The Child Garden Read online

  “So I shouted, ‘Is anyone there?’ You wouldn’t believe how long it took me to open the damn thing and look through it, Glo. And I was still waiting for a slap on the back of the neck. My mum used to go ballistic if you went in her bag and even my dad, even today, if she asks for her specs or her ciggies, he’ll hand the whole thing over and wait to take it back again.”

  “Stig,” I said. For the first time it seemed as if he was just talking to fill the air. Or maybe talking so he didn’t have to say what needed to be said, if he would only shut up long enough to say it.

  He leaned over and opened the clasp, springing the fake buckle at the first go.

  “It’s April’s,” he said, poking at the wallet, make-up, keys, phone. “All her stuff’s in here. And look.” He jabbed a piece of folded paper, but he didn’t pick it up or open it. I did that.

  Stephen, it said on the outside. And on the inside, in a round hand, plain blue biro, it said just what he told me: I heard the car.

  “But why would she do that?” I said. “Why would she do any of this? Even though she wanted to kill herself, why would she involve you?”

  “Just trying to mess with my head?” He looked upwards and spoke loudly as if shouting to someone upstairs. “Nailed it, April.”

  “But why?”

  He closed his eyes and stayed like that with his head back.

  “Was it definitely her?” I said. Stig sat up and blinked at me. Who knows where his thoughts had taken him, but it looked like a long way back to meet mine.

  “Look at the picture.” He took the wallet out of my hands and slid a travel card out of its plastic folder. “It’s her.”

  He was right. The face staring out of the card was the same one we had seen in the hole under the crypt, as round and plain as the signature under it and the writing on the folded note.

  “That’s not what I meant, though,” I said. “Was it definitely April who was contacting you? Isn’t there a chance that someone else was messing with you both?”

  “I wondered that,” he said. “Not at first, because she knew too much for it not to be her. But when she phoned, I couldn’t get the voice to fit the picture in my head.”

  “What did she look like when you knew her?” I asked, still staring at the photo.

  “A skinny wee girl with her hair dyed burgundy, and all that zigzag way.”

  “Crimped,” I said.

  “Yeah. Bad skin, too much make-up, like it helped.”

  “You liked her,” I said.

  “Eh?”

  “That’s a lot of noticing for a teenage boy,” I said.

  He shrugged, half-smiling. “She was my ‘girlfriend’ for about ten minutes,” he said. “We all paired off and reshuffled till we’d been right round. You know what we were like back then.”

  Only I didn’t, not at all.

  “So, she used to be your girlfriend,” I said. “And you’d been phoning and texting recently? And you were only at your flat tonight because of the weather?” He nodded. “Any other Monday you’d have got the text at your mum’s, driven to the huttie, found April, and phoned the police. Like you were going to.”

  “After I’d checked to see if she was really dead and probably got covered in her blood. You see?”

  “I see. And if they got a warrant for your flat, they’d find her bag.”

  “After me telling them I hadn’t actually seen her for twenty-odd years and certainly—definitely—she’d never been at my place. What’s going on, Gloria?”

  “I tell you one thing that’s going on,” I said. “You’re in a world of trouble.”

  He looked me straight in the eye then and spoke in a steady voice. Not a single tremor despite what he was saying, which would have given me the collywobbles.

  “Tell me right now if you want me to go, and I’ll leave. I’ll call the cops as soon as I get a signal, I’ll tell them I was at the huttie on my own. I’m innocent. I’ve got nothing to fear.”

  I took a long time to decide. It was a good offer. He would drive away and keep my name out of it. Nicky and I could carry on the same as ever.

  “I know you didn’t kill her,” I said.

  His relief made him sag down in his chair. “Will you help me?” he said.

  “You didn’t kill her,” I said again. “But you’re not innocent. You stopped being innocent when you found her and didn’t call it in.”

  “But it was you that—”

  I held up my hand. “Let me think!” It didn’t take long. “It needs to be anonymous,” I told him. “And it’s better coming from a woman. I’ll call.”

