Something Wicked This Way Comes

by Amy Rae Durreson

  He lowered the horse’s foot back to the ground and stood, murmuring to the beast as he squinted at the foot from different angles. Then he returned to his crouch, picked up the foot again, and went back to tapping in nails. What astounded me was how calm both he and the horse seemed about the whole process. Perhaps this was the equine equivalent of a relaxing manicure, but I didn’t think most manicurists risked being kicked in the balls.

  The shoe on, he shifted the horse’s foot onto a slanted rest and plucked a file from his tray of tools, intent on smoothing off the ends of the nails.

  He was completely oblivious to my presence, and I snuck away, pondering the many sides of the man—angered by strangers and snide about demanding customers but as gentle with the horse as he had been with me in the throes of panic.

  Admittedly, that didn’t say much about his opinion of me.

  The drive to Langholm cleared my head. Maybe it was getting away from those horribly familiar hills. Maybe it was the fresh air through the windows or the sheer mundane banality of the big superstore. By the time I was halfway through my shopping, I had convinced myself that the strength of my reaction, at least, could be blamed on lack of caffeine—I certainly hadn’t been getting the usual hourly intake I gulped down in term time. I chucked a couple of boxes of strong tea into my trolley and continued on with good cheer.

  There was no sign of Forster when I got back, so I trundled up the drive without pausing. It wasn’t until I stepped inside that I realised I would have to use Armstrong’s fridge. It was empty but carried a certain stale smell. I scrubbed it out, windows open, sleeves rolled up, and radio blasting, then stowed all my groceries with a sense of achievement. By then, I’d filled several sacks, so I went in search of a wheelie bin.

  They were in the barn, and as soon as I stepped into its shadows, my good mood faded a little. I thought of the dog, frozen in fear as I had been in the chapel, and some of my unease returned.

  I could think of no rational explanation for the dog.

  My own behaviour, although distressing and embarrassing, had a clear and logical explanation. I knew perfectly well that the first step towards managing my fear was to face and understand it.

  But the dog’s fear had nothing to do with my flashbacks.

  Perhaps Dimwit had sensed my discomfort and so overreacted to a minor threat. Dogs read body language, didn’t they?

  But I hadn’t really been scared yet, not then.

  I pulled the wheelie bin out into the light and took a deep breath, trying to shake off my worries.

  The sun helped, and I wondered whether I could justify taking Saturday off to go exploring. Cycling seemed to be the big outdoor activity round here, but I’d never learned to ride a bike. I’d done a fair bit of hiking in the South Downs, though. Maybe deliberately trying to enjoy this landscape would let me see it differently and lay some of my personal ghosts to rest.

  The state of Martyn Armstrong’s bungalow no longer seemed so daunting. I’d need space to sort through the papers—space like the big room in Vainguard I had decided on as my base. I propped all the doors open and started lugging over photo albums and other personal knick-knacks. Maybe Felix would be interested in them, maybe not. Either way, they were the easiest thing to extract from the mess first.

  I flicked through one of the albums. It was mostly landscapes—hills, a faded picture of a white-walled town under a bleached sky, a whole sequence of shots from an air show dated 1976. The only people in any of them were fellow crowd members and a few awkwardly posed groups of obvious work colleagues with stiff grins.

  It was a very ordinary life at first glance, but at a second look it seemed very sad. No family, no hint of a lover or spouse. Martyn Armstrong had been alone in the middle of his own life.

  A dead man’s miseries were none of my business. I was only looking for information about Vainguard or his years as an orphan which might be interesting for Felix’s book.

  I tried another album. This one was bound in faded brown leather, older than the cracked glossy plastic of the one I’d already tried.

  In the middle of the first page was a tiny sepia photograph, small enough to have come from a locket. It was streaky around the edges, but I could just make out the figures—a small boy of three or four holding a baby in a christening gown in a carefully posed shot. The next page held a faded brown wedding photo—a young blonde woman in a knee-length dress on the arm of a soldier, a spray of roses crooked in her arm.

