Our Fathers

by Rebecca Wait

  Fiona retrieved her torch at last from the inside zip-pocket of her jacket and watched as Katrina and the children vanished inside the house. Nicky was the last to go, pausing to lay two long sticks carefully by the back door, presumably so he and Tommy could resume whatever game they were playing the next day. The back door closed behind them and a moment later the outside light was switched off. Fiona pictured the Baird family cocooned together in the brightness and warmth of their house. She hoped Gavin had remembered to leave the porch light on for her when she got back, but he often did not. The wind was rising. She knew it would be a rough night.

  Later, when questioned by the police, Fiona gave the time she passed the Baird house on her way to the bins as around 5.35 P.M., and the second time as six P.M. She hadn’t looked at her watch during the walk, but she did remember looking at the clock in her kitchen shortly after arriving home, and it was 6.20 P.M. It was about a fifteen-minute walk between her own house and the Bairds’. Fiona’s information proved important. She was the last person to see the family alive.

  When Nicky and Tommy Baird didn’t turn up for school the next day, their teacher, Aileen Brown, tried to call Katrina at home. There was no answer. Aileen tried again at intervals throughout the morning, but still nobody picked up. As the single permanent teacher in a school with only five pupils, Aileen had no one to consult, and as the morning wore on, she became more and more uneasy. It wasn’t like Katrina Baird to keep her boys home and not call in.

  During the last lesson before lunch, while Angus and the Wilson twins were working on their Viking longboat models, Aileen dug out the number of the firm in Oban where John worked as an accountant. But the receptionist who answered sounded surprised. She said John hadn’t worked there for some time.

  After lunch, Aileen cracked and rang her husband at his surgery, asking if he could drive round to the Bairds’ house to check everything was all right. Greg Brown thought his wife was overreacting, but he didn’t want her worrying all through the afternoon—once she’d got an idea in her head, it tended to get stuck there—and although he was the island’s only doctor, he had no patients that day. He set off immediately. It was a twenty-minute drive to the Bairds’ house on the other side of the island, and he arrived there shortly after two P.M.

  Later that day, once the worst of his shock had worn off and he’d had several cups of sweet tea and was sitting with two police officers in the McKenzies’ house, Greg would try to reconstruct very carefully what happened upon his arrival at the Bairds’ house. Still, there were some parts he was unable articulate, even once Aileen had arrived and was sitting next to him, ashen faced, holding his hand. Some things you could not put into words.

  When there was no answer to his ringing of the doorbell, Greg had waited for a couple of minutes and then rung again. It occurred to him that perhaps the doorbell was broken, so he tried banging the knocker a few times. Still there was no answer, and Greg concluded that the family must be out for the day. Nevertheless, and mainly so he could tell Aileen he’d done a thorough job, he decided to go and knock on the back door.

  Passing round the side of the house, he happened to glance through the kitchen window. What he caught sight of within made him stop dead, though at first he couldn’t process what he was seeing. They’re decorating, he remembered thinking (this part was so absurd he never shared it with anyone). But why choose red?

  Then he felt his whole body go cold. The sun was nowhere to be seen, but it was a bright day beneath a white sky and reflections against the window broke up his view. However, Greg could see enough to realize that the kitchen was awash with blood. For a few moments, he didn’t move at all. Then he made himself put his face closer to the window, and cupped his hands round his eyes to block out the reflections. A red room. Blood all over the floor, glossy and bright around the bodies where it must still be wet; darker, dryer-looking near the corners of the room. Blood sprinkled and spattered in bright patterns across the far wall in a way that reminded Greg of his children’s efforts at abstract art.

  In the middle of this explosion of red, Katrina was on the floor on her back, legs bent, one arm above her head as though she’d collapsed in a faint. Greg knew it was Katrina by that purple jumper she often wore, dense and heavy now with blood, and by the red hair which fanned out around her like she was floating underwater. It took him a few moments to absorb the fact that half of her head was missing, replaced with empty space and dark pulp and glistening red. “Obscene” was the word that came to Greg afterwards when he thought about this moment, seeing a human body as it wasn’t meant to be seen, even by a doctor, as a carcass, a lump of bloodied meat.

  But it was Beth whom he would never afterwards be able to get out of his mind, even though he barely saw her, barely allowed himself to see her. He had caught sight of her immediately, lying not too far from her mother, closer to the kitchen door, but he didn’t let his eyes do anything more than drift quickly over her and away again. He had time to observe that her eyes were open. Her chest open too, a dark red sinkhole in her small torso. What kind of man turns a shotgun on a baby?

  Greg knew that if he entered it, the room would have that heavy smell of raw meat, of blood, of the abattoir.

  All the same, he forced himself to try the back door, his hands shaking so much they kept slipping off the handle. It was locked and he could have wept with relief. The only thing he had grasped in his shock was that whatever else was inside that house, he couldn’t bear to see it.

