by Claire Askew
Someone tapped Ishbel on the shoulder.
‘Mrs Hodgekiss?’
She turned, and found herself facing a young woman whose hair was pulled into two long, straw-coloured braids. The girl was wearing a headset with a curved antenna that pushed a little microphone up under her chin. She was carrying a clipboard. Ishbel flinched, and then tried to steel herself for a fight: She’s about to throw me out.
‘Yes?’ she said.
The girl huffed out air.
‘Oh, it is you. I thought I recognised you . . . from seeing your picture. In the paper. But you know how it is, when you go up to someone? Like, is this actually them? Or did I just make an idiot of myself?’
The girl pushed out a squeaky giggle. Ishbel blinked.
‘My picture’s in the paper?’
‘Oh.’ The girl shifted her weight, and as the clipboard shifted with her, Ishbel caught a glimpse of the ID hanging on a lanyard around her neck. Poppy something.
‘Yes – sorry. Yes, it has been. Just – paparazzi-type photos, you know. I saw one of you getting into your car, I think.’
Ishbel couldn’t think of anything to say. The photographers camped outside the house had bothered her, but more because of their unwanted presence than anything else – their constant watching. Ishbel realised she hadn’t at any point done the simple mental arithmetic that would have told her that where there are photographers, there would also be photographs. Of her.
‘I’ve been very . . . distracted,’ she said, explaining to herself, really, not Poppy. ‘And I’ve been trying not to look at the papers.’
‘That’s probably sensible,’ Poppy said, and then, as though she had only just realised who it was she was talking to, ‘Oh, I really am so very sorry about . . . everything.’
Possible responses flickered through Ishbel’s mind: Thank you. You’re very kind. I appreciate it. Or So you should be. But you don’t mean it. No one means it. They think they do, but they don’t. She decided to stay silent.
‘You’re rather early,’ Poppy said, either not sensing Ishbel’s unease, or sensing it and deciding to ignore it. ‘You’re not going to the vigil first?’
‘No,’ Ishbel said. That didn’t seem to suffice, and she heard herself add, ‘My husband will be there.’
Poppy tilted her head slightly.
‘I don’t mean – that’s not the reason why I’m not going . . .’ Under the glare of the TV lights, Ishbel felt hot. Flustered. Except it is. It’s exactly the reason.
‘It’s okay, Mrs Hodgekiss.’ To her surprise, Poppy reached out and touched her arm, just once, and lightly. ‘I’ve seen what they’re saying in the papers, what Grant Lockley’s writing about . . . well, about it all. It’s enough to put strain on any relationship.’
The girl’s face was suddenly serious.
‘Thank you,’ Ishbel said, ‘for saying you were sorry, just then. For saying you were sorry about everything. I appreciate it.’
Poppy gave her a watery smile.
‘Some of those girls were the same age as me,’ she said. ‘It makes you realise, something like that. Life is short. It really was awful.’
Ishbel swallowed hard. Don’t cry. You can’t cry just because someone is kind to you. You can’t cry at every small thing for the rest of your life. But it was too late: a watery smear was forming on her vision.
‘Let me take you to your seat,’ Poppy said, and laid a small hand on Ishbel’s elbow. Ishbel allowed herself to be guided along the central aisle, right to the front of the cathedral. The chairs in the first few rows had pieces of paper laid across them, bearing the STV logo, and the word ‘Reserved’.
‘This is you,’ Poppy said, glancing at the clipboard and then pointing at a chair about one third of the way along the front row. Ishbel swallowed hard.
‘I’m on the front row?’
‘Yes,’ Poppy said. ‘We’ve put all the, erm – all the parents along here. Parents and siblings. And then other family members will be behind you, and Three Rivers staff have also been reserved seating. General mourners can sit wherever they like behind that. Press are at the back.’
Ishbel recognised Poppy’s tone: some official document had clearly been memorised.
Poppy bent down and removed the ‘Reserved’ sign from the seat she had pointed to, and Ishbel sank onto it, realising she hadn’t the energy to argue.
