The Child Garden (24 page)

“Shut it down, Van,” said Stig. “For fuck's sake, man, you don't need to show us.”

At last, Duggie hunched over the keyboard and started clicking.

“These days you don't have to start rumours,” Stig said. “You just have to download a few files and wait for the laptop to go in for a fix-up. Have you checked your work machine?”

“This is—” said Duggie. “This is—It's my work email.”

“Has the back office been left unattended?” Stig said.

“You don't need to get in to the actual office,” I said. “You can do it remotely.”

“Only if you know how,” said Stig. “And he doesn't.”

“Who doesn't?” said Duggie

Stig ignored him. “Answer me. Has there been anyone in there who shouldn't have been?”

“Zöe left the back door open a couple of weeks ago,” Duggie said. “She was beside herself saying sorry. I told her it didn't matter. Jesus Christ, I told her it didn't matter!”

“Van,” said Stig. “Just keep this off, and when you go into work in the morning, don't start up your system. Just say it's down. Make sure no one can see what's on there. We'll get it straightened out really soon, I promise you.”

Then Stig took me by the hand and drew me out of the study and back down the stairs.

He said nothing all the way home again, through that clear bitter night. The ground was sparkling with frost and the stars looked ice-blue in the cold sky. The wind was whipping up leaves so dry they clattered as they bowled along the road in front of us and the twigs and branches on either side of us clashed with a sound like swords as the wind rattled them.

In the kitchen, William and Dorothy had both come to sit beside Walter Scott, pensive and watchful. I laid a hand on him again and then opened the oven door and let the warmth spill out over him. He gave one low grunt, and his tail twitched as he tried to thump it.

“Oh Walter,” I said, bending to kiss him.

“How old is he?” said Stig.

“He's fifteen, same as Nicky.” Tears filled my eyes and my breath was snatched away in a sob.

“It's a good age for a Lab,” said Stig. “Don't cry.”

I shook my head and tried to explain. “I forgot to go and see him. First time in ten years. And Miss Drumm too.”

“I'm sorry,” said Stig. “When this is all over, I'll find a way to make it up to you. Or maybe when I get out of jail for keeping quiet so long.”

“Tell me,” I said. “What's the final version?”

He took his time, and I had a chance to have a good long look at him. I had thought he was showing wear and tear when he pitched up on my doorstep on Monday night, but this man sitting in front of me now looked ten years older again. There were long beard hairs in the fold of his neck, and I had never got round to buying him any Eumovate or Head & Shoulders. His skin looked sore instead of just dry, broken at the sides of his mouth like Nicky gets from the feeding tube. He'd lost weight too, in spite of the baking and not taking any exercise for days. Now his cheeks and the mounds under his sweatshirt, that had been buoyant and round only a few days ago, were pendulous. Except surely that couldn't be true. It must just be his exhaustion making him slump or my exhaustion making me think so, the memory of his father playing tricks on me.

“It was my dad's car,” he said at last. “He was there that night. I heard it early on, recognised it. We hadn't bedded down and no one else noticed, but I knew the sound of that engine. No one else had a car like it. And so I said my guts were bad and went to look for him, find out what he was doing there.

“I found the car, hidden in the old stables. Really hidden, Glo, not just parked. It must have taken him ages to wiggle his way into the space and he might have scraped the precious paintwork, but he'd put it in there anyway.

“But I couldn't find
him
. He was nowhere to be seen. I didn't understand, so I went to tell Miss Naismith or ask her to help. I had no idea what was going on.”

“But you do now?”

“She was in the bath,” Stig said. “I could hear the water and the window was steamed up, so I waited. It was embarrassing to think of a teacher in the bath, you know? I kept checking my watch—I had one of those watches you push a button and it lights up? She was still in the bath at eleven o'clock. Like I told you. Not out checking the kids. And then I fell asleep.

“What woke me up was my dad's car leaving. Four o'clock, he took off like a bat out of hell.”

“And he had a key to the gate!”

“Yeah,” said Stig. “See? It all makes sense. Anyway, I went back to my sleeping bag. Never noticed who was there and who was missing. Just lay down and tried to sleep. Then it went like I told you.