  Greg stumbled back to his car and drove to the McKenzies’, the Bairds’ nearest neighbours, to call the police and an ambulance. As he heard himself telling Gavin McKenzie what he’d seen, Greg wondered if this high, panicked voice was really his own.

  Since there was no permanent police presence on the island, it was over an hour before the helicopter arrived from Oban and police broke down the door of the Bairds’ house.

  Inside, they found the bodies of thirty-four-year-old Katrina Baird, her one-year-old daughter Elizabeth, her ten-year-old son Nicholas and her thirty-seven-year-old husband John. All had died from shotgun wounds. There was one survivor, eight-year-old Thomas, who was found crouching in the wardrobe of his parents’ bedroom in a pool of his own urine, in a state that appeared almost catatonic.

  Greg would afterwards say to Aileen, over and over, “I should have gone in and got him. He had to stay there for another hour. Alone in that house. I should have got him out.”

  And Aileen would say, “You couldn’t, my darling.”

  And Greg would say, “I should have broken a window.”

  And Aileen would say again, “You couldn’t.”

  The Browns sold their house and moved to Harris two years later, where Greg joined the thriving Harris GP practice. Escaping the claustrophobia of Litta for a much larger island was a relief. They didn’t say they left because of the Bairds, even to each other, but Greg knew he would never get little Beth out of his head if they stayed put, and Aileen knew it too. (Greg never did anyway, not even after their teenage boys finished high school and the Browns left the Hebrides for good and moved to Edinburgh.)

  There were many details about the killings that remained a mystery afterwards, but some central facts were established during the early days of the investigation. They were these: some time shortly after eight P.M. on Tuesday, 8th March 1994, John Baird, described by all who knew him as a quiet man who was devoted to his family, took a double-barrelled shotgun and used it to murder his wife and two of his children, before turning the gun on himself.

  Tommy, when he was finally able to speak, was unable to provide a coherent account of events, but he was able to identify his father as the killer. John’s brother Malcolm, who lived with his wife three miles away to the west of the island, was brought to identify the bodies and to take charge of Tommy.

  There had never before been a murder on the island. There had never been any serious crime a
t all. In that tiny community, everybody knew everybody else, and everyone had liked the Bairds. John, it was agreed by all, had been a decent family man who’d gone out of his way to help his neighbours, and had always been considerate and polite. Nobody, at first, could believe he was responsible, and rumours circulated about an outsider breaking in and staging the killings. But the police were quick to stamp this out. The evidence against John was overwhelming, even without Tommy’s confirmation, and the police didn’t want panic spreading about a fictional killer still at large. They were clear with the public: nobody else was being sought in connection with the deaths. Besides, the islanders themselves had to concede that there was no way a stranger could have made their way across Litta without being seen, and widely discussed, within moments of their arrival.

  But something must have happened, people said. Something must have made John snap. Nobody could say what, beyond the fact that, as it came out later, he had lost his job a few months before and was in some debt. Plenty of men lost their jobs and didn’t go on to murder their wife and children. Perhaps Katrina had been having an affair, some people suggested, but how could this possibly have been the case? Nothing stayed hidden on the island. Still, he must have been driven to it somehow or other; ordinary men don’t suddenly go off the deep end like that. Not without provocation.

  Some things you could never get your head round, however many years passed. Perhaps it was true, the islanders conceded at last, hardly sure if they meant it or not, that you could never really know anyone else, not even your own neighbours, not even your own family.

  PART 1

  1

  When Gavin McKenzie came home from the pub, wiping his boots on the mat with that slow deliberation that meant he was half-cut, he said to his wife, “Tommy Baird’s back on the island.”

  It wasn’t that she didn’t recognize the name; no one would forget a thing like that. But the mention of it was so unexpected that for a few seconds Fiona’s mind was blank. Then she saw him again, his serious little face as he stood in the shop with his mother, those bright cagoules he and his brother wore. Fiona was sixty-three, but her memory was as sharp as ever.

  “Wee Tommy Baird?” she said. “Surely not.”

  “He’s not so wee now,” Gavin said, taking off his wet coat and disappearing for a moment as he went to hang it up. “Must be thirty or more,” his voice came from the hallway.

  Fiona was silent, calculating. Her own Stuart was thirty-nine this year. Already on his second marriage, the one they hoped might stick, though they’d liked Joanne very much. “Thirty-one,” she brought out. “I think he must be thirty-one.” She stopped, trying to take it in. Then, “What’s he doing back here?”

  Gavin, coming into the room, shrugged. “I know no more than you,” he said, which was absurd given that he was the one telling her the news. “Ross saw him on the ferry this morning, coming over from Oban.”

  Fiona allowed herself to relax a little at this. “Well, if it was only Ross! Are we to take his word for everything now? He’d barely know his own wife if she was standing beside him.”

