Strangers at the Gate

by Catriona McPherson

  I smiled. ‘Finnie Lamb,’ I said, shaking his hand. ‘Yes, we moved in on Saturday.’

  ‘You’ll excuse my wife,’ he told me. ‘She would have been up with a batch of scones but she’s got a stomach bug. Running at both ends.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, wishing I hadn’t touched him. ‘Sorry to hear that.’

  ‘And where are you off to up that way?’

  ‘Just getting a breath of fresh.’

  ‘You’ve not started your work, then? I thought it was fulltime for that money.’

  ‘Oh. I— Well, I start on the fifteenth,’ I told him, although I couldn’t imagine why he needed to know. ‘Are you on the committee?’

  ‘No, that’s incomers do that. I’m an elder. They don’t come to the likes of me for committees. Same do when you were interviewed. I wasn’t part of all that. St Angela’s.’ The scorn was thicker than the bonfire smoke.

  ‘Mrs Dudgeon—’ I started, knowing that Lovatt had been born here and was no incomer. Born here and died here, a voice in my head said.

  ‘Aye, those and such as those,’ said the man. ‘If it was left to Simmerton folk we’d have been looking after Simmerton folk.’

  ‘I’d have thought you’d be proud to have something like St Angela’s in your town,’ I said.

  ‘It’s not in our town,’ said the man. ‘It’s up Stirling way.’ As if Stirling was over the far horizon. But I’d met people just like him more times than I could remember: our street, our block, our landing.

  ‘Stirling,’ I repeated. That answered one niggling thought I’d been having. I’d wondered why, if it was a big enough deal to get us our jobs, I’d never heard of it.

  ‘Nothing to do with us down here,’ the man said.

  ‘Well, I mustn’t keep you,’ I said, stirring myself.

  He gave me a hard stare. ‘There’s nothing dragging you away. Next door’s at work. He’s the cowman over the Mains and she’s a teaching assistant at the school. They’ve three weans all at the high school now.’

  ‘Nice,’ I said. ‘Noisy for you, though.’

  ‘Oh, we like it. Children playing. We never had any of our own, Myna and me.’

  I tried again. ‘Well, it was nice to meet you, Mr…’

  ‘Sloan,’ he said. ‘I’ll see you at Sunday service if not before.’

  ‘Tell Mrs Sloan I hope she feels better soon.’ This time I was firmer and started walking.

  ‘Next door’ was another cottage joined onto the Sloans’. Behind the high, panelled fence it had in place of a hedge, the front garden was full of dirt bikes and skateboards. I thought about the racket three teenagers would make through the connecting wall.

  Why would anyone think I was out on a walk up a country lane to meet people anyway? I asked myself. Nature was what this was all about. I picked up a couple of pine cones, to back myself up, but they were soft, rotten on one side.

  When the panel fence ran out I was expecting the forest to press in again but, instead, the orange-stained boards gave way to another hedge. This one I recognised. It was holly. Six-foot-high bushes of it, full of birds tugging at the few wrinkled berries it still had left. I’d only ever seen it in florists’ for a fiver a bunch, or sprigs stuck in wreaths and candle-holders.

  There was a sign on the gate, a piece of driftwood painted like a rainbow, multi-coloured letters spelling out ‘Bairnspairt’. I mouthed the unfamiliar word and looked back towards Mr Sloan, thinking it odd that he wouldn’t mention another neighbour. Then I remembered Tuft – the flash of her face, her open mouth, her skirt swept up to the side. It came as swift and sharp as ever and it took an effort to drive my mind back to the thought I’d been chasing. She had definitely said, or Lovatt had said – the awkward slump of him over his wife and the horrible spike of the knife in the seam of his jacket – ‘a pair of cottages’. The gardener lived in one and the housekeeper lived in the other and the people walked their dogs in the grounds of the house.

  Taking that as a guide to country manners, I went over to the gate and peered in. This wasn’t the neat boast of a garden tidied away for the winter and all the last leftovers burning. It wasn’t the wasteland left by three teenagers with bikes and boards either. This place had vegetables growing in big boxes – misshapen stalks of Brussels sprouts looking like shillelaghs and lacy-leafed cabbages the size of car tyres – and seemed to have half a dozen blanket forts dotted around too. I leaned right over the gate to get a good look up the winding path to the house. It was definitely connected to Widdershins. It had the same latticed window panes as the gate lodge, and the paint peeling off the front door was the same liverish red as the paint peeling off our rusty gates, the same colour as the half-timbering, Paddy called it, on the Agatha Christie house. I gazed at it. Why would people pretend it didn’t exist? The lights were on here too, glowing dimly. Maybe behind those windows was another—

  ‘There’s no one in.’

