“Christ sake,” he said. “I don’t mean I believe it! Jesus, Gloria. I’m saying it gives us a reason Moped took off. If the rest of them were telling horror stories and Mope was scared, then maybe that’s why he high-tailed it out of there. And if Nod was the one doing the worst of the scaring, maybe he felt guilty about it and that’s why he killed himself. And Ned followed him because he couldn’t forgive himself for not stopping Nod from doing it.”
“And Alan Best?”
“Same as Nod. Couldn’t forgive himself for the night Moped died.”
“But what about all the gossip about Bezzo and his girlfriend’s child?” I said. “Where does that fit in? You’re so determined that it’s not true—and that means someone started a rumour. A real live someone, not a ghost. And what about April?”
“Same thing,” said Stig. “Couldn’t forgive herself. Who knows what they all did that night? I wasn’t there.”
I shook my head. “This is delicious, by the way,” I said, even though I couldn’t imagine how I would be feeling by midmorning, starting the day with eggs and cream and herbs. And I was sure there was a bit of garlic in there too.
“You think I should stick to cooking and leave the thinking to you?”
“I wouldn’t go that far,” I said, wiping round the little dish with a corner of toast. “But you’re not quite there. For one thing, Rain Irving wasn’t saying ‘hollow place.’ It’s ‘hallowed place.’ That’s what Miss Drumm calls the huttie.”
“And what does that mean?” said Stig. “Haunted?”
“Hallowed?” I said. “It means hallowed. Holy, basically. Like, hallowed be his name.”
“I’m not much for all that,” said Stig. “Okay, though. The devil’s in the huttie, not the stone.”
I tried not to think about what Miss Drumm had said the night before. It didn’t matter for what we were interested in.
“But what do you think of the theory?” he said. “Moped ran away from their scary stories, and they were ashamed and guilty.”
“There’s more going on here than a wave of guilt that won’t stop. Someone hounded Alan Best. And someone’s out to get you for sure. And someone moved April’s body. Doesn’t it make more sense to think the same thing happened to everyone? That Ned and Nod were hounded too? This isn’t dominoes falling over, Stig. Someone’s pushing them.”
He had stopped chewing with a mouthful of food still there in his cheek. It bulged his face out and made his voice sound thick when he spoke to me.
“Who?” he said. “Mrs. Best? Mr. Best? Who else would still be angry enough about an accident years ago? But they wouldn’t hound their other son. That’s the word right enough, Glo. Bezzo was innocent of any crime but hounded anyway.”
“I don’t think anyone would still be angry enough all these years later if it was an accident,” I said. “But someone is. Ergo … ” I waited, but Stig only shook his head. “Ergo it wasn’t an accident. Someone’s behind what’s happening now and someone was behind what happened then. All the way back to Moped.”
Stig was staring at me. He swallowed his mouthful of toast as though it was a ball of barbed wire and looked as if it might come right back up again. “The car,” he said.
I nodded. “The car.”
“You’re saying someone who came to Eden in the car killed Mope?”
I nodded again. Stig looked down at his plate and then dropped his napkin over it, hiding the food as if it sickened him.
“But how would … anyone … get him away from the clearing so they could hurt him?”
“Maybe they just got lucky. They watched and waited, and if it hadn’t been Moped it might have been someone else.”
“It might have been me.”
“Or no one. If the sausages had been cooked and none of the kids told ghost stories, you would all have been together all night.” Stig’s face clouded and he looked away. “But if that’s what happened, then whoever’s punishing the rest of the kids must know which ones were responsible for frightening Moped away into the woods on his own.”
“I suppose,” said Stig. “But the ones who’ve died aren’t the ones I’d have thought. I mean, it was the Irving girls who knew the folklore, and Jo-jo Jameson and Moped himself were the biggest wind-up merchants. But if you asked me who’d be most likely to keep on and on until it was beyond a joke and Moped ran off ? I know which name I’d tell you.”
Duggie is not perfect. He left us, couldn’t cope. But I knew he was a good man deep down. He always had lots of friends, was always standing someone a drink or lending someone a van.
