‘You learn something new every day,’ Mitchell muttered. ‘So that’s why your mother was here. Didn’t think Spargo was a Scots name.’
‘My father came from Cornwall, my mother from Aberdeen. Not sure how they met.’
‘A neighbour told me your father died years ago.’
‘Back in the nineteen fifties. I was a boy. After the war the mine stayed open for a while but it couldn’t compete with cheap imports. My father died within a few months of the mine closing. Died of a broken heart, the romantics said. The death certificate said cancer.’
Ahead, Kilcreg was grimly busy. Figures in coveralls moved slowly and solemnly, stooping and probing, searching through gardens and inspecting the street. A chequered-topped van blocked the road, its driver shuffling back and forth in a twenty-point turn. Mitchell braked, stopped his car in the road and came to life suddenly, muttering incessantly, holding the car on the clutch and drumming fingers on the wheel. A small van bounced out of a space on the grass verge and like a dog chasing a stick Mitchell jerked the car into the space, its wheels slipping and gripping and scattering stones.
The first house in the row – the furthest house from the sea, apart from the old mine house – was no longer the place Spargo knew but a quarantined cottage, sealed from the world by strands of striped tape. The stuff seemed to be everywhere and it spun in the breeze, blue words that rotated, mesmerising him, transporting him to a film set unreal and unnerving, his mother’s house commandeered for the day by a film crew and actors.
Mitchell leapt from the car and came round to Spargo, opened his door for him and held it with both hands. Spargo stayed put. Knew he shouldn’t have come.
Mitchell waited. Lost patience.
‘I need you inside. You are no use to me out here.’
CHAPTER
THREE
SPARGO’S MOTHER DISLIKED the word bungalow and had always referred to her house as a cottage. Spargo, since becoming a resident of Edinburgh, considered her place more suited to the suburbs of that city than to the wilds of Kilcreg. The building was chunky. It sat comfortably behind a low stone wall and a short but wide garden.
At the front of the house a shadowy, rain-foiling alcove sheltered a typically Scottish, double front door. To the left of the alcove stood the wide, curtained bay window of his mother’s sitting room. The only difference between this house and the one owned by Rose Munro was that hers had a frog-eye dormer window in the roof overlooking what had been the school. Whether it was original or had been added later Spargo did not know. Nor did he care, not today.
Gravel crunched underfoot as he followed Mitchell down the side of the house. Surely his mother had heard her assailant approaching? Not that it would have mattered because everyone in Kilcreg knew everyone else. In this part of the world there were no strangers.
Mitchell reached the side door, stepped up on the tiled step and turned to Spargo. Instead of speaking he took hold of Spargo’s cuff and guided him to the open door the way a father might guide a toddler.
Spargo allowed himself to be led. No matter he had never lived in this house, as he entered the kitchen the smells from his childhood came to him, an ironmonger’s odour of bleach, hard soap and a faint smell of mothballs. He had modernised the kitchen twenty years ago, removing the deep stone sink that stood in one corner and installing a shiny new stainless one under the window so when using it his mother could see the back garden and the hillside beyond. He also bought her a new refrigerator, a freezer and a new stove.
‘Why on earth do I need a freezer?’ he murmured, remembering her words. Mitchell stopped and stared. Spargo shook his head. ‘Nothing,’ he mumbled.
The kitchen was unexpectedly tidy. The floor was clean. A cup and saucer on the drainer had been rinsed out and left to dry. Spargo moved to the middle of the room, involuntarily because Mitchell had moved there and was still gripping his cuff.
Spargo had supposed there would be something on the floor, if not blood then a movie-style chalked outline of his mother’s body. There was nothing. The only sign something had happened there was a dusting of dark powder on the stainless steel drainer.
‘Did her attacker panic and hit her?’ he asked. They were brave words. He wanted simple explanations. Wanted it minimised.
Mitchell shook his head. ‘That doesn’t fit. Not the way I see it.’
