‘But there was a note,’ I told her again, gently. ‘He left a note.’
She sat back, her feet lifting off the floor and swinging. I bent to put a hassock under them and she rewarded me with a distracted smile. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘he hadn’t his troubles to seek. Like I told you. With his first wife. His family. But he’d turned it all to the good. St Angela’s. All those happy children. All those years of good work. What’s suddenly gone wrong now?’
St Angela’s, I thought, nodding. His first wife and his family. All those years of what looked so very much like good work. All those pictures looping to make a slide show in the offices of Dudgeon, Dudgeon and Lamb. ‘How did Simmerton Kirk get involved with St Angela’s?’ I said. ‘It never struck me before, but if their offices are in Stirling, why wasn’t it a Stirling church that stepped in?’
Sonsie frowned. ‘Why would we mind where the office was?’ she said. ‘The children were from all over, the parents too. We sponsor a school in Paraguay. We’ve got a twin parish in Seoul. What’s Stirling?’
‘Right,’ I said. ‘Right. I wonder if it was awkward for them – St Angela’s – to have the lawyer and the fundraisers away down here instead of on the spot. Did you ever have to do any traipsing up and down?’
‘Me?’ said Sonsie. ‘I’m a humble worker-bee.’
‘Or Robert. Or Adam. Ignore me. I’m just … typical new broom! Carping about something that’s been working smoothly for years.’ But still I couldn’t help poking at it, soretooth style. ‘I suppose I just wonder why Lovatt didn’t settle in Stirling when he left Edinburgh. Unless Dudgeon and Dudgeon came first and the St Angela’s connection was second.’
‘What?’ She shook her head, as if getting rid of a gnat. ‘What does that have to do with this now?’
‘Right,’ I said again. ‘They came down here to be close to where Denise and the children are buried ‒ is that right? To be close to the old homestead, even though it’s burned down? Jerusalem?’
‘I don’t know where they’re buried,’ Sonsie said. ‘I don’t even know if they’re buried. Or they might be cremated and scattered somewhere lovely. That’s what Adam and I have said for when we go. I wonder if Tuft and Lovatt have left word. Will the funeral be soon or are the police going to stall everything while they … What is it they’re doing?’
‘The funeral?’ I said. ‘Well, they’d have to find the bodies first. They’ve got no idea what happened to them.’
Sonsie pressed her hands to her mouth again and this time tears formed and splashed down. ‘I can’t believe it,’ she mumbled, through her fingers. ‘Tuft would never. She would never! She used to rant about it to me ‒ people throwing themselves off bridges and putting the lifeboat crew in danger, hanging themselves for their families to find and never sleep easy again. She would never.’
‘As far as that goes, she hasn’t,’ I said. ‘Maybe that’s the whole point. Maybe they’ll never turn up. Sorry!’ Sonsie had moaned in distress at that thought. ‘The cops’ve barely started searching yet. They’ll turn up. They will. And they’ll get a proper send-off. Soon. I’m sure of it.’
‘Are you?’ said Sonsie. ‘Too sure to pray?’
I smiled at her and we both turned to face the front. She bent her head, but I stared at the altar. I don’t know if you’d call what I did praying, exactly. It felt more like letting my mind drift. So much had happened since Monday night that I didn’t understand. There was a murderer walking around, for one thing. And all the mess of St Angela’s. The mystery of why Paddy and I were here in the first place. Whatever was going on with Shannon. But the thing my mind kept drifting back to was – where are they?
I must have been praying after all. When my prayer was answered, so clearly and so quickly, the sound of my gasp echoed round the empty church and set the organ pipes humming again.
‘What?’ said Sonsie, looking up.
I was already sliding round her and out of the pew. ‘I forgot something I’m supposed to do,’ I said. Lying in church again. ‘I’ll find Adam and send him in to you, will I?’
‘He’s golfing,’ Sonsie said. She patted herself where her waist should have been. ‘I could ring him, though. Robert hates us using our phones in here, but—’
‘Time like this,’ I said, as Sonsie ripped a mobile phone from a Velcro fastening under her jumper. ‘Go for it. Will you be okay till he gets here?’
‘I’ll pray a bit more,’ Sonsie said, jabbing buttons. ‘You go on, Finnie. I’ll sit here and have another wee pray.’
