“What is?”
“Well, I checked the books, and it’s supposed to be in Denmark. She sold it in the mid-eighties. For a pittance, if I’m honest; it was one of the first. She got barely enough for a decent supermarket shop out of it.”
“Then how come it’s in the Manse?”
“I haven’t the faintest. I’ve put a call in to the chap who bought it. Perhaps he’d swapped it for another, and we didn’t record it, or we were supposed to be selling it for him and somehow it fell through the cracks. Though I’d be surprised.” I would too. Between them, Karen and Pete were very on top of all the business aspects. Pete still runs an extremely reputable gallery and art dealing has been his life’s work. Both of them knew that you could never afford to neglect a customer.
“Wait, Carrie said a guy from Denmark came to the funeral—is it the same person?”
“That’s right. I’ll let you know if I hear anything. Speaking of Carrie, um, are you two getting along all right?”
I blink. “Fine.” He doesn’t say anything. “Were you expecting that we might not?” I add a half laugh to make the question sound like I’m teasing him.
He laughs a little awkwardly in return. “Well, it’s been a long time since you spent any time together. You’re both grown-ups now; you’re different people from when you last lived together. And you can both be . . .”
“Delightful. Charming. Stormingly good company.”
“That’s exactly what I was trying to say.” His chuckle is genuine this time. “You know she only took the Edinburgh part because of you. She could have been doing a Tom Stoppard thing instead.”
“Really? I didn’t—I didn’t know about that.”
“Well. Anyway. No Safe Place: mind you keep it stored properly in case we’ve got to ship it back. No direct sunlight—”
“I know, I know, I’ve not forgotten.” I change the subject quickly before I get a long lecture on the proper care, storage and transportation of oil paintings. “Anyway, tell me what you’ve been up to.” And he does. He tells me lots of things, and I read in each of them the message he’s trying to give me: he’s keeping busy and there’s nothing to worry about. But I will, and so will he.
It was easier, when I was away. No hooks to catch me, no bonds to tie me. Stories to tell, but none of them of people I love, none of them mine. Easier, certainly.
* * *
• • •
I’m back at the farmhouse, in the yard, having popped out to rather inelegantly retrieve my phone charger from under the driver’s seat of my car—head down, bottom in the air—when I hear something from the direction of Jamie’s flat. Raised voices, perhaps? Though more likely he has that enormous television on particularly loudly. But when I emerge triumphant with charger in hand, I spot a familiar figure descending the stairs down from Jamie’s rooms.
“Ben,” I call.
He looked like he was about to head off across the fields, but he turns. “Oh, uh, hi. I . . . uh, I didn’t quite expect to see you here.” He visibly regroups, and strives for his trademark affable charm, but it’s a far cry from his usual effort. “Which is silly of me since Fiona said you were staying.”
“Yes, she and Glen have been very kind.” I look at him more closely. “Are you okay?”
He raises his eyebrows. “Shouldn’t I be the one asking you that?”
I find a smile. “I’m okay. Have you been out for a constitutional?”
“What?” I gesture at his muddy shoes. “Oh, yeah. Right. Getting some fresh air. Then I thought I’d come and see if Fiona is around.”
“She’s in the house, but she’s about to take Callum to his football match, I think.” Why was he looking for her in Jamie’s digs? I wonder.
We turn for the farmhouse together, then he puts a hand on my arm to draw me to a halt. “You know, I wanted to ask you: did you tell the police about the animals?”
“No, I couldn’t think of a way to do it without sounding nuts. But Ali told them anyway.”
“That’s good, right? It’s part of the overall picture, surely? That someone is targeting you?”
“That seems to be the conclusion.”
He falls quiet and we move toward the farmhouse again. “If it is your father . . . I’m so sorry, this would be no way to find that out. Though I suppose it might offer some kind of closure . . .”
“To be honest, I think it would offer more questions.” We’re just outside the farmhouse door now.
“Yeah,” he says. Then, more quietly, “Yeah, I suppose that’s right.”
