“She’s fading,” Donna said.
“And getting wandered with it,” I said, keeping my voice low. The connecting door was shut, but it was better to err on the side of caution.
“I wouldn’t say that. She’s old and her body’s betraying her, but her mind is sharp as a tack,” Donna said. “Always was and I think it always will be.”
Nineteen
For the first time ever in all the years, I was glad to be out of there. I felt as if I had escaped something unclean. The woods—those friendly woods—were crowding round in on either side of the car, and the long track to the house with its cattle grids was just a stretched-out nothingness between me and anyone who would hear me and come to help me if I screamed. If Stig hadn’t been waiting for me, I might have driven all the way to Dumfries to a budget hotel and stopped at Tesco for a toothbrush on the way. Stig and Walter Scott anyway.
And besides, I told myself as I stopped on the track and opened the garden gate, I promised Miss Drumm I would rock the stone.
I knew the way to it no matter how dark the night, and so there was no fumbling. Ten steps over the pebbles, up the six stone stairs, five steps over the grass where the daffodils grew in the spring. I lifted my hands as I reached it and felt the rough surface under my palms as I had every day for ten years, until these last two. One, two, three. I paused and did something I had never done before. I put my head against the stone between my stretched hands and listened. Four, five, six. I could hear the scrape of the base in its cup. Seven, eight, nine. But the sound was dull and dead. There was no hollow in there. This was solid rock. Ten, eleven, twelve.
I hesitated. Miss Drumm had always been so insistent. Twelve pushes. If I miscounted and made it thirteen, I was to keep going until twenty-four. Still I paused with my hands on the rock, chilled now against its coldness. What if I pushed one more time?
Then I gasped as the outside light clicked on.
“Gloria, you nearly gave me heart failure,” said Stig. “I heard the car, but you never came round to the yard. Then I heard the front gate. I’ve been shitting myself in there.”
“I just remembered I’d forgotten to rock the stone this morning.”
“I’ve been rocking it all day,” said Stig. “I need any luck that’s going. Twelve shoves a pop, right?”
“Right,” I said, making my way back to the gate to get my car and carry on round. When he had put the light on and startled me and I had flinched, had I flinched hard enough to move the stone, making it thirteen?
“You’re early,” Stig said when I was in the kitchen. “I’ve got choux buns in the oven, but they’re not ready to come out yet and they’ll have to cool a bit before I glaze them. But I’m glad you’re back because I’ve got something to show—Are you okay?”
I shook my head. “I was reading this poem to Nicky and it all got too real. Maybe because I saw Moped’s photo this morning at his mum’s, but all of a sudden it’s not just a puzzle. It’s a kid younger than Nicky and he died. Two brothers died, Stig. And April. It just suddenly seemed like there was something badly wrong with this place.”
“What the hell kind of poems do you read him?”
“Robert Louis Stevenson,” I said. “A Child’s Garden of Verses. It’s about a wee boy ill in his bed and the dreams he has. Adventures and make-believe and all that. Because Stevenson wasn’t well a lot of his childhood, you know.”
“I’ve never heard of him,” said Stig. “Robert Stevenson?”
“Robert Louis Stevenson,” I said, trying not to look too astonished. “Of course you’ve heard of him. Jekyll and Hyde? Treasure Island?”
“You’re kidding,” said Stig. “The same guy wrote horror films and Disney films?” He winked at me. “I’m kidding.”
“How can you be so cheerful?” I said.
“Cos I’m cooking again,” he said. “Either that or past caring. And Walter Scott helps a lot.” All the talk of Stevenson had confused me, and I blinked at him. “The dog,” he told me.
“Right,” I said. “Of course. Listen, Stig, about the dog. Before Walter Scott, Miss Drumm had James Hogg, and before James Hogg she had Robert Burns.”
“Heard of him!” said Stig. “Totally heard of Robert Burns.”
“And she used to walk them all over the woods, all the time. She lived here at Rough House when you were at Eden.”
