Michael Ridpath: Amnesia

And the rest of his life? All gone. Erased as if it had never existed.

She could forgive his grumpiness, but she was very glad she had had the courage to stand up to him. She could help him. She was patient, she was a good listener, she was easily entertained. She would help him.

It was dark now outside the cottage, and she heard the quavering hoot of an owl from somewhere among the twisted trees. She felt very alone here, she and the old man in a little house miles from anywhere. And it was miles from anywhere. Three miles to the Stalker’s Lodge and five miles beyond that to the village of Evanton and the Cromarty Firth. It felt both creepy and exciting at the same time. For a girl brought up in overcrowded Hong Kong, the emptiness and desolation of the Scottish Highlands had a lot going for it. It was one of the reasons she had chosen to go to St Andrews, about as far removed from a big-city university as you could get.

But then St Andrews was also a long way from her parents, which seemed to suit them very well. Not for the first time she wondered, if they had lived in Scotland rather than Hong Kong, would she be going to university in New Zealand?

She stuck the plates in the dishwasher, tidied the kitchen and went up to her room to fetch a book. The light was on under the old man’s door, and she could hear him moving around inside there. She thought of knocking on his door and asking if he was OK, but decided not to in case it irritated him.

She peeked in to the study. It was a small room containing a desk, a chair, a bookcase and a tatty armchair. An Ordnance Survey map showing Loch Glass hung on one wall, and a print of a golden eagle on another. She examined the books on the theory that you can tell a lot about a man from his bookshelf. There weren’t many of them: half were about birds, although there were one or two novels — William Boyd and Ken Follett — and some history — Stalingrad , a book on the Norman Conquest and another on the Crusades. A couple were on local subjects.

A blue air-mail envelope lay in the middle of the old man’s desk. It was addressed to Dr Alastair Cunningham at Culzie, Loch Glass and it had been opened. Clémence recognized the handwriting. She flipped it over, and sure enough, the sender’s address was that of her Aunt Madeleine in New York City; it must have been the letter Mrs MacInnes had found. Clémence was about to slip out the couple of sheets of paper inside it, when she stopped herself, remembering her promise not to look through the old man’s private papers.

Despite what Mrs MacInnes had said, Clémence couldn’t see much evidence of private papers or photos in the study, but she resolved not to look too closely. All that would be up to Alastair to check. So she went back to her own room, pulled out a copy of Le Cid by Corneille, a set text for her French Literature course, and took it down to the sitting room, noticing on the way a darker stain of brown peeking out under a rug at the foot of the stairs.

She shuddered. Blood. Alastair’s blood.

There was no TV, of course, although there was a telephone in the hallway. She knew she should telephone Aunt Madeleine in the States, and possibly also her grandfather, but she thought she would leave that until the next day. She also wanted to ring Callum, but she knew he would be working. She couldn’t even text him — although she had brought her mobile phone with her, there was no reception. So she put some more wood on the fire and curled up on the sofa.

Le Cid was hard going. It wasn’t just that the French was archaic, the plot didn’t inspire her. All that courtly love and self-denial in the name of honour was just dumb, in her opinion. Not for the first time she wondered why she hadn’t chosen the module on twentieth-century existentialism.

She put the book down and stoked the fire. The house was quiet, perhaps the old man had put himself to bed. As she replaced the poker, she saw a neat pile of paper on the floor next to the old leather armchair.

She examined it. The paper was yellowing, and slightly dirty. It was a manuscript, in spiky black Biro handwriting. The title page proclaimed Death At Wyvis by Alastair Cunningham and a date: 23rd May 1973.

No one had mentioned anything about Alastair writing a novel. Presumably it hadn’t been published. But Clémence’s interest was far more piqued by the manuscript than Le Cid.

A novel couldn’t be private, could it? Perhaps it could. She hesitated. If it turned out to be steamy, or really bad, she would just pretend she hadn’t read it.

She carefully shifted the manuscript to the sofa and began to read.

She read the first sentence and let out a small cry, her hand flying to her mouth.

It was a warm, still night and the cry of a tawny owl swirled through the birch trees by the loch, when I killed the only woman I have ever loved.

Clémence sat bolt upright, the sheet of spiky writing shaking in her hand. But wait a sec. She was letting the cottage’s isolation, the owl, the dark, the old man’s fear get to her. If the old man had written a novel called Death At Wyvis , then of course it might start with a murder.

She had to read on.

The first page of the novel was a brief prologue. It continued:

We had made love on the bare wooden boards of the floor of the boathouse, out of sight of the others, with the water lapping against the pilings beneath us.

Afterwards, as she lay in my arms, I had asked her to leave her husband. She refused. I remonstrated. We argued. Our whispers became muffled shouts.

I left her naked in the boathouse and climbed up the path back towards the cottage. I was angry, I was drunk and I just couldn’t accept her decision. Without her, my life would mean nothing.

I stopped. An owl somewhere in the woods mocked my in-decision. I couldn’t just give up on her that easily, so I turned back. I would make her do what I wanted. The anger closed around me in a mist of black and red.

The stalker found her the next day, face-down in the loch, caught up in the gnarled fingers of a fallen tree. At first they thought she had drowned, but when the police came and examined her properly they found finger marks on her throat; she had been strangled.

I have thought of that night every day of my life since then. It’s a story I was too much of a coward to tell. But now I must.

What she had just read couldn’t be the truth, could it? Alastair Cunningham couldn’t have killed someone, murdered someone? Surely this manuscript must be a novel rather than a memoir? A killing he had imagined, rather than experienced.

But it sounded like a memoir. It sounded like the frail old man upstairs had murdered someone right here at Wyvis. Clémence hadn’t seen a boathouse on the drive up to the cottage, but there could easily be one on the shore by the woods. She would check first thing in the morning.

That would explain the dreadful secret he didn’t want to remember.

And if, in fact, Alastair had murdered someone, she knew who it must be.

Sophie. Her grandmother, whom everyone had said had drowned, but who had actually been killed by the old man upstairs. And when the ‘I’ in the manuscript had begged the nameless woman to leave her nameless husband, what he had really been doing was telling Clémence’s grandmother to leave her grandfather.

If the Wyvis Estate had in fact been in her grandfather’s family, they could easily have gone there on holiday. And if her grandmother had indeed been murdered, and they wanted to lie to a little girl about it, they might have claimed she had drowned. They would have claimed she had drowned.

Had the old man upstairs murdered her grandmother?