  I knew I lived too much inside my head. How could I not? Where else was there? I was the onlooker to so many human dramas every day at work: small joys, small sorrows but big to the people they happened to. So maybe I’d got the idea that I could see things clearly. Maybe I’d got an inflated opinion of myself. There’s that.

  And it was a chance to do something. I wasn’t much for praying by then, but one I never got tired of is the one that goes: God grant me courage to change what I can, strength to bear what I can’t, and wisdom to know the difference. So much of my life was bearing. And then tonight, all of a sudden, here was a chance to make a change. To take injustice and change it.

  And another thing too. Usually I only get to read the stories that other people make up. I see them when they’re done, for good or bad. Brilliant stories locked tight and unbreakable—The Count of Monte Cristo, The Return of Martin Guerre—or stupid stories full of holes that leave you let down and restless—Cyrano de Bergerac, Persuasion, although that wasn’t her fault because she died. It had never happened to me before that I got bits of a story before it was done and had the chance to sculpt it and polish until everyone saw what I wanted them to see. Until everyone listened to me.

  “You need to get your car out of sight,” I said. “Probably for nothing, because the postie only comes as far as the first grid and that’s not till after two in the afternoon. But if it’s Parcel Express it could be any time, and sometimes they miss the box and drive right in. And I’ve got an Amazon order outstanding.”

  “Stay here?” said Stig.

  “I thought you wanted me to help you.”

  “Yeah, like lend me some cash for a room and say you hadn’t seen me if anyone asked.”

  “But where could you go that’s better?” I said. “You’re invisible. Ninety-nine percent of the country’s useless for hiding now. Your phone says where you are unless you switch it off. You’re in about the only place for four hundred miles where no one can track you.”

  “Still,” said Stig. He reached into a back pocket, pulled out his phone, and killed it. I woke April Cowan’s and did the same.

  “Also, someone should get to the bottom of this,” I said.

  “What are you talking about?” said Stig. He rubbed his hands over his face. “This is real, Glo. April Cowan is lying dead in a hole. This isn’t … you’re not … ”

  “St. Mary Mead,” I said. “Miss Marple. But it doesn’t add up. I mean, your story about what happened that night at Eden? Already I can see loose little threads I can pick at.”

  “Oh?” said Stig. “Likes of what?”

  “Likes of why was Vanman as white as a sheet and using words like missing?”

  “Van the Man,” said Stig. Then he thought about it and his eyes opened so wide his glasses slipped down his nose. “You’re right. It didn’t seem weird, looking back, because it was terrible, so it was like he was right to be in a state from the off. But he shouldn’t have been, should he?”

  “But people are strange,” I said. “That might have been something or nothing. Maybe he had a bad dream. I tell you what’s really off. How did a car roar away in the night if the gates were locked?”

  He blinked at me, stunned. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “Thirty yea
rs I’ve been thinking about this and that never even occurred to me.”

  “Twenty-eight,” I said. “And there aren’t that many possible explanations. We just need to narrow it down.”

  But he wasn’t listening. He was looking around the kitchen, not judging it now, just getting familiar. He laughed suddenly. “Have you ever seen that film Misery?”

  “No,” I answered, “but I’ve read the book. I’m a friend, Stig, not a fan.”

  I keep the spare bed made up more because it looks pretty with the quilt and pillow slips than in hope or fear of sudden guests. No one has stayed in this house except me since I moved in ten years ago. The nearest miss was one night when my mother and father came to see Nicky and came back here after. Dad was too shocked to drive and I got as far as boiling water for hot bottles before Mum came to her senses and realised what was happening.

  “We haven’t set the alarm,” she’d said. “We haven’t set light timers. I’ve left a washing out.” As if Castle Douglas was some hotbed of crime. “Come on, Trevor, stir yourself. You’ll be fine when you get going.”

