Strangers at the Gate

by Catriona McPherson

  My dad nodded absently. He wasn’t really listening. ‘Elayne?’ he said. Elayne had bowed her head. As we watched, a couple of tears fell and splashed into her lap. ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘I would have done anything,’ she said, ‘for a baby. For a child. I would have been happy with a boy and a girl. I didn’t care if they had … problems. But he told me – the lawyer did, Mr Dudgeon – that the boy and the girl had to go to separate homes. I was going to get the boy but I couldn’t get the girl too.’

  The five of us were like statues, sitting watching her, listening to it all coming out, beginning to see what she was trying to tell us. The food lay forgotten.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t know. I didn’t know. I went through the process. All the visits, all the assessments. References. There was a little boy and a little girl. I didn’t mind which one came to me. I wanted both. I couldn’t have both, though. And I never understood how they picked me for the boy and someone else for the girl, but they did. I thought I was getting a little boy with visual impairment and some other special needs. And then the news came that the little boy I was getting was perfect. No health issues, no concerns. He was perfect. He was you, Paddy. He was you.’

  My mum was the only one who hadn’t cottoned on. Her meds make her dozy. It’s hard to blame her for always wanting off them, really.

  ‘So there was a boy and girl killed by their own mammy,’ she said, trying to get things straight in her head. ‘And there was a boy and girl, not perfect but precious, adopted out to separate homes?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘There was a little girl with a faulty gene. She was killed. And a little boy who was lucky. Adopted. Spared.’

  ‘And a little girl adopted out too,’ said my mum, smiling at Shannon. ‘And what about the other little boy?’

  She was the only one who seemed surprised when Shannon let out a howl of pain from the pit of her belly, pushed away from the table and ran out into the rain.

  Chapter 28

  I was right behind her. She had left her hat and her coat hanging in our house and her hair was soaked into rat’s tails before she was halfway home, darkening to a nasty nicotine yellow-grey and bouncing on her back, as if it was whipping her.

  ‘Shannon!’ I shouted. ‘Shannon, wait.’

  ‘Jaysis, feck!’ The cry came from behind me. It was my dad, splashing shin deep in a puddle at the side of the track just outside the Sloans’ gate.

  ‘Dad,’ I said, wheeling round and stopping. ‘Go in there. It’s a Mr Sloan and his wife. She’s got some of the same problems Mam does. And he’s not coping. I told him you might stop in today. Go and talk to him.’

  ‘What are you on about?’ my dad said. ‘We’re in the middle of something here, girl. That kid – where’s she gone? That kid’s just found out she’s busted, hasn’t she? She’s tracked down the people who killed her brother and now she’s done for them. Why the hell on earth would I go visiting?’

  ‘Because he knows something,’ I said. ‘He had a bonfire the morning after the deaths. He said it was leaves. But there’s no leaves to burn in January. And he acted like Shannon didn’t exist. They all did. And I couldn’t work out why. And— Oh, God, Dad, I think the bodies are in his house. Upstairs in his house. There was a smell I couldn’t place. But I know what it was now. It was like that badger under the caravan at Whitley Bay that summer.’

  My dad took a step back, blanching. His hair was plastered to his head and the rain had made him ruddy, but the memory of that badger turned him pale again.

  ‘I think they’re wrapped,’ I said. ‘In fact they must be because of the blood. They’ll be wrapped in plastic. Sealed, you know? It’ll be faint. But I know what it was. Who could forget it?’

  ‘Blood?’ said my dad. ‘How do you know there was blood? I thought nobody had seen them.’

  ‘Just— Look,’ I said, ‘just go and keep him talking. Or get Paddy to talk to him.’

  ‘Elayne needs Paddy,’ Dad said.

  ‘So go!’ I was shouting. ‘He’s an old man and I think he’s ready to give in. The tension must be killing him. I need to talk to Shannon.’

  I left him standing there but, by the time I was throwing myself in the gate at Bairnspairt, he was disappearing up the path towards the Sloans’ front door.

