by Jane Renshaw
She dropped her bag on the pavement and ran.
She was crying so hard she could hardly see where she was going, face scrunched up, mouth hanging open, mucus and tears plopping onto the tarmac.
Fuck off fuck off fuck off. That was what she was like with everything. With everyone. Karen had run right out in front of that woman in the car and probably given her a heart attack but instead of apologising she had yelled at her. Glencoil was a good school and most kids had an okay time there. Normal people who had worked in Lorna’s shop probably thought she was fine and hadn’t got sacked for embezzlement. Damian and Susie were head boy and head girl for a reason. Probably no one had ever said Fuck off to Susie before – why would they? She was really kind and fun. And so was Mum, and so was Bill.
Chimp drowning wasn’t a prism to show Karen the Sicko all the shit bits of her life. That was just sick. Susie wasn’t thinking anything like that. Susie probably spent the whole hour of her counselling sessions talking about what a nice guy Chimp had been and how terrible it was – not for herself but for him. Karen refused to even talk about Chimp to Dr Hoang. She didn’t want to think about him because it was too hard.
It was like she was even Fuck off to poor Chimp.
The way she’d reacted to what had happened was just the same as the way she reacted to everything. She always made everything about Karen DeCicco.
Pathetic.
She was pathetic.
She kept running, down the street and across the bridge and on down the road until she got to the woods and past the gates to the House of Pitfourie and past the lodge to the little path through the trees that led to all the walks you could do in there, there was a whole confusing network of paths but Karen knew the ones to take to get to the pond.
◆◆◆
A girl skidded to a halt in front of the car, inches from the bonnet, long dark hair swinging wildly.
‘Fuck off!’ she yelled.
Claire’s adrenaline levels, already through the roof, shot up another notch. She put a hand to the door catch.
And now the girl was off running, across the road and along the pavement. She’d chucked down the huge bag that had been slung from one skinny shoulder. Had she stolen it? Had she been making off with it?
Claire put her hand back on the wheel, and breathed out slowly.
Not her concern.
She was Claire Colley, off to a job interview and really not needing this. She eased out past the bus. The girl was still running, hair flying, skinny legs pumping. As she passed her, Claire glanced in her wing mirror. That was a private school uniform: yellow and navy striped tie, navy blazer with what looked like a coat of arms embroidered in yellow on the pocket, a well-cut navy skirt that came down to her knees.
You even got a better class of delinquent around here.
‘In quarter of a mile... turn... right,’ said the Satnav.
There was a church on her left, and then more big old houses and some fields, and then she was entering a leafy tunnel bounded by a high stone wall on the right. The big, pale grey trunks of the trees here were like the pillars of a cathedral, a fantasy cathedral with not a single, solid ceiling but a hundred flimsy ones layered one above the other, flapping and shimmering over her head. And slowly disintegrating, leaf by leaf. The verges were strewn with coppery leaves that whipped up round the car as she passed.
A bend to the right and back to the left, and then a long straight road stretching ahead.
Was this where the accident had happened?
It looked like the wall just here had a section a few metres long that had undergone a repair. The pointing was smoother and a slightly lighter colour. If Hector Forbes really had murdered his father to stop him running the family estate into the ground, there was a terrible irony in Alec Forbes being crushed to death against the wall that presumably enclosed the grounds around the house.
But his own father? His own seven-year-old brother? Even the Bristows would have baulked at that. DCI Stewart was surely wrong about this, at least. Phil hadn’t come out and said so, not in the meeting and not privately to Claire later, but he obviously felt that the investigation at the time had come to the right conclusion. That it had just been an accident.
Now the Satnav was telling her to turn right.
The road widened into a semicircular apron of tarmac, at the apex of which were big stone gateposts set into curving walls. She registered a Hansel and Gretel lodge house set back against the trees; a discreet black metal sign with ‘House of Pitfourie’ in raised white lettering, and ‘PRIVATE’ underneath.
