‘A magic eye picture,’ I said. ‘Yeah, me too.’
‘That’s what yesterday was supposed to be,’ my dad said. ‘We maybe overdid the refreshments, mind you.’ He was lifting bacon rashers from the pan now and folding them onto the rolls. ‘Here you go, girls. Bacon butties coming your way, ladies,’ he called through to my mum and Elayne. ‘Paddy?’ he added, raising his eyebrows at me.
‘Migraine,’ I said. ‘Let him sleep on.’
I didn’t want him in the pew, watching me. I didn’t want him in the church. I didn’t trust that he had a right to be there, in God’s house, in good faith. You had to hand it to the Prods, I supposed. If you couldn’t play the old confession card, that was a hell of a good reason to keep your nose clean and make sure you never needed to.
* * *
The church was packed. Of course it was. There was a new deacon – a slip of a girl, at that – and there was a scandal the like of which Simmerton hadn’t seen for decades to be picked over. Tuft and Lovatt had disappeared. Out of the world or out of the country, either way it was another delicious chapter in the tragic lives of the Dudgeon family. It would keep the parish going through more than that morning’s service. The book clubs, darts nights, keep-fit classes and indoor-bowling fixtures would have perfect attendance for a while yet before everyone was done with the post-mortems.
Robert Waugh, as I’d suspected, was one of those ministers at his best on a Sunday morning, belting out benedictions and intimations, like a true vicar of the Old Testament God. I wondered if he had offered this sermon to me purely so I would make him look even better. He introduced me after the first hymn and prayer and I ascended the short flight of steps to the pulpit, tasting bitter adrenalin and feeling my hands prick with a sweat I couldn’t have said was hangover or nerves.
My mum and dad were smiling up at me. Paddy’s mum gave me a wary look then glanced away. Julie put her thumbs up and winked. I couldn’t see Abby. Maybe she wasn’t a churchgoer or maybe she’d faded into the background in her Sunday best, same as weekdays. I recognised one of the butcher brothers, a barista from the good coffee shop and the Webbs, of course, in the front row.
‘I’m going to read today,’ I began, ‘from one John, chapter one, verses five, six and seven. “Now this is the message that we have heard from Him and proclaim to you: God is light and in Him there is no darkness at all. If we say “we have fellowship with Him” while we continue to walk in darkness, we lie and do not act in truth. But if we walk in light as He is in the light, then we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of His Son Jesus cleanses us of all sin.”’
I’d been pleased with myself coming up with this passage to hang my debut sermon on, thinking the people of Simmerton would like nothing better than to focus on light and hope at the deepest days of their dark winter. But as I looked out across the pews, I saw a few disappointed faces, even a couple of raised eyebrows and twisted mouths, and I wondered if maybe every guest who hit this pulpit had the same brainwave and they were sick of it. Maybe it was rude for newcomers to mention it, like a great big birthmark on someone else’s baby.
I really wished I hadn’t started thinking of babies. I could see Shannon sitting there right at the back. But I’m not experienced enough to switch sermons on the run and I couldn’t drum up something to comfort her instead of this clueless riff on light and darkness, reminding her of her condition and her brother’s. The throw of the genetic dice that sealed his fate.
‘No need of UV rays…’ I was saying, ‘… warmth of the Simmerton welcome, bright smiles of my new neighbours…’ I thought of Mr Sloan. I saw the congregation shuffling its feet with a cacophony of gritty, scraping noises. Of course they all knew that two of our neighbours had died as soon as we arrived. If they’d known – or even dreamed – what else those neighbours had done, pretending a child was dead when it was living …
My brain ran up against this fact like a brick wall and stalled. My mouth kept talking. I had practised the sermon enough times for it to pour out of me. But all of my mind was elsewhere now. They had both conspired once before to pretend that a person was dead. They had pretended little Simon was dead. They went as far as to substitute another child’s body and bury it.
And what was happening this time? Paddy and I had seen two bodies and then they had disappeared. Someone had sent an email from a dead man’s phone. No one could work out who had moved the bodies or where they’d been put or who had sent the email or why.
