The Child Garden (11 page)

“A god-botherer?” I said. “You don't seem surprised.”

I don't even think the smirk she gave me was meant to be unkind. I wasn't suppose to get the joke; I never am. People like me are supposed to be as blind to the looks as Miss Drumm and as deaf to the whispers as poor old Mrs. Healey, who's as deaf as a doorknob.

“What's that, love?” the nurses say, when Mrs. Healy's bellowing at them, straining her voice from the effort of shouting so loud. They cup their ears and beckon. “Didn't quite catch that. Speak up, will you?” Eventually she gets it and stops, with her gnarled old hand in front of her trembling mouth.

“Was I shouting?” she asks, still quite loud.

“Never you mind,” says the nurse. “Saves me a fortune in cotton buds, Mrs. H. Never need to get my ears syringed as long as you're with us, love. Might well have cleared my sinuses too.”

“Even your god wouldn't bother with Alan Best,” the woman said as she was closing the door.

Sixteen

Barrwherry, I thought, driving
away from Mrs. Best's little house again. It's past Newton Stewart on the bad Girvan road, the only road that ever made Nicky carsick, after he was a baby when the movement of the car lulled him like a rocking cradle and before car journeys, all journeys, were over for good. Now his bed is his little boat, like Stevenson says. His vessel fast. And he'd be waiting there for me in the evening, no matter if I was a little late or a little early. So there was no reason not to follow the trail where it took me.

Only, the Gatehouse to Girvan road goes right past the entrance to Kennan Lodge, the Tarrants' country house hotel, and without seeming to decide or even consider it, I found myself turning in past the smart green-and-gold sign.

The drive was smooth and level, no ridges or standing water, and the rhododendrons on either side were trim and glossy, not like the half-dead straggle on the drive to the care home. At the sweep, the gravel was even raked into a shell pattern like a Japanese garden, and there were stone tubs of ivy, black pansies, and cyclamen on either side of the door. It reeked of money, and the Range Rovers and BMWs parked along the far edge against the balustrade smelled the same way.

I pulled my little Corsa up at the edge of the row and smiled at it sitting there. I didn't care about flash cars. I'd nurse this one all the way to the scrap heap. It had a sunshade with a teddy bear's face on it velcroed to the back passenger-side window and a light spot on the seat cover where the mark left from that trip to Girvan hadn't quite washed away.

Inside the vestibule, there was the regulation blue-and-white china umbrella holder, mahogany hallstand with antlers to hang the hats on, and a narrow table with leaflets advertising Girlie Spa Getaways, Weddings and Events, a Dickensian Christmas Fayre, Traditional New Year Cèilidh, and Boys' Breaks (golf, shooting, fishing). Every way food, drink, and a bed for the night could be slapped together into packages and sold, the Tarrants had thought of it and made a leaflet.

And right enough, when I got into the hallway, there were four women—two pairs of mother and daughter it looked like—sitting dressed in robes with turbans on their heads and towelling slippers on their feet, eating salad out of boxes with black plastic forks. They pretended not to see me, as if the weirdness of a packed lunch in a hotel lobby with your clothes off could be avoided that way. They'd forked over cash and they weren't going to feel foolish about it. Not out loud, not to each other, not before the end of the day.

I rang the bell at reception and couldn't help my eyes growing wide when I saw who came to greet me. If I hadn't known Stig of the Dump was in my house right now, I'd have said I was looking at him, framed in the doorway from the back office. He was taller than he'd been in primary seven, and he had that stubble that's harder to get than a clean shave. His hair was full and glossy, flopping over one eye and twinkling short at the sides, and his blue eyes shone out of a face just as tanned as when he'd got back from Saudi, on top of a body just as wiry and lean as the one that pelted round the playground every day, dribbling the football past Alan Best and the rest of them.

“Wee J?” I said.

His face broke into a grin that made him seem more familiar than ever. “You've got me,” he said, searching my face and shaking his head. “I'm sorry.”

