A Gingerbread House Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Catriona McPherson

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Postscript

  Facts and Fictions

  Acknowledgements

  Also by Catriona McPherson

  Last Ditch mysteries

  SCOT FREE *

  SCOT AND SODA *

  SCOT ON THE ROCKS *

  Dandy Gilver mysteries

  AFTER THE ARMISTICE BALL

  THE BURRY MAN’S DAY

  BURY HER DEEP

  THE WINTER GROUND

  THE PROPER TREATMENT OF BLOODSTAINS

  AN UNSUITABLE DAY FOR A MURDER

  A BOTHERSOME NUMBER OF CORPSES

  A DEADLY MEASURE OF BRIMSTONE

  THE REEK OF RED HERRINGS

  THE UNPLEASANTNESS IN THE BALLROOM

  A MOST MISLEADING HABIT

  A SPOT OF TOIL AND TROUBLE

  A STEP SO GRAVE

  THE TURNING TIDE

  THE MIRROR DANCE

  Novels

  AS SHE LEFT IT *

  THE DAY SHE DIED *

  COME TO HARM *

  THE CHILD GARDEN

  QUIET NEIGHBORS *

  THE WEIGHT OF ANGELS

  GO TO MY GRAVE

  STRANGERS AT THE GATE

  * available from Severn House

  A GINGERBREAD HOUSE

  Catriona McPherson

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  First world edition published in Great Britain and the USA in 2021

  by Severn House, an imprint of Canongate Books Ltd,

  14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE.

  Trade paperback edition first published in Great Britain and the USA in 2022

  by Severn House, an imprint of Canongate Books Ltd.

  This eBook edition first published in 2021 by Severn House,

  an imprint of Canongate Books Ltd.

  severnhouse.com

  Copyright © Catriona McPherson, 2021

  All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. The right of Catriona McPherson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

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

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-5001-0 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78029-799-6 (trade paper)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4483-0538-4 (e-book)

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is purely coincidental.

  This eBook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

  Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland

  This is for Kristopher Zgorski,

  with love and thanks.

  PROLOGUE

  There was no mistaking the smell. Except, come to think of it, that’s not true. It was all too easy to mistake the smell, to miss that one crucial note in the putrid bouquet. For a start, it was damp and there was a years-deep rind of mould coating the bricks, eating into the mortar, softening the cheap cement that, once upon a time, had been used to pour the floor.

  In the damp, rot had come along and worked away at the joists and beams, at the stacks of softening cardboard boxes and yellowing newspaper. The drains were bad too, always had been; a faint drift in the air like a sigh of sour breath. Cats, of course. Or maybe foxes. Something had got in and stayed a while. And why wouldn’t a cat or a fox stay, out of the rain, with a buffet of little scurrying things laid on? Little scurrying things that must have thought they were safe in here. They added their bit to the chord too, but in such tiny dabs it would take a bloodhound to find them.

  No bloodhound needed for the bottom layer. Under the damp and rot, under the drains and vermin, there was something else, sweet and soft as a whisper. And what it whispered was a tale of death. Unmistakable, inescapable death. Not the snuffing out of a mouse either, nor some gasping stray, nor a proud wild fox brought to broken, whimpering nothing. This was something much bigger.

  There were three of them actually; curled together, as close in death as they were in life. Stopped short, they were a snapshot of themselves, their little vanities there in the coloured hair, covering grey, that lay in hanks near the scalp that had held it, in the good shoes well-polished and cared for, always stored on trees, now buckled and cracked around the bones of the feet inside them, in the pretty lingerie, rotted down to clips and hooks, stained and rusting, sinking through fragile skin. Hopes and triumphs were gone, disappointments too. All their stories were lost except one: the stark truth of what they really were, under their dreams and shame. What they were was meat. And when meat spoiled it stank, worse than old eggs, worse than fresh vomit, worse than shit and sweat and terror, until eventually that truth faded too, the last story told.

  Dear ———

  I hope it’s OK that I’m writing to you. It was my doctor who suggested it. It struck me as selfish but she said there was no harm.

  All I really wanted to say was sorry. I’m sorry I was too late to save your loved one. I’m sorry I didn’t put two and two together a lot quicker.

  I wasn’t trying to be a hero. I was trying to do the right thing. But I’m not cut out for saving the day. I’m a worker bee. Even as the boss’s daughter, I was never really one of the bosses. My dad’s old-fashioned, so I learned the business but I learned payroll in HR, monthly accounts in financial, ambient supply chain in logistics, and maintenance in the fleet.

