No Place Like Home

by Jane Renshaw

  ‘I didn’t weedkill my own vegetables!’

  ‘Not deliberately, no – but the organic liquid feed you’ve got in the shed comes in big red bottles, does it not? Been using that on the veg, yes?’

  ‘Well, yes, but–’

  ‘And the weedkiller I gave you a few weeks ago was also in a big red bottle?’

  ‘The weedkiller’s still there in the shed unopened.’

  ‘No it’s not, Bram. I know because I was in there after lunch and I thought maybe I’d have a go at the jungle you’ve got growing round the verandah, but no. Nada. The weedkiller has gone. I thought you’d maybe swallowed your eco-friendly organic principles and had a sneaky blitz. Little did I think you’d used it on your own bloody vegetables!’

  The room erupted in laughter.

  ‘No,’ said Bram helplessly. ‘I didn’t.’ But David just slapped him on the back again.

  He had not used that weedkiller. He had noted the similarity between the containers and double-checked every time he used the liquid feed that he hadn’t made a mistake, telling himself he needed to get David to take the weedkiller away. He knew he hadn’t made a mistake. Someone had deliberately poured weedkiller all over the vegetable patch.

  5

  Phoebe was sitting at the kitchen table wielding the red felt-tip, head bent in concentration over her work. All around her were felt-tips, most with their tops off. It was another beautiful day, early morning sunshine slanting in through the side window and across the worktops.

  Kirsty came into the room and looked over Phoebe’s shoulder, and Bram braced himself for her reaction, but she smiled. ‘Poor Bertie’s leg has actually been shot off?’

  Phoebe nodded. ‘If I just showed the flesh wound it would look like it was no big deal.’

  ‘And that’s a lot of blood.’

  ‘It has to attract people’s attention, Mum.’

  Phoebe’s notice was quite something. At the top was a depiction of ‘the psychopath’, a heavy-browed figure, mouth wide open in glee as he pointed what looked like a machine-gun at the animal in the centre of the picture, a yellow dog with downturned mouth crying copious blue tears – and no wonder, given that one of his back legs was lying on the ground behind him and blood was pouring out of the stump to create a bright red lake.

  Phoebe had drawn a huge black cross over this picture and under it written:

  !!!NO!!!

  It is WRONG to hurt animals. If you do, you will be COUGHT ON CAMERA and get in trouble with the POLICE. All dogs using this wood are PROTECTED BY PETCAM.

  Underneath was a happy yellow dog with a massive camera around his neck, tongue lolling, mouth smiling, and the psychopath, this time, was prostrate in a second blood lake while a policeman stood pointing a gun down at him. A policeman with bright blue eyes.

  Last night, Phoebe had refused to sleep in her own room. As dusk had fallen, the spectre of the psychopath had become all too real, and Phoebe kept insisting she had seen movement at first one window and then another, and became hysterical when Bram went out with a torch to investigate, which he’d thought would reassure her but had had the opposite effect.

  They had taken her into their bed and she had snuggled in the warm space between them as Bram had shown her the motion-activated cameras with on-board storage that they had ordered and which were to be placed in the woods. Kirsty had had the brainwave of a petcam to be attached to Bertie’s collar, and Phoebe had solemnly participated in the selection of a suitable model from the website.

  If there was anything guaranteed to bring Kirsty back from wherever she retreated to, it was one of the kids needing her.

  They had printed off their own notices this morning and sealed them inside plastic wallets from one of Kirsty’s ring binders, ready to go up, side by side with Phoebe’s one, in strategic positions around the wood:

  PRIVATE PROPERTY

  You are very welcome to use these woods, but please respect them and observe the Scottish Outdoor Access Code. NO SHOOTING OR FIRES, PLEASE. No littering.

  Anyone shooting at wild or domestic animals or vandalising property will be prosecuted. CCTV is operating in these woods.

  Bram joined Kirsty and Phoebe at the table. ‘That’s excellent, Phoebs, if a little bloodthirsty. Our notice is going to look very dull in comparison.’

  A racket like a herd of wildebeest on the stairs heralded the arrival of Max, as usual an hour later for breakfast than the rest of them. He was dressed in a very short-sleeved T-shirt that exposed his upper arms, and Bram noticed that the weights were starting to have an effect. His biceps were definitely larger and more defined. David would be delighted.