  The voice made me jump and I turned to find a woman standing right behind me, smiling. She was stunning, white as a candle with black hair and red lips, eyes hidden behind sunglasses.

  ‘Are you…’ I began, but my voice sounded thin and far away and the next thing I knew my shoulder had banged against the rainbow name-sign and the woman was crouched down straightening my legs out from under me, cradling the back of my head in her mittened hand.

  Chapter 7

  ‘Did I just faint?’ I said. I had never fainted in my life.

  ‘You went down like a barrel of stout,’ the woman said. She was crouched beside me in a deep squat, like women in India can do for hours, her knees round her ears pushing at the brim of her hat so it lifted off her head. ‘I’m really sorry I startled you. Are you pregnant?’

  ‘Bloody hope not,’ I said. ‘Does that actually happen in real life?’

  ‘Nah, right enough,’ she said. ‘Did you hurt anything?’

  ‘Pride,’ I said. ‘Jeans, maybe.’

  The woman laughed and stood up again, holding her hands out. ‘Try it,’ she said. I took hold and she hauled me to my feet. She was strong even though she was a head shorter than me. ‘How do you feel?’

  ‘Fine,’ I said. Her sunglasses were blue-tinted so it was hard to tell but my two little reflections looked fairly grim. ‘I can’t think what caused that.’ It was a lie. I knew exactly what had caused it: the thought of the twelve hours gone by in the kitchen up at Widdershins, the changes taking place. Stiffening, softening again. Drying. Darkening.

  ‘Whoa!’ the woman said, grabbing me as I swayed. ‘Look, come in and have a cup of tea, at least, hey?’

  ‘This is your house?’ I said. ‘Sorry, I was just—’

  ‘Oh, please,’ she said. ‘You didn’t even go inside the gate. I’ve had a right old truffle round the gatehouse while it’s been empty. Only natural.’

  ‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘I am from the gate lodge. Finnie Lamb.’

  ‘Deacon of the kirk, solicitor’s missus,’ she told me. We were halfway to the cottage door now. ‘I’m Shannon. Shannon Mack.’

  I took a closer look but still couldn’t fathom her. She could have been any age between twenty and fifty and she still looked as if she had a spotlight trained on her.

  ‘I like your garden,’ I said. The nearest blanket fort was made of an antique-looking patchwork quilt.

  ‘Keeps the frost off the bananas,’ she said, although I hadn’t asked.

  ‘Bananas,’ I repeated. She opened the front door and ushered me in. The house smelt strongly of incense and curry powder, and the battered armchairs in the living room had Indian bedspreads thrown over them. There were even bookshelves made of bricks and planks. And the windows were draped with red, blue and purple scarves, turning the rooms cave-like in the winter light.

  ‘Sit yourself,’ she said, taking off her hat and unwinding a long scarf. ‘Sweet tea coming up.’ I shoved aside a heap of pillows and a duvet and settled on the couch.

  The décor and incense went with camomile and a dol
lop of honey but when Shannon came back she brought a good big mug of strong builder’s and my first sip was a hit of pure white sugar. ‘Ooh, ta,’ I said. ‘I think I’m just tired. We moved in on Saturday and we’ve been at it pretty much full on.’

  ‘Are you waiting on a call?’ she said. I hadn’t realised I was checking my phone. I laid it face down on the arm of my chair and wiped my hand on my jeans. If Paddy took ten minutes to get to work, then say twenty minutes to wonder where Lovatt was and discuss it with the rest of the staff, he’d be getting close to setting off again to check by now.

  ‘Occupational hazard,’ I said.

  ‘What exactly does a deacon do?’ said Shannon. ‘If you don’t mind me asking.’

  ‘Not at all!’ I was on safer ground now. ‘We do outreach work, youth work, pastoral work, liaise with other agencies to arrange social care.’

  ‘In Simmerton?’ she said. ‘That sounds like something for deprived areas.’

