Killing the Shadows (2000) (18 page)

T
he early morning light was pearl-grey, a thin curtain of cloud hanging just above the tops of the Wicklow Hills across the steely waters of Lough Killargan. The spectacular autumn colours of the trees were beginning to emerge against the soft green of the hillsides, transforming the landscape from chill to warmth.

Jane Elias stood on the flagged patio and gave a long, low whistle. From a stand of green, ochre and brown sycamores a few hundred yards away, two streaks of black and tan emerged, their shapes resolving into a pair of lean Dobermans as they bounded across the grass towards her. Jane held her hands out to the dogs as they skidded to a halt at her feet and luxuriated in the sensuous warmth of their wet tongues on her skin.

“Enough,” she said after a few moments. The dogs, obedient to their morning ritual, lay at her feet while she went through a series of stretches to loosen up muscles still half-frozen from sleep. Then, as Jane moved off in a slow jog, the dogs scrambled to their feet and raced ahead of her. This was the best part of the day, she thought. No promises broken, no sentences written, no phone calls taken. Everything was still possible.

Gradually, she picked up speed, heading out towards the perimeter wall that ringed her property. Five and a half miles, the perfect length for a morning run. She could beat the bounds of her domain in absolute privacy, secure from prying eyes and free from fear.

She didn’t count the guard monitoring the closed-circuit TV cameras as having prying eyes. After all, she was paying him to make sure she was safe. She didn’t mind him watching her run. They occupied separate universes, he in his windowless office, his bulk crammed into khaki shirt and navy trousers, his walkie-talkie at his hip, his small life somewhere else; she in the fresh air of her personal fiefdom, her streaked blonde hair fastened in a headband, her lean muscled limbs enclosed in lightweight sweats, her feet pounding out a regular rhythm as she thought about the morning’s work that lay ahead of her.

After the run, she let the dogs into the mud room where she fed them on chopped steak and vitamin-enriched dried biscuit. While they were still snuffling down their food, she was already on her way through the kitchen of the Georgian mansion, heading for the private bathroom that no one else was permitted to use, not even her lover Pierce Finnegan. Five precise minutes under the hot shower, then a blast of freezing water to close her pores, and Jane was on to the next stage of her daily routine. A brisk to welling then an application of expensive aroma therapy body milk from chin to toe. Facial moisturizer, eye gel, dark-red lipstick.

Dressed in jeans and a silk and wool plaid shirt, she headed back to the kitchen for fresh fruit salad, a slice of wholewheat toast with organic peanut butter and a tall glass of tomato juice. Once, she’d been twenty-five pounds overweight. That was one of many things that was never going to happen again.

She was in her office by seven-thirty, the day’s work arrayed on one of the two large desks that stood against the walls. Today, the task was to correct the proofs of her forthcoming novel. For the next five hours, she focused on the printed pages, scanning each line for errors, making the occasional change to a sentence she now found clumsy, sometimes reaching for the dictionary to double-check a spelling that looked odd.

At half past noon precisely, Jane pushed her chair away from the desk and stretched her arms above her head. She returned through the silent house to the kitchen, switched on the radio tuned to a classical music station and took a portion of frozen vegetable soup out of the freezer. While it microwaved, she opened the morning’s post, delivered by the security staff while she was at work. After the soup and a couple of slices of bread, she returned to her office, where she dictated replies to the day’s letters.

She left the tape on the kitchen counter, where the security staff would collect it and deliver it to the woman in the nearby town who acted as her secretary. The letters would return on a disk that evening, ready for Jane to print out and sign. The two women met only rarely at social occasions in town, but it was an arrangement that worked well nevertheless.

Jane walked out into the mud room and picked up a fleece jacket, letting the dogs back out into the grounds. She walked down the path to the jetty, head up as she savoured the fresh afternoon air and tested the breeze. The cloud layer had lifted, leaving a blue sky smudged with occasional puffs of cumulus. She reckoned the wind was somewhere around force five, just right for a brisk sail in the 2i-foot Beneteau First Classic, currently her favourite of the three boats she kept moored at her small private marina. It was perfect for single-handed sailing, unlike the bigger Moody that she preferred when she and Pierce went out on the lough together.

