The Child Garden

by Catriona McPherson

  “It all helps, Gloria,” she told me. “Keep everyone out and no one will ever know.”

  “Can you shine that torch out the side window?” I asked Stig. I was pretty sure we had missed it, so I turned carefully, back and forth, back and forth, feeling the wheels slip in the mud when I went too far. Once we were on our way back again he leaned across me and clicked on the torch, but the reflection made it useless.

  “You’ll have to wind it down,” he said. “And you’ll get drenched.”

  “Not so bad under the trees, really.” My throat was tight, filled with the smell of his body, he was that close. Stig of the Dump in primary seven had smelled of Palmolive soap and the earth that got stuck to his shoes and ground into the knees of his grey school trousers every playtime. This man smelled of aftershave and fabric softener.

  “She won’t be there,” he said again. “This’ll be just like Starbucks.”

  He was trying to convince himself, it sounded like, and so I faced him with the contradiction.

  “If you’re so sure, why did you come?”

  Before he could answer, there was a sudden flash in the trees off to our left. I stopped and he played the beam around to find it again, the glittering spangled light of a leaded window.

  “No sign of her car,” said Stig, his voice pitched higher than usual.

  “Switch off and look,” I told him, thinking surely this April Cowan would keep a light on, even her phone just, and not stay in a crypt at night in a storm, waiting. But when he killed the torch and I killed the headlights, we were wrapped in instant inky blackness.

  “She’s not there,” he said. “I told you.”

  “But we’ve come this far, so why not check?”

  It was only twenty yards, but getting there was tricky. Stig leapt over the ditch, taking the torch, and then turned and shone it back to me. I picked my way down the steep side, sliding a little, then stepped over the water and clambered up again. He put his hand out and hauled me, gripping me hard just below the elbow like for an eightsome reel. Then we turned. For a wonder, there were no fallen trees in our way; most of the woods at the home were so neglected the trees leaned into each other like drunks, and everywhere you turned trunks lay across your path, roots sticking up in the air. Some of them have been there so long, they’ve rerooted where they fell and become misshapen sideways trees, grotesque somehow but pitiful too.

  All Stig and I had to deal with were the mossy lumps, knee high, that were sometimes soft tussocks and sometimes had rocks under them. So although they rose up like stepping stones, we ignored them and splashed through the boggy dips in between.

  “Jesus, it’s freezing,” he said. “No wonder April’s car’s nowhere to be seen. Who’d come this way?”

  “The proper path’s just as bad,” I told him. “And longer.”

  We were there. A low stone wall with railings above it circled the crypt and we followed it round to the gate on the far side. Stig trained the torch on the gate lock and drew in a breath. The padlock and chain were as rusted as the railings, but quite clearly in the torchlight we could see a little shiny lozenge shape—the raw place where wire cutters had snipped the chain. And recently too.

  “April?” Stig shouted. “Are you in there?”

  The path, no more than ten feet from the gate to the door, was paved in mossy slabs. I remembered it from summer walks here. Remembered thinking that they looked like gravestones, and Miss Drumm saying they probably were. Old ones turned face-down and put to use.

  “April?” Stig shouted again and banged on the door. He handed me the torch and grabbed the tarnished doorknob. “You wait here,” he said.

  “I’m a witness,” I told him. Then I raised my voice. “April?” I called. “My name’s Gloria. I came along to keep Stig company. I hope that’s okay.”

  Then we both listened. The rain hissed in the high branches and dripped miserably off the low branches, but otherwise there was silence.

  “Might as well check,” I said.

  He tried the door. It opened about a foot with a grating squeal before it grounded out on the stone floor inside. Stig grabbed the handle harder and tried to lift it clear but it wouldn’t budge, so he turned sideways and squeezed into the gap, breathing in and wriggling his shoulders until he was through. I followed. It was touch and go if I would fit, but the thought of how embarrassing it would be helped me ignore the pain of the door latch scraping across my front and the way the frame bruised my vertebrae as I forced myself past it.

