The Child Garden

by Catriona McPherson

  “Stig, if we’re ever going to straighten this out, we’re going to have to come clean about everything.” I was amazed to see his eyes flash with anger.

  “We?” he said. “We’ve got to come clean? What have you got to come clean about, Glo? You’re golden, aren’t you? You live here like a fucking saint. Looking after your son and your old lady, doing everyone’s weddings and funerals. You’re so bloody perfect your shit must smell like gravy.”

  “That’s not fair!” I said. “And what happened to not disturbing Walter, by the way? That is so unfair. I’ve come back here and told you that my ex-husband, my son’s father, is probably a murderer. Think I’ll be ‘golden’ round here once that comes out? There’s always someone ready to say, ‘she must have known.’ Another wife lying for her husband.” As I said it, I knew my face changed, Stig’s too.

  “Duggie?” said Stig. “You thought I meant Duggie?”

  “Are you talking about your dad?”

  “You don’t sound surprised.”

  “Look, I admit I don’t know why your Dad opened a school,” I began, “but it was Duggie who—”

  And then the phone rang.

  I answered, expecting a cold call, and almost dropped the receiver when I heard Duggie’s voice on the end of the line.

  “Gloria,” he whispered. “I’m in trouble. You’ve got to help me.”

  “Where are you?” I asked him, mouthing Duggie to Stig.

  “I’m at home,” he whispered, “but Zöe’s downstairs, and I don’t want her to know I’m calling. I don’t want her to see this.”

  “See what?”

  “Please come,” Duggie said, his voice taut enough to crack. “I don’t know what to do. It’s something to do with … ”

  “Eden,” I said. “Duggie—”

  But he had hung up.

  “It’s not your dad, Stig,” I said, mumbling through lips that felt as cold and useless as when the dentist numbs them. “Duggie’s trying to lure me to his house. He’s pretending his girlfriend’s there.”

  “That can’t be right,” said Stig. “I know it’s BJ. I knew it was him right from the start.”

  “Unless it’s both of them,” I said. “Should I go?” I glanced down at Walter. He was breathing easily, hadn’t even stirred when the phone rang.

  “We’ll both go.” He held up a hand as I started to protest. “Duggie and my dad against you and me? And us with the element of surprise? I’ll take those odds.”

  “He’s clever,” I said. “Look what he’s done already. You think he can’t outwit the two of us and get you in jail? Or worse?”

  “I’m past caring,” said Stig. “I’ve got to get out of here before I go mad. I can’t spend another day waiting for you to come back and tell me who’s dead. Jesus! Cloud? She was so beautiful! And Scarlet McFarlet? Dead before she was twenty. I can’t take any more. If I don’t go with you, I’ll go and stand by a bridge and wait for him to come and shove me over.”

  “Wait for who?” I said. “Duggie? Your dad? The devil?”

  I hadn’t been there since the day I moved out. I had packed up Nicky’s room and put my clothes in suitcases, my books in boxes, then I had driven away, leaving behind every pot plant, every cushion cover, every wedding present, anything that he had touched. I had put Nicky’s posters and toys in his new room at the home and bought cheap shelves for Rough House to get my books out again. They looked mean and wrong beside the heavy old furniture and if Miss Drumm could have seen them she’d be disgusted, but the thing about bookshelves is that, once they’re filled, all you notice are the books and what’s holding them doesn’t matter.

  Still it felt strange to be knocking at the door instead of using a key.

  We heard footsteps inside immediately and saw a shadow through the tinted glass. Stig put me slightly behind him and I could see him squaring up, saw him clench his fists. The door opened and there was Zöe, looking startled, but smiling.

  “Gloria!” she said and turned to smile at Stig. “Plus one.”

  “You must be Zöe,” said Stig, frowning at her.

  “Can we talk to Duggie?” I asked. “Is he in?”

  “He’s in his ‘lair’,” she said, rolling her eyes and laughing. “His man-cave. I’ll shout up to him.”

