In His Wildest Dreams

by Marie Treanor

  Izzy came out from behind the stand with a book in time to see Louise staring at Morag as if she were a traitor.

  “You like him,” Louise accused.

  Morag shrugged. “I don’t dislike him. No reason to.”

  “Apart from the bodies,” Harry said humorously.

  “Apart from the bodies,” Morag agreed, just as Jack dumped four books in front of her with an air of triumph. “Good choices,” she approved.

  Izzy hastily grabbed another mystery from the shelf. “Got anything about the ghost?” she asked Morag on impulse.

  “Got two biographies of Mary, Queen of Scots.”

  “No, I mean the sightings of her ghost up at the big house.”

  Morag stood and emerged from behind the desk. “There’s a local-history pamphlet about the house. It doesn’t go out much, so it should be here… And it is,” she finished with satisfaction, whipping a soft-covered booklet out of an archive box. “Never read more than the first paragraph myself—dry as dust.”

  Izzy came and took it from her. It was called simply Ardknocken House, and had been poorly printed on cheap paper before the Second World War. She added it to her pile and walked toward the desk. Louise wandered outside to wait—and no doubt pick up whatever other gossip she could, especially about Fiona Marr.

  Shoving her own and Jack’s books into her backpack, Izzy gave Morag a quick smile and a “bye”.

  “Let me know how it goes,” Morag said, jerking her eyes briefly in the direction of Ardknocken House.

  “I will,” she promised.

  Harry was hovering by the door. “Last stop before home?” he asked brightly.

  “Just something for tea and that’s us.”

  “You and Jack should come and have tea with me one day,” he said casually, and Izzy glanced at him in quick surprise.

  “Thanks,” she said. “That’d be nice.”

  “Have you got chicken nuggets?” Jack asked suspiciously. “Or sausages?”

  “I can get them,” Harry said meekly, and Izzy laughed.

  “Oh, I know her,” Chrissy said in the office an hour after Glenn had spoken to Izzy.

  Chrissy sat in front of the computer gazing at Glenn’s outstretched hand and keying the number into her phone at the same time. “She’s an incomer like us. Got a wee boy just started school. Met her in the library one day. She really interested in this job?”

  “So she says. More interested than me, if the truth be known. Bit fast off the mark there, weren’t you, Chrissy?”

  “Took my chance,” Chrissy said brazenly. “This is a big house, and it can too easily turn into a big shitehole. We’re all busy, and you guys won’t even notice the muck and the mess. And I am not turning myself into a domestic drudge for lazy male chauvinist bastards like you.”

  He had to admit she had a point. “Aye, fair enough,” he allowed, turning away and heading for the door. Once there, he paused. “What did you mean, is she really interested? Any reason she wouldn’t be?”

  “In a cleaning job?” Chrissy said, pressing keys on her phone. “Judging by the range of books she checked in and out of the library when I was there, it’s not her normal forte.”

  “What is her normal forte?”

  Chrissy shrugged, lifting the phone to her ear. “No idea, but definitely something more cerebral. Come to her interview and ask. Hello,” she said into the phone. “Is that Izzy? Oh good, this is Chrissy Lennox at Ardknocken House. I just got your number from Glenn—he said you were asking about the job.”

  Glenn went out and closed the door. As he released the handle, he had to resist the stupid urge to linger and listen to their discussion.

  Chapter Three

  Izzy dropped Jack off at the primary school the following morning—he left her with a happy wave and went bouncing inside with the other kids he’d known at nursery. There was a certain amount of relief as well as pride in him. Jack was doing okay. She’d done the right thing coming here. She was still doing the right thing. Most of all, Jack was happy.

  As she walked up the hill from the village to the main gates of Ardknocken House, her heart beat too fast. As if she was about to be interviewed for a responsible, highly paid position at the BBC instead of a few hours’ cleaning to keep the wolf from the door.

  The main gates stood open as they always had since Brody had moved in. Two men were scraping at the overgrown driveway with shovels and hard brushes. They paused at the sight of her, and one grinned. “All right, hen?” he said, making way for her. “Another two years, and we’ll have this looking lovely.”