“The next thing I knew Van was shaking me, telling me about Mope, and we all got up and went back and saw him in the river, and the girls started screaming and then my parents were there and Naismith was going mental saying she had been to check on us and we were all lying. But she didn't, Gloria. She was in her cabin, in the bath. And my dad was somewhere in the woods. And he killed Moped. Or he chased him and Moped ran away and fell in the river.”

“But Stig,” I began, “you're really jumping to conclusions.”

“That's not all,” he said, cutting in. “At first I didn't understand why my mum was so angry. She's quite an angry person anyway, but I'd never seen her like that before. She changed and she's never changed back.”

I thought about the Angie Tarrant I had seen in the hotel, sharp and bitter; how scared I was of her even though I didn't know why.

“I overheard them arguing once, later,” Stig said. “My dad saying that he was sick of living a lie and he was going to come clean, and my mum—she was hissing at him, Gloria, hissing like a snake, she sounded insane—saying she had stuck by him and covered for him and put up with him and he wasn't going to fling that back in her face and make a fool of her, let people look down their noses at her. That he had made his bed and now he had to lie on it. That she wasn't going to have Wee J's life ruined just so my dad could blab all his filthy secrets to the world.”

“Wee J's life?” I said.

“Yeah,” said Stig. “They're not so bothered about me because they think I know. Obviously they've thought for a while that I know. Or suspected it anyway.”

“How do you work that out then?”

“Blackmail,” said Stig. “Someone's been blackmailing Dad for years. And once when Mum was drunk she let slip that she's leaving everything to Weej because I've had mine.”

“She thinks you're the blackmailer?”

“Yeah. My mum thinks she's so subtle, but it's not hard to piece things together from what she says. She snipes on and on about paying for his mistakes and how she shouldn't have to work herself ragged, about how much she resents—how does she put it? Scrubbing people's smelly feet and ripping their pubes out—but she'll die of old age servicing his debts.”

“But ‘his debts' might mean anything.”

“He's got no legitimate debts,” said Stig. “Not beyond what any business would have. I asked Wee J and he told me. What he does have is sweet Fanny Adams where most of the profits should be. He's been paying someone. I think he's been paying them since the very beginning and he's been trying to find out who. Picking them off one by one. He even went for me, and now he's gone for Duggie.”

“So … like a vendetta?” I said. “Are you serious?”

“Scarlet, Cloud, Jo-jo, Alan,” he began. “It wasn't the devil who killed them all for crossing his bridge, Glo.”

I couldn't hold out against it much longer. Even Miss Drumm had said BJ Tarrant hung around too much and never came and went the front way. And
everyone
said it was odd the way he started a school, discounting fees to fill it with kids. My stomach was turning.

“And speaking of Alan,” said Stig. “Who the hell would think of doing that unless it was in their minds anyway? Kind of takes one to know one, yeah?”

“And your mum
knows
?” I said.

“They've been in separate bedrooms for years,” Stig told me, and I remembered Angie Tarrant's voice saying
for worse and worse and worse again
and finally I believed him.

“It was his idea, you know,” said Stig. “Miss Naismith told us. She said the owner of the school thought it was good idea for us to sleep outside on that special night. She smirked.”

“Oh my God,” I said. “You don't think
she
knew?”

“No,” said Stig. “I think she really believed all the guff about the Beltane. I think she just thought it was funny for the likes of my dad to care about it. Christ, if only she'd thought about it for a minute, asked herself why a man would want a lot of little kids to sleep outside.”

“Do you think your mum'll give him alibis?” I said.

Stig shook his head. “Once it's out, she'll drop him like a ton of bricks,” he told me. “She's got no loyalty, not really. Only pride.”

“And you've suspected this all along?” I said. “From when you got here?” He seesawed his head, screwing his mouth up. “But you let me go chasing around all over the place, tracking people down? I really thought I was helping you, Stig, and all the time you were holding out on me. What a fool I am.”

“I've hated it every day when you go out,” he said. “I was terrified for you. And it was your idea. I never asked you to do anything.”

“You never told me what you knew either!”

