Once his hair was cut, Ranald made his way to The Station, which looked just as its name suggested – a former railway building: long, low, grey brick, with regularly spaced windows, and plenty of hanging flower baskets to add colour.
Inside, he was surprised by the modern feel to the bar. Lots of light. Light tan floorboards, a marble bar fronted with blue tiling. He would have suspected Mr Welsh to be an old-school drinker. Lots of dark wood, brewery sign mirrors, Formica table tops and any drink you wanted as long as it was beer, lager or whisky. The only nod to modernisation in such a place would be a fruit machine and a flat-screen TV.
He ordered a pint of lager at the bar, nabbed a newspaper from a rack and took one of the seats by the window. He settled down to read, thinking, this was what it was like to be a normal person. He sent a silent thank-you to whoever had developed and manufactured the drug he was on. But despite the mind balm of the chemicals he couldn’t help but feel a surge of guilt that he was only on them because someone had died.
Liz.
And she was there in the pool. Sodden cloth sticking to her skin. Sightless eyes staring up at the roof.
Another shot of guilt. Liz didn’t deserve his chemically induced withdrawal from the truth.
A voice in his ear disrupted his chain of thought.
‘If it isn’t the young Fitzpatrick.’
He looked up from his paper. It was Ken Welsh, just as predicted.
‘The name’s McGhie, actually. Ranald.’
‘Aye, son, aye,’ replied the old man, as if locking that piece of information away. ‘I forgot your mother ran away to get married.’
You forget nothing, Mr Welsh, thought Ranald.
‘This is nice,’ said Ranald. Then, remembering Dan’s advice said, ‘I felt like getting out of the house for a while, you know. Big houses get a bit lonely.’
‘Aye, son.’ Ken’s eyes shone a little brighter. ‘What’s happening with the house? Are the developers moving in soon?’
‘Has this place been open long?’ Ranald asked, looking around. ‘I assume it used to be a train station or something?’
‘Wonder what gave that away?’ said Ken with a hint of a smile. ‘The railway line running along the back there?’
Ranald made a face, as if admitting he’d said something stupid. He made a pretence of going back to his newspaper.
‘Aye,’ Ken said again. He was quiet for a moment, then said, ‘I should be getting the new boy a wee drink to welcome him back to the area, eh?’
Ranald looked back up at him and pretended he hadn’t heard. ‘Sorry?’
‘Get you a wee drink, Ranald? Welcome you back.’
‘That’s very kind of you, Ken. A pint of lager, please.’
Looking pleased with himself, Ken walked across to the bar and returned a few moments later armed with two full pint glasses.
‘Cheers, son,’ he said as he placed them on the table and sat down, groaning as he did so. ‘S’good to take the weight off.’ He took a sip. ‘So, what’s happening up at the house then?’
‘You’ll probably know as much as me.’
‘Really?’ Ken sat back in his seat. ‘Last I heard, you inherited the house, but if you sold it you’d have to share the proceeds with your cousins.’ He took another sip. ‘Which, if you ask me, is a strange way to organise an inheritance.’
‘Sure is,’ said Ranald, thinking Ken had strong sources. ‘I think my old uncle was trying to test me.’
‘Hmm. I don’t understand it myself. Either he wanted you to have the house or he didn’t.’ He sucked on his top lip. ‘As much of a prick in death as he was in life.’ He paused. ‘Ach, that’s no’ being quite fair on him, even though I can’t stand him. That was the young man. The older man? He did seem different.’ Ken’s eyes grew distant. ‘I moved away for a few years, came back twenty years ago. First day back I saw Alexander Fitzpatrick up at the Cross, I almost walked past him – barely recognised him. He was a shadow of what he was. Not cowed, exactly. Just … less. As if he’d been rubbed away by something. A guilty conscience, I like to think.’ He flavoured his smile with a sense of self-mockery. ‘Hark at me, sounding all intelligent.’ Ken looked at Ranald over the top of his pint. ‘So what are you going to do?’
