The Third Sin (2 page)

Philippa Lindsay was taking trouble over her appearance today. She took her Max Mara silk-cashmere sweater, a delicious warm red, out of its protective bag and paired it with designer jeans and a smart little DKNY jacket; her audience would be impressed that she’d taken so much trouble – or they should be, anyway. Poised, assured: that was the effect she was channelling, and if she established her authority right from the start it would be less likely that anyone would argue over the arrangements she had decided on already.

She was pleased, too, with her hair: the new shade of ashy blonde was what her hairdresser had vulgarly called ‘classy, not brassy’ and though Philippa wouldn’t quite have put it that way herself, it worked. She touched a little concealer under her eyes and then completed her make-up with a soft-red lipstick to match her sweater, enhancing her rather thin lips just a fraction over the edge.

She’d been scrupulous about working out too – not a trace of flab – and she was still looking good; fully ten years younger than the date on the birth certificate she didn’t care to look at, she told herself. She didn’t register the grooves of disappointment that soured
her mouth or the little temper lines that had hardened between her well-tailored eyebrows.

Brimming with confidence, she went downstairs to breakfast.

Her husband, sitting at the table with a bowl of cereal, looked surprised. ‘I didn’t know you were off somewhere today.’

She turned from spooning coffee into a cafetière to look at him with a frown. ‘I’m not, Charles. I don’t know what you mean.’

‘You don’t usually treat the locals to designer stuff. The only time I ever see you wearing it is when you want to impress your friends in Glasgow.’

Philippa had naturally high colour and her cheeks flared in rivalry with her sweater. ‘That’s a silly and spiteful remark. I have to look after my clothes because as you don’t hesitate to tell me, we’re not made of money.’ She left the words, ‘And whose fault is that?’ hanging in the air.

It was a pity if Charles was in one of his spiky, sarcastic moods. Since he never listened to local gossip she’d managed to put off telling him what was happening, but soon he was bound to find out and she’d decided it would be wise to break it to him before he found out.

‘Actually, today I’m making an effort because we’re planning the Year of Homecoming party.’ She said it casually, apparently concentrating on pouring the water over the coffee grounds.

It was Charles Lindsay’s habit to ignore his wife’s activities as far as possible, more or less in self-defence, but this was going too far. ‘I told you before, Philippa – no! I thought you’d dropped it.’

She threw him a glance over her shoulder as she pressed down the plunger of the cafetière. ‘There’s no point in saying no. It’s too late. I sent the flyer round ages ago, and there’s been a good response. I’ve invited everyone to hold it here.’

Charles choked on his cereal. ‘You’ve … what?’ he spluttered.

Philippa gave him a small, triumphant smile. ‘I told you that was what I was going to do.’

‘And I told you not to! For God’s sake, Philippa, what are you trying to do? Wasn’t there enough trouble before?’

He pushed back his chair and jumped up to confront her. His pose might have been intimidating if she hadn’t been taller than he was, and she took advantage of that to look down on him pityingly.

‘I should have thought you’d have realised by now that there was no point in bullying me, Charles.’

He struggled for words. ‘Bullying – me bullying you! That’s a sick joke, do you know that? You bully everyone. It comes as naturally to you as breathing. Do you know what they think of you in the village – how often they dive down a side street if they see you coming?’

The tide of colour rose in her cheeks again. ‘That’s a lie. They’re happy enough to come to the things I arrange. And I can tell you people are really enthusiastic about this.’

‘That’s because you’ve offered to host it here. And apart from anything else, that’s a bad idea. One way or another it’s going to run us into expense and with the economy the way it is we don’t have the money for lavish, manipulative gestures.

‘I’m not sure why you’re set on this, but any reason I can think of is frightening – playing games with people’s lives. Sometimes I think you’re crazy – power crazy.’

Philippa gave a silly titter. ‘Power crazy – that sounds very grand! You flatter me.’

‘Not really,’ Charles said tiredly. ‘When we were in the nursery we just used to call it wanting your own way, and you’ve never grown past the infantile stage. You want your own way all the time.’

