by Jane Renshaw
No. David would never terrorise his beloved grandkids. Never.
Bram crossed the gravel to join them. David had stopped nodding along, he noted, and was standing with his feet apart, Henry VIII style.
‘Scott thinks it’s okay for the kids to come back,’ said Kirsty.
‘I’ve arranged for a patrol car to come by every few hours through the night,’ said Scott. ‘Not that I think you’re in any actual physical danger. This has bored wee yobs written all over it.’
‘How can you be sure they’re harmless?’ Bram objected. ‘They broke into the house!’
‘The door was unlocked. If they’d intended to actually hurt you, they had a golden opportunity, which they didn’t take. I’m not saying they’re harmless, Bram. Of course I’m not. Intimidation like this is harm in itself. When we get them, they’ll be charged with harassment, don’t you worry. The courts will slap a restraining order on them.’
David shook his head. ‘Bram’s right.’ Everyone looked at him, as if they thought they’d misheard. David grimaced, almost apologetically, but he went on: ‘What use is a patrol car calling by a few times in a night? Will they be detaching their arses from the car seats at all? How do they expect to catch the toe-rags by driving up and down the track a few times?’
‘It’s more the deterrent value. When they see there’s a police presence, they’re not likely to come anywhere near the place. The patrol car will call by here, and also Benlervie.’
‘Have you let the Taylors know what’s happened?’
Scott nodded, as two of the techie guys came down the verandah steps, one carrying a box that presumably contained their kit.
‘Okay folks, all done,’ one of them said.
‘So we can use the kitchen?’ said Kirsty.
‘Yeah, go ahead.’
‘Let’s have a cup of tea. And I don’t know about you, Bram, but I’m starving.’
They hadn’t been able to access the kitchen since it happened. Scott – who thought of bloody everything – had appeared bright and early this morning with a thermos of coffee and a couple of vegetarian pasties. But that was hours ago.
In the kitchen, the blackened pan was sitting on the worktop. Presumably they’d taken away the heart and the burnt rice. Before he filled the kettle, Bram put the pan in the sink and skooshed Fairy Liquid into it. Not that he wanted to use that pan ever again. But maybe he could donate it to a charity shop.
He turned on the hot tap and water gushed through the mixer into the pan. Then he got the kettle, shut off the hot tap and turned on the cold one.
Nothing happened.
The mixer tap just shuddered.
The techs must have shut off the water for some reason. Bram opened the cupboard under the sink and found the stopcock. He tried to turn it anticlockwise, but it wouldn’t budge. It was already turned on.
Oh, great. This was all they needed.
‘Got a problem here, guys. There’s no water.’
Sylvia was practically wringing her hands, standing in the kitchen frowning at the taps as if she could will the water back. ‘I’m so sorry. After everything else that’s happened…’
‘We’ve never had a dry spell like this, in all the years we’ve been here,’ Andrew added defensively, arms crossed above his belly. ‘Seems the spring just isn’t adequate for two households in the summer. A summer like this, anyway. Climate change, I suppose…’
Woodside’s water supply was shared with Benlervie’s. It came from a spring, apparently, that filled an underground tank on Benlervie’s ground. But the spring, Andrew had informed them, had dried to a trickle.
‘It couldn’t have been sabotaged, could it?’ asked Bram.
Andrew looked at him blankly. ‘Sabotaged?’
Scott shook his head. ‘How would someone go about sabotaging a spring?’
Bram could only shrug.
‘I’m afraid we’re going to have to ask you to make other arrangements,’ Andrew went on. ‘There was a clause, you’ll remember, in the contract, in the section about the water supply, stating that we can’t be held responsible for failure of the supply.’
Oh, you bastard, Bram wanted to say. But he just nodded numbly.
‘That’s so helpful,’ sneered David. ‘Thanks a lot, pal.’
‘Dad,’ said Kirsty.
‘You’ll need to sink a borehole,’ Andrew added. ‘Which is a simple enough procedure. Cost a bit, mind you.’
