Hartsend

by Janice Brown

‘‘Maybe this is a mistake,’’ he said, not taking his eyes off the road. There was a car in front of them, but not near enough to illuminate the winding country road and it was impossible to put the lights on full beam with cars coming towards them round the bends.

  Gordon said, ‘‘Did we have a choice? I should warn you, though, I’m not the heroic type. My usual role in a fight is to stand well out of the way with my eyes shut. Ouch,’’ he exclaimed as they encountered a flooded patch, cascading a sheet of water over the field beside them.

  The minister didn’t consider himself the heroic type either. His own last involvement in a brawl had been twenty odd years earlier in a pub in Malaga. He could recall little of it, having been drunk at the time, but he’d a lasting reminder in the form of back pain that recurred when he least needed it.

  ‘‘Hopefully the police will be there before us,’’ he said.

  ‘‘Don’t count on it. I had a patient a couple of weeks ago. Manic depressive and off his meds. He told me on the phone he was going to slit his wrists, and mine if I tried to stop him. His social worker was elsewhere and occupied, no surprise there, but the police said they’d be within the half hour. So I sat outside in the car.’’

  ‘‘And?’’

  ‘‘They weren’t, so I went in.’’

  ‘‘That sounds heroic to me.’’

  ‘‘It’s all role play. I’m very convincing. I should have been on the stage. Anyway, I’d seen a lot of him at the start of the week, and we both knew he didn’t mean it.’’ He made a sound between a cough and a laugh.

  They stopped at a crossroads. Two miles to their destination, according to the sign.

  ‘‘You said you knew this man?’’ Gordon asked.

  ‘‘I know the family. Not very well.’’ Saying more would take him into deeper waters. He didn’t want to go into explanations that involved Harriet. She had begun speaking to him again, but not with any enthusiasm. Most of the time he didn’t know whether she was listening to anything on her iPod, or whether the earphones were merely a declaration of mutiny.

  Long night

  ‘‘Mr Smith?’’

  ‘‘Yes.’’

  ‘‘The Doctor’s asking for you. Can you come with me please.’’

  ‘‘I’ve lost my hat,’’ he told the Police Sergeant’s back, immediately realising how pathetic and pointless this sounded. He could explain death and hell with logic and conviction, but all he could talk about here was the fact that someone had knocked his woolly hat off.

  They’d shouted, trying to get through the crowd. Dr Gordon ploughed into them but he himself faltered after a glancing blow left him hatless, unnerved by the looping wail of sirens, the cries and calls of neighbours, the barking of stray dogs. Before he knew it, Gordon was out of sight and he was alone on the edge of the disordered mass of bodies.

  Now he followed the Sergeant up a badly-lit stairwell, which smelled of damp and burnt fat and pee. Even here there was a lot of noise echoing around. He felt, rather than saw, those they had to squeeze past, all wet like himself, some with heads down, some in black raincoats and police caps, one bulky man in a soaked tee-shirt who was doing most of the shouting, and at the top, a woman in uniform, her face impassive, her one glance memorising everything about him.

  The room seemed full of people. All the lights were on. He called Gordon’s name and the man’s head rose from behind a toppled armchair, followed by the rest of him. He’d taken off his overcoat and pushed up his shirt sleeves. ‘‘Your man’s going to be all right. Probably. I don’t know if he’ll hear you. He’s coming and going a bit.’’

  Had Gordon himself been hurt? His curls were dishevelled, and he was holding himself awkwardly.

  ‘‘That’s the ambulance now,’’ someone said above the other voices, and for a moment there was silence while everyone listened.

  Gordon insisted on staying with the injured man, deferring to the paramedics in all else. His earlier cheerfulness had gone and his face seemed ghost-like to Smith in the crisscross of headlights and yellow streetlights. The wind had dropped but the rain was still falling.

  ‘‘No, I’m fine. There’s no need,’’ he told the Reverend. ‘‘You go home and get on your knees.’’ As the ambulance door closed, he gave a half lift of his hand and a brief nod.