  Then came a death certificate from 1937, the letters faded to pale brown—Mary Esther Armstrong, wife of Albert, mother of Martyn and Francis. The only cause of death was a hastily scrawled Dip.

  Another photo of a man in uniform across the page from a much-folded letter—condolences from Sergeant Albert Armstrong’s CO, informing his sister that Sergeant Armstrong had given his life in the service of his country. He had been a radio operator who never made it back from Dunkirk, and I wondered if that explained Martyn Armstrong’s later career in electronics.

  Next came two black-and-white pictures, stamped across the bottom with the words: Reverend Eilbeck’s Home: Newcastle. I’d seen similar ones before—entrance photographs had been standard practice for Eilbeck homes from the 1930s onward. In these, both boys looked stony-faced, and in the older child’s eyes there was a sort of shuttered expression I knew all too well. They were ordinary-looking boys, fair-haired and slight, and the little one—Francis—had a tuft of hair springing up from his head which even a stern matron had not been able to comb down. He looked about six to Martyn’s ten, and I wondered what had happened to the aunt who received Albert’s death notice. Bombed out? Too poor to keep them? Too many mouths of her own to feed? Or simply disinterested? It was impossible to tell from this distance.

  Then came another death certificate, this time from 1944, for ten-year-old Francis Armstrong. The cause of death was simply listed as “misadventure.”

  “What the hell does that mean?” I asked aloud.

  I got no answer, of course. I probably never would. It was a sad little story, but they all were, the stories of the Eilbeck kids of years gone by. Some of them made it to happy adult lives—to lovers and families and security—but they all came from heartbreak.

  The next few pages were blank, which made sense to me. Martyn Armstrong would have wanted to keep the earliest, most painful years of his life, apart from everything else.

  Except there was an edge of paper sticking out of a later page. I turned to it, and the album fell open easily—someone had paused here often enough to crease the spine.

  A newspaper clipping fell out, leaving behind the brown stain where the tape that held it in place had turned brittle with age.

  It was from 1988, and I didn’t even need to look at the top of the page to date it. The headline was enough.

  “Double Fatality in Moor Road Crash.”

  A few phrases stood out as I stared at it: “…holidaymakers Stella and Jamilah Kwarteng… survived by their son, Leon.”

  I slammed it back into the album and grabbed my phone.

  Unable to get a signal, I stormed out of the house, trying to call Felix as I went.

  What the hell was going on here?

  I didn’t get a dial tone until I was almost back at the lodge. Then all I got was Janice in school office, answering with a cheerful, “Oh, hello, Leon. Surviving the wild north?”

  “Just about,” I said, trying not to snap at her. “Is Felix around?”

  “He and Valerie have just taken the boys down to the shop. Want me to take a message, or shall I get him to ring back?”

  The pure ordinariness of her voice was calming me down by the second. “Don’t worry. I’ll put it in an email.” That was the calm, mature approach.

  But my heart was racing even as I ended my chat with Janice and hung up. Martyn Armstrong had known about me—had he known that I taught at Eilbeck? Had Felix mentioned me to him and—

  And what? Felix was the one who had chosen to s
end me up here, wasn’t he?

  But that was crazy.

  If Felix wasn’t available, there was one other person who might know if this was more than a coincidence. I phoned Rob Ademola at the lawyers.

  He greeted me with polite cheerfulness. “I was just about to ring you. Will you be attending Martyn Armstrong’s funeral?”

  “When is it?”

  “Tuesday, 10:00 a.m., at the crematorium in Carlisle. I can email you the directions.”

  “I’ll be there.” I couldn’t imagine many others would. “Look, about Armstrong—this is going to sound odd, but was there anything in the will to explain why he didn’t ask Felix to come up here and deal with things himself?” Or had Felix just blithely delegated the job to me?

  “There was something,” Rob said. “Didn’t Sir Philip tell you?”

  My stomach clenched, and I had to swallow hard before I said, “He didn’t mention. You’ve got me curious now.”

