Strangers at the Gate

by Catriona McPherson

  ‘You’re lucky it’s just Shannon,’ I said. ‘I asked the Sloans too but they said no.’

  Mr Sloan had stared at me as if I’d suggested a bunk-up. He’d come to the door in a pair of carpet slippers, a shirt and tie under his Fair Isle jumper.

  ‘Nothing fancy,’ I said. ‘Just Paddy and me, our parents and Shannon. I haven’t met next door yet, so I can’t ask them.’

  ‘What makes you think you can ask us?’ Mr Sloan had seemed so fit and efficient out on his drive tending his bonfire, walking his dogs. Now he was hesitant and doddery, and his eyes were wet-looking as he dithered on his doorstep, opening and closing his mouth.

  ‘Why not?’ I said. ‘My mum and dad and Paddy’s mum will want to meet our new neighbours. And I’d like the chance to chat to you and Mrs Sloan.’

  ‘Chat to Mrs Sloan?’ he said, with a quick glance over his shoulder. ‘What about? I can tell you about the bin days and the buses. Or Robert Waugh can. At the church. He’s your boss. It’s him that’s brought you in here among us. Ask him.’

  ‘Not bins,’ I said. He took a step back as a squall of rain somehow found enough open air between the pine trees to get up a bit of speed and lash the backs of my legs and my sodden anorak. Mr Sloan looked down at the drops of water spattering the mat just inside his door. ‘Can I come in?’ I added.

  ‘In?’ he said. ‘In here? No. Sorry, dear. No, it’s not suitable today. Mrs Sloan has a terrible headache and she’s lying down.’

  ‘What a rotten run of luck she’s having. But no wonder she’s got a headache. You must have heard what’s happened. Haven’t you? Have the police been here yet?’

  He mouthed the word but hearing it had knocked all the breath out of him and there was no sound.

  ‘Haven’t you heard?’ I said. I wondered how old he was and how his heart was. It was something I thought about with my mum and dad. It’s all very well for one out of a pair to retire from the world but it needs the other to be a rock. ‘It’s Lovatt and Tuft,’ I said. ‘They’ve … well, they’ve died.’

  ‘Died?’ said Mr Sloan. ‘No, they’ve not died. They’ve gone on holiday. You’ve picked up the jaggy end of the shark there.’ He blinked at me, satisfied that he’d set his world to rights again. ‘I know what’ll have happened,’ he went on. ‘Someone’s said, “They’ve gone,” and you’ve jumped to the wrong conclusion. Quite a big jump, if you don’t mind me saying so.’

  ‘No,’ I said. I pressed forward a bit, truly not trying to muscle my way in, just that I was getting soaked. ‘They’ve committed suicide, Mr Sloan. I’m really sorry to be the one to break the news. But it’s true. They left a note. They left their will. They’ve wound up their affairs and they’ve – like you said, but there’s no mistake – they’ve gone.’

  His chest was rising and falling at quite a clip now and I thought there was a hitch in it too. He glanced behind himself again, at the living room and then up the stairs. ‘You better come in,’ he said. ‘Come away in.’

  He didn’t ask for my coat and that surprised me. He was the sort. I wouldn’t have been stunned if he’d made me take my shoes off, but he just pointed the way and shut the door at my back.

  The living room was set up for a sweet little life. I recognised all the signs. A jigsaw on a trolley, a budgie cage, two armchairs with footstools and reading lamps. A collection of videos, DVDs and crossword books on a tall pine bookcase against the back wall. There was an orchid on the side table by the smaller armchair. But, for all that, it was a closed life that was lived there. The air was stale, and worse than stale, really. There was a taint in this snug little house that stirred unpleasant memories. I swallowed hard as Mr Sloan let himself drop into the bigger chair and waved me towards the couch. I sat back but immediately wriggled forward again as I felt my wet clothes stick to me.

  ‘Does anyone come to give Mrs Sloan communion?’ I said. ‘If she doesn’t manage out to the services.’

  ‘Doesn’t manage?’ he said. ‘It’s only a headache. What are you making such a fuss over?’

  ‘My mum’s very shy too,’ I said. ‘She doesn’t go about. It’s a big thing for her to be coming down here tomorrow, actually. I think maybe she’d like to meet your wife. You know, meet another lady about her age who likes to keep quiet too.’