  “He spoke to him,” Gavin said, leaning against the doorframe. “Ross spoke to Tommy. There were only the two of them on the ferry. You know how Ross is, seeing a stranger, especially this time of year. Went up and introduced himself. Asked Tommy if he was on holiday.”

  “And Tommy—he said who he was?” Fiona said.

  “Aye. Though Ross said he’d worked it out already, soon as he got closer, before Tommy even spoke.”

  Fiona couldn’t explain why she suddenly felt hot and cold all over. “Ross is all talk,” she said. Then, as another thought occurred to her, “He might be lying. The stranger.”

  Gavin did that frown of his she hated, and which he seemed to reserve especially for her; it wasn’t contemptuous, Gavin was too gentle for that, but his look of utter bafflement felt worse, as though he was still amazed, after all this time, at the silly things she said. “Now why on earth would someone lie about a thing like that?”

  Fiona had no answer for this. If there was one thing she’d learned from the Baird tragedy, it was that people acted in ways that could not be explained, that sometimes could barely even be imagined. “But why come back now?”

  “I expect he’s visiting Malcolm.”

  “Malcolm hasn’t seen him in years.”

  “Still, family’s family.”

  Fiona thought, but did not say, that ‘family’ might have a more complicated meaning for Tommy Baird than it did for the rest of them.

  Gavin stomped through to the kitchen and Fiona heard him clattering about, making tea. “I’ll have a cup too,” she called, not holding out high hopes of receiving one; he was getting deafer by the year and he didn’t make one for her routinely anymore. Other women her age joked about having trained their husbands up nicely, but with Fiona it seemed to have gone the other way.

  However, a few minutes later he did bring two mugs through, placing hers, a little sloppily, on the table beside her before he settled into his own armchair by the fire.

  “The funny thing is,” he said, as though there had been no pause in their conversation, “Malcolm never said anything about it. He was in the bar yesterday and he didn’t say a word about Tommy coming.”

  “Maybe he wasn’t expecting him,” Fiona said, further alarmed at this idea.

  There was a long silence, broken only by Gavin slurping his tea. Fiona tried to focus on the crackling of the fire and not the wet sounds coming from her husband. It was a technique she’d taught herself years before. And she reminded herself that he was a good man, that he was kind, that he’d always been patient with Stuart. That patience wasn’t the same as weakness.

  “Tommy Baird,” Gavin said eventually, in a meditative way. “I never felt right about him.”

  “What do you mean?” Fiona said, the hot and cold feeling back.

  “I felt like—we should have known, somehow. Don’t you think? We should have known. Done something, maybe.”

  “Don’t be stupid,” Fiona said, more angrily than she’d intended. “What could we have done?” Firmly, with the air of someone closing the discussion, she said, “It doesn’t help to dwell on a terrible thing like that.”

  She had seen that family almost every day, almost every day for ten years, and she had missed it all. She could never have predicted—but nobody could.

  And she remembered Tommy afterwards, too. She saw him at ten or eleven, his face contorted in rage, hurling something at her—a vase, had it been? Something of Heather’s, something that had smashed just beside her head. He was a demon by then.

  “Shall we have some of the coffee cake?” she said to Gavin, trying to soften the way she’d spoken before, trying to quieten the memory of Tommy. “It’ll be stale before we’re halfway through it.”

  “Aye,” he said. “That’d be nice.”

  There could have been no predicting what happened, Fiona told herself again as she went into the kitchen and got the tin down from the larder, cut Gavin a large slice and herself a small one. And in any case, as she always reassured herself (it wasn’t very reassuring), nobody ever knew what went on behind closed doors.

  2

  No, Malcolm wasn’t expecting him. When he opened the door in the late afternoon, the darkness already thickening, and saw Tommy standing there, he was so shocked that for a few moments he couldn’t even speak.

  Of course, Tommy looked different. He was a grown man now, utterly transformed from when he’d last stood there. But Malcolm would know him anywhere, even after all this time. The worst of it was this: the boy hadn’t grown up to look like Katrina. No, it was John he resembled, with those dark brown eyes, the hard lines of his jaw. Tommy had the same light build as his father, too. The overall resemblance was uncanny. Malcolm could only hope Tommy didn’t realize.

  It had been raining, though only li
ghtly—a rare kind of rain for them here. But the man on his doorstep wasn’t properly dressed for any kind of weather in the Hebrides, wearing only jeans and a jersey, with trainers on his feet (the thin canvas kind, too). There was a rucksack on his shoulder, but it didn’t look to Malcolm like it could have much in it—certainly not proper boots and a waterproof.

  “Tommy,” Malcolm said, because now that seemed like the only possible thing to say.

  And the man said, meeting his eye and then not meeting it again, “Hello, Malcolm.”

  There was a short silence, then Malcolm said, “Won’t you come in?” It was the phrase Heather would have used, and for a few seconds he was breathless with missing her. But he was distracted by this stranger—not a stranger, not really—stepping past him across the threshold, and then Tommy was standing in his house for the first time in twenty years.