  “It’s just a note that was pinned on the will.” He read out, “Tell Felix to send that bright young chap of his—the Kwarteng boy. He’ll do for the—well, it looks like ‘hob,’ but his handwriting is pretty awful. Got any particular qualifications in kitchen repair, have you?”

  “I’m afraid not. Mysterious,” I said. I felt sick.

  Martyn Armstrong had known how my parents died and had deliberately brought me back here.

  Rob chattered at me for a bit longer, and I made rote responses. When he rang off, I stood stock-still in the middle of the drive with the sun pounding down on the back of my head.

  Why?

  Why the hell had Martyn Armstrong wanted to hurt me? He hadn’t even known me.

  My hand was pressing tighter and tighter around the edge of my phone. I unpeeled my fingers, and that was enough to make me want to move, to lash out, to break something that wasn’t me. I lifted my arm, ready to hurl my phone against the drystone wall.

  A warm hand caught my wrist, and a firm voice growled, “Not unless you want to be picking glass out of the gravel all evening.”

  Chapter Nine

  “GET OFF me,” I snapped, pulling against Forster’s wrist.

  He used his free hand to remove my phone from my hand and shoved it in his pocket, then took away the album I was still clutching, holding me effortlessly at arm’s length. He said without releasing me, “If you need to hit something, hit me.”

  I blinked at him, and he added, “If you break something, the NHS can fix me for free. Your phone will cost more.”

  “Are you out of your mind?” I blurted out before I noticed the faint quirk of his lips, which gave away that it was a joke.

  “It’s been said.” He eyed me cautiously. “Still going to take a swing?”

  “I don’t hit people,” I said. “I haven’t thrown a punch since I was a teenager. I don’t even lose my temper.”

  For such a frowning man, he had extremely expressive eyebrows.

  I couldn’t argue. “I swear, until this week I’ve barely raised my voice in years, and only then when I was trying to get some kid from the other side of the playground.”

  “Pretty sure that’s not healthy either.”

  “Healthier than sacrificing defenceless phones.” I shrugged. “Thanks for the save.”

  He was still looking at me thoughtfully. He said, “You look like a man in need of a drink.”

  I blinked at him.

  He gave me an uncertain smile. “It’s Friday, it’s gone five, and you’re obviously having a bad week. Pub?”

  “Oh God, yes,” I said without thinking, then had to hold back the urge to smack myself in the head. Bad enough to come across as a hysteric with anger-management issues, but now he probably thought I had a drinking problem too.

  His smile grew a little. “There’s the pub up in Newcastleton, but I like the Hue and Cry down the other way. It’s five minutes more to drive, but it’s less touristy.”

  “Yeah?” I was feeling a little flustered. It was just a friendly offer, not a date. Only the atrophied state of my social life would make me think differently.

  “I’ll drive. Go and lock up. I’ll be holding your phone hostage.”

  I hurried back up to Vainguard with a little more bounce in my step. Whatever crazy conspiracy theories were still churning in my head, Niall Forster’s cautious smile was a nice distraction.

  I should have emailed Felix with photos of Vainguard and a casual query about what exactly Martyn Armstrong had said about me. Instead I made a quick tour to shut all the windows and lock the doors, then closed my laptop with no further ado.

  I was heading back through the barmkin when I heard a faint sound from the corner. I turned to look, squinting across the slanting shafts of low light.

  The tower door was open again.

  For a moment, I froze. Then, very reluctantly, I approached it.

  There was no sound from within, but I could feel the weight of the darkness pressing at me even out here. Carefully, I reached out and pushed the door closed.

  It thudded back into place. I fumbled through my ring of keys and locked it before backing away quickly.

  I didn’t look back as I stepped outside, but I had the same crawling sensation on the back of my neck as I’d had that morning in the woods, the same bone-deep conviction that something was watching me. Leaving my car parked in the yard, I took off at a quick stride. It was another of those sultry summer evenings where the heat lies heavy in the valleys for the rest of the night. All the same, it was less cloying here than it had been at home.