  ‘Shannon!’ I shouted, hammering on the door. ‘Let me in. If you don’t let me in this minute, I’ll dial 999.’ I tried the door handle and nearly overbalanced as the door gave and I fell into the little hallway. The fug of incense was missing today and the cottage seemed cold and damp. She had opened her windows at the tops despite the weather. ‘Shannon?’ I looked into the living room, then the kitchen. She was nowhere to be seen. She wasn’t in the bright room with the SAD light either. I went to the last door, her private room, and knocked. Then I tried it and, feeling the lock give, pushed it open.

  My heartbeats were bulging up into my throat, but behind that door there was nothing worse than Shannon’s bedroom. She was curled up on her bed under that same duvet from the couch, her face turned into her pillow, sobbing deep and hard. On the far side of the room a curved computer desk was set up with three monitors and a keyboard, a fan at one side to cool the air when all the machines were whirring. Why had she feared me seeing this? I wondered. Maybe it was just her sanctum. Or maybe it was the photographs by her bed. Little white-haired boys in sunglasses and baseball caps. They weren’t Sean. She couldn’t really have photos of Sean, could she? Maybe she was embarrassed that she’d printed out stock pictures and framed them.

  ‘Hey,’ I said, going over and sitting down beside her. The mattress dipped under my weight and rolled her closer to me. ‘Don’t cry like that. You’ll make yourself sick.’

  ‘He’s dead,’ Shannon moaned, turning towards me and letting me put my arms round her. ‘I thought he was. I knew he was, deep down. I kept hoping but I knew. I knew yesterday. That’s why I went to the graveyard.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I think so. I think it was Lovatt that tested the children, not Denise. He tested … What were their names?’

  ‘Vanessa, Simon,’ Shannon said. She had stopped gulping quite so badly now. She sat up and rested against the bedhead, sniffing and wiping her nose with the heel of her hand.

  ‘Right. Vanessa and Simon.’

  ‘She was positive and he was negative.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Lovatt needed a plan to get rid of Denise and little Vanessa and keep Simon.’

  ‘The worthwhile child,’ Shannon said. ‘The perfect child.’ She was crying again, tears coursing down her cheeks, her eyes red and sore-looking.

  ‘So he set himself up as an adoption lawyer and he found a woman – a total stranger – who wanted a child. She was happy to adopt a child with some special needs. But when she heard that the little boy she was getting was perfect she was happy then too.’

  ‘He switched them,’ Shannon said. ‘He killed my brother along with his wife and child. That’s right, isn’t it? That’s what happened. Criss-cross. He switched them.’

  ‘Except he didn’t. He was on the Orient Express. Like it was some kind of joke! He went on the bloody Orient Express to alibi himself. I knew there was something dodgy the first time I heard it.’

  ‘Do you mean maybe Sean’s not dead?’ Shannon said. The light in her eyes was painful to see. ‘But someone has to be in that grave, Finnie. Simon Dudgeon’s little grave. You think there’s a lot of paperwork for an adoption, you should see a death.’

  ‘No, I’m sorry,’ I said softly. ‘He is dead. I just don’t think Lovatt killed him. Because of the alibi. The train.’ There it was again. A flicker of something just out of my view. Even what Shannon had just said – criss-cross – was making me twitchy. Shannon saw the thoughts flit across my face and leaned closer, still hoping. I shut my eyes. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, trying to let her down gently.

  ‘It’s okay,’ she said. ‘I told you I know. I’ve known for years. It’s just this las
t couple of days has been hard, guessing where he died and when. And why. And then Paddy’s mum hammered in the last nail there.’ She scrubbed at her face. ‘But never mind that. I’ve got the rest of my life to grieve. If it’s right enough – what you’re saying – that it wasn’t Lovatt, maybe whoever it was is still alive to get arrested and convicted and do hard time. So, you were saying … alibi?’

  ‘Alibi,’ I agreed. ‘Lovatt’s alibi for the time his family died. It’s off. I know it is. Something’s been bothering me about it since I first heard the story.’

  ‘It’s pretty elaborate,’ Shannon said. ‘But maybe he loves trains and doesn’t read detective fiction. Maybe it never occurred to him that it would ring all the wrong alarm bells for some people. People who couldn’t care less about trains.’

  ‘Trains,’ I said.

  ‘What about them?’

  ‘Oh, buggeration!’ I put my head in my hands and squeezed my eyes shut. ‘It’s something to do with trains. It’s…’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Shhh,’ I said. ‘It’s just out of reach. It’s just on the tip of—’ I sat up. ‘I’ve got it.’