  She had turned back at the front door as my dad weaved towards the car; doddered almost, suddenly an old man.

  “Look what you’ve done to your father,” she said. “How could you be so thoughtless?”

  “Mum, I honestly don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.

  “The way you puffed it all up. A new place, better care. You got our hopes up, Gloria. I’ll never forgive you.”

  The only bright spot in the whole episode was Miss Drumm the next day. She’d been listening through the connecting door.

  “So that’s your mother, is it?” she’d said. “That’s Nicky’s grandmamma? She’s one you’d leave inside the wolf.”

  “What are you smiling about?” said Stig. I was concentrating on filling the bottles, hadn’t realised the thoughts were showing on my face.

  “A happy memory,” I said. “And an appropriate one too. You can’t choose your family, but friends are a fine thing.”

  I love Rough House for saving my life, but showing Stig round, I saw it through his eyes. The only bathroom is downstairs, with just a bath, no shower and no heater either, and the rickety window lets the drafts howl through. It’s a long way upstairs to the bedrooms, four of them, the two big ones facing the sunny garden and the two little ones with the arrow-slit windows facing out the back to the yard. Facing the sunny garden in the daytime in the summer if and when the sun shines, I thought, leading Stig into the room at the top of the stairs. On a night like this, it looked like where Jane Eyre saw the ghost. The furniture was something Miss Drumm called pickled walnut. The wallpaper was a sort of colourless pinky beige in a raised pattern that looked a bit like fungus, and the carpet and curtains were much the same. The crocheted mats, worked in white and stained with tea, and the crocheted, tea-stained handles on the brown-paper sun blinds didn’t help. Cat sick, Miss Drumm called it, which made me shudder, but at least the quilt and the pillow slips were satin. I drew the line at candlewick; all her candlewick covers were in the linen cupboard, dry cleaned and stored in bags sucked small with the hoover.

  “I’ll put towels in the bathroom for you,” I said, as I slid the two hot water bottles in under the bedclothes. “And a toothbrush. And I’ll set out a razor. Can you sleep in the sweat suit for now? I won’t be long and no one will come to the door, I promise, but if they do, don’t answer. No one’s got a spare key. No one can get in.”

  “What?” he said. “Where are you going?”

  “Phone box at Shawhead. It’s tucked well away and nobody’s even going to be walking a dog at this time of night when it’s like this, are they?”

  “You’re really going to call the police?”

  “I’ve got to. We can’t leave her there on her own in the cold and dark.”

  “I can’t ask you to do that,” he said. “You don’t owe me.”

  “Anonymously and a woman’s voice,” I said. “It’s best that way. They’ll probably want to ask me if I heard anything or saw anything, but they’ll get me at work tomorrow. They won’t come round here. There’s no reason for them to connect me with April.”

  He nodded. I held out my hand.

  “I’ll put your car away while I’m out.”

  He nodded again and fished his car keys out of the sweatpants pocket. I was almost out the door when he stopped me.

  “Glo?” he said. “You know earlier, when you were freaking out about them closing the home? Thinking someone who works there might be mixed up in this?” I nodded. “Why would you want them looking after your boy if you reckon that’s possible? Why wouldn’t you want the place closed down if there’s someone there who might harm him?”

  I took a long time deciding what to say, but in the end I was as straight with him as he’d been with me. “What’s the worst they could do?” I asked.

  “I don’t want to say it.”

  “Say it.”

  “They could kill him.”

  “And his troubles would be over. Don’t look at me like that.”

  “Or they could hurt him.”

  “No, they couldn’t,” I said. “Wait here.” I walked along the corridor to the big bedroom at the other end and lifted Nicky’s picture from my bedside table.

  “Oh,” said Stig, when I came back and handed it to him. “What’s caused that then?”

  That’s a fair enough question, and so I answered him. “Pantothenate Kinase-Associated Neurodegeneration,” I said, taking the picture back and polishing the frame with my cuff. “PKAN, for short.” I kissed the glass over Nicky’s face “My little PKAN pie. Nothing hurts him, nothing helps him, nothing ever will. I’d best be off.”

