by Ruth Ware
Still, though, it left an odd sensation of vulnerability—the way the foursquare front looked so neat and untouched, while at the back it had been ripped open, exposing all the house’s insides. Like a patient who looked well enough above their clothes, but lift their shirt and you would find their wounds had been left unstitched, bleeding out. There was a strange feeling of split identity too—as though the house was trying hard to be one thing, while Sandra and Bill pulled it relentlessly in the other direction, chopping off limbs, performing open-heart surgery on its dignified old bones, trying to make it into something against its own will—something it was never meant to be, modern and stylish and slick, where it wanted to be solid and self-effacing.
The ghosts wouldn’t like it . . . I heard it again in Maddie’s reedy little voice and shook my head. Ghosts. How absurd. Just folktales and rumors, and a sad old man, living here after the death of his child.
It was more for want of anything else to do that I opened up my phone and typed in “Heatherbrae House, child’s death, poison garden.”
Most of the early results were irrelevant, but as I scrolled down and down, I came at last to a local-interest blog, written by some sort of amateur historian.
“STRUAN—Struan House (now renamed Heatherbrae), near Carn Bridge in Scotland, is another curiosity for garden historians, being one of the few remaining poison gardens in the United Kingdom (another being the famous example at Alnwick Castle in Northumberland). Originally planted in the 1950s by the analytical chemist Kenwick Grant, it is thought to feature some of the rarest and most poisonous examples of domestic plants, with a particular focus on varieties native to Scotland. Sadly, the garden was allowed to fall into disrepair after the death of Grant’s young daughter, Elspeth, who died in 1973, age eleven, having, according to local legend, accidentally ingested one of the plants in the garden. Although in its day occasionally open to researchers and members of the public, Dr. Grant closed the garden completely after his daughter’s death, and after he himself passed away in 2009, the house was sold to a private buyer. Since the sale, Struan has been renamed Heatherbrae House, and it’s believed that it has been the subject of extensive remodeling. It is unknown what remains of the poison garden, but it is to be hoped that the current owners appreciate the historical and botanical importance of this piece of Scottish history and maintain Dr. Grant’s legacy with the respect it deserves.”
There were no photographs, but I returned to Google and typed in “Dr. Kenwick Grant.” It was an unusual name, and there were few results, but most of the pictures that came up seemed to be of the same man. The first was a black-and-white picture of a man aged perhaps forty, with a neatly clipped goatlike beard and small wire-framed spectacles, standing in front of what looked like the wrought iron gate of the walled garden where Maddie, Ellie, and I had entered the day before. He was not smiling, his face had the look of one that didn’t smile easily, with an expression naturally serious in repose, but there was a kind of pride in his stance.
The next photograph made a sad contrast. It was another black-and-white shot, recognizably the same man, but this time Dr. Grant was likely in his fifties. His expression was totally different, a distorted mask of emotion that could have been grief, or fear, or anger, or a mix of all three. He seemed to be running towards an unseen photographer, his hand outstretched, either to push the camera away or shield his own face, it was not clear which. Behind the goatlike beard his mouth was twisted into a snarling grimace that made me flinch, even through the tiny screen, and the passage of decades.
The final photograph was in color, and it was a shot that seemed to have been taken through the bars of a gate. It showed an elderly man, stooped and bent, wearing a buff overall and a wide-brimmed hat that shaded his face. He was extremely thin, to the point of emaciation, and leaning on a stick, and his glasses were thick and fogged, but he was staring fiercely at the person taking the photo, his free hand upraised in a bony fist, as though threatening the viewer. I clicked on the picture, trying to find out the context for the shot, but there was none. It was just a Pinterest page, with no information on where the picture had been found. Dr. Kenwick Grant, the caption read, 2002.
As I closed down the phone, my overwhelming emotion was a kind of desperate sadness—for Dr. Grant, for his daughter, and for this house, where it had all happened.
Unable to sit in silence with my thoughts any longer, I got up, put the baby monitor in my pocket, and, grabbing a ball of caterers’ string from the drawer by the cooker, I left the house by the utility room door, tracing the path the girls had shown me the day before.
