The Child Garden (4 page)

Six

He left by the
front door and it banged out of his hand like always with a bad north wind, slammed back against the porch wall and rattled. There was a deep gouge in the plaster there from all the years that door had been flung open. Over a hundred years of north winds and children in high spirits rushing in and out from the garden. Maybe even a young wife taking time to settle and flouncing off in her clogs and apron to fume out there in the open air, where the view could calm her. I liked to think that Rough House saw some life before Miss Drumm and then me.

He was more careful on the way back in, and he locked it after him.

“It's not letting up,” he said, using one of his hands like a window washer to scrape the rain from his forehead. He had a woman's handbag in his other one.

“I've started coming to see my mum and dad,” he said, sitting down again with the bag in his lap. “Trying to build bridges, you know. Tea at my mum's every Monday, like a happy family. And Wee J's there with the wife and kids, so that takes some of the pressure off. What I'm saying is, usually I'd have been here—or ten miles off—when the text came to meet her at Eden.”

“But?”

“But what with the weather, I'd decided to skip it. I was sitting in a sushi bar in the West End when it came. So I decided to go back to my flat, get wellies and Gore-Tex.”

“What happened?” I asked, thinking about his thin dress shirt and suit trousers, his ruined leather shoes.

“I found this.” He put the bag in my lap. It was one of those squashy ones with too many buckles.

“I thought at first it was Carol's—she's my ex—from how it was tucked under the hall table like someone who lived there would put it down. I nearly didn't see it except I was guddling around in the hall cupboard for wellies.

“So I shouted, ‘Is anyone there?' You wouldn't believe how long it took me to open the damn thing and look through it, Glo. And I was still waiting for a slap on the back of the neck. My mum used to go ballistic if you went in her bag and even my dad, even today, if she asks for her specs or her ciggies, he'll hand the whole thing over and wait to take it back again.”

“Stig,” I said. For the first time it seemed as if he was just talking to fill the air. Or maybe talking so he didn't have to say what needed to be said, if he would only shut up long enough to say it.

He leaned over and opened the clasp, springing the fake buckle at the first go.

“It's April's,” he said, poking at the wallet, make-up, keys, phone. “All her stuff's in here. And look.” He jabbed a piece of folded paper, but he didn't pick it up or open it. I did that.

Stephen
, it said on the outside. And on the inside, in a round hand, plain blue biro, it said just what he told me:
I heard the car
.

“But why would she do that?” I said. “Why would she do any of this? Even though she wanted to kill herself, why would she involve you?”

“Just trying to mess with my head?” He looked upwards and spoke loudly as if shouting to someone upstairs. “Nailed it, April.”

“But why?”

He closed his eyes and stayed like that with his head back.

“Was it definitely her?” I said. Stig sat up and blinked at me. Who knows where his thoughts had taken him, but it looked like a long way back to meet mine.

“Look at the picture.” He took the wallet out of my hands and slid a travel card out of its plastic folder. “It's her.”

He was right. The face staring out of the card was the same one we had seen in the hole under the crypt, as round and plain as the signature under it and the writing on the folded note.

“That's not what I meant, though,” I said. “Was it definitely April who was contacting you? Isn't there a chance that someone else was messing with you both?”

“I wondered that,” he said. “Not at first, because she knew too much for it not to be her. But when she phoned, I couldn't get the voice to fit the picture in my head.”

“What did she look like when you knew her?” I asked, still staring at the photo.

“A skinny wee girl with her hair dyed burgundy, and all that zigzag way.”

“Crimped,” I said.

“Yeah. Bad skin, too much make-up, like it helped.”

“You liked her,” I said.

“Eh?”

“That's a lot of noticing for a teenage boy,” I said.

He shrugged, half-smiling. “She was my ‘girlfriend' for about ten minutes,” he said. “We all paired off and reshuffled till we'd been right round. You know what we were like back then.”

Only I didn't, not at all.

“So, she used to be your girlfriend,” I said. “And you'd been phoning and texting recently? And you were only at your flat tonight because of the weather?” He nodded. “Any other Monday you'd have got the text at your mum's, driven to the huttie, found April, and phoned the police. Like you were going to.”

“After I'd checked to see if she was really dead and probably got covered in her blood. You see?”

“I see. And if they got a warrant for your flat, they'd find her bag.”

“After me telling them I hadn't actually seen her for twenty-odd
years and certainly—definitely—she'd never been at my place.
What's going on, Gloria?”

“I tell you one thing that's going on,” I said. “You're in a world of trouble.”

He looked me straight in the eye then and spoke in a steady voice. Not a single tremor despite what he was saying, which would have given me the collywobbles.

“Tell me right now if you want me to go, and I'll leave. I'll call the cops as soon as I get a signal, I'll tell them I was at the huttie on my own. I'm innocent. I've got nothing to fear.”

I took a long time to decide. It was a good offer. He would drive away and keep my name out of it. Nicky and I could carry on the same as ever.

“I know you didn't kill her,” I said.

His relief made him sag down in his chair. “Will you help me?” he said.

“You didn't kill her,” I said again. “But you're not innocent. You stopped being innocent when you found her and didn't call it in.”

“But it was you that—”

I held up my hand. “Let me think!” It didn't take long. “It needs to be anonymous,” I told him. “And it's better coming from a woman. I'll call.”

I knew I lived too much inside my head. How could I not? Where else was there? I was the onlooker to so many human dramas every day at work: small joys, small sorrows but big to the people they happened to. So maybe I'd got the idea that I could see things clearly. Maybe I'd got an inflated opinion of myself. There's that.

And it was a chance to
do
something. I wasn't much for praying by then, but one I never got tired of is the one that goes: God grant me courage to change what I can, strength to bear what I can't, and wisdom to know the difference. So much of my life was
bearing
. And then tonight, all of a sudden, here was a chance to make a
change
. To take injustice and change it.

