The Child Garden (21 page)

“Sounds like an adventure.”

“It was,” she said. She had slipped down into her seat on the sofa with her legs stretched out in front of her. “It was like something from a movie. There was champagne and flowers in the suite when we got there, a car came for us, we had our hair done and our faces done, got waxed from head to toe—we didn't even know what waxing was! Castle Douglas in the eighties, who did? We got taken to a studio and styled and dressed and got started on our portfolio. Those pictures you've got there. We did all those on the same day and then went to a big party at night.”

“And did you stay in London working or did you travel around?” I asked her. “I always think of models being off and on planes all the time.”

“We didn't work,” she said. “We got sent out. Claudie most and me next and Sue sometimes too, but we just didn't get the jobs. The phone would ring and it would be his secretary—can't remember her name—and she'd give us auditions to go to. But we just weren't lucky.”

“Whose secretary?” I asked.

“Oh, yeah. JC,” said Rain. She waved her new cigarette at the folder. “Turn one over.” On the back of the picture was stamped
Property and copyright JCM Agency
and a London phone number.

“So eventually there was a big meeting. We weren't at it, but we heard about it, and the upshot was that we were all wrong. None of us was thin enough for couture, even though Claudie and me were tall. Sue was the only one curvy enough for glamour work, but she didn't have the right look, and I was too thin for catalogues because they like a size ten. A six for catwalks and a ten for catalogues, and I was stuck at eight. Like Claudie. No shifting it.”

“But you were beautiful,” I said. “All of you. Why couldn't you just be face models, in magazines? Perfume and make-up and things.”

“Because there's not enough work to go around,” said Rain. “Anyway. We went to a party and we told this friend of ours, who was at the same agency. And she … helped us out.”

I knew where it was going now. It wasn't too difficult to work out when where it had ended was sitting right there in front of me.

“Drugs,” I said.

“It was 1989 and it was London,” said Rain. “I'm not talking
Midnight Express
. Just a leg up to get the fat shifted and start us on our way. Just one of us and then she'd help out the others.”

“What went wrong?”

“We got busted,” said Rain. “Stupidest thing. We never found out who said what or which one us was silly at a party—Claudie was a bit of a chatterbox when she was speeding—but anyway, we got busted. Search warrant for the flat. The works. And to this day I don't understand how it happened, but there was more coke and speed in that flat than all three of us had used in our lives. So when we got done, we got done for dealing. It wasn't mine, I swear to God, and Sue swore an oath to me when we were both standing in the chapel of rest right beside Claudie's coffin. She swore it wasn't hers either. So it must have been Claudie's. Anyway.”

“Did you go to jail?”

“No,” said Rain with a laugh. “You've led a sheltered life, haven't you? We went to rehab. Or Claudie did and I did. Sue didn't need to. She got a fine and community service. Sloshing a mop around in a hostel in Hammersmith. Rehab would have been less depressing. Christ,
jail
would have been less depressing. And the agency dumped us like hot turds.”

“And rehab didn't work?” I said, hoping it sounded sympathetic and not nasty, because it wasn't meant to be.

“It worked on me,” said Rain. “Sue had a harder time. But the last thing fucking JCM Modelling did for us—by way of an apology, I suppose, for not taking better care—anyway, the last thing they did was put us on to a therapist. A rebirther. Total nutjob. She worked out of her house away up in Grantham and she sent Claudie right over the edge. Took five years, but it broke her in the end. It was when she fell off the wagon again after the fucking therapy that she went to prison.”

“Why jail that time then?” This was a different world to me.

“She lifted scripts,” said Rain, “And bingo! Eleven months in Cornton Vale.”

“Scripts?” I said, thinking of the modelling agency and acting jobs.

“A pad of blank prescriptions. She hadn't touched heroin before she went into the Vale, but she came out the biggest junkie ever born. Never had another straight day in her life.”

“I'm so sorry,” I said. “I can't even imagine.”