  Smith tried later to think what exactly he’d done after that, and couldn’t, although he did recall a plain clothes officer taking some details, and asking him questions. Then the Sergeant came over. Actually he was a member of the Church, he said, introducing himself, grown up through the Sunday School and the BB, though he didn’t get along much, what with overtime and shift work and that. They’d made several arrests, he said, though many of the culprits had disappeared into the night as soon as they’d heard the squad cars. They would probably all be well-known characters. It could have been much worse. They’d used fists and boots, not knives. They might have tried to burn Flaherty out, endangering the lives of all the building’s occupants. They’d been drinking but were not as drunk as they might have been later in the evening. The doctor’s intervention had given the man a chance.

  ‘‘How did you know what was happening?’’ the Sergeant asked.

  ‘‘We were in the pub. Pie and Pint night.’’

  He watched the Sergeant consider whether or not to delve deeper.

  ‘‘Aye well, it’s going to be a long night for some,’’ the man commented at last. ‘‘Drive home carefully, sir.’’

  All the slow, cautious way home, Smith listened to loud music on the radio, afraid he might fall asleep at the wheel. When he reached the manse and checked his watch he was astonished to see that it was closer to four than three am. Every part of him was exhausted. He took his sodden shoes off in the kitchen, went upstairs, stripped, and fell into bed without his usual scrupulous brushing and flossing of teeth. He tried to pray, as was his habit, but couldn’t manage more than a few words. God and the dental hygienist would have to forgive him.

  When he woke, he was surprised that he’d slept so well despite all the night’s events, only to find, glancing at his phone, that it was just after five. He switched on the light. They had promised to use email and not to phone one another. It wasn’t expensive to phone, but hearing her voice made the separation unbearable. He had never been good on the phone, not when it mattered. Skype wasn’t much better. He always felt afterwards that no-one had said what they meant to say. Now he stared at the other half of the bed, flat and forsaken, and dialled the sunny side of the world. It rang a few times, then his father-in-law’s voice, formal, but having lost none of its Scots accent, told him no-one could come to the phone, but please leave a message.

  Santa Claus

  The room felt very chilly. Duncan pulled the quilt closer, hoping he might get back to sleep , but it was no use. Once more consciousness brought with it thoughts of Lesley.

  And a feeling of guilt. He’d been very upset that night, hurt by her lack of explanation. He’d pondered deeply on what he might not ‘have a clue’ about, and come up with nothing. But for Mrs Fleming, he might never have found an answer.

  She’d been in need of painkillers. Apparently the box in the First Aid kit was empty. Negligence on the part of the Miss Guthrie the First Aid officer. He offered ibuprofen, which she accepted gratefully. Then, with a small fluttery gesture of one hand towards her middle, she mouthed the words ‘time of the month.’

  He was embarrassed, but later realized that she had done him a service. She had solved the mystery. Everything now made perfect sense. He supposed in a way it was something of a compliment, since it suggested Mrs Fleming didn’t see him as an old fuddy-duddy. Lesley, being the person she was, would never dream of mentioning such things. Not to him, certainly.

  At once his anger had evaporated. Her name now conjured up for him only vulnerability. He felt terrible. His heart ached with sympathy. Lukewarm tea, custard cream biscuits too long in the tin, a kitchen tiled in ancient, pale yellow Vitrolite – he
saw now with miserable clarity how everything fitted together to make a sort of metaphor of her life. No wonder she disliked it so much. It reminded one of old hospital corridors, and boiler rooms in school basements. And yet, if she hated it, why didn’t she change it? Surely there was something childish in this refusal to change things?

  The temperature, as forecast, had fallen overnight. In the dim garden below the cracks in the tarred paths were frost-rimmed, the lawns altered to rough expanses of greenish white. Time to take the first suet balls from the freezer. Breadcrumbs. Beef suet from the local butcher. Oats and raisins. Chunky peanut butter. Sunflower seeds got from the Pet Shop, and polenta from the Co-operative.

  He was proud of his suet balls. He gave some to a select few of his colleagues in the library each year as an early Christmas present, with a note on the gift tag, ‘‘Not For Human Consumption,’’ because as someone had jokingly said, they had more nutrition in them than supermarket sausages.

