Thankfully, she went to the kitchen then and left me behind her. A thing like that! If she had said after a thing like that has happened to him, she might have meant the PKAN happening to Nicky. But the only thing that had happened to me was my son. By the time she came back through, I had composed myself and was smiling again.
“Are you warm enough?” she asked.
It was a cheerless little room, no fireplace, which always makes a living room feel like the relatives’ lounge in a hospital to me, chairs and coffee tables and those curtains that reach halfway down the wall under the window and just hang there. This place even had the bland factory pictures of a relatives’ waiting room too.
“I’m fine,” I said. “Have you had a test of your own faith, Mrs. Best?”
“I’ve no faith to be tested,” she said. “But you do?”
“I do,” I told her, still smiling. “He’s not in any pain, you know. And he is loved. His father and I love him more than we could love any other son or daughter God had sent us.”
“He’s your only one?”
“He is. It’s genetic, what happened to—” I broke off. If I said Nicky I’d look like an egomaniac. “Stephen.” It was the first name that came to my mind. “My husband and I together made him what he is. So yes, he’s an only one.”
“There’s testing,” said Mrs. Best. “But I suppose if you’re … you wouldn’t … ”
I had said it once to Duggie, when he was sitting numb with the shock, nursing a vodka so big I’d thought it was lemonade, sitting hunched on the footstool bit of his leather lounger, just staring. “There’s testing,” I’d said. “I’m not saying I’m not glad to have Nicky, but it’s different going ahead with another one now that we know. But we can have tests. We wouldn’t have to carry on.”
He had shuddered. I’ll never forget it. He had actually shuddered. Then he’d taken a slug of the vodka and focussed his bleary eyes on me. “Glad to have Nicky,” he repeated, in a flat voice.
“Of course,” I’d answered. “He’s our son.”
“The Church of God teaches that life is sacred,” I said now to Mrs. Best. “All lives. Your life. You are as precious to God as his own son.”
The kettle through in the kitchen clicked off.
“He’s got a bloody funny way of showing it,” said Mrs. Best, ignoring the click. “I had two boys.” She nodded towards the mantelpiece where there was a school portrait of both of them. Alan Best, just as I remembered him, in a lurid shirt like they used to wear on school picture day, his hair slicked down at the front but still wild over his ears from running around the playground with Stig and the others. In front of him, as if his big brother was protecting him, there was Mitchell. The same fair fluffy hair as his brother and mum, a shirt just as snazzy in a different shade of pink, and a missing front tooth not taking an ounce of brilliance out of his smile.
“Beautiful boys,” I said.
“That was about three years before Mitch died,” she said. I wanted to stop this charade. Wanted to come clean to her, talk honestly. Never mind God and faith and the perfect love of my perfect husband that had only been strengthened by what was sent to us. I wanted to talk to her for real, mother to mother. Then I thought of April Cowan’s mother and Mrs. McAllister, who’d lost both her sons in a year.
“Was Mitch your husband?” I asked, and I managed to look properly shocked when she put me straight. “Twelve years old,” I echoed. “I am so very sorry.”
“How could I worship the god that did that to me?”
“No one could fault you for doubting,” I said, hating myself for the sound of it. “His brother must have been deeply hurt too. You can tell from this picture how close they were.”
Mrs. Best just nodded, with her eyes filling and said nothing.
“He must be a comfort to you,” I said.
Her head had sunk onto her chest, but it snapped back up again now. “Get out,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” I stammered. “I didn’t mean to be unthinking.”
“Just get out. You know nothing and you understand even less.” She stood up and stalked to the front door, wrenching it open and waiting until I scuttled past her. I half-expected her to take a swipe at me. On the doorstep, I stood, heart walloping, mind racing, and I could hear the first wretched sobs being torn out of her behind the door.
I took a quick look to either side. The house to the left was neat, smart, and empty. The one to the right had Little Tykes bikes on the path and an elderly car with its hatchback open on the driveway.
I hopped over the wire fence and rang the bell.
