Michael Ridpath - Amnesia

Clémence was frustrated she couldn’t ask Aunt Madeleine the questions she wanted right away, but there was only twenty-four hours to wait.

In the meantime there was one more person she could call.

Stephen paused for breath as he made his way up Campden Hill. Either the hill was getting steeper or he was getting older. What had a few years before been a pleasant twenty-minute stroll to the pub from his flat, was now a major excursion.

He was getting older.

But at least his pint of Guinness would taste good when he eventually got there.

And it did. The Windsor Castle was an old pub split into a number of bars by wooden screens. The smallest, the Sherry Bar, was his favourite, and he usually got there early enough to grab his favourite seat. Maitland, a tiny crooked man who looked ninety, but who was in fact only seventy-seven, was already there with the Telegraph crossword open in front of him.

‘How many have you done?’ Stephen asked.

‘Four. It’s tricky today.’

Stephen eased himself onto the wooden bench with a harrumph, and took his second sip of Guinness. A small sip. The pint, and the crossword, would last him a couple of hours.

‘Give me one.’

‘“Solution given by Italian who made notes before court.” Seven letters.’

‘Ah.’

Although they usually finished their pints, Stephen and Maitland never finished the crossword. That was the point.

His ruminations were interrupted by Harry, a recently retired stockbroker, who really needed to find himself another pub. Preferably in Woking or Weybridge or somewhere.

‘Morning, gents,’ he said, setting his gin and tonic in front of him. ‘Lovely day.’ He beamed at them from a face of flab and sweat.

Maitland grunted. Stephen ignored him. ‘“Made notes”. Music, do you think?’

‘Doing the crossword?’ Harry said.

Of course they were bloody doing the crossword. Just like they did every day.

‘You two are like the furniture in here,’ Harry said. ‘How long have you been coming here? Doing the crossword together?’

‘1962 we did our first one, don’t you think, Stephen?’ Maitland answered.

Stephen nodded. ‘That sounds about right.’

‘But not here,’ said Maitland. ‘Somewhere else.’

‘Did you work together?’ asked Harry.

‘No.’

‘Old school friends?’

Stephen glanced at Maitland. This man had to be dealt with. ‘Cell mates.’

Harry laughed. ‘Shared an office, eh? Or was it National Service?’

‘Wormwood Scrubs.’

‘Ah.’ Harry sipped his drink uncomfortably.

Stephen waited. Anyone with any decency would let it rest there. But Harry...

‘What were you in for, if you don’t mind me asking?’

Actually Stephen did mind.

‘Murder,’ said Stephen.

‘Murder,’ said Maitland.

‘You’re kidding, right?’ said Henry. He tugged at his double chin nervously. ‘You’re not kidding.’

‘They let us out when they thought we were no longer a threat to society,’ said Stephen. ‘But you know what?’ He leaned forward.

‘What?’ said Harry, distinctly uneasy now.

‘When you’ve killed once, you can always kill again.’

The retired stockbroker drained his glass and left the pub, knocking the table and spilling Stephen’s Guinness on the way.

Stephen glanced at Maitland. One side of his friend’s lip twitched. Then he returned to business. ‘An Italian musical instrument. Piccolo?’

Two hours later, Stephen made the trek back to his flat just on the other side of Notting Hill Gate. He wanted to catch the three-thirty at Newmarket on Channel 4. He had enjoyed dealing with Harry. He and Maitland were a good team. He was a good man, Maitland, even if he had murdered his wife with a cricket bat.

Stephen lived in a tiny basement flat bought for him twenty years before by his sister-in-law for fifteen thousand pounds. The other people in the building were yuppie bankers and solicitors, who had paid twenty times that for theirs. The flat was dark and it was a tip; but Stephen knew where everything was, and he liked it.

He was bursting, so he dived into the lavatory as soon as he got in the front door.

He had just finished when the phone rang.

‘All right, all right,’ he muttered to himself. Why people bothered him like that, he would never know.

He picked up the receiver. ‘Yes.’

‘Grandpa?’ It was a woman’s voice, a young woman.

‘I think you’ve got the wrong number.’ Stephen did have a few grandchildren, but they never wanted to speak to him. More to the point, he didn’t want to speak to them.

‘Is that Mr Trickett-Smith?’

‘Yes,’ Stephen admitted.

‘It’s Clémence. Your granddaughter.’

It was true, Clémence was his granddaughter. Rupert’s girl. Although Stephen had hardly ever seen her.

‘Are you telephoning from Hong Kong?’

‘No. Scotland. I go to St Andrews University. You know that.’

‘Yes, yes of course,’ he said, relieved that she wasn’t in London and about to take him out to tea. Although actually from what he remembered of her, he rather liked Clémence.

‘But I’m at Wyvis now. Looking after Dr Cunningham. Alastair Cunningham? Your old friend.’

‘Wyvis? Alastair?’ Stephen had been standing holding the telephone receiver, but now he slumped into an armchair.

‘Yes. He fell down the stairs last week and hit his head. Badly. They took him to hospital, but now they’ve let him out and Aunt Madeleine asked me to look after him until she gets over here.’

Interfering old bat.

Clémence was in full flow. ‘Alastair has suffered a brain injury and has forgotten everything, so I am trying to help him remember. Was Wyvis the Scottish estate that was in our family?’

‘Yes,’ said Stephen. ‘We had to sell it in the seventies when my father died. Death duties.’

‘I thought so,’ said Clémence. ‘Alastair’s been living in a cottage called Culzie. I found a book in there, which I have been reading to him. Death At Wyvis. Have you read it?’

‘Yes, I’ve read it,’ said Stephen.

‘We’ve only done a few chapters, but it starts with Alastair killing my grandmother, Sophie. The author calls the protagonist Angus, but it’s definitely Alastair, isn’t it?’

‘I remember the beginning,’ said Stephen.

‘Well, is it true?’

‘Why do you ask?’

‘What do you mean, why do I ask?’ said Clémence. She was beginning to sound angry now. ‘My grandmother was murdered, and no one told me. This old man killed her and Aunt Madeleine makes me stay with him. I want to know what’s going on!’

‘Listen to me, young lady,’ said Stephen. ‘There are very good reasons why no one told you what happened to Sophie. It’s a bad idea to read that book. If you ask me, Alastair is lucky he has forgotten some things. Put that book back on the bookshelf and leave it alone. Better still, throw it in the loch where it belongs.’

‘Grandpa!’

‘Now I have something to watch on television. Goodbye, Clémence.’

Stephen put the receiver down. His eyes were drawn to the mantelpiece above the fire, and the photograph of Sophie aged twenty-four, looking at him over her right shoulder, with that quiet smile. By the time he switched on the television he had missed the three-thirty race. And the four o’clock.

It was good to be out in the open, walking again. The old man had listened to the lecture from Dr Stenhouse in the hospital about making sure he got both his mind and his body going again. So he had left the cottage and let his feet take him where they wanted. They led him on to a rough path out of the woods and on to the hillside of heather, dead bracken and peat bog, with Ben Wyvis rising to his left and Loch Glass beneath him on his right. The path made its way diagonally down the hill to the loch, just by Wyvis Lodge.