I tried to think it through rationally while I drove to work, forgetting that I knew him, that for a while I thought I’d be spending the rest of my life with him.
On the one hand, I could absolutely imagine that Duggie would joke around in a dark wood and not stop even when it had gone too far. He always did play tricks like that. He’d pretend to have lost the car keys when I had an appointment I was nervous about—when we booked our wedding, or had a scan at the antenatal clinic, that sort of thing. And there was the fact that he didn’t mention Eden to me and didn’t want Nicky living there. That was secretive in a way that was hard to account for.
But the persecution of Alan Best went on for years. Could Duggie keep it up that long? Of course, he had mounted quite a campaign with me.
Our courtship took place on Thursday nights, Friday nights, and every other Saturday. Once I asked him if he was busy on Tuesday, and he grimaced at me as if it hurt him to say so, but Tuesday night was quiz night at the club. “I like quizzes,” I had said, and he had gone so quiet for so long that I had never mentioned it again. Mondays he had a few quiet pints, Tuesdays the quiz, Wednesday in the football season was the midweek fixture and out of the season he got together with the same crowd to look back at where it went wrong and look forward to the next one, Thursday night was mine, Friday night we went out with another couple, Billy and Jade, and the three of them drank too much and giggled a lot and I drove them home, then dancing on a Saturday. Sunday he spent with his family. It occurred to me that I might be invited there too, but I said nothing; I just spent it with mine.
“If I didn’t think you were too sensible to make up stories about a local lad, I’d hardly believe you had a boyfriend,” my mum would say.
“He’s stringing you along, Gloria,” said my sister, “using you.”
“What for? What do you mean?” I asked her.
She said nothing until my mum went to take the pudding plates through and put the kettle on, then she curled her lip and said, “You tell me what you’re doing for him to keep him. He’s a good-looking guy, so it must be worth his while to hang on to you.”
I had tears in my eyes when my mum reappeared.
“What’s wrong with you now, Gloria?” she’d said.
“She’s upset because her boyfriend’s so off-hand,” said Marilyn. “I would be too.”
I couldn’t help myself: “At least I’ve got one,” I shot back. And then they both turned on me.
So I always wondered, after the night when Duggie suddenly parked at Auchenreoch Loch on the way home from seeing Titanic and it turned out that he wasn’t planning to seduce me as I’d been expecting—actually, as I’d been beginning to think was never going to happen.
“Gloria,” he’d said, “you don’t need to answer right away, but I want you to marry me.” He was so low-key, so un-nervous, that at first I thought I had misheard him. I don’t want you to answer right way but I want you to … hear me. That was what I thought he said and so I waited, obedient as ever, for what he had to say. After a long silence, he turned to me, and the look on his face was one of complete astonishment.
“Did you hear me?” he asked.
“No,” I said.
“Are you winding me up?”
“No. But why are you getting upse
t? You told me I didn’t have to answer right away.”
He started the car and jerked back out of the parking space hard enough to make the wheels screech. On the ten-minute journey home I had time to think it over, and when we parked again I plucked up my courage.
“Did you propose?” I asked him. He nodded, still looking at me with that same bewilderment. “I couldn’t believe my ears.” He started to smile. “I convinced myself it wasn’t true.”
The half-smile spread and before long he was laughing, one arm round my shoulders, shaking me and roaring with laughter. “God, you had me going there for a minute, Gloria,” he said. “Come on then. Will we go in and tell your folks?”
I gave him an impish smile, my first one ever, not having the face or figure to be impish usually. “I haven’t answered you yet,” I said.
He clicked the side of his mouth and pointed his finger at me. “No way. You don’t get me twice in one night. I’m not that gullible.”
So, strictly speaking, I never said yes.
That night for the first time he came into the house with me. My mum had her dressing gown on and my sister had done a face pack earlier and was still wearing the towelling band round her hair and no cover-up on her spots. I wasn’t to know that, though; it wasn’t fair of them to blame me.
