Strangers at the Gate

by Catriona McPherson

  ‘And your other business?’

  ‘That didn’t need any start-up,’ Shannon said. ‘It grew out of my lurking online looking for Sean. I’ve got a video channel.’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, my God!’ said Shannon. ‘You’re as bad as Mr Sloan. I’m not a prozzie. Listen, when Sean was a toddler he was obsessed with this set of plastic barrels that nested inside each other. He used to line them up in order of size, then put them together. He liked the clicking noise they made. He would hold them up to his ear and listen to it. He took those barrels with him when he left. So I found a set of them on eBay. You can find anything on eBay if you look every day. I got a set of them and put them up for resale and kept rejecting the offers, waiting for an offer to come in from a Sean one day. And I made a video of them too, setting them out and putting them together, A good mic to pick up the sound of the click.

  ‘It was just one of the nets I cast to catch him. I made videos about all kinds of things I thought might interest him. You know, as far as I could guess when I hadn’t seen him since he was tiny. All politics from the National Front to the SWP. Everything Scottish. All sports. All music styles. Made sure my face was in them all and I always used my own name. Shannon Shine. But it was the plastic barrels that took off.’

  I had dug my phone out of my pocket and was googling. ‘Here it is,’ I said. ‘Clicking Barrels by Shannon Shine. Eh? It’s got half a million hits.’

  ‘Yeah, you should see my “tidying the button box” video,’ Shannon said. ‘That’s my best one. I sold ad space to a commercial film distributor for that one.’

  I was watching it now. Shannon sat behind a table wearing her mirror shades, slowly stirring a pile of buttons and moving them into rows according to size and colour. ‘I don’t get it,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t get it either,’ said Shannon. ‘I don’t get the vids of girls pretending to clean your ears out, but it’s big business.’

  ‘And Mr and Mrs Sloan reckon it’s kinky, do they?’ I said, half wondering if I didn’t agree with them.

  ‘Not Mrs,’ said Shannon. ‘She’s okay when you get past the doorman. Wait, no, that’s not fair. She’s pretty much a recluse and he takes good care of her.’

  ‘I thought she was just under the weather today,’ I said. ‘Well, and Monday, actually.’

  ‘And every other day,’ Shannon said. ‘The only thing that changes is the excuse. She hasn’t been over the door once while I’ve been here. Poor old soul. Lovatt and Tuft go in and play mah jongg with them some nights, especially in the winter when there’s less for Mr Sloan to do in the garden. They were there on Sunday. And I drop in when he’s out of the way. But no one else ever sees her.’

  ‘We’re drifting off-topic a bit,’ Paddy said. It was his lawyer’s brain. He was like a border collie, hunting down the thread of a conversation and nosing it back into place.

  ‘The point’s made,’ Shannon said. ‘Lovatt’s got something in his past somewhere that he doesn’t want anyone getting too close to and I think it concerns my brother. Him taking off for Brazil just makes me even more certain.’

  I looked at Paddy and he looked at me. Lovatt being dead removed the last whisker of doubt surely.

  ‘Well, Shannon,’ Paddy said, ‘I’m bound by the same ethical and professional rules as Lovatt was.’ Shannon’s shoulders slumped. She hadn’t noticed the was instead of is. At least I hoped not. ‘But,’ Paddy went on, ‘there’s one difference. I’m adopted. I don’t think anyone who’s not adopted can really…’ He smiled at me. ‘Sorry, Finnie. I don’t mean to shut you out, but it’s true.’ I smiled back. ‘So, as I say, I can’t break the rules. But I can bend them as far as they’ll go. Lovatt was probably trying his hardest to keep everything quiet. I’ll be trying as hard as I can to lift the lid.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Shannon said. ‘Really. Seriously. Thank you. I’ve been on my own with this for so long.’

  ‘You’re very brave,’ I said. I didn’t know if Shannon would be the sort who’d blossom under flattery or if it would shut her down.

  ‘Brave?’ she said. ‘How?’

  ‘Weren’t you frightened?’ Paddy said. He understood what I was getting at. He had read me. But he had used the wrong tense again. I flashed my eyes at him.

  ‘Wasn’t I frightened of what?’ said Shannon, not understanding.

