The Child Garden (15 page)

I couldn't help myself: “At least I've got one,” I shot back. And then they both turned on me.

So I always wondered, after the night when Duggie suddenly parked at Auchenreoch Loch on the way home from seeing
Titanic
and it turned out that he wasn't planning to seduce me as I'd been expecting—actually, as I'd been beginning to think was never going to happen.

“Gloria,” he'd said, “you don't need to answer right away, but I want you to marry me.” He was so low-key, so un-nervous, that at first I thought I had misheard him.
I don't want you to answer right way but I want you to … hear me
. That was what I thought he said and so I waited, obedient as ever, for what he had to say. After a long silence, he turned to me, and the look on his face was one of complete astonishment.

“Did you hear me?” he asked.

“No,” I said.

“Are you winding me up?”

“No. But why are you getting upset? You told me I didn't have to answer right away.”

He started the car and jerked back out of the parking space hard enough to make the wheels screech. On the ten-minute journey home I had time to think it over, and when we parked again I plucked up my courage.

“Did you propose?” I asked him. He nodded, still looking at me with that same bewilderment. “I couldn't believe my ears.” He started to smile. “I convinced myself it wasn't true.”

The half-smile spread and before long he was laughing, one arm round my shoulders, shaking me and roaring with laughter. “God, you had me going there for a minute, Gloria,” he said. “Come on then. Will we go in and tell your folks?”

I gave him an impish smile, my first one ever, not having the face or figure to be impish usually. “I haven't answered you yet,” I said.

He clicked the side of his mouth and pointed his finger at me. “No way. You don't get me twice in one night. I'm not that gullible.”

So, strictly speaking, I never said yes.

That night for the first time he came into the house with me. My mum had her dressing gown on and my sister had done a face pack earlier and was still wearing the towelling band round her hair and no cover-up on her spots. I wasn't to know that, though; it wasn't fair of them to blame me.

“I've got something to ask you, Mr. Harkness,” Duggie had said to my dad. “No prizes for guessing what.” He was standing in the middle of the living room floor, bouncing a bit on the balls of his feet, jingling his change, miming his golf swing. He was nervous, probably.

“Go on then,” said my dad. “Ask me.”

“Trevor!” my mum yelped. But my dad was looking at Duggie with an unreadable expression.

Duggie took his hands out of his pockets and cleared his throat. “I'd like to ask for your daughter's hand in marriage,” he said.

“I'm not surprised,” said my dad. “She's a wonderful girl.”

But just like me, he didn't actually say yes either. My mum leapt up and kissed Duggie. My sister gave me the world's coldest hug, and my dad went to get a bottle of wine out of the fridge.

“The champagne's not cold,” my mum said, glaring at him for bringing Liebfraumilch out in front of a Morrison. My dad ignored her and gave me the first glass once it was open.

“Are you sure, Gloria?” he'd said. “Is this the man for you?”

I nodded, beaming. I was twenty-four and I'd had three boyfriends in my entire life. Duggie, one of the trolley boys from my Saturday job at the Co-op who took me rabbit-shooting and made me touch them, and Stig who drew a love heart on my pencil case.

Twenty-One

Lynne banged on my
car window.

“What are you grinning about?” she said, when I opened the door. “You look like love's young dream.”

“Believe it or not, my husband,” I said.

Lynne snorted and took my bag out of my hands so I could clamber out and lock the car door. “It's nice that you're so happily divorced,” she said. “I saw Duggie yesterday, as it happens.”

“Oh?” I was opening up the office and hurrying in to get the heating on as quick as possible. We had someone coming to register a birth and this old building, after a closed day in winter, was no place for a new baby.

“Out for lunch in Designs with his new squeeze, I think she was,” said Lynne.

“Straightened hair, suede suite, posh nails?” I said.

“Big bum, bad dye job, I was going to say.”

“Zöe,” I said. “She's actually very nice.” And I felt the same sinking feeling I'd had yesterday when she was sitting on his desk. She was nicer than me. She was even nice
to
me.

“Except for her terrible taste in men,” said Lynne. She had a lot of divorced friends and she was automatically nasty about the ex-husbands. I went along with it, never admitted I would take him back in a heartbeat if he asked me, to be a happy family again. “Cup of tea?” she went on. “I've got éclairs.”

She would only be gone a few minutes, so I had to decide who to look for, and that was easy. The Scarlets and the Irving girls—the weather girls, Wee J had called them—might have disappeared in a string of marriages, names gone forever. But there was one boy left. Jo-jo Jameson would have stayed Jo-jo Jameson from his cradle to however near he had got to his grave. I keyed in JAMESON, J—, a rough birth date of 1972, and the county DUMFRIES. If he had lived in Moniaive his whole life, I might be lucky.

Luckier than Jo-jo Jameson, as it turned out. I stared at the screen trying to take it all in and jumped when Lynne came back.

