The Child Garden

by Catriona McPherson

  “You’re still on the first sheet?” he said, giving me a puzzled look. I could tell from the way the pad of paper was ruffled into little seersucker shapes, the way it gets when someone leans hard with a biro, that he had filled a good many pages.

  “What about Miss Naismith?” I said. “She should have an entry. What was her first name? And there must have been someone else. Secretary, janitor? Someone.”

  “No idea what Naismith’s first name was,” said Stig. “And no, no one else. It was sort of on a shoestring. A cleaner used to come, but nobody else lived there.”

  “How late did the cleaner work? Did she have a key to the gate?”

  “Couldn’t say,” said Stig. His voice was low and gruff. Was I getting near something he didn’t want to tell me? Were there things he didn’t want to tell me? I looked at the list again. There must be.

  I told him I would take the notes to bed with me later, after I’d been to the huttie again. Told him that was where I did important reading because that was where I concentrated best. He believed me.

  “Takes all kinds, Glo,” he said. “If I tried to read in bed I’d be asleep in seconds. Maybe not tonight, mind you.”

  “Try it,” I said. “I’ve got most things. Except Westerns.”

  “The last book I read was at school,” he told me.

  “Nick Hornby,” I said, calling over my shoulder as I walked along to the living room to the big bookcase. “High Fidelity.”

  “I’ve seen it.”

  “About a Boy then.”

  “That was a girl’s film. Carol tried to make me, but I got out of it.”

  “It was a boy’s film, actually,” I said. “And it’s a boy’s book too.” I came back to the kitchen and put it in his hands. “Don’t turn the pages back. Use a bookmark. And I’ll go to the chemist tomorrow and get you some sleeping tablets. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  This was either the bravest thing I had ever done or the worst idea of my life, and I would never have dared to go through with it if it had been a night like the one before, black as pitch and freezing cold with lashing rain. But tonight was dry with a thin fresh wind and a good bit of light from a three-quarter moon.

  Anyway, I had to. When I stopped Stig from phoning 999 it was like jumping off a cliff. A split-second decision and no way back. Now, if the police broke into April’s flat and found a note casting suspicion on Stig, and then they found he’d disappeared, they’d be looking for him so hard it would be like a manhunt. I pictured them in Rough House opening doors and swiping at curtains with their truncheons. And even though I knew that was nonsense, once the idea had grabbed me, it wouldn’t let go. There would be traces of him everywhere. If they asked the residents, Miss Drumm would say I was on edge. If they looked in my byre, they’d find his car. If they checked to see if I was connected to Eden …

  I shook the thought away and tried instead to concentrate on April.

  Finally she would be taken care of, taken somewhere safe, given somewhere proper to lie down instead of staying curled in that hole. Her poor arms would be bathed, her eyes closed, and she’d be at peace. And as long as she lived alone, the other half of the plan would work too. Stig said she was divorced, so chances were she did.

  Stig had said a lot of things. The names on his list danced in front of my eyes again, and once again I forced the thoughts away.

  Did I have the courage to look at her, touch her, check her pockets?

  I pulled off the lane in the same spot as the night before, stepped out of the car, and played the torch around. Our footprints were gone in all the rain, as I’d said they would be, and there was no sign of any new disturbance. I slipped through the gate again and up the path to the door.

  I wasn’t as strong as Stig, and I had to haul on it and shove it hard with my shoulder to budge it. Already I was sniffing, couldn’t help it, even as I tried to tell myself that it was almost cold enough for frost out here and she’d been there only a day. There would be no smell yet. There was no smell except earth and leaf mould, that mushroomy pungent smell of Milharay in a wet winter. Once the door was open, the dust and damp of a cold, closed building was mixed in there too but there was nothing stronger, and that made it easier for me to squeeze through the gap and into the deeper darkness, where the torch made shadows leap and shudder all around. It took every scrap of my nerve to steady the beam and train it on the far side of the floor where the tilting slab lay.

  We hadn’t made as good a job as I’d thought of wiping away the evidence of our visit; the edges of the slab were smudged and there was a smear on the floor in front of it too.

  A smear of what? I wondered, crouching down and peering at it in the torch light. It could have been coffee or ketchup just from the look, but there was no question here, in this place. The only puzzle was how.

  I’m not a fanciful woman. I couldn’t afford to be, living all alone in that isolated house, with the stone outside and Miss Drumm’s stories ringing in my ears. I’d read Wilkie Collins, Edgar Allen Poe, and Thomas Harris and go to bed quite happily in the dark to dream of old friends and exams, just like everyone. But at that moment, crouching there, all I could think was that those smudges were April’s fingerprints from where she’d grabbed the slab and pushed it open. And that smear was a trail of her blood from when she’d hauled herself out or perhaps from where she had slithered back in again.

  “Nicky, Nicky, Nicky, Nicky,” I said to myself as I set the torch down and took a firm grip. When the slab shifted, I grabbed it and set it upon its edge. Then I held my breath, took the torch, and shone it down into the hole.

  She was gone. Nothing left of her except a small rusty stain.