  ‘Weren’t you frightened to move so close to their house, in such a quiet spot?’ I said. ‘Aren’t you frightened still?’ Paddy flinched, finally twigging that he’d slipped up. ‘If you think Lovatt’s got a secret, aren’t you scared he’ll do you harm?’

  Shannon shrugged. ‘Should have been,’ she said. ‘Probably. But I was too excited, thinking I might find Sean again after all these years. I was thrilled to get the chance to be right here on the spot, nose to the ground and all that. I thought I could volunteer at St Angela’s, have a snoop around if I got the chance.’

  ‘And did you?’ Paddy said. ‘Did you find anything out?’

  ‘I wish I’d known St Angela’s was all the way up in Stirling,’ Shannon said. ‘I found that out.’

  ‘Oh!’ I said. ‘That’s why you joined the church fundraising committee. It was nothing to do with my brilliant cheerleading for practical Christianity.’

  ‘No,’ said Shannon. ‘It was neither. It was learning Tuft was out of the picture. I thought I could nip in and no one would stop me.’

  ‘Did you know that Tuft was out of the picture?’ I said.

  ‘On holiday, I mean,’ said Shannon. ‘Or so we thought then.’

  ‘Only,’ I said, ‘I sort of got the impression that you’d found out she’d gone after you got there. Didn’t Sonsie and Adam tell you?’

  ‘No, I got it on the grapevine,’ Shannon said. ‘Simmerton jungle drums. You’ll soon find out.’ Then she lifted her sunglasses and put her hands over her eyes. ‘What a day. My head’s banging. I’m not used to after-lunch brandy.’

  So we waved her off, standing side by side on the doorstep.

  As soon as she was out of earshot, Paddy spoke. ‘Thank God she’s gone. Finnie, there’s something else I needed to tell you that I couldn’t say in front of her. You need to brace yourself. Maybe you should sit down.’

  ‘Just say it,’ I told him.

  ‘It’s three things,’ Paddy said. ‘I’ll tell you. And see if you come to the same conclusion as me.’

  ‘Okay.’

  He took my hand and started walking. But we were headed the wrong way. We’d be going round the house widdershins. I turned and started moving in the other direction. When he caught up with me, he began.

  ‘The time stamp on the fax is too late for Lovatt or Tuft to have sent it.’ I felt the blood drain out of my face. ‘I got Julie to fish the papers back out of the file today. I told her I wanted to reread them, but I really only wanted to see what time they’d come through. It was quarter to eleven.’

  ‘Quarter to eleven,’ I said. ‘Could he have scheduled it in advance? Can you do that with faxes?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Paddy said. We were at the back door now. ‘And here’s the second thing. The fax didn’t come from Widdershins. It was a different machine. Julie didn’t notice – why would she? – because it was headed stationery. But I noticed. It was a different fax number from all the stuff he sent through to me before I got down here.’

  I screwed up my eyes trying to make sense of it.

  ‘And the final thing,’ Paddy said.

  ‘What?’ I opened my eyes again.

  ‘The thing that explains why, if he was sending a fax, he didn’t just send an extra page with the news about the Brazil trip. Julie said this morning he usually scrawled a note and faxed it. He’d always do that before he’d type an email, especially on his phone. But he didn’t.’

  ‘And why’s that?’ We were back round the front.

  ‘Because Julie and Abby both know his writing.’

  My mouth was dry. I tried to lick my lip
s but my tongue dragged on them. ‘The messages were sent after he died,’ I said. ‘They were sent from a different machine and typing an email was out of character?’

  ‘Yep,’ Paddy said. ‘So you see, don’t you?’ I nodded. ‘We said the fax and email were meant to buy time. But it wasn’t Lovatt buying it. Or Tuft. And what’s the only reason someone else would buy time?’

  For a long empty moment we stared at one another. We both knew. We couldn’t face knowing but we couldn’t keep pretending. At last, Paddy started moving again. I fell in beside him. ‘They didn’t kill each other.’ He said it, but it could just as easily have been me.

  I squeezed my eyes tight shut again and this time the scene was playing behind them. ‘No,’ I said. ‘Of course they didn’t. He couldn’t have killed her with that knife in his back. I knew that. So he must have died second. I really did know that. But he can’t have died second. It’s all wrong.’