  “Good luck,” she said and walked on. Behind her, she heard the two men arguing in obvious Glaswegian about the best method of proceeding. The shovels scraped some more.

  “What are you doing, you tube?” one of them yelled at the other. She walked faster, but as far as she could tell, the quarrel remained verbal.

  The old, dark grey stone of the house needed cleaning and, she suspected, repointing. But although it was one of those over-the-top, Victorian, fake Gothic piles, there was something rather beautiful about this house. Perhaps it was the proportions, or just the setting beneath the hills, which were just beginning to turn fantastic shades of brown and burnt orange as autumn fell on the Scottish Highlands.

  To one side of the house, a large, open garage displayed a white van and two cars—a big, beaten-up Land Rover type, and a small, if equally beaten-up Volkswagen. Izzy had seen them both in the village from time to time. She walked past the garage entrance and up to the front door, which bore a large, brass knocker in the shape of a particularly ugly gargoyle.

  Taking a deep breath, Izzy lifted it and rapped, trying to prepare herself for whoever opened the door.

  “Take a pepper spray in your bag,” Louise had advised, running into her at the library door this morning.

  Even the normally sensible Morag—although she’d demanded, “Where would she get a pepper spray round here?”—had added, “Just take a pepper pot. Jerk it in someone’s face, it has much the same effect.”

  “Oh for God’s sake, I’m going about a job, not a gangland convention!” Izzy had exclaimed. Even then, she’d felt slightly guilty because, in fact, she always carried a pepper spray in her bag. Not that she expected to use it now, but it was still there lurking at the bottom like old, almost-repairable tights in a laundry basket.

  The door swung open after only a few seconds, and the slightly punk, friendly figure of Chrissy Lennox grinned at her.

  “Hi there, come in!”

  Izzy followed her into a wide, spacious hall lined in beautiful old wood beneath a broad, wood-framed arch. A staircase on the left wound up to the upper floors. Several open doors on the right and one on the left promised lots of rooms, and beyond those a passage narrowed to another open door from where Izzy could hear hammering.

  “Putting some doors back on the kitchen cupboards.” Chrissy explained the noise apologetically. “They’ll be finished soon. Do you want to see the house first, and I can tell you what sort of work I’m thinking about, and then we can talk later in the office?”

  “Sounds good,” Izzy said, still looking around her. “It’s a lovely house, isn’t it?”

  “Better than it was,” Chrissy allowed. “Still needs a fortune spent on it, though. Glenn sank most of what he had into buying it—not much left over for renovation.”

  “How’s he going to carry on living here, then?”

  “Ah well, that’s the grand plan,” Chrissy said easily, waving her arm into the first room on the right. “Not sure exactly what they’re saying in the village, but I gather they’re imagining some kind of doss house for ex-cons.”

  Izzy gave her a quick, apologetic smile as she glanced into the big room which contained an armchair, a large, mahogany desk on which sat a computer, a printer and a mountain of paper, and a filing cabi
net. Under the bay window, which faced the sea, the broad sill had been covered in cushions.

  “Nobody’s dossing here,” Chrissy assured her. “This is my office.”

  “What do you do?” Izzy asked. “Manage the estate?”

  Chrissy grinned. “Sort of. I try and manage Glenn and the boys, keep track of who’s doing what and how much it’s bringing in. Try and get them orders, and gigs and stuff. We’re sort of a cooperative,” she explained. “Most of the guys you’ll meet here are ex-cons practising trades they learned either inside or out, and also teaching them to others who’re interested. Got a budding chef in the kitchen, a jewellery maker, three musicians, a joiner, a mechanic, an artist and a writer.”

  Izzy blinked. “Which is Glenn Brody?” she blurted.

  “Musician,” Chrissy said. “In fact, he got a degree in music while he was in prison. I’ll take you down to see him later—they’ve got a sound-proofed studio set up in the basement.”

