Stronger Than Death

by Manda Scott

  I am not, whatever you choose to think, in any immediate danger. The same could not necessarily be said for you.

  ‘If I’m on anyone’s hit list, it isn’t hers, Mike.’

  ‘Right.’ He swilled Coke from another can and then spat the results in the waste-bin. ‘Tell that to Eric.’

  The alarm beeped again. He stood up. ‘It’s nearly two, sweetheart. Pugh’s what you’d call punctual to the point of obsession. He’ll be back from lunch on the hour. I’d be grateful if you’d be gone by then. It is, I promise you, more than my job’s worth if he finds you here.’

  ‘And that isn’t?’ I moved my head. Sweet smoke hung heavy in the air.

  The smile this time was crooked, deliberately so. ‘He needs me. Some crimes are less equal than others.’ He sobered suddenly and opened the door. ‘Will you go now? Please? I’ll let you know if I hear anything else.’

  ‘Is that a promise?’

  ‘You wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t.’

  The forgotten sandwich lay, flat and unappetising, in the bottom of my bag. I threw it in a waste-bin in the car park and walked back the long way to the Unit. It was a warm day, not over-hot, with thin, high clouds and just enough sun to make shadows. Down at the Unit, the gardener rode his mower along the edge of a flower-bed. He’s young, the gardener, but he cares and he doesn’t believe that gardens should be set out in straight lines. For that, we can overlook any amount of inexperience.

  I sat on one of the garden seats under the sycamores and watched him cutting curves in the grass. A fork stuck out of a newly dug bed. A robin sat on the handle, scanning the fresh earth for insects.

  ‘Penny for them?’

  It was Dee, standing on the grass somewhere behind me. I didn’t turn, but then I didn’t need to. I could pick that voice out now in a crowd of twenty. ‘I was thinking Jack Souter was wrong,’ I said. ‘There are birds here. He just couldn’t hear them for the cars.’

  ‘He knew that. He was making a point.’

  ‘Maybe.’ I stared out across the grass, seeing other faces, hearing other words. ‘It’s his funeral this afternoon.’

  ‘Fine. So you can go and tell him you cared for him and let him go.’ She moved round and sat on the other end of the bench, leaving clear space between us. ‘Funerals go with the territory, Kells. You don’t like the heat, you should put down your spade and stop stoking the furnace.’

  ‘Thanks.’ This is the old Dee. Compassion is for wimps.

  ‘You’re welcome. That’s what friends are for.’ She stretched her legs out on the grass. ‘Now suppose you tell me what’s really going on?’

  With someone else, I would ignore that, but not here, not now, not with her. I shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I just had lunch with Mike at the mortuary. Hillary Murdoch got a syringe full of sux between the shoulder blades. Pugh thinks she was conscious while she died.’

  ‘Does he, indeed?’ Her eyes tightened at the edges. She rested her chin on her hand and watched the mower start a new row. In time, she shrugged. ‘You could say much the same for Jack Souter. I’d put money she went a lot faster than he did.’

  ‘Is that supposed to make me feel better?’

  ‘No. It’s supposed to give you a different sense of perspective and drag you out of the bog before you sink in past your neck. Does Pugh think Lee did it?’

  ‘Mike Bailey does. He thinks she’s working her way through the staff with ever-increasing venom.’

  ‘Ah.’ She rocked sideways on the seat. Her stare was as comfortable as it ever is. ‘And this is the real reason you look … the way you look.’

  I flinched. ‘That bad?’

  The smile was sharp. ‘Don’t go passing any mirrors if you can help it.’

  ‘Thanks.’ I found a crumb of pony cube in the depths of one pocket and threw it out on the grass. We both watched as the robin came down off the fork handle to find it. ‘What am I going to do, Dee?’

  ‘Give up and go home?’

  ‘I could do.’ It’s an option. ‘I can’t see I’m doing anything useful here.’

  ‘Bullshit.’ She turned sideways on the bench. ‘Do you think she did it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  I shrugged. I felt like a child. ‘Just because’ is not an adult response, so I said nothing and there was silence for a while, as much as there ever is at the Unit. When it had gone beyond mere thinking, she stood up.