  ‘What?’ Paddy said. ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘It’s the cuts,’ I said, as we turned the corner to the darkest side. ‘I’ve been dreaming about them.’ Paddy was breathless, his steps faltering. ‘Those gashes all over her hands. All those stabs and slices. Those God-awful cuts.’ He slumped back, as if someone had shoved him, and leaned against the wall, his breaths tearing at him. ‘They must have come first, see? She couldn’t have driven that knife into his back so deep with her hands slashed to ribbons, could she?’

  ‘That’s what’s been eating at you?’ Paddy said. His breath had started up again, too fast now. And he was walking faster too, back towards the light, such as it was, at the front of the lodge.

  ‘Yes, and I didn’t know why. The blood’s so thick it’s black on his jacket. It’s from his heart. She couldn’t do that, with those hands.’

  ‘She probably couldn’t do that even without any nicks and scratches on her hands.’

  ‘They’re not nicks and scratches,’ I said. ‘They’re deep, deep cuts. Didn’t you look, Paddy? Didn’t you see?’

  He shook his head. ‘No. I saw nothing and neither did you. We have to forget. Someone killed them. We don’t know who and we don’t know why. But we’re safe. By some bloody miracle, we’re safe. God, when I think of us traipsing back up there and walking in. The blood was still running!’

  ‘Who do you think put my bag out in the hall?’ I said, suddenly struck by it.

  ‘Don’t think about it,’ Paddy said. ‘If … whoever it was … knew we’d been up there, they’d have done for us too. No one knows we saw them. We have to forget we saw them. We have to forget everything.’

  He took a deep breath, so deep it put white lines down the sides of his nostrils. Then he blew it out through pursed lips, like he was smoking, and heaved in another one. ‘Come on, Finnie,’ he said, in a creaking gasp, not using the breath on the words. I gulped a lungful of my own and this time we blew out together.

  ‘Let’s go round one more time,’ I said. ‘For luck.’

  ‘They’ve gone away unexpectedly,’ said Paddy, setting off. ‘They’ll be back in three weeks. Okay?’

  ‘And that’s when I’ll meet them for the first time,’ I said. ‘These two strangers who’re nothing to me.’

  ‘Meanwhile we just act normal. Act like two people starting a new life together. In a new place. Making friends and doing our jobs. Act normal and get ready to act surprised when someone, like you said, when someone finds them.’

  ‘And then even more surprised when the police solve the case,’ I said. ‘Eventually.’

  ‘Right,’ said Paddy.

  I could do that. There was no reason not to make friends with the people I’d met. It was none of them, after all. Mr Sloan wouldn’t make himself homeless. Him and his poor wife. Julie and Abby wouldn’t risk their jobs. No one at the church had a motive. When it all came out, it would be someone we didn’t know.

  We were back at the front door. ‘Paddy?’ I said. ‘Who do you think—’

  ‘No!’ he said, harsher than I’d ever heard him. ‘God’s sake, Finnie. We breathed it away. We went three times round in the magic direction. Let it work!’

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t think,’ Paddy said. He was nearly hissing. ‘And you shouldn’t either. If you think about it you’ll ask questions and then we won’t be safe. Forget it. Turn your mind away from it and unknow it.’

  I couldn’t. I didn’t believe in magic. ‘Shannon,’ I said. ‘It was Shannon. She didn’t hear on any “jungle drums” that the Dudgeons had gone. She knew they were “gone” because she killed them.’

  ‘Where’s this coming from?’ Abruptly, almost roughly, Paddy pulled me inside and closed the door.

  ‘She just said it. She thinks Lovatt Dudgeon’s withholding—’

  Paddy put his arms round me and drew me towards him. ‘If she thought someone knew where her brother was she might kidnap him and put thumbscrews on him until he gave up the secret but she’d never – no adopted kid would ever – kill him and let him take his secrets to the grave. No way.’

  ‘Sorry,’ I said. I hated Paddy explaining her to me. Like I was the outsider. ‘Sorry,’ I said again. ‘Okay, I’ll forget. I’ll unknow. I’ll breathe myself to shreds. I’ll wear a path round the house. It won’t be too long now anyway.’