  ‘Usually,’ I said. She was echoing exactly what I’d thought on my first visit, except we didn’t call them deprived any more. Of course, that trip had been in November, with late roses still blooming and fingers of light still filtering through the trees in the mid-afternoon. Now, in January, when Simmerton was battened down and bleak-looking, it was easier to believe it needed me.

  ‘The only thing Simmerton’s deprived of is sunshine,’ Shannon said, as though she’d read my mind. ‘Perfect for me. Is that what you were going to ask? Before you blacked out there, you said “Are you…”’

  I shot her a look, because even in the lamplight, away from the fog, she really did have skin as white as snow, hair as black as pitch and lips as red as rubies.

  ‘I was going to ask, “Are you real?” actually,’ I said. ‘You looked like something from a fairytale.’

  ‘Ha!’ she said. ‘No, I’m not real. It’s all fake. Hair, brows, lashes.’

  ‘And coloured contacts?’ Her eyes, now she’d taken off the sunglasses, were violet. Or at least they looked violet in the shaded light shining through the scarves.

  ‘No, the peepers are mine, funky colour, failing eyesight and all. I’m an albino. As we’re not supposed to say, these days. I’m a “person with albinism”.’

  ‘Oh!’ I said. ‘It sui— Would it be wrong to say it suits you?’

  ‘In winter it does,’ she said. ‘But come summer I’ll be slathered in fake tan. I get no end of snash on the albino boards for it. Well, sod them all. Did you know how Simmerton got its name?’

  ‘Must be ironic,’ I said. ‘Bloody freezing in January.’

  Shannon wrinkled her nose at me. ‘I thought you’d be too holy to swear. No, it started out as “Summertown”, because the sun only gets up above the sides of the valley from May to September.’

  ‘Is that why you chose it? You’re not from here, are you?’

  ‘Glasgow,’ she said.

  ‘And what do you do down here?’

  ‘I run a business. Well, a couple of businesses. Come and see.’

  She brushed through a doorway under a garland of prayer flags and disappeared along a short corridor lined with more bookshelves. At its end, she threw open a door onto blinding whiteness. The walls and ceiling shone, and in the middle of the floor a trolley bed was covered with a white sheet. Above it, swinging on a mechanical arm, was a solid block of something electronic I couldn’t understand.

  ‘What is it?’ I said, thinking of death chambers and shock treatments.

  ‘It’s a UV saturation unit,’ she said. ‘For people with SAD.’

  ‘You sell sunlight?’

  ‘By the hour,’ she said. ‘First session’s free.’

  ‘And are there enough SAD people in Simmerton to make a living?’

  ‘I live cheap,’ Shannon said. ‘Peppercorn rent and a garden full of veg. I’ve got chickens round the back and I sell the excess.’

  ‘Eggs?’

  ‘And chicken,’ she said, with a grin that had just a touch of relish in it, or so I thought anyway.

  ‘I was going to say,’ I said, veering away from the idea, ‘you’re lucky to have such a big patch. We’ve got ten feet and then a wall of pine trees. And Mr Sloan and the other cottage are right squeezed in at the side of the road. Your garden’s massive.’

  ‘It was the quarry,’ Shannon said. ‘All the stone to build Jerusalem was carved out of here.’

  ‘To build what?’

  Shannon laughed, closed the door on the white room and headed back to the armchairs by the stove, the mugs of tea. ‘Jerusalem House. When the Dudgeon estate was intact, it was all over this valley. The main house was a big stone mansion up a cut on the other side. It’s a shell now. Uninhabitable. All that’s left is over in this cut: the dower house, this place, the two cottages and your gate lodge. And the trees, of course. Just the one or two pine trees. As you might have noticed.’

  ‘Widdershins is a dower house?’ I said.

  ‘The Widow’s Portion,’ said Shannon.

  ‘Ah,’ I said. That was the gateposts deciphered. But I couldn’t let myself think about a widow or a widower. One way or another, someone had lived a few moments of agony up there in that kitchen. Either Tuft, with her slashed hands thrown wide and her mouth filling with blood, or Lovatt with the knife in his jacket seam and the black butterfly unfurling its wings over his back.

  ‘Of course, it doesn’t matter so much now the family’s died out,’ Shannon said.