“We're all right most of the time,” Rain said. “The parents left us okay for money and the thing about heroin is, it's not actually all that bad for you. Coke'll kill you and speed'll kill you even faster—ha-ha—but if your supply is clean and you eat right, there's no reason heroin will ever do you much harm.”

“That's an unusual point of view.”

“I don't beat myself up anymore,” Rain said. “I look after Sue and I look after me and I've let Claudie go. I can't change it, and I can't spend the rest of my life feeling bad about it.”

I nodded. She must have had some therapy of her own. No one spoke like that who hadn't been trained to.

“It took me long enough, though,” she said. “When Claudie was in Cornton Vale, I went to track down JCM, give JC a piece of my mind. But it had closed. The agency was gone, no sign of it, no listing in the yellow pages, no way of getting hold of him. When she died, I tried again. I got a detective this time. Sent scanned copies of our old agency contracts, the lot. I just wanted to be in the same room as the motherfucker that told Claudie she needed to lose some weight and spit in his lousy face, just once.”

“Did you find him?”

“The detective agency couldn't turn up so much as a whisker,” she said. “Searched old business listings, all the industry contacts. It was like JCM had never existed. Mark—that was the detective—even started asking me if I was sure any of it had actually happened. As if London and the hotels and parties and our flat in Lurline Gardens was some kind of drug dream. I paid him off and tried to forget about it.”

It sounded like the end of the story, but something about her held breath, her tense pose, suggested she had more to say.

“Can't really blame him,” she let out at last. “Bits of it have never made sense. Where the stash came from that Claudie got done for. The agency paying for that bloody therapist in Grantham. Maybe it
was
some creep in his spare room playing an elaborate trick on us. Only … what was the punch line?”

It took me a minute to understand her.

“You mean, you never went to the offices while you were on the agency's books?”

“Never went there, never met JC. Just spoke to his secretary on the phone and saw his signature on papers. We used to laugh about it. Charlie's Angels, like. It seemed normal. All the other girls—the ones we met at parties—just got picked up in cars to go to jobs and had their contracts couriered to their flats. What did we know?”

“Do you mind if I make some notes?” I asked her. “Can I sit here and jot things down and ask you if I need reminders of anything?”

“I'll make you another coffee,” she said. “Want something to eat? Toast or a yoghurt?”

“Some toast would be lovely.”

“April, Jo-jo, the Best boys, Ned and Nod, and Stig all dead, eh?” she said.

“Stig's not dead,” I told her. “But he's missing.”

“What about the Scarlets?” she asked. “Are they okay?”

“I haven't tracked them down yet.”

“And Morrison?” she said. “What about him?”

“He's still in Castle Douglas,” I said. “He works in his dad's carpet shop and he still plays golf.”

“I bet he does,” she said. “Tell me he's single, at least. Tell me he's sad and lonely.”

“He's divorced,” I said. I didn't mention Zöe. It troubled me to think of someone so kind and happy being taken in by him. Or maybe she was more than able to look after herself. She seemed so.

“Good,” said Rain. “He reeled one in, but she got away. Maybe I should go and spit in
his
face, eh? If he hadn't been such a tosser, Moped and Jo-jo wouldn't have egged him on to spend the night in the huttie, and then Moped wouldn't have followed and wouldn't have died and Claudie wouldn't have been walking along the high street with her make-up in streaks, and JC's scout wouldn't have seen her. No London, no bust, no prison, no rebirthing therapy. We'd all be married to farmers and swapping scone recipes.”

This time when she stopped talking, it was really as if she had nothing left to say. I bent my head and started writing.

“Can I do anything for you?” I asked once my notes were done. I had tried to stick to the facts and not scrawl down all the theories that I couldn't help building, up and up, into the airy reaches of complete fantasy.

“Likes of what?” said Rain. She looked around that filthy kitchen as if she couldn't imagine what I might think she needed.

“Go and bring you some shopping back or something,” I said.