‘But what are we going to do in the meantime?’ Kirsty was standing with her back to the worktop, also with her arms folded.
‘Come and live with us,’ said David.
‘And we’ve got the housewarming on Saturday,’ Kirsty continued, as if David hadn’t spoken. She was making eye contact with Bram, looking at him in the way she did sometimes, as if she knew he would sort it, she knew he would make it all right.
‘The stream,’ he found himself saying. ‘We can get water from the stream in buckets, for flushing the loos and washing the dishes. Bottled water to drink.’ In glass bottles, though, not plastic.
‘What about showering?’ from David.
‘We can survive on sponge baths for a while. Or a dunk in the stream. With the odd visit to you for a hot shower. Just until the borehole can be dug. I’ll get onto that today.’
Sylvia was staring at him, her eyes filmed with tears. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she repeated. ‘Is it really a good idea to be going back and forth to the stream all the time, with whoever is doing this still out there…? It’s so scary, the way everything’s just escalated suddenly. And all that cruel trolling stuff on your blog.’ She shook her head. ‘It’s like that awful case a couple of years ago, do you remember it, that poor couple who moved into a house in the country in Perthshire? The locals took a dislike to them for some reason, and they were victimised for months without the police taking any action, and one of their children ended up being killed?’
Bloody Nora.
It made sense to relocate the cameras from the wood to the house. When everyone had gone, and Kirsty had taken the Discovery to pick up bottled water and get the kids, Bram psyched himself up to go back into the wood. It would only take half an hour to remove the six cameras. Scott was right – whoever was doing this, their intention seemed to be to freak them out, no more. The way to deal with it was not to freak out.
Once they saw that their scare tactics weren’t working, they’d stop.
Would they?
Or would they step it up a gear?
But their best chance of putting a stop to it was definitely the cameras.
Bram had been on the point of asking Scott if a police officer could stay behind and help him relocate them, but then he’d remembered the conversation with Willie in the bar about the bush telegraph. As things stood, the only people who knew about the cameras were Bram, Kirsty, the kids, David and Linda. Best it stayed that way. He would check the SD cards to see if they’d picked anything up, and only if they had would he tell the police about the cameras.
Funnily enough, as he carried his toolbox along the path through the paddock, he found that not too much psyching himself up was required. He was still running on adrenaline, he supposed. That surge of anger he’d felt last night – he found he could still tap into it as he approached the wood. He had his phone at the ready, with the camera function primed. He hoped he did see someone. This time he’d get a proper shot of the bastard.
The rage that had consumed him last night – and it had consumed him, as he stood there in the Room with a View with Max and Phoebe, with who knew what on the other side of that door – it had swept away all rational thought. He guessed it was primeval. Instinctive. There was probably a special neural pathway that lay dormant, that might lie dormant all your life, that was only activated if the lives of your children were threatened.
Okay, so with his rational mind, with the evolved, intelligent, logical part of it, he now accepted that the kids’ lives had never actually been in danger. No one had tried to g
et into the room, to smash through that door, to burn the house down like the Big Bad Wolf coming after the Three Little Pigs. It was probably just some messed-up kid who’d never had the life chances Bram had been privileged to enjoy, who didn’t have a loving family to set him on the right path. Someone to be pitied, not condemned.
But the primeval part of his brain wasn’t rational. And those neurons were still sparking off a signal whenever he thought about that bastard.
That complete and utter bastard.
Was that all that was happening, though? He was tapping into some primitive instinct? Wasn’t it possible that the rational part of his brain was in agreement with the primitive bit? Was he having a Road to Damascus moment, only in reverse? Was this Bram Hendriksen reluctantly confronting the possibility that David McKechnie’s repellent world view might be closer to reality than his own? He’d begun to worry about David’s influence on Max, his gentle, sensitive boy who seemed to be starting to buy into David’s mindset… But what if Max, clever Max, was weighing the two of them up and coming down on David’s side because the evidence suggested that David was right?