“Her!” said Stig. “We called her Dogbreath Dora. She was always shouting at us and shaking her stick and—sorry, animal lovers, but—that dog was a bastard.”
“Robert Burns,” I said. “Twenty-eight years ago, it must have been Burns. Even Miss Drumm admits he was … lively.”
“So that’s your friend,” said Stig. “Jesus, how old is she?”
“She’s eighty. She was only fifty-two when you were at Eden. Twelve years older than we are now.”
“Jeez,” said Stig. He sucked his stomach in and pulled at his face that way he had. “I suppose I’d look like some mad old codger to twelve-year-old kids already, mind you.”
I smiled at him. “I need you to cast your mind back,” I said. “To that night in the woods. I don’t suppose there’s any way for you to remember, but you never know. Was Miss Drumm around? That night? The days leading up to it?”
“I don’t need to rack my brain for that,” said Stig. “I can tell you right now she was away. Scarlet McFarlet was terrified of that damn dog, and the only reason she agreed to sleep out was that Dora had gone to see relatives and she’d taken the mutt with her.”
I went over to the kitchen window and poked a gap in the curtains. I couldn’t see the stone, but I knew it was there. So she had been away, neglecting her duties, when Moped died. It was crazy, but then, everything was beginning to feel crazy to me.
“Stig,” I said, turning round, “next time you’re on the Internet, can you look up folklore about bridges for me?”
“Bridges?” he said. “Like Devil’s Bridges?”
I felt my eyes widen. “Why would you say that?”
He shrugged. “That’s the only folklore about bridges I know. Will do. I’ve finished what I’ve been looking for anyway.” I waited, but he just chewed his lip.
“It’s bad news, isn’t it?” I said.
He nodded. “You don’t need to look up Bezzo at work.” He went over to the laptop where he had set it up at one end of the kitchen table, a notepad and collection of pens beside it. Between that and the two armchairs, the side table, and a footstool he’d brought from his bedroom and squeezed in between Walter’s basket and the chairs, Stig was making a little nest for himself in my kitchen. I wasn’t annoyed; it looked more purposeful and lived-in with his clutter. When it was just me, sometimes I felt as if the house was no more than a shelter for sleep. As if there was no sign that I actually lived my life there. I ate from the freezer and threw the packets away in the wheelie bin, and I read one book at a time and kept the others in order on the shelves. Stig, in my kitchen, had dirtied every pan, washed most, dried some, left some steeping, some draining. He’d made notes and spread them around. His glasses were hooked over the edge of the fruit bowl in the middle of the table. A fruit bowl filled with fruit he’d got me to buy, that he’d polished and arranged. He’d even been out and picked bunches of herbs and strung them up from the hot pipe running along under the high mantelpiece, and he’d put a little tin pail lined with newspaper on the bunker near the sink.
“What’s that for?” I asked him.
“Scraps for the compost heap.”
“I haven’t got a compost heap,” I said. “If Walter or the birds won’t eat it, I just chuck it.”
“I’ve started you one,” he said. “If you stick at it, you’ll have a mulch for those gooseberry bushes come next year. Anyway, look at this.” He beckoned me over. “It’s taken me forever to get three pages loaded at once, by the way.”
I sa
t down in the chair he had set up in front of the screen. It wasn’t one of the kitchen chairs; it was a dining chair with a padded seat that usually stood on the top landing, but it was just the right height and comfortable enough for long stints at the keyboard.
On the monitor was an article from the online Guardian. Vigilantism Claims Another Victim. The group was called Letz Go and they had hounded a man out of supervised care in the community somewhere in Hertfordshire, sent him underground again, except that a man answering his description had been picked up from the changing rooms at a—
I stopped reading.
“Just look at the end,” said Stig. “At the bullet points.”
•Jack Sower of Lancaster: died in custody after his community placement broke down following the
activities of a chapter of Letz Go.
•Peter Masterton of Greenwich, considered highly dangerous: dropped out of sight of authorities after
a campaign of harassment targeting him and his
family by an unnamed local parent organisation.