* * *
The sun of the morning had gone in, and I was cold by the time I reached the cobbled path that led to the poison garden. It was strange to think it was June—down in London I would have been sweating in short skirts and sleeveless tops, and cursing the shitty air-con at Little Nippers. Up here, almost halfway to the arctic circle, I was beginning to regret not taking my coat. The baby monitor was silent in my pocket as I reached the gate and slipped my hand through the metalwork to try to trip the catch, as Ellie had done.
It was more difficult than she had made it look. It was not just the fact that the hole in the wrought iron was too narrow for my hand to fit comfortably, it was also the angle. Even after I had forced my hand through, swearing as the rust ripped skin off my knuckles, I could not get my fingers to the catch.
I changed position, kneeling on the damp cobbles, feeling the chill strike up through the thin material of my sheer tights, and at last managed to get a fingertip to the tongue of the latch. I pressed, pressed harder . . . and then the gate opened with a clang and I almost fell forward onto the worn bricks.
It was hard to believe that I had ever mistaken it for a regular garden. Now that I knew its history, the warning signs were everywhere. Fat, black laurel berries, the thin needles of yew, straggling patches of self-seeded foxglove, clumps of nettles, which I had taken to be weeds when I first entered the garden but which I now saw bore a rusted metal tag dug deep into the earth labeled Urtica dioica. And others too that I did not recognize—a plant with flamboyant mauve flowers, another that brushed my leg with a sensation like tiny needles. A patch of something that looked like sage but must have been something very different. And, as I pushed open the door of a tumbledown shed, a profusion of mushrooms and toadstools, still sprouting gamely in the dark.
I could not suppress a shudder as I drew the door quietly shut, feeling the damp wood grate on the flags. So many poisons—some tempting, some decidedly not. Some familiar, and some I was certain I had never seen before. Some so beautiful I wanted to break off a branch and stick it in a jug in the kitchen—except that I did not dare. Even the familiar plants in these surroundings looked strange and ominous—no longer grown for their lovely flowers and colors, but for their deadliness.
I hugged my arms around my body as I walked, partly to protect myself, but the garden was so overgrown that it was impossible to avoid brushing up against the plants completely. The touch of the leaves felt like prickles on my skin, and I was unable to tell anymore which plants were toxic to touch, or whether it was pure paranoia on my part that sent my skin itching and tingling when I brushed past.
It was only when I turned to leave that I noticed something else—a set of pruning shears, sitting on the low brick wall holding back one of the beds. They were new and bright, not in the least rusted, and looking up, I saw that the bush above my head had been pruned—not much, but enough to clear the path. And further up, I saw that a piece of garden twine had been used to hold back a swag of creeper.
In fact, the more I looked, the more I was sure—this garden was not as neglected as it appeared. Someone had been tending to it—and not Maddie or Ellie. No child would have thought of neatly cutting back that hanging branch—they would have snapped it off, or just ducked under it, if they were even tall enough to notice.
So who then? Not Sandra. I was sure of that. Jean McKenzie? Jack Gran
t?
The name sounded in my head with a curious chime. Jack . . . Grant.
It wasn’t an uncommon surname, particularly around here, but . . . still. Dr. Kenwick Grant. Could it really be coincidence?
As I stood, wondering, the baby monitor in my pocket gave a little grumbling squawk, recalling me to reality, and I remembered what I had come here to do.
Picking up the shears, I hurried back to the gate, and pulled it firmly shut behind myself. The clang as it closed set a flock of birds rising into the sky from pine trees up the slope, and seemed to echo back at me from the hills opposite, but I was in too much of a hurry now to care.
Taking the string out of my pocket, I clipped off a generous length and then I stood on tiptoes and began to wind it round and round the top of the gate, above the height of my own head, where no child could possibly reach, twining it in and out of the ornate fitting and round the brick lintel above, until at last the string was used up, and the gate was totally secure. Then I tied it in a granny knot, wrapping the ends around my fingers and pulling the string tight until my fingertips went white.
