They were kitsch enough to find a market in a city, she thought, flipping through them. They would make great toilet books in a boutique hotel run by people who thought they’d invented irony. Maureen would be able to sell the knitting patterns, certainly. She dished the bag’s contents out between her three towers and carried on, telling herself she was letting them rest, knowing she wasn’t, really.
TWENTY
By lunchtime, she had turned the canyon into a wide valley, emptying and dispersing seventeen bags, emptying and flattening twenty boxes. Down and down she went from Deathly Hallows to the Philosopher’s Stone. She hoped poor J.K. didn’t poke around secondhand bookshops these days, because they would hurt her heart and it wasn’t a true reflection. Harry was loved more than anyone else in the land, except maybe Jesus and Kate.
One of the boxes had a very old mouse nest in it, all the books in one corner nibbled to a kind of dry froth and the whole thing reeking of urine and rattling with desiccated pellets when she moved it.
“Stand back,” she said, emerging with it at arm’s length. “Eddy, get the door!”
Eddy, who had been sitting almost horizontally in Lowell’s chair with her legs stuck straight out and her chin on her chest, leapt up and sprinted along the hall.
“Garden door, Eddy,” Jude said. “Gawd, what a stink when it shifts.”
“What is it?” said Eddy, trotting back again. She scooted ahead of Jude to the back of Coasters and Key Rings, reached up, took the garden-door key down from above the doorframe, and opened it.
“It’s what landlords call ‘evidence of rodent activity’,” Jude said. “Ugh.” She put the box down on the small patch of concrete right outside and turned away, wiping her hands. “I’ll take it down to the wheeliebin after lunch. If I do it now I’ll lose my appetite.” Then she gave Eddy a smile. She couldn’t help it. “Good thing you knew where the key was. I don’t remember telling you.”
Eddy looked blankly at her, not scowling but without even a wisp of a smile. “Dad told me,” she said.
“Funny,” said Jude. “I kept meaning to tell him where I put it, but I forgot.”
“Lucky guess,” said Eddy. “Why are you being such a bitch?”
“Speak your mind, why don’t you,” said Jude. “Because you won’t tell me why you were in the garden that first day.”
“I wasn’t—”
“I covered for you with Lowell about last night.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I told him you were waxing your legs or something.”
“So? What do you mean ‘covered for me’? I was … doing my hair. And texting.”
She looked scornful and completely calm and actually now that Jude took a closer look at her hair it did look lovely, shining like a beetle’s back.
“So you didn’t jump out the window and go wandering?”
“Jump?” said Eddy, pointing at her belly with both hands, like a rapper. “No I didn’t ‘jump’. Why the hell would I? Lowell would drive me anywhere I wanted to go. What are you on about?”
Jude took a long time to decide, but in the end she locked the back door again, saying to Eddy, “I’ve got to trust someone and God help me, it looks like it’s you.” She shouted upstairs, “We’re going out for lunch!”
They both heard Lowell’s muffled reply from somewhere on the second floor and heard the old house creak as he began to move.
“Laters!” Eddy shouted, and they hurried towards the front door. “That sounds tons better in your accent than mine. No one Northern Irish is cool. God, it’s brilliant to see the sun!” she went on as they emerged. “Where we going?”
Jude smiled at the girl’s instant lift in spirits, then she put her face up and let the dishwater sunshine lighten her own eyelids. “Liam Neeson’s cool,” she said. “Picnic down by the harbour?”
“He’s bloody ancient,” said Eddy. “He’s Lowell’s age. You shouldn’t give up so easy, Jude. If you did a bit of work and got some different clothes, you could totally get someone great.”
Jude only laughed. Then, hurrying to catch up with Eddy—who was sailing along no matter what she’d said about jumping—she put a hand on her arm. “Cool it when we go past the Post Office, all right? Jackie’s really ill in hospital and we don’t want to look unfeeling.”
“Who to?” said Eddy. “It’s shut. And how do you know anyway? How do you know so much about everyone? You’re like a spy or something. God, I wish there was a chipper. Do you think the café round the top road’ll do chips to carry out?”