  “Oof,” I couldn’t help saying when I got inside.

  “I told you!” said Stig, playing the torch around. It was about twelve feet across maybe, just that one window we had seen, and nowhere for someone to hide. Nothing in there at all except for a stone shelf that ran round the wall and an alcove at the far side. The place was absolutely empty, just dust and cobwebs.

  “Jeez. Memories,” Stig said. “We put beanbags in here, and those Indian cotton things.” He moved forward. “Better than wooden benches any day, but it looks terrible now they’re out too.”

  “Wait,” I said, putting an arm out to stop him going in. “Shine the torch on the floor, see if there’s footprints. Someone cut that wire. Someone’s at least been here.”

  He trained the torchlight downwards and I saw that it was shimmering a little as if his hand was unsteady.

  “Look,” he said.

  There were footprints. The dust around the edges of the room was so thick that the mortar lines between the stone flags appeared soft, the way the garden softened under the first thin fall of snow. In the middle though, footprints criss-crossed, leading away from the door to the far side in front of the alcove. There they were muddled and scraped about, and at one spot the floor was completely clear. A square with no dust at all.

  I walked over and looked down at it. Stig followed me, the torchlight sending a monstrous shadow dancing on the wall.

  “Why would she clean off that one slab and leave footprints everywhere else?” he said.

  “She didn’t,” I answered. “I think the dust slid off when the stone tilted.” I crouched down, feeling along the edges.

  “Tilted?” said Stig. “Like a trap door? Glo, this place is freaking me out. Let’s get ou—”

  I had found the spring, or the latch or whatever it was, and the clean stone slab lifted at one end. I grabbed it and pulled until the slab stood up like a gravestone. I don’t know what I had been expecting: a staircase, a tunnel, treasure? Or maybe deep down inside I knew what I was about to see. And there it was.

  Nicky!

  “Oh Jesus fuck,” said Stig behind me. A brutal, needless pair of words, so wrong to put them together that way. But looking into the hole, I nearly echoed them.

  “Is that April Cowan?” I whispered.

  “Oh Jesus fucking Christ,” said Stig, and I knew from the way his voice had softened and grown guttural that he was almost retching. “It’s been so long. It’s—But I think so.”

  I reached down and pulled the thick brown hair away from her face.

  “Yes, yes, that’s April. Jesus,” he said. “Oh Christ.”

  She was cold, but it hadn’t been long. I brushed her cheek, moving her hair, and it was still soft to the touch. Her eyes were half open and still shining. The knife was shining too. Blood had poured over the handle and coated her hands, drying in the creases of her knuckles and around her fingernails, but its stubby little blade was clean, wiped clean when she’d pulled it out of the long gaping gashes on both her arms. I remembered a nurse at the home telling me one time that someone crying out for help slashes sideways, but if they mean it they open the veins from wrist to elbow.

  I heard electronic bleeps from behind me and saw a new bluish light added to the torch beam.

  “What are you doing?” I shouted, standing, turning, and grabbing Stig’s arm all in one m
ovement.

  “I’m calling the police,” he said.

  Nicky!

  “No. Don’t.”

  “Gloria, what are you talking about. We’ve got to.”

  “There’s no signal,” I said. “You won’t get a signal until you’re back on the road at Crocketford. Let’s go. And use my landline.”

  “What are you doing?” said Stig. I had pulled my coat sleeve down and I wiped it over her hair where I had touched. Then I pushed the stone until it was closed again and wiped my fingerprints away. “Gloria? Why are you doing that?”

  “Ssh,” I told him. I pulled the scarf from round my neck and, walking backwards towards the door, pushing Stig along behind me, I swished it over the floor, wiping all the footprints, his, mine, and the ones we had found. Mixing them all up into a churned mess of dust. He squeezed out through the door first. I followed, took the torch, and ran it all up and down the opening looking for fibres. But my anorak was shiny and Stig was so wet that nothing would have come off him. I pulled the door closed, surprised I was strong enough to shift the swollen wood, then I polished the handle.