‘You’ve put Aidan next to me, I suppose?’ she said.
‘Oh yes,’ Poppy replied, but then seemed to remember something. ‘Wait – is that bad? Would you prefer . . .’ She began looking around rather desperately, as though seeking a superior to confer with.
‘It’s all right,’ Ishbel said, waving a hand. ‘I just wondered.’
Poppy’s face relaxed. She smiled.
‘I’m afraid I need to leave you,’ she said. ‘I’m needed elsewhere. I’m needed everywhere, this morning. But if you need anything, just give a shout, and any one of us will be happy to help. I really am sorry, again. Sorry you need to be here . . . that any of us need to be doing this today.’
Ishbel felt the threat of tears once again, and could only smile.
Poppy had half turned away, but then spun back on her heel.
‘Oh,’ she said, touching two fingertips to her throat. ‘The school tie?’
Ishbel’s hand flew to her own neck. Above her coat’s collar, she could feel the silky polyester with its raised white cotton stripe. She’d forgotten about it.
‘Nice touch,’ Poppy said. Then she righted herself, and strode away along the aisle.
Ishbel sat very still, looking up at the Great West Window. She watched as the light that fell through it ebbed and changed as clouds passed, or as the TV lamps behind her were adjusted. The wooden seat was hard, uncomfortable. Ishbel’s gaze drifted to the altar, which stood below the huge window, and which had been adorned with a white embroidered cloth and two simple vases of white lilies, white roses and baby’s breath. Between the vases, the huge brass altar cross, so much more real than its plastic counterpart in the crematorium, flashed and darkened with the movements of the TV crew, their lamps and monitors.
Again, as she had in that weird crematorium, Ishbel wondered if she ought to pray. She’d been raised in the Church of Scotland, and guessed she would probably still know when to stand and when to sit in the standard Sunday service. She knew St Giles well enough, too, because she and Aidan attended the Christmas Eve Watchnight service most years. Abigail had come along as well, of course, when she was small. Ishbel liked church for its muted voices and musty smells, and at Christmas she loved the candlelight and some of the more hopeful carols. But she’d stopped attending Sunday services as a young woman. She’d never been able to understand – if there was a God who saw and knew everything anyway – why she needed to get up when it was still dark, and give up her ever-more-precious Sunday mornings to go and sit in a cold barn and get a telling-off from some elderly minister. Surely she could just pray at home? And she had done, for a while, until praying fell down her list of priorities, and then eventually off the bottom of it altogether. That was years ago, now.
And what God, she wondered, what so-called loving God, could allow things like Ryan Summers to happen? It’s not just the shooting, she found herself thinking, it’s what’s happened since. Photographers on the doorstep. Harassment. Aidan, sleeping with his dental nurse, behaving like some stranger. The papers and their rumour mill. Grant Lockley threatening people over the phone. Jack Egan. Abigail – we can’t even celebrate Abigail’s life, thanks to the press. Ishbel realised that she was praying, in a way, but it was a strangled, bitter prayer.
What sense can there be in any of this? The thought seemed to grow in her mind, like a ripple on the surface of a deep pool. What sense was there in Abigail’s death? Why had she been first – the drugs? The student union complaint? Something else Ishbel had no way of ever guessing? Or had it all just been one great mess of noise and blood and rage? ‘Why?’ was the only question lef
t, but it was the only question that had no answer.
She looked up again at the polished altar cross.
‘That’s it,’ she hissed. ‘I’m done with you. I refuse to believe you exist.’
She waited, as though some response might come. But there was only the clang of scaffolding, and the background scuffle of feet and voices.
‘How could you, anyway?’ Ishbel looked away from the altar, its white cloth dappled with patches of stained-glass light. ‘How could you exist when such senseless things happen?’
Ishbel realised someone was standing near to her: one of the men with STAFF printed across his back, carefully avoiding eye contact. He was setting up a large TV monitor under the pulpit – doing as his colleagues had done throughout the church, gaffer-taping cables to the stone-flagged floor. He flicked the monitor on, and raised a walkie-talkie close to his face.
