Dead Secret (11 page)

Aviemore. Only thirty miles to go to Inverness, and then the search for Lochglas. It is a fast stretch of road from Aviemore, takes little over half an hour to Inverness. Almost a hundred and eighty miles I have travelled. Miles and miles and miles of memories, laid like a motorway from Glasgow to Inverness. I had saved the most painful to the last but I didn’t feel strong enough to examine it. It would have to wait.

I can see a pinky-orange glow of lights in the sky above
Inverness
before I reach the top of the hill, as if there is a space ship hovering somewhere behind the bank of cloud. On the outskirts of town, the lights from the Kessock Bridge shoot into the sky like red antennae and I stop the car at a lay-by before crossing, and look again at Pa’s map. Not far. Twenty minutes maybe.
Fatigue
has seeped from my body right through to my brain. My eyes are stinging, partly with hayfever and partly with tiredness. I look at my watch. Ten to four.

Lochglas when I reach it is a one-street town, spread out in a meandering main street lined with hanging baskets. I slow right down and peer out. A Spar shop, a chemist, a Post Office and, up the far end, a butcher. The village is built on a slight incline and there is a lay-by at the top end, overlooking a bay. I park the car with relief and open the window. The air is warm and sweetly perfumed with the flowers from the hanging baskets.
It is too late to get a room anywhere and anyway, I don’t have much money and it will be one less night to pay for. I pull the lever of my seat back and close my eyes.

I doze fitfully for an hour and then wake with my head lolling off the edge of my chair, my neck stiff and sore to move. I clamber sleepily into the back seat, stretching out as best I can, and don’t wake again until shortly after seven. My leg is in cramp, and I open the door and jump out. There is a garage across the road that I hadn’t noticed in the darkness. I am desperate for a shower and a change of clothes but it is too early to book in anywhere. I lock up the car and walk down to see if I can see Bayview
anywhere
, the address on mother’s letter. I walk through the whole village before returning to the car and realising that there is a path leading down from the lay-by towards the loch below, and that a house sits in against the hillside just under me.

I scramble down the gorse-lined path towards it. The dawn has long disappeared into morning but the sky is still pristine with the promise of a new day, the horizon streaked pink above the loch. A small boat sits unmoving on the
surface
, the water clear blue, still and glassy beneath. It is going to be another scorcher. I reach the house and look at the wooden gate, a faded sign hanging by a single rusty nail. Bayview.

It is clearly abandoned; whoever owns it now has left it to rot. The house stands at an angle, as if deliberately turning its shoulders from the village to look out over the bay. It is half hidden, trees and bushes grown tall on neglect straggling across the gate, scratching across the window panes and down over the peeling façade of the painted porch. Only the upstairs windows are clearly visible through the greenery, like two watchful eyes peering through a curtain of unkempt hair.

The air is warm and thick with the heavy sweetness of
honeysuckle
, pale creamy flowers falling against my knees as the gate pushes a pathway through. The paint on the porch is faded green and flaking, washed almost colourless with the rain and hail of many winters, and seared by the summer heat. Shards of glass lie splintered on the narrow windowsills, and above, there are gaping holes in the window panes with jagged,
crocodile’s-teeth
edges where stones have been lobbed through the glass.

I can feel my heart hammering as I walk up the path, the
shattered
glass crunching beneath my feet. For the first few years of my life I must have lived here. I want desperately to dredge something out of my memory bank. There must be a whole page of the mental photograph album devoted to this place, but I
cannot
find it. Did I play once in this overgrown garden? Were the lawns neatly cut and the bushes trimmed? Perhaps there was a swing over by that bush there. Perhaps I stood at that window with the faded green curtain and waved to Da as he dug in the garden.

Through the window I can see an old three-piece suite, the sofa toppled over on its back like a beetle turned on its shell and unable to get back onto its legs. It looks like one of those large floral prints from the 1960s and although years of sunshine have seeped the colour from its cushions, there are still flashes of yellow and orange visible. Yellow and orange. Did my sticky, chocolate-covered toddler hands grab hold of that sofa to haul me to my feet when I was taking my first steps? I remember nothing.

