Risk of Harm

by Jane Renshaw

  He had looked down at her with that disbelieving-but-gullible expression that always brought out the worst in her. She’d elaborated on her theory. The vestibule probably hadn’t changed at all since the house was built. If there was anywhere ghosts would linger, it would surely be here.

  It still had the original heavy doors – the huge grey-painted front door with its massive original key, and the white door into the house with stained-glass panels in the upper section. There were two narrow stained-glass windows on either side, and on the floor Victorian terracotta tiles in black and brown and ochre and white.

  It was easy to imagine a Victorian or Edwardian gentleman, she’d said, taking off his hat in here. Didn’t he feel some kind of… presence?

  ‘You can’t seriously believe in ghosts,’ Neil had finally spluttered, clattering down the steps to stand facing her, his chin lifted slightly. He was an inch shorter than her. ‘Ruth –’

  Her grin had faded. ‘You mean Flora.’

  ‘I mean Flora,’ he had agreed, grimly.

  And from somewhere the words had come out of her mouth: ‘Do you believe in the ghosts of Ruth and Alec Morrison?’

  Sometimes she used to imagine those ghosts, the ghosts of the people they had been, still living in the cottage at Arden: Ruth and Alec Morrison sitting out in the garden on a summer’s evening, reading and talking and laughing, as Hobo swished his tail in the paddock and Beckie called down from her bedroom window that she wasn’t sleepy and could Daddy come and tell her a story?

  And Neil had looked around the vestibule, and started on about how doorways had always had cultural significance; about how the Romans had worshipped Janus, the two-faced god of thresholds, one face looking back and one forward. The god of transitions, of endings and beginnings.

  It had irritated her so much. Typical of him, she’d thought, to gloss over the personal and lose himself in contemplation of ancient history. But then:

  ‘Let’s not look back,’ he’d said. ‘Let’s think of this as a beginning, yes? Not an end.’ And he’d pulled her to him. ‘Yes, Flora Parry?’

  Oh God oh God oh God.

  ‘Flora. Flora!’

  Caroline was standing in the vestibule facing her. She had assumed a professional-but-caring expression that might, once, have been funny.

  ‘I’m Constable X and this is Constable Y.’ Caroline held out a hand. ‘I guess they’d just send ordinary plods at this stage?’

  ‘I’ve no idea.’ Flora took her hand limply. ‘Um. Thank you for coming…’

  ‘You’re not welcoming them to a dinner party! Your husband’s missing! You’re upset, you’re really worried.’

  She felt more tears prickling her nose.

  ‘That’s more like it.’

  ‘Thank you for coming so promptly,’ she gulped.

  ‘All right, Mrs Parry, let’s go inside and sit down, shall we, and we can take some details.’

  ‘He might be hurt. He might be – I don’t know… in danger…’ She stopped. ‘I should mention the Johnsons. I would, wouldn’t I?’

  ‘Why? They’ve been off your radar for weeks. There’s no reason for you to jump to the conclusion that they’ve done Neil any harm. Not yet. Some sort of accident or maybe mental breakdown is what you’re thinking at this stage. Yes?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’re really worried, but you’re not hysterical. You’re not thinking anything sinister’s happened. If you start on about the Johnsons, about Neil being in danger, if you’re the one to bring the possibility up, they’ll associate you with it. They’ll think Why did the wife immediately start talking about murder? Even if the word never actually crosses your lips. They’ll wonder about you – about why you should jump to that conclusion.’

  Caroline was right. She needed them not to wonder about her. She needed them to think of Flora Parry as a poor soul struggling to cope with her husband’s disappearance: a victim, an innocent; a rather naïve, rather pathetic creature who would never for one moment imagine that her husband hadn’t come home because he had met with violence.

  ‘Tricia – thank you.’

  ‘Who’s Tricia?’

  Oh God.

  It was as if her brain had chosen this moment to finally rebel, to fight her, to bring the hard little doll out into the light.

  She tried to smile. ‘Sorry, I’m all over the place…’

  ‘So be all over the place. That’s fine – that’s what they’ll be expecting. Listen, you’re doing great.’

