Strangers at the Gate

by Catriona McPherson

  ‘Finnie!’ said the only man there, standing and coming towards me with his hand out. ‘I recognise you from your mug shot.’ The minister had asked for a close-up and I guessed he had put something in the parish letter or maybe even stuck me up on a notice-board.

  ‘Here we were, thinking if you were late today we could have ourselves sorted before you came!’ said a small woman, almost completely round except for her little legs and little short arms that looked as if she wouldn’t be able to clasp them across her front.

  ‘Are you elders?’ I addressed the question to the last of the three, Shannon, my neighbour, who was sitting at the foot of the table, knitting something lumpy and porridge-coloured on a circular needle.

  ‘Ho!’ said the round woman. ‘No, we’re the volunteers, aren’t we, Adam?’

  ‘We are the volunteers,’ the man agreed. ‘I’m Adam Webb. This is my lady wife, Sonsie. And Shannon Mack.’

  ‘Yes, I met Shannon yesterday.’ I smiled and sat down in the empty chair opposite her. The head of the table, more or less. ‘You’re the committee who raised the funds to pay for my job for its first year? Shannon, yesterday you were asking me what a deacon does. Were you … Were you checking up on me?’

  Sonsie – if that could actually be her name in a million years – started rumbling. But Shannon put down her knitting and laughed. ‘I’ve only been on the committee for seven minutes,’ she said. ‘Adam and Sonsie weren’t even sure if they could vote me on, just their two selves. I liked what you said yesterday. I didn’t know there was anything like that going on here. But when you told me there was, I decided I wanted in.’

  I could have wept. That was the quickest I’d ever recruited a volunteer in my puff and it was all for nothing. By the time the truth came out about Lovatt and Tuft, this parish would be in ruins.

  ‘You’ve done a grand job for such a small committee,’ I said, turning away from Shannon. Adam smoothed his moustache with the side of one index finger, but not in a villainous way. I thought he was comforting himself. His wife looked angry.

  ‘We’re not that small,’ she said. ‘There’s someone missing. Mrs Dudgeon is the chair but she’s … in the wind.’

  ‘Dudgeon?’ I said. ‘The same Dudgeon as the lawyer? My husband told me he’d sloped off on a posh holiday.’

  ‘I could kill the both of them!’ Sonsie burst out.

  I had done so well, keeping my mind from coiling up the drive and into Widdershins that morning. The vision of them was beginning to loosen its grip on me and, as long as I didn’t think about it, I could almost forget they were up there. But Sonsie’s words smashed through it all. I felt sweat prick at my lip and my brow, and I knew my hands, splayed on the table, were seeping a dark print onto its pale surface. I couldn’t move them, but sitting there like I was at a séance wasn’t much better. And Shannon was watching me, her knitting abandoned in her lap. If I fainted again, there was no chance of her believing I was okay.

  ‘Sonia!’ her husband said. At least the name made sense now.

  ‘Ocht, I don’t mean it,’ Sonsie said. Shannon had started knitting again. I leaned forward, pretending to be fascinated by the pattern but really wiping away my handprints with my jacket sleeve. I was wearing my God suit, plain black with a dog-collar. It comforted me like Adam’s trim moustache did him. ‘I’m very fond of Tuft,’ Sonsie went on. ‘That’s Mrs Dudgeon’s name, Finnie. Tuft. She’s been good to Simmerton. And she saved Lovatt’s life, more or less.’

  There it was. The story Shannon hadn’t told me. The story Julie hadn’t told me.

  ‘Sonsie, there’s no need—’ Adam began.

  ‘There’s every need,’ his wife said. ‘Finnie needs to know what she’s dealing with. If you don’t want to hear it, you can go and do something else. There’s three boxes to be sorted before the shop opens.’

  Adam wasted no time getting out of the room. His crêpe-soled shoes squeaked across the café floor and we heard him speed up as he headed towards the other end of the annexe.

  Sonsie laughed. ‘Adam doesn’t trust the shop volunteers. Three years ago someone took delivery of a box of coasters with a cracked one and they glued it instead of returning it. He nearly had a fit.’

  ‘Army background?’ I said. There was something about the little moustache and the twinkling short hair above his shirt and tie.