“I’ve got something to ask you, Mr. Harkness,” Duggie had said to my dad. “No prizes for guessing what.” He was standing in the middle of the living room floor, bouncing a bit on the balls of his feet, jingling his change, miming his golf swing. He was nervous, probably.
“Go on then,” said my dad. “Ask me.”
“Trevor!” my mum yelped. But my dad was looking at Duggie with an unreadable expression.
Duggie took his hands out of his pockets and cleared his throat. “I’d like to ask for your daughter’s hand in marriage,” he said.
“I’m not surprised,” said my dad. “She’s a wonderful girl.”
But just like me, he didn’t actually say yes either. My mum leapt up and kissed Duggie. My sister gave me the world’s coldest hug, and my dad went to get a bottle of wine out of the fridge.
“The champagne’s not cold,” my mum said, glaring at him for bringing Liebfraumilch out in front of a Morrison. My dad ignored her and gave me the first glass once it was open.
“Are you sure, Gloria?” he’d said. “Is this the man for you?”
I nodded, beaming. I was twenty-four and I’d had three boyfriends in my entire life. Duggie, one of the trolley boys from my Saturday job at the Co-op who took me rabbit-shooting and made me touch them, and Stig who drew a love heart on my pencil case.
Twenty-One
Lynne banged on my car window.
“What are you grinning about?” she said, when I opened the door. “You look like love’s young dream.”
“Believe it or not, my husband,” I said.
Lynne snorted and took my bag out of my hands so I could clamber out and lock the car door. “It’s nice that you’re so happily divorced,” she said. “I saw Duggie yesterday, as it happens.”
“Oh?” I was opening up the office and hurrying in to get the heating on as quick as possible. We had someone coming to register a birth and this old building, after a closed day in winter, was no place for a new baby.
“Out for lunch in Designs with his new squeeze, I think she was,” said Lynne.
“Straightened hair, suede suite, posh nails?” I said.
“Big bum, bad dye job, I was going to say.”
“Zöe,” I said. “She’s actually very nice.” And I felt the same sinking feeling I’d had yesterday when she was sitting on his desk. She was nicer than me. She was even nice to me.
“Except for her terrible taste in men,” said Lynne. She had a lot of divorced friends and she was automatically nasty about the ex-husbands. I went along with it, never admitted I would take him back in a heartbeat if he asked me, to be a happy family again. “Cup of tea?” she went on. “I’ve got éclairs.”
She would only be gone a few minutes, so I had to decide who to look for, and that was easy. The Scarlets and the Irving girls—the weather girls, Wee J had called them—might have disappeared in a string of marriages, names gone forever. But there was one boy left. Jo-jo Jameson would have stayed Jo-jo Jameson from his cradle to however near he had got to his grave. I keyed in JAMESON, J—, a rough birth date of 1972, and the county DUMFRIES. If he had lived in Moniaive his whole life, I might be lucky.
Luckier than Jo-jo Jameson, as it turned out. I stared at the screen trying to take it all in and jumped when Lynne came back.
“So,” she said, plumping down and blowing a raspberry at the stack of filing she should be doing, “have you heard the goss?”
I bit into my éclair and waited for her to tell me. I never heard gossip before her. Lynne loved that about me.
“Death,” she said. “It happened in Glasgow, but it’s connected to here.”
“How’s that then?” I said.
“Remember the Tarrants? They tried to buy the station yards and they ran the country store for a bit and then that mad school out in the sticks where they had the tragedy, then they took on a hotel? You must know them. She dresses like a drag act and he dresses like a villain and they’ve got two sons must be near your age.”
“I think I was at school with one of them,” I said. “Is one of them dead?”
“One of them did it!” said Lynne. “The victim’s a woman but the guy that killed her is one of the Tarrant boys.”
“That’s terrible,” I said. “I wonder if it was the one I knew.”
“I don’t know which one’s which,” said Lynne. “But he killed this girl. Well, woman. She was forty, but she had everything to live for. She was going into business with a friend. Reiki and aromatherapy and all that, those ear candles. Had a business loan and a premises lined up. Everything to live for, and then this guy just loomed up out of the past and slashed her to ribbons.”