  I took the moment needed to kick the slab back down again, but I didn’t bother with the door. I just squeezed through and left it open. The raw edge of the cut chain would attract attention soon enough anyway, I told myself. But really, I just wanted out of there. As far away as I could get, as soon as I could get there.

  Twelve

  “That was quick,” said Stig.

  I shrugged out of my coat, letting it fall onto the floor behind me, and then dropped into a chair. “She’s not there.”

  “Who’s not where?” said Stig. Then he put both hands up to the back of his head as if to stop it hurting.

  “Maybe the police—” he began.

  But I shook my head. “No chance. There was no tape, no signs up, nothing to show there’s been a stretcher or medics. It looked exactly the same, except she was gone.”

  “Why would someone move her? And keep it quiet?”

  I had a head start on him from the drive back, and I was almost calm as I laid it out to him. “I can only think of one reason someone would move a body,” I said. “And it explains why we couldn’t find the car she came in too. And why you’re involved.”

  Stig opened his mouth to speak, but after a frozen silent moment he slumped back. “Yeah,” he said. “There’s no such thing as being framed for a suicide, is there? Someone—”

  “Say it.”

  “Someone murdered her.”

  “At least now you don’t need to go to her flat,” Stig said, and his words shoved the new truth into my head

  “Oh yes, I do,” I said. “And tonight too.”

  “At this time? Why?”

  “He moved her because it didn’t work. You didn’t call it in, and then even trying to get the cops prowling around here looking for you didn’t get her discovered. So he’s moved her somewhere she’ll be found. And where do you think would that be?”

  Her address was on King Street, right in the centre of Glasgow, in the Merchant City, which was good. There’d be lots of bustle even on a Tuesday night, but it was two hours hard driving to get there. An hour on the empty twisting roads out of Galloway up as far as Ayr, threading along the valleys beside the rivers that had made them, over
stone bridges meant for carts, through pine woods planted for profit not beauty, and growing so close on either side of the road that they blotted out every gleam of moonlight and sucked at the headlamp light too, swallowing it, leaving me blind at every corner, so that I pushed the car into blackness praying—Nicky!—not to meet someone pushing through the blackness the other way.

  And the second hour was down out of the hills, onto the plain, into the traffic like a fish joining its shoal, swept up in the surge. Trying at first to ignore the other cars as they wove in and out around me, then speeding up, keeping pace, hanging onto the taillights ahead, not a fish anymore; more like one of those bulls in the stampede that doesn’t even need to touch its hooves to the dusty ground, letting the herd carry me.

  Then after the suburbs and city lights, eventually, at getting on for ten o’clock, I turned onto King Street and noticed nothing wrong, not at first anyway. I was crawling along, peering at the shop fronts and the fanlights above the tenement doors, searching for numbers and not looking beyond the lights of the car in front of me until the flashes of red and blue were sweeping across my face, bathing everything warm and then cold. Then finally I flicked a glance along the street and braked hard. The car behind me hit its horn, but what was in front of me was worse than an angry driver. Six police, in their bright bulky jackets, turned and stared to see who was tooting.

  Carefully, I pulled into a parking space outside a little corner shop, lit up and welcoming, still with its trays of fruit outside on the astro-turfed tables. The shopkeeper was in the doorway, holding up his phone to the cops, filming them. I looked at the number in peeling gold on the window above him and counted forward to where the police were clustered around, their cars double-parked, a van with its doors open and the gleam of metal machines inside, bathed red then blue then red again.

  The knock on the window was soft, but it still shot me hard against my seat belt.

  “Whoa, whoa!” I saw the shopkeeper mouth it even before I rolled the window down. “Sorry, sorry,” he was still saying, once I could hear him. “Are you okay?”

  I stared at him, then back at the colours, the red and blue lights, the yellow jackets, and the fierce white of the high-sided van.

  “I’m having a better night than some people,” I managed to say. “I’m just trying to work out whether to carry on or go round another way.”

  “The road’s open,” he said, nodding.

  It was down to one lane, though, between the double-parked cars and the open white van. Drivers were taking turns, slow and steady under the gaze of all those police. And they were gazing too. Cop habit, I suppose, unbreakable. Every car that drove by got a flick of a glance at the licence plate and another flick at the driver.

  “Pretty disrespectful, though,” I said. “That’s a mortuary van, isn’t it?”

  He stopped smiling then. Must have thought I was calling him a gawper.

  “I think I’ll go round,” I said, rolling up the window, hoping he wouldn’t remember me because I’d insulted him, wouldn’t mention me when the door-to-door started.

  Just then, something caught his attention and he hurried away. They were bringing the stretcher out. A green cloth mummy strapped to a board, the wheels dropping down when they got to level ground and then folding up again as they shoved April Cowan into the back of the van and slammed the door.

  I drove in a trance with the herd, in a deeper trance down through the dark folded hills, and pulled in at home after midnight, cold, crabbed into the shape of seat and steering wheel, my head as numb as my toes.

  Walter was awake. I could hear him shuffling around on the other side of the door waiting for me to open it. Stig was still up too. I let myself in and saw the back of his head in the light of one lamp, his chair still drawn up close to the open stove.

  “We were right,” I said quietly.

