I nodded, feeling more of a bastard by the second. Had I entirely misjudged the man? I had assumed his hostility was born out of prejudice, not pain.
Well, it could easily be both.
Or that could be me making excuses to justify the hurt I’d caused.
“How—”
“Car crash. They were on the moor road. Slid on the ice.” He waved out vaguely at the low rise of the hills. “There’s two roads north out of here—the main B road goes up northwest towards Newcastleton, but there’s a narrow road which goes up northeast across the moor and meets that road after it swings east. Takes fifteen minutes off the drive to Hawick, but it’s single track and never gets gritted. Wee lass was at the high school there—secondary two. She’d spent the weekend with her dad, and they were driving her to school.”
“He was in the car?” My voice rose, and I looked quickly in Niall Forster’s direction, hoping he hadn’t heard.
He was well out of earshot, to my relief. I could imagine it too vividly—the lurch on a slick road, the crack and shudder of impact, then lying there for hours, caught in the crumpled metal, hoarse from screaming at the slumped, unresponsive shapes in the front seats, breathing in the bitter tang of blood and knowing it wasn’t yours, knowing—
“Hey, are you okay?” Rob’s hand landed lightly on my arm.
“I’m good.” I wasn’t, but it was none of his business. “Was he…?” I swallowed.
“He was driving,” Rob said soberly. It was a warm summer day, but he shivered. “He was trapped, and his, er, partner was thrown free—knocked out cold. Poor little lass managed to crawl out, but she lost too much blood before the ambulance got to them. God, I can’t imagine anything worse. My oldest girl is the same age now.” He shook himself again.
“He had to watch?” I was shaking too.
My mother had been conscious. She had reached out to me, and I had watched as her fingers slowly went limp.
“Seriously, man, you look like you’re about to pass out. Sure you want to do this today?”
“I’m fine.” I swallowed back that old sick, helpless fear, and knelt to rub Dimwit’s ears. He bounced at me joyously, tail whipping back and forth as if he’d never been scared stiff by an invisible rat. “Shall we take this guy with us?”
“I’ll leave him in the car, I think. Hate to tell you this, but Vainguard itself probably has mice at least.”
“What old house doesn’t?”
He laughed. “Fair enough, but I don’t want either a repeat of just now or to lose him in the attics, which would be more his usual style.”
Rob went to put Dimwit in the back of the car, and I looked up at the sky, staring into the blue expanse until my heart rate slowed and I could put my own grief away. I would have to deal with it later, like I would have to find a way to apologise to Niall Forster, but not yet. I had a job to do now.
Then another part of what Rob had said sank in—his, er, partner.
I knew what that “er” meant.
Oh. Oh shit. Oh shit squared.
In any rural setting, gay men were few and far between (or was it bi if the daughter had been from a previous relationship? What did it matter?). Up here, where 70 percent of the local population lived in the small city of Carlisle and the overall population density was still one of the lowest in England—well, I hadn’t had high hopes. Now I’d immediately managed to piss off at least one of the couple living by my gates. And, yeah, Forster had been rude first, but I wasn’t as sure as I had been of the reason for that.
Dismally, I trailed Rob around the site. We went into the bungalow first, and my initial instinct was to gag. It smelt bad, like old food and unwashed clothes, and I soon saw why. The whole place was heaped with junk, some of it crammed into black sacks but much of it piled up on the chairs and tables: magazines, newspapers, old clothes, food wrappers, a screwdriver sticking out like a spear, mugs, plates, dead plants, and open tool boxes overflowing with more clutter.
“We paid someone to come in and clear out the fridge,” Rob said grimly, “and we’ve cancelled all his bills, but there’s a lot here which will need to be gone through in detail. We can recommend a firm.”
“Thank you,” I said, more than a little dismayed. “I’ll talk to Felix tonight and see what he wants.”
“We’ve made a start on the legal paperwork in accordance with Mr Armstrong’s wishes and Sir Philip’s advice, but there are a lot of small decisions which will need to be made about what’s on-site. Sir Philip indicated that Becky’s would be appointing you as their proxy.”
I nodded. I had envisaged it as pure paperwork, but the state of the bungalow suggested I would have more to do. “Are there any other beneficiaries I need to coordinate with?”
“No one. He was the last in his family. A couple of mementos went to a friend in Hawick, but we’ve already dealt with that. Vainguard is all yours—well, your charity’s—lock, stock, and barrel.”
The bungalow had a mere three rooms—kitchen, bathroom, and bedroom—all opening off a square hallway. An attached garage still contained a battered truck with cobwebs hanging off its tyres and rusty tools hanging off the walls. The whole place was miserable, cramped, and dirty, and I wondered what Martyn Armstrong’s last years had been like, burrowed in here like a rat in its nest.
It was a relief to step out into the fresh air, and we both sighed before catching each other’s eye and laughing.
“The next bit’s better,” Rob promised.
I certainly hoped so.
We headed for Vainguard itself just as the sun came out. It washed the stern old walls with gold, and suddenly I felt excited again. As a kid, before anything else happened, I’d dreamt of having a castle of my own—a place to defend from dragons, fill with books and treasures, and make all mine. Later, I’d let the dream go, like every other bit of childish whimsy.
