by Jane Renshaw
She had to act on the assumption that there could be something here.
And if there was, she had to find it before he did.
Changing into her oldest jeans and sweatshirt, she climbed the ladder back into the attic and spent an unpleasant half an hour crawling around poking at the gaps between the boards lining the inside of the roof, and the boards that formed the floor, and heaving the lid off the water tank to look inside it, and pushing her hand under it, expecting any moment to surprise a mouse or – ugh – a rat.
But all she found was dust bunnies and dead insects.
Maybe they’d found what they’d been looking for and removed it.
Or maybe not.
Where else might John have hidden evidence? Somewhere that could have been overlooked if the house had been searched during the renovation? The grotty, inaccessible spaces you got in every kitchen, between the fridge-freezer and the worktop, or behind the kick-boards under the units, or in the gaps where cupboards had to have holes cut in them for pipes?
The units were carpenter-made, rustic ones that looked several decades old and presumably had just been sanded down and painted in the soft duck-egg blue no doubt selected by Lorna from the interiors shop. The kick-boards were screwed in place.
She spent an equally unpleasant half hour unscrewing them and rooting around under the cupboards, and inserting her fingers into gaps, and shining the torch into any small space she could find.
Poking a mop handle into the gap between the Aga and the cupboard to its right, she felt it snag on something, something that crinkled, and carefully pulled towards her a small booklet.
The instructions for a probably long-dead iron.
It was getting dark outside, already – the sun left the sky early in winter, this far north – and the little front garden was disappearing under a covering of snow. The hedge was thick with it, like someone had gone mad with a foam gun, gobs of snow sticking to every horizontal surface. Beyond, the roof of the garage was white.
Would they have bothered searching the outbuildings?
This was a chance to try out her new gear. She selected a pair of charcoal-coloured fleece-lined trousers, a thermal vest and a cashmere jumper to go under her new jacket, then laced up her new walking boots, grabbed the torch and set out into the snow.
Big wet snowflakes assaulted her, blowing onto her face, onto her eyelashes. She pulled up the hood of her jacket and zipped the collar right up over her mouth. She felt like Amundsen or someone, setting off for the South Pole.
Her feet crumped in the snow, sinking through it to the gravel of the path. This wasn’t the sharp frostiness of yesterday – it was a wet, chilling sort of cold, like when you came out of a shower into a cold room.
The garage was an old-fashioned wooden one. It had wide double doors with panes of glass in the tops of them. She pulled at the left-hand door, and it shivered, sticking on the concrete floor, swollen, she guessed, in the damp. She opened it just wide enough to slip through, and pulled it shut behind her.
There was a light switch, thank God.
The bare bulb illuminated an empty space, smelling of creosote and engine oil and old damp wood, with a few tools hanging from nails around the wall and an old wardrobe without doors acting as a repository for WD40 and tins of nails and old paint pots. This was definitely the kind of place where you might secrete something you didn’t want anyone to find.
She spent another unpleasant hour examining the walls with her torch, searching for gaps into which something might have been pushed. She found old nails, and more dead insects, and a hibernating butterfly that stuck to her finger as if it had glue on the ends of its legs. She didn’t like to try to get it back into the gap between planks that she’d found it in – she was frightened of damaging it. Maybe if she just left it on a shelf in the old wardrobe it would find another place.
She looked at her watch: almost four o’clock. She’d better get over to the House and make a start on plucking those bloody pheasants. She’d found a recipe that looked fairly simple – you just plucked them, cut off the heads and feet, ripped out the insides and shoved them in the oven. She could adapt her salmon dish, substituting pheasant. Roast pheasant, boiled potatoes and peas. And would she need to make gravy?
She was out in the snow, pulling the garage doors shut, when she saw the movement in the periphery of her vision.
Someone was out here.