  Shannon was staring at me.

  ‘Okay, I need to admit something first, though,’ I said. ‘I met Lovatt and Tuft. On the night they died. I met them.’

  ‘I know,’ Shannon said. ‘I mean, I thought so. You spoke as if you had.’

  ‘And Tuft said it took Lovatt just a few months from meeting her to proposing. Twenty-five years ago. And she also said that they met at North Berwick at Christmas time, just before the old station was pulled down and it all went automatic. She said Lovatt’s mother was pissed off about the station. And I’ve got a hunch. Maybe a memory. Google it for me, will you?’

  Shannon was scrambling off her bed almost before the words were out of my mouth. She woke one of her monitors and typed something very fast into the browser.

  ‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘North Berwick station. Closed down and demolished. Oh, wait – in nineteen eighty-five. That’s not twenty-five years ago. That’s over thirty years ago.’

  The click as everything fell into place was so clear I swear I could hear it happening.

  ‘Nineteen eighty-five,’ I said. ‘When Lovatt met Tuft and proposed. And Paddy’s mum went to a private clinic in East Lothian, a lovely train journey along the coast. What do you bet it was Berwick she was going to? Tuft Dudgeon’s home town. What do you bet when Lovatt and Tuft went looking for a vulnerable woman, unconnected to them, who would bring up Simon and ask no questions, they found her at a mental-health clinic in Berwick? The “Mrs Dudgeon” Elayne got to know was Mrs Dudgeon-in-waiting. And I think she took care of turning her intended into a widower, while he was off constructing an alibi for himself. On that bloody stupid train.’

  I tilted to the side so I could get my phone out of my back pocket. I dialled Paddy.

  ‘Hi,’ I said. ‘How’s your mum? How’s mine? Shannon’s fine. He’s okay. He’s talking to Mr Sloan. Listen, ask Elayne to describe Mrs Dudgeon. I know it’s years since she saw her but it was an intense experience. She should remember.’

  There was a succession of muffled noises while Paddy relayed the question and then passed over the phone.

  ‘Finnie?’ Elayne said. ‘Why do you want to know? She looked just normal. We weren’t raving maniacs.’

  ‘Did she have long red hair?’ I said.

  ‘No, she had a shampoo and set,’ said Elayne. ‘Lots of women did back then. I did, if it comes to it.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said. I hung up the phone. She had still had her shampoo and set last Monday, the little kiss curls at her temples soaked in spilled blood, her face as grey as her hair had turned in the thirty-odd years since Elayne had met her. I squeezed my eyes shut. The picture was back. Her open mouth and her slashed hands and the hump of his chest and the black butterfly spreading its wings on either side of the knife handle. I almost hoped they really were in Mr Sloan’s cottage, wrapped in plastic. I wanted to see them now. Anything to take that vision away.

  ‘Can you face coming back to mine again?’ I asked Shannon. ‘You don’t have to but we need to talk this out – Paddy and I have got a lot to come clean about – and then we need to decide what to do.’

  ‘You think you’ve got a lot to come clean about!’ She pushed herself up off her bed and wriggled her shoulders. ‘I’ll come but not in these wet clothes.’ She peeled her top off, revealing skin so white it was luminous in the low light. She looked like a Botticelli – I think I mean Botticelli – so rounded and smooth, no sign of muscles underneath that pale flesh. Then she shrugged on a new jumper and twisted her hair up into a topknot. She put on a pair of sunglasses that were sitting on her bedside table and smiled a brave smile, not quite steady, at me.

  We huddled under a shared umbrella back out in the rain. It hammered like fists on the taut nylon, dropping like marbles on the sagging quilts over the banana plants, like snare drum brushes as it hit the waxy cabbage leaves.

  Outside the gate, my dad was standing. He was quite still, not even bowing his head against the downpour. It ran over his glasses and behind them too. He blinked when he saw me.

  ‘I…’ he said. ‘I didn’t know what to do, Finn. I don’t know what to do.’

  ‘Are they in there?’ I said.

  ‘What’s this?’ said Shannon.

  ‘I think he’s got the Dudgeons in there,’ I told her.