Spargo wanted to know how Mitchell saw it, but there wouldn’t be more. Letting go of Spargo’s cuff the man turned on his heel and walked to the hall, his eyes moving constantly as if following a fly: floor to ceiling, ceiling to wall, wall to Spargo and then the front door – or where the front door would be if it wasn’t blocked by a bookcase. Spargo made a pointless mental note of it all, as if anticipating being quizzed on everything he saw. He wondered why Mitchell had asked him about the postman using the back door, when he must have seen that the front door was blocked. Didn’t want to ask.
‘We’ve been through the place,’ Mitchell said, his gaze steady on Spargo. ‘Nothing seems to have been taken. I want you to check everything. I want you to tell me if there is anything missing, out of place or unusual. Check the bedrooms first. We are still working in the sitting room.’
There was nothing out of place in his mother’s bedroom, nor in the spare room. He stared at the bed he last slept in seven months ago and wondered if there would be more dead woodlice between the sheets. He admitted to himself their presence in the bed was his own fault. Whenever he stayed he always told his mother not to remake the bed because he would soon be back. Where did the woodlice come from, anyway? Did their presence mean there was rotten wood somewhere, or did they just come in out of the cold? If so he could hardly blame them. Not at Kilcreg. Not with those winters.
Mitchell’s voice brought him back.
‘Mr Spargo… the sitting room… you can check it now.’
Spargo paused in the room’s doorway, blocking it. A man and a woman in white coveralls excused themselves with low grunts as they eased past him into the hall. Spargo felt Mitchell’s hand on his back, propelling him gently in to the room. Déjà vu.
‘Go right in, Mr Spargo.’
Spargo looked at the television, the DVD player and the stereo.
‘You’ve cleaned up,’ he said.
‘No. Only the kitchen. This is how it was in here.’
‘It’s not right.’
Mitchell raised his eyebrows. ‘Tell me?’
‘It’s not right,’ he repeated. ‘It’s too clean. My mother’s eyesight wasn’t good. She didn’t notice how dusty things became.’
‘Maybe someone cleaned for her.’
‘Nobody cleaned for her.’
Spargo stood still and took it all in. No dust on the floorboards. No dust – apart from fingerprint powder – on the places you’d expect it to be, the TV screen, the DVD player, the mirror on the wall above the old fireplace – a fireplace blocked off for years behind a panel of painted plywood. No dust at all. Only brush-swipes of the powder.
He tried to get his head around what he was seeing. The fingerprint powder had been dusted on to spotlessly clean surfaces. Had the police found fingerprints? He didn’t think so.
‘Did your mother have any work done recently? Any repairs? Plumbing or building work?’
‘Why?’
‘Please answer my question.’
She’d had nothing done. Her pension was small. When things needed doing he did them for her or arranged for them to be done. He paid for them.
‘No. She would have said.’
The floorboards in the room were painted in black gloss, covered partly by two rectangular rugs. Spargo watched Mitchell crouch near the wall and run his hand over the boards. He stood again. Showed Spargo his fingers.
‘Fine sawdust,’ he said. ‘Just a trace. At first we thought the place was cleaned to remove fingerprints. Now we believe it was done to remove traces of sawdust. Many of the floorboards have been cut and lifted. Not just in here, in all the rooms except the
kitchen.’
‘The kitchen floor is concrete. It’s covered with vinyl.’
‘So we discovered. They removed this, too.’ he said, walking to the boarded-up fireplace. ‘The nails holding this panel have been removed and hammered back. The paint on their heads is damaged. Would your mother…?’
‘No, not my mother. I meant what I said.’
‘So why would anyone want to remove it? Why would they lift floorboards?’ he looked at Spargo as if expecting an answer but Spargo just shrugged. ‘We spent half the night lifting them,’ he added. ‘There’s nothing underneath.’
‘That doesn’t surprise me. I’ve been under them. The space there is small. There’s just enough room for cables and pipes.’
‘Under? You? Why?’
‘Had the boards up years ago. Rewired the whole place with new cables. Put in extra sockets.’
‘What about the attic, has anyone been up there recently?’
‘Not since I rewired. My mother didn’t store junk. My father used to say that if something was ready for the attic it was ready for the tip. I haven’t been up there for years but I’m sure it’s empty.’
