Excerpt of The Child Garden by Catriona McPherson

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.