  ‘Caroline. Caroline, thank you so much for – I don’t know what I’d have done… without you.’ She caught the other woman’s hand.

  ‘Oh Flora, don’t be silly.’ Caroline gave her a brief, tight hug. Then she smiled. ‘Right. I don’t think the cops are going to inflict a group hug on you.’ She put her police face back on. ‘Let’s go inside, Mrs Parry, and we can get some details from you…’

  She stepped into the hall and closed the vestibule door behind her.

  Flora couldn’t stop shivering. ‘Please come through.’ But she didn’t move. She stared at Caroline, stupidly. ‘I don’t want Beckie in there when they come. I’d better take her up now…’

  ‘In a minute. We have to get this straight.’ Caroline stopped and turned at the foot of the stairs. ‘Okay, so you take them through into the kitchen. I’m there, and you introduce me as your neighbour. Pretend we’re all sitting down at the coffee table now.’ She sat down on the steps, and waved Flora to the Arts and Crafts chair next to the hall table.

  Flora lowered herself to the hard oak seat. ‘Okay. Uh… This is my neighbour, Caroline Turnbull… Please sit down. Would you like tea or coffee or…’

  ‘No thanks, Mrs Parry. I’m just going to ask you some questions and take down your answers, okay?’

  ‘Yes. Of course.’

  ‘Great. Right then. First of all, what was the last contact you had with your husband?’

  ‘At breakfast. We had breakfast together, as always – Neil and I and Beckie, our daughter – and then he shut himself in the study to work before going in to the university – I think his first lecture wasn’t until eleven – and Beckie and I went off for the day – we went to the beach with Caroline and one of Beckie’s friends…’

  ‘Right, and here’s where I say I called round for the two of you, and I’ll say I popped my head round the door of Neil’s study to say hello and goodbye, and he seemed fine. And there’s your alibi – that means I’m a witness that he was alive and well when you left.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘And so, Mrs Parry, would you also say he seemed just as usual when you left?’

  Flora nodded. ‘I assumed he was going to work as usual, but Stephen – that’s his colleague, Stephen Black – he says he never turned up.’

  ‘I see. How does your husband usually travel to work?’

  ‘Well, he usually takes his –’

  Her brain slammed to a halt as time raced on past, seconds, minutes, hours ticking away.

  There was no time. She had no time.

  ‘What?’ Caroline was saying. ‘Flora! What?’

  ‘His car,’ she said, quite calmly.

  ‘What about his car?’

  ‘It’s parked in front of the garage. It’s the first thing I’d’ve checked, isn’t it? Whether his car was gone? When I started wondering where he was –’ She stood but her knees shook, her legs buckled under her and she had to sit back down.

  ‘Right. Let’s think.’

  ‘Idiot! When I was out there at my car – when I – when I was – how could I not have registered There’s HIS car, get that dealt with?’

  ‘You had other things on your mind at the time.’

  They looked at each other, frozen there in the quiet of the hall while the grandfather clock Alec had inherited from his actual grandfather ticked placidly on in its placid Victorian way.

  She’d never met his grandparents, but he’d talked about them a lot. He and his sister Pippa had spent happy
summer holidays with them on the west coast, running wild along the shore, up in the hills… It was where Alec had developed his interest in nature. In the natural world, as he called it. She’d seen photographs of his grandparents, Granny a beaming, friendly looking soul, Grandad a sterner prospect in shirt sleeves and waistcoat and wide 1940s suit trousers.

  If they were here now, if they could be standing here –

  Tick, tock.

  Tick, tock.

  ‘Is there room in the garage? Can you get it in there? Flora? Can you get his car into the garage? We have to get it out of sight. He never puts it in the garage, right, so there would be no reason for you to check in there?’

  She nodded. ‘We never bother. There’re boxes stacked along the wall, but there’s plenty room. For one car, at least.’ She stood up on her wobbly legs and reached out to the little dish on the table where they kept their car keys.

  Caroline grabbed her hand. ‘No, gloves! You need to wear gloves or they’ll see that the most recent fingerprints are yours and wonder why.’ Caroline pulled open the drawer in the table. Amongst the paper clips and elastic bands and Post-It pads and bits of Lego there was a pair of grey cashmere gloves. She held them out to Flora, but all Flora could do was stare at them, remembering them caked with snow, the snowman they had made on the front lawn at New Year –

  Caroline pulled the gloves onto her own hands.