  Max grabbed a handful of nuts and raisins from the bowl on the table. ‘I thought I might go out and – Oh, crikey.’ He did a double-take at Phoebe’s work. ‘That’s going to give them nightmares, all right.’

  ‘Good,’ said Phoebe, busily expanding the red lake around the psychopath. ‘He’s got it coming.’ She’d heard David say that yesterday, presumably.

  Max got himself a huge bowl of cornflakes, which he inhaled in two minutes flat, then disappeared off upstairs again, to return a minute later wearing his new trainers. ‘I’m going over to Finn and Cara’s – is that okay?’

  ‘If Mr and Mrs Taylor don’t mind, that’s fine,’ said Bram.

  ‘No, Max!’ Phoebe looked up at her brother with beseeching eyes. ‘I don’t think you should go out there.’

  ‘You heard what the cops said,’ Max attempted to reassure her. ‘It’s just kids messing about. It’s not like we’re going to be jumped by him’ – he pointed at Phoebe’s drawing – ‘every time we set foot outside the house.’

  ‘Now look, Phoebe.’ Bram took a seat next to her. ‘You know this boogie man doesn’t actually exist, don’t you? You heard what Scott said. What Mr and Mrs Taylor said. It’s just a load of teenagers. They’re not even bad people, probably, just thoughtless and silly.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Kirsty. ‘Most teenagers aren’t as sensible as your brother. They often do silly things. It’s nothing to get all worried and upset about, darling – it really isn’t.’ Was she trying to reassure Phoebe, or herself?

  It hadn’t quite been Lord of the Flies, but living in halls of residence had certainly been very different from being at home. Was it really a good idea, Bram wondered, to put a load of immature teenagers together in a building with hardly any adult supervision and let them get on with it? In those first few days, he really missed the cosy comfort of the little mews house, and the peace and quiet, and his parents’ reassuring presence. Not to mention Ma’s cooking.

  The little kitchen in the common room shared by the eight students on Bram’s corridor was basic, to say the least: just a Formica table, six black, moulded plastic chairs, a sink and draining board, and a small area of worktop on which sat a microwave oven. A fridge in the corner. A cupboard with chipped plates and mugs. A stinky bin no one ever emptied. And that was it.

  But they generally ended up there at the end of a night out, often with takeaways. On this particular night, Steph was more wasted than usual. She aimed the tomato ketchup at her chips, missed the plate and sent an arc of it whipping over the chair on which Bram was about to sit down.

  ‘It looks like the Weird Girl’s been in here,’ said Gary, ‘doing a spot of ritual killing.’

  The others found this hilarious. Steph crumpled onto the floor, eyes rolled back in her head.

  ‘Oh for God’s sake,’ muttered Bram, wiping the chair with a cloth.

  ‘Weird loners do often end up going on a killing spree,’ Steph pointed out, flopping over to look up at him. ‘You see it all the time in the media.’

  Bram sighed, and chucked the cloth in the direction of the sink. ‘Kirsty McKechnie’s the last person on this corridor I could imagine hurting anyone.’

  ‘No, but you must admit she’s creepy.’ Liv shuddered, tucking into her own chips as Steph hauled herself back onto a chair. ‘The way she looks at you! It’
s like her soul has died.’

  ‘It’s like she’s just the husk of what used to be Kirsty McKechnie,’ Gary agreed. ‘Taken over by an alien life force.’

  There was a movement at the door, and Bram looked up, and met Kirsty McKechnie’s clear green gaze. She had a mug in one hand and a plate in the other.

  Awful, awful silence.

  ‘Hi,’ said Bram.

  ‘Hi.’ Kirsty walked past them to the sink, where she used washing-up liquid and the brush to clean the mug and plate, wiped them with the tea towel, and put the plate away in the cupboard. Clutching the mug, which Bram saw had a picture of an owl on it, she walked back past them, head held high, and out into the corridor.

  ‘Oh-oh!’ giggled Steph. ‘Oh-oh, Gary! Guess who’s just gone to the top of the list of potential victims!’