“Yeah well, that's where you're wrong,” said Stig. “I wrote it all down in the notes, but you ripped them up without reading them. While
you
were hiding the fact that Duggie was your husband, actually.”

“You wrote it down?”

“I wrote that I recognised the sound of BJ's car. Then, when you didn't read the notes, it felt like I'd been let off the hook. It took me till tonight to face up to telling you again. Come on, Gloria, that's only two days. It takes time to face up to someone you love being a sick fuck.”

I couldn't argue with that. “What are you going to do?” I asked.

“I'm going to go to the police,” said Stig. “I just need to get everything straight, make a load of notes and then I'll go and turn myself in. They'll arrest me, I know that, but as long as they listen, in the end it'll be okay.”

“They'll arrest Duggie too, won't they?”

“Probably,” he said. “For a while anyway. Is that okay?”

“It's fine by me,” I said. “He's up to his neck in this. Making up stories and hiding things. I still don't understand why he wasn't straight about what happened with Moped.”

Stig thought for a while. “Me neither,” he said. “Some people just aren't straight. Just not made that way.”

Then we sat in silence waiting for the dawn, listening to Walter Scott's breathing get shallower and shallower and slower and slower until it was no more than a ragged gasp and the pauses in between the breaths were long enough to let us doze. By the time they stopped completely we were both asleep and, when we woke, his stillness was so perfect that even if I could have changed it and made it not true, I would have kept things how they were. I looked down at him and thought something I had never thought before:
Maybe I can do this. Maybe if it happens this way round, then by the third time I'll be ready
.

Thirty

Saturday

“He never laid a
finger on
me
, mind,” Stig said. He had edged round the bathroom door and was watching me brushing my teeth.

“Of course not,” I said. I damped my hands and pressed them over my hair. One good thing about my hairdo is that it never gets messy. No problem sitting up all night.

“Or Wee J,” he went on. “I mean, not that I ever asked, but Weej brings the kids round to Mum and Dad's all the time and leaves them there overnight sometimes.”

“When are you going to go to the police?” I said. “I could knock off about twelve and come with you.”

He nodded. “I want to bury Walter anyway,” he said. “I wouldn't have got through the last week without him. No offence.”

“And I want to go and see Nicky,” I said. “I still think it's weird that the home didn't call me when I never showed up last night. They know I live alone. I could be lying at the bottom of the stairs with a broken neck for all they know.”

“But if you've never not shown up before then you don't know what they do when someone doesn't show up, do you?” Stig said.

“Can't fault your logic,” I said, smiling. Then we both remembered where Stig's logic had led us, and the smiles were gone.

Lynne was at work before me.

“Well?” she said. “Any developments?”

I closed my eyes and shook my head. Where would I begin? There was so much of it. For some reason, though, it was Duggie who was bothering me.

“Am I going to have something to hold over my mum's head for the rest of our lives?” Lynne said.

“Definitely. So was there any walk-in business on Thursday? It seems a bit too good to be true that I can just swan off from my job and nobody missed me.”

“A birth,” she said, “but I batted it back again.”

I started up the computer and pulled my mail tray towards me. Duggie could wait; I owed him nothing. “What do you mean ‘batted it back'?”

“Ocht, it was the dad on his own with the big brother. Mum and baby still in their goonies at home and he'd forgotten the marriage lines. So I told him he'd have to come back when he'd found them.”

“That was a close call then,” I said, wondering what would have happened to me if my bosses had found out I was AWOL.

“They're coming back today, first thing,” said Lynne. “It was Leo McGill. I know fine and well him and Theresa are married because I was at their evening do, but he didn't argue. I think he was worn out from getting the wee boy up and dressed and out with his breakfast inside him. No Hand of Woman there, I'm telling you.”

I laughed, but only briefly.

“What is it, Gloria?” said Lynne. “You suddenly got a really funny look on your face.”

“Something,” I said, vaguely. Then I shook my head. “I'm too soft for my own good, but I need to make a quick call.”

Duggie was at the shop already. He always started early, a matter of pride to be in before his dad got there and long before the paid assistant-manager who ran the kitchen side.