  ‘Worse,’ said Sonsie. ‘Bank manager. I’m his second wife. We’re just like Lovatt and Tuft that way. Except there’s no heroics. Adam did a painting class at night school and I was the life model. Three years after his first wife ran off and left him. They didn’t have children. But he’s been a wonderful father to mine and he’s born to be a grandpa. He’s taught four of them to drive and they all passed first time.’ She sat back and it turned out her arms could meet in the middle. She clasped her hands and said, ‘So that’s me.’

  There was a wisp of emphasis on the last word. I took it and ran. ‘What d’you mean by heroics?’ I asked. I glanced at Shannon to see if she knew.

  ‘Poor Lovatt,’ Sonsie said, sitting forward again. ‘We’re nearly the same age, you know. Except I spend half my life in that dratted salon trying to hide the fact.’ She waited for one of us to praise her. Shannon gave a low whistle and Sonsie patted her curls. ‘Like I said, Tuft and Lovatt have no children. But Lovatt had children. He was a bachelor – oh, for years. Years and years. Then he came back with a wife and they settled at Jerusalem and had a little boy and a little girl. They’d be grown-up now, of course.’

  Shannon was concentrating on a complicated bit of her pattern, tracing the instructions with a forefinger and murmuring to herself. Whatever was coming, she knew it already.

  ‘Then Lovatt’s wife was taken ill,’ Sonsie said. ‘His first wife. She was a beauty. Very different lines from Tuft. She was Amazonian, like a thoroughbred. English, of course. Peaches and cream. Clean-limbed. Yes, she was just like a thoroughbred racehorse. And I know it shouldn’t make a difference, but it does.’

  ‘What was it?’ I said. ‘Cancer?’

  ‘Huntington’s,’ said Sonsie. ‘She went from striding about the high street in her riding boots to walking with two sticks just like that.’ Sonsie snapped her fingers. ‘Her lovely hair. She had this chestnut hair all down her back in big curls. It went like straw at the end.’

  ‘Poor Lovatt.’

  ‘Poor Denise!’ said Sonsie. ‘That was her name. Denise. Not a very smart name, I always thought. It didn’t really suit her. She was a very well-connected lady. Except she wasn’t. Do you see what I’m getting at, Finnie? Do you, Shannon?’

  We both shrugged.

  ‘It’s genetic, Huntington’s is. Only her father had died very young in an accident so she didn’t know it was in her family. But once she found out … Well, as I say, she was very well connected in one sense. She had lots of doctors in her social circle. And money. She had money. She had all the money, as it happened. Lovatt had the house and she had the cash.’

  ‘So … the doctors gave her the best of care?’ I said. I knew it was nothing so innocent. I had no idea where she was going, though. If I’d known I would have fled the room before I heard it.

  ‘See, you’re not allowed to be tested for it until you’re eighteen,’ Sonsie said. ‘There’s no cure anyway. And some people say, “Why find out? Why meet trouble halfway?” Well, Denise Dudgeon saw it differently. She didn’t think she’d still be alive, or at least not compos mentis, when the children were eighteen. So she leaned on her doctor friends and she had the tests done.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Were they okay?’

  Shannon’s knitting had slipped off her lap onto the floor and she hadn’t noticed.

  ‘They weren’t,’ Sonsie said. She had tears in her eyes. ‘They both had the gene.’ I sucked my breath in over my teeth. ‘So one night, when Lovatt was away from home, she gave them each some sleeping tablets and she took some sleeping tablets and then she lay down with them and set the bed alight with paraffin
. She burned Jerusalem House back to the stone.’

  I couldn’t breathe.

  ‘Wickedness,’ said Shannon. ‘They could have found a cure by the time the children showed symptoms. I mean, they haven’t. But she wasn’t to know that.’

  I gulped at the air but my throat was closed. It made sense now – Lovatt’s specialism, Tuft’s fundraising. St Angela’s. He had seen his own wife kill his children instead of letting someone stronger look after them. That would be enough to turn any man’s life into a mission. It made sense of something Tuft had said too, about scans and genetic testing and how she loathed them.