  ‘Who’s been saying this?’ Mr Sloan demanded, sitting forward. ‘Is it that nasty piece at the end?’ At least he had admitted Shannon’s existence. ‘Look, never mind silly gossip. People should mind their own. Tell me what happened to the Dudgeons. Who found them? Was it you?’

  ‘Well, that’s the trouble. Part of it anyway. No one’s found them yet, as far as I know. Or they hadn’t found them earlier this morning.’

  ‘Well, there you are.’

  ‘But they’re looking. And they’re definitely going to want to talk to your wife and you. You might be close to the last ones who saw them. To talk to properly, instead of just in passing.’

  ‘Us?’ he said. ‘Me? Who’s told you that?’

  ‘Sonsie,’ I said. I dug down deep, deep, deep for the name and managed to find it. ‘Sonia Webb. Tuft told her that you all had a game of mah jongg on Sunday. Although you didn’t mention it to me, did you? Wednesday, was it? When we walked up the drive.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ he said. He looked up at the ceiling. ‘I forgot about that. The days run together when you’re retired. Well, they were neither up nor down on Sunday night. They said nothing about anything to either Mrs Sloan or me. The police have got no reason to come pestering us. Either of us. I’m busy with my garden.’

  ‘In January?’ I said. ‘Burning more … whatever it was you were burning?’

  ‘Leaves,’ he said. ‘Plenty to do whatever the month. In a tidy garden.’

  ‘It’s just routine,’ I said. ‘They’ll need to talk to everyone who knew them. Especially if they still haven’t found the bodies.’ I was leaving a wet print on the wooden arm of the sofa from my sleeve. I put my hands in my lap. ‘They’ll be asking everyone. Colleagues, committee members. Other friends. You are friends, aren’t you? Were friends?’

  ‘They were very good to us years ago,’ Mr Sloan said. ‘When Myna had a wee bit of trouble. They were kind. And then they changed our lease, like I told you. I suppose you might say we’re friends.’

  ‘So can you think where they would go? A special place?’

  ‘And if I could, you’d pass it on to the coppers and stop them bothering Mrs Sloan and me?’

  I opened my mouth to tell him no way, then reconsidered. I was the deacon of his church and I had a stake in his wellbeing. ‘I’ll try,’ I said. ‘If they find them there’s maybe no reason for the cops to bother anyone.’

  My guilt leaped at the breath he let out and the way he sat back in his chair, passing a hand over his brow. ‘Thank you, dear.’

  ‘I wish you’d come along and say hello to my dad tomorrow,’ I said. ‘Never mind the rest of them. Or my dad could come along and have a wee cup of tea with you. He’ll be sick of the wittering before we’re halfway through dinner anyway. He really does understand, Mr Sloan. Look, I don’t want to upset you. If you want to say stomach bug, twisted ankle, making jam, headache, you just go ahead and say it. Whatever works. But it’s a stressful role being a carer and my dad’s been doing it a lot of years. He could help you.’

  ‘They’re not in their house then, I take it? The Dudgeons.’ He was ignoring me.

  ‘They’re not,’ I said. ‘And they’re not over at Jerusalem or in the old graveyard either.’

  ‘The church?’ he said. ‘The offices. Dudgeon and Dudgeon.’

  ‘They’ve been checked,’ I said. ‘And no one would do that in a church anyway, would they?’

  ‘Is the car there?’ Mr Sloan said. I shrugged. ‘It’ll be in the garage, like mine. Not like that lot next door. Garage full of junk and cars parked on the grass. It would make you weep.’ He tutted, distracted by his annoyance. Then he seemed to remember why he was thinking about cars.
‘Because if they’ve flung themselves in the sea then they’re in the sea, aren’t they? If they’ve flung themselves in a river it’s the same do. If they’ve booked into a wee hotel somewhere and taken a lot of pills, the hotel staff’ll know soon enough.’

  This was going nowhere. There was no overlap between the places a couple would drive on a suicide bid and the places a third party would dump their corpses. They could be absolutely anywhere in the country. They could be on the Continent if someone had enough bottle to get on a ferry with two corpses in the boot of a car or under the bunks in a camper van.

  ‘So there’s nowhere nearby that’s like a significant spot for them?’ I said. ‘Somewhere they’d go to spend their last moments? A picnic spot? Or somewhere they’d scattered ashes in the past?’