‘I’m going to give it serious consideration.’ He felt satisfied with that answer; it gave nothing away.
Ken studied him for a minute. ‘You know exactly what you’re going to do, son,’ he said. ‘You just don’t want to admit it yet.’
Ranald shrugged. Then thought about something Ken said earlier.
‘That’s a couple of times you’ve called Alexander a prick. What’s he to you?’
Ken’s eyes narrowed. ‘I hate it when rich folk think they own the rest of us.’
Ranald said nothing, hoping Ken would expand on his comment. But the old man returned to his pint. Ranald was the first to crack.
‘There’s any number of rich folk in this place. Are the Fitzpatricks the only ones who piss you off, or do they all get your goat?’
Ken smiled. ‘Oh, your family manage to take it to another level.’ He placed his glass back on the table and rested his hands on the table edge. There was a faint tremor in his right hand. The skin on the back of it a map of fat veins, deep wrinkles and liver spots. ‘To be fair, as I said, Alexander seemed to be a different guy than the one who went to war.’ He exhaled. ‘War tends to do that, you know.’ He shook his head. ‘You seem a nice young fella. Maybe being kept away from them has done you some good.’
To hell with it, thought Ranald. He should just ask.
‘I need to know what those people were like, Ken. It might help me make a decision about the house, you know?’ He adopted his best hangdog expression and looked into the older man’s eyes. ‘Last time we met you hinted that you knew … stuff. That there might even have been a scandal?’
‘Just the one?’ Ken snorted, and then shook his head, the disdain he felt for the family evident in that small movement.
‘We’re talking about Alexander,’ Ranald replied. Just tell me.
Ken studied him. Narrowed his eyes as if making a decision. ‘There was a young lassie on the staff. A bonnie wee thing apparently. Your uncle got her pregnant.’ Pause. ‘Good as raped her if you ask me…’
‘Aww, c’mon,’ said Ranald. ‘That’s a bit harsh.’
‘What would you call it?’ Ken leaned towards him. ‘He’s got all the power. She’s worried about keeping her job. He forces himself on the wee lassie.’
Ranald studied Ken and for the first time saw how old he really was. The pale, fragile skin under his eyes, puffy and threaded with small, red veins. The sparse, but overly long eyebrows. There was more to this antagonism than a neighbour looking in envy at another.
‘She was your big sister, wasn’t she?’ Ranald said. The realisation came at him and he’d voiced it before he could give it more consideration. ‘What happened to her?’
Ken widened his eyes, clearly surprised at Ranald’s reading of him. Then he slumped a little in his seat and took a long pull at his pint before speaking. ‘I was just a kiddie when our Jennie got that job, but I remember her leaving our house for her first day at work. Wearing her best hat and gloves. You should’ve seen the smile of excitement on her face when she turned at the end of the path to wave cheerio to me and my mother. She would have been eighteen, just fresh out of secondary school.’
He shook his head slowly, and Ranald could see that for Ken, his sister would be forever eighteen.
‘Most kids in those days left school at fifteen, you see. But Mum and Dad were keen for her to get an office job or something, maybe even go to university. But Dad took a turn for the worse. Some old war wound or something, and Jennie had to give up her dreams and go into service. I don’t remember much about her after that. The big house was only a few miles away, but in those days, that might as well have been a million. And folk rarely got any time off. Sometimes at New Year and the like.’ He sniffed and rubb
ed at his nose. ‘He tried to buy my mum and dad off, you know,’ he said. ‘After the war. Big as you like, in his best clothes. Said that he loved her. Said he wanted to pay for a proper tombstone.’
‘She died?’ Ranald asked, rather unnecessarily.
‘Fucking brain of Britain, you, eh?’
Ranald acquiesced to that with a shrug. It was a stupid question. ‘What happened to her?’
Ken was silent for a long moment. He stared at the top of his drink as if it was displaying all of his memories.