* * *
Paddy was out of my way in his office, dealing with a pair of coppers of his own. I had the car keys in my bag and, thanks to the landscape of the Simmer Valley, with its one road and its two cuts, I was pretty sure I could find my way where I wanted to go. And even if I was wrong, it was a chance of some silence, some solitude, to let the fizzing stop and wait in hope for calm, for clarity, and for answers.
It had been a beautiful morning, the ribbon of sky above our rooftops a pale opalescent blue and a dazzle behind the waving tree tips, showing where the sun was still shining. Up out of this black valley and its cuts there were hills where sheep felt warmth on their thick winter backs. There was light drenching the ground and throwing shadows. Somewhere away to the north my dad would be tutting and shutting the blinds to get the glare off the news.
But clouds had gathered and thickened by the time I left Sonsie in the church, and I started the wipers along with the engine, the headlights too, and I felt my heart slump in my chest as I realised they really were lighting my way as well as making my little car brighter. As I swung onto the east back road and headed up out of the town, I even tried the full beams.
‘It’s bloody one o’clock!’ I said. ‘This place is a joke!’
But I wasn’t laughing. Little courtyard developments had been squeezed into the valley floor at the south-west corner on the way to Widdershins. Neat pairs of semis and clutches of townhouses, with patios and a bit of parking, were tucked into the steep lanes. But up this way, there was just one row of grey cottages that used to be sweet shops and smithies and along the back of them ran the slimmest of passages to let folk in and out their back doors. Then the hill started to rise, behind retaining walls that bulged and crumbled, flakes of whitewash lying on the ground and moss filling the cracks. Then, at the end of the row, abruptly, Simmerton gave up. The pavement stopped and the bracken-covered bank came right down to meet the yellow paint at the edge of a single-track lane.
‘The cut,’ I said. ‘The road to Jerusalem.’ I shivered, and turned the wipers up a notch.
If I thought the lane to Widdershins and our gate lodge was dreich, this knocked it into a coal bucket. Shannon had said Bairnspairt Cottage was in the quarry, but I reckoned whoever had built the country seat of the Dudgeons had blasted out this cut too. It couldn’t be natural, surely. On either side of the roadway, there were slate walls, great slabs of rock with seams of quartz shining in the rain. They loomed jaggedly up over the roof of the car, seeping rusty water that gathered and ran down in streams. At the top, the knuckles of the pine roots looked like the claws of gigantic birds, perched there. I turned the radio on, for a bit of cheer, but of course there was no reception.
And even when a clearing opened up on my left side – a verge and a drystone wall with what I thought might be a meadow lying beyond it – it turned out to be a graveyard, the entry still padlocked shut although one of the gateposts had crumbled badly enough to leave the gates buckling as they twisted round the chain that joined them.
I drove on. ‘“Last night I dreamed I went to Manderley again”,’ I said to myself. ‘Then how does it go? Gates rusted shut, drive choked with weeds, bushes and trees rampaging. Three out of three.’
I was at the entrance to Jerusalem House now. I knew because the gateposts were the same as ours and, just like ours, the name on them was wrong. ‘Giro’ said one and ‘Solem’ the other.
‘Oh!’ I said. Giro solem – foll
owing the sun – had changed to Jerusalem, like Widow’s Portion turning into Widdershins. I still didn’t understand Widdershins. Going round a church anti-clockwise was bad luck and an ill omen for a house. There was no ‘turning to the sun’ at Jerusalem either. This cut faced due north. They’d get a noonday blast at midsummer and the rest of the year they’d spend in shadow.
I shook my head to get the nonsense out. Who were ‘they’, with their unlucky houses and strange nicknames? Why did they bother me? Well, I knew that, at least. ‘They’ were that poor woman and her diagnosis. ‘They’ were her children, sentenced by their father’s selfish decision to leave them and their mother’s disastrous decision to test them.
I wondered if she’d even got a therapist to talk things over with. Posh Scots thirty years back, it was unlikely. Then I wondered if she’d ever considered just moving. Getting the kids out of this open-air dungeon into a nice bright villa somewhere fun. Not Edinburgh. Somewhere she could have fallen apart without everyone getting a cat’s-bum mouth and calling her ‘hysterical’ behind her back. Brighton, I thought. If only the story of Lovatt Dudgeon was that his first wife lived in Brighton with her care team and her grown-up kids. A few grandchildren around who wouldn’t mind that she was slow and shaky because they’d never known her any other way. Then – and I was sure of this – Lovatt and Tuft would still be alive.