  ‘Ashes?’ said Mr Sloan. ‘What ashes?’

  ‘A pet, I was thinking,’ I said. ‘But any ashes. I’m clutching at straws, if I’m honest.’

  ‘I don’t hold with that,’ Mr Sloan said. ‘Scattered ashes! What’s wrong with a decent plot in a cemetery? It’s done till now. It’ll do me.’

  ‘Some people find it morbid,’ I said, ‘to think of a body mouldering on and on.’ The image came as a shock to me. Not the tableau in the kitchen and not that flash of blue and white in the rain of the graveyard. This time the vision was Lovatt and Tuft in ash, as if a clear cast of their two bodies had been made – pleated skirt, patched jacket, knife blade and all – like a vessel, and inside this vessel ashes swirled. The ashes were gritty. They scraped against the inner wall of the see-through shape, always moving, like when Paddy used grains of rice to clean the red wine stains from a carafe, swishing it and swishing it until the water clouded pink. ‘But each to their own,’ I added, hoping that, if we kept talking, the image would loosen its grip on me.

  ‘Exactly,’ he said. ‘If you’re harming no one.’ He clapped his hands on his knees and smiled at me. ‘Well, if we’re done…’

  ‘Could I use your toilet?’ I said.

  ‘You’re yards from home,’ he said, seeing through me. Because, of course, I wanted to introduce myself to Mrs Sloan. Maybe Tuft had said something to her it would help to know.

  ‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘I don’t play mah jongg, Mr Sloan, but I’m a fiend at cribbage. Or Scrabble even. It’s not a good idea to let your wife withdraw any further.’ I held up my hand as he started to talk over me. ‘I wish you’d let me send my dad down for a word,’ I said. ‘But I’m not going to nag.’

  ‘Bit late,’ he said.

  ‘Do you think she’ll be okay?’ I said, going through to the little hall and dropping my voice. There was no sound from upstairs. Despite the two armchairs and the jigsaw table I thought Mrs Sloan must live up there. The stale smell – worse than stale – was coming down the stairs from the landing.

  ‘Will who be okay?’ he said. He had positioned himself across the bottom of the staircase as if I was just going to burst up there and blat the door open, shove pastoral care down her neck in a raid.

  ‘Your wife,’ I said. ‘How’s she going to take it that her friend is gone?’

  Mr Sloan stared at me for two blinks before he licked his lips and spoke. ‘You leave her to me. I’ll take care of her. I’ll not upset her.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said.

  Outside on the doorstep, when I shivered, it wasn’t just my damp clothes and the cold air with the soak of rain through it. I walked down the path, then looked back at the house, at the upstairs window, lamplight behind net curtains. A shadow moved but I couldn’t tell if it was Mr Sloan or his wife watching me go.

  * * *

  ‘So at least we’ve escaped that,’ I said to Paddy the next day. I had taken the Christmas cactus away, but the truth was, there was nowhere else to put it and nothing else we could use as a centrepiece, so I replaced it as Paddy polished glasses, three at each place. My dad would have trouble not mocking that.

  ‘God, yes, Mrs Sloan and your mum, like a pair of bookends,’ Paddy said. ‘Might have been a bit much for any party to rise above. It’s not exactly a sure thing as it is.’

  ‘I’m worried about her,’ I said. ‘Not my mum. I’m worried it’s not Mrs Sloan’s choice to live shut in there. I’m a bit worried that he’s got her that way. Like boiling a frog.’

  ‘Ask the rev,’ Paddy said. He hadn’t heard the way Tuft talked about Robert Waugh, calling him a chocolate teapot and hinting that his laziness – or maybe it was just golf – suited her. That hadn’t struck me too hard on Monday night, but I wondered now what it was she needed him not to see.

  ‘Could do,’ I said.

  ‘But she looked okay to me,’ said Paddy. ‘She was out in the front garden yesterday when I was on the way to work. Just putting something in the wheelie but she waved and said hello.’

  ‘Well, you’re honoured,’ I said. ‘I was sitting in her living room and she never came to say hello to me.’

  ‘Make the gravy,’ said Paddy. ‘Plenty time for Mrs Sloan another day.’

  ‘Bisto, or port and cornflour?’