‘My big sister was my hero,’ he said eventually. ‘It seemed like she’d found a good life for herself. Lots of kids wanted to work in service in the big houses in those days. And the Fitzpatricks had plenty of cash. She wrote me a letter once, telling me all about life in Newton Hall. About the grand feasts and the posh people with their fancy clothes.’
In Ranald’s mind, a bat-squeak of recognition sounded through the fog.
‘Don’t know what happened to that letter.’ Ken looked about himself as if it would appear magically in front of him. ‘I read it over and over again. Tried to keep it safe, but you know what you’re like as a kid. Careless doesn’t cover it, eh?’ He wiped at the side of his right eye. ‘Sorry, son. Old age makes you get sentimental.’
Ranald motioned that there was no need for an apology. He felt absurdly responsible for the older man’s age-old grief.
‘The head bummer up there hated her. Old Mrs Winters was in charge of the staff.’ He paused. ‘That one was well suited to her name. Constant winter around Mrs Frosty Knickers.’
Ranald wanted to urge Ken to get to the point, but knew he’d best let him ramble.
‘It was her fault really, you know. All of it.’
‘All of what?’
‘It was her that found Jennie. Said she had gone mad and had her committed.’
‘Ken, I don’t understand. What are you saying?’
The old man sighed like there was decades of pain in his breath. ‘It was weeks after Alexander had gone off to war. Jennie had managed to hide her pregnancy from everyone. Even Alexander said he didn’t know.’ He wiped at another tear. ‘I’m amazed this has still got the power to hurt, son. It was such a long time ago.’ He looked into Ranald’s eyes. ‘You look so much like him, I’d give you a good kicking if I thought it would help.’
Ranald faked a smile in response. He was irritated, keen for answers, but knew the old man was taking his time because it was painful.
‘So, anyway. The old bitch, Winters, found her. Accused her of giving herself an abortion. Said she was some kind of witch and was trying to eat the foetus as part of some kind of spell…’
‘What?’ A terrible image formed in his mind. Her with the dead thing in her arms.
‘Aye. Anyway. Different times.’ And then he added, as if it explained everything: ‘And let me tell you son, mud sticks. Of course, no one knew about the pregnancy and Alexander wasn’t there to defend her. Unmarried girls who found themselves in the family way were treated appallingly in those days.’ A film of water covered the lower part of his eyes. ‘She was carted off to the asylum. Died a few weeks later.’
‘Dear God,’ said Ranald, feeling an ineffable sadness. What a waste of a life. Then his mind brought him back to what Ken had said moments earlier, about a letter.
‘Your sister wrote to you?’ he asked.
‘Well, to my mum and dad.’ Ken nodded. ‘Just that one time. That was a disappointment to my mother, that she didn’t keep in touch. Thing is, as my parents told it she was always a girl of her word. After she died, they would point to that letter and the words at the bottom. She had even underlined it, saying she would write again soon. But,’ he shrugged, ‘we didn’t get any more letters from her.’
The letters in his grandmother’s desk.
Ranald jumped to his feet. ‘I’ve got to go check something,’ he said, abandoned a mystified Ken at the table, and ran nearly all the way back to Newton Hall.
He was panting when he dropped onto the seat in front of his grandmother’s desk. Sweat dripped from his face as he pulled the drawer open and laid the folder on top of the desk. He opened it and scanned down to the signature. When he’d first read it, he was unable to decipher the signature, but with Ken Welsh’s voice ringing in his ears, the small name became instantly clear.
Jennie.
30
Ranald was curled up on a sofa in the library. He needed food, but he was now too afraid of going near the lift to walk along to the kitchen. All he could think about was what Ken Welsh had told him. And the letters in his grandmother’s desk.
Jennie – was she his ‘ghost’?
There were no bloody ghosts, he thought. It was just the effects of coming off his meds for all those weeks. He’d experienced similar kinds of things in the past.
Then he thought about the times he’d spent with her. Slept beside her image in the mirror. Dreamed of her mouth on his. Her hand in his. That had all been, well, pleasant. He revised this thought. Better than that. It had felt like love.
He laughed at the notion.