“How are you doing?”

“What's happening?” His voice was ragged. “I'm going spare here, Gloria.”

“It's BJ Tarrant,” I said. “And we can prove it. Just sit tight.”

“Easier said than done.” Stig had had six days of this and Duggie was strung out already.

“Your computer's off, eh? And no one else can get into your email from the other stations?”

“My dad wouldn't know an email if it bit him.”

“What about the other manager?”

“Zöe's called in sick.”

I hadn't known she was a manager—I thought she was his assistant in the flooring side, from the way she was right there with him instead of in her own department along the street—but it made no difference.

“Probably just as well,” I said, trying not to wonder what it was that was wrong with her and if she'd been incubating it when she went in to see Nicky. “I'll be in touch.”

“Who was that?” said Lynne when I had hung up. “And what about BJ Tarrant? Glo, you really don't look too good, you know.”

“I didn't get much sleep last night. We sat up with Walter.”

“Who's this?” said Lynne.

“The dog, Walter Scott. He died in the early hours. So, as well as everything else, I need to get ready to tell Miss Drumm about that when I see her.”

“No, I mean who sat up?” said Lynne. I closed my mouth very firmly. I was so tired, my thoughts weren't making any sense and my mouth was running away with me.

“You know, it'll all be out by the end of the day anyway,” I said. “I suppose there's no harm in telling you now.”

But I didn't get the chance because the door opened and in came the McGills, all four of them today. Theresa, still slow and tired, was dressed in grey sweats like Stig, but the little boy—Adam, if I remembered right—was dressed in smart new blue corduroys and a wee checked shirt in blue and yellow with a yellow tee-shirt peeking out at the neck. The baby, a girl, was like a collection of marshmallows, palest pink and pure white, with swansdown round the hood of her hat.

“Aww, Tess, she's lovely,” said Lynne, flashing her eyes at me. Hand of Woman, they were signalling. Again something flipped inside me as if I'd eaten a live fish.

“Congratulations, both of you,” I managed to get out, but the young McGills and Lynne and the little boy and the baby disappeared, and I felt as if I was floating up out of my body and looking down. I could see the home and the woods, the bridge and the huttie, Rough House and the Rocking Stone, Stig in the garden and Walter covered with a sack, waiting until the hole was dug. I could see Mrs. Best and Duggie in town, both sitting alone and worrying; Angie and BJ in the hotel, locked together and hating each other; Rain and Sun Irving up at Borgue, locked together and loving each other still; Sally Jameson and her sister in the big white house in Moniaive tending to their mother; Scarlet in Perth, waiting for Rosie; those poor McAllisters wherever they were, and the car park overlooking the prison and the Hermitage up at Dunkeld; and April Cowan, who had started it all.

I could see all of them, except one. I had known all along someone was missing. But who was it? And where were they?

“Earth to Gloria,” Lynne was saying.

I cleared my throat. “Sorry!” I said. “Miles away. What's the name?”

“Huh, well,” said Theresa McGill. “Just as well this one forgot the forms yesterday because we changed our minds overnight. We were on Morgan yesterday, but then last night we started looking up meanings as well and we've settled on Zöe.”

“What does Zöe mean, like?” asked Lynne.

“It's Greek,” said Theresa. “It means Eve. So we've got Adam. And Eve!”

“We like the sound of it too,” said Leo. “We wouldn't give her a minging name just because it matched.”

“Eve,” I repeated. Lynne gave me a careful look. The McGills couldn't see what I was doing from where they sat. No doubt they thought I was firing up the system to take their details, but really I was Googling. BABY NAME MEANING, I typed. And when I got to the site, I entered GIRL and then FRONIA and then stared at what it told me. There it was in dark pink letters on a pale pink screen and everything fell into place.

TEACHER, it said. An ugly name chosen for its meaning alone.

Somehow I registered little Zöe Morgan McGill and got the happy family out of the office again.

“Is there anything I can do to help?” said Lynne, as the door was closing behind them. I shook my head, dialling as I did so.

The phone rang out again and again until the answering machine kicked in.

“Stig?” I said.

“Who?” said Lynne.