But would Paddy be the newest partner at Dudgeon, Dudgeon and Lamb? Would I be here in Simmerton, working as a deacon for a church that raised funds and didn’t ask where the money went? No way.
And that, I thought, as I nosed into this dead end, feeling it close and darken around me until I couldn’t see anything except the white fuzz of raindrops in my headlights, would be fine by me. I wished I had said to my mum and dad that I’d go to them tomorrow instead of them coming down here to me. I wanted more than anything to be on the seventeenth floor, in the block of flats where I’d been born. If Denise Dudgeon could have moved in next door she might have been fine.
‘Best-kept secret in the city,’ my dad used to say, waving a lordly arm at the view spread out below us, whenever he was on the balcony having the fag my mum knew about, and sharing it with me, which she didn’t. ‘If them in their leafy suburbs knew what we’ve got up here, Finnie, they’d have it off us.’ He leaned his elbows on the rail and feasted his eyes. I loved the view too, but it was my dad I was watching. He traced the arterial routes down to the city centre, to where church spires and grand bank buildings began, then the castle on its rock and the sleeping giant of Arthur’s Seat, and beyond even that, the glinting ribbon of the Forth and the green hills of Fife. ‘We’re rich, Finn,’ he always said to me.
It was his sanctuary, out there on that balcony: drinking in the view, feasting on the light, watching the clouds scud for hours across that massive sky, getting friendly with pigeons and starlings. It nourished him and got him ready to open the sliding door into the living room and deal with my mum again.
The dream faded as the cut opened out like the top of a keyhole. Suddenly, there was Jerusalem House, a skeleton now, no roof and no glass, its stones still blackened decades later because they’d never been cleaned. There was no way the woman who had lived in this house would ever get into the lifts at our flats with her shopping or dry her wash on the balcony. It was enormous. I had known it was going be quite a pile because Widdershins was big enough to be a hotel and dower houses were where unwanted mothers-in-law were shunted off to, but Jerusalem House was so big and grand – and so over-the-top ornate – I was surprised I hadn’t heard of it. I was surprised some trust hadn’t bought it and put the roof back on, opened it up for weddings or something, charged entry.
I trundled round one side of the pond that split the drive and stopped, staring up the front steps at an arched doorway. There were still urns on either side, and when I got out and walked up there, I could see there was still soil in the urns. There would have been flowers here the day she gave her kids their last warm drink and cuddled them down in their beds.
The front door was gone, replaced by a sheet of warped hardboard with a danger notice nailed onto it. It had been undisturbed for years, like the hardboard over the windows to either side. Anyway, they were narrow and stone-mullioned. It might have been possible to wriggle through one but stuffing a pair of corpses in would have been hard work. I stepped down and started walking to the right to take a turn around the place and check for signs of entry.
But I stopped before I’d reached the first corner. I was going widdershins. And even though it was a load of old rubbish and I didn’t believe in bad luck, I turned and walked towards the other corner, to go round Jerusalem.
I didn’t even know what made me so sure they were here. And the echo of that time I’d gone round the side of the dower house to look in the kitchen window was a bit too clear as I paced along the weedy gravel and turned the corner to see another terrace, another low stone wall, more urns, a dry fountain and three sets of French windows, boarded up, with a danger notice insolently bright on each one.
I walked to the far edge of the terrace and looked back at the place. This was a … an orangery, I think you’d call it. All those windows, for one thing, and there was nothing above it except a walkway built on its flat roof. The upstairs windows were set well back. There was no way in. I pushed myself up off the balustrade and took the second corner.
Round here was heartbreaking. It was that much more obvious that this wasn’t an ancient ruin, sacked in some ancient tribal scuffle. There were coal sheds and an outside toilet with no door but still with a chipped, seatless bog and a white sink on iron legs, a plug chain still wound round one of the stumps where a tap had been looted and carried off. That was the only open doorway; the house itself was shut fast. There were bars on some of the windows so they hadn’t been boarded up and were broken now. I switched on my torch app and shone it in, seeing here and there the pattern of a tiled floor under landslides of fallen plaster. Craning in past the shards in the window frame, I saw a room absolutely intact, slate shelves and a strange dullmetal finish to its walls.