  We both laughed. It was impossible to please both sets of parents. I’d always thought, as long as Paddy and me were united, we’d muddle through the middle of them all. I didn’t know what I thought now.

  Chapter 25

  The meat had shrunk to the size of a brick, which was bad. Elayne would move chewed-up gobs of it to the side of her plate under cover of her hand and give me sad smiles. And my mum, looking at the chewed-up gobs of meat on Elayne’s plate, would push hers away completely. Then my dad would clap my mum’s dinner between two bits of bread and scarf it down once he’d finished wiping his own plate, and Elayne’s mouth would purse so hard it practically disappeared, for all the world as if she hadn’t started it, pretending she couldn’t swallow my food.

  There was an upside. All the juice that poured out as the joint shrank would make both sorts of gravy. And it would drive Elayne spare to be served the gravy she wanted instead of getting to complain.

  I divided it into two jugs, making sure to put all the fat in hers. Sometimes when she ate a lot of fat she got evil wind by mid-afternoon and watching her clench and squirm was like a cabaret. I was raking through a cupboard for the Bisto, asking myself how kitchen cupboards could get so chaotic so quickly, when the knock came at the door.

  It wasn’t crazy early for Shannon, but that was a copper’s knock.

  ‘Come in!’ I sang out and, as the door swept open on the squall and bluster outside, suddenly there they were, two of them, enormous in their yellow jackets, jostling for space in the little hallway. ‘Have you found them?’ I said. ‘Have they turned up?’

  ‘Mrs Lamb?’ said one of them. ‘Mr Lamb?’

  Paddy was leaning in the living-room doorway with the tea towel over his shoulder.

  ‘We’ve put out an alert for them,’ one of the coppers said. Paddy had passed him the tea towel to wipe his face, which was streaming with rain. He ran it over his stubbled head too.

  ‘You mean you think they’re alive?’ I said. ‘In spite of the note and the will?’

  Paddy said nothing.

  The cop shook his head. ‘Their car’s in the garage up there. Their passports are there. Their cards. Phones haven’t been used since that last email on Monday.’ He gave Paddy the cop smile that spells trouble. ‘You phoned the house late on Monday, sir. That’s why we’re here. We wanted to ask you about that.’

  ‘Me?’ said Paddy. ‘I don’t think so.’

  I felt as if I’d been turned to stone. That was right. Paddy had dialled the number, hadn’t he? In the middle of the first storm of it all, when we didn’t know what to do and every minute made it too late to do anything, he had dialled the number and heard Lovatt’s voice on the answerphone and he’d hung up again in panic and misery.

  ‘Was it a long call?’ Paddy was saying. ‘I honestly have no memory of it. Finnie, can you remember what we were doing on Monday night? What sort of time?’

  �
�We were unpacking,’ I said, hoping my voice sounded even halfway normal. ‘Could it have been when you found your charger at last and plugged your phone in?’

  ‘It was eighteen seconds long,’ said the cop. He finished with the tea towel, folded it and put it under his arm while he looked in his wee notebook.

  ‘There you go, then,’ Paddy said. ‘Bum dial, probably. So what now?’ I wondered if they’d resent it, him sounding like it was time to move on, or if they’d assume it was just a lawyer thinking about settling the estate, executing the will.

  ‘Search me,’ said the other cop, taking the tea towel and wiping his glasses before putting them back on.

  ‘It’s not illegal to kill yourself,’ his colleague said. ‘Much as we sometimes wish it was.’

  ‘You do?’ I agreed ‒ but, then, I would.

  ‘When you’ve scraped some twat off a railway line and interviewed the train driver,’ he said, ‘or tried to get emergency counselling in her native language for some poor cow of a Polish chambermaid who’s just found some other twat.’

  ‘Right,’ I said. I grinned at him. If this was a typical Simmerton polis, I could enjoy liaising. If we weathered it. If we stayed. If there was even still a ‘we’. ‘Sonsie – Sonia Webb – reckons Tuft thinks that too, you know.’

  ‘Did you get anywhere with the note and the will?’ Paddy said.

  ‘Until we find bodies, we’re hanging fire,’ said the speccy cop. ‘Why?’

  ‘Just wondered if you’d started searching for the beneficiaries yet,’ he said. ‘And what about … I mean, has anyone said anything about St Angela’s?’