‘Why don’t you leave, then?’ she said shrilly.

He had turned to walk out; he swung back. ‘Because you own half the business and you’d collapse it for sheer vindictiveness. That’s the only reason, believe me.’

Philippa was left staring at the door he had slammed, feeling for
once a little shaken. She was no stranger to marital rows, but she’d never known Charles be – well, vicious.

She still wasn’t going to pay any attention. He’d get over it. Her hand was shaking, though, as she poured out her coffee.

Ballinbreck, on the shores of the Solway Firth between Balcary Bay and Abbey Head, was a picturesque fishing village, the haunt of smugglers in days gone by and now generally prosperous enough. The pretty harbour, home mainly to leisure craft, was a draw for tourists to support the small hotel and self-catering cottages as well as a couple of artists’ studios, craft shops and galleries.

The seventeenth-century houses, harled and whitewashed or colour-washed in a spectrum running from pale cream to deepest blue – with one unfortunate shade of purple – were looking particularly charming in the watery spring sunshine, Jen Wilson thought as she walked along the main street.

There was a ‘Chocolate and Cupcakes’ fundraiser at the little local school where she taught and her Primary 4 pupils had been high as kites about it for days. Cupcakes were definitely beyond her but she’d made enough chocolate crispies to ensure obesity and dental decay for fully half the school.

She loved occasions like these. The mums would be out in force today, and the grannies, as well as a number of other people who realised that the home baking on offer would be seriously underpriced, but whatever the motive it brought people together. The village was growing, with a good number of new houses spreading round the back, and charity events were a bridge for the ‘incomers’ to get into the local community.

The woman who ran the general store and post office had promised an iced and decorated cake to raffle, so Jen went in to collect it, admired it effusively, and was just on her way out carrying it carefully
when she all but bumped into Philippa Lindsay, hurrying in.

‘Oh – sorry, Jen,’ Philippa said. She didn’t look directly at the other woman, moving round her to pass.

Jen put a hand on her arm. ‘I hear it’s going ahead – the party.’ Her voice was cold.

‘Oh, yes, the party.’ Philippa gave a false, social laugh. ‘It’s proving very popular, giving the village a sort of focus for this year, you know? A lot of people are arranging family visits round about it. Well, you know how it is with the young – it’s more tempting to come and see the wrinklies if you know your friends are going to be there too. And it’s a community thing – you know how sentimental expats are. It’s going to be a shot in the arm for the local economy.’

‘Very public-spirited,’ Jen said. ‘What I want to know is, did the fish take the bait?’

Philippa’s thin lips tightened. ‘I don’t know what you mean. If that’s your attitude, you don’t have to come.’

Jen held her gaze steadily until Philippa’s eyes dropped. ‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘You invited me. I’ll be there.’

She walked away.

Eleanor Margrave had smelt bad weather all day. After a bitter March of relentless frost and snow it had turned sultry and today the air felt thick, oppressive. A headache was gripping her skull like a vice.

It was late afternoon when she heard the first dull moaning of the gathering storm, a complaining wind from the south-west, muttering and grumbling. Looking out from the sitting-room window of Sea House across her strip of garden to the Solway Firth, narrow at ebb
tide and muddy-brown under low, sullen clouds, she could see the scrubby trees above the shoreline starting to sway as the wind rose, then to bend and twist.

The spring tide would be turning now down the estuary, racing over the sand flats with the driving wind, faster than a horse could gallop, according to local legend. She wanted to listen for the roar of its arrival but when she tugged at the handles to raise the sash window with her rheumaticky hands it had no effect.

Even with the window shut, though, she could hear the rushing waters now and when she craned her painful neck to look west, there was the line of surf with its cloud of spray encroaching on the sand flats with menacing speed. She sat down to watch; it thrilled her, just as it had thrilled her when she’d been taken down to see it as a child, being given dire warnings about its dangers.