The baby monitor in my pocket wailed again, more determinedly this time, but I was sure now that the gate was secure, and that nothing short of a ladder would enable Maddie and Ellie to break in this time. Dropping the shears into my pocket, I picked up my phone and pressed the Happy app icon.
“Coming, Petra. There, there, sweetheart, no need to cry, I’m coming.”
And I ran up the cobbled path to the house.
* * *
The next few hours were taken up with Petra, and then figuring out how to drive the Tesla to collect the girls from school. Jack had taken the Elincourts’ second car, a Land Rover, with him to meet Bill, and had given me a quick crash course in driving the Tesla before he left, but it was an undeniably different style and it took me a few miles to get used to it—no clutch, no gears, and a strange slowing every time you took your foot off the accelerator.
The girls were both tired after their day at school. They said nothing as we drove home, and the afternoon and evening passed without incident. They ate supper, took turns playing on the tablet, and then got into their pajamas and climbed into bed with barely a peep. When I went up at eight to turn out their lights and tuck them in, I heard an adult’s voice, coming over the speakers.
At first, I thought that they were listening to an audiobook, but then I heard Maddie say something, her small voice inaudible through the door, and the amplified voice on the speakers replied, “Oh darling, well done! Ten out of ten! I’m very proud of you. And what about you, Ellie? Have you been practicing your spellings too?”
It was Sandra. She had dialed into the children’s room and was talking to them before they fell asleep.
For a moment I stood, hovering outside the door, my hand on the doorknob, listening to their conversation, half hoping—half fearing—to hear something about myself.
But instead, I heard Sandra tell the girls to snuggle down, the lights dimmed, and she began to sing a lullaby.
There was something so loving, so personal about the simple act, Sandra’s voice wavering over the high notes, and tripping over an awkward lyric, that I was left feeling like an eavesdropper. I wanted, more than anything, to open the door, tiptoe in, and cuddle Maddie and Ellie, kiss their hot little foreheads, tell them how lucky they were to have a mother who at least wanted to be there, even if she couldn’t.
But I knew that would break the illusion that their mother was really present, and I backed away. If Sandra wanted to speak to me, no doubt she would dial down to the kitchen after she had finished.
While I ate and tidied up, I waited, slightly nervously, for the sound of her voice, crackling over the intercom, but it didn’t come. By 9:00 p.m. the house was silent and I locked up and went to bed with a feeling like walking on eggshells.
After I had done my teeth and turned out the lights, I lay down in bed, feeling my limbs ache with weariness. My phone was in my hand, but instead of plugging it in to charge and going straight to sleep, I found myself googling Dr. Grant again.
I stared at his photo for a long time, thinking of Mrs. Andrews’s words in the café. There was something about the contrast between that first picture and the last that was almost shocking, something that spoke of long nights of grief and agony—perhaps even in this very room. What had it been like to live here all those years, with the local gossip swirling around him, and the memories of his daughter so stark and painful?
Returning to the search screen, I typed in “Elspeth Grant death Carn Bridge” and waited as the links came up.
There was no photo—at least none that I could find. And she had not had much of an obituary, just a passage in the Carn Bridge Observer (now defunct), stating that Elspeth Grant, much loved daughter of Dr. Kenwick Grant and the late Ailsa Grant, had died in St. Vincent’s Cottage Hospital on 21st October 1973, aged eleven years.
Another brief piece a few weeks later, this time in the Inverness Gazette, recorded the results of a postmortem and inquest on Elspeth’s death. It seemed she had died from eating Prunus laurocerasus, or cherry laurel berries, which had been accidentally made into jam. The berries were apparently easily mistaken for cherries or elderberries by inexperienced foragers, and it was thought that the child had gathered them herself and brought them to the housekeeper, who had simply tipped them into the pan without checking. Dr. Grant never ate jam himself, preferring porridge and salt, the housekeeper did not live in and took her meals at her own house in the village, and Elspeth’s nanny had resigned her post almost two months before the incident, so Elspeth was the only person to ingest the poison. She had become unwell almost straightaway and had died of multiple organ failure, in spite of strenuous efforts to save her.
A verdict of misadventure was brought, and no charges were filed as a result of her death.