“Just a minute!” a voice called, and I heard an enormous bunch of keys being applied to the lock before the door swung open to show a young woman—somewhere in her twenties—in the dark blue trousers and tunic of a dental nurse or a physio. She had a toddler on her hip and a phone in her hand.
“What?” she said. “Who—” Then she looked over my shoulder at the car. “Oh God almighty, I thought I was doing well remembering to unload the shopping. Thanks for letting me know.” She walked past me to the car, talking into the phone. “I’ve left my boot hinging open again, Mel! Some wifie’s come and told me. I know! I know!”
“Actually,” I said, “that’s not—”
“What?” she said again. “Mel, I’ll get back to you.” She hung up and waited, still smiling.
“I um—I’m from the Church of God,” I said, and the smile was gone like fan snapped shut at a ball.
“Not. Interested.”
“Fine, fine, but I was just talking to your neighbour and I’ve upset her. I wonder if you would stop in later and see if she’s okay.”
“Aren’t you god squad lot meant to help people?” she said. Then she shifted the toddler to her other side and looked more closely at me. “Wait a minute. I know you.”
“She was talking about her sons,” I said. “And she’s in great distress.”
“She’s in great distress?” said the girl. Her tone had got so rough that the baby was starting to look troubled, gazing up at her mother with solemn eyes.
“I know one of them died,” I said.
“And the other one should of. Only death’s too good for him. Here, he’s not back, is he? Because if he is and my Scott catches so much as a glimpse of him, there’ll be hell.”
“He’s not back,” I said.
“Is he with you lot?” she asked me, taking a step forward. “You’re all about forgiveness, aren’t you?”
“We are,” I said. “But I have no idea where he is. Do you?”
“I haven’t heard a thing about him since he went to Barrwherry,” said the girl. “Years ago. Must be ten years. And I’m happy for it to stay that way.” She had gentled a little. “Look, I’m sorry for Jill Best. But you’ve got to ask yourself, I mean, she brought them up, didn’t she?”
“Maybe you could look in later,” I said again, “and make my apologies. Here.” I scrabbled in my purse and pulled out a ten-pound note. “If you’re back in town you could maybe get some flowers or chocolates for her. You don’t need to say they’re from me.”
Now she was almost smiling gain.
“You lot are usually taking money in, not giving it out,” she said and gave me another hard look. “I do know you, don’t I? You used to live in CD. Years ago. But your hair’s the same. I didn’t know you were one of them.”
“A god-botherer?” I said. “You don’t seem surprised.”
I don’t even think the smirk she gave me was meant to be unkind. I wasn’t suppose to get the joke; I never am. People like me are supposed to be as blind to the looks as Miss Drumm and as deaf to the whispers as poor old Mrs. Healey, who’s as deaf as a doorknob.
“What’s that, love?” the nurses say, when Mrs. Healy’s bellowing at them, straining her voice from the effort of shouting so loud. They c
up their ears and beckon. “Didn’t quite catch that. Speak up, will you?” Eventually she gets it and stops, with her gnarled old hand in front of her trembling mouth.
“Was I shouting?” she asks, still quite loud.
“Never you mind,” says the nurse. “Saves me a fortune in cotton buds, Mrs. H. Never need to get my ears syringed as long as you’re with us, love. Might well have cleared my sinuses too.”
“Even your god wouldn’t bother with Alan Best,” the woman said as she was closing the door.
Sixteen
Barrwherry, I thought, driving away from Mrs. Best’s little house again. It’s past Newton Stewart on the bad Girvan road, the only road that ever made Nicky carsick, after he was a baby when the movement of the car lulled him like a rocking cradle and before car journeys, all journeys, were over for good. Now his bed is his little boat, like Stevenson says. His vessel fast. And he’d be waiting there for me in the evening, no matter if I was a little late or a little early. So there was no reason not to follow the trail where it took me.