  ‘No, no, he hasn’t,’ my dad said. ‘Poor auld sowel. He doesn’t know a thing about that anyway.’

  ‘So what’s up?’ I said.

  ‘She’s dead,’ my dad said. ‘His wife’s dead.’

  ‘Mrs Sloan died?’ Shannon cried out. ‘When?’

  ‘Years back,’ my dad said. ‘It looks like years ago.’

  ‘That can’t be right,’ I said.

  ‘I just saw it with my own eyes, Finnie,’ my dad said. ‘She’s a skeleton. It’s the bonfires, like you said. He scrapes … And then he burns…’

  ‘But…’ I didn’t know why it was troubling me so much but before I could catch the thought, another one struck me. ‘So that’s the deal he had with the Dudgeons, is it? They pretend they’re seeing Mrs Sloan regularly for mah jongg nights and he does whatever it is he does for them. Keeps whatever secret it is he keeps for them.’

  ‘It’s not just me, then,’ Shannon said.

  ‘Or me and Paddy either,’ I said. ‘Oh, God, let’s go and talk about it inside, eh?’

  As we splashed our way back along the lane to the gates and the lodge, I could feel the eyes upon me from the upstairs windows: Mr Sloan hovering behind his net curtains, watching us walk away.

  Sunday

  Chapter 29

  I woke at six the next morning after a dreamless night. It was still dark – of course it was! – and the room was cold outside the covers. Actually, the room was pretty cold inside the covers because we’d given our top quilt to Paddy’s mum, on the couch. My mum and dad had gone along to Shannon’s to her fold-out sofa-bed to save her being alone. I lay beside Paddy, listening to him muttering, ‘Too dark, it’s too dark.’ When that stopped, I listened to the silence. The rain had let up and the wind had stilled. If any creatures were moving about the forest, they were tiny ones or they were tiptoeing. I told myself Simmerton – its newsagents opening soon for rolls and papers, its garage open now for fags and juice and ten-pound pay-outs off last night’s lottery – was a five-minute drive away, or a ten-minute walk up and over the steps. We weren’t marooned here. We weren’t stranded.

  But all I could think of was the thin thread of the road slicing through miles of black trees, the two cuts on either side, the burned shell of Jerusalem and the graveyard up one, Widdershins and the Bairnspairt down the other – death and death and more death all around.

  ‘You okay?’ came Paddy’s gravel voice.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘You?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But I need to get on with it anyway. Why
did I agree to preach today?’ It was a stupid question. Why wouldn’t I have agreed to contribute a sermon on my first Sunday in my new parish, as a way to say hello to my new community, as a fresh step in my new life, my bright future?

  ‘I might not make it,’ Paddy said. ‘My head’s killing me.’

  ‘Hangover or migraine?’ I said, as if it made a difference.

  ‘We’ll see,’ he said. He was quiet for such a long time I thought he was sleeping again. ‘We’re finished, aren’t we? You and me.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Was it the will?’

  ‘The will was the last straw,’ I said. ‘Caring so much about money, Paddy. About things. But giving yourself a migraine to avoid looking at the bodies?’

  ‘I had a good reason for that,’ said Paddy. ‘A reason, anyway.’

  ‘Go on,’ I said. ‘If you’ve still got something to say. Only I thought we’d said everything last night. That was the point, wasn’t it?’

  ‘I wanted you to identify them because you’re a deacon so you’re…’

  ‘Above reproach?’

  ‘Further above reproach than a slimy lawyer who’s going to win big from the deaths anyway.’

  ‘But you hadn’t seen the will then,’ I said. ‘Wait, but you knew about the partnership papers. Hang on, no. You found out about the partnership papers same time you found out they’d “gone to Brazil”, right? And by then you knew you weren’t going to have to go into the house and see the bodies. Right? Paddy, right?’

  ‘I saw the signed papers first.’

  ‘Faxed papers first, then cheese and chocolate, then the email. Like that?’

  ‘Shhh,’ Paddy said. ‘Don’t talk about food.’

  He never did have a stomach for boozing.

  We hadn’t meant to get drunk last night. None of us. My dad had meant to drive home, take Elayne home. My mum didn’t even have her morning pills with her and I was worried about how she’d be through the day, even though I knew it took longer than that for her dose to dip.