  ‘Which keys are his?’

  Flora pointed. ‘What if Beckie wakes up? What if –’

  ‘It’ll only take a minute.’ Caroline snatched up the keys, pulled open the vestibule door, unlocked the front door and opened it.

  Night air flooded into the house.

  Flora followed her outside, shutting the front door behind them.

  The yellow streetlamps cast an eerie light on the flagstones and pots in front of the house; the gravel path; the hummocks of the lavender bushes; the two little rectangles of front lawn on either side of the path; the high, neatly clipped privet hedges that shielded the front garden from next door and from the street.

  Over to her left, screened by the trellis, the driveway ran down the side of the house to the garage. It was pure luck that, when she and Beckie had got back from the beach and then when they’d left again, heading to Caroline’s flat, they had used the path rather than the driveway both times.

  So Beckie wouldn’t have seen Neil’s car.

  Caroline was running now across the flagstones towards the drive, her ponytail bouncing.

  Flora ran after her.

  The night air was cold on her skin, in her lungs, and she was suddenly very conscious of the city all around them, the millions of people out here, the millions of strangers who cared nothing for her or for Beckie. The whole indifferent world which would go on hurtling through time and space no matter what happened to them.

  She slowed as she reached the driveway.

  Here they were exposed. It was never completely dark in the city. Anyone passing on the street could look through the big black spiky Victorian gates and see them.

  Caroline was standing in front of the garage next to Neil’s car, bouncing on her feet impatiently like Beckie did – although in Beckie’s case it was generally a sign she was excited or eager or just needing a pee.

  Neil’s blue Nissan was parked, as usual, casually, on the apron of gravel in front of the garage next to her own Ford Ka. Flora hadn’t taken her car to the beach. She didn’t like driving and Caroline did, so when they went out together they always took Caroline’s car. Caroline refused to take any money from Flora for this, but Flora always provided the sweeties and the picnic, or paid for their lunch, or tea and scones, or whatever.

  That was their arrangement.

  In another life. Another universe.

  ‘Flora!’ Caroline was calling. ‘The key! Where’s the key to the garage?’

  Flora wheeled back round, back across the flagstones to the front door, through the vestibule, fumbled in the cupboard under the stairs for the garage key hanging on its hook next to the others.

  Clutching it, she ran back out, across the flagstones and down the drive, her feet crunching gravel.

  Caroline was sitting in the driver’s seat of the Nissan, the engine turning over. No lights.

  Flora flew past to the garage, felt on the flaky painted doors for the keyhole, shoved in the key and turned it. Theoretically, the doors concertina-ed back to either side, but they were over a hundred years old and the mechanism was dodgy. She had to shove them, juddering on the concrete floor, and she couldn’t get them all the way back. It was a wide enough space, though, to get the car through.

  She didn’t switch on the light inside the garage.

  Caroline put the car in gear and slid it past her into the oily-smelling gloom, the exhaust puffing out fumes. The engine seemed to Flora terribly loud.

  But it soon cut off.

  A soft clunk as Caroline closed the driver’s door.

  Another engine chugged past on the street, slowed, accelerated.

  ‘Right. Lock the doors.’ Caroline was at her elbow. ‘Quickly.’

  She could smell a faint, cloying odour of sweat from her own armpits. The smell of fear, of panic. Of guilt. She’d have to have a quick wash and change again before the police got here.

  They dragged the doors back in place and Flora locked them. They ran back up the drive, across the flagstones in front of the house, their legs brushing against the lavender bushes where they needed cut back, releasing a waft of sickly scent. Every moment Flora was expecting a voice behind them; a heavy ‘Mrs Parry?’

  But they made it.

  They made it inside, with the front door shut and locked behind them.

  Flora dropped onto the old pew.

  Caroline tugged off the cashmere gloves. ‘Okay, come on then. Let’s get Beckie to bed.’

  ‘What if someone saw us?’

  Exasperation widened the other woman’s eyes. ‘If someone saw us, someone saw us. There’s nothing we can do about it, is there?’

