that Dad wasn’t happy. That bothered me as much as anything. He’d married her to be happy again, and he wasn’t. But I was young and I was selfish and all I felt when it came time for me to go to university was relief to be away from her sphere of influence. I went off happy as a sandboy with no thought for poor old Dad.
Then a couple of weeks ago, just before she took off to America, things must have reached some sort of climax. Cress had been home for half-term and when she got back to school she rang me to say Dad was looking like hell. She sounded so worried I took the first chance to duck out of college and head home. I should have checked first. When I got back, I discovered that Dad was away for a couple of nights. I almost went straight back to Cambridge, then I thought, Why the hell should I let this cow keep me out of my own home? We were very polite to each other and of course Helen was there too. She was nine now, old enough to take notice, and she made a good chaperone. One thing Kay didn’t want was to risk losing the halo Helen had put round her scheming head.
That night I went out to a pub to eat with some old chums and when I got back, Kay had gone to bed. I went to my room and made sure I locked the door. After a couple of hours I had to get up for a pee. As I came out of the bathroom, I heard a noise downstairs. Someone was playing the piano in the music room. We’d all had lessons, but with Cress and me it never took. Dad, who loved music, was disappointed, but Mother didn’t really care so we soon gave it up. Helen was different. She had some talent and Kay, who played a bit herself, kept her at it, which really pleased Dad. One of the first pieces she’d learned, a tune from Schumann’s Childhood Scenes, became a sort of signature tune with her. This was what I heard now so I thought she must have sneaked out of bed. Naturally I did the big brother thing and went downstairs to sort her out.
I pushed open the music-room door. It was pitch-black inside, curtains drawn, no light on. I stepped inside saying, “OK, Sis, time for little girls to be in bed.”
