S Bolton - Sacrifice

'No. She was just gone.'

'Did you talk to her?'

'We didn't even have a number,' said Mark. 'Stephen Gair phoned us most evenings with a report. Kept saying she was comfortable but very drowsy with the drugs. Not able to talk on the phone.'

'Can you remember the date she died?' asked Helen.

'The sixth of October,' said Caroline.

Helen was looking at me, to see if I'd finally got it. I had. The sixth of October was the day Melissa – Melissa number one, that is – was supposed to have died.

'We weren't happy,' said Mark. 'We weren't happy at all that she could just disappear like that. We wanted to talk to her doctors, find out about her last days. We kept phoning Stephen Gair but he wouldn't take our calls.'

'Did you try calling the hospital?' I asked.

'Yes,' said Caroline. 'I rang the Franklin Stone in Lerwick but they had no record of a Cathy Morton. I panicked a bit then, went down to Stephen Gair's offices in town. He wasn't there, but I made quite a fuss. Then, the next day, that doctor bloke came round. At least, the one we'd thought was a doctor.'

'Go on.'

'Well, I was on my own in the house and he pretty much threatened me. Said we had to stop pestering Mr Gair, Cathy hadn't been harmed by the drugs and would have died anyway, that she was taken very good care of and that we should let it rest now. He implied that if we wanted to keep the money we'd have to keep quiet.'

'We had to think about the kids,' said Mark. 'Nothing was going to bring Cathy back. We had to think about their future.'

'I wasn't happy, though,' repeated Caroline. 'I threatened to call the police.'

'What did he say?'

'He said he was the police.'

No one spoke for a few moments. Helen appeared to be thinking hard. Then she turned once more to Caroline. 'Do you have a photograph of your sister, Mrs Salter?'

Caroline got up with the baby still clutched to her chest. She crossed the room and opened the top drawer of a dresser. As she fumbled inside, the rest of us looked at the carpet. Then Caroline returned to Helen and gave her something. Helen looked at it for just a second and then handed the photograph to me. It had been taken at a beach on a bright, windy day. Stephen Gair, a couple of years younger and a whole lot happier than when I'd seen him, laughed at the camera. His arms were round a very pretty young woman in a green sweater. They say men often go for the same physical type and it was certainly true in Gair's case. You'd never have mistaken the two women for twins but the likeness between Melissa and Cathy was close enough: similar age and build; long red hair, although Cathy's had been straight; fair skin, fine, small features.

There'd been a semblance after all.

I SPENT THE NEXT TEN HOURS AS A GUEST OF THE TAYSIDE Constabulary.

Helen and I flew to Dundee; she sat up front with the pilot, headphones on, talking continually on the radio. I sat in the back, cocooned by noise. After twenty minutes of watching the scenery I dug into my bag and pulled out, once more, Dana's copy of The Woman in White. I still hadn't had chance to look at the Post-it markers she'd attached to several of the pages. They were probably just remnants of A-level notes, but as long as we were still in the air, I had little else to do.

I opened the book at the first marker. Page fifty. Dana had been at work with her pink highlighter again:

There stood Miss Fairlie, a white figure, alone in the moon- light; in her attitude, in the turn of her head, in her complexion, in the shape of her face, the living image of the woman in white.

On page 391 I found another highlighted piece:

The outward changes wrought by the suffering and the terror of the past fearfully, almost hopelessly, strengthened the fatal resemblances between Anne Catherick and herself.

Living image. Fatal resemblances. Stephen Gair had had an incredible stroke of luck. Needing to get rid of his wife, he'd known a terminally sick woman who bore a strong resemblance to her. Terrified for the future of her young children, Cathy Morton had allowed herself to be moved to a new hospital where, spaced out with painkillers, she wouldn't have known what was going on around her. And who was there to suspect she wasn't who a respected local solicitor said she was? None of the medical staff who had treated Cathy had known Melissa; Cathy's sister and brother- in-law hadn't been allowed to visit, Melissa's parents hadn't been told she was in hospital and it was a safe bet that none of her friends had known either.

Even if someone had met Melissa once or twice, it was still possible he or she would have been fooled by the sight of a cancer- ridden Cathy in a hospital bed. Both Cathy and Melissa had been pretty women, but a second photograph Caroline had shown us, of a barely recognizable Cathy towards the end of her illness, showed the devastating effect cancer can have.

Cathy had died just days after being admitted to hospital. There'd been a post-mortem, the report of which I'd seen in Gifford's office, and then she'd been cremated. I imagined the funeral, the church full of Melissa's friends and relatives, deeply shocked by her sudden death, struggling to even begin the process of grief. Which of them could have dreamed the body in the coffin heading for the furnace wasn't Melissa at all? That Melissa, still very much alive, was… somewhere else? How had he done that? How had Gair arranged for his wife to disappear so effectively? Where had she been for the nine months between Cathy's death and her own? And what the hell had happened to her in that time?

I closed The Woman in White and put it away. At the time I knew nothing of the story but I read it some months later. It's about a man who fakes his wife's death – for money, of course – by spiriting her away and substituting a dying woman in her place. Dana had known the story and had been well on her way to working it out. Whether she'd made contact with the Salters, whether that was the final trigger that made her killers act, I'd probably never know.

When we landed at Dundee Helen gave me a quick smile and disappeared into a waiting car. Another car took me to the station, where I was given coffee and left to wait in an interview room. I waited almost an hour, going nearly nuts in the process, and then a member of Helen's team, an inspector, came to interview me. A constable sat in the corner of the room and the whole thing was tape-recorded. I wasn't read my rights, I wasn't offered a lawyer, but in all other respects it was an interrogation and he was taking nothing at face value.

I told him the whole story, from finding the body to meeting the Salters. I told him about Kirsten Hawick who'd been killed in a riding accident and about my finding the ring that had every appearance of being hers; about someone breaking in to my house and my office; about the pig's heart on my kitchen table; about my suspicions that I'd been drugged and that someone had tampered with my computer. I told him about my sabotaged boat and useless life jacket; about my belief that Dana had been murdered because she'd found out too much. I described the evidence of financial irregularities that Dana had unearthed and about my escape with Helen through the dark Shetland landscape. Then I went through it all again. And again. He pulled me up time after time, making me repeat myself, clarify myself, until I really wasn't sure what I'd said and what I hadn't. After five minutes I was very glad I wasn't a suspect in the case; after twenty minutes I was starting to think that perhaps I was.

An hour and a half later we stopped. I was brought lunch. Then he came back. More questions. Another hour and he leaned back in his chair.

'Who knew you planned to go sailing that morning, Miss Hamilton?'

'We didn't plan it,' I replied, knowing I was stalling. 'We hadn't even planned spending that weekend on Unst. It was a last-minute thing. But lots of people know we keep a boat there.'