“I don't think we've ever met,” I said, “but you look so much like your brother. He's a friend of mine.”

In one snap he seemed to take in the four women in their bathrobes, kill his smile, resurrect it, and shoot out a hand to grab my arm.

“Do you know where he is?” he asked in an urgent whisper. He looked down, saw his hand holding me, and let go, stretching out his fingers like a starfish. “God, I'm sorry,” he said. “I'm just—you've heard what's happened, right?”

“I heard on the news about the woman in Glasgow,” I said. “It doesn't seem possible. I just came to offer my—But condolences are like he's—I just, I'm not some kind of ghoul come to stare.”

“Of course not,” said Wee J. “
Do
you know where he is?”

“I haven't seen him for years,” I said.

“Yeah, I believe that,” said Wee J, “or I wouldn't remind you of him. Steve's not had an easy time.”

The first thing I noticed was the perfume. Wee J was looking intently into my eyes and I was lost in his and the memories of Stig they had stirred up in me, so Angie Tarrant was right there before either of us knew it. There was a sudden blast of scent in the air, then her two arms wound round Wee J's neck and her face appeared hooked over his shoulder.

“Not in the front shop, Weej,” she said. She flashed her eyes at me. “Come on through, sweetheart, and let's hear what you've got to say.”

One of her arms, exercised ropey and tanned as dark as the wood that panelled the hall, uncoiled from around her son and reached out to me. She had those pink and white nails too and pale flesh in hoops around her finger bases where she must wear rings when she wasn't working, rings that would match the thin bangles of gold and diamonds she wore even when she was. The short sleeve of her white tunic rode up above her knotted little biceps as she reached further and further, far enough to touch me, and I saw that the tan went round her arm as dark underneath as on top. She must roast herself like a kebab to get as even as that. And it wasn't from a bottle, I could tell. It was ground as deep into her skin as the riot of smells from her massage oils was ground into her palms—citrus, geranium, lavender, and lily, all fighting each other. The spot on my sleeve where she touched me would still smell of her by the evening. Stig would say “Christ,” and step back from greeting me, and Walter Scott would snuff at it and give me a look of puzzlement.

Behind reception was a small private office with two desks, and sitting at one of them was the wreckage of BJ Tarrant. If Wee J was Stig in the past, then here was Stig in the future—some unhappy future where nothing worked out for him, his body even softer and much larger, his face pouchy under the eyes and jawline. Big Jacky still had a full head of jet-black hair and his purple shirt had four buttons open at the neck, showing a turquoise and silver pendant on a leather thong nestling in his chest hair these days, in place of the heavy gold chain he had worn when I was a child. He had even more rings too. The signet and the sovereign, just the same, but also a claddagh and more of the turquoise and silver, cheap-looking against his tobacco-stained fingers. He had been the only dad who smoked cigars when it wasn't Christmas.

Angie Tarrant took her place at the other desk without so much as a glance at him. Wee J rolled a chair over for me, smiled, and hitched himself onto the edge of a shelf running round the walls. All three of them looked at me expectantly.
What was I doing here
? I asked myself.
Why had I come?

“Friend of Stevie,” Angie Tarrant said. “She knows something.”

BJ grunted but didn't speak.

“I don't know any more than I heard on the news,” I said.

“Do you know where he is?” said BJ, just as his son had.

“I haven't seen him for years,” I repeated. “It looks bad if he's gone missing.”

“He's done a runner,” Angie said. “Chased her all over the country and no one's seen him since the night she died. ‘Looks bad' isn't the half of it.”

“But you can't suspect your own son, surely?” I said. Neither of the men would meet my eye.

“Of course not,” BJ said. “But we're worried about him.”

“Doesn't matter what I suspect,” said Angie, not quite interrupting him but absolutely ignoring him and answering me as though he hadn't spoken. “We're in the hotel business here. Customers have to feel safe enough to lie down and sleep, safe to eat the food we've prepared. We've just spent a bomb advertising Seasonal Gift Packages. Who's going to buy a gift token to a weekend at the Slasher Arms?”

