Peter Robinson - Friend of the Devil

“I’d just finished uni and wanted to see something of the world before settling down back home. I had some money saved up, so I came over to Europe, like so many Aussies do. We’re such a long way from anywhere, and it’s such a huge country, so we feel we have to do the big trip once before settling down back here. I have an ancestor who came from Whitby. A transport. Stole a loaf of bread or something. So it was a place I’d heard a lot about while I was growing up, and I wanted to visit.”

“Tell me about the girl you met.”

“Can you just hang on a minute? I’ll get my notebook. Everything I remember is in there.”

“Great,” said Annie. She waited about thirty seconds and McLaren came on the line again.

“Got it,” he said. “I met her at breakfast one day. She said her name was Mary, or Martha, or something like that. I never have been able to remember exactly which.”

Annie felt a pulse of excitement. The woman who took Lucy from Mapston Hall had called herself Mary. “Not Kirsten?” she asked.

“That doesn’t ring any bells.”

“What sort of impression did she make on you?” Annie asked, sketching the view from her window on the writing pad, the mist like feathers over the corrugated red roof tiles, the sea a vague haze under its shroud, gray on gray, and a sun so pale and weak you could stare at it forever and not go blind.

“I remember thinking she was an interesting girl,” McLaren said. “I can’t remember what she looked like now, but she was easy on the eyes, at any rate. I didn’t know anybody in the place. I was just being friendly, really, I wasn’t on the make. Well, not much. She was very defensive, I remember. Evasive. Like she just wanted to be left alone. Maybe I did come on a bit too strong. Us Aussies sometimes strike people that way. Direct. Anyway, I suggested she might show me around town, but she said she was busy. Something to do with some research project. So I asked her out for a drink that evening.”

“You don’t give up easily, do you?”

McLaren laughed. “It was like pulling teeth. Anyway, she agreed to meet me for a drink in a pub. Just a sec… yes, it’s here… The Lucky Fisherman. Seemed to know her way around.”

“The Lucky Fisherman?” echoed Annie, her ears pricking up. That was Jack Grimley’s local, the one he had just left the evening he disappeared. “Did you tell the police this?” she asked.

“No. It’s just something I remembered years later, and they never got back to me. I didn’t think it was important.”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Annie, thinking there were more holes in this case than in a lump of Swiss cheese. But Ferris was right: They didn’t have the luxury of pursuing every mystery to its solution the way TV cops did. Things fell through the cracks. “Did she turn up?”

“Yeah. It wasn’t easy having a conversation with her. It was like she was very distracted, thinking of something else. And she’d never heard of Crocodile Dundee. That’s something I remembered years later. He was big at the time.”

“Even I’ve heard of Crocodile Dundee,” said Annie.

“Well, there you go. Anyway, I was quickly getting the impression she’d rather be elsewhere. Except…”

“What?”

“Well, she wanted to know about fishing. You know, the boats, when and where they landed the catch and all that. I mean, I didn’t know, but I just thought it was another weird thing about her. To be quite honest, I was beginning to think I’d made a big mistake. Anyway, I went to the loo, and when I came back I got the distinct impression she was staring at some other bloke.”

“Who?” Annie asked.

“Dunno. Local. Wearing one of those fisherman’s jerseys. Good-looking enough in a rough sort of way, I suppose, but really…”

Jack Grimley, Annie was willing to bet, though he wasn’t actually a fisherman, and she doubted that Kirsten, if that was who it was, was studying him because she thought he was a nice bit of rough.

“Then what?”

“We left. Walked around town. Ended up sitting on a bench talking, but again I got the impression she was somewhere else.”

“Did anything happen?”

“No. Oh, I made my tentative move, you know, put my arm around her, gave her a kiss. But it obviously wasn’t going anywhere, so I gave up and we went back to the B and B.”

“To your own rooms?”

“Of course.”

“Did you see her again?”

“Not that I know of, though, as I said, the police think I might have.”

“You don’t remember anything else about that day in Staithes?”

“No. Sorry.”

“I understand it was touch and go for a while?”

“I’m lucky to be here. Everyone said so. I’m even more lucky to have been able to pick up my life and carry on, become a lawyer, get a good job, the lot. Everything except marriage and kids. And that just never seemed to happen. But there was some talk at the time of possible permanent brain damage. My guess is they don’t understand the Aussie brain over there. It’s much tougher than you pommies think.”

Annie laughed. “I’m glad.” She liked Keith McLaren, at least what she could gather of him over the telephone. He sounded as if he would be fun to go out with. He’d also be about the right age for her. Single, too. She wondered if he was good-looking. But Sydney was a long, long way away. It was good to have the fantasy, though. “You must have wondered why it happened,” she asked. “Why you?”

“Hardly a day goes by.”

“Any answers?”

McLaren paused before speaking. “Nobody ever came right out and said it at the time,” he said, “perhaps because I was either in a coma or recovering from one, but I got the distinct impression that the police didn’t discount the theory that I’d tried it on a bit too aggressively and she defended herself.”

That didn’t surprise Annie. She was almost loath to admit it, especially after talking to McLaren and liking him, but it was one of the first things that would have occurred to her, too. Whether that was because she was a woman or a police officer, or both, she didn’t know. Maybe it was because she’d been raped, herself. “They suggested you’d assaulted her, tried to rape her?”

“Not in so many words, but I got the message loud and clear. It was only the fact that there were two unexplained bodies around and she seemed to have done a runner that kept me out of jail.”

“Did you ever see her naked?”

“What a question!”

“It could be important.”

“Well, the answer’s no. Not that I remember. Like I said, I don’t know what happened that day in the woods, but I think my memory up to that point is as clear as it’s going to get. I mean, she just didn’t want to know. I kissed her that once, on the bench near the Cook statue, but that’s all.”

So, Annie thought, he couldn’t have known about Kirsten’s chest injuries — if, indeed, it was Kirsten — until they were in the woods together, which he couldn’t remember, and he had somehow got her top off. But the dream indicated that he had some subconscious knowledge of her injuries. He must have tried something on with her, then, or perhaps it was mutual up to a point, then she began to struggle, to panic. Kirsten knew by that point that she couldn’t have sex, so what was going on?

If McLaren had cottoned on to who she was, as he may well have done even if she had modified her appearance, seen through her disguise and posed a threat to her agenda of vengeance, then wasn’t there a chance that she had cold-bloodedly lured him into the woods and set out to get rid of him? That she had led him on, and when he was sufficiently distracted, attempted to kill him? What kind of creature was Annie dealing with? The moment she thought she had some kind of connection with Kirsten, the damn woman slipped beyond her understanding and sympathy again.