“So,” she said, plumping down and blowing a raspberry at the stack of filing she should be doing, “have you heard the goss?”

I bit into my éclair and waited for her to tell me. I never heard gossip before her. Lynne loved that about me.

“Death,” she said. “It happened in Glasgow, but it's connected to here.”

“How's that then?” I said.

“Remember the Tarrants? They tried to buy the station yards and they ran the country store for a bit and then that mad school out in the sticks where they had the tragedy, then they took on a hotel? You must know them. She dresses like a drag act and he dresses like a villain and they've got two sons must be near your age.”

“I think I was at school with one of them,” I said. “Is one of them dead?”

“One of them did it!” said Lynne. “The victim's a woman but the guy that killed her is one of the Tarrant boys.”

“That's terrible,” I said. “I wonder if it was the one I knew.”

“I don't know which one's which,” said Lynne. “But he killed this girl. Well, woman. She was forty, but she had everything to live for. She was going into business with a friend. Reiki and aromatherapy and all that, those ear candles. Had a business loan and a premises lined up. Everything to live for, and then this guy just loomed up out of the past and slashed her to ribbons.”

Before I could answer, the door opened, letting in the thin, high-pitched keening of an eight-day old baby who'd rather be at home getting cuddles than in his buggy in my office getting a name.

Lynne swept up the cake plates and pushed them into the slot under the counter. It was fine to be drinking a cuppa on a cold morning, but registering is serious business and messy cream cakes give the wrong impression. I left my desk and came around the front.

“So who have we got here then?” I said, peering in under the hood of the buggy. He was kicking his blanket and waving mittened fists in the air, screaming hard, his eyes squeezed shut and his mouth wide open, the little white milk stripe down his tongue looking bright in his purple face. “Can I?” I asked.

The dad, harried and dazed, nodded straightaway but then checked with his wife. She was just as dazed but dreamy with it, still looking soft and undone from the birth, bags under her eyes and her hair tousled. She gave the baby a look and then nodded too.

“Oh, little man!” I said, working one hand under his head and one under his bottom and lifting him, letting the blanket fall away. I brought him up to my shoulder and let his head rest there. I patted his bottom rhythmically and bounced up and down. First he said, “Hoowoo-hoowoo,” then he grunted, then with a quivering sigh he shut up completely and the room was silent except for the snuffling of his breaths and the clanking of the old radiator. I smiled at the young mum and then turned to Lynne. She wasn't in her seat. She was standing with her hands on the back of my chair looking at my computer screen.

“I suppose you get a lot of practice,” said the mum, grabbing my attention again.

I tried to read Lynne's face, failed, and turned away. “New ones are easy,” I said. “Once he's worked out who his mummy is, no one else'll do. So make the most of it while you can.”

That pleased the woman, and she smiled again.

“But now I'll pass him over to Daddy,” I said, “and let's get started. Have you got the card from the hospital? That's grand.” I sat down again and regarded the screen. I could have opened another one. In busy offices they have half a dozen registrations going on at once sometimes, loads of windows open while people are looking for documents or arguing over names. But this was a sacred moment. I didn't want to register this little scrap on a computer where Jo-jo Jameson's death record was open—a death I had no business looking at. I'm not usually superstitious, but that was a bad omen if ever I saw one.

“And any other documents for me?” I said. I glanced at her left hand but she had gloves on.

“Marriage lines,” said the dad, putting his hand into his back jeans pocket and taking out an envelope.

“Perfect,” I said. “Righty-ho. I've just got a few entries to make, but I'm dying to ask you: What's the name?”

“Mario,” said the girl. “Mario Tobias Carson.”

“That's lovely!” I said. It was one of the first things I learned in basic training. “Mario Carson. That's really lovely, the way it rolls of the tongue.”

“Unless …” said the dad. “Is there any way to check—I mean, can you look up in that thing and see if there's been any Marios already? Round here?”

“Gloria can look up all sorts of things,” Lynne murmured. “She should be able to manage that for you.”

“I don't need to,” I said. “I can tell you that there hasn't been a single Mario. Not in this office or in the local region. You've done the impossible for your little boy: a lovely name that everyone can spell that nobody else has thought of. Well done.”

They beamed and I guessed that their families—the Carsons and whatever clan she came from with her red hair and freckles—had had plenty to say.

Ten minutes later they were gone. I waved them away and turned to face Lynne.

“Mario,” I said. “That's worth entering.”

Registrars take their duties seriously, of course we do, but we have to have a bit of fun sometimes. And “Mario” was in with a shout for the weekly sweepstakes in the southwest region. We had had no winners from our office for four years, not since we took the weekly sweep, the monthly national round,
and
got to silver placing in the annual championship with a pair of twins called Tancred and Ulrika. And the sweep's an exception; most of the games we played were just between Lynne and me, like The Hand Of Woman, where we tried to tell whether a toddler had been dressed by its dad when the mum was still on her back from the birth.

