But we’d got a head start at lunch and then my dad had needed a wee something for the shock of ‘meeting’ Mrs Sloan. Shannon needed something to calm her nerves. I needed something too. And when you put a bottle of whisky on a coffee-table with six people sitting round it, six Scots with a nip of Irish anyway, it’s a done deal.
‘Why aren’t we going to the polis?’ my mum said.
‘Because we need to get it straight first,’ said Paddy. ‘I need to know where my mum stands. Legally.’
‘Get it straight?’ said Shannon. ‘Where do we start?’
‘How about with a prayer?’ It’s not often I play the God card, but this was a very strange day.
‘How about with an agreement?’ my dad said. ‘Nobody here killed anyone, right?’ Nods all round. ‘And nobody here covered up for a killer, right?’ More nods after a few glances to check that everyone else was nodding. ‘Right, then. We go forward on that basis. If we all agree.’ I smiled at my mum. It was years ago my dad was made redundant, but he had snapped back into shop-steward mode as if he’d never been away.
‘What about Mr Sloan?’ I said. ‘Are you calling the cops on him?’
‘Who’s Mr Sloan?’ Elayne said. ‘Sloan?’
‘Not today,’ my dad said. ‘Not on a Saturday teatime, to get him slung in the cells with a lot of drunks after the football. It’s waited this long. It can wait till tomorrow.’
‘Right,’ I said. ‘Right-oh. That’s nothing to do with this anyway.’ But even as I spoke I could feel a wriggling inside me, a worm of doubt burrowing into my gut. There was something about the idea of Mr Sloan, loving his wife too much to let her go, hanging on and hanging on to the scraps that were left: washing her clothes and pegging them out, talking about her to neighbours. I couldn’t work out why it was bothering me. But I needed to pay attention to what was happening here in my own house. My dad was handing round the whisky glasses. Paddy was speaking.
‘So the adoption – my adoption – wasn’t legal?’ he said.
‘I’m your mum,’ said Elayne, miserably.
‘Of course you are,’ said Paddy. ‘Of course you are.’
‘I didn’t know.’ She turned to Shannon, pleading. I always wanted to shake Elayne when she turned on the ‘poor wee me’ routine, but Shannon was twice the woman I was, clearly.
‘Don’t upset yourself,’ she said. ‘You were happy to take a little boy with a visual impairment and other issues, weren’t you? That’s what you said. You’d have taken both of us, you said.’
‘I would,’ Elayne said. ‘I really would. Not that – I mean, your mum, the woman who brought you up, wouldn’t be without you.’
‘She died,’ said Shannon.
Elayne shuffled forward so she could reach Shannon’s hand and squeeze it. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry for all of it. I don’t know why they picked on me.’
‘If it wasn’t you it would have been someone else,’ I said. ‘I think Tuft Dudgeon – she wasn’t Tuft Dudgeon yet, because Denise was still alive, but anyway – was on the hunt for someone. She was at the clinic specifically on the look-out for someone who would go along with their plan. You were perfect, Elayne, because you were trusting and innocent and you wanted a child. You’ve got nothing to be sorry for, you see?’
‘Why didn’t they get someone who’d do it with her eyes open?’ Elayne said. ‘For pay?’
‘Maybe they would have, if they hadn’t found you,’ I said. ‘But they’d always have worried, wouldn’t they? They’d always have had to keep paying.’
I saw her eyes flash at the same exact second the light came on for me.
‘Sloan!’ she said. ‘Myna Sloan. She was there at the same time. She was older than me, going through the change. They do say if you’re aching for a baby of your own, the change can be rough.’
‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘That’s what Mr Sloan had on the Dudgeons. They tried there first! Lord above.’ But even as the light-bulb came on and burned away inside my head, making sense of things, I knew that wasn’t what had really been tugging at me.
‘So,’ my dad said. ‘Lovatt Dudgeon – bloody stupid name – wanted rid of his wife and daughter and wanted to keep his son safe. Even if it meant he’d never see the lad again.’
‘Why not just kill his wife and daughter and make it look like suicide?’ I said. ‘And then he’d have kept his son safe and with him all these years. He did stay away, didn’t he, Elayne? He didn’t visit Paddy? He didn’t have contact. Sorry! I’m sorry! I know, I know.’