‘Check live feed on six,’ he said.
A picture appeared on the monitor. It was a few feet away, but Ishbel recognised the backdrop of the Scottish Parliament: the white stone, and the weird bamboo-cane bars across the doors. She realised she was looking at the vigil, watching it happen live at the far end of the Canongate. She couldn’t see the entire crowd, but she could guess at the scale of it from the way people seemed bunched together, jostled. A lot of people held candles: the thin, white kind that came with a cardboard skirt to keep hot wax off the hands. The feed began to show cutaways of individual faces, some of them crying. They must be listening, Ishbel realised, to a speech of some kind. The monitor gave out no sound.
‘Six is a go,’ the man said into his walkie-talkie. He lifted his gaze and threw a thumbs-up sign, apparently at someone or something high up in the cathedral’s roof space. But Ishbel didn’t turn to look. As the man walked away, a new picture appeared on the monitor. The camera had panned round to show the speech-giver, the person whose words were drawing tears from the amassed crowd. Ishbel felt her own mouth fall open: it was Aidan, standing at a white podium, holding one of those same white candles, and talking, with his head bowed. Behind him were some of the other Three Rivers relatives. Barry Kesson’s eyes were turned to the floor, and he was shaking his head, as though despairing of the words Aidan was saying. A little further back, but still clearly in shot, was Annetta. Netta, Ishbel thought, remembering the pet name Aidan had used. His mistress. He asked his mistress to be at the vigil. The vigil for our daughter.
Ishbel put a hand over her mouth. Her stomach flipped and swam: she struggled to place the feeling that churned inside her, and she worried that she might vomit, right there on the scrubbed stone of the cathedral floor. She swung her head around, casting about for Poppy, though she wasn’t sure what she wanted her for. She was aware of someone behind her, someone shuffling around in the aisle not far away. She turned, thinking maybe she could ask for the awful monitor to be shut off, or at the very least moved. But the figure in the aisle wasn’t Poppy, or anyone else who could help her. Once again Ishbel’s mouth fell open.
‘You.’
Grant Lockley was standing about five rows behind her, his mobile phone raised in his hand as if to take her picture.
‘Oh, Ishbel,’ he said, loudly enough that his voice rang the nave with harmonics. ‘That was going to be a lovely shot – just you, on your own, contemplating. I had the window in the background and everything. I wish you hadn’t turned around.’
Ishbel jumped up from her seat, and felt herself sway. The ground seemed not quite level, and not quite still, as though she were somehow afloat.
‘Don’t you dare take my picture without my permission,’ she said.
Lockley made his trademark shrug.
‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t get the chance. But if I could just . . .’
He took a step towards her.
‘Don’t you come near me.’ Ishbel held up one hand, like a policeman stopping traffic. To her surprise, Lockley did stop moving. ‘What are you doing here? Is there really no space you people won’t grub your noses into? Is nothing sacred?’
At the back of the church, a few faces had flicked anxiously up to look at them, and Ishbel realised that her voice had been raised.
Lockley held up both hands – in his right, his phone was wedged between thumb and palm, its screen glowing. He was smiling a serpentine smile.
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ he said, speaking quietly, now he knew people were watching. ‘There are a lot of folk can’t be here today – I’m simply reporting what’s happening for the people at home.’ He brandished the phone, and added, ‘All thanks to the wonders of Twitter.’
Ishbel wanted to spit. She might even have done it, had she not been in a church, and surrounded by cameras.
‘Does anyone fall for you when you play stupid like that?’
Lockley only shrugged again, his face still split in a lopsided smile.
‘And if you really are reporting,’ Ishbel was thinking aloud, ‘why aren’t you at the vigil right now?’
Lockley smirked.
‘I could ask you the same thing.’ He nodded at something just beyond her, and she remembered the monitor. ‘Though I could take an educated guess.’
Ishbel turned. The vigil seemed to be breaking up: the camera showed a vague line beginning to form, as people prepared to walk up the street towards the cathedral. A close-up: Aidan shaking hands with the First Minister. Then Ishbel watched as her husband turned away from the podium, and stretched out a hand to Annetta, who stepped forward, smiling, to take it.