But what, I was suddenly asking myself, what if the same thing had happened again? What if they weren’t dead? What if Tuft, lying there with blood glossy in her mouth and bright in her cuts … What if Lovatt, slumped over her with that knife sliced into his back and the bloom of that black butterfly … What if, once we had seen them, they got up and walked away? Flew to Brazil, safe from Shannon, safe from everyone. Scot free.
Maybe that was why the tableau had kept pulsing in my head, filling my dreams, pounding at me to pay attention. Some bit of my brain knew some bit of that picture was wrong.
I was still talking, about light and hope, about truth and clarity, and I was still thinking: we were always supposed to go back and see them. That wasn’t a slip. It was part of the plan. I wasn’t supposed to forget my bag. No one could have made me do that. It was the signed papers we were supposed to go back for, the papers Paddy thought he had, that Lovatt must have taken back from him. The bag was just an unexpected bonus.
But, then, why the hell did they send the email about going on holiday? That made no sense at all. Less than putting the bag out on the hallstand.
I drove my mind away from it all and back to the pulpit, back to the words I was speaking, back to the upturned faces of the Simmerton churchgoers. I was horrified to realise that they were speaking too. We were halfway through praying together in chorus, without a word of it – my direct address to God! – having glanced against any particle of my brain.
‘Forgive us our trespasses,’ I said, hoping they wouldn’t hear my voice change, ‘as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil. Amen.’
The congregation kept muttering and started shuffling again but I didn’t even register the dissonance until Robert Waugh, taking over again from behind the lectern, made some snippy little dig about the many paths to God.
I had said the Our Father of my childhood instead of the Lord’s Prayer as approved by my current bosses.
It was the least of my worries today.
Chapter 31
‘They’ll put it down to nerves,’ my dad said, tucking me under his armpit and shaking me after I had finished saying goodbye to the parishioners, filing out with their dead eyes and their pursed mouths. ‘It’s nothing. They loved you. You were fantastic up there. End of the pier. Céline Dion at Caesar’s Palace.’
‘For God’s sake,’ I said, and went to the vestry to take off my robes and get my anorak. Robert Waugh was in his office but he didn’t want to speak to me any more than I wanted to speak to him. I nipped in and out like a rat terrier and left by the side door.
My dad was still there, standing with Shannon. ‘Don’t get rid of me that easy!’ he said.
‘Okay, okay,’ I said. ‘Thank you. You’re right. My first outing was a triumph. You happy?’
‘Me? I’m always happy,’ he said. It was true.
‘But I need a bit of time,’ I told him. ‘I need a walk on my own, then I’ll be happy too. I won’t be long.’
‘We’re all going for a pub lunch,’ my dad said. ‘Elayne, your mum, Paddy, if we can rouse him. You in, Shannon? Where’s got decent beer and a roast dinner?’
‘Text me where you are,’ I said, beginning to walk away. ‘I’ll join you, honest, Dad. I just need some alone time.’
‘You’ll be okay?’ he called after me. ‘Lot of funny stuff going on round here, Finnie. I could come with you.’
I flapped a hand at him and walked on. The funny stuff was all i
n Brazil, I was nearly certain. Simmerton was back to its quiet life again. Simmerton, Jerusalem and Widdershins – the sliver of valley and its two needle-thin cuts – had had their adventures and now they could settle back into obscurity. I just needed to work out whether I could settle into obscurity along with them. Or if I had to keep at it, like a loose tooth, until that last niggling question was answered. Did I have to keep picking at the threads of that squeak-tight knot until it loosened and I could smooth the strands and follow them, all the way from Denise Dudgeon’s genetic black luck to Paddy’s future as my husband, the father of my – maybe, who knew? – children and my safe place in this harsh world?
The rain, for a mercy, had stopped. The strip of sky above the trees was like the inside of a mussel shell, that shape cupped over me, those bands of blue and grey criss-crossing me. I walked with my head tipped back, drinking it in and feeling my worst fears shrink down until they were spiders instead of monsters: bad enough but nothing I couldn’t stamp on.