‘It is, we checked. But somebody’s been up there. Would your mother have had any reason to?’
‘She wasn’t much of a one for ladders.’
‘I don’t mean her. A builder or a neighbour?’
‘She would have told me.’
His father’s oak veneered roll-top bureau stood beside the fireplace. He went to it, grasped the two varnished wood handles on its roll-front lid and then released them suddenly, as if burned. He looked back at Mitchell. Mitchell nodded and Spargo held them again. The lid was a wooden-slat shutter running in a groove cut in the desk’s sides. It snaked up and over as he lifted it, vanishing behind the small drawers and cubby-holes at the back of the desk. As it rattled and rolled out of sight he felt the same strange satisfaction he had always felt when he opened it.
He slid out each drawer in turn and upended each one, ploughing his fingers through things he had seen many times, long ago: glass marbles and golf tees; a leather tip from a snooker cue and keys to locks long-gone; a small metal wheel from a Hornby train; pen nibs and pencil stubs. One stub was the stump of an indelible pencil and he wondered if they still made them. Probably not. Now there are permanent markers.
All sparked memories. He was aware, between flickers of childhood images, that Mitchell was speaking but the words meant nothing to him, they were part of another world, a world harsh and unreal. He went to pull out the last drawer but didn’t quite make it before his feelings overpowered him. Elbowing Mitchell aside he stumbled through the kitchen and out to cold air.
The weather changed suddenly, the way it does at Kilcreg. Thin icy drizzle crept in from the sea and drenched everything, Spargo included. Leaning heavily on the back wall of the cottage he breathed deeply, hoping that by doing so the nausea would leave him. Instead he felt dizzy.
A lone fir with gnarled branches high on the hill was the last thing to be swallowed by mist. The tree, that to Spargo was the same size and shape it had always been, vanished into steamy wisps only to reappear in its entirety for no more than two seconds. Then it went again, as if snatched from the sky.
He became aware of Mitchell standing beside him, looking around in that way of his, at the asbestos sheet roof of the garage, at the eaves of the house and the gutter, the rainwater downpipe, the water butt, and the stumps of cabbages in the vegetable plot that lay in the shelter of the garage wall. Finally at the mossy gravel path at his feet.
‘Could the attacker have got the wrong person?’ Spargo asked. ‘The wrong house?’
Mitchell jerked his head to face Spargo. He raised one eyebrow independently of the other, something Spargo had often tried, but always failed, to do. It reminded him now of a Victorian automaton or ventriloquist’s dummy. He had seen something like it long ago, in black and white, probably. That actor, Dirk Bogarde.
‘Are you suggesting there is somewhere in Kilcreg worth burgling?’
Spargo tried hard to concentrate. Maybe Mitchell thought there was a moneyed recluse tucked away somewhere, either that or it was tongue-in-cheek humour. For once in his life Spargo didn’t know. Couldn’t tell.
‘Most of the folk here are retired,’ he said. ‘Don’t suppose they have much. No closet millionaires.’
‘What did your mother do?’
‘Do?’
‘Did she work?’
She worked, yes. Worked like hell. Worked non-stop. ‘She was a wife and mother. When I was a boy most mothers stayed home and looked after the house and kids.’
It sounded medieval and he remembered how it was. Morag baked her own cakes and sometimes the bread, did the washing by hand, tended the garden and grew vegetables throughout the year. There was more than enough food for the three of them and he remembered how boring their food was in winter, the potatoes and cabbages, the turnips, sprouts and swedes. In summer there would be tomatoes and lettuces brought by the van man, never any fancy stuff like asparagus, aubergines or courgettes. There were wild strawberries the size of his fingertips, and blackberries from hedges. When he got home from school each day – to the mine house, not this one – the beds were made and the house, unlike him, was spotless. By the time he had done his chores, cleaned his boots, brought in logs for the fire and washed himself, his tea would be ready. When his father came home from work all would be cleared away. Including him.
‘So she never worked?’
