Strangers at the Gate

by Catriona McPherson

  Lovatt’s face was hidden against her collarbone, as if he was seeking comfort there. You might have thought that, if he was moving. If he was breathing. But the back of his tweedy jacket was stone still, and in the middle of it, right on the seam, a knife handle stood poking up out of a stain so dark it looked black, even in the bright lights beating down. Another knife, dull with blood, lay under his hand. He was still half gripping it. At least, his fingers were curled around the handle. As we watched, a single bead of blood ran the length of the blade and dropped, with a tiny shimmer, into the pool of red on the floor.

  ‘My phone,’ I said, surprised by the croak of my own voice. I patted my pockets, searching for its comforting weight. ‘Nine nine nine.’

  ‘No!’ Paddy’s voice was another toad’s croak, just like mine. He turned and looked at me, his face so white I could see every little iron-filing speck of his stubble, so white his eyes looked yellow and his teeth grey, as he grimaced. ‘No,’ he said again. ‘No police. I can’t. We need to get out of here, Finn. I can explain everything. I will explain everything. But we need to get out of here now. We need to go.’

  I felt as if I was floating up out of my body. There was a rushing sound in my ears, like the sea in a shell. It was deafening me. I saw Paddy’s mouth move but couldn’t hear the words. Too good to be true. I’d said that, hadn’t I? There’s a reason things look too good to be true.

  ‘What?’ I said at last, shaking the sea-sound and the memory out of my head.

  ‘I should have told you,’ Paddy was saying. ‘I’m sorry. But we really, really need to get out of here.’

  ‘Should have told me what?’

  ‘Not now. We need to go. Trust me. I’ll explain. I should have told you before. I’ll tell you now, I promise. But please, Finnie.’

  ‘Should have told me before,’ I repeated. I stared at him for a long moment, then plucked my cuff down over my knuckles and wiped where I had put my hand on the edge of the island.

  ‘Thank God, thank God,’ he said. He made it sound like one word, speaking on a massive breath he was letting go. ThankGodthankGod.

  He took my arm and pulled me out of the kitchen, along the corridor, swiping up my bag from where it sat on the carpet, and out through the half-glass door.

  ‘It doesn’t change anything,’ he said. His words were still tumbling over each other. ‘I’m sorry. I should have told you.’

  I wiped the door handle with the end of my scarf and we started walking.

  ‘Tell me now,’ I said. ‘Start at least.’

  ‘I’ve never been to Canada.’

  I have no idea if the sound I made was a gasp or some kind of twisted laugh. ‘Me neither,’ I said.

  We walked in silence the rest of the way.

  Chapter 4

  Paddy locked and bolted the front door while I checked the back. Then we met in the kitchen, where no one passing on the road would see the light. No one going up the drive would see it either. But anyone skulking out there in the trees – it wasn’t a deer – would see everything: the unshaded bulb, the boxes and bubble wrap, the two of us stark-faced, standing staring at one another.

  ‘Okay, explain everything,’ I said. I had walked down the drive steadily enough, but as I spoke I started to shake. I leaned against the sink and covered my face with my hands but, no matter how hard I pressed, I couldn’t get the image to disappear from behind my eyes. Tuft’s open mouth. Her gashed hands. The jaunty swoop of her pleated skirt. The knife bisecting Lovatt’s jacket on the seam.

  When I took my hands away, tears were pouring down Paddy’s face. ‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘I don’t know where to start. I can’t even think straight. What happened? How could that happen in the time it took us to…?’ He was staring at the floor as if he might find the answers there.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. I’d seen domestic abuse before, of course. At work. I’d seen a woman’s jaw dislocated so far she couldn’t close her mouth, a man’s back covered with bruises from his wife pinching him all night long as he lay turned away and curled up in their double bed, his hands pressed between his knees. And I knew it could start in a flash, especially at the end of a long night’s drinking. I knew people put on a face in public. But, still, I couldn’t believe those two people – those two old people – had done that to each other. If I hadn’t just seen it with my own eyes, I’d swear it couldn’t be.