“You'd do us more good carrying on with that,” she said, nodding at my notes. “Something doesn't make sense. It never has. I'm too tired to think it through now, but you can do it for me. And for Sue. And Claudie.”

Twenty-Seven

There wasn't much to
go on. Twenty-fours years ago Scarlet McFarlane had lived on Methven Street in Perth and had registered a birth from there. The chances that she'd still be at the same address all these years later were slim to nil. But what else did I have? And when else would I get the chance to drive all the way to Perth and see? I was working the next day, and I had a wedding on Sunday.

I topped up with petrol at Kirkcudbright and got myself a pie and a pint of milk to keep me going—the instant coffee was fizzing inside me and the adrenalin wasn't helping it any—then I turned north and put my foot down.

It wasn't until nearly two hours later when I saw the sign for Stirling University that the idea occurred to me, but I swung over into the inside lane, indicated, and shot up the slip road before I could reconsider. It was a maze, like every college or hospital always is, and I looped around for nearly ten minutes, until I was beginning to feel stupid and telling myself my schedule was tight enough without wasting time on this wild goose chase. Then I saw a sign for the Sports Centre and took the narrow winding road to what must be its car park. It was
a
car park, anyway, and there was the stadium right over my left shoulder. I pulled into an empty space, ignoring the sign—
A permits only, no guest parking
—and looked around.

At nothing. Behind me was the stadium, in front was the athletics track. To either side were more buildings with parking and clumps of those bushes that always get planted around car parks, the red ones with the thorns and the shiny ones with yellow splashed leaves. Stig would know what they were. I got out of the car and stood up, looking beyond the sports grounds. The land sloped away in front of me to a row of scrubby trees—hard to tell what they were at this time of year with their bare branches. Behind them, across a valley, were more boxy buildings that must be another part of the university. I locked the car and started walking around the edge of the car park. I was looking for a memorial, I suppose. A man had died here, and maybe there would be a plaque or a little sculpture or something.
In memory of Nathan McAllister, who died here on May Day 1995, in the place that …

But I couldn't guess what it would say.

I walked all the way round, finding nothing, and only noticed the man when I was almost back at my car. He was bending over the bonnet as if looking in the window.

“Hey!” I shouted, starting to jog towards him. “What are you doing?”

“Looking for your permit and not having any luck,” he said, standing up and glaring at me. He was dressed in a grey uniform with a crest on his top pocket and he was holding a pad of forms and a biro with its lid off.

“Oh,” I said. “Parking? I was just here for a minute.”

“There's five-minute drop-off parking over by the Alpha Centre.”

“It was the sports centre I was after,” I said. I was studying him as I spoke. He looked to be in his sixties, and that amount of personal affront at a parking misdemeanour was the sort of attitude that came from long association with a place. “Well,” I added, “the sports centre car park anyway. Because this is where that boy died, isn't it? Years ago?”

His eyes flashed, but at least he put his pad of forms away. “You a relative?” he said.

“Cousin,” I said. “But I live in Australia and this is the first time I've been back since it happened. I wanted to find the spot and maybe say a wee prayer.”

“Aye, well,” said the man. “You're nowhere near it. Here, follow me.”

He led me to the far corner, to the last space, looking out between the trees across the valley.

“It's the longest walk to the buildings from here and the spaces fill up from the other end, so it was gone ten before somebody pulled in alongside and saw what had happened.”

“Poor Nathan,” I said. “No one ever found out why he did it, you know. My auntie's never been the same since. I saw her a couple of days back and she's a shell, so she is. Just a shell.”

“Aye, well,” said the man. It seemed to be his favourite comment. “There's copers and there's quitters. If he had thought on his poor mother before he did it, she'd be a happier woman today. But then, she brought him up and made him what he was.”

Even to me, a stranger, this sounded like the most cold-hearted, smug-faced drivel anyone could think up if they were paid to try. If I really had been Nod's cousin, it would have been unforgivable. To compose my face and get my voice under control, I turned away.