Her heart was hammering and her breathing had gone funny, as if the automatic process of breathing had somehow stopped and she was having to do it consciously, each breath in, each breath out.
The drive beyond the gates wound through another tunnel of trees before sweeping into the open: fields with horses, more trees, a small wooded hill straight ahead in the near distance... No sign of the big house, though. Had she taken a wrong turning? There had been a track back there to the left – maybe she should have taken that? But then she was through a copse of trees and there, across another field and an expanse of garden, was the stately pile: grey granite and austere, very Scottish, very shortbread tin. Banks of windows reflected the sun and at the far end there were turretty bits and what looked like a raised, covered terrace on the side of the house, where a huge lawn sloped gently away into trees.
Oh God.
She pulled over, opened the windows even wider and took another slug of water in a vain attempt to damp down the cortisol. She fumbled her phone from her bag. Only one person could help her now.
‘Grannie. It’s me.’
‘Oh, darling, how nice! I’ll just take you through to the kitchen.’ Claire closed her eyes, imagining Grannie sitting in the garden room of their little house in Ealing, doing the crossword or arguing with Grandpa. It was a nightmare trying to have a conversation with someone on the phone with Grandpa there, ultra-sociable Grandpa who always wanted to know what the other person was saying. She heard Grannie make a little mmph noise and imagined her sitting down at the kitchen table. ‘Now, then!’
‘I can’t do it!’ Claire blurted. ‘I’m almost there, I’m almost at the house, but – but –’
‘Well, darling, there’s no law against nerves!’
Claire spluttered a laugh that was more like a sob. ‘But I can’t mess this up, this is my last chance saloon! And this man – the target – he –’ Belatedly, she looked around her. What if some dog walker was right there in that copse, overhearing all this? What if he was there, the target? She jabbed at the buttons to close the windows. ‘I’ve got to try to impress him, this –’ She lowered her voice: ‘ – this psychopath. Under the veneer of respectability, he’s probably just like the Bristows, that’s what the DCI obviously thinks, and I’ve got to convince him to hire me as his fucking housekeeper! I can’t do it, Grannie. I’ve lost it. I’ve totally lost it, whatever ability I once had, or was it even ability, was it just... dumb luck, or –’
‘You’re always like this, though, aren’t you? You’re always a bundle of nerves.’ Grannie’s voice was upbeat, full of confidence. ‘Like Björn Borg and all those other top players who practically swooned in the changing rooms before going out onto that court and smashing it! Winning Wimbledon! And think of all those wonderful actors who say they throw up before every performance. The minute you step out onto the stage, so to speak, you’ll be fine. You always are.’
‘Feel the fear,’ she muttered.
‘Exactly! What’s the worst than can happen?’
‘Oh, no, I really don’t want to go there –’
‘It’s a job interview. Why on earth would he want to harm you? He can’t possibly have any suspicions at this stage.’ Grannie always knew. She always went straight to the heart of the problem. ‘The worst that can happen is that you don’t get the job. If he turns out to be a truly horrifying prospect, if you feel you just can’t have anythin
g to do with him, all you need to do is blow the interview. With your cooking skills, darling, that shouldn’t be a problem. Let’s face it, it might happen anyway.’
Claire released the breath she’d been holding. ‘I can’t blow the interview. They’re depending on me. Phil’s depending on me.’
‘Well, Phil would just have to depend on someone else for a change. Best foot forward, Claire, and see what you’re dealing with here, and you can take it from there.’
‘Yes. Yes. You’re right. Thank you. Thank you, Grannie. What would I do without you?’
Grannie shouldn’t, of course, know anything about Claire’s UC jobs, but Claire always ended up telling her all about them. She couldn’t help it.
After she’d ended the call, she took a moment to imagine Grannie smiling down at the phone, and returning to the garden room, and telling Grandpa that Claire was working a difficult case involving fraud. No way could Grandpa be let in on it – he’d have blabbed to all their friends within twenty-four hours.