  ‘Maybe,’ I said, at last, ‘maybe one of them had early dementia. Lovatt. He was older, right? There can be violence with that. Maybe that’s why he brought you into the firm. Maybe. And she was defending herself. The police will sort it out, Paddy.’

  His head jerked up and his eyes flashed. ‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘I can’t. I told you.’

  ‘Shh,’ I said, as if I was talking to a baby. ‘Hush now. We have to. I know you panicked. I panicked too. They’ll question us and they’ll pull our records and there might be press. But what we need to do is tell each other everything and then it’ll be okay. Won’t it? No surprises. It’ll be okay.’

  Paddy said nothing, just kept staring at me. This was a new kind of seesaw. If he was going to fall apart I’d need to hold it together. Somehow. I went through to the living room and came back with that bottle of Tesco’s port I’d been all set to take up there as a present, to share with them. Laughing and telling stories.

  I slopped some into a mug and pushed it into Paddy’s hands. He took it but didn’t drink. I knocked mine back in two gulps.

  ‘I’ll go first,’ I said. ‘I got in the habit of saying I’d been in Canada to cover a hole in my employment history.’ I checked my mug, but there wasn’t a drop left in it. ‘A decade back, I had a car crash. No one was badly hurt, but I got a year.’

  ‘For dangerous driving?’ Paddy said. Talking about the law had got through the wall of shock.

  ‘I was over the limit.’

  ‘That’s six months.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘It’s hard. I’m scared you’ll hate me.’ I waited for him to say that was impossible, and when he said nothing I went on: ‘Drink-driving and failure to report.’

  ‘You crashed when you were pissed and drove away?’ Did he know how harsh it sounded when he put it like that? I couldn’t look at him. ‘But six months for each should have run concurrently.’

  ‘Well, they didn’t,’ I said, still looking at my feet. ‘I didn’t know no one was badly hurt when I took off.’

  ‘Bloody useless lawyer you had.’

  I looked up and felt my eyes fill. He was still pale and his cheeks were still wet but he was smiling at me.

  ‘It was the Church of Scotland prison chaplain that turned it round for me. It took longer than six months too,’ I said. ‘So the year was a blessing.’

  ‘Who all knows?’ he said, sounding as if he was shifting into a higher gear.

  ‘My family,’ I told him. ‘My parents and my brothers, I mean, not the aunties and cousins.’ They’d taken the crash, the court case and the prison sentence in their stride. But when it came to ‘kicking the Pope in the nuts’ – my dad’s expression – I had finally managed to shock them. ‘Work knows. They had to.’ A shadow crossed Paddy’s face. I thought I understood it. ‘Sorry!’ I said. ‘I know I should have told you too. Canada was a stupid lie I used for strangers. I’ve got an auntie over there. And then when you said you were a lawyer, I thought you’d run a mile. I knew I should tell you. I knew it would blow up in my face one day.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ Paddy said. ‘It’s all over and done with.’

  ‘I take it your thing’s nothing legal,’ I said. ‘Since you are a lawyer.’ He said nothing. ‘Aren’t you?’

  ‘Yep,’ he came out with at last. A clipped little hitch of a sound. ‘I am. Just. By the skin of my teeth.’

  ‘So where were you when you weren’t in Canada?’ I said, when I realised he wasn’t going to say any more.

  ‘Brent Alpha.’

  I echoed the sounds silently to myself
. They didn’t make any sense at first. Then: ‘Oh! The oil rig? When was this?’

  ‘Finished two years ago,’ he said. ‘The night we met I was celebrating getting back to work as a solicitor.’

  I remembered my first impression of high spirits and a hard body, calloused hands. I knew he’d got softer round the middle in the time since, but then so had I. ‘Why were you on an oil rig?’

  ‘Because I needed the money. I had to pay off a loan.’

  ‘But what kind of lo—’ I began.

  He cut me off. ‘I made a mistake. With a client’s assets. And I got burned.’ It was as if every clipped little sentence took a whole breath to say. In between them he had to haul in another one. ‘The client died. I had to come up with—’ His breath ran out completely.