Trouble was, there was nowhere to walk. If I circled the town I’d meet my parishioners, maybe even my family, and if I headed out at the south end I’d end up at home. So I found myself walking where I’d driven on Friday. Up the east cut past the graveyard towards that blackened, shuttered house. I would walk round it just once, clockwise, like an act of faith that somewhere outside this valley the sun really was still rising, crossing the wide sky and setting again. Then, whether or not I had come to any conclusions, I would join my family and eat. I would even ask for a doggy bag for Paddy.
Maybe in spring there would be wild garlic up here, I tried to tell myself, as I left the last of the cottages behind me and slipped into the cut. Primroses, bluebells, orchids. Maybe in summer there would be wild raspberries and families with buckets out picking them, coming back in autumn for the brambles, making jelly and winning rosettes at the village show.
‘Right, Finnie,’ I said. ‘And the men’ll be whistling and the women’ll tie scarves over their hair and the kids’ll play Pooh-sticks because you’ve left the city and moved to nineteen fifty.’
That strip of sky was beginning to make me feel dizzy, so I lowered my head and faced where I was going, passing the graveyard, with its mangled gate, passing the mossy and mouldering gateposts, picking my way through the tall weeds and saplings sprouting in the rotting drive, until once again the house was before me and then beside me and then behind me as I circled it and took the last corner to turn for home.
Then stopped.
Something had changed.
I retraced my steps to the back of the house again, to where the store rooms and sculleries dribbled out into leantos and sheds. There, beside one of the many iron-barred windows, the board across a doorway was broken. It had been pulled free and had split in a ragged diagonal, then been propped back in place.
I knew better but the habit was ingrained. I plucked out my phone and looked for a signal. I was tugging at the bottom half of the broken board before I’d got the bleep and the frowny face. I flipped my phone to torch and faced it away from me.
Behind the board, when I stooped to see, there was a plain corridor of white walls and stone floor, doors along its length and a staircase rising up at its far end.
‘Hello?’ I shouted. ‘Is anyone in there?’ I put one foot inside and tested the floor. It felt solid enough.
Of course I shouldn’t go in. I wasn’t a moron. But I told myself if a homeless member of the Simmerton community had moved in here, he – probably he – was just the person a deacon needed to meet.
Assuring myself it was nothing sinister, telling myself that the door first closed then open in Shannon’s cottage was nothing to worry me, I slipped inside and started walking.
The fire hadn’t reached down here to the back basement. The rooms off the corridor were empty but intact, nothing more than the odd sheet of yellowed newspaper on the dusty floors. The staircase I had seen at the far end was a different story. Halfway up to the first landing the paint on the stone steps turned black and crackled and the walls darkened to a blistered brown. But the steps were stone. I tried the first, then the second and, listening closely for warning creaks, I climbed them.
Decades after the fire, the dead air on the main floor was still kippered, smoke and rot in equal doses turning my stomach. I stood at the head of the stairs and played my torch around. The floor of this hall was – I thought – marble. I could see faint traces of squares and little diamonds under a thick layer of greasy dust. There was another staircase opposite me, with a splayed bottom step and a newel post with a bulbous, carved base. The top of the post was burned to a jagged spear of charcoal and the steps above that one grand, sweeping riser were missing. There was a sagging landing banister twenty feet above that showed where the staircase had once arrived on the upper floor, but stair, floor and rooms had all burned away. The interior of the house above the ground was simply – and obscenely somehow – gone.
It couldn’t be safe for anyone to be holed up in there.
‘Hello?’ I shouted again, and thought I heard scuffling. It was a small scuffling. But, I supposed, it might have been someone’s boot heels scraping on the floor if he had been startled awake by some daft woman shouting.