Around the third corner was a stableyard, a high wall blocking the view of it from the downstairs windows of the house. This hadn’t burned, thank God. Or maybe they didn’t have horses in these loose boxes thirty years ago. But Sonsie had said Denise wore riding boots in town and I imagined plump little ponies, one for the girl and one for the boy, and something massive and glamorous that Mummy took out cantering on her private road. Up and down the cut. I imagined the poor creatures rolling their eyes and kicking at their stable doors as the light and heat of the fire reached them. As the noise reached them. Fires big enough to destroy a house like Jerusalem are deafening.
Even though the stable hadn’t burned, it was ruined. The roofs had fallen in and the thin brick walls were wavering outwards in some places, stove in at others. Probably some wee scallies had been and nicked the lead the same time they took the taps from the outside kludgy and that was the start of it. Roof leaking, the timbers would rot and the rain would get into the walls. Thirty years was plenty time for the place to come this close to total destruction. This close but not close enough. The stable door held when I tried it. Anyway, the weeds and rotten leaves showed no one had opened it recently.
Why did he leave them? I came back round to the front and got into my car, turning on the engine and the heater. He must have known how low she was. Why did he go off on a treat on the Orient Express and leave her to cope? It was so ostentatious. Much more in her face than a plane to a beach. It bothered me.
‘Never know now,’ I told myself, looking in the rear-view mirror before I shifted gear. I was distracted by the sight of myself. The soft, soaking rain had beaded on my hair and on my eyebrows. It had wrecked my mascara, putting new streaky grey stains under my eyes on top of the dark grey smudges that always started creeping out by lunchtime. I lifted up to see the rest of my face. Rain had beaded on the down that was starting to thicken on my cheeks
and my lip. I was turning into my mother. I was so busy worrying about getting my dad’s eyebags that I hadn’t seen my mum’s moustache coming for me. I swiped the beads away with my knuckle and then dried my face, much wetter for the swiping, with my scarf. Stupid fleece scarf. Absolutely useless for absorbing moisture.
I had chased away a thought there, freaking out about the old Freddie Mercury I was getting. I stared at myself and tried to catch it again. Inheritance? Mother and father? But as I stared, that same vision came crashing back again: the blood in the cuts and the blood in the butterfly. I drove away.
Chapter 23
There was a very different view on the way back down the cut towards the town. Light beckoned and the lane widened. I felt my shoulders drop, even though I hadn’t realised I’d raised them. It was strange how the architect, away back whenever, hadn’t tried to make the approach more welcoming. Why not set the house in the light? Or maybe Jerusalem was sanctuary. Maybe the first owner, the one who had made the decisions, took comfort at the drawing in, the way my mum took comfort from seventeen floors and the fact that she knew who was on either side, and no one else ever got off the lift to come and bother her. Maybe Mrs Sloan loved her life too, with her husband covering for her and the Dudgeons popping in to play mah jongg. Maybe Shannon and I could learn the game and take over. If we were staying.
I almost missed the clue, so busy thinking about the life to come for Paddy and me in Simmerton. If there was any chance Lovatt’s will would hold. If I could bring myself to lie about witnessing it. If I even wanted to try.
I was past the graveyard before it registered. I stopped and slowly reversed up beyond the entrance again to take a second look at what I hadn’t seen on my way north. The gates were mangled and twisted around where the chain held them together, but they hadn’t been like that for long years, as I’d thought looking at them from the other direction. Facing this way, I could see a brand new scar, pale and sharp, in the mossy stone of the southern gatepost. I switched off the engine and climbed out, swishing through the long grass of the verge in what I was sure were someone’s footprints. Yes, a clump of moss had definitely been scraped off by the sharp edge of the gate as it pivoted. It was sitting on the wet grass, like a pom-pom. And the gate had pivoted. There was a mark in the grass, the outline of the top edge, yet that top edge was now three feet in the air. I put my foot on it to bring it back down, like a seesaw, and watched it settle back into the dent of dead grass where it belonged.
Strangers at the Gate Page 19