They didn’t, but they did sandwiches and chocolate and cans of Sprite, and the sun, at the height of its short arc, had a trace of mild warmth about it that the breeze couldn’t quite blow away. So, as they larked down the harbour road towards the picnic tables, Jude felt a lightness she almost didn’t recognise. Not since Max dropped his trio of bombshells—girlfriend, pregnant, over—had she looked forward to telling another person her worries and having them soothed away.
That was part of the problem, she’d realised, once it was too late. All her friends were their friends, mostly from the ambulance depot, and so they went with Max when the time came to choose. Her own friends? She had let them go, the girls’ nights turning to lunches and then to emails and then to Christmas cards as she made her nest and shared it with Max. You’re my best friend, she used to say. And he smiled and ruffled her hair. It only occurred to her during the divorce that he had never replied.
“Bloody seagulls!” Eddy said, looking at the splotched picnic benches when they arrived. It wasn’t what Jude had imagined. A harbour to her meant Southend or Margate: bustle and boat-trips, vendors of tourist tat. Here there was a wooden jetty, a tarmac car park edged with more of the high bracken, and these picnic benches. “Rip that bag and we’ll sit on half each,” Eddy said.
They settled themselves side by side, both facing the water. The tide that rolled quietly in and out of the bay was at its gentle highest, and the water lapped and slopped against the wooden bracings while the few small boats not yet taken out for winter tugged at their moorings and seesawed on the dips and swells.
“I’ll puke if I watch that anymore,” Eddy said after a few bites. She rose and resettled herself, facing in towards the fields, staring across the table at Jude. “Right then,” she said. “Shoot.”
“Something’s going on,” Jude said.
“No shit,” said Eddy, “but we agreed we wouldn’t talk about it.”
“I don’t mean with you or me,” Jude said. “Something else.”
She put her sandwich down on its wrapper. It was making her feel heavy in her heart, the way a lot of things about Wigtown seemed to. It was a place from the past. Instant coffee in polystyrene cups and these tuna sandwiches, made from sliced bread scraped with margarine. And for every middle-aged woman in a velour tracksuit with a water bottle, there was another one with a tartan shopping trolley and a plastic rain bonnet. The men at the bowling club wore shirts and ties, and the children at the primary school played hopscotch. What with finding another Valley of the Dolls or Little Red Hen every day, altogether too much about the place took her back to when she was a child and seemed to make that lost time so close that, perhaps if she tried hard, she could jump tracks and end up somewhere that wasn’t here and now. She could keep up with her girlfriends, stick with the exposure therapy, or make it so she never needed the bloody exposure therapy. She could ignore Max that night in that bar when he kept looking over and smiling. And she could tell her parents what no competent adult should ever need to be told: don’t sleep in a closed garage with your engine running. If she had done all of that, she would be single and surrounded with pals, or happily married to someone else, taking him round to tea at her mum’s every Sunday. She wouldn’t be sitting on a plastic bag on a picnic bench covered in seagull shit, about to be mocked by a teenage headcase like Eddy. But then she flashed on Lowell’s face and his voice saying It’s a subjunctive, my dear, and she couldn’t
help smiling.
“I had an anonymous note shoved through my letterbox last night,” she said. “I wondered if maybe you had put it there.”
“Nope,” said Eddy. “I’ll tell you stuff to your face: you should grow your hair and get some highlights in it, and you wear your jumpers too long.” She winked, but something in Jude’s expression got to her and, after clearing her throat, she started listening.
“It said Let the dead rest.”
“But that’s just kids. That’s just someone yanking your chain, isn’t it? Cos you live in a graveyard.”
“I don’t think so,” Jude said. “Because then it gave names. Five names of dead people. And three of them were names that had come up before. Written in books at the shop.”
“What do you mean written in books? You mean like voodoo?”
“What?” said Jude. “I’m serious. Someone—Todd Jolly, who lived in my cottage—was recording the names of people who died. There were four and then he was the last one.”
“Of course he was last!” Eddy said. “It’s like that hundred books, isn’t it? He’s hardly going to write more names after he’s dead.”
“But here’s the clincher. Whoever wrote the note last night went round the graves too. They left footprints in the frosty grass.”