  * * *

  And so it was Shannon’s brother who tiptoed into my dreams that night. He peered out from a quilt-tent shrouding a plant on the Widdershins terrace, ghostly white and pink-eyed with long yellow teeth that stuck straight down, like a rabbit’s. I watched him scrabble the window open and slip inside, up and over the sill, like a four-legged creature instead of a boy. And the noise he made, once inside, was a woodland shriek. The sound of trapped panic. I fumbled at the window as the trapped boy squealed and scuffled, stuck in there, the air turning rank with the stink of his desperation. So much blood. Black as sin and reeking. My mum and dad were swimming in it, coming down through the hills to save me.

  Thursday

  Chapter 17

  I dabbed concealer on the shadows under my eyes, smeared blusher on my white cheeks, and tried to shake the dream off me. A nice neutral reading for the school assembly was what I planned. A nice neutral easing into my new role in my new place. I’d toyed with the Good Samaritan. But when I thought of the words ‘and stripped him naked and wounded him and left him for dead’, all I could see was Lovatt Dudgeon in the bright kitchen, still clothed, it was true, but wounded and left there. So I plumped for my favourite, these days. It’s topical, popular, uncontroversial unless you’re a total git: the sojourner at the gate. Or ‘stranger’, as the modern Bible would have it. The ‘alien’ is what American churches say, but that’s a bit on the nose, even for me.

  An hour later, looking out over a sea of bent heads, I felt my throat start to tighten around the words I was reading. ‘And if a stranger comes within your gates you will not reject him. The stranger at your gate will be as one born among you and you will love him as you love your own family.’

  As I spoke, an idea began to whisper itself to me, like another voice inside my head, drowning my own. I fell silent, listening. I even closed my eyes, to see if I could tune in any better. When I opened them again, none of the students were scrolling or tapping at their phones. Every face was turned up towards me. I felt a flush begin to creep up from under my collar.

  ‘That got your attention!’ I said, too brightly. ‘Here I am, a stranger among you! And it’s not me telling you you need to treat me like a lifelong friend, like a member of the family. It’s God telling you.’

  Someone smothered a giggle. A teacher shushed them. I’d saved it. I hiked in a sharp breath and smiled. ‘Of course He’s not talking about a new deacon at your school assembly, is He? Who’s He talking about? Who is it we need to open our arms to?’

  ‘Hearts fans,’ shouted a boy in a Hibs scarf. ‘Forget it!’

  I kept smiling through another giggle and another shushing. I looked around the roo
m, waiting for a more sensible answer.

  ‘Like homeless and that?’ came a voice from the back. ‘Instead of moving them on kind of thing?’

  ‘Definitely,’ I said. ‘Who else?’

  ‘Immigrants,’ said someone off to the side. There was a rustle of whispers.

  ‘Refugees!’ Now they had it.

  ‘Foster kids?’

  ‘Gypsies!’

  ‘Visitors from outer space!’

  A teacher turned as if to hand out a scolding for that one, but the kid turned to me, eyes wide and hands out, beseeching. ‘Eh, no, miss? If space aliens came we’d need to be nice to them. Eh, no?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ I said. ‘Imagine how scared they’d be. Let’s have a hymn now, so if they land their spaceship on the roof they’ll know we’re friendly.’

  The teachers were glowering, but I didn’t care. The kids loved me. And the singing gave me time to ponder what that little voice had been whispering. There’s almost as much in the Bible about kindness to strangers as there is about murder. It used to puzzle me, till Jed in the first parish pointed out that it’s pretty easy not to murder people day-to-day and much harder to be open-hearted to weirdos. Lovatt should have tried harder to act like everyone else ‒ who need to be told. He shouldn’t have given Paddy a partnership and me a deaconship and both of us a cottage. He was even more reckless, giving Shannon a house and all that expensive equipment. And the Sloans were set for life. It made me wonder about the family with the skateboards. Were they lucky winners in Lovatt and Tuft’s big giveaway too?

  I wasn’t going against what I’d agreed with Paddy. I wasn’t going to investigate. I was going to leave it. Like we said. I was just thinking. There was no harm in that.

  * * *

  It was eleven o’clock as I turned the corner onto the high street. I stopped at the coffee shop at the top of the town. It was what passed for a hipster joint in Simmerton, with an espresso machine, muffins instead of scones.