House. Tree. Person.

by Catriona McPherson

  Copyright Information

  House. Tree. Person: A Novel of Suspense © 2017 by Catriona McPherson.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any matter whatsoever, including Internet usage, without written permission from Midnight Ink, except in the form of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  As the purchaser of this ebook, you are granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen. The text may not be otherwise reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, or recorded on any other storage device in any form or by any means.

  Any unauthorized usage of the text without express written permission of the publisher is a violation of the author’s copyright and is illegal and punishable by law.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  First e-book edition © 2017

  E-book ISBN: 9780738753065

  Book format by Bob Gaul

  Cover design by Kevin R. Brown

  Editing by Nicole Nugent

  Midnight Ink is an imprint of Llewellyn Worldwide Ltd.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: McPherson, Catriona, author.

  Title: House. tree. person: a novel / Catriona McPherson.

  Description: First edition. | Midnight Ink: Woodbury, Minnesota, [2017] |

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017005420 (print) | LCCN 2017011866 (ebook) | ISBN

  9780738752167 () | ISBN 9780738752167 (hardcover: acid-free paper)

  Subjects: LCSH: Psychiatric hospitals—Fiction. | Psychological fiction. |

  GSAFD: Suspense fiction. | Mystery fiction.

  Classification: LCC PR6113.C586 (ebook) | LCC PR6113.C586 H68 2017 (print) |

  DDC 823/.92—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017005420

  Midnight Ink does not participate in, endorse, or have any authority or responsibility concerning private business arrangements between our authors and the public.

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  Midnight Ink

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  Manufactured in the United States of America

  This is for Terri Bischoff, with love and thanks.

  Prologue

  The anger was long gone, doused in vodka and tamped down to a sour thud. But the memory of it wouldn’t fade. For a few hours there, everything had been clear. The rage was a high, pure note sounding in your ears, slicing through the junk of life. It was a white light, vicious and merciless, showing the truth if you dared to open your eyes. It was a flashing blade, quicker and cleaner than anything.

  A high note, and a white light, and a quick blade.

  Then suddenly it was dark. Or maybe not suddenly at all, because time had stopped its steady ticking. It lurched and yawned, and slabs of it slid out from where they belonged and shoved in where they didn’t.

  But, sudden or not, there was darkness. And cold mud. The slop of stone-cold mud skidding under your heels as you dragged and staggered. Colder than ice, that mud. A sly, filthy cold.

  And the smell of it. Not like earth at all. No mushrooms and leaf mould there. No life. Just the tang of iron and the sulphurous seep of cold clay and the suck of the mud at your feet.

  It dried like a carapace. Waking, hours later, it felt like armour. Like an extra skin. It flaked off your fingers when you moved them and rubbed to crumbs onto the pillow below your cheek. Under the sheets, last night’s clothes were caked and streaked, clay-yellow and iron-red. Rusted iron, was it? Those red streaks? And that tang last night? That metallic reek?

  Someone was moving. Someone was coming. The door opened and the silence lasted so long that sleep stole up and around you again. Then, at last, screaming.

  “No! Oh God, oh God, oh my God, no! What have you done?”

  One

  “I been broke but I never been poor.” Or so said someone on Facebook, in loopy writing over a picture of a beach at sunset. It sounds great, and fair play to you if you can hack it. Me? At half-past ten in the morning on Tuesday the sixteenth of February, after I dropped off my husband but before I got to my interview, on the A711 between Palnackie and Auchencairn, I became poor. Here’s how.

  Like a lot of broke people, I’d changed jobs and moved house in the last year. Also like broke folk everywhere, I was praying as I drove along: Please God, don’t let the car break down. Please make that funny noise just because of the rain and nothing to do with the engine. Please make the gauge be on the stingy side. Let there be plenty of petrol to get me there and back again.

  I took the main road through Palnackie, trying not to think about the nice man in the garage shop on the side street. No one with an important appointment to keep would make a detour to hand over £11.20 for bread and milk, would they?

  But by the time I’d gone the five miles to Auchencairn, two things had happened.

  First, this time I veered off the through-road and did go round by the back street, a slalom of parked cars and sharp turns not to mention an extra few yards using an extra few drops of petrol. Thing is, the shop in Auchencairn happens to be on the main drag and I owed the nice man in there closer to twenty, for bog roll and Tampax and a tub of margarine I’d scraped out that breakfast time, working a sharp knife right round the ridges where the lid snapped on, for Angelo’s lunch.

  I wasn’t paranoid. I didn’t think he’d be out the front watching for me, setting up a road block for his eighteen quid. But if the funny noise wasn’t just puddle water splashing up and I did break down right under his nose, I couldn’t laugh it off and buy a coffee from him while the AA came.

  So that was one thing. But then came the clincher. Working my way round the back of Auchencairn, old ladies frowning through their nets to see who it was, I decided to do something only poor people do.