  So, you see, I didn’t go looking for trouble; I stumbled over it like an extra stair in the dark. Only that’s the wrong way to say it. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make your heartbreak sound like something that happened to me. And it wasn’t trouble. It was evil. It wasn’t a surprise either. It was more like finding out that something you always thought was a fairytale, something to scare children giggly round a campfire on a dark night, was real and was never going to stop unless you, worker bee, no way a hero, stopped it.

  I’m sorry. That’s more like it but still not right. I knew vampires, werewolves,
trolls under the bridge and poisoned apples weren’t real. If I suddenly met them all one dark night, blundering into their private party, I’d still have known they weren’t real. I’d have known I was ill. I’d have gone to a doctor and got myself a nice wee prescription and a note for a couple of weeks off work.

  I knew it was real. I knew things like that could happen. I just didn’t know it was close. Maybe it was the same for you. I watched the news, sometimes. I heard it often enough anyway, when I was driving. And I heard your tearful pleas. Maybe not yours literally (or maybe I did) but parents like you, siblings, repeating a name, begging anyone who was listening to help. I’m sorry I didn’t pay attention until it was too late.

  Because I’m still not being honest. I’m so sorry. It wasn’t a coincidence. It was more than “close to me”. But if my dad hadn’t got a stomach bug last spring,

  From: Tash Dodd

  To: E.S. Norman

  Doc N – this is pointless. I don’t know what to say to them. I don’t even know who I’m writing to. Every time I get going I end up talking about me, me, me and I have to cross it out. Thanks for the suggestion but seriously look at what I wrote! I can’t send that.

  Sorry.

  Thanks anyway.

  See you next week.

  Tash. xxx

  From: E.S. Norman

  To: Tash Dodd

  Tash, you misunderstood me. That’s on me – last session was very hard for you. I didn’t mean for you to send a letter. I still think it would help you to write it though. Please write it down. Write it out of you.

  See you Thursday,

  Ellie Norman

  Dear ———

  I am writing to say I’m sorry I was too late.

  Tash Dodd.

  From: Tash Dodd

  To: E.S. Norman

  Dear Doc N,

  That’s what I managed to come up with after I fired off that last email to you and started again. Better, but still hopeless. I get it now. You want me to write what happened? OK.

  See you Thur,

  T xxx

  ONE

  I’m not cut out to be a hero. I’m a worker bee. Even though I’m the boss’s daughter I was never one of the bosses. Not really. My dad’s old-fashioned, so I learned the business but I learned payroll in HR, monthly accounts in financial, ambient supply chain in logistics, and maintenance in the fleet. Hiring and firing, nursing the big corporate accounts, wrangling chilled chains and screwing bargains out of dealers? Big Garry Dodd, the BG of BG Solutions, BG Connections and BG Europe, while it lasted, did all of that.

  The name makes him sound worse than he is, or was, or seemed anyway. But what else would he have called his ‘company’ back when it was one van with a hand-painted logo on both sides and a stack of business cards from a machine at the service station? BG was what he’d scratched into the teak veneer of his desk at school when he was bored, and what he’d scratched into the clouded plastic of the fag machine at the Coach when he was waiting outside the girls’ bogs for Little Lynne to stop moaning about him to her friends and come back out again. It was BG who loved LM in the tattoo he got when they broke up, to show her and win her back, and it was BG he’d tried to get her to have tattooed on her bikini line when they went on their engagement trip to Tene.

  ‘Jesus, Mum!’ I remember saying, the first time I heard this. I left the table and stamped upstairs to my room. ‘Nice story to tell the kids!’

  My mum just smiled and went back to pecking at her calculator. She took care of the money – every penny, from investing the pension fund to setting the Christmas bonus for the jannies – and she took good care of Big Garry too. Never nagged him, never laughed at him. The perfect wife. Too perfect, if you ask me. I’d hear them in the afternoons, crooning away in the master suite across the landing and then I’d stamp downstairs. One time, I passed Bazz on the way.

  ‘Doesn’t that bother you?’ I said.

  ‘What does?’ Bazz said.

  ‘That’s not even the right way to turn it into a ques— Never mind. Jesus!’ Bazz just looked at me out of red eyes and shrugged. I grabbed my car keys and left the house, aimlessly driving until I was sure they would be finished, showered and up again and Bazz would be out on whatever thrilling stoner night he had planned. He was one of the bosses. His childhood in video games and adolescence on the dark web had turned him into a tech wizard. But he was usually off his tree, not fit to be in charge of a Ms Pacman. So his official title was ‘outreach and PR manager’ and God knows what he actually did to earn it, except that he was in the Herald most weeks, handing over a giant cardboard cheque to someone and grinning.