  “I know,” said Stig without turning. “It was on the news. They know she didn’t die where they found her. They’re looking for me.”

  I stood there, one hand on the kitchen door handle, letting all the heat out into the scullery. My excuse, if he’d confronted me, would have been that Walter was out in the yard. The truth, if I’d asked myself, was that a bit of me didn’t want to put my keys down and step away from the door.

  Stig of the Dump! I had thought when I saw him at my door. I knew what kind of sandwiches he liked best and what kind he’d rather go hungry than eat. I knew he couldn’t spell except and exact and couldn’t draw horses, and I knew he loved his little brother and his brother loved him back.

  But whoever killed April Cowan had been to school too, gobbling Marmite and spitting out egg, talking about brothers and sisters, and asking the little girl at the next desk to do the hooves and hocks for payment in bubblegum.

  “What did the news say?” I asked the back of his head.

  “Named her, said she was dead under suspicious circumstances; named me, warned people not to approach.”

  “She was in the flat. I saw the police and the mortuary van, saw them taking her away.”

  “Did they see you?” said Stig.

  I thought of them turning to look when the horn behind me blared, thought of the shopkeeper filming with his phone, and still told him no.

  “Where are my car keys, Glo?” he said, still without turning. His voice was dull and empty. “This has gone far enough. I’ll keep your name out of it somehow.”

  “Where are the cats?” I said as Walter lumbered back in again. I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  “Here,” said Stig, and I stepped closer to look. Both house cats, Dorothy and William, were crammed onto his lap and he had his hands laced together, making a sling out of his arms, to keep them from falling. They were deeply asleep, heads lolling.

  “How long have you been sitting there?”

  “Since I switched off the eleven o’clock news. My shoulders are killing me.”

  I lifted one cat and then the other, dropping them down into the other chair.

  “Mitchell Best, Nathan and Edmund McAllister, and April Cowan are in the clear,” I said. “And you are too.”

  I thought he would look up at me, but he bowed his head even lower.

  “That still leaves eight,” I went on. “Do you really think if you turn yourself in, the Castle Douglas cops are going to track down eight more people before they start the paperwork?”

  Stig laughed. “I’m fu—I’m stuffed,” he said.

  “No,” I answered, thinking if I was going to do this, I’d better toughen up quick. “You were right the first time. Okay. I’ll start in the morning. I’ll start with Duggie Morrison because he’s easy to find, but I’ll track them all down and I’ll … ”

  “Unfuck me?”

  I actually laughed. He was ruder than anyone I’d ever liked before, but I laughed because it was funny.

  Thirteen

  Wednesday

  Duggie Morrison was more than easy to find. He was hard to avoid. Morrison’s Carpets and Flooring, Morrison’s for Beds, and Morrison’s Kitchen and Bathroom spread out along the top end of Castle Douglas High Street as they had for sixty years, ever since Duggie’s grandfather and great-uncle came back from the Ideal Home exhibition with pounding hangovers and a vision of the future. In other towns, less staid and settled, Morrison’s would have been long gone, but in Castle Douglas with its butcher’s shops and greengrocers, its bakers and cobblers and gentlemen’s outfitters, IKEA was defied and the townspeople, along with the farmers from all around, got their laminate and granite islands from the same dependable family business where their fathers had bought their wine racks and black ash, and their grandfathers had bought their breakfast bars and knotty pine.

  That’s why the likes of the Tarrants can’t waltz in and take over, my mother had said, when the station-yard development plan had fallen through. Castle Douglas has its
own way of doing things.

  I parked outside the carpet shop and tried to prepare myself. I couldn’t help my pulse starting to race, and I knew my cheeks were starting to colour too. I’d never stopped hoping that every time could be the time. It could easily be today.

  But it wasn’t Duggie behind the reception desk in his shirtsleeves and tie for once, with one phone to his ear and another in his hand rubbing its surface with his thumb, like a child with a blankie. It was a woman. She was somewhere in her forties, with sleek tawny hair and a suit of caramel-coloured moleskin. Her fingernails were bubblegum pink with rims so white they were almost blue, and when she stood up and walked around the desk to greet me I could see that her toenails were done the same way and she wore a gold ring on her middle toe. Smiling, she tugged the jacket straight before she stretched out a hand to shake mine. The jacket was too short for her figure, cutting her off just above the swell of her bottom so that her thighs looked like hams. And the caramel-coloured trousers were too short too, half-mast above her chocolate brown mules, shortening her legs and turning her dumpy.

  She had probably paid a fortune for the outfit and it did nothing for her. I—clever with my needle—once I found a pattern that suited me, made it up in every colour in my palate, perfect fit, perfect length, like the button-through dress I had on under my Mackintosh today. You look like you’re in costume, Lynne at work had said once, and I thought I knew what she meant: that it was unusual to see someone in clothes specially tailored for their shape. One other time a girl on a bus had called me a Texas polygamist, which had puzzled me until I Googled it at work and saw them, with their beautiful hair and their handmade dresses. Only those frocks were hanging off their shoulders like sacks and mine fit me like gloves. Like my gloves, which I also make to fit.

  “Can I help you?” said the moleskin-suit woman.