17
Karen could hardly see three paces in front of her. The winter afternoon twilight was already descending and it was snowing hard. She’d decided to try to hitch a ride in the next car that passed her, but the problem was that there was hardly any traffic. The snow had already covered the tyre tracks of the last vehicle that had gone by, and she was walking through pretty much virgin snow. Her left foot had a damp patch on the top of it because her crap boots weren’t properly waterproof. She needed new boots but she couldn’t afford them. Maybe she could ask Mum for the money.
She’d decided she had to go to Mum’s Christmas soiree after all because she’d had another horrible idea about the rescue phone and she needed to see Damian. She’d stupidly decided to bike it, but the road was far too slippy. She’d soon given up and left her bike propped against a snowy dyke.
It was weird, but she didn’t feel cold. Probably all the elderflower wine swilling about in her bloodstream. She’d had three glasses at lunch – because the stew had been really spicy, and because she’d wanted to blot out all the stupid rescue phone stuff for a while. And it had been refreshing and delicious, it hadn’t even tasted alcoholic, but obviously it was because when she’d stood up she’d almost fallen over and everyone had laughed, but not in a mean way – more like Yeah, we’ve all been there.
And she’d looked round at them all, Rainbow and Doffy and Prim – the definition of harmless – and Jagdeep who was such a laugh, and Ade and Gwennie, and she’d known that none of them could have done anything really bad like murder someone.
Gwennie had been talking about all the protests she’d been on with Baz, her ‘lover boy’ (Gwennie hated the terms ‘partner’ and ‘boyfriend’), who was kind of the only one of them apart from Karen with a job. He sold animal feed and was away at the moment – he was away a lot, but Gwennie said that suited her because she liked to pretend she was a proper radical feminist who had nothing to do with men. She supposed Gwennie and Baz were like the mum and dad of the group, only way cooler than any mum and dad Karen had ever met.
They had been involved in activism against capitalism and nuclear weapons and the Iraq War. They had been arrested and done prison terms. It was when they were doing animal rights stuff that they’d met Doffy. Karen couldn’t imagine Doffy doing anything more confrontational than signing a petition, but he had a story about when he and this other man had broken into a lab and freed some pigs that were being experimented on. Probably the other man had done all the breaking in stuff and had had to keep calming Doffy down.
Karen had told them about freeing the rats, and Doffy had seemed impressed, and Gwennie had been all ‘Fantastic!’ and ‘Way to go, Karen!’
It was so great to be living with people who got you. Who had the same values. Who weren’t all judgy, unlike some. Anna had been such a bitch about Ade that Karen hadn’t seen her for over a month. If you were over the age of consent, which Karen was by almost two years, an age gap between two people in a relationship was no one’s business but theirs.
‘He’s got you brainwashed!’ Anna had yelled last time Karen had seen her at the House.
‘I’m not the one who’s been brainwashed!’ Karen had yelled right back.
Anna thought anyone who wanted to follow a slightly alternative lifestyle had basically sold their soul to the devil. Ade said you had to expect that attitude because people weren’t going to accept overnight that if they wanted nature to survive they were going to have to make sacrifices and not just go on living the same way they always had. It was only to be expected that they’d
get all defensive and aggro about anyone who was actually walking the walk.
It was shit, though.
It was shit that her two best friends wouldn’t even give Ade a chance. They’d come here to meet him and the others once and it had been a disaster. Prim had been in one of her manic phases – she was cyclothymic – and it had all been a bit full on because Doffy and Rainbow had been sitting by the kitchen range with no clothes on, Doffy with his hands on Rainbow’s baby bump, trying to draw energy up from the centre of the earth to balance the foetus’s chakras. Doffy had explained what he was doing, and okay, so it was obviously loony tunes, but Damian had been really insensitive and tried to tell them why chakras were a physical impossibility. Rainbow had got upset, and Gwennie had said if Damian couldn’t respect other people’s belief systems, he’d better leave.
He and Anna had practically trampled each other to get out the door.