  “What about them?” said Stig, pointing to our muddy prints on the gravestone path.

  “It’s going to rain all night,” I told him. “Let’s go.”

  “Back to yours and call the cops?” he said. “Only why did you wipe—”

  “We need to talk,” I said.

  The silence lasted a long time. I thought it was because I had shocked him. But then he spoke again.

  “Yes, we do,” he said. “I haven’t been completely straight, Gloria. There’s something you should know.”

  Four

  “I didn’t do it.”

  That was the first thing he said when we were back in the car, crawling along the track to the gap in the fence. I would have driven like a bat out of hell if I could have, but my limbs had turned leaden on me, my feet sludgy on the pedals and my arms so heavy I thought they might drop from the steering wheel and just lie in my lap like sandbags.

  “So if you’re protecting me for some mad reason, you don’t have to. I didn’t do that. I could never … ”

  I believed him. I knew without a flicker of doubt, right from the off that Stig Tarrant hadn’t killed April Cowan. It wasn’t sentiment. It wasn’t old times. It was the way he had called out her name, so hopeful, and the way he had said she wasn’t there, so torn between relief and disappointment, and the way he had said those terrible words: Oh Jesus fuck. He wasn’t acting.

  I can smell insincerity at fifty paces. I can hear the lie under the kind word every time. Lynne at work calls it a certain kind of detector, and though I don’t like the sound of having one of them inside me, I suppose it’s true. One of the orderlies is always saying Nicky’s a lovely boy and I’m a lucky mummy or he’s a lucky boy and I’m lovely mummy, and she might as well shout at the top of her lungs that she despises me and Nicky gives her the creeps. But then there’s this old Irish orderly, Donna, and she says, “Ah, the poor soul, but he’s still your blessing.” And she means every word.

  “I know you didn’t,” I said to Stig. “She did it herself.”

  “But I mean I didn’t drive her to it,” Stig said. “I don’t know why she picked on me and set me up for this. I don’t understand anything that’s happening.”

  “I know.”

  “So why aren’t we dialling 999?”

  “Listen,” I said, “and I’ll tell you.”

  Back in the kitchen the Rayburn was teetering. When the wind gets up in the north it sometimes just snuffs it out, and then Rough House is a miserable place to be. I usually light a fire in the living room if it looks likely, but tonight I didn’t have the energy to strike a match, never mind lay the paper and twigs and nurse it. The chimney’s as bad as the stove when the wind blows.

  “Tea?” I said.

  “Whisky?” said Stig. I went through to the living room to get the bottle from the press. When I got back he had dragged two chairs from the table, set them close to the oven, and opened the door.

  “I know it’ll cool your hot water, but needs must.” His teeth were chattering.

  I turned and left again, went upstairs to my bedroom, got a tee-shirt and a sweat suit—a plain one in pale grey with no sparkles—thick socks and a fleece hat.

  “Here,” I said, when I got back to the kitchen again. “Strip off and get into these. I’m going to change too. Shout when you’re ready.”

  I managed not to laugh at the sight of him, bundled in my clothes with the hat flaps pulled over his ears. I just sat down beside him, kicked off my slippers, and put my feet on Walter Scott’s back. He thumped his tail once but didn’t open his eyes.

  “Think my size nines would flatten him?” said Stig, his voice sounding rough from a big swallow of whisky.

  “Not Walter,” I said. “Sometimes at night he burrows under me so I’m right on top of him, and he stays there till morning.”

  I blushed then, but who knows if it was from admitting I slept with a dog, alluding to my figure, or just the whisky.

  “Okay,” I said. Stig wouldn’t know I was blushing. Only the lamps were on, not the big light, and the green distemper makes everyone look like a vampire. “Why I live here. It’s not my house. It belongs to a friend who’s not in good enough health to stay here alone anymore. So I’m long-term house-sitting.”