The first fat spots of rain slammed on the windowpanes and even as the low breakers started to cover the shore the wind noise rose with the storm screaming in from the Irish Sea. Though it was only six o’clock the light went rapidly and she found herself sitting in darkness. It had turned cold again and the bleakness outside made her melancholy.

Eleanor got to her feet and limped slowly into the hall that ran from the front to the back of the house. With a door at each end, the draughts were fierce on a night like this and she shivered as she crossed it. The Aga kept the kitchen cosy, though; ever practical, she had pretty much lived here during the cold spell but she’d been pining for the long light evenings in the sitting room watching daylight fade to a glimmering gold on the sea outside, trying once more to capture even a hint of its glory on her sketch pad.

Sighing, she made her supper and ate it in the chair by the stove off a folding table, watching the small TV set up in one corner. They were advertising the Year of Homecoming extensively now and she
watched with a small, cynical smile. In the run-up to the vote on independence for Scotland, no heartstring was to be left untugged.

At least the headache had cleared and the warmth eased her painful joints. She found herself nodding over the killer Sudoku she tried to do every night, to prove to herself that her brain was still working, jerking awake with a ‘Tchah!’ of annoyance each time.

She was dozing when the peal of thunder broke directly overhead and she woke in a panic, convinced the ceiling was falling down – something to do with her dream. She sank back in her chair with a gasp as the room lit up with a lurid flash of lightning and seconds later heard another, just as loud.

The old house had withstood storms for two hundred years and Eleanor loved them. She always watched the moods of the sea from her window as if they were dramas with a celestial cast played out for her especial benefit and it looked as if tonight they were lining up for a spectacular. She went back to the chair in the window of the sitting room, picking up a throw from the back of the sofa and wrapping it round herself

The
son et lumière
was, she judged, more or less at its height with forked lightning flickering every few moments and the crashing rumble of one thunderclap barely fading before the next took its place. The sea below her was tossing, white-capped, under hissing sheets of rain, but the tide had turned again and the shallow waters were making their slow retreat.

Gradually, the intervals between strikes grew longer, the rumbling fainter as the electric storm moved on. Show over. She yawned, ready for bed now; satisfied, replete almost. Storms were always cathartic, as if wildness outside somehow purged the emotional storm that had raged within her ever since Julia’s terrible decline into drugs and death.

As she got up she caught a movement out of the corner of her
eye, just to the left of the house. She turned her head, peering into the darkness, but could see nothing. A trick of the light, perhaps, a shadow thrown by distant lightning flickering behind a waving tree. She folded up the throw and put it back neatly over the arm of the sofa, but she felt a little unsettled. It was almost midnight; she had no near neighbours and with the nearest house quarter of a mile away, no one could have a reason to be about in weather like this. No good reason, anyway.

She was not by nature nervous, and anyway, you couldn’t afford to indulge your imagination when you lived in this sort of isolation. She’d just go and check that the doors were locked then make herself a cup of tea and take it up to bed with her—

The knocking on the front door was alarmingly loud in the silent house. She stood in the hall staring at its unrevealing back in fright.

After a moment, it came again, louder, more imperative.

She would be crazy to open it without knowing who was there, she thought, suddenly conscious of her frail body, her brittle bones. Even if she went to an upstairs window and looked down she wouldn’t be able to see because there was a porch over the doorstep. She could pretend she wasn’t here or hadn’t heard – but then would they just break in?

There were keys in all the doors leading on to the hall. She could lock these, retreat upstairs, call the police on the phone at her bedside, but it could take half an hour or more for anyone to reach her. And what if they cut the phone line? There was no signal for her mobile here.

Her heart was fluttering. When she went to lock the nearest door, her hands were shaking so that it was a struggle to turn the key and when the beating on the door began again she jumped so that she knocked it on to the floor. This time, though, she heard the sound of a woman, a child, even, wailing desperately.

Eleanor was no fool. There were criminals who wouldn’t hesitate
to use a decoy to gain entrance, and even women who were evil themselves. But you could die of exposure on a night like this and there was no other shelter. She switched on the outside light, fixed the chain across the door then very cautiously opened it.