  I pushed up off the sink and dragged myself across the few feet of floor as if I was scaling a cliff. I pulled his head down onto my shoulder. He slumped, a sandbag weight against me, and spoke into my neck. ‘I had to come up with a shedload of cash or lose my job. I managed to get a loan, but the only way to pay it off in time was to leave my job anyway and work three years on the rigs.’

  ‘Three years?’

  ‘So now you see why partner before forty means so much to me. This chance. This new beginning.’

  But that wasn’t what I was thinking at all. What I was thinking was, how much money had he – what did he call it? – ‘made a mistake’ with, that it took three years’ oil pay to clear it? And another little thought was wriggling away underneath that one that I couldn’t face right now.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ was what I said instead.

  ‘I didn’t tell anyone. “Canada,” was what I always said. Like you. Everyone’s got an auntie in Canada. And I avoided Canadians like yellow snow. I nearly didn’t call you back after St Patrick’s night.’ He squeezed me. ‘But I thought I’d chance a second date. Then a third. And you never talked about it. Then after, when you and me got serious, it never seemed like the right time to come clean. Like you said too.’

  ‘Does your mum know?’

  Paddy’s breath was hot on my neck as he huffed out a bitter laugh. ‘She chooses not to. For God’s sake, don’t say anything to her.’

  ‘Does your work know? Does – did Lovatt know?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Paddy. ‘I came clean about it to him and I still got the job. That’s another reason it meant so much to me. It really was a completely new start. I can’t believe it.’ He pulled away from me and started pacing up and down the kitchen. ‘New start! One bloody day and then this nightmare. This’ll finish me, Finnie. This’ll—’

  ‘Wait, though,’ I said. He stopped pacing and turned to face me. ‘You managed to cover the “mistake”, right? You made it good? With the loan? And you paid it off? So the police and the courts never got involved? Right?’

  ‘Right,’ said Paddy.

  ‘So why did you panic about calling them? Up there.’ I flashed on the scene again, the red drop splashing into the red pool, the colour of her teeth, nicotine and drying blood.

  ‘There was talk,’ Paddy said. He was back to those little bursts of speaking. ‘It’s a small place. Edinburgh. As far as lawyers go. I had friends who’d vouch. But there was talk.’

  ‘Of what?’ I said. I was thinking here was the reason he’d never dragged me to lawyers’ parties. I’d thought they bored him too. But, really, he wasn’t welcome. Because of the talk.

  ‘What’s going on in that head of yours?’ he said. ‘I’m sorry, Finnie. I really am sorry, you know.’

  ‘Talk of what?’ I asked again. ‘Why would a financial “mistake” have anything to do with what’s happened tonight?’

  ‘I’d started to put it right off my own bat,’ Paddy said.

  ‘Good. That’s good, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes. But the timing was bad. I went to see the client. At home. She wasn’t able to come to the office and she was far too set in her ways to have any truck with email. I went to see her, to work on her will. But I couldn’t get in. She didn’t answer the door. I went back to the office and … call it a hunch. I started clearing up the mess I’d made. I’d already cleared it up when the news came out.’

  ‘That she’d died,’ I said.

  ‘In her sleep,’ said Paddy. ‘In her bed. Of natural causes.’

  ‘But your colleagues thought…?’

  ‘Bosses, in those days,’ Paddy said. ‘They didn’t know for sure, but they suspected I saw her dead, or even saw her die, and that was why I straightened everything out in time.’

  ‘The mistake,’ I said. ‘The mistake you made.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Paddy. ‘I was trying to make her money work harder for her. I was trying to help her. I liked her. We hit it off together. She’d had a rough start. Like me.’

  I nodded. I’d liked the look of Paddy that first night in the pub. But what kept me going back after we were both sober was that I trusted him. He was a straight arrow, a plain dealer, honest as the day is long at midsummer in Iceland. He told me what his hopes and dreams were, his fears and sorrows. He told me what embarrassed him and what annoyed him. He told me what he thought about religion, organised and personal, and never tried to spin it so he would seem like a better fit for a deacon.

  ‘I thought you were the most truthful person I’d ever met in my life,’ was all I said.