  There. That was something positive to focus on.

  Forster was waiting in the front seat of the van when I got back to the lodge. I swung up into the seat beside him, and said, “Lay on, Macduff.”

  “Wrong side of the border for that,” he said. “We’re English on this side of the burn.”

  “We crossing the border on the way to the pub?”

  “No. This one’s all English, though it was a gathering point for a few hot trods.”

  “A few what?”

  He turned us down the main road to the south. “You know any border lore?”

  “I’ve got a copy of Steel Bonnets on my Kindle, but I haven’t started reading it yet.”

  “So if I told you that you were free to pursue a hot trod if you set up a hue and cry?”

  “I’d sit back politely and let you explain it.”

  “If the reivers came sweeping in, back in the day, you had six days when it was legal to chase them back over the border and retrieve your stolen cattle. It had rules, though—you had to proceed openly with hound and horn, hue and cry, and there was a fair chance they would turn around and chase you back again, no matter what the law said.” His tone was dry, but I detected a hint of delight in the old story.

  “Interesting times,” I said. “So, what’s the story with the pub?”

  “Legend has it that it used to be a hideout for Hobbie Noble, famed in song for cunning and courage, who rescued Jock o’ the Syde from the clutches of the wicked Scots, carrying him away chains and all. Later it was a good point to muster—not so close to the border to be seen from Liddesdale but close enough that you could be across and striking deep before the signals went up to rouse the Elliots and Armstrongs in response.”

  “And I assume the Scots are always wicked in these songs, and the English poor wronged innocents.”

  “Depends on the song. They were both as bad as the other. They raided their own country as well as over the border, both sets of them, and there was always a chance they’d fall in with a cousin from the other country and decide to switch sides for a while.”

  “Lovely folk.”

  “Survivors in a hard country.”

  “Ancestors of yours?”

  “Of most people round here.” We were running between deep slopes of forest now, fir trees in every direction. “Population’s declined over the last fifty years, though. There are Armstrongs and Forsters in every village on this side still and o
ther Armstrongs and Elliots on the far side, but hardly enough to form a quiz team, let alone a raiding party.”

  “No jobs for the kids?”

  “Yeah, and it’s not the kind of place people retire to. Bit of farming, bit of forestry, bit of tourism. That’s it.”

  “And some really cutthroat quiz nights?” I asked.

  He laughed again. “Just steer clear of the ukulele band and you should make it out alive.”

  The pub stood at a crossroads. It was old, but if it had ever been the hideout of a notorious outlaw, little hint of that harsher existence remained. It was a low whitewashed building with its ground-floor windows barely at knee height. A single-story extension might have been stables once. The chalkboard by the door announced the times when food was served and upcoming events, which sure enough included a Wednesday Quiz Night and a Saturday afternoon ukulele band.

  At five thirty on a summer Friday, it was slowly starting to fill up. The car park contained more trucks and vans than cars, and the bar, when we entered, was stiflingly warm, with worn wooden boards underfoot. The walls were covered with an eclectic muddle of old photos of the local area, stuffed fish in glass cases, old beer mats, battered tin signs advertising beers from past decades, and, for some reason which probably only made sense if you were local, row upon row of bright-feathered fishing flies.

  A few long looks came our way from the handful of folks leaning on the bar as I followed Forster to the bar. I tried to ignore them.

  “Usual?” the barman asked.

  “Aye,” Forster said and jerked his shoulder at me. “This one’s come up from London to see to old Martyn Armstrong’s place.”

  That got a few murmurs from elsewhere in the pub, but most of the starers looked away.

  I ordered a pint of the local brew, and we headed out into the sunlight. Half the tables in the rear garden were full. Forster led us away from the little playground where several kids were scrambling over a climbing frame. We settled in the back corner of the garden, and I lifted my face to the sun and breathed in.

  “Shade will come around in twenty minutes or so,” Forster said. “Still warm, aye?”