She opened her eyes, breathed in, breathed out, and started the engine.
The garden looked like a lot of work – high hedges and low hedges and lawns, and flowerbeds, and more rose bushes covered in glossy red hips. There was an expanse of gravel in front of the house, but a candidate cook/housekeeper wouldn’t roll up at the front door. She followed the signs for ‘Deliveries’ down a sloping gravel drive, past a low run of little outbuildings, to an arch under a clock tower. Through the arch was a large cobbled courtyard enclosed on one side by the back of the house and on the other three by ancillary buildings. The range opposite the house had outside steps that led up to what looked like staff accommodation over what would once have been carriage houses, the five arched doors painted a dark blue-grey. The clock tower building also looked like it was accommodation, the Georgian-paned window she parked next to giving a glimpse of a TV and a couch.
The place was neat as a pin.
The cobbles had been recently swept and there were flowerbeds against the walls and stone troughs filled with lavender and other flowers she couldn’t identify. Bees buzzed. A little yellow fly landed on her sleeve as she got out of the car, its wings catching the light like tiny fragments of soap bubble, so fragile-looking she didn’t like to blow it away in case she damaged them. She shook her arm instead and watched it drift off.
Two men were standing talking at the other side of the yard – a man in a tweed jacket about her own age, and an older man in a T-shirt with a shaved head and a compact, muscly body. Both of them were watching her.
Oh God oh God!
She straightened, and pulled her skirt back down to her knees.
Use it, Phil always said, and she always rolled her eyes at him because she hated ‘it’ and he knew it: she hated the way men looked at her, as if she were an inanimate object on public display. She didn’t know what was worse – the way she used to feel at sixteen, almost six feet tall and built like an Amazon, when she used to go around stooped over in the flattest shoes she could find – ‘a strapping girl’ as Grandpa used to say – or the way she felt now, sans puppy fat after discovering running in sixth form, her body now apparently an object of desire, if long legs and a sporty size 12 were your thing. Grannie said she looked like Lauren Bacall. She couldn’t see it herself, but Grannie wasn’t the only one who had made the comparison, so she supposed there must be a passing resemblance.
‘Hi there,’ the younger guy called, trotting over with a big grin.
‘Hi.’ The word came out as a croak. She laced her fingers together to stop her hands shaking. ‘I’m – I’m Claire Colley?’ And she had to stop. Her breathing had gone funny again, and she couldn’t get the words out; her heaving lungs wouldn’t let her. She attempted a smile, and shook her head in an apology.
What was happening to her? Where was Claire Colley, housekeeper/cook extraordinaire? Where was her chameleon skin?
‘You okay?’
She nodded, and heaved in a breath.
‘Here to see – Hector Forbes – for an interview? Claire Colley,’ she repeated, pathetically.
‘Don’t worry, he doesn’t usually bite. He’s expecting you.’ The English accent was a surprise. ‘I’m Gavin Jenkins – Assistant Estate Manager.’ He put out his hand, and she realised she was expected to shake it. Of course she was. He took her hand with just the right amount of pressure. ‘So you’re all the way from London? Bit of a culture shock, I expect?’
All she could do was smile.
‘I’ll take you in. It’s a bit of a warren.’
She followed him through a heavy old door to a dim, high corridor painted sludgy green that turned one way and then the other, opening eventually into a big old kitchen with a row of four large Georgian windows over a butler’s sink and a long expanse of worktop that London interior designers would have gone into rhapsodies over. It looked like the original Victorian wood, densely grained and waxily patinated.
Oh God, there was a bloody Aga!
What the hell was the equivalent of gas mark 4 on an Aga?
‘I guess this would be your domain,’ Gavin said, waving a hand vaguely. ‘Are you okay with the stairs or would you rather take the lift?’ He glanced down at her footwear.
‘Stairs – are fine.’
