Quiet Neighbors

by Catriona McPherson

  “I bet she did,” Eddy said. “That’s it. She tried to save Inez but she failed, and she didn’t want me to go into care so she did the only thing she could, and then she tried to wangle it all so her and you and me would all live together somewhere, but it was a no-go. I’m not blaming you, Dad. You didn’t know.”

  “Thank you,” Lowell said and managed not to sound too dry.

  “Now get lost so’s I can get up and dressed.”

  Jude and Lowell walked in silence down the first flight of stairs. On the bedroom landing, Jude took his hand, raised it to her lips, and kissed it.

  “It’s just a defence mechanism, all that,” she said. “It’ll stand her in good stead.”

  “Oh quite quite,” said Lowell. “I’m here for her to rail at and get it out of her system. Much better than being angry with poor Miranda, really.”

  “I’m just praying she doesn’t go over it and over it,” Jude said. “Or pretty soon she’ll wonder why Miranda didn’t get help while Inez was still alive. Why she didn’t call a doctor when she knew about the labour.”

  “Dear me, dear me,” said Lowell.

  “Unless Inez didn’t tell her.”

  Lowell shook his head. “They were inseparable,” he said. “I can’t believe that.”

  “So … no way Miranda would have harmed her then?”

  Lowell was quiet for a moment. “If it were the other way around,” he began, “Inez wouldn’t have harmed Miranda. Or a flea, come to that.” He made a sound somewhere between a sigh and a sob and then said. “Forgive me. But Miranda was a woman of great passions and appetites. She flew into rages as easily as she was transported into raptures. If she discovered that Inez had a secret, that Inez and I had kept Miranda out when she thought she was the centre of our little band here … ”

  “Let’s see what the doctor says,” Jude murmured.

  They stepped over the landing and into Lowell’s bedroom, which had a side window. Down at the edge of the garden the white tent billowed and snapped in the wind and, as they watched, someone inside it poked at the sagging roof to spill the rain gathered there. Then, realising that the hubbub of the reporters had grown louder and realising too that every camera was now trained on the pair them standing there, they drew back. Lowell pulled the shutters roughly over the window and bolted them.

  “It won’t take long,” Jude said. “She can’t be too far down, can she? One woman alone doing it all on one night?”

  “Miranda was a force of nature,” Lowell said. “If she did bury a corpse, it would be deep.”

  Four of them—Lowell, Jude, Liam, and Terry—were in the kitchen when the knock came. The doctor was a short, broad woman in her fifties, with hair too thin to withstand the drenching she had taken on her way up the garden. It was plastered to her head and rivulets were running down her cheeks and the sides of her nose. The policeman with her had a Gortex jacket on over his suit. He pushed the hood back once they were inside.

  “We need to question you, Mr. … Glen, isn’t it?” the policeman said. “I’m Inspector Begbie and this Ms. Naughton, the forensic specialist from Glasgow.”

  “Sharon,” said the doctor, smiling. “Are you all family?”

  “More or less,” Lowell said. “Modern family, you know. Dear me, yes, very much so. This is my partner and these are the parents-to-be of my daughter’s biological child. She’s resting. But I can fetch her.”

  Give them their due, they caught up without so much as a blink. Sharon smiled at each of them and the inspector took out a notebook and snapped open its elastic strap.

  “Full names?” he said. He wrote down Terry Ennis and Liam Doyle without reacting, but Jude was sure his pencil hovered before he printed Jemimah Hamner. “So,” he went on, “you were right enough, Mr. Glen. There is indeed the skeletonised remains of a corpse buried in your garden. Who is she?”

  “Definitely a she?” said Lowell. He had drained of colour but his voice sounded steady enough.

  “Most definitely a she,” the doctor said. “From her size alone I’d have said it but also, her pelvic girdle is detached. She died either giving birth or very shortly afterwards and men tend not to, you know.” Even these words were softened by a smile at Liam and Terry.

  “And do you know who she is?” the inspector persisted.

  Lowell nodded. “Her name is Inez Cato. I’ve got photographs of her, if they’d help.”

  “Alive?” said Begbie, and then blushed at revealing he’d heard the gossip.