Eddy had grown slack-jawed as she listened. Jude could see a half-chewed bite of sandwich in her cheek. She washed it down with a painful-looking gulp of Sprite and then answered.
“Of course they went round the graves,” she said. “They had to, to get names to write down to yank your chain. And of course they left footprints. It’s when someone’s flitting about a graveyard without leaving footprints that you have to worry.”
“That’s—” Jude began and then blinked. “Shit, that’s true.”
“It’s quite funny, really,” said Eddy. “Like some kind of neighbourhood watch committee! I don’t blame you for thinking it was me. I might have done it if I’d thought of it.”
“Okay,” Jude said. “Okay. I admit, I’ve made fool of myself.”
“You’re under a lot of stress,” Eddy said.
“But when I mentioned it to Jackie, she pretty much warned me off. And then she collapsed. The same day.”
“Mentioned what? If you only found out late last night when you went home from Jamaica House, how’d she even know?”
“I mentioned two of the names—Etta Bell and Archie Patterstone—when I stopped in at the shop at teatime. And she definitely knows something.” Jude sat ruminating for a moment about how best to explain it to Eddy. It was real; she knew it was. But it was a delicate thread and Eddy could break it with one shout of her scoffing laughter. Jude pulled the frilly edge of a lettuce leaf and it slid out of her sandwich, slick with dressing, wilted dark where the oil had got in. She let it drop and wiped her fingers.
“Etta and Archie and them are resting easy,” she said, and arched her eyebrows. “That’s what Jackie said to me.”
“Resting easy?” Eddy echoed and Jude saw that her interest was hooked. She wasn’t a stupid kid, not by any means. “And then the note said let the dead rest too?”
Jude nodded. “But she really didn’t have time. She shut the shop at six and she was at home away down that way somewhere at half past and collapsed as soon as she got in the door.”
Eddy looked over at where Jude was pointing and then back towards the town. “Half an hour?” she said. “Yeah, that’s pretty tight. That would totally make you collapse if you’d legged it there and back, eh?” She had finished her sandwich and now she screwed up the paper, looked around, and threw it at the bin, missing. “Come on! Get that sarnie down you and let’s time it.”
“It was foggy.”
“Yeah, but she was born here. I bet anyone who belonged here could trot about just fine in a fog or that.”
Jude remembered the footsteps hurrying away from her last night. “Okay, but actually, Eddy, before we go chasing off? That’s not the bit I was thinking of. Etta and Archie and them are resting easy. Resting is only part of the puzzle, you see?”
Eddy finished her Sprite and burped, getting through doh, ray, mee before it ran out. “Pardon,” she said. And then went on in a singsong voice, counting the words off on her fingers. “Resting. Easy. Etta. Archie.” She stopped, crooked her head to one side and gave Jude a look. “Wait a minute,” she said. “And who? Etta and Archie and who?”
“Right,” said Jude. “Exactly. Now, I know this was a long time ago and I know they’d all be dead now anyway. But there’s two things I know for sure. Auntie Lorna—Jackie’s Auntie Lorna—was ninety-nine and she went into a nursing home.”
“The one Lowell’s dad made him work in?”
“I don’t know. But she went into the nursing home and died pretty much overnight. And Todd Jolly died at home. He left his cottage to Dr. Glen in gratitude for all the care and help and things that meant he never had to go into the nursing home. And he kept notes about who died. He wrote in his books. They started like reviews, but then they … changed into something else.”
Eddy was sparking now. Her eyes darted from side to side and she played a little tune with her tongue and her bottom lip. “Bloody hell,” she said. “I knew there was something weird about this place. So you think everybody put their oldsters in this home to make sure they didn’t rip through the inheritance? I wonder if it’s still open.” She cast her eyes at Jude’s half-eaten sandwich and wilted lettuce leaf lying on top of it. “Are you eating that or can we get going?”
“That’s her house,” said Eddy when they turned the corner onto a row of semis. One of the doors was open, a woman in slippers leaning against the doorjamb enjoying a cigarette and another standing on the step.
“How do you know?”