  Izzy closed her mouth, which was in danger of swallowing flies, and followed Chrissy along to the next room, where a curtain of dangling silver jewellery hung up on string half-hid the machinery and the men behind it.

  “All right,” someone called above the noise of metal cutters.

  “This is Izzy!” Chrissy yelled, then drew her out again and shut the door. “We usually keep this one shut for the noise, but most of these guys prefer their doors open for obvious reasons. Most of them will even leave the house doors open for preference, but it makes the place damned cold, so I usually shut those again. You’ll find most of the windows open too. Oh, and bedroom doors upstairs—you might want to knock, even when the doors are open. Don’t want an eyeful of these guys after your breakfast.”

  “You’d want me to clean the bedrooms too?” Izzy said with some dismay, although until she’d got here, she’d assumed that would be the case.

  “Optional,” Chrissy said, glancing at her. “Their option. If they want total privacy to live in their own grime, fair enough. Otherwise, yes, a quick hoover and dust mostly. They’ll all make their own beds, deal with their own laundry. This is the dining room. It gets used all hours of the day and night.”

  It was a big, old-fashioned dining room of the kind that lent itself to comedy sketches, shouting from one end of the table to the other. But there was carpet on the floor, the walls were half-panelled in wood, with warm, sunshine orange paint above it. Light flooded through the windows, filtered only by open curtains. There could not, surely, have been a greater contrast with a prison canteen.

  Chrissy showed her the massive kitchen, the outhouses where a young man was making furniture and an older one was repairing car engines, and then took her back into the house and upstairs to see an art room and a rather beautiful, old-fashioned library, where one man seemed to be helping two others to write letters. As always, Chrissy introduced Izzy to everyone and everyone to Izzy, although by this time, she couldn’t retain all their names.

  Izzy lingered, looking around her at the dark wood shelves, inhaling the distinctive smell of old books. You didn’t get that from Morag’s library, for though the village building was old, the vast majority of the books were new. These in Ardknocken House looked as if they’d come with the property. Everything was just a little musty, and this room was darker than most she’d yet seen, due to the windows facing north; and yet she liked it. She wanted to stay here. Despite the fact that the current occupants were waiting patiently for her to go.

  Hastily, she turned and followed Chrissy outside. “Lovely room,” she said, rather lamely.

  Chrissy cast her a comical grimace over one shoulder. “That’s our haunted room, you know. But I confess I like it too.”

  Izzy lifted one joking eyebrow. “Then you’ve never seen the notorious shade of Mary Stuart?”

  “Not a peep,” Chrissy said cheerfully. “I suspect she was invented to try and draw tourists here, but it didn’t work.” She pointed to the other doorways as they walked along the hallway, making for the next flight of stairs. “These two rooms are bedrooms, and up here are more bedrooms. That’s mine,” she said, pointing at the first on the left as they climbed the stairs, “and the one at the end is Glenn’s. There’s a bathroom on each floor, plus a few of the bedrooms have en suites.” She gave a lopsided grin of understanding. “Don’t worry. They’re untidy bastards, most of them, but they’re pretty much toilet trained, and they appreciate what they’ve got here.”

  Izzy flushed slightly, ashamed of showing her fastidious distaste for cleaning the toilets of male ex-cons. To cover it, she looked upward to the huge glass window, through which she could see sky.

  “I thought there’d be attics up there.”

  “There are, over part of the house. There’s also a private roof garden. Get Glenn to show you it sometime. You can only get up through his room or from the attics which are in too poor condition to use right now. You get in through that half-hidden door in the far wall. So what do you think, Izzy? Could you bear it?”

  Izzy drew in a thoughtful breath, trying not to look at the open door to Glenn Brody’s room. “It’s a big house with a lot of work. I could only be here from about nine thirty to two thirty. And if Jack’s sick, I can’t call on anyone else to look after him.”

  Well, she wouldn’t. Although Louise would be happy to help, Izzy could never bring herself to ask. It didn’t seem right—wouldn’t have been even if Louise didn’t have a business to run plus her elderly parents to care for. Louise’s life was difficult enough.