And another thing too. Usually I only get to read the stories that other people make up. I see them when they're done, for good or bad. Brilliant stories locked tight and unbreakable—
The Count of Monte Cristo
,
The Return of Martin Guerre
—or stupid stories full of holes that leave you let down and restless—
Cyrano de Bergerac
,
Persuasion
, although that wasn't her fault because she died. It had never happened to me before that I got bits of a story before it was done and had the chance to sculpt it and polish until everyone saw what I wanted them to see. Until everyone listened to me.

“You need to get your car out of sight,” I said. “Probably for nothing, because the postie only comes as far as the first grid and that's not till after two in the afternoon. But if it's Parcel Express it could be any time, and sometimes they miss the box and drive right in. And I've got an Amazon order outstanding.”

“Stay here?” said Stig.

“I thought you wanted me to help you.”

“Yeah, like lend me some cash for a room and say you hadn't seen me if anyone asked.”

“But where could you go that's better?” I said. “You're invisible. Ninety-nine percent of the country's useless for hiding now. Your phone says where you are unless you switch it off. You're in about the only place for four hundred miles where no one can track you.”

“Still,” said Stig. He reached into a back pocket, pulled out his phone, and killed it. I woke April Cowan's and did the same.

“Also, someone should get to the bottom of this,” I said.

“What are you talking about?” said Stig. He rubbed his hands over his face. “This is real, Glo. April Cowan is lying dead in a hole. This isn't … you're not … ”

“St. Mary Mead,” I said. “Miss Marple. But it doesn't add up. I mean, your story about what happened that night at Eden? Already I can see loose little threads I can pick at.”

“Oh?” said Stig. “Likes of what?”

“Likes of why was Vanman as white as a sheet and using words like
missing
?”

“Van
the
Man,” said Stig. Then he thought about it and his eyes opened so wide his glasses slipped down his nose. “You're right. It didn't seem weird, looking back, because it
was
terrible, so it was like he was right to be in a state from the off. But he shouldn't have been, should he?”

“But people are strange,” I said. “That might have been something or nothing. Maybe he had a bad dream. I tell you what's
really
off. How did a car roar away in the night if the gates were locked?”

He blinked at me, stunned. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “Thirty years I've been thinking about this and that never even occurred to me.”

“Twenty-eight,” I said. “And there aren't that many possible explanations. We just need to narrow it down.”

But he wasn't listening. He was looking around the kitchen, not judging it now, just getting familiar. He laughed suddenly. “Have you ever seen that film
Misery
?”

“No,” I answered, “but I've read the book. I'm a friend, Stig, not a fan.”

I keep the spare bed made up more because it looks pretty with the quilt and pillow slips than in hope or fear of sudden guests. No one has stayed in this house except me since I moved in ten years ago. The nearest miss was one night when my mother and father came to see Nicky and came back here after. Dad was too shocked to drive and I got as far as boiling water for hot bottles before Mum came to her senses and realised what was happening.

“We haven't set the alarm,” she'd said. “We haven't set light timers. I've left a washing out.” As if Castle Douglas was some hotbed of crime. “Come on, Trevor, stir yourself. You'll be fine when you get going.”

She had turned back at the front door as my dad weaved towards the car; doddered almost, suddenly an old man.

“Look what you've done to your father,” she said. “How could you be so thoughtless?”

“Mum, I honestly don't know what you're talking about,” I said.

“The way you puffed it all up. A new place, better care. You got our hopes up, Gloria. I'll never forgive you.”

The only bright spot in the whole episode was Miss Drumm the next day. She'd been listening through the connecting door.

“So that's your mother, is it?” she'd said. “That's Nicky's grandmamma? She's one you'd leave inside the wolf.”

“What are you smiling about?” said Stig. I was concentrating on filling the bottles, hadn't realised the thoughts were showing on my face.

“A happy memory,” I said. “And an appropriate one too. You can't choose your family, but friends are a fine thing.”

I love Rough House for saving my life, but showing Stig round, I saw it through his eyes. The only bathroom is downstairs, with just a bath, no shower and no heater either, and the rickety window lets the drafts howl through. It's a long way upstairs to the bedrooms, four of them, the two big ones facing the sunny garden and the two little ones with the arrow-slit windows facing out the back to the yard.
Facing the sunny garden in the daytime in the summer if and when the sun shines
, I thought, leading Stig into the room at the top of the stairs. On a night like this, it looked like where Jane Eyre saw the ghost. The furniture was something Miss Drumm called pickled walnut. The wallpaper was a sort of colourless pinky beige in a raised pattern that looked a bit like fungus, and the carpet and curtains were much the same. The crocheted mats, worked in white and stained with tea, and the crocheted, tea-stained handles on the brown-paper sun blinds didn't help. Cat sick, Miss Drumm called it, which made me shudder, but at least the quilt and the pillow slips were satin. I drew the line at candlewick; all her candlewick covers were in the linen cupboard, dry cleaned and stored in bags sucked small with the hoover.

“I'll put towels in the bathroom for you,” I said, as I slid the two hot water bottles in under the bedclothes. “And a toothbrush. And I'll set out a razor. Can you sleep in the sweat suit for now? I won't be long and no one will come to the door, I promise, but if they do, don't answer. No one's got a spare key. No one can get in.”

“What?” he said. “Where are you going?”

“Phone box at Shawhead. It's tucked well away and nobody's even going to be walking a dog at this time of night when it's like this, are they?”

“You're really going to call the police?”

“I've got to. We can't leave her there on her own in the cold and dark.”

“I can't ask you to do that,” he said. “You don't owe me.”