  In our living room, the shelves we’d had made by a joiner were still there, full of golf trophies and silver-framed photographs of tournaments and nights out. There were some books here and there. Three on a shelf with a book-end made in the shape of a miniature whisky barrel. I looked at the spines. Andy McNab, Brad Thor. Good God in heaven, Dan Brown.

  But she came back into the living room with a puzzled look on her face, a minute after we’d sat down.

  “He says you have to go up,” she told me. “Listen, you’ve obviously got some talking to do. I think I’ll take off and leave you to it. Tell Duggie I’ll be at home with wet nails so if he phones me, let it ring and I’ll answer eventually.” She gave me a smile and squeezed my arm; then, with a quick glance flicked at Stig, she made for the door.

  “Zöe?” I said. “Before you go. Last Tuesday night, Duggie was with you, you said. That’s right enough, is it?”

  She stopped and looked from one of us to the other.

  “Last Tuesday?” she said. “Why? I mean yes, he was.”

  “How about Monday?”

  She nodded. “We went to the pub on Monday and then we had a quiet night in on the Tuesday, but why? Is everything okay?”

  I gave her the best smile I could muster.

  Duggie had had the smallest of the three bedrooms for a study since the day we moved in. We slept in the big front room, the second double was for the guests we never got, and the third—the one we called the nursery, smiling shyly at each other—was his until it was needed.

  “Because I won’t have time to use a study when I’m teaching my boys to ride their bikes and dodge an off-side trap, will I?”

  But when Nicky moved out of our room, he needed the big double for his wheelchair, and by then Duggie wouldn’t have wanted guests anyway.

  I knocked on the door, wondering how he would look to me now that Rain Irving and Scarlet McInnes had opened my eyes. And Stig too. Surely Stig had something to do with me seeing so much so suddenly.

  “Gloria, thank God,” said Duggie when I went in. He looked different, right enough, but it wasn’t my eyes. His face was painted with terror, eyes stark, cheeks pale, mouth trembling. He was sitting at his computer desk, and the blue light from his screen picked out every line on his face—some lines that surely hadn’t been there when I’d last seen him two days ago. “Help me,” he said.

  “Van?” said Stig. “What’s going on?”

  Duggie turned to see who had spoken, but his face showed no recognition. He just repeated the words, even more desperate this time. “Help me, Gloria. This isn’t right. This is nothing to do with me.” He turned back to his computer and pointed a shaking finger. “I didn’t—I don’t understand—Help me.”

  I took a step towards him to see what he was pointing at, but Stig brought his arm down in front of me like a barrier.

  “Don’t, Glo,” he said. “Van, shut it down.”

  “It’s not mine,” said Duggie.

  “I know,” said Stig. “Just close it down.”

  “How do you know? What are you doing here?” Recognition was slowly spreading over Duggie’s face. “Stig?” he said and then glanced at me. “How do you know each other? And what do you know about this?”

  “Close your computer down,” Stig said. “Don’t look at any more of it.”

  “Are you behind this?” Duggie said. He swung his monitor sharply towards me, showing me the screen. In the seconds before I squeezed my eyes shut, I took in a tree and a lawn and children. Three of them, chubby and rosy, rolling in the long grass with the su
nlight dappling their skin. Then he clicked to the next screen, and I saw just a flash of it before I squeezed my eyes shut and turned away. Happy hearts and happy faces, happy play in grassy places, I found myself thinking, and I couldn’t help a small moan escaping me.

  “Shut it down, Van,” said Stig. “For fuck’s sake, man, you don’t need to show us.”

  At last, Duggie hunched over the keyboard and started clicking.

  “These days you don’t have to start rumours,” Stig said. “You just have to download a few files and wait for the laptop to go in for a fix-up. Have you checked your work machine?”

  “This is—” said Duggie. “This is—It’s my work email.”

  “Has the back office been left unattended?” Stig said.

  “You don’t need to get in to the actual office,” I said. “You can do it remotely.”

  “Only if you know how,” said Stig. “And he doesn’t.”