The door handle turns easily, the lock broken. To the left of the front door is the room with the suite, a light and spacious room with an open fireplace and a bay window. That must be
where mother wrote her letter to Da all those years ago. The kitchen, with its yellow Formica-topped table and a rag of striped, washed-out curtain still hanging at the window, is at the back of the house. Broken bits of crockery lie on the work tops and the sink; half a saucer, a cup handle, a chunk of plate. White with yellow spring flowers. I have a vague feeling I have seen those cups before, a half-memory, the closest I come to
recognition
in the whole house.

The kitchen is the strangest room of all to go into. There is even a rusting old kettle still lying on top of the cooker, as if someone has just made tea. It reminds me of Flannan Isle, the story of the three lighthouse keepers who just disappeared
without
trace leaving a half-finished meal and an overturned chair. There is no meal on the table here but there is certainly a
feeling
of interruption, of a life that suddenly stopped mid-flow and simply never resumed.

At first, I am frightened of climbing the stairs in case the wood of the steps and the bannister is rotten and gives way beneath me. Carefully, I stand on every second step, testing gingerly before putting my full weight down. It seems solid enough.
Upstairs
there are only two bedrooms. There is an old bed with an iron bed head and a slashed mattress, half on, half off the frame. Up here, I am above the line of the overgrown bushes and trees in the garden and the view across the water is breathtaking. Why did Da move us from here to a cramped two-bedroom council house in Glasgow after mother died? Who would ever leave this place voluntarily? But I suppose if you love someone, memories can weigh heavily in the place where you loved them.

Memories can follow you around too. I always felt with Da that there were times he carried a load with him. It was strange the
way his mood swung sometimes. There would be nights when we would be sitting late at night, yawning, winding down before bed, when he would suddenly say, “Becca, let’s go out somewhere,” and we’d take the car and drive to the airport and have a coffee and watch the late-night planes. Or we’d go to the twenty-
four-hour
supermarket where Da would buy an exotic fruit he’d never tried before, or a packet of continental biscuits, or a new cheese. He loved spur-of-the-moment, unexpected trips.

Da would wonder around the supermarket aisles smiling, saying there was never this kind of choice when he was a boy. Sure, there was just the village shop in Donegal and fresh
produce
meant a battered old box with some apples. Apples that were more leathery and wrinkled than Grandpa’s old farmer skin, Da joked.

“Is that not marvellous, Becca?” he would say, holding up a star fruit or a lychee that we didn’t even know how to peel, or a piece of French Brie. Then he’d shake his head and pop it in his basket. “Marvellous.”

He enjoyed the fact that he could go into a supermarket at one in the morning. He enjoyed the lights and the brightness and the people and the buzz. He enjoyed being alive.

And then there were the other nights, the nights when Da seemed haunted, invaded by some presence that he couldn’t shake off. People talk about depression being black, but Da’s
depression
wasn’t black. It was grey; drained and colourless like a spectre that sat on his shoulder and sucked the life from him. Those were the nights when he would stare at the television screen and you knew he wasn’t watching. When there was
nothing
, simply nothing, that you could say that would elicit more than a couple of words. Sometimes, he would go to bed at eight
o’clock on those nights. His door was ajar one night and I saw him from the landing, lying on the bed fully clothed just staring at the wall. But I didn’t go in.

He moved differently at those times. He looked older and he kind of shuffled, like there were boulders in his shoes that stopped him lifting his feet. His skin looked dull and pallid.
Sarah
and I dreaded the arrival of the grey visitor who descended without warning like an uninvited guest and locked Da away from us where we couldn’t reach him. It wasn’t that Da lost his temper with us; maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad if he had. It was just that he withdrew from us and went somewhere else, leaving this impostor behind, a man who looked a bit like Da but wasn’t really. It was like he had gone away for a while and I missed him when he left. There was just a shell left behind. A bit like death, really.