David was always accusing Bram of being hopelessly naïve. Hopelessly liberal and gullible and in denial about the underlying dog-eat-dog nature of human interactions. And Bram, in his arrogance, hadn’t even stopped for a second to consider the possibility that David could be in any way, shape or form right. He’d been completely dismissive of and dismayed by what he’d thought of as David’s unreconstructed right-wing views.
But could David have a point, about this at least?
Bram had, after all, enjoyed a pretty charmed, sheltered existence, up till now. What did he know, really, about the darker side of life?
If he was going to defend his family, maybe it was time to lose the rose-tinted spectacles.
10
‘Look,’ said Kirsty. ‘I know it’s not ideal, but we have to try to retain some sort of feeling of normality, don’t we? The kids have been looking forward to the housewarming for weeks. The Millers are coming, and you know how desperate Phoebe is to see Lily, Rhona and Katie. It’s not as if we can have a sleepover at the moment – four little girls in the house and no running water? And Phoebe’s night terrors would infect the lot of them. Can you imagine the hysterics? They’d never get to sleep.’
Bram and Kirsty were sitting at the kitchen table, sharing a bottle of water. It was weird how knowing there was a limited supply of the stuff made you thirsty. This was Bram’s second bottle and it wasn’t even eight o’clock in the morning.
The morning of the bloody housewarming party, which Kirsty was determined to go ahead with.
He grimaced. ‘It’s going to be a challenge, though, isn’t it, throwing a party with no water?’
‘We’ve got plenty of bottled stuff, and lots of soft drinks as well as the alcohol. We can fill up the cisterns of each of the loos, and tell people not to flush unless strictly necessary. And we can line up buckets of water for refills, and for pouring into the sink for washing hands.’
‘I guess. But with some nutter running around out there determined to terrorise us, does it really make sense to throw open our doors to all and sundry?’
There had been nothing on the cameras, which wasn’t too surprising given that the intruder had probably approached the house via the track, not the woods. The camera sited where one of the paths through the wood met the track had been pointing the wrong way.
‘I think it does.’ Kirsty took a gulp from the bottle of water. ‘It’s not as if we’re going to be in any danger, with a house full of people. And we need to try to get the locals onside. What better way than to welcome them into our home?’
Bram flashed on an image of the pig’s heart, dumped in the middle of the risotto pan. ‘I’m not sure how welcoming I’m going to manage to be. And as for the concept of a housewarming…’ He grimaced. ‘It just seems so inappropriate. The intruder – all the stuff that’s been going on – it’s like it’s taken away the feeling of home altogether. He’s taken it from us. Your home should be your sanctuary, where you feel safest.’
‘Bram–’
‘I’m starting to wonder if maybe your dad is right. The softly-softly approach with these people… How’s that ever going to work? That notice we put up was pathetic – effectively apologising for asking the yobs to behave like decent human beings. We might as well have laid out the red carpet and asked them to trample all over us.’
‘No, Bram. Dad isn’t right. Of course he isn’t!’
‘Yeah, we look down our noses at him, don’t we? We think we’re so much better than him? But if David had been there last night, he’d have been on that bastard like a Rottweiler.’
‘Bram–’
‘And I’m the better person?’
‘Of course you are! Where do I even start?’ She reached across the table and took his hand. ‘And if it had come to it, you’d have done anything necessary to protect the kids.’
‘Would I, though? Would I have been able to protect them? In their own home?’ He shook his head. ‘I’m sorry. I’m probably overreacting.’
She smiled. ‘Of course you are. You’ve always wanted to… to wrap the people you love up in a safe place, haven’t you?’
‘What’s wrong with that?’
‘Oh, Bram, nothing, it’s lovely!’ The smile widened. ‘Remember when we were deciding where to go on honeymoon, and I was suggesting all these exotic places, but I could tell you weren’t keen, and then you said it might be nice to visit your grandparents in Amsterdam?’