I touch his arm. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
“Of course. All good.” He smiles and opens the door without knocking in a way that speaks of years of familiarity. “Hello, hello—ah, Glen! How are you?” The kitchen seems smaller with Ben in it, shaking hands vigorously with Fiona’s father, and tousling Callum’s hair whilst Fiona attempts to pull a tracksuit top over Callum’s head. It’s already apparent to me that Callum is the beating heart of this house. Fiona and Glen revolve around his timetable.
“Is it Doune we’re playing?” Callum asks, when his head emerges.
“Aye,” says Fiona, her head bent as she ties Callum’s lace. He’s only wearing one football boot.
“Oh no!” he groans. “Then Stuart Davidson will be there. He’s a wee gobshite.”
“Callum!” exclaims Fiona.
“Well, he is,” he says stubbornly.
“Go and find your other boot. And some better language,” she says sternly.
“Who’s Stuart Davidson?” I ask as Callum disappears through the door.
“A wee gobshite,” says Fiona, to a bark of laughter from Ben that sounds overly loud. “And he’s going to be on particularly special form today when Doune wins.”
“What?” Callum is already back in the doorway, a boot in his hand. “Mum! We’re not going to lose again, are we?”
I glance at Fiona, expecting to hear I meant if, or one of the many encouraging things that any parent might say, but all she manages is, “Just play your best, wee man. Do that and you’ll have a great game.”
“Hey, Callum, shall I come and watch?” Ben says, in a transparent distraction attempt, but it works. Callum erupts in an enthusiastic cheer. “I’ll drive you, shall I?” Ben says to Fiona. “We can catch up.”
“Uh, sure. Thanks,” she says casually, but her gaze stays on him until Callum asks her for a water bottle. Then there’s a crescendo of noise and bustle as Callum, Fiona and Ben clear out of the kitchen, leaving Glen and me alone in the loudly silent farmhouse with Glen’s black Lab, Sheba, and a sleeping Toast. Glen smiles at me awkwardly. Since I arrived, he’s been gruffly welcoming and quietly, genuinely horrified by the circumstances. I can see that he can’t quite believe the bones can be those of his old friend, and yet he’s thinking what we are all thinking: who else could they belong to? All except Fiona, that is. I know she has always believed they are his.
“I’ve been meaning to show you something. I’ll be back in a second.” I nip off to my bedroom—Callum’s bedroom—and return with the box of my father’s research.
“Goodness,” Glen says, as he leafs through the contents. There’s a reverence in the way he holds the book that touches me. “I knew he was taking it seriously, but this is . . .”
Obsessive. “Yes. I know.”
“Well, he did seem fair passionate about it.” He reads on. “Window tax records! Smart man, your father.”
“All done pre-Internet. I suppose he must have actually gone to public record offices or something.” All that effort. A labor of love, surely. Or a way to avoid the breakdown of love.
“Aye, he did that. Wee research trips.” He reads out loud from the front of the jotter. “Love makes a furnace of the soul. I remember that. He wanted to find out who wrote it.” Me too. And why. And what they meant.
“And the kirk, he wanted to find the kirk. It’s not short of secrets, that house. Though it doesnae seem about to give them up.”
I fish out the aerial photos. “Here, take a look at these. I think they came just after he disappeared.” He puts the jotter down carefully to take them. “Callum says the path on this one—see here?—isn’t there anymore.”
“He would know; he loves to take Toast round there. I dinnae let him go alone, though, not by the water.” He flips through the photos again, then pauses on the last two, that don’t contain the Manse. “Now that’s interesting.”
“What?
“This is the falls—see here? You cannae get up there now, with the landslips. But these must have been taken before. Martin thought there was a memorial up there.”
I grab for one of the jotters. “Yes! I read that somewhere. He found notes on a Sunday collection for an unspecified memorial. He thought it might prove the church fire story, right? Yes, look, here—he thought it might have been in memory of all those that died. But . . .” I read the date in his notes. “1802. That’s far too late. That would have been years after the actual fire.”