She checked the boat over, then cast off, allowing it to drift out from the jetty before she raised the mainsail. Leaving a single reef in it, she headed out towards the centre of the lough, planning her afternoon cruise in her head without bothering to consult her charts. She knew this part of the lake better than she knew her own face in the mirror. Three days out of four, she sailed more or less the same route, depending on the winds. It was, she had decided, best for views across the water to the hills as well as having no treacherous snags to trip her if she grew forgetful, her mind on her work rather than her helm.

Soon she had left the shore behind, moving across the water at a sharp forty-five-degree angle, the only sounds the hiss of the water against the hull and the crack of the wind in the sails. Jane gloried in the feel of the air against her skin, loving the sense of release that sailing the lake always brought her. Who cared if people thought she was weird, a slave to routines and patterns, a paranoid recluse? She knew different. There was nothing routine about what she did on the water every afternoon she could, pitting herself and her craft against the weather and the wildness of the lake. Out here, she was Queen of Freedom Hill. Fuck them. They could call her anal as much as they liked. All that proved was how little they knew of her. They knew nothing of her life at the tiller. Nor did they know about the fierce passion of her relationship with Pierce, kept secret by both of them for so long they had forgotten there was any other way to live.

He visited when he could, which, given the schedule of a member of the Garda Siochana’s undercover drug squad, was not often. They had met when he’d attended an FBI course at Quantico. One of the instructors, an old college friend of Jane’s, had invited them both to dinner and the spark had been instant. Within weeks, she had sold her estate in New England and bought the property in Ireland. It was only after she’d made the move that she discovered the unexpected bonus of the tax exemption the Irish state extended to writers. Now she was as settled here as she’d ever been anywhere.

And when Pierce was travelling undercover, she would sometimes take a room in the same hotel. Being a recluse had its advantages. No one recognized her the way they might with other best selling authors who appeared on chat shows and full-colour jacket photographs. Producing ID for Margaret J. Elias, her given name, had never raised so much as an eyebrow with hotel clerks. In two days, proofs finished and sent off to New York, she’d be flying out to Morocco to meet him. She could hardly wait.

After a long tack, she went about and cut a course at right angles to her previous direction. It would bring her nicely round the headland and into the bay, where she’d lose some of the wind, allowing her plenty of leeway to alter her heading to take the boat back out towards the centre of the lake.

Coming into the bay, she noticed a dinghy tacking erratically back and forth across the line she planned to take. With a touch on the tiller, Jane adjusted her heading, hoping the dinghy sailor would respond accordingly. But suddenly, the small boat heeled over in a capsize, catapulting the man at the helm into the water. Within seconds, the wind had carried the dinghy in one direction, the current had swept the man in the other.

Calling down the wrath of the gods against fools who didn’t know what they were doing on the water, Jane started her engine then hurried forward to lower the sail. Inside a minute, she was motoring slowly towards the bobbing orange life jacket that was all she could see clearly of the idiot who obviously didn’t know how to handle his boat.

Coming alongside him, she set the engine to idle and dropped the swim ladder at the stern. The man swam clumsily round to the back of the boat and hauled himself out of the lake, icy water streaming from him. “Thanks,” he gasped, unfastening his life jacket and slipping one hand inside it.

“I guess you don’t know these waters,” Jane snapped, turning away to put the engine back in gear.

She never saw the cosh as it arced through the air towards the base of her skull.

F
rom below, the two women on the sheer side of the hill looked like a pair of cursors moving diagonally across a muted green screen. They had climbed swiftly from the Wye Valley at Litton Mill through the trees that lined the old railway, then out on to the bare hillside where even sheep preferred not to scramble among the limestone outcroppings. They reached the highest point of the climb and Fiona, who was quicker on her feet over the familiar terrain, chose a boulder with enough of an edge to perch on while she waited for Caroline to pant her way up the last twenty yards. She looked down at her companion with an affectionate smile.