Only, the Gatehouse to Girvan road goes right past the entrance to Kennan Lodge, the Tarrants’ country house hotel, and without seeming to decide or even consider it, I found myself turning in past the smart green-and-gold sign.
The drive was smooth and level, no ridges or standing water, and the rhododendrons on either side were trim and glossy, not like the half-dead straggle on the drive to the care home. At the sweep, the gravel was even raked into a shell pattern like a Japanese garden, and there were stone tubs of ivy, black pansies, and cyclamen on either side of the door. It reeked of money, and the Range Rovers and BMWs parked along the far edge against the balustrade smelled the same way.
I pulled my little Corsa up at the edge of the row and smiled at it sitting there. I didn’t care about flash cars. I’d nurse this one all the way to the scrap heap. It had a sunshade with a teddy bear’s face on it velcroed to the back passenger-side window and a light spot on the seat cover where the mark left from that trip to Girvan hadn’t quite washed away.
Inside the vestibule, there was the regulation blue-and-white china umbrella holder, mahogany hallstand with antlers to hang the hats on, and a narrow table with leaflets advertising Girlie Spa Getaways, Weddings and Events, a Dickensian Christmas Fayre, Traditional New Year Cèilidh, and Boys’ Breaks (golf, shooting, fishing). Every way food, drink, and a bed for the night could be slapped together into packages and sold, the Tarrants had thought of it and made a leaflet.
And right enough, when I got into the hallway, there were four women—two pairs of mother and daughter it looked like—sitting dressed in robes with turbans on their heads and towelling slippers on their feet, eating salad out of boxes with black plastic forks. They pretended not to see me, as if the weirdness of a packed lunch in a hotel lobby with your clothes off could be avoided that way. They’d forked over cash and they weren’t going to feel foolish about it. Not out loud, not to each other, not before the end of the day.
I rang the bell at reception and couldn’t help my eyes growing wide when I saw who came to greet me. If I hadn’t known Stig of the Dump was in my house right now, I’d have said I was looking at him, framed in the doorway from the back office. He was taller than he’d been in primary seven, and he had that stubble that’s harder to get than a clean shave. His hair was full and glossy, flopping over one eye and twinkling short at the sides, and his blue eyes shone out of a face just as tanned as when he’d got back from Saudi, on top of a body just as wiry and lean as the one that pelted round the playground every day, dribbling the football past Alan Best and the rest of them.
“Wee J?” I said.
His face broke into a grin that made him seem more familiar than ever. “You’ve got me,” he said, searching my face and shaking his head. “I’m sorry.”
“I don’t think we’ve ever met,” I said, “but you look so much like your brother. He’s a friend of mine.”
In one snap he seemed to take in the four women in their bathrobes, kill his smile, resurrect it, and shoot out a hand to grab my arm.
“Do you know where he is?” he asked in an urgent whisper. He looked down, saw his hand holding me, and let go, stretching out his fingers like a starfish. “God, I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m just—you’ve heard what’s happened, right?”
“I heard on the news about the woman in Glasgow,” I said. “It doesn’t seem possible. I just came to offer my—But condolences are like he’s—I just, I’m not some kind of ghoul come to stare.”
“Of course not,” said Wee J. “Do you know where he is?”
“I haven’t seen him for years,” I said.
“Yeah, I believe that,” said Wee J, “or I wouldn’t remind you of him. Steve’s not had an easy time.”
The first thing I noticed was the perfume. Wee J was looking intently into my eyes and I was lost in his and the memories of Stig they had stirred up in me, so Angie Tarrant was right there before either of us knew it. There was a sudden blast of scent in the air, then her two arms wound round Wee J’s neck and her face appeared hooked over his shoulder.
“Not in the front shop, Weej,” she said. She flashed her eyes at me. “Come on through, sweetheart, and let’s hear what you’ve got to say.”