Glen takes the jotter off me. “Aye, but that doesnae surprise me. The English would never have allowed a memorial at the time. It would have been a lovely spot for it too. I remember it from before the landslips. Fair overgrown, though. There could easily have been something up there somewhere.” He turns a page, then frowns. “Now that’s interesting.”
“The list of names? Yes, I saw that. Turn the page—” He gives a short, surprised bark as he reads the entry I’m pointing to, written clearly in my father’s decisive script. Callum McCue, babe in arms. “I don’t think my dad knew if they were donors for the memorial or names to go on it. The church records weren’t clear.”
“I didnae think there were any McCues round here until the nineteen hundreds. We were mostly in Ireland and then Lanarkshire before then. What a coincidence!” He frowns slightly. “Seems odd to list a babe as a donor, though.”
“Maybe those are the names on the memorial then.” We fall silent together. I’m thinking of the raging inferno inside the church. My mind skitters away from imagining the final moments of those trapped inside; it’s simply too horrific. Babe in arms. Whose arms, though? I take the jotter from him and read the list of names again. There isn’t another McCue.
Glen shakes himself, then peers at the photos of the falls again, then hands them to me. “I cannae see anything on these, though.” I don’t know what I should be looking for, but whatever it is fails to jump out at me.
Glen glances at Sheba. “She could use a walk. Shall we go and take a look for the path by the loch?”
His immediacy takes me aback, but I don’t want to seem rude, which is how I come to be walking through the wood with Glen, his black Labrador running ahead of us. There are clusters of bluebells at the base of some of the trees, and in one area, a full carpet of them in a sun-dappled grove. “It’s beautiful here. I always think I should get a dog when I’m walking through here.”
He snorts. “Not if you’re living at the Manse.” I glance sideways at him. “You willnae get a dog in there.”
“You’ve tried?” When would he have tried? Has the whole bloody McCue family been wandering through the property? A comic book–style image jumps into my head of Glen trying to shove poor Sheba through an open window.
“Sometimes Callum and I walk the dogs that way.”
“Ah.” That’s more feasible. “Fiona’s lucky to have you around to help.”
“Aye, well.” He doesn’t take a compliment easily. “It was a bit of a shock when she turned up with him, but it’s easier being a grandpa, I can tell you.”
“Were Fiona and Jamie that bad?” I ask lightly.
“Well. I wasnae the perfect dad, either. It took a long time to get Fiona diagnosed. And Jamie . . . well, he was Jamie.” He grimaces. “If I’d known that Fi . . . I like to think I would have handled things different. Been gentler, maybe. Fewer thrashings and more talking. Like all these modern dads I keep hearing about.”
“It was a different time, I suppose.”
“Aye, it was. And I was a different man, in many ways. I hadnae learned to cope with missing my wife.” I look over again, surprised at his honesty. He’s very determinedly not looking at me at all. This walk was never about finding the path. “I’m partly to blame. Just like the way you are, the way your life has turned out, is partly because we never found your dad. That was my job and . . . I didnae do it. And I’m sorry for that.”
“Well.” I’m caught off-balance. Once again, I’ve failed to appreciate that my parents’ story touched more lives than mine. “Well, I . . . I believe you did everything you could.”
“I did.”
“And my life isn’t that bad,” I say drolly. “When I’m not being terrorized out of my own home, that is.”
He expels air sharply in what might be a laugh. We’ve reached the loch already, and we search the edge for a few minutes, looking for any sign of a path that might match the photo. But there’s nothing to be seen there now.
Later, back at the farmhouse, Callum comes home red cheeked and muddy. I ask him what the score was, and he tells me they lost 5–3, but he was the one who scored all three. And Stuart Davidson was an absolute gobshite to him afterward.
My father is . . . I don’t know, I can’t think, I won’t think about it. He’s dead, or alive; he’s a thief, or a victim; he’s . . . I won’t think about it, I won’t think about any of it, because whatever else he might be, my father is not here.