  ‘Wait here,’ she said.

  She was gone nearly five minutes. Long enough for the mower to make two full trips down the garden and once across the front of Jack Souter’s old room. When she came back, she held a polystyrene mug in one hand and a can of something bland and carbonated in the other. ‘Here.’ She held out the coffee. ‘The real thing. I brewed up the machine in the office.’

  I moulded my hands to the soft polystyrene of the mug. The heat burned my palms. The smell of it cleared the last dregs of Mike Bailey’s joint from the pits of my mind. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Don’t. It’s all self-interest, believe me.’ She sat down on the grass with her back to one of the bigger trees and laid her can on a stump at the side. In a while, she looked up. It was like looking at flint. ‘I’ve got people dying there, Kellen, and you’re about as useful as a wet Tuesday in Galway. We have to get you out of it somehow. Now, have you thought of a good reason why she didn’t do it?’

  I don’t think that’s up to me. I drank the coffee. Black, one sugar. Only on the worst of days do I take it either black or with sugar. She knows me better than I thought she did.

  ‘She didn’t kill Eric,’ I said, eventually. ‘I saw her face when she came up over the edge. She didn’t know he was there and she absolutely didn’t want to believe that he was dead.’

  ‘She could have been acting, Kellen.’ Soft, musical Irish, so very different to the implacable stone of her eyes. ‘It’s not unknown.’

  It isn’t. But she wasn’t acting. Of that, I am sure, as of nothing else. ‘She was on the end of a rope, Dee. It’s not a time you can act. The rock doesn’t allow it.’ And that, perhaps, is the other reason why we climb. ‘There aren’t any masks when you’re climbing. What you see is what you are.’

  ‘That would make a change.’ She smiled a dry, acerbic smile. ‘Remind me not to go climbing with you.’ She twirled a sycamore key in her fingers and spun it out on to the unmown grass beneath the trees. ‘OK, we’ll go with that. It would hardly stand up in court, but I saw how she was after she got here and if she was faking that, she’s a better actor than any of us. So we’ll agree she didn’t kill Eric. What about the others? You need more than decent acting for them.’

  Good question. I stared, unseeing, at the twin-tone bands of the grass. The coffee grew cold in my hands. Far out on the edge of the garden, a gaggle of house sparrows fought over the remains of a sandwich. Bloody good question. Just because. Just because I know it in my guts as much as I’ve ever known anything. But now, just knowing is not enough. I need to find words. If I could think past the sight of her lying out cold on the bench in my kitchen, past the image of Hillary Murdoch, sitting there alive and not breathing, past the fear that she might be next, I might perhaps find an answer.

  ‘Kellen … ?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Is there anyone else you can talk to? Anyone else who knows her well enough to give real answers to real questions?’

  ‘There’s Mhaire Culloch. The madwoman. If anyone knows her, Mhaire does.’

  ‘Can you go and see her?’

  ‘I can try. She might not see me. We don’t get on.’

  ‘Still, I think you need to try her. For your own peace of mind as much as anything.’ She stood up, brushing the broken leaves from her knees. ‘Will you go? Please? For me and the Unit, if not for you?’

  What else is there to do? ‘If you like.’

  She scooped up her can and ruffled tidying fingers through her hair. I put out an arm to stop her as she walked past me. ‘Dee … ?’
>
  She lifted my hand and pushed her lips to the back of it in a small, old-fashioned gesture. ‘Don’t mention it,’ she said. Her smile was as dry as her kiss. ‘I need you here, body and soul, for Claire Hendon. I’d have left you to wallow otherwise.’

  ‘Funerals are for the living, Kellen. It’ll not matter to me if you come or not. We can say all we need to say before I go.’ It was still spring then, when death was a long way off, an abstract thing to be spun on the fingers and viewed from all angles. By autumn, it was different. ‘Go and look, Kellen. See the land. See what it’s like before they drive their bloody road through by the river and everything green goes down under houses. I’d like you to see the places we’ve been walking.’ And then in winter, a day or two before Christmas, when his voice was a thin wind, blown over reeds: ‘Bring the dog, Kellen. That would be good. Mind and get me to tell Joan when she gets here. I want everyone to bring their dogs. They know how to feel things better than we do.’