“And as to why he picked here,” the man went on, speaking to the back of my head, not caring if I was praying apparently, “nobody had a single clue. He had no association with Stirling. He had no reason to be here upsetting staff and giving us grief. But that's the same thing again, isn't it? Selfish. Like them that throw themselves under trains and never think about the drivers.”

“What's that over there?” I said, pointing at the distant buildings, more to shut him up than because I cared.

“That!” he said. “That's nothing to do with the university. That blot on the landscape's not part of the campus at all. That's the hen house.” He gave an unpleasant laugh.

“A chicken farm?” I said, turning back to him.

He laughed ever harder then. “Good one,” he said. “Naw, that's the women's prison, love. That's Cornton Vale.”

I thanked him. I was so happy finally to have made a connection that I really did feel grateful. He took it as no more than his due and waved me on my way.

Cornton Vale
, I repeated to myself. The prison where Cloud Irving was sent for her drug offences. Nathan McAllister died looking right at it. Moped died at the Devil's Bridge, Jo-jo at another, Edmund died near a second huttie, Alan by a sculpture of Adam and Eve. And Nathan McAllister died right here looking at the place where Cloud Irving's troubled life finally tipped and went off the rails forever. I had them all connected at last.

The only problem was that none of it made sense. There were no motives, no reasons, no suspects, no way to make one whole story. I turned my mind resolutely away from what Miss Drumm had told me—there was no place for devils and curses here with so many lost and so many still alive but hurting. There had to be a rational explanation. There was the car, for one thing. The car that Stig and April had heard that first night and Rain hadn't. And the question of why BJ Tarrant had opened a school. There was the fact that Stig knew or suspected something he couldn't even bring himself to say. There was a story emerging; I hoped it wouldn't be the true one.

I shook the thought away and tried to focus my mind on what I might discover at the other end of this journey. Of course, Scarlet McFarlane might be dead. If she had married in England and changed her name, then died afterwards, Lynne wouldn't have found her. But maybe she was alive, and maybe the Perth address from the time her baby was born was her parents' place, and maybe they'd tell me where she was, or at least take my number and get her to ring me. And maybe—this was a stretch, but I couldn't help it—everyone talked about The Scarlets as if they were a pair, and Rain/Rena Irving had said they were curled up together sharing a sleeping bag the night that Moped died—so maybe they were best friends. Best Friends Forever, like youngsters say now. And maybe in their case it had really meant something, and when I found one I would have found the other. I didn't hold out much hope, but I pressed on anyway.

The tenement on Methven Street, when I found it, looked much more like somewhere a girl would have digs while she waited for her baby than somewhere her parents would make their home for all their married life. It was two streets back from the main shopping precinct, with businesses below and flats above and, although some of the stairs looked trim enough, this one with its scuffed paint and lopsided rush-blinds was definitely bedsits, or at least private lets.
Great for transients but pretty hopeless for me. I opened the front door, went upstairs anyway to 4C as Lynne had told me, and knocked.

It took a long time for it to be opened, but one good thing about a bedsit is that there's a good chance whoever lives there doesn't have a job and doesn't get up very early either, so I wasn't surprised when eventually I heard slow footsteps approaching, a pause while the person inside looked through the peephole, and the clink of the chain being taken off.

It wasn't who I was expecting. The woman who stood there was neatly dressed in a soft cream fleece and stretchy leggings with crocs on her feet. Her hair was brushed smooth and her face was made up with blue eye shadow and pale lip gloss. She was enormously pregnant, impossibly pregnant, carrying her belly in front of her like a snail carried it shell on its back, the rest of her looking insignificant behind that massive billow.

“I'm sorry to disturb you,” I said. She smiled and shook her head. “I'm looking for someone who used to live here.” She shrugged and shook her head again. “Scarlet,” I said. “It was a long time ago, but I just wondered … Can you understand me?”