TWENTY-ONE
It’s done.
The DNA of Jonathan and me, those intertwining strands and bonds that made we two into an us, has been torn asunder. Actually, not torn, exactly, since I more or less took a knife to the sections which were still holding together. A clean break, a neat slice, if there ever could be such a thing in matters of the heart.
I miss you, he said.
You could always get on a plane.
Carrie calls me just as I’m waving off the man who has fitted the Manse with an alarm. I texted her that Jonathan and I had a fight, though fight is not the right word—it suggests fire and fury, whereas this was a study in measured statements, at least until the last few exchanges. I’m not sure whether I texted her because I wanted her to call me or because she would have wanted me to reach out, but it amounts to the same in the end. “Are you okay? What happened?”
You know I can’t do that, he said.
I know you won’t do that.
“We spoke this morning. It went badly.” A wry laugh escapes me. I think it’s a laugh. “I made sure it went badly.” I’m wandering through the ground floor of the Manse as we talk. When I got here, the alarm guy was already waiting for me, and this is the first time I’ve been alone in the house since I found the skull.
The skull.
“Are you sure it’s over?” Carrie asks hesitantly.
“Yes. It’s been coming a long time. We worked because I would make the effort, I’d bend my life to match his.” The rooms are very quiet, but the Manse is listening to me. “I’m tired of doing that.”
I don’t want to fight, he said.
Sure.
Oh, come on, Ailsa, what do you actually want from me?
Maybe I do want you to fight. Maybe I want you to fight for me.
Jesus, Ailsa, what does that even mean?
“You shouldn’t have to bend,” she says. “It should be more . . . organic than that. Honey, I’m really sorry.” I hear her blow out a breath down the phone. “I’ll get back as quick as I can tonight. Just . . . be kind to yourself today, okay?”
Be kind to myself. I don’t know what that equates to in her mind. Chocolates, a trashy magazine? A hot bath with scented candles?
I climb the stairs to the second floor and stand in th
e landing. If this was a television series, there would be some kind of police tape hanging limply from the doorframe of the spare bedroom, but there’s nothing to show that someone once carefully placed a human skull in there. I head into my own bedroom instead.
Detective Laws still hasn’t called. The bones are still in both states: they are my father’s and they aren’t. And I am, too, though I think I have splintered into more than two states. There’s the Ailsa that believes there’s nothing to fear, that every oddity can be explained away, and there’s the Ailsa that sees the layers beneath the Manse. There’s the Ailsa that’s suspicious of each and every person here: Ali, Jamie, Fiona, Ben—Jesus, even Carrie (How well do you really know her?). That’s the Ailsa that scares me most. She might be the one I can never shake.
I sit on my bed and look around the room. Even with the alarm, I don’t know how I’m going to be able to sleep here tonight. A sudden shiver runs through me, and it occurs to me that the house is cold. Perhaps the flame on the boiler has snuffed out again. I really ought to get it serviced.
A door thuds.
I know it will be the bathroom door. I know that even if I go and close it, even if I test that it’s so tightly shut that I can’t force it open, only minutes later it will be thudding again. I sit and listen to it. Thud. Thud. Thud-thud. If Carrie was here, the Manse wouldn’t be clamoring for my attention in this way.
It’s a day for bold decisions. When Carrie comes back, I will tell her we should leave.
The phone in my hand suddenly rings again.
“Ailsa, I need to talk to you.”
“Ben?” I know it’s Ben—it says so on the screen—but it’s not the usual Ben. He sounds ragged and flustered, a far cry from his usual laid-back demeanor. “Are you okay?”
“Yes, but I need to talk to you.”
“Fire away.” Thud.
“No, I mean in person. I can’t do it now,” Ben says. “Fiona too. Will you be home tonight?”
“Uh, sure.” I pause. Thud. “Are you sure everything is okay?”
The Missing Years Page 27