Taking possession of Vainguard on Felix’s behalf was as close to that childish daydream as I was ever likely to get.
Rob pulled a heavy brass key out of his pocket and flourished it in my direction. “Want to do the honours?”
“Tell me that’s not the only—”
“There’s an electronic keypad on the inner doors and a back door with a Yale lock.”
I laughed and took it. “Onwards, then. I warn you, if there are dragons, I’m hiding behind Dimwit.”
He grinned back at me as I turned the key in the stiff lock and we heaved the great wooden doors open.
No bats or dragons came flocking out, and we ventured inside.
To my surprise, the space I stepped into was more barn than vestibule. Another frontage, with windows and an equally thick door, stood in front of us. This space was two stories high, and empty, with the only light slanting in through the empty windows.
“What’s this?” I asked, squinting up at the traces of worn glass in the frames of the outer windows.
“The barmkin. They would have herded all their cattle in here at first warning of a raid,” Rob said. He turned his torch on again, swinging it left. “This connects to the old tower through another doorway—the documents I’ve read suggested this enclosure was an extension of the tower first, and they built the later hall around it. Want to see the tower next or get inside?”
“Inside,” I decided. “Let’s save the oldest bit for last.”
He grinned again, and I laughed. I felt like a schoolboy on an adventure, like something out of the kind of outdoorsy books that had always felt more like fantasy than the ones with dragons in them when I was a kid growing up within the confines of a grey, sprawling city.
He showed me the code for the inner door, which had a very incongruous modern security lock.
Inside, the entranceway was dim and cavernous. If there had ever been furniture in this hallway, it had long ago been removed. Doors opened out on either side, and we explored a series of sitting rooms, all full of furniture shrouded by dust sheets. Light came in through the side windows, but the atmosphere was dark
and gloomy, and I found it hard to imagine these dim rooms turned into working classrooms.
The first floor was even more dispiriting. One bedroom held a dust-covered four-poster bed adrift on an expanse of faded carpet, but the rest were more collections of junk—boxes, old furniture, drawers and cupboards shoved in double-banked rows across walls and windows alike.
The third floor was worse. All that was in the rooms were rows of rusted bedsteads. In one, mattresses stained with damp were piled in a corner, their edges crumbling into one another.
“Tell me this isn’t left over from its orphanage days,” I said.
“Probably not. The place was a youth hostel during the fifties and sixties. Closed in the early seventies due to lack of business—this was before they made the cycle paths through the forest. It went in and out of various hands after that, but it’s been mostly empty. Then Armstrong bought it, and that was that.” He caught my look and added, “I went through all the paperwork before I drove up—Armstrong had details of all the previous sales. The place seems to have been an obsession of his long before he bought it.”
“But he never did anything with it?”
Rob shook his head. “Just maintenance, from what I know.”
“You seem to know a lot.”
“The place is legendary in our office. He was our oldest client, and it’s definitely the creepiest place we’ve had to deal with. I tell you something—I wouldn’t want to be here at Halloween.”
I looked at the forlorn outlines of the beds and shuddered. My earlier unease returned.
“And on that note,” Rob said, “let’s look at the attics.”
A stairway was hidden behind a door, thick with cobwebs. We both hesitated on the bottom step.
From above came the faint skitter of claws again—the ever-present vermin in the walls.
“We could leave the attic for another time?” Rob suggested.
But I was suddenly determined to see the worst. I gritted my teeth, ducked my head, and started up the narrow flight of stairs.
Behind me, Rob said, “If Shelob comes down the other way, Dimwit and I are running for the hills.”
“We’re already in the hills,” I pointed out. “Come on. Fortune favours the bold.” It was one of Felix’s favourite assembly themes.
At the top of the stairs, still flailing at cobwebs, I stumbled into another closed door. This one was locked.
After a few tries, we found a key that worked. It was hot up here, stuffy and airless.
The lock clicked, and Rob reached for the metal ring that formed the door handle. “Here we go.”
He pushed the door open.
Chapter Four
IT WAS just another dorm, empty bedsteads standing in rows across the bare wooden floor. Light filtered in through a dusty dormer window. Rob laughed, and I joined in, rather shamefaced.
“Fine luxury accommodations,” he said lightly.
It was stiflingly hot, and I crossed to the window. It was painted shut, and three narrow bars ran across the bottom half of it—to prevent anyone from climbing out? Through the dust, I could just glimpse the corner of the tower jutting out and the forested hills behind. That uneasy sense of familiarity crawled over me again, and I turned back to Rob. “Anything else to see in the house?”
“Stairs, cupboards, the other attic. No dungeon, I’m afraid.”
“Oh, it doesn’t need one,” I said dryly, and he grinned. I liked him and was hopeful I might have found a local friend. If I did end up running a new school here, maybe I could manage to get to know a few people outside of work.
Or maybe I’d be stuck out here in nowhere land, single, lonely, and friendless.
I wasn’t sure where that bleak thought had come from, but it made me eager to get outside again. I still had to find my guesthouse, and Vainguard’s gloomy atmosphere was beginning to wear me down.