‘She never stopped working. When she was young she helped in a shop in Aberdeen. When she married and came here she worked at the mine in what they called the counting house, she did the accounts and helped with clerical work. The counting house was way over the moor at the mine and she walked there and back every day, up the track you saw when we came down the hill.’
‘And that’s all?’
‘All? As I said, she never stopped. It was a busy life. What I suppose I’m saying is that even though she was the mine manager’s wife she didn’t have much. The mine was small, it employed no more than twenty or thirty men – mainly men – even in wartime. There are no gold bars hidden away, Detective Sergeant. There was no money here. A few pounds at the most.’
‘We found twenty pounds and fifty pence in a tin in her bedroom.’
Spargo ignored him. He turned to face the man. Confronted the inquiring eyes.
‘What I really don’t understand is why nobody heard anything. Surely my mother cried out?’
Mitchell turned away. Gazed up into the mist. ‘She couldn’t cry out,’ he mumbled, almost inaudibly. ‘Whoever did this taped up her mouth.’
Spargo threw back his head and looked up to where the sky should have been. Drizzle drenched his face, ran down his forehead and flushed away tears. Then Mitchell’s hand was there, clamped onto his shoulder.
‘Come, Mr Spargo. It’s time to go.’
CHAPTER
FOUR
THE PLANE MIDGE ROLLO WAITED FOR in a coffee shop at Edinburgh Airport landed five minutes ahead of schedule. Midge had been there for two hours, not because he had expected the plane to be early – at the time he arrived it was still on the runway at Heathrow – but because he had no idea how long it would take him to get to the airport in the blue bus from Edinburgh’s Waverley Station.
Rollo had spent the first hour of his wait staring at the baggage carousels, fascinated by bags that appeared, vanished and then reappeared until finally their owners heaved them off the endless belt with either too little strength or with much more strength than was needed. The second hour passed more quickly. He spent the time reading – for the third time at least – a thirty year old dog-eared copy of Readers Digest he’d stuffed in his pocket before leaving home.
Now Midge was on a blue bus again. He was returning to the city, upstairs in the front seat because that was where he thought Mr Luis, as a first-time visitor to Scotland’s capital city, would prefer to sit.
Mr L
uis is Mafia, of that Midge is sure. Never mind that the man is Spanish and not Italian, these Latins are all the same with their family ties and their loyalties. Like himself, he supposed. Or on second thoughts maybe not, as there wasn’t much family loyalty in the Rollo household, not since his mum shopped his dad to the police when he gave her that kicking. Since he was five he had lived with his Nan.
Apart from himself and his grandmother the family were losers, he knew that. In his teens he had idolised elder brother Robbie but then things had changed. Only a complete bampot would park his car – his own car – on double yellows while he did over the Co-op. Photographed at the kerb, it was, by the parking attendant who gave it a ticket.
As the airport bus trundled towards town Midge did the travel guide thing. Pointed out places of interest.
‘Edinburgh Zoo,’ he said with a flourish. Then, almost immediately, he swivelled around, jabbing a finger in the opposite direction. ‘Wheelhouse, the tyre place,’ he said. ‘And that’s new place that fills printer cartridges.’ As if they were national monuments.
Though Mr Luis seemed to ignore him, Midge knew he was taking it all in. He had already established the man was not much of a talker. Uncongenial, Midge decided.
Despite his rudimentary education Midge knew such words; when he was twelve his Nan bought a suitcase at a car boot sale. It was heavy, packed with old Readers Digests. Because it was so heavy, and as she only wanted the case, she upended it over the first litter bin they came to and dumped all the books. Midge had argued with her and then, ignoring her protestations, he refilled the case, carried it home for her and stored every single book under his bed in his room. It wasn’t long before he discovered a page in the Digests about increasing your word power. That night, and almost every other night since that distant day, he studied them under his blankets, by torchlight.
Mr Luis had, in fact, said only two things since they’d met in Arrivals. ‘Mister Rollo, I presume…’ like when that Stanley guy discovered Livingstone. Then: ‘Mister Midge Rollo?’
The Man Who Played Trains: The gripping new thriller from the author of Playpits Park Page 3