  The sparrows would find them first. He’d changed his mind recently about sparrows on learning that they were in decline and it cheered him to feel that they’d found a haven in his garden. The starlings would squabble over them. Not the favourites of his flock. Their sheen reminded him of petrol on water. Greedy, vicious in their intentions and unintelligent, they were the avian equivalent of bikers in black leather. (He wasn’t sure whether this idea was his own, or whether he’d found it somewhere, but when he’d used it in conversations, it had been appreciated, which was quite satisfying). In contrast, finches and tits seemed to him to justify their existence merely by their bright defiant colours.

  Washed and dressed, he made himself an espresso, set bread in the toaster, then decided to make porridge. While it rotated slowly in the microwave, he opened the blinds. He had neglected the feeders. The male robin was looking directly at him from the hydrangea. It might as well have been carrying a protest placard.

  ‘‘I know they’re empty, but I’m having my breakfast first,’’ Duncan said. ‘‘Would that be all right?’’ It was as much of a bully as the starlings, but it was a loner, that was the difference. He would order mealworms if he could ensure that only the robin got to them, but they were very expensive and a gang of starlings could devour an entire tray in minutes. He’d put some out once when he had workmen installing a new boiler. The chap in charge had watched it happening and compared them to piranhas.

  In an ideal world, he mused, birds could be trained to fetch seed for themselves. The shed door was never locked. Apart from the bird seed mix, nothing of value was stored there, their present gardener preferring to bring his own tools, but it was a useful repository for items that might yet be used; hairy balls of brown twine, ceramic bowls once faithfully filled each autumn with hyacinth bulbs, screws and nails in jam jars attached by their lids to the undersides of shelves, hessian potato sacks, rolls of netting for the long-abandoned strawberry bed, mousetraps (not the humane kind), wooden-handled hoes and forks not used since Mr MacKenzie’s day. A tired but somehow reassuring smell of dust hung in its air.

  The door wouldn’t open more than a few inches. Assuming it was to do with either the previous rain or the present hard frost, Duncan put his weight on it. When he heard sounds from inside, his first thought was that it might be a hedgehog or a cat. But what animal would close the door behind itself?

  He scraped the frost-encrusted side window and peered in. There was a body on the floor, face down, wrapped in sacking. Male, judging by the size of the shoes. He breathed on the glass again, making a wad from his handkerchief this time rather than using his leather glove.

  All Ryan wanted was to be left alone, but Crawfurd wouldn’t let him be. He’d been forced to sit up, then get up, his arms and legs totally numb, as if they were substitutes, his own taken away, and prosthetic parts attached to him in the night. Crawfurd half dragged, half carried him into the house. Now he was in an armchair, with a scratchy rug round his shoulders, another round his legs and feet, in front of an electric fire, his teeth vibrating against one another, and his throat feeling like it had been scoured with one of his mother’s sink cleaners. A cup took shape in the space just beneath his nose. Crawfurd told him to drink. He did as he was told. It was coffee, but there was alcohol in it.

  ‘‘How do you feel? Any better?’’

  Fuck this guy who kept waking him. He looked like a teacher, the kind who needed to be liked, the one nobody took seriously, not even the rest of the teachers.

  ‘‘You haven’t done any harm, except to yourself, so I suppose I should just turf you out onto the street …’’

  Ryan bent down, trying to find his trainers and socks, then decided against it. His head felt like it was going to break in two.

  ‘‘I don’t think you quite realise how stupid you’ve been. D’you know what the temperature is out there? Once your jacket’s finished drying, I’ll drive you home.’’

  ‘‘Fuck you.’’

  The old guy seemed to explode. ‘‘Don’t you dare use that language in this house!’’

  ‘‘Stop it. You’re doin’ my head in.’’

  The shouting stopped. When he next opened his eyes, Crawfurd was sitting across from him on the other side of the fireplace, with an expression on his face Ryan couldn’t interpret. It could have been hatred or disgust. Or maybe the opposite. This was, after all, the man his mother spoke about as if he was next in line to Santa Claus for sainthood.

  ‘‘Your mother must be worried to death about you.’’