  ‘I am,’ said Paddy. ‘And now you know why. Like I know why you’re you.’ Then he frowned. ‘But, truthful or not, I’m going down anyway. I’ll never survive another scandal.’

  ‘You’ve forgotten something,’ I said. He raised his eyebrows at me. ‘You’ve got me now. You’ve got me rooting for you.’

  Finally, he picked up the mug of port I’d given him and swigged it.

  ‘You’re right about calling the police,’ he said. ‘Of course we have to. So here’s what we tell them: we moved here on Saturday. We went for dinner. You left your bag. We went back. We saw them. We phoned.’

  ‘Except we didn’t. We panicked. We came home.’

  ‘Right. We came home, we locked the doors and we phoned.’ Paddy took his phone out. I watched him prod three times at the key pad. With his finger hovering over the call button he looked up at me. ‘So we shouldn’t say your bag was out on the hallstand, right? We should say we went into the kitchen to get it from where you’d left it hooked on your chair.’

  ‘The kitchen chairs are the wrong shape for hooking,’ I said. ‘If you’re going to give details they need to be right. Don’t dial yet.’

  He nodded and, very carefully, he put the phone down.

  ‘Why did we come home?’ I said. ‘Why didn’t we phone from up there?’

  ‘We could tell them we only saw the bodies at a glance.’ He was talking slowly. ‘We didn’t look long enough to work out what had happened. And we thought they’d both been attacked by someone else.’

  ‘Right! And we were too scared to stay there. That’s right. That’s what we’ll say. We left because we were too scared to stay in that house.’

  ‘We walked back down the dark drive because we were scared?’ he said. ‘They’ll never believe that.’

  He swirled the dregs of his port in the bottom of the mug.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘They’ll never believe that. So what will we say?’

  Paddy shrugged, not meeting my eye.

  ‘When you think about it,’ I went on, after a while, ‘there’s no rush. They killed each other. They’re both dead.’ I waited, no idea what his answer would be.

  ‘There’s nothing for the police to investigate anyway,’ he said eventually.

  ‘No emergency,’ I added.

  For a long, still moment we stared at each other.

  ‘No need to phone at all,’ I said.

  And I saw Paddy’s shoulders drop. As if this was some huge relief. As if it had come out of nowhere. As if this wasn’t on the cards from the moment I wiped my fingerprints off the edge of the hob and the inner door handle. From the momen
t we walked away.

  Chapter 5

  ‘So … did we go for dinner even?’ Paddy said.

  We had wandered through in the dark and were sitting side by side on the couch, not touching. We hadn’t lit a fire since we’d moved in and the smell of the ashy grate made my stomach turn over. What century was this? Setting wood alight in the corner of your living room to keep warm. What were we doing here?

  We were finding out we didn’t know each other. How could Paddy not tell me about three years in the North Sea? Somewhere underneath the shock – her skirt kicked up and the blood pooling – that was nagging at me. But, then, I hadn’t told him about my two times six months. And I knew how easy it had been. You just pushed it down so deep it was like it never happened. But I also knew what the pushing cost. So, even though this was the second worst night of my life, I felt the weight lift off me. No more secrets.

  ‘Finnie?’ Paddy was saying. ‘Did we?’

  ‘Depends. If anyone else heard we were going, we should say we went, right? Did anyone?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Paddy said. ‘I don’t think so. Lovatt never mentioned it when he left the office. It was only when Tuft offered me a lift home. She thought of it on the spur of the moment, I think. I don’t know.’

  ‘You’ll soon be able to tell,’ I said. ‘When you go in in the morning. Won’t someone ask you how it went? If they knew it was on.’

  Paddy rested his head on the back of the couch and blew out a long, shaky breath. ‘Right. When I go in in the morning.’ I could tell he was running over the office staff in his mind. I had always been able to tell what Paddy was thinking, from about our third date onwards. Lovatt was the only other partner, but there was Abby the trainee, and Julie in the front office. ‘I’ll go in, and when he doesn’t turn up we’ll phone, and when he doesn’t answer his phone, I’ll offer to come back and see what’s what. If anyone heard that we were going up for dinner they’re bound to mention it by then, right?’