•Allan Best of Galloway: found hanged in St. Quivox
Parish Church graveyard after sustained harassment
by unnamed groups. Mr. Best was never convicted
of any crime.
“Where’s St. Quivox?” I said, once I had read it over several times.
“Ayrshire,” said Stig. “Can’t be too far from where he was staying. But I think I know why he chose there.” He leaned over me to use the mouse and restored another page. On it was a photograph, unmistakably taken in a Scottish churchyard. Everything about the cold light, the tussocky grass, and the leafless sycamores said so. In the middle of the photograph was a headstone, ancient and weathered, the names and epitaphs worn away, but the carving still distinct. Trees, gnarled and heavy with fruit, climbed up either side of the stone framing two naked figures, hand-in-hand, who stood on something that looked like a crude gondola but might have been a serpent.
“Eden,” said Stig. “I looked up The Ayrshire Post and found the report.”
He clicked again, but I didn’t have the heart to read any more. I pushed my chair away and let him in close to the screen.
“Body found in St. Quivox churchyard,” he said. “Blah blah blah—suicide, no one sought in connection—blah blah. Overdose of drug from opiate family and hanged by means of a rope attached to the well-known Adam and Eve gravestone.”
“What?” I said rejoining him. “Go back to the picture.” I leaned over his shoulder, peering at the screen. “That headstone’s only five feet tall at the most,” I said. “If he hanged himself from that, it must have been by sitting down and letting his neck take the weight.”
“Well, with the overdose too,” said Stig. “But yeah, you’d have to be determined, wouldn’t you?”
“Moped, Ned, Nod, Alan, April,” I said, half to myself.
“I looked for the rest,” said Stig, “but I couldn’t find them. Over to you and your work computer.”
I nodded. “I’ve even thought of something to say if I find people and phone them. I can tell them about April, let them know about a funeral.”
“Who will you say you are?”
“I’ll think of something,” I said. “A friend. Therapist. Could even wheel out the Church of God again if I have to. If I find them. If they’re somewhere I can get to.”
“If they’re still alive,” said Stig. “That’s the big if, really.”
Twenty
Thursday
I didn’t remember what I was dreaming but I woke with a strong sensation of having seen something, like a face in a crowd or a name I recognised in a long page of writing. I lay for a while, cuddled into my soft bed, hoping that if I drifted it would come back to me. Dorothy and William were pinning the covers down around me, one curled behind my knees and one stretched along the front of my thighs. The stone, I thought to myself. The bridge, the huttie, the clearing, the stream. Edmund and Nathan, Mitchell and Alan, April and Duggie and Stig. What was I missing?
After a few minutes, I wriggled out from between the cats and stepped over to the window. Dorothy stood, squeezed herself up into an arc, then stretched herself out and settled down beside William, greeting her brother with an ear lick before closing her eyes again. I nudged the curtain open. Stig was out there already, watched by both the byre cats, Bill and Weed, hunched side by side on the top step waiting for him to finish and feed them. They had waited many times for me to do the same. They and Ben, the other male, before the night when the fox got him.
I had trembled at the thought of telling Miss Drumm, but she took it calmly. Mousers, Gloria, she’d said. Nothing more. I wouldn’t see harm done to them, but they’re not of my heart. Not like Dorothy, William, and Walter. I nodded my relief and tried not think about how callous she sounded. Miss Drumm could hear a thought even if she couldn’t see the expression that went with it. Perhaps it was easier for me because none of the animals was of my heart when I got there and I had to work at all of them just the same. Or perhaps Bill, Ben, and Weed were just more to my liking; they asked for little—a bowl of biscuits, a paraffin stove in the shed on the coldest nights—and they repaid those little favours. They would sit, as they were now, watching me hang out washing or weed the herb bed, scurrying away and resettling if I moved too close. But then, every so often, when the sun was warm and I was still for long enough, one then two then all three would steal close to me, close enough for me to hear their rusty purring.