‘I didn’t mean to scare you,’ I called to him, willing him to exist. ‘Are you okay?’ Now there was silence, but I played my light over the floor towards where that scuffle had come from and I was sure I could see … not footprints exactly, but some kind of disturbance in the layer of dirt. I walked over, headed for an archway, its doors long gone.
There was something in there, I thought, standing on the threshold. But either this room was cavernous or my phone was starting to lose juice because the light, so sharp at my feet, only just picked out the shapes I was peering at.
‘Are you okay?’ I said. Whoever it was was on the floor and he didn’t smell too good. I took a deep breath and started making my way over. I had thought my days of homeless drunks who’d pissed and puked and never changed their clothes were over when I took this job but I wasn’t complaining. I didn’t have ‘WWJD’ tattooed inside my wrist for nothing. And I knew the answer this time. He’d wash their feet.
‘Are you awake?’ I said, halfway there. I clicked my phone off and clicked it on again but the light was the same smeared and feeble yellow. ‘Don’t get a fright,’ I said, stepping softer. I lifted my phone and closed my eyes, so’s I’d have a better view when I opened them.
I got one good look before my phone went black as I dropped it, shrieking.
The rat I had startled, shouting from the hallway, was a bold one. It had come back. It was sitting on Tuft’s chest gnawing at the ropy skin of her neck. And she was watching it. Her yellow eyes were turned down towards her body, bulging as if with outrage.
Lovatt lay beside her on his back. The knife must be gone. The knife was gone and his face was gone too. It was slashed to … they weren’t ribbons. They looked like entrails: lumpy and ragged, hanging down the sides of his head and jumbled at the base of his throat. I whimpered as I realised the blob of gristle nestled above his collar was his nose.
I turned away, then whipped back again, hearing the claws of that plucky little rat click on the floor, slow but determined, as it inched back towards the feast.
‘No!’ I shouted, and stamped my feet, feeling my phone crunch under my heel. ‘Stop it! Go away!’ I shrieked, as loud as I could. I heard the rat’s claws as it fled.
‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘It’s okay, Finnie. Mortal remains can’t harm you. They have gone to God. They’ve gone home to God.’ I was sure they had, no matter what doctrine I was going by. This was no suicide. That spindly old lady couldn’t have done that to Lovatt’s face and there was no way on Earth or in Heaven anyone could do it to himself. Someone had killed them both, and by the grace of God, they were with Him now. There was nothing in this house for me to fear. Not even the rat, God’s creature, living his allotted life, a part of God’s plan.
&nbs
p; Finally, I had talked myself into moving. I knew the floor was solid behind me. I would find my way. I turned and, with my arms straight out in front, I searched for the open archway.
How could I be lost inside a room with just one door? It was large and I was moving slowly, but it seemed like half an hour I spent edging forward, feeling empty air with my waving arms, before I grazed my knuckles on a wall and began to feel my way around it.
It had to be here somewhere, that yawning empty opening where the double doors had burned out. Unless – this stopped me – unless I had walked straight through it already and was edging my way to the stairs right now, about to plummet down them and lie there until someone else saw the ragged board and found us all.
‘Dear Lord, hear my prayer,’ I said. ‘Please help me to…’ My mind ran dry and my voice petered out. ‘Oh, sod it!’ I said, so loud it rang above me. ‘Hail Mary, full of grace. Our Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen. Hail Mary, full of grace. Our Lord is with thee…’
It took two and half to find the doorway. It took the other half and three more before I hit the back wall of the hallway and inched my way round in the pitch black to the stair head. Then, hugging the blistered wall, I slid down the stairs on my bottom to the long corridor with the stone floor and the faint light through the broken board far ahead of me.
I ran down the drive, down the cut, past the graveyard and banged on the door of the first cottage I came to.
‘What on earth?’ Sonsie Webb answered it in her slippers with a folded newspaper under her arm. ‘Finnie, where have you been? Are you all right? You’re filthy.’
‘Phone,’ I managed to mumble before I grabbed Sonsie by both her hands and used the resistance of her solid little round body as a counter-weight to stop me sliding too fast to the floor.
Strangers at the Gate Page 26