  Bram stood. ‘That’s not cool. That’s so not cool. How do you think she must have felt, hearing you saying all that crap? It’s bullying, guys. That’s what it is. You need to back off and leave her alone.’ It was on the tip of his tongue to tell them what he had heard, through the thin wall separating his room from Kirsty’s.

  Crying.

  Almost every night.

  But knowing them, they were likely to find a way to use it against her. Gary and Steph exchanged mock-chastened looks, then burst out laughing again.

  Bram raised his voice over them. ‘Or better still, try to be her friends?’

  ‘Uh, yeah,’ cackled Steph. ‘Let’s all make friends with the poor little serial killer!’

  That night, when Bram was woken by sobbing coming from Kirsty’s room, he didn’t just grimace in sympathy and turn over and go back to sleep. He padded out to the corridor in his bare feet and knocked on the door, standing shivering in the eery dim light of the night-time corridor.

  ‘Kirsty?’

  The noise stopped.

  ‘It’s Bram from next door. Are you all right?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ came a small, choked voice. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ He put the palm of his hand flat against her door, as if he could somehow transmit comfort through it.

  ‘Yes. But thanks.’

  As he returned to his room and jumped back into bed, he made a decision. Kirsty was obviously horribly homesick, so far away from everyone and everything she knew in Scotland. This must all be so strange and frightening for her, on her own for probably the first time in her life, and instead of her fellow students rallying round and supporting her, they were calling her names and laughing at her distress and joking about her being a potential serial killer.

  Oh my God. When he thought about it, he’d pretty much been complicit in that.

  He needed to help her.

  He needed to help Kirsty.

  Phoebe stopped dead in her tracks. ‘What was that?’

  Bram stopped too. ‘I can’t hear anything, Phoebe. Apart from a bird.’

  They had stapled the first two notices to tree trunks where the path leading off the track entered the wood, and were now walking down that path deeper into the trees.

  ‘It was a sort of crunching noise!’

  Phoebe had bravely agreed, in the end, to accompany Bram and Max to put up the notices, but Bram was beginning to think that had been a mistake. When he’d slid open the glass doors onto the terrace, he’d had to fight a primitive instinct that had told him to shut them again, to keep doors and walls between his children and –

  And what?

  ‘There’s nothing there,’ he said firmly. ‘Come on.’

  They carried on through the trees, the path turning first one way and then another. In the stands of little birch trees, light dappled the mossy, hummocky ground, where brambles and other scrubby stuff grew, but as the path entered the beechwood, the huge canopies of the mature trees blocked the sun and they walked through a twilit world populated by giants, great grey giants with twisted trunks and roots that seemed to writhe their way out of the ground. Not much grew here. A russet carpet of previous years’ dead leaves stretched away to a high bank to their right. Bram knew, because he’d googled it, that this carpet of beech leaves and husks suppressed the growth of most other plants.

  ‘I guess you can appreciate why people in Medieval times thought woods were evil places,’ Max mused. ‘Dark and mysterious. Where robbers and outcasts hung out. Hence all the fairy tales warning children not to go into the woods because you never know what might happen, you might get stalked by wolves or kidnapped by a mad witch or–’

  ‘Yes, okay, thank you, Max.’

  ‘– a psychopath,’ Phoebe finished for him in a small voice, her hand finding its way into Bram’s as a sudden vortex of air whooshed through the branches over their heads.

  Bram upped the pace. ‘Max, I was thinking maybe you could sound out Finn and Cara, find out if they maybe do have an inkling about who might be using an airgun around here.’

  ‘I already asked them, Dad. They don’t have a clue. We’ve put out word on the social media grapevine, but so far nada.’

  ‘Good thinking. Right. Let’s put the rest of these notices up.’

  They stapled the last two notices to a tree at the edge of the wood where it abutted the paddock. Bram looked from the mountains and woods and fields to the house, the cedar shingles glowing in the sunlight. A few days ago this view would have made him smile, but now he felt his stomach lurch a little. They were pretty isolated out here.

  Phoebe ran ahead of them towards the house. But of course the sliding doors on the terrace were locked, and she had to stand there waiting for Bram and Max to catch up.

  ‘Come on, Dad!’