  “Photos would certainly help,” said Sharon. “Although DNA would help more.”

  “She was my daughter’s mother,” Lowell said. “DNA won’t be a problem.”

  “Your wife?” said Begbie, and Jude wasn’t the only one who noticed the change in his voice.

  “My fiancée,” said Lowell. “She lived here from early summer in 1994 until the following spring and then—so I thought—she left. In fact, I see she didn’t.”

  “You see?” said Begbie, with another sharp drop in the temperature of his voice. “She ‘left’ and the baby stayed and it’s all news to you, sir, is it?”

  “What did she die of?” Jude asked the doctor.

  Begbie rumbled but Sharon ignored him. “I can’t see any signs of trauma beyond the evidence of childbirth,” she said. “Of course, I’ll have to have a good look at the cleaned bones for nicks and dents.”

  “Nicks?” said Liam.

  “It’s unusual for a fatal stabbing not to leave marks on bone somewhere,” Sharon said. “Or for strangulation not to compress at least one vertebra. But there are no breaks, nothing dislocated. If I had to guess, I’d say she died of natural causes—haemorrhage, eclampsia, scepticaemia—childbirth, I suppose you’d say.”

  “Well, aren’t you a wee ray of sunshine,” said a voice from the kitchen door. Eddy stood there in another cardigan and tights outfit. “That’s set my mind right at rest.”

  “Perinatal mortality rates are lower in the UK than in any other developed nation in the world,” said Sharon. “We even beat Scandinavia because they’ve got so many elderly prims and not as many teenagers as us. You’re doing it at the right time, flower, at least as far as your body’s concerned.”

  “This is all getting a bit too much like a tea party,” said Inspector Begbie. “Mr. Glen, perhaps you’d be more comfortable answering these questions at the station?”

  “Oh no, I don’t think so at all, Inspector,” Lowell said. “My family needs me here today, I’m afraid. If you want me at the station you shall jolly well have to arrest me.”

  “Speaking of tea,” said Sharon, and Jude and Liam both leapt up as Eddy lowered herself into the last empty seat.

  “There’s no need to arrest my dad,” she told Begbie. “We know who killed her if she was killed. Or buried her anyway. It was my … Shit! It was the woman who brought me up. Miranda Preston. What’s that wee word, Jude? For Mum’s other name?”

  “Née?” said Jude. She was sure Begbie had given her another look when he heard what Eddy called her. And he glanced his notebook. Jude Hamner was ringing bells in him somewhere.

  “Right,” Eddy said. “Miranda Preston, née Daley. She buried my … Inez and took me to Northern Ireland. I’ve been there my whole life until this month—you can check the schools and that, but I don’t think I’ve got a birth certificate. Can I get one?” she asked turning to Lowell.

  “And can you give us Ms. Preston’s current address?” said Begbie. He was working hard not to react to what he was hearing, but it was stretching him. Sharon didn’t even try. She was looking at Eddy with her mouth hanging open.

  “You were born here and stolen and came back and … ”

  “He didn’t know I existed,” said Eddy, jerking her head at Lowell.

  “And Ms. Preston’s current address?” said Begbie again.

  “Scat
tered in the Garden of Remembrance at Crossnacreevy,” Eddy said. “She died.”

  “I’m so sorry, you wee soul,” said Sharon.

  But Begbie was looking at Jude. “There’s a lot of it about,” he said.

  By the end of the day, Lowell was exhausted. The team had stayed until dark, working under their tent. Until after dark, actually, the last two hours spent with lights inside, making the white dome glow like something unearthly and malevolent. They had photographed and photographed and then even when Inez was out and wrapped and gone, they stayed, taking soil samples and small pieces of plant root. And snapping the house and drive and bungalow and garden wall from every angle.

  Of course, they had to speak to Mrs. Hewston, but they let Lowell go with them as support for her. And they let Jude go with Lowell, fearful of his bad colour and the tremor in his hands, which grew as the long day wore on.