  ‘No. I’m sorry.’ Staring at Caroline, she found herself thinking about Tricia again, about a sunlit garden long ago and the same wide-eyed look of exasperation on Tricia’s pretty face.

  But Tricia was no one to Flora Parry, just as she’d been no one to Ruth Morrison or Ruth Innes. Tricia was only Tricia to the hard little doll she mustn’t think about. The hard little doll she had to put back inside the others and forget about.

  ‘Flora!’

  ‘I’m sorry. I – I’m not thinking… I can’t think…’

  Caroline sat down beside her on the pew and put an arm around her shoulders, and for a moment Flora relaxed against her. She was so tired. It felt like the last few hours had been going on for days, weeks, months.

  ‘How do I explain why his car’s in the garage?’

  ‘You don’t need to explain it. You’ve no idea why it’s in there. Maybe he put it in there himself, maybe not… but you don’t know why it’s there because you never put your cars in the garage. It’s a mystery. Right?’

  ‘Right.’

  Caroline rubbed her arm. ‘It’ll be fine. You’ll be fine.’

  ‘Beckie –’

  ‘Let’s get Beckie up to bed. Then maybe get a brandy in you, yeah?’

  Flora nodded and Caroline nodded with her, briskly, as a parent would, encouraging a good brave child. ‘And then all we have to do is wait for the cops to get here. We’re ready. Yes, Flora? Flora?’

  Obediently, Flora nodded again. ‘Yes.’

  She was ready.

  She had to be.

  Seven years before

  Chapter 3

  ‘Right, let’s make a start then,’ goes the sheriff bint. ‘Ladies and gentlemen. This Court of Session is sitting to determine an application for a Permanence Order, with Authority to Adopt, by Glasgow City Council in respect of the child Bekki Johnson. The application is opposed by the child’s grandparents, Jed and Lorraine Johnson.’ She takes off her glasses, l
ooks right at me and starts on about what a Permanence Order is, like I’m a daftie, like I dinnae even know what it is I’m here fighting.

  I know what a Permanence Order is. It’s the fucking system saying Bekki’s gonnae be adopted by fucking randoms and there’s nothing we can do about it.

  Our fucking Bekki.

  The sheriff bumps her gums, blah blah blah, and then Mair gets up, in her white silk shirt and wee black skirt and I’m-so-down-with-the-kids nose stud. If it wasnae for Bekki I’d swing for her so I would.

  She goes to the box thingmie like a sheep pen in front of the sheriff’s bench. She sits on the chair inside it and puts her papers down in front of her, like she’s so professional.

  ‘Ms Mair.’ The lawyer who’s for the Council gets up. The lawyers have this big table in the middle of the court room with computers and that. ‘Could you describe for the sheriff what your role has been in this case?’ Bastard’s English. Fwah fwah fwah.

  ‘I’m the social worker assigned to Bekki Johnson’s case. I’m the author of the Permanence Order Report, Lady Semple, which I think you have there…’ The smug face on her, like Bekki’s an exam question she’s aced.

  Sheriff goes, ‘Yes, thank you, Ms Mair. A very clear, comprehensive report it is too.’

  Aye, a very clear, comprehensive load of shite.

  Fwah: ‘Perhaps you could give us some brief background on Bekki and her family situation, Ms Mair?’

  Mair: ‘Bekki is now two years and eight months old. She’s a bright, healthy child but I would also describe her as unusually quiet and undemanding for her age. She has been assessed by medical doctors and a psychiatrist – I think you have also had those reports, Lady Semple. They found her to show no signs of physical or cognitive impairment, but there were some indications of impairments in developmental functioning and emotional well-being, in particular symptoms of anxiety, excessive shyness and withdrawal. Immediately following her removal from the family she was found to be malnourished and was diagnosed with a vitamin C deficiency. There were also some dozen or so cuts and bruises to her arms, legs and torso. She’s now living with foster parents. There has been no contact with her mother, Shannon-Rose Johnson, or any of her biological family, under the terms of the Emergency Child Protection Order granted by this court in July of this year, following Bekki’s removal into Local Authority care, as there was felt to be a significant risk of harm.’