  ‘And because it was suicide,’ Sonsie was saying, ‘the insurance wouldn’t even pay out on the house. That’s why Lovatt and Tuft live up in the dower house by you, Finnie. Finnie? Are you okay?’

  I balled my fist and used it to thump myself in the middle of my chest. The shock of it kick-started my breathing.

  ‘Oh, that poor, poor woman,’ I said.

  ‘Tuft?’ said Sonsie.

  ‘Denise,’ I said. ‘She must have been in such torment.’

  None of us had noticed the door opening. The minister made all three of us jump with his pulpit voice.

  ‘Sonsie,’ he thundered. ‘I’m ashamed of you.’

  Chapter 12

  I knew I wasn’t his first choice. The other candidates for the deacon’s job were one man in his fifties who’d gone to the same Edinburgh school as Robert Waugh and one man in his forties who played golf as obsessively as Robert Waugh. The golf guy had pulled a couple of tees out of his pocket along with the loose change he was putting in the honesty box for his coffee and the pair of them spent the rest of the ‘refreshment reception’ practising swings and telling tall tales. I went to meet Paddy afterwards and gave him the thumbs-down from across the pub. When I got the job offer, in a text on the drive home, I couldn’t believe the other two had turned it down so quickly. Now, though, sitting in Waugh’s office getting scolded for gossiping, I found out different.

  ‘We took a chance on you, Finnie,’ he was saying. ‘Tuft was very keen to see the church embrace a diversity of views.’ I had no idea what that was supposed to mean, so I said nothing. ‘I was concerned that someone from a city background wouldn’t navigate small-town waters well. I was outvoted. And here I find you in the hen-house on your very first day.’

  Hen-house?

  ‘It must have seemed like gossip, Robert,’ I said. He blinked at me. Maybe I was supposed to wait until I was invited to use his first name. Tough. ‘But Sonsie was filling me in on something I think it’s essential for me to know. The history behind the Dudgeons’ close association with St Angela’s. I mean, that’s the explanation, isn’t it? Lovatt Dudgeon has dedicated his professional life to securing good homes and bright futures for the most difficult-to-place children?’

  I rubbed my hand over my brow, feeling a headache begin to settle there. That dedicated life was over, stopped by a knife lodged up to its hilt in his back. The strain of not letting the image flood my mind every minute was exhausting.

  ‘In front of strangers, though,’ Waugh said.

  ‘Shannon?’ I said. ‘She’s joined the volunteer committee.’ And a bit of me resented even giving him that much. If he had a problem with what Sonsie said and whom she’d said it in front of, he should be taking it up with her. ‘Would you like me to have a word with Sonsie on your behalf?’

  He flushed, didn’t like the implication that he needed my help. ‘That young woman might have elected to sit in on a meeting,’ he said, ‘but I approve committee members. And I’ll say anything that needs to be said.’

  ‘That seems like the best idea,’ I said. ‘More straightforward.’ I gave him a smile. He just about managed to give me one back. Then he pulled a thick file towards him and started, in clipped tones, filling me in on the other committees and working groups I was joining, giving me a set of notes to turn into a progress report on a mission twinning. I had suspected he saw getting a deacon as a way to drop all the boring bits of his own job. As he kept talking, though – interfaith initiative, care-home-visiting schedule, youth group – I started to wonder what bit of his job he was actually keeping.

  ‘We do the primary-school assembly every Thursday,’ he said, ‘and the high school on Mondays on a three-week rota along with Father Lymme and the Reverend Arthur Kayes, the Anglican. I wouldn’t throw you in at the deep end tomorrow but…’

  ‘Throw away,’ I said. ‘Is there a calendar of topics?’

  ‘I’m sure you’ll manage,’ he said idly. ‘Right, then.’ He sounded as if he had finished.

  ‘And then there’s St Angela’s.’ I was surprised he hadn’t mentioned it in his round-up.

  ‘St Angela’s is not under our remit,’ he said. ‘It’s a separate entity, with its own board. It’s not a Church concern.’

  ‘But we’re … Simmerton Kirk is partnering it, right?’ I said. ‘We’re a major sponsor and we coordinate the fundraising efforts?’ I knew my face creased with the sudden pain of remembering Tuft saying ‘money-laundering’ with a twinkle in her eye. The spark that was already dull when I saw her lying there and must be absolutely gone now.

