Strangers at the Gate

by Catriona McPherson

  ‘Right,’ I said. ‘Your other business.’ But we had got to the puddle and Shannon was concentrating on picking her way round it. Remembering the way I had snapped that twig off and churned up the ground at the gate lodge this morning, I took the chance to have a good look off into the trees. I was sure I could see the pale ends of broken branches. More than one of them. Exactly the tell-tale signs there would be if someone – Shannon? – had been up there watching us and knew I was lying now. Maybe I should pay her back, just as sneaky.

  ‘What you looking at?’ Her voice came from right behind me and I flinched.

  ‘I thought I saw a deer,’ I said. ‘Well, I thought I saw an animal and it’s not going to be a wolf or a bear. Are there deer? It was too big to be anything else.’

  ‘The trees are too close for deer,’ Shannon said. ‘They run up and down the firebreaks but they stay out of the plantings. It was probably a hare. Some of them are massive and what with them being up so high ‒ I’ve jumped out my skin at hares more than once. Revenge of the ten-foot rabbit isn’t in it.’ She was quiet for a beat, then said: ‘I can’t hear anything.’

  ‘It’s not moving,’ I said.

  ‘Can’t be a hare, then,’ said Shannon. ‘They’re terrified of people. It would be offsky.’

  ‘Maybe it’s dead,’ I said. I wished I hadn’t said anything now. ‘Do people hunt them?’

  ‘They take them away for the pot if they catch them,’ she said.

  ‘Or trap them?’ I only said that because why else would a hare sit still?

  ‘That’s a horrible thought.’ Shannon chewed her lip for a moment or two. ‘Give me a leg-up, Finnie,’ she said, hopping over the drainage ditch and scrambling up the far side.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ I straddled the ditch and put the side of my arm against her bum, giving her a shove until she could grab on to a tree.

  ‘Wring its neck,’ said Shannon. ‘Put it out of its misery.’ She put a hand in front of her face to keep the twigs from snatching at her. ‘But I can’t see anything. Mind you – my eyesight. Here.’ She was still hanging on to a trunk with one hand and she bent to the side and put a hand down to me. ‘You have a look,’ she said.

  Her grip round my arm was firm and the upwards yank she gave me was strong.

  ‘Wonder Woman,’ I said, grabbing her to steady myself as the mouldy earth crumbled from under my feet. I peered into the trees, at the kicked-over earth and bent twigs I’d been sure I’d seen before. Spoor, they call it on the documentaries. I was right then.

  ‘Something’s been here,’ I said. ‘Look.’

  Shannon flipped the brim of her hat up and lifted her sunglasses. ‘Can’t see a thing,’ she said. ‘It’s too bright without my shades and too dim with.’

  Did I believe her? Was she claiming not to see the marks she’d left? Or was she being completely open about a disability while I trolled her? Why exactly did I suspect her anyway and not one of the Sloans or any of these Manns I’d never clapped eyes on? Teenagers mucking about in the woods made much more sense. And, now I knew about the shortcut of the path and steps, it could have been anyone.

  ‘So your eyesight’s really that bad?’ I said, thinking that she’d be the last one to go blundering about a planting in the dark.

  She turned her head. ‘Nothing wrong with my ears, though.’

  I heard it too. A car engine. Someone driving far too fast on these potholes.

  ‘Hold tight,’ Shannon said. ‘We’re okay up here.’

  The car splashed past, racing away from the big house. It hit the sinkhole hard enough to make the struts thump. By the time Shannon had let go of me to put her glasses back on and pull her hat brim down it was out of sight.

  ‘Delivery van,’ I said, hoping my voice sounded steady because, near as I could tell as it flashed by, it was our car. It was Paddy. ‘Poor old Lovatt and Tuft’ll have to go to some Godforsaken depot somewhere to get something they probably don’t want anyway. When they get back from holiday.’

  ‘Hope he hasn’t just left it on the step,’ Shannon said, jumping down, then getting out of the way so I could jump down too without landing in the puddle. ‘Well, we can check, can’t we?’

  I said nothing. How could I explain wanting to scrap the walk because of a delivery van? As we started up the drive again, her silence began to pulse, began to deafen me. Did she know that wasn’t a van? Could she tell from the sound of its engine? Was she wondering why I was silent?