‘The kitchens of the original castle were where the clock tower is now – away from the main house in case of fire,’ Gavin was explaining over his shoulder. ‘When the house was extended in Georgian times, that wasn’t convenient any more, so they did some major groundwork – dug away the ground behind the house, so they could lower the courtyard and add kitchens and so on at cellar level. Lot of big old houses have that arrangement. Makes sense I guess, so the nobs don’t have to climb up steps at the front and the lackeys don’t have to lug stuff down steps at the back.’
But these steps were steep and narrow. At the top was another corridor, still painted sludgy green but with the addition of a yellow line at waist height, for no apparent reason, and then they were through a baize door and into a different world.
An airy, cavernous hall smelling of beeswax and flowers and wood fires, Persian carpets under her feet, their patterns jewel-like in the light streaming down from the windows on the half-landing of a wide, elegant staircase. In front of her was a huge oil painting of sheep battling through a snowstorm, the shepherd barely visible at the back of the flock.
Gavin smiled at her as somewhere a grandfather clock ticked away, as it had ticked away the seconds and the minutes and the hours down the centuries, probably, in this very same hall.
‘Just down here,’ he said, and somehow she managed to walk after him.
A wide panelled corridor lined with more pictures, and a Georgian mahogany door on which Gavin knocked and called out, ‘Boss? Claire Colley here for the interview,’ and without waiting for an answer he opened the door and stood back for Claire to walk in.
She walked in, and everything changed.
5
Leaves were drifting down from the trees onto the water, and if Damian had been here he’d probably have made Karen play the Leaf Game. It was a good day for it – sunny and without much of a breeze, at least not here at the pond. Nice clear reflections.
It wasn’t really a game at all. All you had to do was look into the water and wait until you saw a leaf coming off a tree in the reflection, and watch it rising up and up like a fish, until at the surface the real leaf suddenly pounced on the reflection leaf, like a predator.
That was all there was to it.
She secretly used to enjoy it. It was relaxing but at the same time made you feel like you were Alice Through the Looking Glass, in a world gone all weird and off. But the Leaf Game was just one of the many, many things she couldn’t enjoy any more, and probably never would again.
What was she doing here?
She was all cried out, lying on her side on a lounger she’d pulled out onto the verandah of the boathouse, on one of the thin lounger cushions that always smelt a bit
fooshty from being stored here. The boathouse used to be one of her favourite places. In the little room perched above the boats there was a wood-burning stove and some old tables and chairs and loungers, and oars on a rack on the back wall, and under them some canvases and an old easel and boxes of paints because Hector’s mother used to use it as a studio about thirty years ago and the Forbes family never threw anything out.
To get to the little room there were outside steps up to the verandah, which sort of hovered out over the pond, like being on a ship. If you looked down through the gaps in the planks you could see the water moving. The keys to the little room and to the boat bit underneath were both kept in a crack in the wall where the wood was rotten, so anyone who knew where they were could let themselves into the room and get some oars and take a boat out if they wanted.
She rolled over and looked at the reflections of the sky and the trees in the panes of the windows of the little room. Two reflection ducks flew past but they didn’t circle to land. Probably because Karen was there. The trees in the reflection were hardly moving at all. Just the very tops of them were swaying a bit. The tops of the trees, she realised, had the fewest leaves, probably because they were most exposed to the wind.
If Susie had been here, she wouldn’t be thinking about herself and her PTSD and being all self-pitying. Susie would be thinking about Chimp.
Had he known about the boathouse keys?
Probably. Maybe, that summer evening, he had let himself into the room like she had just now, and maybe got out this same lounger and lain on it and thought about his life like she was doing –
And decided to kill himself?
Was that what had happened?
But he had always seemed so happy. Maybe he’d just been out for a walk. He could have heard a fish jump and gone to the edge to look, and then he slipped or something, and fell in where it was deep, and weed had twined round his foot –