So. Elspeth had been the only person who was ever in danger of eating that jam. I could see why gossip had arisen—though quite why it had settled on Dr. Grant, and not the unnamed housekeeper, was unclear. Perhaps it had been a case of local people looking after their own. And what of the nanny? She had resigned “just two months before,” according to the writer of the piece, who managed to put the simple phrase in such a way as to make it sound both innocent and suggestive, but presumably she could have had nothing to do with the incident, or it would have been raised at the inquest. Her absence had been noted purely in connection with the fact that Elspeth had been unsupervised at the time of picking the berries, and therefore, by inference, was more likely to make a slip concerning identification of the plants.
The more I pondered the idea, though, the more problems there seemed to be with the suggestion that Elspeth had gathered the berries by accident. I was a 1990s child of the suburbs, totally unused to fruit picking, and even I had a vague idea of what laurel looked like compared to elderberry. Would the daughter of a poisons expert with a locked garden explicitly dedicated to deadly plants really make such a slip?
Rereading the piece, I felt a sudden surge of sympathy for the nanny, the missing link in the case. She was not interviewed. Whatever had become of her was not stated. But she had missed, by just a few weeks, the possibility of being embroiled in scandal. What future was there for a nanny whose child had died in her care, after all? A very bleak one indeed.
* * *
I’m not sure when I finally drifted off, my phone still in my hand, but I know that it was very late when a sudden sound jerked me from sleep. It was a ding-dong noise, like a doorbell, not one of my usual alerts. I sat up, blinking and rubbing my eyes, and then realized the noise was coming from my phone. I stared at the screen. The Happy app was flashing. Doorbell sounding, read the screen. It came again, a low bing-bong that seemed to be able to override all my do-not-disturb settings. When I pressed the icon a message flashed up. Open door? Confirm / Cancel.
I hastily pressed cancel, and clicked through to the camera icon. The screen showed me a view
of the front door, but the outside light was not on, and inside the shelter of the porch I could see nothing but grainy pixelated darkness. Had Jack come back? Had he forgotten his keys? Either way, as the doorbell sounded for the third time, I could hear the chimes filtering up the stairwell as well as coming out of my phone, and I knew I had to answer it before the noise woke the girls.
The room was unnaturally cold, and I pulled on my dressing gown before padding quietly downstairs, my feet soft on the thick carpet runner, picking my way in the semi darkness but not wanting to turn on the lights and risk waking the children. In the hallway I had a moment’s struggle with the thumb panel, and then the door swung silently open to reveal . . . nothing.
It was quite dark. The Land Rover’s parking space was still empty, and none of the motion-sensitive security lights around the yard were on, though the porch light flicked on as soon as I stepped over the threshold, detecting my presence. I shaded my eyes against its harsh glare and peered across the yard and down the drive, shivering slightly in the cool night air. Nothing. There were no lights on in Jack’s flat either. Had something triggered it by mistake?
Closing the door, I made my way slowly back up towards my bedroom, but I was barely halfway up the second flight when the bell sounded again.
Damn it.
With a sigh, I belted my dressing gown tighter and made my way back downstairs, hurrying this time.
But when I wrenched open the door, again, there was no one there.
I slammed the door harder than I meant to this time, the tiredness making my frustration boil over for a second, and I stood in the dark of the hallway, holding my breath and listening for a sound from upstairs, the rising siren of Petra’s wail perhaps. But none came.
Nevertheless, this time, instead of setting back upstairs to my own room, I stopped and peered in at Petra, sleeping peacefully, and then into Maddie and Ellie’s room. In the soft glow of their night-light I could see both of them lying fast asleep, sweaty hair strewn across the pillows, their cherubic little mouths open, their soft snores barely disturbing the quiet. They looked so small and vulnerable in sleep, both of them, and my heart clenched at my anger towards Maddie that morning. I told myself that tomorrow I would do better—that I would remember how young she was, how disorienting it must be to be left with a woman she barely knew. Either way, it was clearly not one of them playing with the doorbell, and I shut the door softly and made my way back upstairs to my room.