The Weight of Angels Read online

  Catriona McPherson, formerly a linguistics lecturer at the University of Leeds, now divides her time between California and Scotland. She writes full time.

  Website: www.catrionamcpherson.com

  Twitter: @CatrionaMcP

  Also by Catriona McPherson from Constable & Robinson

  After the Armistice Ball

  The Burry Man’s Day

  The Child Garden

  The Weight of Angels

  Catriona McPherson

  Constable • London

  CONSTABLE

  First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Constable

  Copyright © Catriona McPherson, 2017

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN: 978-1-47212-527-9

  Constable

  An imprint of

  Little, Brown Book Group

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ

  An Hachette UK Company

  www.hachette.co.uk

  www.littlebrown.co.uk

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Postscript

  Facts and Fictions

  Acknowledgements

  Terri Bischoff

  With love and thanks

  Prologue

  The anger was long gone, doused in vodka and tamped down to a sour thud. But the memory of it wouldn’t fade. For a few hours there, everything had been clear. The rage was a high, pure note sounding in your ears, slicing through the junk of life. It was a white light, vicious and merciless, showing the truth if you dared to open your eyes. It was a flashing blade, quicker and cleaner than anything.

  A high note, and a white light, and a quick blade.

  Then suddenly it was dark. Or maybe not suddenly at all because time had stopped its steady ticking. It lurched and yawned and slabs of it slid out from where they belonged and shoved in where they didn’t.

  But, sudden or not, there was darkness. And cold mud. The slop of stone-cold mud skidding under your heels as you dragged and staggered. Colder than ice, that mud. A sly, filthy cold.

  And the smell of it. Not like earth at all. No mushrooms and leaf mould. No life. Just the tang of iron and the sulphurous seep of cold clay and the suck of the mud at your feet.

  It dried like a carapace. Waking, hours later, feeling it like armour. Like an extra skin. It flaked off your fingers when you moved them and rubbed in crumbs on the pillow below your cheek. Under the sheets, last night’s clothes were caked and streaked, clay-yellow and iron-red. Rusted iron, was it? Those red streaks. And that tang last night? That metallic reek.

  Someone was moving. Someone was coming. The door opened and the silence lasted so long that sleep stole up and around again. Then, at last, screaming.

  ‘No! Oh God, oh God, oh my God, no! What have you done?’

  Chapter 1

  ‘I been broke but I never been poor,’ said someone on Facebook, in loopy writing, over a picture of a beach at sunset. It sounds great, and fair play to you if you can hack it. Me? At half past ten in the morning, on Tuesday, 16 February, after I’d dropped off my husband but before I’d got to my interview, on the A711 between Palnackie and Auchencairn, I became poor. Here’s how.

  Like a lot of broke people, I’d changed jobs and moved house in the last year. Also, like broke folk everywhere, I was praying as I drove along: Please, God, don’t let the car break down. Please make that funny noise just because of the rain and nothing to do with the engine. Please make the petrol gauge be on the stingy side. Let there be plenty of fuel to get me there and back again.

  I took the main road through Palnackie, trying not to think about the nice man in the garage shop on the side street. No one with an important appointment to keep would make a detour to hand over eleven pounds twenty for bread and milk.

  But by the time I’d gone the five miles to Auchencairn, two things had happened.

  First, this time I veered off the through road and went round by the back-street, a slalom of parked cars and sharp turns, not to mention an extra few yards using an extra few drops of petrol. Thing is, the shop in Auchencairn happens to be on the main drag and I owed the nice man in there closer to twenty, for bog roll and Tampax and a tub of margarine I’d scraped out that breakfast time, working a sharp knife right round the ridges where the lid snapped on, for Angel’s pieces.

  I wasn’t paranoid. I didn’t think he’d be out the front watching for me, setting up a road block for his nineteen quid. But if the funny noise wasn’t just puddle water splashing up and I did break down, right under his nose, I couldn’t laugh it off and buy a coffee from him while the AA came.

  So that was one thing. But then came the clincher. Working my way round the back of Auchencairn, old ladies frowning through their nets to see who it was, I decided to do something only poor people do.

  I decided to lie my way into a job. And not just a bit of spit and polish on the old CV, like everyone does – sole responsibility for day-to-day running, cash handling, managerial experience. I decided to tell big fat dangerous porkers, to defraud people who needed to count on me, to shortchange people who needed more than I could give them. I reached over, took the thin green folder with my true life history in it and threw it onto the back seat, leaving the plump, buff folder, with the résumé that was going to land me this job, sitting there under my good black handbag, ticking like a time-bomb.

  I heard my husband’s voice in my head, laughing at me. You hate it when I’m right, don’t you? How long had it been since Marco had laughed in real life?

  Actually, three weeks. He laughed when he found the job advert. ‘God Almighty!’ he shouted. ‘Ali! Ali, get in here and see this.’

  He was in Angel’s room, on the computer. The kitchen timer was going and Angel lay on the bed with his hands laced behind his head, staring daggers at his dad, counting along with the ticks, grudging every lost minute.