  “Of course, if you’re going to tell them that Stephen Tarrant drove a woman to suicide and you’ve got him locked in your house without his car keys, there’s nothing I could do to stop you,” Stig said. He was smiling at me.

  “You could overpower me now before I start,” I said, smiling back. “If you’re going to leave one woman’s body behind you, why not two?”

  We considered one another for a long minute. I’m not sure who broke eye contact first. Probably me since I’m not much of a hard nut.

  “Drive safely,” he said.

  “Sleep tight,” I said back.

  Seven

  I practised what to say all the way on the back lane to the Shawhead phone box. Just as I had imagined, I didn’t pass another car and I drew off the road before the start of the houses, made my way to the kiosk on foot with no torch. It was lit up, but there was no one to see me as I slipped inside and fumbled the buttons with my gloved fingers. I had never dialled 999 before and my pulse started racing as I waited for the call to go through.

  “What service?” asked a bored voice.

  “Police,” I said, trying to make my voice sound gruff.

  “Are you in a safe place, madam?” asked the exchange. Obviously I sounded like exactly what I was: a scared woman.

  “Police,” I said again. “There’s been a death.”

  When I got through to them, I didn’t chance the gruff voice again. I whispered.

  “There’s a body,” I said.

  Then I froze. I felt a sick swirling in my head and my vision blurred. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen it until that moment, couldn’t believe I had got that close to blurting out the words that would wreck everything. I crashed the receiver down, burst out of the phone box, ran to my car, and drove away.

  He didn’t come to meet me at the door and I wondered if he was sleeping. It was hard to imagine that sleep would have come to him, but then shock does strange things to you. When the doctors told us about Nicky—finally told us straight, laid it all out, stopped spinning fairy tales—I slept for thirty-six hours. I’ve never been so ashamed of anything in my life. Just when he needed his mot
her most of all, when he was trying to deal with such bad news, I abandoned him and slept. I even remember what I dreamt of. A childhood summer, a room with floating white curtains and a shining wooden floor and me sitting up in bed with a nightcap on, eating soup from a cup and playing with tiny little wooden soldiers that turned into chessmen and then marbles and rolled away. I’ve never been in a room like that in my life. More’s the pity.

  I turned off the kitchen lamps, rubbed Walter’s head, and said a prayer to keep the Rayburn lit until morning, then slipped out into the hallway. That was when I heard him snoring. I put the light on and looked down at him, sitting at the bottom of the stairs with his head against the banisters, his mouth open and his hands hanging down between his knees. A scrap of paper had dropped from his grasp and lay on the floor.

  I bent and lifted it, seeing that it was a clipping from a newspaper. A tiny thing; it hardly took a moment to read it.

  McAllister, 1 May 1995. It said. By his own hand, Nathan McAllister. Private funeral. No flowers.

  I hadn’t had any dinner, beyond the bit of gingerbread and chocolate biscuit they’d brought me at the home with my cup of tea. They’re good to me there since I’m in every day. So I was lightheaded by this time. Never mind the whisky that I’m not used to. And the newspaper clipping was one thing too much. By his own hand.

  The words danced on the page and all I could see was April’s hands, curled round the handle of the knife with the dark blood in the creases of her fingers. And then Nicky’s hands, curled round the rolled flannels they give him to stop them spasming up so tight I can’t wash them. I wash them every night. Well, boys his age get mucky. I wash them and rub lotion into them and once a week I trim his nails and take off his friendship bracelets, rub his wrists underneath in case they’re itchy. April wore no jewelry. Her sleeves were pushed back up her arms as far as they would go and there was nothing.

  “It was in the bottom of her bag,” said Stig. I hadn’t noticed him waking. “It’s Nod, from our class. If that’s real, and it looks real, he’s dead.”