  ‘So what’s he like?’ I said at last, trying to sound casual. ‘Lovatt. Is he still … marked by his past or has he put it behind him?’

  ‘It’s like I was saying before,’ said Shannon, as if a companionable lull had drifted naturally back towards some chat again, ‘it is over for him. His wife killed his kids and herself. Brutal but final. It happened one day and every day after that takes him further from it. It’s the not-knowing – never knowing whether or when – that doesn’t disappear into the past. That sticks with you. There it is.’

  I blinked. I had been looking at her as she spoke and hadn’t noticed that we were round the last bend, facing Widdershins. It squatted there in the dull daylight, the stained-glass fanlights giving it a heavy-lidded look, as if it was watching me on the sly, hoping to catch me out. The skin on the back of my neck shrank and my hair prickled.

  ‘They’re not worried about break-ins, are they?’ I said. ‘They’ve gone off on their spur-of-the-moment trip and left the outside door open.’ I had a vision of myself walking through that door and hearing it shut behind me. And it wasn’t the slam of wood on wood I could hear, but the smack of lips.

  ‘There’s no crime round here,’ Shannon said. ‘I never lock my doors and windows either. What makes you think it was spur-of-the-moment?’

  ‘I’m hoping it was, to be honest,’ I said, after a moment’s wild scrabbling for an answer. I was no good at this. ‘Otherwise they might have warned Paddy and saved him panicking.’

  Shannon said nothing.

  ‘It’s a pretty house,’ I added, thinking that was what I’d say if I was seeing it for the first time.

  ‘Yeah?’ said Shannon. ‘I think it looks like a bullfrog. Those bay windows and that stuff it’s covered in. Like a toad. It’s nicer from round here, mind you.’ She was walking towards the archway. ‘There’s a terrace.’

  I followed her. ‘I suppose it was the style back then,’ I managed to say. ‘It’s like something from out of a black-and-white film. Greer Garson.’ I was looking along the length of the terrace now, at the skeletons of the roses and the dark earth underneath them.

  ‘And a colonel,’ said Shannon.

  ‘At a tennis party,’ I agreed. I couldn’t look at the house any more closely than an innocent visitor would, but something was worrying me about it. Something had changed.

  ‘Plus the dead body lying in the library,’ Shannon said.

  Somehow I got a chuckle out. I even added a bit more to the scene we were painting. ‘And there’s someone who’s got all the money, who’s in a wheelchair. And he’s got a secretary, and a trained nurse, but they’re actually long-lost—’

  ‘No!’ said Shannon. ‘He’s the corpse. The one with all the money is lying in the library with a dent in his skull from a length of lead piping.’

  I turned round and headed back the way we had come because suddenly it seemed to me that the difference was the light coming out of the house, and I had a horrible feeling that the kitchen curtains weren’t closed any more, a horrible feeling that if we kept walking and glanced sideways we would see them lying there.

  ‘Finnie?’ Shannon’s voice came from yards away. ‘Oh, there you are.’ She scurried back to catch up.

  ‘I crapped out,’ I said. ‘I’d be dead embarrassed if someone saw me snooping.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Dog-walkers?’ I said. ‘I dunno. Farmers? Lumberjacks?’

  ‘Lumberjacks are called foresters, these days. And they yomp around on quad bikes
. They don’t creep up on people.’

  ‘Good to know,’ I said. ‘Let’s go back down for a cup of tea. I’m cold.’ It wasn’t even lunchtime but the Simmerton valley was flexing its muscles. The strip of sky between the treetops was the colour of pewter and the still air was clammy as the chill came down.

  ‘Yeah, the day’s dead,’ said Shannon. ‘“Each bright morning soon slain.”’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s a poem, translated from Norwegian, about long winter nights.’

  ‘We should all have it on our fridge doors,’ I said. ‘They should sell it in the church gift-shop.’

  ‘My mum gave me it on a little plaque when I moved here.’

  ‘Is she Norwegian?’ I was thinking about the lumpy knitting on the circular needle.

  ‘No, she was English.’

  ‘Was?’ I said. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘She just believed in the power of poetry. A lot. She bought me a daily poetry delivery service for a whole year once.’

  ‘Eesh,’ I said.

  ‘For my birthday.’

  ‘Wow. She might at least have foisted it on some African village. Like those goats.’

  ‘She meant well,’ said Shannon.