‘Nothing!’ Elayne said. ‘There was nothing. I never saw hide nor hair of either of them again. He was my little boy and that was that. That was all, Finnie. I wish you’d believe me.’
‘Except there was the money,’ Paddy said. ‘There was the money, Mum. Come on, eh?’
I nodded. As soon as he’d mentioned the missing money and the loan and the oil rig on Monday night, the thought had struck me that he’d always had too much. I was used to everyone having more money than me so I didn’t question it, but he should have come out of a law degree with some student debt. It was even longer than an ordinary degree and I knew he’d had a little hatchback car while he was at uni. There were photos of him on trips with the orienteering club. And he hadn’t worked in the holidays: there were photos of him backpacking and scuba-diving and all that. I thought he was so glamorous when we first met. Me, who’d gone on school field trips to the country park in wellies because I didn’t have anything else except trainers, and we’d been told not to wear them.
‘I had a benefactor,’ Elayne said. I could tell it was killing her. ‘I thought it was the birth family. I thought maybe they’d found out where Paddy had gone.’
‘It was the birth family,’ I said. ‘The birth father, anyway. Lovatt.’
‘He had a heart,’ Shannon said. ‘Not her. She was just a brain. Like a calculator. She was the one that cottoned on to me. She had me taped as soon as I got here. Day one.’
‘Do you think you can tell us?’ I said. ‘I know it must be painful, but like my dad said … If we agree?’
‘Wait, though.’ That was my mum. ‘Finnie doll, I think I know why they hatched this mad plan instead of doing what you said.’ She shook her head, as if she was literally trying to drive out the fug of her meds and the booze she’d chased them down with. ‘Because if a wife and kid with Huntington’s just conveniently die and the dad swans off with the healthy son and gets married again? People would talk, wouldn’t they? Folk would wonder. I know I would. But the way he did it – never having any more kids after that, marrying a woman too old to give him any, dedicating his life to helping other children like his own? He’s untouchable. I bet no one ever dreamed he was anything less than an angel.’
‘And then suddenly after years of getting away with it, they kill themselves,’ I said. ‘They just up and kill themselves.’
‘Exactly,’ my mum said. ‘That’s what I mean.’
My dad nodded. ‘What changed?’ he said. ‘Mary, you’ve nailed it. What changed? Paddy, how did you come across the job advert?’
‘It was in my inbox,’ Paddy said. ‘Someone emailed it to me.’
‘So you didn’t find them,’ my dad went on. ‘You didn’t close in on them and frighten them. You weren’t a threat to them.’
‘All they would need to do was not give me the job,’ Paddy said. ‘I would have shrugged and moved on to the next one.’
‘No, son,’ my dad said, the choice of word hitting all of us with a clang. He licked his lips before going on. ‘They sent the advert to you. They must have decided to bow out and pass everything on to you. But why?’
‘Health again, maybe,’ Elayne said. ‘A bad diagnosis.’
‘I think,’ said Shannon, ‘it might have been me. If we’re really talking in confidence. When I first got here, I had made an appointment to see Lovatt and I took all the paperwork from my adoption, all the correspondence from my mum – my mum that brought me up, I m
ean – and from my birth mum. I marched in there and started asking about Sean. I showed them how hard I’d tried to find him. I even asked if there was any way the lawyer who’d handled it away back then would be able to find out, for sure, if he had died. I asked if Lovatt could help me find out if Sean had died.’
‘Jaysis,’ my dad said. ‘If we’re right about all of this, love, you’re bloody lucky it’s them that’s dead and not you.’
‘They seemed sympathetic,’ Shannon said. ‘They wanted to help me. They offered me such a fantastic deal on the cottage I couldn’t say no. But it backfired. The house was supposed to sweeten me up and shut me down but it just made me more suspicious.’
‘They wanted you close,’ I said. ‘Like the Sloans. Where they could keep an eye on you. Maybe they were looking for leverage on you too. Something they could hold over you, like they held Mrs Sloan over that poor old man.’
‘There’s nothing to find,’ Shannon said. ‘I’ve never had so much as a parking ticket. Because I can’t drive. I suppose they could have threatened me with taking the cottage back.’
‘Could they?’ I said.