  “Glo,” he said. “That’s all very—We’ve got more impor—”

  “Wait,” I said. “Just listen. It’s Nicky.”

  Nicky! I thought when I swerved to avoid Stig on the road. I can’t have a car crash because who’ll be there for Nicky?

  Nicky! I thought when the knock came at the door. I can’t be attacked in my home by a crazed madman because Nicky needs me.

  And crouching in the huttie looking down at the curled shell of April Cowan’s body, my only thought was Nicky!

  “My son, Nicky, lives at the home,” I said. “I go every night after work. I’ve never missed a day in ten years and if they were to close it off—for an investigation—and I couldn’t go … Well, it maybe doesn’t make much sense now, but that’s why I wiped the prints.”

  “What’s wrong with him?” said Stig.

  “That’s why I wiped the prints,” I said again, ignoring the question. Nothing is wrong with Nicky. “For Nicky. Because never mind an investigation. They might have to close the home.”

  “They wouldn’t.”

  “I can’t chance it.”

  “We can’t just leave her there!” said Stig. “We have to phone and tell someone. People will be worried about her. Her family.”

  “If they close the home … ”

  “They won’t. Things happen, Gloria. Bad things happen. People die. Very unhappy people kill themselves. There’s a pub in Edinburgh where a girl was murdered and it’s still open. It’s only a pub and that was a murder. They won’t close a care home.”

  “But what if someone who works there is mixed up in it somehow? If there’s a scandal and they lose their license?”

  “They won’t,” he said again.

  “How can you say that!” I said. “It happened before. It happened when the home was a school. It happened at Eden.”

  “Exactly,” said Stig and drained his glass. “What happened tonight is nothing to do with the home. What happened here tonight started with Eden.”

  “You know that for a fact?”

  He nodded.

  “Okay,” I said. “Phone them.”

  But he shook his head and laughed very softly.

  “No,” he said. “Now it’s my turn.”

  Dorothy had been sitting on the floor looking up at us and now she finally made her choice. She sprang up into Stig’s lap, kneaded the grey sweatpants for a moment and then curled into a ball, purring. He stroked her back in slow gentle movemen
ts. I noticed because he had patted Walter Scott before and usually someone who knows how to pat a dog is too rough with a cat, ruffling them up and confusing them. Stig smoothed Dorothy’s fur from just behind her head all the way to the tip of her tail, and she uncurled and stretched along the length of his legs to let him make a proper job of it.

  “What is it you need to say?” I asked. But he just kept stroking the cat, not looking at me. His head was sunk down onto his chest. The cat purring, the aftershock, the whisky. His breathing sounded halfway to snores, but then some heavy men do breathe that way.

  I tried again.

  “Earlier you said you knew April was talking about Moped. Was that because she said more then you’ve told me? Because just from what you’ve told me, it could have been anything.”

  He roused himself at last. “You’re sharp,” he said. “You always were even though you never looked it.” He was staring down into his empty glass, but he didn’t reach out to the bottle for more. “I would have guessed if she’d said even less,” he went on quietly. “It was my first thought when the first message came. Before I even read it. I saw April Cowan’s name and thought, Moped! Just like that.

  “One time years ago I passed another girl from Eden in the street in Glasgow. Rain Irving. I recognised her and I thought, Moped! And she recognised me and thought the same. Her lips moved, saying his name. I bet that sounds crazy.”

  “Not to me.” It sounded like my life. “Except that a tragic accident years ago … you’d think it would have faded by now.”

  “It would have,” Stig said. He stroked Dorothy. “It wasn’t a tragic accident,” he said at last, and the low light, the cat, and the whisky made the words seem gentle. I nodded when I heard them.

  “Is that what you needed to say?”

  “Not really,” said Stig, “but we can start there. Have some more whisky. I feel as if once I start talking, I’ll never stop.”