When Fiona’s sister Lesley had been an undergraduate at St. Andrews, she’d learned as much about herself as she had about her studies. One of the things she’d discovered was the direction of her heart. At the time of her murder, she’d been tight in the grip of first love. The revelation of its nature had been another aspect of her death that her parents had found difficult to cope with. For Fiona, though, it had come as no surprise that the person who was sharing her sister’s bed was another woman. Lesley hadn’t actually told her in so many words, but Fiona had understood the meaning of the way she spoke about her friend Caroline Matthews.

Because their relationship had been clandestine, Fiona was also the only person with whom Caroline could properly grieve. It was no surprise that out of grief, the bond of friendship had been forged. Now, twelve years later, Fiona and Caroline met whenever Caroline was in London, and they communicated irregularly by phone and e–mail. And at least three times a year, they met to walk in the Peak District.

Caroline had remained in St. Andrews and was now a lecturer in mathematics. She had moved on, as Fiona had. But for both of them, the loss of Lesley was an undercurrent that would forever inform the tenor of their emotional relationships. And the debt of guilt that both bore about Lesley meant they would never let each other down.

Caroline reached the crest, scarlet and panting. She collapsed on a boulder near Fiona, her breath ragged and shallow. “Oh God,” she gasped. “I am so out of condition. The summer was such a washout, we hardly got out on the hills at all.”

“Sounds like you’ve not been to the gym either,” Fiona commented.

Caroline pulled a face. “Julia’s started going to a step class in her lunch hour, so she’s knocked the gym on the head. And we both have so many work commitments, she gets pissed off with me if I spend our two free evenings a week down the gym. I keep telling myself I’ll get up early and go before work. But somehow, I never manage it.”

“You’d feel better if you fitted it in.” Fiona opened her rucksack and took out her water bottle.

“Fiona…” There was a warning in Caroline’s voice.

Fiona laughed. “I’m sorry, you’re right. I’m not your mother. Shut up, Fiona.” She extended a hand and Caroline gave her a gentle smack on the wrist. It was an old routine, born of the early days of their common grief, when Fiona had fussed around Caroline as a substitute for the caring she could no longer offer her sister.

Fiona took a swig of her water, offering it to Caroline, who shook her head. “If I start drinking in these temperatures, I’ll want to pee within five minutes. And I can’t see a single bit of shelter for the next half-mile.”

“As long as you don’t get dehydrated.”

“Fiona!” This time it was a shout. “You are not my mother. Behave.”

“Sorry. It’s living with a man that does it. Especially one who spends half his time inhabiting a parallel universe.”

“Presumably one where somebody else always remembers to pick up the dry cleaning and puts food in front of him at regular hours?”

Fiona grinned. “It’s not that sort of thing Kit forgets. It’s stuff like being so engrossed in his work that he suddenly looks at the clock and realizes he was supposed to pick me up ten minutes ago. Or missing his stop on the tube because he’s busy having a conversation with himself and coming round to find he’s in Kennington when he should be in Leicester Square.”

“How is he, anyway?”

Fiona got to her feet, stuffing her water bottle into her backpack and shouldering it. “Bloody-minded as ever.”

Caroline, now breathing normally, stood up, giving Fiona a speculative look. Fiona wasn’t given to bad-mouthing Kit. And besides, if she had to divide the bloody-mindedness in that relationship between them, she’d have to award Fiona the lion’s share. As far as Caroline had observed, Kit was pretty laid back. In debate, he was quick and decisive, but never attacked the way Fiona could if she sensed weakness in the opposition that could be bulldozed aside. “Sounds like he’s rattled your cage,” she said cautiously as she fell into step behind Fiona on the narrow track that cut across the shoulder of the hill above the spectacular curve of Water-cum-Jolly Dale.

“You could say that.” Fiona clamped her mouth shut, her eyes on the ground in front of her.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“I’m so cross with him,” Fiona said fiercely. “We had a blazing row the other night. He got this death threat in the post, and he refuses point blank to take it to the police. He says it’s just a routine crank letter, but I’m not so sure. It felt very unpleasant to me. And after what happened to Drew Shand…”