  I decided to lie my way into a job. And not just a bit of spit and polish on the old CV, like everyone—sole responsibility for day-to-day running, cash handling, managerial experience. I decided to tell big, fat, dangerous porkers, to defraud people who needed to count on me, to short-change people who needed more than I could give them. I reached over, took the thin green folder with my true life history in it, and threw it onto the back seat, leaving the plump, buff folder with the version that was going to land me this job sitting there under my good black handbag, ticking like a time bomb.

  I heard my husband’s voice in my head, laughing at me. You hate it when I’m right, don’t you? How long had it been since Marco had laughed in real life?

  Actually, three weeks. He laughed when he found the job advert.

  “God Almighty!” he shouted. “Ali! Ali, get in here and see this.”

  He was in Angel’s room, on the computer. The kitchen timer was going and Angel lay on the bed with his hands laced behind his head, staring daggers at his dad, counting along with the ticks, grudging every lost minute.

  I stopped in the doorway and put the tea towel up to my face to breathe through its sweet folds. The room was tiny, to be fair. And Angel—Angelo—is fifteen,
with all his shoes kicked off under his bed and the sheets weeks past changing, a dark ghost of hair gel blooming on the pillowcase and God knows what under the duvet. But it was Marco too. Forty-eight years old and rank with the tension that never left him these days. Even now his face was shining and his hair, still dark at the back although his temples were silver, sat against his neck in wet spikes like shark teeth. At least he’d started having it trimmed again recently. He had even updated the style, making me hope we were turning a corner.

  “I’ll just crack the window,” I said, fumbling through the gap in the curtains and wrenching the catch on the metal frame.

  “Mu-um,” said Angelo. “It’s freezing.”

  “You need some air in here,” I said. “Get under the covers if you’re cold. Or go out for a walk and get your blood moving. The road’s clear. Just stay off the verges.”

  The shutter came down over his face and took a swipe at my heart on its way. I know, I wanted to tell him. I know. A walk, when none of your friends are in walking distance and you can’t make new ones. Not with that phone and those jeans.

  “Ali, will you listen?” Marco said, twisting round and beckoning to me. I stepped into the curve of his outstretched arm and he hugged my hip against his shoulder as he traced the text on the screen, moving the cursor like a karaoke ball.

  “Full-time, flexible hours, excellent pay and advancement for the right candidate.”

  “A job!” I said. “Where?”

  “Here!” he said. Yelped, really. “Right here!”

  Angelo snorted at the sound of his dad’s enthusiasm and my heart healed. Wee shite, I thought, and turned to scowl at him.

  “Where here?” I said, turning back. There had been long nights of working out petrol costs to do the hundred miles up to Glasgow or even half that down to Carlisle, calculating what I’d bring home after tax.

  “Right bloody here,” Marco said. “Townhead. Five minutes away.”

  “Townhead?” I said. “That’s the arse end of nowhere. What job is there for you at Townhead?”

  Marco squeezed me harder against him and that was when he laughed. “Not me,” he said. “You, ya plank. It’s for a beauty therapist.”

  I had caught a little bit of his excitement, and the slump as it left me felt like the bathwater draining. Townhead was two farms and a phone box, and even the phone box wasn’t hooked up these days. “Oh, darlin’,” I said. “It’ll be one of those franchise things. Make money in your own home. Pay this shyster in Townhead to get your starter pack and hand over a chunk of your takings.”

  “Ye of little faith,” Marco said. “It’s not a franchise. It’s a full-time position for a qualified beauty therapist to work at Howell Hall.”

  “A-oooooooo!” said Angelo. “Ow-ow-aooooooo. Howl Hall? Go for it, Mum. You can wax their knuckles at the full moon.”

  I said nothing. Marco let go of me and started fiddling with the cables to hook up the printer. The kitchen timer went off and Angelo leapt up, flat to standing in one move.

  “Time’s up,” he said.

  “I’ll just—” said Marco.

  “Time’s up, Dad. Twenty minutes. A deal’s a deal.”

  I looked up at him, trying to think what to say. Up! Up at the little boy I had been singing to sleep in my arms seemed like ten minutes ago. I had only thrown out his shampoo shield when we moved out of our real house last summer. I’d found it in the bathroom cabinet and remembered him bolt upright in the shallow bath. Don’t let the soap get in my eyes, Mummy. Promise me. Sitting there looking like an old lady in a sunhat with that floppy brim all over his face and his little ears bent down under it while I lathered up his hair.

  I threw out the shield in one of the extra-sturdy, extra-large black bin bags. Seventeen of them it took to downsize us into this place. No point saving money on the mortgage and handing it over in storage fees.

  Marco was finished anyway. He gathered the pages from the printer tray then took my hand and pulled me out as our loving son nearly clipped my heels shutting his door.

  “Marco, listen,” I said, back in the kitchen. “They don’t mean an ordinary beauty therapist. A commercial one like me.”