  Maybe. We’ll know soon enough. There are thirty-odd cars parked in the car park and in almost all of them there is a dog.

  It is a warm day and I am chilled to the core. It’s difficult, now, to think of Jack Souter without feeling the frost etch cold on the windows, without seeing the snow fall in great slabs off the roof. It takes effort to stay in the present, to stay with the warm of a July afternoon; with the rattle of a badly tuned engine, driving up the hill to the small, south-side village; with the sharp, ammoniacal smell of nettles, crushed under foot on the other side of the wall where fifty people took their dogs to empty their bladders before bringing them on to the mown grass of the cemetery. It takes effort, if I am honest, simply to be in a cemetery. I am not fond of cemeteries—too many childhood memories of tall grey walls and the claustrophobia of repressed emotion. Jack promised me this one would not feel like a prison and, so far, he is right. It’s a small place, inoffensive and understated, and it merges with the fields around it in the way of a garden, growing back to the wild. The walls are whitewashed stone, not grey brick, and low enough that you could be over them in a moment if the hare on the hill moved closer and the dogs decided not to wait. There are daisies making snow-in-saffron carpets round the headstones, a new crop since the last time the mower ran through. There are always daisies in cemeteries: a universal statement on the cycles of existence. They live, they flower, they die. Nobody writes their headstones. Jack Souter is dead and the family headstone carries his name, newly cut, at the bottom. I find it difficult, standing here, to know what I feel. I am not sorry he died. He was a good man and I am glad that I knew him, but he died when he was ready to die, which is as good as it gets. If I had the right kind of perspective, I expect I could say the same for Eric, but I don’t believe that. If I had the right kind of compassion, I could say it, too, for Hillary Murdoch, but I would have to have liked her enough to care. As it is, I can’t find it in me to be sorry that the woman is dead. I am sorry for the manner of it, but beyond that, I am only sorry because she was a name on a list, and while she was alive there was a chance that Lee might not be next, and whatever I feel about funerals, I would give everything I’ve got not to be standing sometime in the next few months beside a grave dug for Lee Adams.

  The dogs are stirring. The folk closest to the grave are throwing dirt on to the coffin and there are two dozen terriers present who know for a fact that a hole that big must have something truly spectacular to be hunted down in the bottom. Jack Souter was right. Dogs are better at showing their feelings than people. No one here would dare to complain that they’re filling the hole in too soon. He said he didn’t want a staid, quiet funeral. They have given him his wish. We line up to speak with Joan and Sally on the way out. His wife shakes my hand. His daughter goes down on one knee and hugs the dog.

  ‘Thank you for coming, Kellen.’

  ‘I said that I would.’

  ‘Are you coming back down to the house?’

  ‘No. I’m sorry. I have to get back to work.’

  ‘You’ll come back sometime, won’t you? Bring the dog down and we’ll go for a walk.’

  ‘I will. In a month or two. When the summer’s over.’

  ‘Thank you. Jack would have liked that.’

  He would. And perhaps I will go, but we both know that it is the saying of it that matters.

  I have to get back to work. But first I have to make a house-call to a friend of a friend. Mad Mhaire Culloch is not a friend of mine. I don’t like her. I don’t trust her. I have no desire to spend time in her company. But this is the woman who chaperoned Lee through her childhood. She is the closest thing the lass has ever had to a mother, and if anyone knows what’s happening to her now, Mhaire Culloch will be that one. All I have to do is find her and then get her to speak to me. Neither of these is necessarily guaranteed to succeed.