  I stopped in the doorway and put the tea-towel up to my face to breathe through its sweet folds. The room was tiny, to be fair. And Angel – Angel – is fifteen, with all his trainers under his bed and the sheets weeks past changing, a dark ghost of hair gel blooming on the pillowcase and God knows what under the duvet. But it was Marco too. Forty-eight years old and rank with the tension that never left him these days. Even now his face was shining and his hair, still dark at the back although his temples were silver, sat against his neck in wet spike
s like shark-teeth. At least recently he’d started having it trimmed again. He’d even updated the style, making me hope we were turning a corner.

  ‘I’ll just crack the window,’ I said, fumbling through the gap in the curtains and wrenching the catch on the metal frame.

  ‘Mu-um,’ said Angelo. ‘It’s freezing.’

  ‘You need some air in here,’ I said. ‘Get under the covers if you’re cold. Or go out for a walk and get your blood moving. The road’s clear. Just stay off the verges.’

  The shutter came down over his face and took a swipe at my heart on its way. I know, I wanted to tell him. I know. A walk, when none of your friends are in walking distance and you can’t make new ones. Not with that phone and those jeans.

  ‘Ali, will you listen?’ Marco said, twisting round and beckoning to me. I stepped into the curve of his outstretched arm and he hugged my hip against his shoulder as he traced the text on the screen, moving the cursor like a karaoke ball.

  ‘Full-time, flexible hours, excellent pay and advancement for the right candidate.’

  ‘A job!’ I said. ‘Where?’

  ‘Here!’ he said. Yelped, really. ‘Right here!’

  Angelo snorted at the sound of his dad’s enthusiasm and my heart healed. Wee shite, I thought, and turned to scowl at him.

  ‘Where here?’ I said, turning back. There had been long nights of working out petrol costs to Glasgow and Carlisle, calculating the take-home from the top line, with tax credits and me still signing on.

  ‘Right bloody here,’ Marco said. ‘Townhead. Five minutes away.’

  ‘Townhead?’ I said. ‘That’s the arse end of nowhere. What job is there for you at Townhead?’

  Marco squeezed me harder against him and that was when he laughed. ‘Not me,’ he said. ‘You, ya plank. It’s for a beauty therapist.’

  I had caught a little bit of his excitement, and the slump as it left me felt like the bathwater draining. Townhead was two farms and a phone box, and even the phone box wasn’t hooked up these days. ‘Oh, darlin’,’ I said, ‘it’ll be one of those franchise things. Make money in your own home. Pay this shyster in Townhead to get your starter pack and hand over a chunk of your takings.’

  ‘Ye of little faith,’ Marco said. ‘It’s not a franchise. It’s a full-time position for a qualified beauty therapist to work at Howell Hall.’

  ‘A-oooooooo!’ said Angelo. ‘Ow-ow-aooooooo. Howl Hall? Go for it, Mum. You can wax their knuckles at the full moon.’

  I said nothing. Marco let go of me and started fiddling with the cables to hook up the printer. The kitchen timer went off and Angelo leaped up, flat to standing in one move. ‘Time’s up,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll just—’ said Marco.

  ‘Time’s up, Dad. Twenty minutes. A deal’s a deal.’

  I looked up at him, trying to think what to say. Up! Up into the bum-fluffed face of the little boy I had been singing to sleep in my arms, seemed like ten minutes ago. I had only thrown out his shampoo shield when we moved out of our real house last summer. I found it in the bathroom cabinet and remembered him bolt upright in the shallow bath. ‘Don’t let the soap get in my eyes, Mummy. Promise me.’ Sitting there looking like an old lady in a sunhat, with that floppy brim all over his face and his little ears bent down under it, while I lathered up his hair.

  I threw out the shield in one of the extra-sturdy, extra-large black bin bags. Seventeen of them it took to downsize us into this place. No point saving money on the mortgage and handing it over in storage fees.

  Marco had finished anyway. He gathered the pages from the printer tray, then took my hand and pulled me out, as our loving son nearly clipped my heels shutting his door.

  ‘Marco, listen,’ I said, back in the kitchen. ‘They don’t mean an ordinary beauty therapist. A commercial one like me.’

  ‘You haven’t even read it,’ he said. He brushed the day’s junk mail back against the bread bin and hitched himself up on the bunker. There was no space for a table. No space in the so-called living room either. We’d turned into one of those families that eat in a row on the couch with the telly on. Angel and Marco were thrilled. I kept my mouth shut.

  ‘“Howell Hall,”’ he read, ‘“is an independent psychiatric hospital situated in the peaceful Galloway countryside.”’

  ‘Peaceful?’ I said. ‘What a pile of shite!’ The headland round Howell Hall was owned by the army. When it was quiet it was very, very quiet, but when they were training, it was guns and tanks and soldiers shouting. DANGER AREA, the signs said. No kidding, I always thought when I passed by.

  ‘“Its twenty-three beds, in private en-suite rooms, and individually tailored therapy programmes cater for clients with a wide range of health and social needs.” See?’