  “And then there are school holidays,” she said ruefully.

  Chrissy considered. “Well… We could pay you for the hours you do work. Or you can bring Jack with you in holidays.”

  Izzy dropped her gaze. An ideal offer from almost any other employer.

  “Ah. Of course you have reservations,” Chrissy said without expression, making her way back downstairs again. “I understand. But for what it’s worth, he wouldn’t be contaminated by any more than occasional bad language. We don’t talk, commit or plan crime here. No one talks about prison. And we have no violent criminals, apart from—”

  Apart from Glenn Brody himself. She didn’t need to say the words.

  “Haven’t shown you the music studio, have I?” Chrissy said brightly. “Let me put the kettle on, and I’ll take you down while it boils.”

  Izzy’s heart dived into her stomach. She couldn’t tell if she was appalled at the prospect of seeing Brody, or interested in observing him in this new environment. A musician? What the devil did he play? Drums? She supposed that might dissipate any lingering aggression from his past or present nature.

  As soon as Chrissy opened the door under the staircase, Izzy could hear the faint strains of indistinguishable music drifting upward. When she followed Chrissy downstairs, bass rhythms vibrated through the wood to her feet.

  At the foot of the steps, Chrissy opened another padded door, and Izzy was struck by a wall of music. Neither the raucous rock nor badly played classical she’d half expected, but vital, energetic jazz.

  She closed the door firmly behind her before turning to see the musicians. A man on drums, one on saxophone, and Glenn Brody on keyboards, which must have been what was giving the music its fuller sound.

  He stood behind the keyboard, wearing jeans and a T-shirt, his scarred hands flying across the keys with all the speed, elegance and sensitivity she’d guessed at when she’d written her number on one of them. Blue veins and sinew stood out on the backs and in his forearms. Above the elbow, his biceps bulged. A hint of perspiration at his chest dampened his T-shirt.

  Butterflies lunged in her stomach, dancing and spinning lower. She’d been right when she’d first glimpsed him. His body was fit and strong and damned hot in those close-fitting jeans and T-shirt.

  Hastily, she lifted her gaze to his face, but if he’d seen them come in, his concentration now was all on t
he music. Unobserved, her gaze clung. Something seemed different about him here. He looked—younger, more at ease. Even the scar below his cheek looked less threatening. She had the odd notion that while he played, he was the man he might have been without the wrong turning that had led him to crime and prison.

  Without warning, his gaze flickered to Chrissy and to Izzy, then back to the keyboard, where it remained until the song came to a stop and he turned to the other two musicians with a thumbs-up that made them grin.

  “Sounding good,” Chrissy approved, and to Izzy, “They’re going to play a beer festival in Edinburgh. Got a minute, Glenn?”

  Brody nodded but went over to speak to the saxophonist. Izzy looked around her at the array of recording equipment, computers and amplifiers until Chrissy tugged at her arm and they went back upstairs to Chrissy’s office. Halfway there, she realized what it was she’d glimpsed in Brody’s face as he played. Happiness. Music made him happy.

  “Have a seat,” Chrissy invited, and while she made coffee, Izzy sat in the chair on the visitor’s side of the desk and gazed out at the front of the house. An overgrown, partially cleared terrace gave way to thoroughly overgrown grass that had perhaps once been a lawn. Through the trees, you could just make out the village at the foot of the hill, and the wideness of the sea beyond.

  Chrissy sat and pushed one steaming mug across the desk to Izzy. “There’s no point in me asking the old clichéd interview question, ‘Why do you want this job?’ I’ll just say, why are you even considering it?”

  “I need the money,” Izzy said frankly. “And I need flexible working hours.”

  Chrissy’s sharp eyes weren’t unfriendly, but they didn’t miss much either. “What do you normally do? For a living.”

  “Freelance stuff mostly. Research, a bit of writing. But I’ve been out of the mainstream too long—work’s drying up a bit, and I’ve nothing definite before the New Year.”

  “Ardknocken not a bit out of the way for that line of work?” Chrissy asked.