I’m only sorry that if one had to go it wasn’t Weed, Miss Drumm had said. Stupid name. They were christened before they came to Rough House, of course. Or they would have been … I thought but couldn’t come up with two brothers and a sister from literature. Unless it was Charlotte, Emily, and Bramwell with no Anne.
There went that elusive thought again, just out of reach, as I watched Stig and the cats. Bill and Ben, the Flower Pot Men. I turned and looked at the two curled up as tight as snail shells on the bed. William and Dorothy Wordsworth. Miss Drumm had her own talent for stupid names, if anyone was asking me. Moped and Bezzo Best. Ned and Nod McAllister. April Cowan and—
Nicky! I flinched and turned as a shower of gravel hit the windowpane. Stig was standing at the top of the steps, the cats gone, waving up at me.
“Come down,” he shouted. “I’ve got something to tell you.”
I shrugged myself into my dressing gown, belted it shut, shoved my feet into my warm slippers, and went downstairs.
“Eggs en cocotte,” said Stig, when I got to the kitchen. “Ready in five. That’s proper French tarragon you’ve got out there, you know. None of your Russian muck.” He put a mug of coffee at the seat nearest the stove, took a slurp of his own, and jiggled the laptop screen back to life.
“You must admit it’s better than that sewage you were drinking,” he said. “Even if I did have to bash the beans with a rolling pin. How can you not have a coffee bean grinder? Or a mortar and pestle?”
“If coffee at home tastes like Starbucks,” I said, “what do you do for a treat?” I ignored his look. “What did you want to tell me?”
“Devil’s Bridges,” said Stig. “They’re all over the shop. Scotland, Wales—France is lowping with them—and the story’s the same every time. It freaked me out a bit when I was reading about it last night because it all sounded so familiar and I couldn’t think why. But listen.”
I sipped the coffee and waited, letting my hand fall down by the side of my chair to rest on Walter Scott’s head.
“There’s always an uncrossable river,” he began. “So up pops the devil and offers to build a bridge. The only catch is that he gets the first soul to cross it once it’s finished, right? So he builds it and then either no one ever crosses it and he just sits there forever waiting and it’s an uncrossable bridge over an uncrossable river. Or some sneaky villager chucks a bit of bread over and a stray dog r
aces after it, so the devil gets a dog soul. Sometimes a rat, sometimes a pig. Or—and here’s the one that’s interesting—he builds the bridge but before anyone crosses it, he’s—hang on.” He scrolled down the screen and read from it. “‘Imprisoned by a spell so that the villagers can use the bridge without danger to their souls.’”
“Okay,” I said, carefully. “When did you say for those eggs?”
“Shit,” said Stig, leaping to his feet and dumping the laptop down on the seat behind him. He grabbed the oven mitts and opened the Rayburn door. “Caught them,” he said. “Birl round, Glo.” He had set the table with napkins and matching china and a few of the last asters in an egg-cup, and now he put down a plate of toast triangles and the little dishes of egg. “Leave it minute if you don’t want to burn your tongue.”
Walter, now that the opening and closing of the oven door was over, went to his basket and lay down.
“He’s not used to so much action at the stove,” I said. “But this looks lovely.”
“Perfect,” said Stig, sitting and shaking his egg dish. “I’ve never worked with a single oven oil-cooker before, but once you get used to it, it’s fine. Right, so I looked up spells to imprison the devil.”
“What?” I said. “Where?”
“On the Internet,” said Stig. “You don’t even have to look hard. You need a load of people and some words and somewhere to put him—like a stone cross, or a cairn, or a standing stone or ‘an ancient and sacred marker of that ilk.’ And that’s when I remembered. The Irving girls were all about Pagan crap, and I’m sure one of them knew about your stone, Glo. They were even talking about it that night. Telling each other ghost stories. They had started before I took off to the bog. I remember it now. Rain Irving was talking about what she called the hollow place! And I think she meant your stone out there. I think the devil’s in it.”
I concentrated on my breathing. My throat had closed and I knew I couldn’t speak, but if I could just keep breathing I would be okay. Then Stig gave a snort that almost choked him.
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