On the nights in the airport café or in the supermarket aisles, he was alive and he was free. But on his haunted days, he was like a man who had switched off the light and was stumbling around in the dark. Sometimes the switch would flick so quickly. Once, on one of our night excursions, he got me to drive all the way to Largs at eleven o’clock at night with a flask of coffee.
Neither
of us had work the next day and we giggled like schoolkids tripping over rocks on the beach. We were happy. Then we sat in the car with the coffee and we looked up at the stars.

“You know, sometimes it make me feel physically sick looking at the stars,” he said suddenly. “The vastness of it all. It unnerves me.”

I sipped my coffee, just thinking about what he’d said.

“What’s the point?” he said suddenly.

“What?”

“Of any of it. What are we doing in Largs; what are we doing anywhere?”

I tried being flippant. “If you’d wanted to go to Gourock, you should have said.”

But he didn’t laugh as he would usually have done, as he would have done five minutes before. He opened the door and drained his cup into the road and said, “Let’s go home darlin’, eh?”

I put the cups in the bag and we drove back in silence.
Halfway
home he closed his eyes but I knew it was just to avoid talking. I knew he was wide awake.

He kissed me goodnight when we got home, and said thank you for a nice drive, and then he climbed the stairs to bed as if he had a hundredweight of coal on his back.

He didn’t come down the next day till one o’clock in the
afternoon
. I kept going upstairs to check if he was up, but his door remained fully closed.

Looking out over the bay in Lochglas, I try to imagine Da in this house. But I can’t. It is a million miles away from Rosebank Street, and the fumes of the buses in the depot, and the crowds in the city-centre shops. It is like a holiday home; beautiful but not part of you. When you go there on holiday, you say how wonderful it would be to live there all year round, but inside you know it is not your life really. It is someone else’s.

I sit on the hillside and watch the day come to. The ground is baked dry as straw with the heat of the last week and the grass stubble prickles through even the thick material of my jeans. The Spar shop opens at eight o’clock and I go in to buy
something
for breakfast and to ask about a B & B for tonight. There is a woman serving, maybe in her mid forties, plump and cheerful and wearing a pink check overall.

“Right, love,” she says taking my morning roll, a miniature cheese and a raspberry yoghurt. The electronic till beeps as she passes them through.

“That house,” I say as she packs the things into a bag. “
Bayview
. Who owns it?”

The woman smiles.

“Taken a fancy to it, love?” she asks. “A lot of people do. Do you know, we have at least half-a-dozen people a year in asking about it. It’s a lovely position of course, but it’s gone to rack and ruin now. It’s a Glasgow man owns it but he never comes near.”

Even when she says, ‘Glasgow man’, it still doesn’t click.

“A guy called Connaghan,” she continues.

My heart skips a beat.

“Connaghan?” I say. “That can’t be right. Didn’t he move a long time ago?”

“That’s right,” she says, looking surprised. “But he never sold it. Not as far as we know, anyway. He just left it and never came back.” She hands me the shopping bag.

It doesn’t make sense. I give her a five pound note in silence. We had never had any money all our lives. Why would Da just let a house crumble when he could have sold it? Why didn’t we ever use it?

“Why did he leave?” I ask, as casually as I can.

“Long story. There was a lot of trouble round that house,” says the woman, and the till drawer slams shut.

“What happened?”

“Well, this fellow Connaghan and his wife lived there – oh, well over twenty years ago, maybe twenty-five. I was just a young lassie at the time so I didn’t know much about either of them but I heard he was well thought of. At first, anyway. But the wife
died and the husband moved away and never came back into the house. Just left it with furniture and everything, though over the years the house got vandalised and the stuff was thrown into the loch and chopped up for firewood. There’s not much left.”

“Did the wife get ill?” I can feel my heart hammering and a wave of nausea sweeps up inside me, even as I ask the question. I knew already that I am not going to like the answer. The woman hands me change. I notice the name tag on her apron. Marion.

“No, she didn’t get ill,” Marion says. “It was a huge scandal at the time, the biggest thing to ever happen in this place. It was all over the national news too but you’d be too young to
remember
that. Mrs Connaghan was murdered. They never found her body.”