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 shone, 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 sweat
pants 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 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.
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