  “You haven’t even read it,” he said. He brushed the day’s junk mail back against the bread bin and hitched himself up on the bunker. There was no space in here for a table. No space in the so-called living room either. We’d turned into one of those families that eat in a row on the couch with the telly on. Angel and Marco were thrilled. I kept my mouth shut.

  “Howell Hall,” he read, “is an independent psychiatric hospital situated in the peaceful Galloway countryside.”

  “Peaceful?” I said. “What a pile of crap!” The headland round Howell Hall was owned by the army. When it was quiet it was very, very quiet, but when they were training, it was guns and tanks and soldiers shouting. Danger area, the signs said. No kidding, I always thought when I passed by.

  “Its twenty-three beds, in private en suite rooms, and its individually tailored therapy programmes cater for clients with a wide range of health and social needs. See?”

  “See what? They mean occupational or what do you call it. Like a proper trained-up … that can do psychology about body image. There was a talk about it at the college, like an option module.”

  “Full-time, flexible hours, excellent pay,” Marco said again. “And I’m looking and qualified beauty therapist with relevant experience of special needs clients is all it says.”

  “Well, there it is right there,” I said. “I don’t have any experience of special needs clients.”

  Marco was rubbing his jaw with the side of his hand. “What about Australia?” he said.

  I was draining the pasta and didn’t answer, concentrating on pouring without scalding myself or slopping any of the strands over the edge of the sieve.

  “You could make up anything about our year in Oz,” Marco said. “How would they check? You could say you worked at an old people’s home or a residential school for … whatever you call them … kids.”

  “But I didn’t,” I said. “I don’t know the stuff I’d have learned there.”

  “Aw, come on, Ali,” said Marco. “Google it. You could Google yourself to being a brain surgeon these days.” He hesitated, rubbing his jaw again. “And you do know something about it, don’t you?”

  I tipped the sieve and sent the pasta sliding into the pan full of sauce, concentrating hard on the year in Australia. We’d had the trip of a lifetime, the three of us, before Angelo started school. Temporary managers in our two businesses, temporary tenants in our house, and me sitting on a white beach watching them: Marco casting for sharks and Angel poddling about with his baby doll under his arm, looking like a fish finger from all the sand stuck to his sunblock.

  “Make your mind up, eh?” I said, keeping my voice light. “Either I can tell tales about our gap year and no one the wiser, or everything’s on the Internet for the world to see. Can’t have it both ways.”

  “So you’re saying no?”

  “I’m saying I can’t believe you’re even asking me!” I dropped my voice. Still a habit even though Angel would have earbuds in. “You want me to go and work in a loony bin? Go inside that bloody Abbey every day for hours on end?”

  He pulled his chin back into his neck and frowned at me.

  “Hall, I mean, not Abbey. Shit!”

  “Don’t upset yourself,” Marco said.

  Truth be told, Howell Hall and the Abbey and the danger area were all mixed together in my head, and I tried not to think about any of them. I tried not to even look at the Abbey even though it was practically hanging over us, smack outside the living room window right now, the bare bones of its vaults and arches sharp against the sky, all the glass and wood gone, like a dead thing picked clean and left there.

  Thank God the flood had drained at last. Whe
n the grounds were knee-deep for a week and the wind rippled over the water, the Abbey had looked like a ghost ship floating endlessly closer yet never landing. And one still night the moon had come out, and every arch was reflected to make an O, like a ghost mouth screaming. It was back to normal now, marooned in a sea of rotting yellow grass. But it was there. It was nearly dark already, of course, teatime on a day like this at this time of year, but I would still see its outline if I turned. It was always there.

  I shouted over my shoulder. “Ange? Tea’s ready.”

  He was moving already. Food was the one thing that got a response from him. He filled the kitchen doorway. “Pasta again?”

  “You’re welcome,” I said.

  “Any garlic bread?”

  I handed him his plate and watched him as he took the five paces through to the couch and plopped down, swiveling his plate to keep it level and hitting the buttons on the remote with his free hand. Canned laughter broke out before his bum touched the cushion.

  I was used to driving past the army checkpoint—no more than a hut, with its dusty windows, old phonebooks and Yellow Pages slumped on its windowsills, and yellowing posters adorning its walls—but this was the first time I had tried to get in. Half of me thought they’d turn me back. And half of that half hoped for it. But when I wound down the window and gave my name to the guy on the gate, he just glanced at his clipboard and tapped my name with his pen.

  “Ms. Alison McGovern,” he said. “Here you are in black and white. You know where you’re headed, madam?”

  “It’s just straight down, isn’t it?” I squinted ahead to where the road dimmed and disappeared, as if the trees on either side had swallowed it.

  “One road in and one road out,” he said. “If you start to float, you’ve gone too far.” He smiled and patted the roof of the car to send me on my way.

  Strange job, I thought, looking at him in my rearview mirror as I drove on. When he joined the army, he couldn’t have expected he’d spend his days standing in a kiosk on a back road in the middle of nowhere keeping tourists and birdwatchers off the training range.