Before I could answer, the door opened, letting in the thin, high-pitched keening of an eight-day old baby who’d rather be at home getting cuddles than in his buggy in my office getting a name.
Lynne swept up the cake plates and pushed them into the slot under the counter. It was fine to be drinking a cuppa on a cold morning, but registering is serious business and messy cream cakes give the wrong impression. I left my desk and came around the front.
“So who have we got here then?” I said, peering in under the hood of the buggy. He was kicking his blanket and waving mittened fists in the air, screaming hard, his eyes squeezed shut and his mouth wide open, the little white milk stripe down his tongue looking bright in his purple face. “Can I?” I asked.
The dad, harried and dazed, nodded straightaway but then checked with his wife. She was just as dazed but dreamy with it, still looking soft and undone from the birth, bags under her eyes and her hair tousled. She gave the baby a look and then nodded too.
“Oh, little man!” I said, working one hand under his head and one under his bottom and lifting him, letting the blanket fall away. I brought him up to my shoulder and let his head rest there. I patted his bottom rhythmically and bounced up and down. First he said, “Hoowoo-hoowoo,” then he grunted, then with a quivering sigh he shut up completely and the room was silent except for the snuffling of his breaths and the clanking of the old radiator. I smiled at the young mum and then turned to Lynne. She wasn’t in her seat. She was standing with her hands on the back of my chair looking at my computer screen.
“I suppose you get a lot of practice,” said the mum, grabbing my attention again.
I tried to read Lynne’s face, failed, and turned away. “New ones are easy,” I said. “Once he’s worked out who his mummy is, no one else’ll do. So make the most of it while you can.”
That pleased the woman, and she smiled again.
“But
now I’ll pass him over to Daddy,” I said, “and let’s get started. Have you got the card from the hospital? That’s grand.” I sat down again and regarded the screen. I could have opened another one. In busy offices they have half a dozen registrations going on at once sometimes, loads of windows open while people are looking for documents or arguing over names. But this was a sacred moment. I didn’t want to register this little scrap on a computer where Jo-jo Jameson’s death record was open—a death I had no business looking at. I’m not usually superstitious, but that was a bad omen if ever I saw one.
“And any other documents for me?” I said. I glanced at her left hand but she had gloves on.
“Marriage lines,” said the dad, putting his hand into his back jeans pocket and taking out an envelope.
“Perfect,” I said. “Righty-ho. I’ve just got a few entries to make, but I’m dying to ask you: What’s the name?”
“Mario,” said the girl. “Mario Tobias Carson.”
“That’s lovely!” I said. It was one of the first things I learned in basic training. “Mario Carson. That’s really lovely, the way it rolls of the tongue.”
“Unless …” said the dad. “Is there any way to check—I mean, can you look up in that thing and see if there’s been any Marios already? Round here?”
“Gloria can look up all sorts of things,” Lynne murmured. “She should be able to manage that for you.”
“I don’t need to,” I said. “I can tell you that there hasn’t been a single Mario. Not in this office or in the local region. You’ve done the impossible for your little boy: a lovely name that everyone can spell that nobody else has thought of. Well done.”
They beamed and I guessed that their families—the Carsons and whatever clan she came from with her red hair and freckles—had had plenty to say.
Ten minutes later they were gone. I waved them away and turned to face Lynne.
“Mario,” I said. “That’s worth entering.”
Registrars take their duties seriously, of course we do, but we have to have a bit of fun sometimes. And “Mario” was in with a shout for the weekly sweepstakes in the southwest region. We had had no winners from our office for four years, not since we took the weekly sweep, the monthly national round, and got to silver placing in the annual championship with a pair of twins called Tancred and Ulrika. And the sweep’s an exception; most of the games we played were just between Lynne and me, like The Hand Of Woman, where we tried to tell whether a toddler had been dressed by its dad when the mum was still on her back from the birth.
The Child Garden Page 16