“She laid that outfit by,” Lynne had said one day, full of scorn, when a young man brought in a child, chittering and blue-lipped in a matching sundress and sandals during a sudden cold snap. “That's the hand of woman,” she said, and the phrase had stuck.

But Lynne wasn't up for games today, wasn't to be distracted.

“What are you up to, Gloria?” she said. “Who was John Jameson?”

I didn't answer. Where would I start? John Jameson was a boy called Jo-jo who had gone to school in the woods with twelve others, and like every one of them I'd found so far, except Stig and Duggie, he was dead now. He had died in 2005, in France, falling off a bridge into a ravine at a place called Herault. And his cause of death, amended after toxicology and a full investigation, was accidental drowning.

I brought up Google and typed in
Herault
. It was a town in the Languedoc, a region with good beaches and popular with tourists. But the main claim to fame of Herault itself was
Le Pont du Diable.
The Devil's Bridge.

“Glo?” said Lynne. “Is everything okay?”

“Almost nothing,” I said. “Listen, you didn't finish telling me about the murder.”

“What?” said Lynne. Wondering what I was up to had driven gossip out of her brain. “Oh! Yes, I did. There's nothing more to tell really.”

“He loomed up out of her past, you said? So … he was her ex?”

“My mum didn't think so. She's got a pretty good memory for all that sort of thing. And she didn't think so.” Lynne was trying not to look at the computer as she spoke; if she tried any harder, in fact, she might snap a tendon in her neck.

“Do you want me to check?”

“My mum asked that and I said, ‘no way because Gloria's a real stickler', and you never do that, do you? Look up old boyfriends and whatnot. You never do.”

“How did your mum find out about the business loan?”

“From her friend Maureen that works at Enterprise Scotland.”

I closed Google and opened up our own system again. “Here's the deal,” I said. “I do this for you and you just forget that you saw me looking up a record before?”

“No idea what you're on about, Gloria,” said Lynne. “What record? Before when?” She winked at me, and I turned and rested my fingers on the keyboard.

“April Cowan,” said Lynne. “And Tarrant. No idea about the first name.”

“Let's try Stephen,” I said. “It was Stephen Tarrant who was the same age as me and I think his brother was younger, so if she was forty it's probably him. If it's either.”

I entered the search and waited, aware that my mouth had turned dry and my palms were prickling with sweat.

“No matches.” I let my breath go in a rush that clouded the monitor, it was still that cold in here.

“Huh,” said Lynne. “Course she might have been April somebody else when she married him. Check on Tarrant alone.”

But under TARRANT, STEPHEN, dob 1972, CASTLE DOUGLAS there was only a marriage to Carol née Watson, and a divorce from the same two years previously.

“So it's not a domestic,” said Lynne, finally getting her éclair out from the ledge below the desk. “Unless they were just shacked up. But if he was married until two years ago and she's been on her new life kick since then—training and all that—it's hard to see how they know each other. I wonder what the connection is then.”

“It might have been the other brother,” I said. “Maybe he likes older women.”

Lynne wiggled her eyebrows at me. “Like your Duggie,” she said. “His new bit must be fifty.”

“Never,” I said. Then I tried for a very casual tone. “Maybe April and Stephen were at school together. Not primary. And I'm sure April Cowan didn't go through CD High School with me or I'd remember her, but it was what you said about the Tarrants' school in the woods. Maybe they knew each other from there.”

Lynne was dabbing up crumbs with a wetted finger. She licked it, wiped it on her jeans, and took her phone from her body-warmer pocket.

“Mum?” she said, after a pause. “Are you busy? Gloria's just had a brainwave. That April Cowan that the Tarrant lad bumped off ? Do you think she was at the school they had up there in the hills for a bit?” She listened, nodding distractedly for a while, and then she sat up straight with her eyes wide. “Thanks,” she said. “Look, I've got to go.” She snapped the phone shut, then turned those wide staring eyes on me.

“What?” I said.

“She can't think of a Cowan,” said Lynne. “But one of the Tarrant kids was definitely there and the wee Best kid too—he was the one that died. An accident in the woods when they were camping, Mum said. And some hippies from the Borgue called River and Leaf. But then she said—get this—your Duggie was there too. Said quite a lot about that, actually. The Morrisons had a storage warehouse at the station yards, and Mum reckons Duggie's dad swapped it for school fees.”

“I never knew Duggie was at Eden,” I said.

I didn't see the mistake I had made. But Lynne spotted it.

“That's right,” she said, looking at me archly. “That's what it was called.
Eden
. My mum just reminded me.”

We regarded each other for a long moment.

“Well, no wonder your eyes were out on stops,” I said.

“Oh, that wasn't the big surprise,” said Lynne. “The big surprise was the other name my mum remembered.” She turned and looked very definitely at the computer. It had gone on stand-by and her face was reflected in it. “Jameson,” she said. “John Jameson from Moniaive. Gloria, what's going on here? What do you know?”