  “Who doesn’t?” said Duggie

  Stig ignored him. “Answer me. Has there been anyone in there who shouldn’t have been?”

  “Zöe left the back door open a couple of weeks ago,” Duggie said. “She was beside herself saying sorry. I told her it didn’t matter. Jesus Christ, I told her it didn’t matter!”

  “Van,” said Stig. “Just keep this off, and when you go into work in the morning, don’t start up your system. Just say it’s down. Make sure no one can see what’s on there. We’ll get it straightened out really soon, I promise you.”

  Then Stig took me by the hand and drew me out of the study and back down the stairs.

  He said nothing all the way home again, through that clear bitter night. The ground was sparkling with frost and the stars looked ice-blue in the cold sky. The wind was whipping up leaves so dry they clattered as they bowled along the road in front of us and the twigs and branches on either side of us clashed with a sound like swords as the wind rattled them.

  In the kitchen, William and Dorothy had both come to sit beside Walter Scott, pensive and watchful. I laid a hand on him again and then opened the oven door and let the warmth spill out over him. He gave one low grunt, and his tail twitched as he tried to thump it.

  “Oh Walter,” I said, bending to kiss him.

  “How old is he?” said Stig.

  “He’s fifteen, same as Nicky.” Tears filled my eyes and my breath was snatched away in a sob.

  “It’s a good age for a Lab,” said Stig. “Don’t cry.”

  I shook my head and tried to explain. “I forgot to go and see him. First time in ten years. And Miss Drumm too.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Stig. “When this is all over, I’ll find a way to make it up to you. Or maybe when I get out of jail for keeping quiet so long.”

  “Tell me,” I said. “What’s the final version?”

  He took his time, and I had a chance to have a good long look at him. I had thought he was showing wear and tear when he pitched up on my doorstep on Monday night, but this man sitting in front of me now looked ten years older again. There were long beard hairs in the fold of his neck, and I had never got round to buying him any Eumovate or Head & Shoulders. His skin looked sore instead of just dry, broken at the sides of his mouth like Nicky gets from the feeding tube. He’d lost weight too, in spite of the baking and not taking any exercise for days. Now his cheeks and the mounds under his sweatshirt, that had been buoyant and round only a few days ago, were pendulous. Except surely that couldn’t be true. It must just be his exhaustion making him slump or my exhaustion making me think so, the memory of his father playing tricks on me.

  “It was my dad’s car,” he said at last. “He was there that night. I heard it early on, recognised it. We hadn’t bedded down and no one else noticed, but I knew the sound of that engine. No one else had a car like it. And so I said my guts were bad and went to look for him, find out what he was doing there.

  “I found the car, hidden in the old stables. Really hidden, Glo, not just parked. It must have taken him ages to wiggle his way into the space and he might have scraped the precious paintwork, but he’d put it in there anyway.

  “But I couldn’t find him. He was nowhere to be seen. I didn’t understand, so I went to tell Miss Naismith or ask her to help. I had no idea what was going on.”

  “But you do now?”

  “She was in the bath,” Stig said. “I could hear the water and the window was steamed up, so I waited. It was embarrassing to think of a teacher in the bath, you know? I kept checking my watch—I had one of those watches you push a button and it lights up? She was still in the bath at eleven o’clock. Like I told you. Not out checking the kids. And then I fell asleep.

  “What woke me up was my dad’s car leaving. Four o’clock, he took off like a bat out of hell.”

  “And he had a key to the gate!”

  “Yeah,” said Stig. “See? It all makes sense. Anyway, I went back to my sleeping bag. Never noticed who was there and who was missing. Just lay down and tried to sleep. Then it went like I told you.

  “The next thing I knew Van was shaking me, telling me about Mope, and we all got up and went back and saw him in the river, and the girls started screaming and then my parents were there and Naismith was going mental saying she had been to check on us and we were all lying. But she didn’t, Gloria. She was in her cabin, in the bath. And my dad was somewhere in the woods. And he killed Moped. Or he chased him and Moped ran away and fell in the river.”