  Inside, Mrs. Hewston’s bungalow was exactly what Jude would have imagined. Just like Kirk Cottage, it had been fitted out decades earlier and then kept spick and span but never changed. The spongy beige wallpaper in the kitchen, with sepia coffeepots and bunches of grapes, matched the hedgerow kitchen textiles, the curtains and tiebacks still bright but the oven gloves and tea towels faded with washing. Not so much as a teaspoon was out of place. The sink was bare and dry and a spanking white cloth was draped over the taps.

  Mrs. Hewston looked around with a slight smirk of pride as Inspector Begbie, a young constable, and the two of them trooped through. She was glad to have her housekeeping displayed this way. A month ago Jude would have loved it. Now it looked like the definition of loneliness. The living room was just as bad. Not a single book to collect dust, thin foam cushions standing up at regular intervals along the back of the sofa, the only sign of life a TV remote by one of the armchairs, the ever-so-slightly less pristine armchair, with a dented seat and a flattened headrest where Mrs. Hewston spent her solitary days.

  “Can I get you some tea?” she said, as everyone sat.

  “A glass of water perhaps,” Lowell said.

  Mrs. Hewston ignored him. She only had eyes, and refreshments it seemed, for the inspector.

  “You don’t mind, Mrs. H., do you?” said Jude, and slipped back through. She filled a glass and returned, setting it down beside Lowell on a coaster instead of the laminate top of the side table, under Mrs. Hewston’s watchful eye.

  “And can you tell me what you remember about that night?” Begbie was saying. “April the nineteenth, 1995?”

  “I remember it as if it was yesterday,” Mrs. Hewston said. “It was a beautiful spring evening and I had the windows open to smell the narcissus. I was watching the news from Oklahoma, because Mr. Glen here was just down the road and I was worried about him.”

  She hadn’t said any of that last time, thought Jude. She hadn’t mentioned the kind of flowers, or what the disaster was that she was glued to. And Jude hadn’t asked. If she’d thought to check what flowers smelled so sweet or what the terrible doings in America were … what? The events of the last week, dreadful as they were between Jackie’s collapse and the fire, were nothing to do with Miranda, after all.

  As Jude thought that, though, she felt something somewhere. She’d read her share of suspense novels and she had heard it described in various ways. Either as a stray hair across the face, unignorable and elusive, or as a shifting inside like sunken objects when the tide turns. She had even heard it described as a half-familiar face seen from a train carriage and gone again before it was pinned down.

  But sitting musing like this, she was missing what Mrs. Hewston was saying.

  “—would recognise the sound of a newborn baby’s cry in my sleep. I was a nurse, you know.”

  “And yet you didn’t attend?” said Inspector Begbie.

  “I don’t like to push myself in,” said Mrs. Hewston.

  There it was again. Begbie didn’t know the woman and so he only nodded, but it took all Jude’s willpower not to snort. She glanced at Lowell, who didn’t catch her eye.

  “I mean, for all I knew there was a midwife there, wasn’t there? Or a doctor. I don’t have anything to do with the new surgery. They’re not interested in old-timers like me. For all I knew there was a whole team in.”

  “So … you didn’t actually see anything?” said Begbie.

  “I saw plenty!” said Mrs. Hewston. “I heard a noise close to my house here, and I looked out and saw the Miranda one, the mother of that piece that’s fetched up here now, in the garden, busy with her ways.”

  “You saw her through the window?” said Begbie. “Or you went out?”

  “Me?” said Mrs. Hewston. “An old widow woman like me? I did not. I stayed safely inside, but I saw her in the garden through my small bedroom window. She was digging.”

  “And when you say ‘the mother,’” said Begbie, “you mean this woman, don’t you?” He held out one of the photographs, unpeeled from behind its sticky plastic in Lowell’s album. The glue had dried onto its surface and it looked decades older than it was, yellowed and tatty.

  “Wait a minute, till I get my right specs on,” said Mrs. Hewston. She fumbled down the side of her chair and brought up a spectacle case. She opened it, polished the glasses inside with the little cloth, and threaded them carefully over her ears. “Let’s see now,” she said. “Yes, that’s her. The tall one with the bushy hair. The wee thing that’s come back now doesn’t favour her at all.”

  “She looks like my mother,” said Lowell.