  Most folk move closer to town and basic amenities as they age. Mhaire Culloch, because she is mad, chose the occasion of her eighty-fifth birthday to move from a perfectly weather-proof council semi on a nice, douce housing estate not far over the river to a battered, leaking labourer’s cottage halfway down the Ayr road with fifteen miles to the nearest conurbation. Her home is not at all easy to find and I have directions only from memory. It took a good half-hour to find the turning off the main road and it was gone five by the time I nursed the car up a potholed track that looked as if it might lead to her cottage. It was there, behind a gap in the hedge, a mile or two up the lane, and it looked better than I was expecting: a small, squat dwelling with walls radiant in the way of whitewash newly done and a roof of corrugated iron painted matt black to draw in the sun. I turned in and parked the car in the shade of the hedge and looked at it for a while. Next to the climb, this has been Lee’s big project for the year, an inordinate absorber of time. She has not done badly, although clearly, beyond the paint and the new wood, there are still things aching to be done. The bindweed choking the hedge needs to come out before it takes over the entirety of the north side of the garden. The front door could do with being stripped and repainted before the winter sets in. The vegetable patch at the side is too small, still, to give any serious yield. The fork and the spade standing up in it are both from the farm and both, no doubt, are waiting for Lee Adams to come back and finish what she began. If I was her, I would work on that next. I left the car, whistled the dog from the back seat and went over to have a closer look.

  ‘You’re late.’ Mhaire stood in the dark space of her doorway. In that kind of light, all I could see was her hair: absolutely white and standing up round her head like a curve-bristled brush.

  Really? ‘I had a funeral, Mhaire. You can’t time these things.’

  ‘It finished an hour ago. You’re still late.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I got lost. May I come in?’

  She put her head to one side and considered that one as if it were more than a rhetorical question. ‘If you must.’ A cat slipped out past her feet. ‘You’ll leave the dog in the car.’

  ‘If you say so.’ The dog, I would say, was happier with that than I was.

  I followed her in. There was no hallway. In the way of the very old labourers’ cottages, the front door led straight into the single downstairs room. It was lighter inside than I might have imagined; Mhaire, for me, is always shrouded in gloom, but here in her own home she had windows on three sides and a fire that flared, freshly lit, on the fourth. Odd interplays of sunlight and flame curled together up the walls.

  ‘Sit down.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  The sofa was clean and did not smell unduly of tom cat. Mhaire Culloch pushed a grey striped queen off the chair opposite and sat down in the space she had left. She doesn’t age, this woman. I can vouch for the fact she’s looked the same since she was seventy. Lee can tell you she was no different in her sixties. I think if you looked at her hard, you’d find she doesn’t stand quite as straight as she did and her hair carries more of the nicotine at the forelock than it used to, but otherwise, she is simply a w
hite-haired, fearsome old hag with yellowing eyes and no teeth of her own and a voice like wet chalk dragged down a board. Until I met Dee, this woman was my only direct experience of the Irish. It was not the best introduction.

  ‘They took her in again at lunchtime, did you know?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘You should be.’

  Oh, God, here we go … ‘I’m sorry, Mhaire, it’s been a long day, I’m not in the groove yet. Can we go through this slowly? Who took who where?’

  She lit a fresh cigarette from the fire, took a long, long drag and spelled it out. ‘The police. Took your friend. Lee Adams. Into custody. At two o’clock. This afternoon.’

  Oh, shit. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Of course I’m sure. Why else would I have you here?’

  I hate to think. ‘Is she under arrest? Have they charged her?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Are they going to?’

  ‘It would be safer for her if they did.’

  You rarely get sense out of Mhaire Culloch. Not at the first time of asking, anyway. ‘So have they let her go?’

  ‘Not yet. They will. They shouldn’t but they will.’

  Whose side are you on? ‘She didn’t do it, Mhaire.’

  ‘I thought you came here to ask me that?’

  Impasse. I’d forgotten what it was like to hold conversations in hieroglyphics. Everything symbolic, nothing said straight. I rehearsed this conversation four times driving down the A77 to get here. Now, I can’t even remember how it was supposed to start. We stared at each other through the growing haze of cigarette smoke.

  ‘You have a headache.’ She said it suddenly, out of the blue, a statement, not a question.

  I was doing my best not to think about that. ‘It’s the smoke,’ I said. ‘I’ll be fine when I get outside.’

  ‘Smoke nothing.’ The blue trail of her cigarette wove knots in the air. ‘It’s the coffee. You’re drinking too much coffee. You’ll need to stop.’