“Because I’m from a village,” she said. “Hey!” she shouted. “Any news?”
Both women turned to look. “Who’s asking?” the smoking woman shouted back. She stubbed out her cigarette on the harled wall of the cottage, leaving a black smear there, and threw the stub into the flowers. “Are you one of Billy’s girls come over as quick as that?”
“What’s she on about?” muttered Jude.
“Billy?” said Eddy. “Come over? Shut up and follow my lead, Jude.” She opened the gate and strode up the path. “Aye, I am,” she said. “Is he in? Or is he at the hospital?”
“Christ, how many years has it been since you saw him?” said the woman. “If he was fit to be at the hospital why would I be here, wiping his arse for minimum wage? This is emergency care on top of my regular shift, you know.”
That was when Jude noticed that as well as her slippers she wore a nylon tabard and had a name badge pinned to her chest.
“Well, aren’t you a fucking bitch?” Eddy said. “He’s expecting us.”
“You think I’m daft?” said the woman. “Why would he be expecting you?”
“Why wouldn’t he?” said Eddy, squaring up to her.
“Because I know who you are now I get a right look at you,” she said. “Both of you. You’re nothing to Billy at all.”
“Now, now,” said the other woman, with a chiding note in her voice.
But the care worker sailed on. “You’re the pair that have shacked up with the Glen one. Maureen Bell’s my cousin, by the way. I ken all about you.”
“And I’m finding out more about you every time you open your mouth,” Eddy said. She shouldered past the woman with her hand raised to block any more talk.
Jude scuttled after her, marvelling.
Thankfully, there were so many visitors inside and all of them talking that it seemed unlikely the man of the house had heard his care worker’s words. At least six women were either sitting around on hard dining chairs or bustling back and forth from the kitchen with tea things.
Billy himself was in the main living room in a hospital bed with a drip and a catheter bag on one side, two tanks of oxygen on the other. He was a terrible greyish-yellow colour, but he was all there. Jude k
new that as soon as he turned his head and looked at Eddy and her. She saw the lift of helpless hope in his eyes and then the swift drop.
Jude squeezed Eddy’s hand, willing her for once not to say anything from her usual menu. But Eddy surprised her. Surprised them all.
“Sorry to disturb you, Mr. McLennan,” she said. “We were just coming to ask after Jackie. We’re not wanting to be bothering you.”
“Oh!” said the old man, lifting his head from the pillow just a shade before he ran out of energy. “Listen to that now, will you? And who might you be?” There was a thick layer of Galloway in his voice, but the sound of Belfast lay underneath it like a seam of iron.
Eddy played up her own accent even more as she answered him. “Sure, I’m Lowell Glen’s daughter, sir. I’m the big scandal of Wigtown, with the state of me, see. Had you not heard?”
The old man’s face cracked into a smile, his eyes swimming. “Aye, Jackie was telling me.” He turned to Jude. “And you’ll be the girlfriend, are you?” Eddy cackled and then smothered it. “You’re surely young? But look at that. Jackie and me had forty-odd good years till this morning.” He turned away and groped around on his bedspread until the nearest of the women in the dining chairs took his hand. She had red-rimmed eyes and looked exhausted.
“Oh, Dad,” she said. “Don’t lose hope. Come on, eh?”
“I wonder,” Eddy said, “Mr. McLennan, can I have a wee word with you? Can we? Jackie … see now, the thing is that Jackie told Jude here something in confidence yesterday, and we’ve sort of been left with it hanging. We don’t want to bother you at all, but can we just have one wee quiet word?”
His daughter was frowning and she gave her dad an uncertain look.
“You can stay, of course,” Eddy said to her. Clever psychology, Jude thought. It was enough to get the woman on her feet and backing away politely.
“Right,” she said. “Ladies? Fag break in the back garden. Come on. You’ve got five minutes,” she told Jude. “And only because I know my mum would never have taken ill if there wasn’t something really badly wrong.” She dropped a kiss on her father’s head. “Don’t upset him,” she said to Eddy, and then she herded the other women out ahead of her and closed the door.
QUIET NEIGHBOURS an unputdownable psychological thriller with a breathtaking twist Page 19