Love.
With a ghost.
An imaginary ghost, even. How messed up was that? And in those letters she was not much more than a girl. He considered them, what they said, and kept going back to the word that had jumped out at him when he read them – ‘safe’. The poor girl was trying to ask for help and there was no one there for her.
And how could they be, if his grandmother had kept the letters, if they’d never been sent? Then it occurred to him that his grandmother herself would have been young. How did she come to have them, then?
He lay back, head against the arm cushion and sighed. That was the ghost he was in love with?
A memory: he was in his room at the hospital, scratching at his right arm, convinced something had burrowed under the skin there. He was speaking to Martie at a hundred miles an hour. He had no recollection of what he was saying, but the horror he could remember seeing on her face told him it was far from healthy. It was her reaction more than anything that bothered him. He saw real fear there.
He could deal with remembering the mania. That wasn’t really him. But what shamed him, what burned into his brain, was the fact that he had made life so difficult for Martie. She was so young, how had she found the strength to deal with the change in him, while helping with all of the funeral preparations for his parents. While dealing, alone, with the truth of what happened…
No, this thing, whatever it was – this obsession with a ghost, with the spirit of a wronged girl – it wasn’t love. It was a shift in brain chemistry. His condition. God knows how that would have affected the workings of his brain. He was imagining things. He was prone to psychosis, wasn’t he? And what the successive discoveries he’d made since coming to Newton Hall – blow upon blow upon blow…
And he’d been so bone-crushingly lonely with all this space around him. Still was, despite going back on the meds. It would drive anyone to imagine a companion, someone to turn to for solace.
He looked at his laptop. Stood up from the sofa, went and sat at the desk and opened the lid. Wouldn’t it be better to go online like the rest of the world? Get lost in social networking, dating apps or whatever echo chamber of banality he could find? It might even make him feel sane.
He closed the lid.
No, he wasn’t going there.
He pushed his laptop away, knocking his great-uncle’s letter further along the desk as he did so. He thought about giving it another read and stood up to reach it. As he did so he pressed his thigh against the underside of the desk.
Bending forwards to rub the sore spot on his thigh, he saw that one of the desk’s drawers was pulled out slightly. Had he left it open? He reached down to push it shut and then remembered that this was where he’d stored Alexander’s laptop. He opened the drawer and pulled the machine out. The power cables were attached.
He pushed open the lid and pressed the on button. The battery was
low, so he plugged it in.
As when he’d first opened the machine, all those weeks ago, it had demanded a password. His right index finger hovered over the mouse. This time a hint came up on screen: ‘Ranald’ it said.
What?
No, he thought, it couldn’t be that easy. Could it?
With a shrug he typed his full name in the password box, and was allowed entry.
The home screen was a generic Windows image and right in the centre of the screen was one icon: a Word document thumbnail. He clicked on it and began reading.
31
Dear Ranald,
As my hour comes, I regret more and more that I didn’t defy my sister’s wishes and get in touch with you. And somehow the thought that you may read my words here does warm me.
I do have a number of notebooks spread around the house that you may have read, but they were simply for my pleasure. This is going directly to you.
My lawyer, Mr Quinn, has another letter for you. As I write this I have no way of knowing which of these missives will find their way to you first. But I can tell you that the letter I sent to you via the lawyer tells you only part of the picture. This will fill in the rest. Why didn’t I just include this with the other letter? Because it contains information that if read by anyone outside of the family would be incendiary. I trust Mr Quinn almost completely, but he is a mere human and, as Seneca once said, errare humanum est.
What age are you now, Ranald? Late twenties? Do you look back at your younger self and wonder at the change time has wrought? Do you look back at him as if he is another person and wonder how he could have done the things he did?
I do. Every single day of my life; it has coloured my every waking second and chained me to a moment I wish was confined to another’s memory.
I was young, immature and born in to a life of privilege. And that wealth and the licence it offered did not have a positive impact on my burgeoning ego. I thought I was untouchable. I thought that everything and everyone was there for my use.
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