  ‘Right, then,’ said Robert Waugh again. He didn’t seem to notice that I was awash with strong emotions. As far as he was concerned, I had stopped talking and that was good. He stood up and came round his desk with an arm extended to shepherd me out. ‘Let’s get on with it all, shall we?’

  ‘Let me at it,’ I said. Maybe he was the sort of minister who did a lot of home visits, although offloading the care home to me suggested not. Or perhaps he was painstaking about his sermons. But it was hard to resist the idea, when I saw his little car belting off a few minutes later, that he was headed up out of the valley to the nearest nine-hole course.

  Back in the café, Sonsie and Adam had disappeared. Shannon was wiping tables. I took my armload of folders to a quiet corner and sat down to study them. I had never had the time and space to read over paperwork before. At my last place, if I wasn’t sitting in A and E with someone, trying to get them to calm down before the nurses called the cops, I was trawling round charity shops, trying to get five kids kitted out for school with the forty quid I’d nicked from the slush fund, or persuade some drama queen to unlock the function-room toilets and come out, or talk some kid who’d snapped into coming down off the roof, or sitting in on the interdepartmental case meetings when the nurses had called the cops, or the fire service had broken down the toilet door or the local news-hounds had seen the kid on the roof and brought a camera.

  What was I doing here? I thought again, with a budget report on the Holy Land trip fundraising. The kind of parish that could afford to send delegations to Palestine didn’t need a deacon. If St Angela’s had been funded for all these years without my help, what did Tuft Dudgeon think I could do that was so important?

  Tuft.

  It had been thirty-six hours now. I hadn’t noticed whether the house was hot or cold on Monday night. Paddy’s mum’s was always frigid, windows open at the top, winter and summer the same, and the back door wide for hours after she’d cooked anything the least bit pungent, even though the extractor fan roaring away made sure there was no trace of dinner left anywhere. My mum and dad’s flat was sealed tight against the draughts, plastic secondary ‘glazing’ put on every October and not shifted till Easter. And every curry, every pair of my brothers’ trainers, every brimming ashtray, every manky relaxation candle my aunties brought over to ‘help’ my mum, all of it was there in every breath.

  But about the neat kitchen at Widdershins, I couldn’t remember. If they were really going away to Brazil, they’d have turned the thermostat down. But if that was a blind, maybe the kitchen was snug and cosy – the heart of their home – and they were already beginning to swell and rot, lying there. I had no idea if flies would swarm in January. If there were no flies, there would be no maggots. Maybe, if the kitchen was cold, they would just dry out and mummify.
Maybe in three weeks it would all be over and the remains – when someone finally broke in and found them – would be desiccated, mild.

  I turned one of the plastic sleeves over, as if I was reading, in case Shannon was watching. Surely it wouldn’t take the whole three weeks. Mr Sloan, walking his dog in the dark, would get suspicious of the lights blazing out night after night. Or walking his dog during the day, he’d wonder why they hadn’t put them on a timer.

  Someone would deliver a parcel or go to wash the windows. They couldn’t see anything – I knew that – but they would stretch in to put the parcel on the hallstand in the vestibule, or they would knock on the inner door, then wrinkle their nose, lean in closer and sniff deeply.

  Because, of course, Tuft and Lovatt wouldn’t just politely desiccate and mummify. Of course they wouldn’t be unobjectionable when they were found. Whether it was days away or if they made the whole three weeks, they would be what flesh is, what we all try so hard to pretend we’re not.

  ‘Penny for them?’ Shannon was standing in front of me with her spray bottle and cloth. ‘You’re miles away.’

  There was no point in pretending it wasn’t true. I had jumped a foot in the air when she spoke. ‘It’s what Sonsie said. I can’t get it out of my head.’ God forgive me, I thought, for using that story as cover.

  Shannon’s face clouded and she sat down opposite, letting the bottle and cloth drop onto the floor beside her. She was definitely wearing contacts today, her eyes bright green instead of amethyst. Her black hair, white skin and red lips were the same though. I still thought of fairytales. ‘She said more after you’d gone. They were just tiny, the kids.’