“No English,” she said. “Thank you.”

“Oh,” I replied. “I see. Well, good luck with the baby,” I said, pointing. She ran her hands over the expanse of soft cream fleece stretched across her front and smiled. Then she shut the door and I heard her footsteps retreating again, their slowness making sense now. I imagined her waddling back to her seat and easing herself back down from where she had struggled up and was sorry I had disturbed her.

Maybe a neighbour, I thought, turning round and looking across the landing at the opposite door. I thought I heard a noise inside when I first knocked, but no one came, not even to look through the peephole. Maybe they only ever had trouble, never good news, knocking at the door.

I looked up the stairwell. There was one more storey above, two more flats in all, and I had come this far, two hours driving and two hours back again. It would be silly not to be thorough. So I grasped the banister and started to climb the stairs.

I knew I had hit the jackpot as soon as I turned onto the top landing. One of the flats was the same as the two down below—dulled paint on the door and the glue from old stickers partly peeled off again, but the opposite door was exactly what I was looking for. Its plastic mat, its wrought-iron trough on spindly legs with the plastic begonias, its polished brass name plate—
Thomas
—and the brass lock plate, knocker and handle all glittering to match it; even the fanlight above with its arch of ruffled net and its small bowl of dried flowers picked to fill the space the arch left bare—everything proclaimed that here lived a resident of many years' standing, one who could not possibly fail to have a view of the neighbours whose housekeeping lagged so far behind her own. I rang the doorbell, resisting the urge to pull my cuff down and polish the button after my finger had touched it. This time the footsteps sounded right away, the soft thump of slippers. The pause as their wearer peered through the peephole was a short one, but this time the door opened a crack with the catch still on.

“I'm not buying anything and I'm not changing my gas and electric,” said a reedy but firm old voice. I could see one eye behind the lens of a pair of spectacles and below it a very firm mouth, pursed so that the flick of pink lipstick it wore looked fluted around the edges.

“I'm not from a company,” I said. “I wanted to ask you about one of your neighbours.”

The door banged shut. She took the chain off and then threw it wide.

“Are you from the letting agency?” she said. “Because I don't know where to start. That lot over there come and go at all hours and the minute they're in the door they've got the music on. Downstairs is as bad—
tromp tromp
in their work boots and they've no need to be wearing them because none of them work. None of them are up before noon and then the telly's on till the small hours. I don't even know what they can find to watch. And as for her!” The little woman jabbed a finger down and across the landing.

“She seemed nice,” I said. “As far as you can tell when she doesn't—”

“She doesn't!” said the woman. “Not a word. The good Lord alone knows where she's from, but she doesn't understand a single word I say to her. And that man of hers is not much better.
Please
and
thank you
and
good morning
and
good night,
but that's it. And he's out twelve hours a day. It'll be worse when there's a new baby screaming the place down and kicking up mud in the back green.”

“It's not actually any of current neighbours I wanted to ask about, to be honest, Mrs. Thomas,” I said. “But it was a young girl with a baby, right enough.”

“Another one of these whatever they are?” she said. I had to bite my lip on the retort. What they were—more than likely—was citizens of an EU member state, and it sounded as if the husband of the girl in the soft cream fleece worked long hours every day and had a courteous word for his neighbour when they passed on the stairs.

“No, she was Scottish,” I said. “This was a while back, mind you.”

“Aye, it would have been,” said Mrs. Thomas. “You've to hunt to find a Scot getting given these flats these days. So what was her name then and when was she here?” I opened my mouth to speak, but before I had the chance, she changed her mind. “Look, away you come in,” she said. “Come and sit and I'll get the kettle on. There's no use standing here letting the dust blow in on my good carpets. For they're no better at closing the front door than they are at sweeping the stair.” This last was delivered in ringing tones, in hopes, no doubt, that the deadbeat neighbours would hear it and be chastened. Then she drew me in with a hand on my arm, shut the door behind me, locked it, and applied the chain.