One of her arms, exercised ropey and tanned as dark as the wood that panelled the hall, uncoiled from around her son and reached out to me. She had those pink and white nails too and pale flesh in hoops around her finger bases where she must wear rings when she wasn’t working, rings that would match the thin bangles of gold and diamonds she wore even when she was. The short sleeve of her white tunic rode up above her knotted little biceps as she reached further and further, far enough to touch me, and I saw that the tan went round her arm as dark underneath as on top. She must roast herself like a kebab to get as even as that. And it wasn’t from a bottle, I could tell. It was ground as deep into her skin as the riot of smells from her massage oils was ground into her palms—citrus, geranium, lavender, and lily, all fighting each other. The spot on my sleeve where she touched me would still smell of her by the evening. Stig would say “Christ,” and step back from greeting me, and Walter Scott would snuff at it and give me a look of puzzlement.
Behind reception was a small private office with two desks, and sitting at one of them was the wreckage of BJ Tarrant. If Wee J was Stig in the past, then here was Stig in the future—some unhappy future where nothing worked out for him, his body even softer and much larger, his face pouchy under the eyes and jawline. Big Jacky still had a full head of jet-black hair and his purple shirt had four buttons open at the neck, showing a turquoise and silver pendant on a leather thong nestling in his chest hair these days, in place of the heavy gold chain he had worn when I was a child. He had even more rings too. The signet and the sovereign, just the same, but also a claddagh and more of the turquoise and silver, cheap-looking against his tobacco-stained fingers. He had been the only dad who smoked cigars when it wasn’t Christmas.
Angie Tarrant took her place at the other desk without so much as a glance at him. Wee J rolled a chair over for me, smiled, and hitched himself onto the edge of a shelf running round the walls. All three of them looked at me expectantly. What was I doing here? I asked myself. Why had I come?
“Friend of Stevie,” Angie Tarrant said. “She knows something.”
BJ grunted but didn’t speak.
“I don’t know any more than I heard on the news,” I said.
“Do you know where he is?” said BJ, just as his son had.
“I haven’t seen him for years,” I repeated. “It looks bad if he’s gone missing.”
“He’s done a runner,” Angie said. “Chased her all over the country and no one’s seen him since the night she died. ‘Looks bad’ isn’t the half of it.”
“But you can’t suspect your own son, surely?” I said. Neither of the men would meet my eye.
&
nbsp; “Of course not,” BJ said. “But we’re worried about him.”
“Doesn’t matter what I suspect,” said Angie, not quite interrupting him but absolutely ignoring him and answering me as though he hadn’t spoken. “We’re in the hotel business here. Customers have to feel safe enough to lie down and sleep, safe to eat the food we’ve prepared. We’ve just spent a bomb advertising Seasonal Gift Packages. Who’s going to buy a gift token to a weekend at the Slasher Arms?”
“Mum,” said Wee J.
“And you can bet your life the Galloway Snooze’ll have plenty to say,” she went on. “They’ll be raking up all the shit in the world to see if it sticks.”
“Crying out loud, Mum.”
“Here!” said Angie, suddenly. “You’re not from there, are you? You are! You’re a muckraker from that tenth-rate wee pile of chip wrappings, aren’t you?”
“Mum, for God’s sake!”
“I’m a friend,” I said. “An old friend. And a worried mum. My son lives in the care home at Milharay, you see, and I was thinking as long as the cops keep trying to find Sti—Stephen, they’re not looking for whoever it was who killed April Cowan for real. I was thinking maybe when they saw his car that night, maybe it was nothing to do with April driving around down here, maybe he was just on his way to see you. And if you told the cops that, they would forget about him and start looking for the real villain.”
“What?” said Wee J. “Hang on.”
Angie Tarrant was frowning hard. The two black darts she had made of her brows with dye and plucking were pulled together, and a third line just as thick and black had formed between them on her skin.
“Why are you worried about your son?” she said. “April Cowan died in her flat in Glasgow. So what if she drove by Milharay?”
Too late I saw the trap I had walked myself into. Milharay only mattered because of what Stig and I had seen hidden under the huttie floor, and the police had only said a red Skoda. I shouldn’t be worried at all. I shouldn’t be here.
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