  For a moment, Bram couldn’t find the small key that opened the sliding doors, and Phoebe pressed close against his side. He could see her small chest rising and falling under her blue sweatshirt as her breathing quickened.

  ‘Here it is!’

  Phoebe made sure he locked it again after them and even wanted to pull the curtains across the expanse of glass, but Bram was able to distract her with a text message from Kirsty, who was away for the day in Inverness meeting clients.

  ‘Mum says well done for being so brave and helping put up the notices. See?’

  Phoebe leant into him as she looked at the message on his phone, her head against his arm.

  ‘You really did well, Phoebs. I’m proud of you. And now you’ve seen there’s nothing to be frightened of out there, haven’t you? Just a few noisy blackbirds and a deer or two!’

  The deer had been pretty traumatic.

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  Maybe a sing-song would help. Bram had put the guitars at the library end of the Room with a View, and he fetched them now, slinging the strap of his own guitar over his neck and handing the other to Max, who perched on one of the sofas and started tuning the strings, while Phoebe skipped off to get her recorder.

  ‘I’ve found a good song for our party piece,’ said Bram. ‘For the housewarming.’ He fetched his tablet and brought up the bothy ballad he’d found on the internet. Bothy ballads were traditional Scottish songs, it seemed, sung by farm labourers in their bothies, basic accommodation that used to be provided on farms in Victorian times. They’d while away the evening hours after a long day’s work by singing these ballads to each other, some tragic, some comical, some, it had to be said, offensively sexist and sometimes verging on the pornographic.

  He’d found a nice one, though, about a ‘kitchie deem’ – a kitchen maid – in love with a ploughboy. He strummed his nails across the strings and began to sing.

  ‘Doon yonder den there’s a plooman lad,

  Some simmer’s day he’ll be aa my ain.

  And sing laddie-aye, and sing laddie-o,

  The plooman laddies are aa the go.’

  He paused. Was ‘aa’ a typo? No – he googled it, and found it meant ‘all’ in the Scots language.

  ‘Aa the go means “all the rage”,’ he clarified for Max. ‘What do you reckon?’

  Max nodded. ‘It’s, uh, goo
d to keep these traditional songs alive.’

  ‘There are four more verses.’

  He stumbled a bit over the unfamiliar words, but it really was a charming song, all about how the kitchie deem could have had the merchant or the miller, but no one else would do for her but her own humble ploughboy. Phoebe appeared for the last verse, piping away rhythmically but untunefully on her recorder. A musical interlude could generally be counted on to restore Phoebe’s spirits.

  ‘It’s quite funny, really,’ Bram said as he came to the end. ‘These ballads were written by the farm labourers, and they often put themselves in the starring roles. The guy who wrote this one was probably a ploughman.’

  Max was screwing up his face a little, in the way he did when he wanted to say something negative but wasn’t sure how to phrase it in a non-hurtful way.

  ‘It’s a bit rough around the edges,’ Bram conceded, ‘but we’ve a few days to practise.’

  ‘It’s great, and the history behind it is really cool and everything, but they’re not into that kind of stuff here, Dad. I’m not sure it’s a good idea to sing that at the housewarming.’

  ‘There’s a long tradition of making your own entertainment in the north of Scotland,’ Bram pointed out. ‘At ceilidhs and get-togethers in the long winter evenings. People doing turns, singing a song or telling a story–’

  ‘Yeah, maybe fifty years ago. Finn says they still have ceilidhs, but it’s mainly just dancing now. And if there was any singing, I think it would be the locals doing it. That kind of stuff sounds… a bit peculiar, if you don’t have the right accent.’

  ‘Och, I’ve a few days to work on that too!’

  Phoebe giggled, but Max rolled his eyes, setting his guitar aside on the sofa.

  Max shared Bram’s love of folk music from all corners of the world, and Bram had expected him to jump on this with his usual enthusiasm. He hardly thought Finn Taylor was representative of the tastes of the local population, but refrained from saying so. The Taylors were incomers too, having moved up here from Edinburgh a decade or so ago. Andrew had been in ‘finance’, whatever that meant, until he’d had a midlife crisis and decided to give up the rat race and open a restaurant in the Highlands. What did they know about the local culture?