  “God help her,” said Mrs. Hewston and everyone, even the constable who was taking notes, raised their eyes and stared at her.

  “And so you never went outside and you never mentioned this to anyone and you never told Mr. Glen when he got home,” Inspector Begbie said.

  “I keep myself to myself,” said Mrs. Hewston, her mouth pinched.

  “Yes, you do,” said Begbie. “You certainly do. Not so much as a twitched curtain all day while we dug up round your house and the press was at your gate. You’re a marvel.”

  “My gate?” said Mrs. Hewston. “If they’d stayed at my gate, I would have been delighted. They were ringing my bell and shouting through my letterbox. You should arrest them for harassment.”

  “We’ll have to see,” murmured Begbie. “We’ve got one or two wee things to be getting on with.” Then he rose, excused himself, and left, with the rest of them trailing after him.

  When Jude got outside, Begbie was standing just to the side of the tent, gazing back at the bungalow.

  “She told me a very different version,” Jude said to him. “I think she’s forgotten.”

  Back at the big house she laid it out. “The newborn baby’s cry bit was the same,” she began, “but what she said to me was that she went out and saw Miranda with a placenta in a bowl, all bloody and streaked—Miranda, I mean—and barefoot.”

  “She embellishes,” Lowell said. “People do, don’t they? And she got it wrong. She knew a baby had been born and so when she saw something being buried she guessed at what it was. And got it wrong.”

  Begbie played a little tune with his fingertips on his stretched cheeks and then shut his lips with a smack. “And is that true about recognising the cry of a newborn?”

  “It must be,” said Jude. “If she didn’t see the placenta or talk to Miranda, then the crying is the only thing in the whole night that would have made her guess about a baby. No one knew Inez was pregnant. Not even Inez, maybe.”

  “I’ll ask my wife,” Begbie said. “She’s a lactation consultant up at Ayr. But I have to say, my crap-dar’s going off like an air-raid siren.” Jude smiled. “Oh, by the way,” he added. “A couple of things. First, Sharon got back with a prelim. She’s washed the bones and says they’re pristine. No sign of violence. So I was talking to my wife at lunchtime, Mr. Glen, and she said to me to say to you that if that’s right enough, if young Eddy’
s mother died of eclampsia or some such, that’s crucial information when her own time comes. I don’t know if it’s genetic, but there’s a lot we don’t understand and it’s best to be safe, eh?”

  Lowell took it in only slowly, but then he groaned and, clamping one hand on each knee, hauled himself to his feet. “I’ll go and break the news,” he said. “She’s been talking about doulas and pools of water, you know.”

  “No way,” said Begbie.

  When Lowell was gone, Jude smiled at Begbie again. “What was the other thing?” she said.

  “No flies on you,” said the inspector. “Aye, you’re right enough. I wanted to tell you on your own. Not sure how things stand between the two of you. Did you know you’re on a missing persons list?” Jude shrugged. “I had to call it in when I realised who you were,” he said. “Sorry, love. Life doesn’t play the game these days for anyone who wants to take off and get lost. Surprised this Miranda managed it twenty years ago, if I’m honest.”

  “Me too,” said Jude. “Didn’t Inez have anyone looking for her? No one who missed her?”

  “She had someone who missed her right enough,” Begbie said, nodding at the chair where Lowell had been sitting. “Anyway, I best be off.”

  “Thank you,” said Jude. “For the heads up,” she added at his frown. For not being what I thought policemen were, she really meant. Maybe none of them were the way they had seemed when she had looked at them from Max’s side. “Am I … I got in the habit of not looking and I can’t seem to break it. Am I just a missing person? Or a witness? Do you know?”

  “Witness?” said Begbie. “There’s no need for a witness. The guilty one’s dead. Just like here. Miranda’s dead and gone and the case is closed.”

  Just like Lowell’s father too, Jude thought. The guilty one dead and the case closed.

  Except someone put a note in a door, someone shoved papers through a letterbox and lit them, and someone upset Jackie enough to make her collapse.

  Maybe none of the stories was the way it seemed. Dr. Glen and the old people. Inez and Miranda. Maybe two more guilty ones were alive and well somewhere and counting their blessings. Just like her.