  “But Stig,” I began, “you’re really jumping to conclusions.”

  “That’s not all,” he said, cutting in. “At first I didn’t understand why my mum was so angry. She’s quite an angry person anyway, but I’d never seen her like that before. She changed and she’s never changed back.”

  I thought about the Angie Tarrant I had seen in the hotel, sharp and bitter; how scared I was of her even though I didn’t know why.

  “I overheard them arguing once, later,” Stig said. “My dad saying that he was sick of living a lie and he was going to come clean, and my mum—she was hissing at him, Gloria, hissing like a snake, she sounded insane—saying she had stuck by him and covered for him and put up with him and he wasn’t going to fling that back in her face and make a fool of her, let people look down their noses at her. That he had made his bed and now he had to lie on it. That she wasn’t going to have Wee J’s life ruined just so my dad could blab all his filthy secrets to the world.”

  “Wee J’s life?” I said.

  “Yeah,” said Stig. “They’re not so bothered about me because they think I know. Obviously they’ve thought for a while that I know. Or suspected it anyway.”

  “How do you work that out then?”

  “Blackmail,” said Stig. “Someone’s been blackmailing Dad for years. And once when Mum was drunk she let slip that she’s leaving everything to Weej because I’ve had mine.”

  “She thinks you’re the blackmailer?”

  “Yeah. My mum thinks she’s so subtle, but it’s not hard to piece things together from what she says. She snipes on and on about paying for his mistakes and how she shouldn’t have to work herself ragged, about how much she resents—how does she put it? Scrubbing people’s smelly feet and ripping their pubes out—but she’ll die of old age servicing his debts.”

  “But ‘his debts’ might mean anything.”

  “He’s got no legitimate debts,” said Stig. “Not beyond what any business would have. I asked Wee J and he told me. What he does have is sweet Fanny Adams where most of the profits should be. He’s been paying someone. I think he’s been paying them since the very beginning and he’s been trying to find out who. Picking them off one by one. He even went for me, and now he’s gone for Duggie.”

  “So … like a vendetta?” I said. “Are you serious?”

  “Scarlet, Cloud, Jo-jo, Alan,” he began. “It wasn’t the devil who killed them all for crossing his
bridge, Glo.”

  I couldn’t hold out against it much longer. Even Miss Drumm had said BJ Tarrant hung around too much and never came and went the front way. And everyone said it was odd the way he started a school, discounting fees to fill it with kids. My stomach was turning.

  “And speaking of Alan,” said Stig. “Who the hell would think of doing that unless it was in their minds anyway? Kind of takes one to know one, yeah?”

  “And your mum knows?” I said.

  “They’ve been in separate bedrooms for years,” Stig told me, and I remembered Angie Tarrant’s voice saying for worse and worse and worse again and finally I believed him.

  “It was his idea, you know,” said Stig. “Miss Naismith told us. She said the owner of the school thought it was good idea for us to sleep outside on that special night. She smirked.”

  “Oh my God,” I said. “You don’t think she knew?”

  “No,” said Stig. “I think she really believed all the guff about the Beltane. I think she just thought it was funny for the likes of my dad to care about it. Christ, if only she’d thought about it for a minute, asked herself why a man would want a lot of little kids to sleep outside.”

  “Do you think your mum’ll give him alibis?” I said.

  Stig shook his head. “Once it’s out, she’ll drop him like a ton of bricks,” he told me. “She’s got no loyalty, not really. Only pride.”

  “And you’ve suspected this all along?” I said. “From when you got here?” He seesawed his head, screwing his mouth up. “But you let me go chasing around all over the place, tracking people down? I really thought I was helping you, Stig, and all the time you were holding out on me. What a fool I am.”

  “I’ve hated it every day when you go out,” he said. “I was terrified for you. And it was your idea. I never asked you to do anything.”

  “You never told me what you knew either!”

  “Yeah well, that’s where you’re wrong,” said Stig. “I wrote it all down in the notes, but you ripped them up without reading them. While you were hiding the fact that Duggie was your husband, actually.”