Back downstairs, we crossed the covered courtyard—the barmkin, I reminded myself—to the old tower. This was the only way into the oldest building. There were two layers of doors—the outer solid wood and the inner a studded metal panel that opened with a squeal.
Pure historical excitement built in my gut again. I could almost imagine the clash of steel and squeal of beasts as armed reivers swept down over the border—or, just as likely, herded stolen flocks into the barmkin to be divvied up.
But when I stepped into the base of the tower, all I felt was the cold. Outside was the lazy heart of summer, humidity hanging low in the air. In here, I was breathing ice.
It was very quiet—no scratches or rustling here. There were no windows, and as the door swung shut, the darkness closed around us. Rob’s torch seemed too dim, fading with every second.
I froze.
Nothing could have forced me to move in that moment. I felt like a mouse suddenly engulfed by the shadow of a plummeting hawk, like the Lady of Shalott as her doom came upon her, like a child in the back seat of a car as it slides on the ice, propelled gracefully towards the grey stone wall.
Rob swore cheerfully and swung his torch towards the door. “Can you see a light switch? Actually, no worries—I’ve got it.”
I couldn’t speak. The world was retreating away from me, as if I were no longer truly part of it.
I hadn’t panicked like this in years. Slowly, clinging on to the distant sway of Rob’s torch against the wall so I didn’t lose track of reality, I curled my fingers and shoved my nails into my palm.
The pain brought me back towards my own body, and the light came on with a low crackle.
I breathed in sharply as the fear lifted.
We were standing in a chapel.
Unlike the rest of Vainguard, this room was spotlessly clean. Its walls had been plastered white, and a small altar stood against one wall. Two long benches had been set before the altar, angled slightly to face it. A cross was mounted on the wall. The only other piece of decoration was an old black-and-white photograph hanging behind the altar. I went over to examine it, Rob at my heels.
It was a print of the same photograph Felix had shown me—the orphans of Blacklynefoot, sitting in sombre rows outside Vainguard.
Except in this version, most of their faces had been scribbled out.
“Okay, then,” Rob said. “Not creepy at all.”
I managed a hollow laugh. “Funny.”
There were two more floors to the tower. Although they were cold, they didn’t feel as menacing as the windowless chapel. Eventually, we made it out onto the roof, and I breathed in the sharp breeze with relief. From here I could see the shape of the land, the loom of the hills and the slide down towards the river.
Rob leaned against the edge, surveying it all easily. He said, “It’s good land. Lonely, but good.”
“You grow up here?”
“No. Met a girl at uni, got married, moved back to her parents’ farm because she was too homesick to stay in the city another day. Been here fifteen years now.”
“And does anyone have a problem with you? It’s not the most diverse place, is it?” I stood out in rural Sussex, but we were barely sixty miles from London’s glorious multicultural muddle, and it was a rare week when I only saw white faces. I wasn’t sure if I could cope somewhere even less diverse.
“I’m aware of it sometimes. More than Anna is—that’s my wife,” he said slowly. “You don’t get anything blatant—not more than anywhere else—but you get a lot of funny looks. There are a few people who still don’t know what to make of me, especially once you get out of the towns, but… I don’t know. Older folk out here, they ask me where I’m really from—and they do that a lot—but when I tell them my mum was born in London and my dad in Lagos, you’d think one was as strange as the other by their reaction. Then there’s the hippies and the second-homers and the back-to-nature brigade, who all want to be your best mate just to show they’re cool. It gets to you, sometimes more than others, and I miss the city, but….” He looked out across the hills. “My kids are growing up with fresh air
to breathe. We can afford a house and rent out a second. My cousins in London are making more than me and sleeping in airing cupboards. And the good people don’t care.”
I thought about being gay and black in a place where each group made up less than half a percent of the population. If we did try to make something of Vainguard, was I dooming myself to a lifetime alone? At least where I was now I was in driving distance of London. Theoretically, I could meet someone from the capital and….
Yeah, right.
I asked, “Honestly, what do you think of this place? Could we make something of it? Is there local need?”
He thought about it and said, “Probably. This is a poor part of the world. People talk about inner-city poverty and deprivation, but some of these rural and coastal communities—well, I’ve heard stories that would turn your stomach.”
“I doubt it.”
He acknowledged that with a nod. “Yeah, fair enough. You’ve seen stuff, right? I reckon the more charities get out of London to help kids, the better.”
“But here?” I said, waving my hand to indicate Vainguard, the scatter of houses in the hamlet below, and the remoteness of it all.
He shrugged. “There are worse places. Probably.”
“Not convincing me there.”
He sighed. “If you’re thinking to sell it and use the money elsewhere—well, the terms of the will permit that, but you’ll struggle to find a buyer, for all it’s worth on paper. It needs investment to be turned into anything profitable, and it’s both too far from town and too far from true tourist country to attract private buyers.” He grinned. “If the dollar were stronger, you could maybe hook some rich American with the romance of crenellations and crap central heating, but as it is….”
“Say no more. Where’s a reclusive film star when you need one?” I grumbled. “I’m going to have to talk to Felix.”
Something Wicked This Way Comes Page 3