  Anyway that’s who we were. Four Dodds – Big Garry the boss, Little Lynne with the pound signs in her eyes, Bazz the wasted hacker, and me. The worker bee, best behind the wheel of a van out on the road, or a forklift in the warehouse, back straight and buds in, grafting at what Big Garry called ‘the coal face’ for every day, ‘the family empire’ when he was trying to hide his pride under a joke, and ‘the reason I missed your childhood’ when he was at the teary stage of hammered. End of a wedding, kind of thing, Christmas night with his fifth brandy, last dinner of a holiday, over the grappa.

  It used to make me angry, make me think why shouldn’t he be proud, why should he be guilty about the life he made for us? He’d come from nothing, although my granny hated hearing her life summed up that way. A council house in Grangemouth though, skiving in the back row right through school, flirting with a bit of trouble when he was bored, till his mum took her hand to him and skelped the sense back in. And so maybe my granny was right; he’d started with that.

  The council house was long gone but he was still in Grangemouth. ‘Makes sense, Lynne,’ he used to say. ‘Nice and central. Halfway to Edinburgh, halfway to Glasgow, handy for everything.’ ‘Handy for the refinery,’ she’d say. ‘Nice view of the Young Offenders.’ This was when my mum was going through her property phase, egged on by the telly. She spent a good couple of years leaving schedules for estates in Perthshire and mock castles by the sea lying around. He built her a house on an acre plot with a kitchen island and two sinks in their en suite, and she stopped moaning.

  Maybe that was what she wanted all along. I didn’t have a very clear view of my family. All I saw was Lynne being greedy, Big Garry being successful, Bazz being as jammy as get out, and me? I was lucky. Ordinary and lucky and just sort of fine, the way lots of people can only dream of being. The way – it turned out – that I was only dreaming of being too.

  A late outbreak of stomach bugs in the middle of May had brought the warehouse to its knees. And the logistics contractor up in Dundee was going to have to recreate an entire set of forecasts because Big Garry had gone meddling in an online projection he didn’t have the competence for and wrecked everything. So, while he was at home, propped up in bed sipping flat Coke, and his assistant was staying away in case she caught it too – she’d mumbled something about a suppressed immune system, no details, and I couldn’t be bothered arguing – I was alone in his office on a Saturday morning. The mess on Big Garry’s desk was legendary, but if I knew my dad he’d have printed out that forecast beforehand. The print-out was sure to be somewhere deep in this mulch of paper, and I was determined to find it.

  I started by sorting into piles by broadest category, but no matter how I cut it there was a growing heap of paper I couldn’t put anywhere. There were figures and numbers and jotted notes. I couldn’t work out whether the figures were weights or prices, whether the long numbers were for international dialling or invoice tracking, and the notes might as well have been Greek.

  ‘Dad!’ I muttered to myself. ‘All this paper!’ I heard his voice in my head and smiled in spite of myself. ‘Paper and ink, Tash. That’s the way.’ It was one of his favourites, along with ‘Belt, braces a
nd glue.’ Because belt and braces between them still left too much to chance.

  He’d listened to people selling the paperless office, back in the day, but a desktop computer with outsize monitor, keyboard stored on a little tray that slid out – occasionally – from underneath, hadn’t helped, on account of the printer that came with the rest. The photocopier definitely hadn’t helped. It was right here in his private office and he used it every day. So the paper mountain grew and grew and grew.

  I knew there were probably sandwich plates and coffee cups living underneath it, so when a muffled phone rang it was no kind of shocker. This wasn’t the confident bell of Big Garry’s mobile. He had that at home with him, charging up on his bedside table. It wasn’t the discreet beep and flash of his internal landline either. And it wasn’t an outside call because he didn’t get them; they went through the outer office to save him being hassled.

  I started hunting but hadn’t found the handset before the ringing stopped. Maybe it wasn’t a phone at all. Had my dad finally got himself a step-counter? Was that his alarm going off to tell him to stand up and stretch? I grinned at the thought and laid another piece of paper on the miscellaneous pile. The ringing started again. And it wasn’t a step-counter. It was definitely a phone: a second phone – that marriage ender, that respect shredder – and it was somewhere in this jumble of paper on my dad’s desk. I could feel it thrumming as well as hear it ring.

  Who knows what induced me to do what I did next? Maybe it was the timbre of the vibration, too deep and solid for the sound a little burner would make if it was sitting on a desktop shifting as it rattled. I wheeled the chair back, bending to look underneath. And there it was, in a nifty little pocket made out of gaffer tape. Without thinking, I plucked it out and flipped it open.

  ‘Garry?’ came a voice, as I was saying hello. ‘Oh, Lynne,’ it went on. ‘Good enough. Where’s the big man? No matter. Tell him I owe him a bottle of forty-year-old single malt and a round at St Andrews. Talk about getting out in the nick of time.’