The kitchen windows had been open – something to do with an escape route for the energy the chakras didn’t need – and everyone had heard the two of them laughing their heads off out there, and Anna saying, ‘I’m using this in my novel,’ and then Damian, loudly, and sounding more Hooray Henry than usual: ‘You’d think the chakras might divert some of the energy from the Earth’s core to getting those fucking hippies off their arses and cleaning this fucking yard.’ At that point, Karen had been pretty sure he knew the windows were open. ‘Look at the car! Look at our shoes! And is that goose shit on your jeans? Get a docken leaf or something to wipe it off before you get in the car.’
Ade was right. Who needed friends like them?
She could hear an engine, thank God, slowly coming down the hill behind her. She stuck out her thumb.
The car slowed. It stopped opposite her and the passenger window whined down and then Lorna Beattie was leaning across and telling her to get in. Like thinking about judgy people had telepathically summoned her.
‘No, you’re okay.’
‘Don’t be silly, Karen. Get in.’
She didn’t move.
What if Lorna had killed Chimp? Lorna drove this way a lot, visiting her friends at Backhill of Lounmay. She could have chucked the phone out as she was passing the end of the drive to Kinty. Lorna was definitely capable of murdering someone. Her brother had been a psychopath, and that kind of thing could be genetic.
‘Karen, if you don’t get into this car I’m calling your mum right now.’
‘Okay, okay!’ The thought of Lorna Beattie as a psychopath was pretty ridiculous. She’d probably use a spread sheet to keep track of her victims and the dry cleaning expenses.
She found the handle, yanked the door open and plomped herself down on the seat.
‘Seatbelt please... Are you drunk?’
‘Yeah, and I’ve been smoking weed.’ She hadn’t, but what the hell.
Lorna put the car in gear. ‘I don’t know why you seem always to feel the need to shock.’
Karen made a face out at the snow. Neither of them spoke until they got to the junction with the Kirkton road.
‘How’s your new job going?’
‘Fine.’
Another silence as they passed the gates to the House.
‘I haven’t been sacked yet, if that’s what you mean.’
A sigh. ‘It’s almost as if you wanted to get caught taking that money. As if it was...’
‘Oh my God, are you going to say “a cry for help”? I just took like maybe twenty quid, because you didn’t pay me enough? Fifty pee over the minimum wage?’
‘You were a schoolgirl in a Saturday job. What did you expect?’
‘I get like a third as much again as a fucking cleaner!’
‘Yes, in a full-time job. I hope you haven’t taken your light-fingered ways with you to the House, because I doubt Hector will be as lenient as I was about it.’
Oh my God! ‘Have you told Hector?’
‘No, Karen, I have not.’
What would happen if Hector caught her stealing? He could hardly object – pot, kettle? Everyone knew his money came from crime. She hoped he was careful, whatever it was he was up to. It would pretty much be a disaster for Damian if Hector was sent to prison again. What would even happen to him? Would he be allowed to stay at the House on his own? If he wasn’t, did that mean he’d have to go away to stay with his aunt and uncle? It wasn’t something she’d ever discussed with him. How did you start that conversation?
‘People’s patience is going to run out, you know,’ said Lorna, sounding exactly like Mrs Harvey.
‘Yeah, well, PTSD isn’t something you can just switch off because people are sick of it.’
‘I know... I didn’t mean...’
‘You knew Chimp, didn’t you?’
Lorna sighed. ‘Not really. I spoke to him a couple of times. He seemed a nice man.’
They’d passed the Forbes Arms, and now they were turning off onto the single track road that snaked up the hill between the beech trees.
‘Thanks for the lift,’ Karen said as Lorna pulled in at the wide bit of road at the bend where their house was. There were cars parked along the verge and the house was all lit up. She had the car door open before it had even stopped.
‘You’re welcome. I hope you have a good Christmas, Karen.’
‘Yeah, you too,’ she muttered.