  I put my mug down carefully on the edge of a bookshelf by my chair, shoving a couple of paperbacks further in to make room. ‘Died?’ I said, hoping she couldn’t hear the dry catch of my voice. Was the news out already?

  ‘There goes my Feminist of the Year award!’ said Shannon. ‘There might be a sister somewhere or an auntie. But no more Dudgeons. And Lovatt – have you met Lovatt? – isn’t going to pull a Charlie Chaplin and produce any nippers now. Not with Tuft anyway. That would be a medical miracle to end all. Have you met Tuft?’

  I tried to smile. ‘You know them quite well, then?’ I said, deflecting. I was wondering what had got Shannon her ‘peppercorn rent’, the way Paddy’s partnership had got us ours.

  ‘I know about them,’ said Shannon. ‘But I don’t want to tell you the story on your first day getting to know your new home. It’s not a very happy tale.’

  I was sure – or I wished I was sure – she didn’t mean their deaths. She couldn’t possibly. She was just a nice woman who didn’t gossip. She was friendly and funny. And yet I could feel – like a physical itch in my legs – a strong desire to get out of this cottage and away from her. Maybe it was the smell of curry powder and incense sticks. Maybe it was the syrupy sweet tea. I thought, the more I drank, that it had goat’s milk in it. Maybe the heat of the woodstove was getting to me. Or maybe waiting and waiting for Paddy to call, for the news to break, was just more than I could stand. I muttered thanks, and stood up.

  ‘That’s not the right way,’ Shannon said, when my hand was on the doorknob.

  I blinked, then looked again at the door I was facing. She was right. This wasn’t the way I had come in, but it looked like a solid front door, with a mortis lock and a pair of bolts.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said, pulling my hand back.

  ‘No worries,’ she said, waving a hand as she opened the door that did lead out to the garden. She was trying for airy now but she’d definitely said ‘a couple of businesses’, then only shown me one.

  I made it back to the gateposts in minutes flat, keeping my head tucked down in case Mr Sloan saw me. It had to be my imagination that the temperature dropped as I passed between them. Had to be, although I couldn’t help remembering that I’d thought the same thing last night: it was colder facing the house than it was facing away.

  ‘Widow’s Portion,’ I mouthed to myself and my thoughts were spinning again. Had Tuft been a widow? Had she lain under her husband’s slumped corpse, gasping for every wet breath, before she joined him?

  I slid my phone out of my
back pocket, checked the time, checked the volume, checked my message alert. It was after ten o’clock. What was Paddy doing? If I went back inside the cottage, how long was I going to have to sit there before he rang me?

  ‘Why not go for a nice walk up the other way?’ I said to myself. ‘Why live at the gate of a country estate and not go for lovely country walks? I’m sure the Dudgeons won’t mind. We’re neighbours and colleagues, after all.’

  So I didn’t go up the short path of chips towards my own front door. I set off up the drive to Widdershins again.

  Chapter 8

  It swallowed me like it swallowed the sunlight, deadening my footsteps and stilling the wind. A cut, Shannon had called it. Jerusalem House, derelict now, was up a cut on the other side of the Simmerton valley, and all that the Dudgeons owned now was here in this one. ‘Five houses,’ I said, ‘and one or two pine trees.’

  I had never seen them this way before, massed like an army, instead of standing in a bucket in the living room, twinkling and scented, or standing proud in the botanic gardens with a ring of needles, like a rug, on the wide velvet carpet of grass.

  Those trees had no needles at all. They had no branches to speak of. Well, stunted little spindly things that made a cat’s cradle between the trunks. I stopped walking, stood in the middle of the drive and looked up, no need to shade my eyes, at the dizzying dwindle of them, far above me. Up there was a suggestion of green, a sign of life, but down here not even the rain could penetrate. The drive and ditch were dark with damp, like all of Scotland in January, but two trees up the bank, the bark was pale and dusty, and cobwebs hung on those cat’s-cradle twig tips, as if the trees had died down here.

  But I needed to look where I was going, instead of gawping at the tree trunks, because surely the big puddle was coming soon. Yes, there it was, reflecting the white slit of sky above. And there at one edge were Paddy’s boot prints. And there at the other edge were mine. My heart rose into the base of my throat, bulbous and soft like an egg, choking me. We had wiped our fingerprints from the door handle and the edge of the kitchen island and left footprints leading to a murder scene.