Shannon smiled. ‘No. I’d have slept in a hedge to get the truth.’ Then her face fell. ‘What I can’t forgive,’ she said, ‘and I’ll never forgive, is why they took their secrets with them. Why – if they were dying – couldn’t they leave a letter for me? Why couldn’t they tell me if he suffered at the end? Why couldn’t they just tell me he didn’t suffer at the end? I’d have believed them. Why didn’t they leave a letter for me?’
I flashed a look at Paddy, but he didn’t get what I was trying to say. Were we sure they hadn’t? There was nothing in the kitchen desk, the place I’d checked. But he had searched the office and Abby had searched Lovatt’s study. Would a letter to a neighbour have struck them as important? Or might there still be some comfort for Shannon hidden somewhere? Then another thought struck me. What made her so sure there wasn’t?
I glanced back at her. She was flame-faced and looking down at her lap.
‘Were you in the house?’ I said.
She raised her head, showing me my own face reflected in her mirror shades.
‘My house?’ she said. ‘When?’
I didn’t push it.
‘So they killed themselves,’ my dad said, heaving a sigh and filling his glass. ‘Another suicide.’
‘Except the first one wasn’t,’ my mum said. ‘In nineteen eighty-five. It was murder.’
‘And the second one wasn’t either,’ I said. ‘Or not entirely. One of them wanted to die and decided to take the other down. But which one was it? Did she kill him or did he kill her?’
‘You tell us, Finnie,’ said my dad. ‘You saw them after they died. What did the corpses tell you?’
‘What?’ Paddy said, jerking in his seat. ‘Why did you say that?’
‘The time’s past for secrets,’ I said. ‘Between us anyway – we agreed that much. What did they tell me? That he died second with a knife in his back. But she couldn’t do it with her hands cut to shreds. I keep thinking about it, dreaming about it. Can’t stop seeing it and I don’t know why.’
‘And can’t go back for another look either,’ my dad said. ‘Because even if it was just between the two of them when they died, someone else got involved for sure afterwards. Right?’
‘Right,’ I said.
‘Who except a killer would have moved them?’ my dad said.
‘Right,’ I said again.
For a moment we were silent. Then my mum said what we were all thinking. ‘Where are they?’
Chapter 30
I was getting too old to drink that much, I thought, looking at myself in the cruel side-light hitting the bathroom mirror in what passed for dawn. I remembered when pallor and dark eyes were just a Gothic touch. Today I looked washed up. I looked seedy. A black cassock and the harsh white slash of the dog-collar did me no favours either. I put some blusher on my cheeks but that only made the rest of me look greyer so I swiped a fistful of bog roll and scrubbed it off again.
I could tell from the commotion outside the bathroom door that my dad had arrived, revelling in his hangover as ever.
‘Mouth like a junkie’s carpet,’ he was saying, as I sidled into the kitchen. ‘Bacon roll, Finn?’ He had the frying pan out and buttered rolls lying open on plates.
‘Go on, then,’ I said. ‘What time did you pack it in? I never heard Paddy hitting the mattress.’ I had gone to bed as soon as we’d made our decision.
My dad nodded and groaned. ‘God knows. I was bladdered. We wrote everything down, though. Here was me ripping the piss out of your boy for taking notes, but he’s right. He’s not wrong.’
‘And?’ I said. I had half an ear cocked for what my mum was saying to Elayne in the living room, the timbre of her voice, the depth of the dips and the height of the peaks in her intonation. Her voice flattening out was an early sign of her beginning to sink again. But there was nothing of that about her this morning. She was clucking over it all like a flustered chicken. And Elayne, answering, warbled like a pigeon. They were both fine.
‘And,’ my dad said, ‘Paddy reckons that this Lovatt – his father! You can’t get your brainbox round it, can you? – played a canny hand. St Angela’s was as bent as a seven-bob bit but he never kept a penny of the takings. All handed over fair and square. So none of Paddy’s inheritance is tainted. It’s not the proceeds of crime. And it really is his inheritance too.’
‘Are you sure?’ I said. ‘Is Paddy sure?’
‘Yep,’ said my dad. ‘It’s Paddy’s – inherited from Denise, his mother.’
‘What about Tuft?’ I said.