“Pick up,” I said. “It's Gloria. Oh my God, please God, tell me you haven't gone to the cops already.” And then I heard the blessed sound of the handset being lifted and felt the tone change from the hissing tape to the warmth of a real connection.

“Glo?” he said. “Of course not. I'm still writing notes. I haven't even started with Walter. Why?”

“Well, rip them all up,” I said. “And listen.”

I told him, and Lynne because she was hovering. I told him how much I was kicking myself for not seeing it before. The hand of woman was everywhere, although the woman was missing. Jo-jo's wife Fronia who met the family only once and disappeared forever once he was dead, not leaving a single photograph behind her. The concerned stranger who brought Scarlet's baby home again after snatching the pram for the third time. The secretary who was the Irving girls' only contact with that wholly fictitious agency. Alan Best's girlfriend who supposedly let her daughter be groomed and then spoke out in gossip and rumour instead of police reports and legal action. The fake April Cowan sending Stig the texts, calling him Stephen. The business partner supposedly helping the real April set up in herbal therapies. And last but not least, Duggie's new girlfriend, so out of his league, so forgiving of all his failings, so willing to work late and use his computer, so happy to meet his son.

There, I lost control of my voice and had to breathe in and out for a minute or two, trying to swallow the bile rising in me. She had met Nicky. She had kissed him and touched his hair.

“And what about the McAllisters?” said Stig.

“We'll never know,” I told him. “But we can be sure that she got her hooks in them, one and then the other. And she killed them. I bet she was put on remand. I bet she spent at least one night in Cornton Vale prison and that's why Nod died there.”

“But how could Miss Naismith be Duggie's new girlfriend?” said Stig. “He'd recognise her. We all would.”

“What?” I said. “Like you recognised me with different clothes and hair? You said she was a tie-dyed hippie. Hairy legs and no make-up. And it was nearly thirty years ago. A nose job, hair dye, different style. Think, Stig. Zöe—is it possible?”

“But she'd be too old.”

“No,” I said. “You're wrong. We always thought our teachers were old, but if she was just out of college twenty-eight years ago, she'd only be nudging fifty now. Zöe could be fifty any day.”

“But how could she do it?” said Stig. “A flat in London and all the drugs and a honeymoon in France. Year after year. How could she … ” He spoke slower and slower and then stopped talking completely.

“What is it?” I said. I could hear papers rustling on the other end of the line.

“I'm looking at the dates, Glo. I was setting it out for the cops when we thought that my dad—My God, if I'd gone to the cops and said that about my own father!”

“What
about
the dates?”

“They're spaced out,” said Stig. “It starts with Scarlet's baby in 1989. That took care of both Scarlets, really. The weather girls' modelling-turned-drug-habits and Cloud's ‘therapy' took up the early '90s. Nod was '95, Ned that same year. Bezzo's troubles started around 2000, but they dragged on. Jo-jo's whirlwind romance with Fronia was in 2005. I think you're right. They're spaced out like that because it's one person doing it. And she needed time for the campaigns. After Jo-jo she moved on to April, and through April she was going to start on me. I was supposed to be hauled in for April's murder.”

“Except you threw a spanner in the works,” I said. “She must have been seething about you going to ground. I can't believe she held it together when you showed up at Duggie's last night. I mean, she got out pretty quick, but she was calm.”

“And finally Duggie,” said Stig.

“I wonder why he was last.”

“That's a really good question, Glo. Do you think she had something different planned for him before you started sticking your oar in? But then she had to fall back on a re-run of the Alan Best routine, because you were right there, getting in her way?”

“Me?” I said.

“You went to the shop the day after April was in the huttie,” he said. “You asked her about it. Of course you were getting under her skin. I mean, for God's sake, Gloria. She came round to the house in the night and left those footprints around the stone, didn't she? She must have been wearing borrowed shoes—maybe Duggie's—but it was her.”

“You think she's targeting
me
?” I said, and I knew my voice was tiny. I couldn't seem to get any breath behind it. “What would she do to hurt
me
?” The question hung between us until the silence was deafening.

“I'm on my way,” said Stig and crashed down the phone.