  ‘See what? They mean occupational or what-do-you-call-it. Like a proper trained-up . . . that can do psychology about body image. There was a talk about it at the college, like an option module?’

  ‘Full-time, flexible hours, excellent pay,’ Marco said again. ‘And I’m looking and “qualified beauty therapist with relevant experience of special-needs clients” is all it says.’

  ‘Well, there it is,’ I said. ‘I don’t have any experience of special-needs clients.’

  Marco was rubbing his jaw with the side of his hand. ‘What about Oz?’ he said.

  I was draining the pasta and didn’t answer, concentrating on pouring without scalding myself or slopping any of the strands over the edge of the sieve.

  ‘You could make up anything about our year in Australia,’ Marco said. ‘How would they check? You could say you worked at an old people’s home or a residential school for . . . whatever you call them . . . kids.’

  ‘But I didn’t,’ I said. ‘I don’t know the stuff I’d have learned there.’

  ‘Aw, come on, Ali,’ said Marco. ‘Google it. You could google yourself to being a brain surgeon, these days.’ He hesitated, rubbing his jaw again. ‘And you do know something about it, don’t you?’

  I tipped the sieve and sent the pasta sliding into the pan full of sauce, concentrating hard on the year in Australia. We’d had a last fling, the three of us, before Angelo started at the school. Temporary managers in our two businesses, temporary tenants in our house, and me sitting on a white beach watching them: Marco casting for sharks and Angel poddling about, with his baby doll under his arm, looking like a fish finger with all the sand stuck to his sunblock.

  ‘Make your mind up, eh?’ I said, keeping my voice light. ‘Either I can tell tales about our gap year and no one’s the wiser, or everything’s on the internet for the world to see. Can’t have it both ways.’

  ‘So you’re saying no?’

  ‘I’m saying I can’t believe you’re even asking me!’ I dropped my voice. Still a habit even though Angel would have earbuds in. ‘You want me to go and work in a loony bin? Go inside that bloody abbey every day for hours on end?’ He pulled his chin back into his neck and frowned at me. ‘Hall, I mean, not abbey. Shit!’

  ‘Don’t upset yourself,’ Marco said.

  Truth be told, Howell Hall and the abbey and the DANGER AREA were all mixed together in my head and I tried not to think about any of them. I tried not to look at the abbey, even though it was practically hanging over us, right outside the living-room window, the bare bones of its vaults and arches sharp against the sky, all the glass and wood gone, like a dead thing picked clean and left there.

  Thank God the flood had drained at last. When the grounds were knee-deep for a week, and the wind rippled over the water, the abbey had looked like a ghost ship floating endlessly closer yet never landing. And that one still night the moon had come out, every arch was reflected to make an O, like a ghost mouth screaming. It was back to normal now, marooned in a sea of rotting yellow grass. But it was there. It was nearly dark already, of course, teatime on a day like this at this time of year, but I would still see its outline if I turned. It was always there.

  I shouted over my shoulder, ‘A
nge? Tea’s ready.’

  He was moving. Food was the one thing that got a response from him. He filled the kitchen doorway. ‘Pasta again?’

  ‘You’re welcome,’ I said.

  ‘Any garlic bread?’

  I handed him his dinner and watched him as he took the five paces through to the couch and plopped down, swivelling the plate to keep it level and hitting the buttons on the remote with his free hand. Canned laughter broke out before his bum touched the cushion.

  I was used to driving past the army checkpoint – no more than a hut, really, with dusty windows, old phonebooks and Yellow Pages slumped on its windowsills, and yellowing posters adorning its walls, but this was the first time I had tried to get in. Half of me thought they’d turn me back. And half of that half hoped for it. But when I wound down the window and gave my name to the guy on the gate, he just glanced at his clipboard and tapped my name with his pen.

  ‘Ms Alison McGovern,’ he said. ‘Here you are in black and white. You know where you’re headed, madam?’

  ‘It’s just straight down, isn’t it?’ I squinted ahead to where the road dimmed and disappeared, as if the trees on either side had swallowed it.

  ‘One road in and one road out,’ he said. ‘If you start to float you’ve gone too far.’ He smiled and patted the roof of the car to send me on my way.

  Strange job, I thought, looking at him in my rearview mirror as I drove away. When he’d joined the army, he couldn’t have expected he’d spend his days standing in a kiosk on a back road in the middle of nowhere, keeping tourists and birdwatchers off the training range.

  ‘It’s got to happen somewhere, pal,’ Marco had said. ‘Sewage treatment, nuclear power, army training.’

  Mental illness. He didn’t say it, but I heard it anyway.

  ‘Middle of Sauchiehall Street would be a bit daft, eh?’

  Of course, he was right. Galloway is empty and this little corner of Galloway, a bulge in the coast with no beaches, is even emptier than the rest of it. And, Marco said, there were unforeseen benefits. Rare orchids, fragile mosses and shy nesting birds flourished there with no ramblers to flatten them or picnickers to scare them. It wasn’t just a training range, he told me. It was a site of special scientific interest. It was a haven. A sanctuary.