‘That’s got to hurt,’ Lockley said.
Ishbel rounded on him, but found she couldn’t speak. She could barely breathe: she pulled in a single mouthful of musty church air, and made a sound that was something like a sob, though for once, there were no tears in her eyes.
‘I’m sorry,’ Lockley said. Had Ishbel not known better, she might have said that he meant it.
He waited for a moment before speaking again.
‘I was going to ask you if you’d had any more time to think about my suggestion. My offer still stands, even after today.’ He nodded at the monitor again. ‘Especially after today, perhaps. Wouldn’t you like to be able to talk about all this, Ishbel? Wouldn’t you like people to know how you feel?’
Behind her, on the monitor, Aidan and Annetta were leading a slow march of mourners up the hill of the Canongate: part of a front row that also included the First Minister, the parents of Liz Gill, the Three Rivers principal, and – Ishbel’s throat tightened – Jack Egan. They were flanked by neon-coated police officers and sinister-looking men in black suits who had little spirals of clear wire tucked behind their ears. Lockley was watching, and Ishbel was watching him watch. She didn’t want to look at him, but she couldn’t turn back to the screen.
‘I wouldn’t sell my story to you,’ she said, slowly, ‘if you were the last man on earth.’
Lockley smiled again.
‘You know,’ he said, ‘I’ve heard that before. It’s amazing how often people change their minds once they see the size of the cheque.’
Ishbel closed her eyes.
‘Get away from me,’ she hissed. ‘This is a church. I’m here to think about my daughter, and remember her.’ She opened her eyes, and looked Lockley up and down. ‘You’re here to do business deals. You ought to be ashamed.’
Again, the trademark shrug.
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Can I ask what you’re thinking about Moira Summers right now? There’s a rumour she may turn up today.’
Ishbel blinked, once, twice. She was still learning about Lockley’s tenacity, his batter-and-blindside approach to communication.
‘What?’ she said, in spite of herself.
‘Shocking, isn’t it?’ Lockley said. ‘That the police – well, that anyone – would think it was appropriate for her to be here.’
‘Why wouldn’t it be?’ Ishbel wasn’t sure where the thought had come from, but as soon as it had come she’d said it aloud, and the echoes hung in th
e air between her and Lockley. It was the same thought she’d had at the family meeting that DI Birch had invited them to at the police station, when she’d asked Rehan whose FLO Amy was. ‘Why wouldn’t it be appropriate for her to be here? We’re remembering the people who . . .’ she paused, but then went on, ‘. . . the people who died, that day at Three Rivers College. That includes her son as well as my daughter, doesn’t it?’
Lockley’s smile widened.
‘Oh Ishbel,’ he said, ‘you really should think about calling me, after today is over. I think we could do so much together. I mean, imagine you and Moira Summers in conversation. Two women who’ve been so differently affected by this tragedy, working out their differences in print. It could be a beautiful thing.’
Behind Lockley, a young man was moving between the chairs, counting out pieces of paper and placing one on each seat. An order of service, Ishbel guessed: at fifty paces, she could clearly recognise her daughter’s smiling portrait, shrunk into a small square on the front cover, alongside twelve others.
Lockley turned his head, following her gaze. The TV people had begun to scatter, and seemed to be taking up strategic positions around the cathedral.
‘Showtime,’ Lockley said, looking back at her. ‘I’d better get to my allotted square foot of space.’ He threw her a hammy eye-roll. She pretended not to see it.
‘Ishbel,’ he said, and in spite of herself, she looked back up at him. In a seamless movement, he flicked something out of the inside breast pocket of his scruffy grey jacket, and tossed it towards her. Instinct made her stumble forward to try and catch it, but it skittered onto the stone floor under her chair: Lockley’s business card.
‘You can call me any time,’ he said.
Ignoring the card, Ishbel sat back down on her hard wooden chair, and thought about crying. But instead, after a moment, she took out her mobile phone.