Michael Ridpath - Amnesia

So what now?

She felt like getting into Livvie’s Clio and just driving off, leaving the old man to his own devices. He could probably survive until Aunt Madeleine arrived. And he could read the damn book himself and find out what an evil monster he really was.

And yet. While Clémence often visited her French mother’s family in Rheims, she knew virtually nothing about her family on her father’s side. Apart from a couple of visits on her way to boarding school, she had been kept away from her grandfather Stephen. She was aware there were cousins — children of her father’s sister whose name she thought was Beatrice — but she had never met them. She got the impression that Stephen’s family had once been wealthy, with an estate in England and one in Scotland as well, but the feckless Stephen had frittered it all away. She was vaguely aware that Stephen himself had been briefly famous as an actor in the forties, but now nobody had heard of him, and according to her mother his films weren’t any good anyway. Then there had been some kind of scandal: her mother muttered darkly about drink. Her father said nothing at all.

There was Aunt Madeleine, her fairy godmother, and Uncle Nathan, whom she occasionally saw, and of course that framed black-and-white photograph of her beautiful grandmother Sophie. And that was it.

No one had told her the truth about her grandmother’s death. They hadn’t even told her Alden Burns existed, let alone he had been killed and they had all connived at covering it up. Who might have told her? Grandpa? She didn’t have that kind of relationship with him. Her father? He never spoke about his own family. Aunt Madeleine? Clémence certainly had some questions for Aunt Madeleine now.

Because now she wanted to find out more. She needed to find out more. Without the knowledge of what had happened back then, her family didn’t make sense. And that meant she didn’t make sense. There was so much she had never questioned: how her grandmother had died, why her grandfather was a broken-down old man. Why her father had dropped out and gone to Morocco when he was in his early twenties.

And all that determined who she was. Half-French, half-English, living in Hong Kong, educated in Britain, with parents who had never really got the hippie out of their systems. Or at least her father hadn’t. He was ten years older than her mother, and although he had eventually become a career teacher at a private school in Hong Kong, he had never reconciled himself to his own father. And then he had walked out on his wife and daughter, and left the island to get a job in Vietnam. After a few months, Clémence’s mother had moved into a nice apartment in Mid-Levels with an Australian fund manager called Patrick. It was only recently that Clémence had begun to suspect that Patrick was the cause, not the result, of her father’s departure.

It was why last Christmas had been so horrible. Why she never wanted to go back to Hong Kong. Ever.

All this, everything that had happened to her in her first twenty years, had causes, had roots.

Those roots were in that book. And Dr Alastair Cunningham, of whom she had barely heard, and whom she had met only once before, knew about them. More than that, he had had an active part in planting them.

Despite herself, part of her couldn’t bring herself to abandon him, at least until she was absolutely sure what he had done. Those brown eyes, firm, intelligent, yet vulnerable tugged at her. He needed her help. Clémence liked it when people needed her help.

She heard the old man make his way up the steep spiral stairs to his room. The soup was bubbling, so she turned the gas down. A car came up the drive to the cottage, a Suzuki four-wheel-drive. A very tall woman with broad shoulders, long legs in tight blue jeans and short blond hair got out and waved to Clémence through the kitchen window.

Clémence opened the front door.

‘Hi, I’m Sheila,’ said the woman. ‘Sheila MacInnes.’ She held out her hand, and Clémence shook it briefly. The voice was soft and friendly and very Scottish. For some reason, Clémence had expected someone much smaller and a little older — Sheila was about forty, she guessed.

‘Oh, hi, come in. I’m just making some lunch. Do you want some?’

‘Och, no. I’ll pop back in later, if you like?’

‘No, no, no,’ said Clémence. ‘Please stay. It’s only soup, it can wait. I’ll turn it off for now. Have a coffee.’

‘That would be very nice. I’m so sorry I wasn’t here last night. My mother’s poorly and she lives all the way over in Ullapool, I had to check on her. How’s Dr Cunningham? Is he here?’

‘Oh, yes. He’s upstairs. I can call him if you like. But actually it would be nice if I could ask you a couple of things first.’

‘Of course, pet. How is he?’

‘Physically, he’s not bad at all,’ Clémence said, putting the kettle on. ‘Mentally he’s quite sharp. And he seems to know his way around the cottage. But he can remember next to nothing about his life.’

‘Aye, I know. It’s right weird. But at least he’s still alive. When I found him, I thought he was a goner, if you see what I mean.’ She shuddered. ‘He was right at the bottom of those stairs. They’re very steep, you tell him to watch himself on them. He was out cold, and there was a pool of blood by his head. You can still see a wee patch on the floorboards; I couldn’t get rid of it no matter how much I scrubbed.’

‘Can you tell me anything about him?’ Clémence said. ‘Did you speak to him at all? Before the accident.’

‘Aye, I did,’ the woman laughed. ‘But I suppose I did most of the talking. That’s the way it is with me, if you see what I mean. But he told me a wee bit about himself.’

‘How long had he been here?’

‘He wrote to me last year asking about renting the cottage for the winter. Usually, that would have been a problem, but we’ve had some difficulties with the owners recently, so it made sense. And when I spoke to him on the phone, he sounded awful nice. He had just come back to England from Australia. He was staying in a hotel somewhere in Yorkshire, but decided he wanted somewhere a bit more remote.’

‘Did he say he had been here before?’

‘Aye, he did. Just the once and that was a long time ago. He was very curious about the estate. I told him what I could — Terry and I only came here ten years ago. We are both from Ullapool, Terry was a stalker at an estate over there.’

‘Who owns the Wyvis Estate?’

‘A Dutchman, Mr de Bruijn. He’s a lovely man, but he’s getting old, too old for the stalking. He used to come for months at a time, and bring lots of his friends with him, but we hardly see him now. That’s why we rented out this cottage and Corravachie down by the loch. You might have passed it on the way up?’

Clémence remembered the smoke she had seen rising up from the white building on a spit of land.

‘What about the big house at the head of the lake?’

‘That’s Wyvis Lodge, where Mr de Bruijn lives when he comes. We’re thinking about renting that out as well. We should get a fair wee bit for it. But it’s empty at the moment. I keep it clean and we make sure the grounds are tidy.’

The kettle boiled and Clémence spooned instant coffee into cups. ‘Thanks for getting the food and coffee,’ she said.

‘Och, it’s no bother. I’m glad you could come and look after him.’

They sat down opposite each other at the kitchen table. Clémence noticed that Sheila had a small tattoo of a Chinese character under her T-shirt by her collar bone, though it was not one of the few that Clémence recognized. Clémence liked her: she seemed competent and willing, and Clémence might need her help in the next few days.