  ‘‘She’s no’ worrying about me. She’s got a hell of a lot more to worry about than me.’’

  ‘‘What d’you mean?’’

  Ryan shook his head, and wished he hadn’t.

  ‘‘We knew she was ill, obviously. Is it … something serious?’’

  Was the guy being stupid on purpose?

  ‘‘I don’t want to intrude of course, but if it’s … something that a specialist might …’’

  Ryan looked at the room, seeing it properly for the first time. Rows of books, gilt-framed mirror above a marble fireplace, paintings, heavy dark green curtains with tasselled tie-backs, the B&O music centre and the stacked CD’s, the brass-studded tan leather of the chairs they were sitting in – it was a different planet. Nothing ugly, nothing cheap, nothing that would have looked at home in their living room less than a mile away. Three times a week his mum had come into this world and back to theirs. How had she stayed sane?

  ‘‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you,’’ Crawfurd said.

  ‘‘You’re no’ upsetting me. It’s having a fucking paedophile for a father that’s upsetting me.’’

  The word was out before he could stop it. He waited for Crawfurd to shout at him again. Nothing.

  Next moment, the door opened.

  ‘‘Duncan? I thought I heard voices.’’

  Crawfurd stood up.

  ‘‘Raised voices, Duncan. What is happening? Who is this person?’’

  Influencing the situation

  The Manse door was opened, by the daughter, the pretty blond girl. She was yawning, only belatedly remembering to cover her mouth.

  ‘‘Good morning. Is your father at home?’’ Lesley asked.

  ‘‘I’m sorry, I think he’s still asleep. There was an emergency last night. He didn’t get back till this morning …’’

  Clearly this was why the phone had been ringing out. Lesley stood her ground. Saying she would go and see, the girl showed her into a small book-lined room. Old weighty volumes stood neatly along the bottom shelves. Others more modern lay at odd angles or on top of one another. Facing the door was a small desk with a computer and a telephone. A poster of a black motorbike, with the word Honda in bold red letters, took up most of the other wall, but the oddest thing was a penguin, at least three feet high, hanging on a hook next to the window. It was made of black and white fur fabric, with spiky black hairs on the top of its head, a garish orange beak and over-large shiny eyes.

  The daughter came
back into the room. She had straitened her hair a little, and put a long jumper over her rather skimpy pyjama top.

  ‘‘I’m really sorry,’’ she said again. ‘‘If it’s not desperately urgent, could you leave a message, and he’ll phone you in a little while?’’

  The penguin seemed to Lesley to be staring at her, trying to read her mind. She turned her back on the glittery eyes.

  ‘‘Please tell him my friend’s husband was attacked last night. He’s now in Intensive Care in the District General.’’

  The girl wasn’t looking at her, more interested in the garden outside, where nothing at all was happening.

  ‘‘I’ll certainly pass that on. Thank you for …’’

  ‘‘The point is, she can’t stay in that house.’’

  The girl retreated into the hall. Lesley followed her.

  ‘‘I don’t make a habit of interfering in other people’s lives,’’ she said as the girl opened the front door to let her out. But her response was nothing more than a faint smile.

  Clearly the Reverend Smith didn’t want to be disturbed. And indeed, why should he do anything? Mrs Flaherty was not one of his flock. But with each homeward step Lesley felt more and more annoyed. Johnny Flaherty, perpetrator of unspeakable crimes, lay safe in a hospital bed being looked after, while Mary sat behind closed curtains, too scared to show her face. The police didn’t have the manpower to watch the house constantly, no surprise there, and she refused to go to either daughter. ‘‘Come to me then.’’ The words had formed in Lesley’s mind, but she hadn’t said them. There were all sorts of reasons why this was impossible.

  Once back at the house, she took out two shopping bags and placed various basic foodstuffs in them. As she walked past the end of the Crawfurd’s street, she told herself that she did not need help. A grown man who couldn’t ask a friend out for dinner without his mother’s permission, correction, on his mother’s instruction, was hardly likely to help in this kind of situation. If there were troublemakers outside the house, it was very likely that she would know them from school. She would know exactly who they were.