Bram could feel himself blushing. ‘Yeah. Sorry…’
That’s what they had ended up doing, too, although Kirsty had seemed to enjoy herself, and Bram liked to think the success of the honeymoon had partly been down to the warmth with which his grandparents had welcomed them, the love in which they had been enveloped by all his Amsterdam relations during that wonderful week. Honeymoons were meant to be all about love, after all, weren’t they?
Kirsty chuckled. ‘It was so Bram! It was adorable! If you had your way you’d gather us all up together in a big castle, all our family and friends, and never let any of us out into the big bad world!’
He grinned. ‘Yeah, that would be my dream scenario.’
‘I know it was a horrible experience, but – it’s still our home, Bram, and we still love it, don’t we? Having a nice party will go some way to… to reclaiming it for ourselves, don’t you think?’
‘You’re right. You’re absolutely right.’ She could always make him feel better. ‘Let’s do it.’
He dipped the pail into the stream, trying not to think about all the microscopic creatures he was scooping up that were destined to be flushed down a loo. He’d already filled up the cisterns in the downstairs toilet, the family bathroom and his and Kirsty’s en suite. Now he was doing the refills.
He lugged the full pails across the grass towards the house, trying not to slop the water out of them too much. When he reached Henrietta the goose, he set the pails down and rubbed his hands where the handles had dug into the flesh, and patted Henrietta’s smooth white head.
‘Well, Henny. What do you think of your new home?’
When Bram was eight years old, his walk to and from school had taken him past a beautiful wooden goose on the flagstone area outside a little house. He had worried that a bad person could steal her, so one day he had snatched the goose up in his arms and run. He’d told Ma and Pap that he’d found her thrown out with someone’s rubbish, and made a nice safe home for her in their narrow back garden. But the next day, an elderly Ugandan lady, introduced by Ma as Mrs Nabirye, came to have coffee at their house, and Ma told him, ‘This is the lady who owns the goose.’
Ma had, of course, known all along where he’d got the goose. Bram had broken down in tears and confessed that he’d taken her because he’d been so worried about her being stolen. Mrs Nabirye had explained that her late husband had made her, and her name was Henrietta. She said her hu
sband would have been delighted to know that a young boy so loved Henrietta that he went to such lengths to protect her. She’d insisted that Bram keep her.
But Bram couldn’t look Henrietta in the eye for a long time after that, he was so ashamed of what he’d done, thinking of poor Mrs Nabirye and her dead husband. Now, every time he looked at Henrietta, he remembered the lesson of empathy that Ma and Mrs Nabirye had taught him. He hadn’t so much as stolen a grape from a supermarket since.
Mrs Nabirye had had a Ugandan proverb painted on a piece of driftwood in her conservatory: A child does not grow up only in a single home. He always smiled when he thought of that. He’d been so lucky, growing up in that wonderful little community in Primrose Hill where his parents still lived in their narrow little mews house which, they always said, reminded them of Amsterdam. Islington, too, had been a close-knit, almost village-like community. He really missed the support network they’d had there. He’d hoped to find another such ‘village’ here for Max and Phoebe, but that dream was fading fast.
Still, maybe this housewarming party would turn things around.
He took a moment to scan the house. He’d hidden some of the cameras under the eaves, quite successfully – he couldn’t even see them himself, and he knew where they were. There was another under the gutter on the shed, one in a corner of the verandah, and another fixed to a tree covering the other gable. If anyone approached the house now, they’d be caught on camera.
He gave Henrietta’s beak a pat and hefted the pails.
The party would kick off at five o’clock, so that people with kids could leave reasonably early, but Bram had all the catering side of things ready by four. Linda had been ‘cooking for Scotland’, as she put it, because it was problematic for Bram to prepare food with the limited water availability. The fridge was full of a range of vegetarian and meat-eater salads and quiches and tarts and sausage rolls, and David’s supply of raw meat for the McKechnie Special barbecue. He’d set up the barbecue equipment this morning on the terrace.