‘Nope,’ said my dad. ‘Lovatt never owned it – can’t benefit from a crime you committed – so he couldn’t leave it to his second wife, even if she did outlive him by a minute or two.’
‘So what was the point of the fake will?’ I asked. Then I answered myself: ‘So Paddy could get it without the story coming out.’
‘Bingo,’ said my dad. ‘Nice as ninepence.’
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Pretty neat.’
‘You don’t sound happy,’ my dad said. ‘I mean, I know it’s a lot to take – it’s like something off the telly – but if your life’s going to turn into a soap, better Dynasty than EastEnders, eh?’
I said nothing.
‘You can sell it all if it’s too tainted.’
‘The problem is, Dad, it’s tainted for me but not for Paddy. He’s okay. He didn’t even seem bothered about what Elayne was going through.’
My dad grunted, hunched over the frying pan, pushing the bacon around. ‘Aye,’ he said quietly, after a bit of thinking time, ‘you’ve got a point. I was as bad, off my head on that homebrew and thinking it was just a puzzle. Just a … Like a game. I never thought of Elayne.’
‘She’s your daughter’s mother-in-law,’ I said. ‘You can forgive yourself. But she’s his mum. And it’s not just that.’ I was whispering now, hoping, between the clucking and cooing in the living room and the hot fat spitting in the frying pan, Paddy wouldn’t hear me. ‘Why’s he not freaking out? Or why’s he not catatonic? Why’s he so on top of it all? Checking out his financial situation and feeling pleased about it? It’s not right, Dad.’
‘Trained mind?’ my dad said. ‘What’s that thing they say about surgeons?’
‘Compartmentalisation. But why’s he not worried about who moved the bodies? Someone moved them. Someone sent an email to buy a bit of time. That someone might even have killed both the Dudgeons. Paddy should be scared he’s next. Shouldn’t he? How can a job and a bit of money, even a few cottages … How can they even register?’
My dad turned to face me, and all the bravado of how much he loved a crippling hangover was gone now. He looked old and ill and more troubled than I had ever seen him.
‘We agreed to leave it,’ he said.
I nodded. We had. Every one of us. To save Elayne a bashing in the tabloids, to save Shannon more
pain, to save Julie and Abby’s jobs, to make sure Mr Sloan had privacy while Social Services did what they had to do, we had agreed. I’d say I witnessed the will and we’d all take the true history of Sean and Simon to our graves.
‘You don’t suspect him, do you, Finn?’ my dad said. ‘Of moving the corpses?’
‘All I’m saying is we’re not at the bottom of this and Paddy doesn’t care.’
I saw a movement in the doorway and the skin on my neck shrank, pulling my shoulders up and freezing them. Turning, ready to face him if I had to, all my breath rushed out of me again in a gust of relief as I saw it was Shannon. And that very fact brought tears to my eyes. To be so relieved it was this woman I hardly knew, instead of the man I’d thought I knew better than I knew myself.
‘There she is!’ my dad said. ‘That’s a rare comfy sofa-bed you’ve got along the road. I slept like a slug. Zed beds we crashed on when we were young and daft and couldn’t afford a taxi? They’d cripple you. And a nice fierce shower too. I’m halfway to fixed. Couple of bacon butties…’
‘How did you sleep?’ I said. Shannon was so white she looked blue, but it might have been the cold light and her dark clothes, the fact that she had her black wig on again.
‘I dozed a bit towards morning,’ she said. ‘Dreamed of Sean, of course. But a different dream from usual. The start of the process, probably.’ She took a shuddering breath in and caught her lip. Then she sniffed deeply and shook her head. ‘I’m not going to cry today. Don’t know what I am going to do. But no crying.’
‘Come to church,’ I said. ‘I’m preaching a sermon. You can give me a star-rating after.’
‘I’m not really—’ Shannon began.
‘Have a bit of a sing-song,’ I said. ‘It’s like going to Mamma Mia. Or The Rocky Horror Picture Show.’
‘Maybe,’ Shannon said. ‘Is there any quiet time?’
‘That’s Quakers,’ I told her.
‘Because you’re right,’ Shannon said. ‘There’s a bit of this that’s still out of sight, isn’t there? There’s something missing. I can’t help thinking if I just sat and thought for long enough it would come into view. Like…’
Strangers at the Gate Page 25