  And suddenly I had a flash of understanding. The combination of what she’d said about not knowing if someone was dead or alive, of being stuck because lost, and now suggesting that her mother had tried a bit too hard ‒ even the fact that a woman with an English mother didn’t have the slightest whisper of English in her voice. My Irish mammy had put a good few quirks in my accent even though I’d been born in Edinburgh and always lived there.

  ‘Shannon,’ I said, ‘tell me to mind my own business, by all means, but can I ask you something?’ She nodded. ‘Are you adopted?’

  ‘Yeah,’ she said.

  ‘And you’re looking for your birth family?’

  ‘Something like that. It’s not going well.’

  ‘You want to talk about it over a cheese toastie?’

  I threaded my arm through hers and stepped up my pace towards comfort and home. This nightmare would end and I’d still be a deacon. I’d still need to reach out to strangers in trouble and help them. I’d had a life before this and I had to keep living it, for after.

  Chapter 15

  I opened the gate-lodge front door onto a burst of warmth.

  ‘Finnie, thank God!’ Paddy’s voice came from the kitchen. ‘Where the hell have you been? I came home to tell you—’

  ‘I’ve got a friend with me, Pad-Thai,’ I shouted back, in warning. The kitchen went quiet and Shannon and I gave each other a quick look.

  ‘We can do it another time,’ she began.

  I shushed her. ‘No, this is fine. Actually, this is perfect. Paddy’s adopted too. Closed adoption out of the care system, which might not be anything like your situation, but he’s bound to be more use to you than, well, me.’

  He had come round the corner to the front door and was staring at me, listening to me tell a complete stranger intimate details about his life.

  ‘Paddy, this is Shannon. She’s one of the neighbours from just down the way there. We’ve been for a walk.’

  ‘Maybe I should just—’ Shannon tried again.

  ‘I must have sounded like a right old Neanderthal there,’ said Paddy, swinging into action in charmer mode. ‘I don’t usually demand to know why my wife left her kitchen, Shannon. Please stay and have some lunch. Give me your coat.’

  ‘Paddy’s worried about his city girl getting eaten by wolves in the woods,’ I said, trying as hard as him to turn it harmless. Shannon was looking from one of us to the other with narrowed eyes, as she slipped out of her coat and handed it to me. ‘Or hares, eh? Revenge of the ten-foot rabbit.’ She kept her cap on and swapped her sunglasses for a lighter pair.

  ‘Go through and sit,’ Paddy said. ‘I’ve got soup heating up. I’ll make toast.’

  I led Shannon to the living room. Paddy had laid a fire and lit a match and the flames were beginning to lick around the kindling sticks.

  ‘Cosy,’ Shannon said. ‘And a kind man who cooks. You’ve hit the jackpot there, Finnie.’

  I wrinkled my nose at her. I still didn’t know how old she was, with her strange colouring and her face unmarked after a lifetime shaded from the sun. But she didn’t seem cut out to be single – although, even as I thought it, I wondered what I meant by that. Maybe she’d had disappointments, if she really was forty, or maybe she’d scarcely started thinking about it yet, if she was closer to the twenty end. Or maybe – and this seemed a strong possibility – the search for her birth mother had got in the way of other searches.

  ‘Otherwise we’d starve,’ I said. ‘I’m no cook. And my kebab-stand-finding skills are not much use to me down here. Thank God for Paddy.’

  ‘Has he found his biological family?’ she said, as I gestured her to sit.

  But I couldn’t think of a reply. On the coffee-table – unmistakable, still with the upside-down mob cap of shiny paper it had come in – was a potted Christmas cactus. The same one. There was a wilted section where Paddy had crushed it, carrying it in the dark.

  ‘Are you a vegetarian or anything?’ I said. ‘I’ll check what he’s making, this paragon of mine.’

  ‘I eat chicken,’ she said. ‘You know, once I’ve wrung their necks.’

  ‘Oh, yeah.’ I went through to the kitchen, pulling the door closed at my back.

  Paddy was stirring a bowl of soup, halfway through its microwave time. When he had re-covered it and put it back in, I took him in my arms and pulled his head down onto my shoulder.

  ‘Jesus, that was close,’ he said. ‘I nearly shouted the news through the house.’

  ‘The news that you went back?’ I said. ‘I saw the plant. Oh, my God, Paddy. How bad was it?’