As she walked up the path to the front door, her legs went a bit jelly again. Their house had been built in the 1960s and was ugly as fuck, three big boxes joined together with a smaller box perched on top. The architect who designed it had won a prize, unbelievably. Mum loved it. Mainly because of the two giant reception rooms at the back with glass walls looking out on the garden.
One of them was the music room, of course.
As she pushed open the front door and jelly-legged across the hall to her room, she could hear what sounded like Mollie playing Mozart. The hall had loads of Christmas decorations, the long ‘Merry Christmas’ banner with all the reindeer looped along one wall, and candles lit on the table. The kitchen door was open and people were in there yapping and laughing.
In her room, she flopped down on the bed and closed her eyes.
She’d better go and find Mum and let her know she was here. Mum had sent her a text message asking if she could come early so they could have ‘a proper chat’, but it was too late for that now, thank God. She kicked off her boots and wriggled out of her cold wet jacket and trousers and pulled on leggings and slippers. For about half a second she thought about taking the wet stuff to the utility room. Then she went for a pee in her en suite and pulled a brush through her hair. Weird to be back in her old room. It felt like it wasn’t anything to do with her any more. On a shelf next to the window was the collection of Acorn China animals: the bowling mole with the massive arse, so cute in his blue checked waistcoat; the evil little hedgehog on a tree stump with fly agaric fairy toadstools around him; the mother rabbit giving the baby rabbit a bath; the sweet little wren on a branch; the cricket-playing duck ready to go in to bat. Mum and Bill used to give her one every Christmas at the bottom of her stocking. Pathetic, how excited she used to get when she reached the last present in the stocking and knew it was going to be the best one of all.
She picked up the little wren and held it in her hand.
Those Christmases.
Stockings at six o’clock in the morning, Karen and Mollie stuffing their faces with the sweets in them and feeling sick... Mollie quite often being sick... Grandparents and sometimes aunts and uncles and cousins coming round for lunch... All those silly games... Snuggled up in front of the stove late at night when they’d all gone, just Mum and Bill and Karen and Mollie, telling stupid jokes and doing magic tricks that never worked but were all the funnier because they were so bad.
She put the little wren back on the shelf and opened the door.
In the music room, Mollie was still playing. The room was dimly lit and there was a Christmassy smell from the bowl of clove oranges on the table by the door. People were sit
ting around in chairs and on the big sofa, and standing with drinks and nibbles, watching Mollie, who was playing something with lots of dissonance and show-offy fast leaps between octaves, so she had to keep changing from first position to third to fifth, her hand sliding up and down the fingerboard. Mum was at the piano playing the accompaniment, all smiley proud parent.
Andrew, Anna and Eve were on the sofa. She couldn’t see Damian.
The other big room, the lounge, was where the real party was at. And of course Damian was in the middle of it, people standing round him laughing as he told the anecdote about how he managed to lock himself in a toilet on a train in Germany when he was nine. One of the audience was Miss Larsen and one, of course, was Cat. And one was Fridolf Brotzen! Why wasn’t he in the other room listening to Mollie?
Now Miss Larsen was starting a story about a similar experience, when she’d got stuck in a pub toilet with a faulty lock and the music had been so loud no one heard her banging on the door, and none of her friends had come looking for her for two hours, and Damian just let her take over, saying things like ‘Oh Christ, but where did they think you had gone?’ That was one of the few good things about Damian. He could be really entertaining, but he didn’t hog the conversation – although often he seemed to subtly control it. When he was there, somehow other people became wittier and funnier than usual. Like now, Miss Larsen was looking pleased with herself as everyone suddenly burst out laughing.
The thing Karen could never work out was whether it all came naturally, or whether it was a conscious, manipulative thing.
Probably a bit of both.
She swooped on a bowl of crisps and shoved some in her mouth. Cheese and onion. She picked up the bowl and took it with her to the chaise longue by the window, where she lay down, the bowl resting on her stomach, and closed her eyes, letting the babble of voices wash over her.
‘Life and soul of the party,’ said Damian.
‘Fuck off.’