  He burrowed his head deep into me as if he was trying to scrub the memory off onto my skin. ‘Don’t ask,’ he said. I could feel his words warming my neck. ‘I want to forget before it gets its claws into me. If I blank it out all day and manage not to dream about it tonight, I might be lucky.’

  The tomato soup was beginning to bubble in the microwave, seething and splatting as it turned. As if it was alive.

  ‘Are there flies?’ I whispered.

  Paddy shuddered. ‘Someone needs to get in there and officially “find” them,’ he said. His close breath felt wet as well as hot now, making my neck prickle.

  ‘Sorry, lovebirds!’ said Shannon, suddenly in the doorway.

  Paddy and I broke apart. ‘I thought I should tell you I’m allergic to mushrooms.’ She sniffed and smiled.

  ‘All mushrooms?’ Paddy said. ‘Even just ordinary ones?’

  ‘Even Campbell’s ones.’

  ‘I wouldn’t eat wild mushrooms either,’ I said. ‘Death wish.’ I pressed my lips closed.

  ‘You eat wild mushrooms all the time,’ Paddy said. ‘I use three different kinds in that risotto you like.’

  ‘He’s a keeper,’ said Shannon. ‘It’s a shame, too, because there’s lovely trumpets and puffballs up in the woods and I can’t eat any of them.’

  ‘Up in the woods,’ said Paddy. ‘Right, right, up in the woods. Lovatt told me about everyone roaming in the grounds. Never mentioned the mushrooms.’

  ‘Did he?’ I said. ‘That’s a relief because that’s where Shannon and me have just been. We came up over the shortcut from the back of the high street – I’ll show you – and then took a tramp up the drive and back. It’s a nice house. I’m looking forward to getting a neb inside it when they get back from their holidays.’

  ‘That’s what I wanted to tell you,’ Paddy said. ‘No, it’s okay, Shannon.’ She had started murmuring and edging towards the door. ‘This is Simmerton gossip, not private business. Or it soon will be. And it’s warmer through here till the fire gets properly away.’ He paused. ‘Julie reckons they’re not on holiday.’

  ‘What?’ said Shannon. ‘Who’s Julie?’

  I was
cutting slices of bread and I kept going, concentrating on not slicing into my fingers. There was a jagged place in the loaf where my hand had jerked at his words.

  ‘She’s the office manager at DDL,’ Paddy said. ‘She filed the partnership paperwork I signed and something about it caught her attention. She’d typed up the originals, you see.’

  ‘Typed up?’ I said. ‘On an Olivetti?’

  ‘Lovatt’s pretty old-fashioned,’ Paddy said. At least he was using the present tense, not hesitating and swallowing. ‘Anyway, Julie noticed a couple of changes in the survivorship wording.’

  That word stilled the breadknife in my hand. I laid it down and wiped my palm on my jeans.

  ‘And she talked to Abby about it,’ Paddy went on.

  ‘Who’s Abby?’ Shannon said.

  ‘Trainee solicitor,’ said Paddy. ‘So Abby had a quick shufti and she agrees.’

  ‘About what?’ I said, trying to make my strain into a joke, because there was no way on earth I could hide it. ‘Spit it out, for God’s sake, Paddy.’

  ‘Abby and Julie reckon they’ve gone for good.’

  For a moment no one spoke.

  Shannon broke the silence. ‘It did seem strange timing,’ she said. ‘Sonsie and Adam at the church said it seemed strange, Finnie, didn’t they?’

  But I still couldn’t answer. I opened the fridge door, as the toast popped up, buying myself a moment. Then I didn’t do anything. Just stood there.

  ‘Telling you, Finnie, he’s a keeper,’ Shannon said, over my shoulder. ‘Mushroom risottos and hot puddings.’

  ‘Sorry?’ I said.

  ‘Rhubarb crumble,’ she said. ‘In the fridge. It’s not every man would be making crumbles within days of moving house. You should hold on hard to this one.’

  By the time I got the power of speech back, Paddy was ferrying plates of soup through to the table in the living room. ‘So what does Julie reckon they’re up to?’ I called after him. ‘If it’s not a straightforward holiday.’

  ‘Reckons they’ve hooked it,’ Paddy said, coming back, banging the tray against his legs, like a tambourine. ‘Reckons they’ve done a runner. Abby too. Come through while it’s still hot.’