“Mum,” said Wee J.

“And you can bet your life the
Galloway Snooze
'll have plenty to say,” she went on. “They'll be raking up all the shit in the world to see if it sticks.”

“Crying out loud, Mum.”

“Here!” said Angie, suddenly. “You're not from there, are you? You are! You're a muckraker from that tenth-rate wee pile of chip wrappings, aren't you?”

“Mum, for God's sake!”

“I'm a friend,” I said. “An old friend. And a worried mum. My son lives in the care home at Milharay, you see, and I was thinking as long as the cops keep trying to find Sti—Stephen, they're not looking for whoever it was who killed April Cowan for real. I was thinking maybe when they saw his car that night, maybe it was nothing to do with April driving around down here, maybe he was just on his way to see you. And if you told the cops that, they would forget about him and start looking for the real villain.”

“What?” said Wee J. “Hang on.”

Angie Tarrant was frowning hard. The two black darts she had made of her brows with dye and plucking were pulled together, and a third line just as thick and black had formed between them on her skin.

“Why are you worried about your son?” she said. “April Cowan died in her flat in Glasgow. So what if she drove by Milharay?”

Too late I saw the trap I had walked myself into. Milharay only mattered because of what Stig and I had seen hidden under the huttie floor, and the police had only said a red Skoda. I shouldn't be worried at all. I shouldn't be here.

“Eden,” I blurted. “I'm worried because that's the only connection, isn't it? Between April and Stig. They know each other from Eden.”

“Don't talk to me about that place,” said Angie. “If I never hear that word again it'll be too soon.”

“Ange,” BJ chipped in, sounding weary.

She turned on him. “Shut it,” she said. “Sit there like a lump and leave everything up to me if you like, but don't start moaning about it too.”

“It must have been a terrible time,” I said. Even I knew how false the sympathy sounded in the middle of whatever was going on in that little room.

Angie Tarrant laughed, just a chuff of breath, and not so much as the hint of a smile. “And every day since,” she said. Her voice was bitter. “For better or worse. Or in my case, for worse and worse and just when you think it couldn't get any worse, a bit worse.”

Wee J was squirming with embarrassment, but his father looked beyond being bothered by anything his wife said. He was looking at me, studying me really. “A friend of Stig's,” he said. “An old friend?”

Angie Tarrant stood up, slow and measured, as if a string on the top of her head had been pulled, lifting her. “Oh my God,” she said. “
Now
I get it! Which one are you?”

“Which one what?” I said. “Mrs. Tarrant, I'm just worried about my son and—”

“What's your son's name?” said Angie. “A Milharay resident? Aye, right! Which one of them are you? Walking in here—”

“You've got to be kidding,” I said. “I'm not telling you my son's name when you're acting so—What's wrong with you?” She took a step towards me and I bolted. I didn't mean to do it, but somehow I managed to send the wheeled chair spinning as I took off and it tripped her, slowing her down and letting me get clear—that and the fact that her husband reached out and laid a firm grip on her arm. Wee J was running too, but he didn't follow me to the front door; he took off the other way.

The women in bathrobes stopped forking up their salads as I shot past them. Then I was back at my car, inside, engine on, ignoring the seat belt bleeps, ignoring the spray of gravel hitting the Range Rover next to me and the skid that ruined the shell pattern under my wheels.

I was halfway down the drive when Wee J stepped out in front of the car holding his arms out wide to the sides, staring me down, daring me. I slammed my brakes on and stopped, slewing to the left. He came around to the driver's side and mimed at me to roll down the window. I cracked it. That would have to do.

“You're not any of them, are you?” he said. “A Scarlet or a weather girl. You're Knickerbocker Gloria.”

I nodded. “How—” I began, but he shushed me.

“Is he okay?” he asked, and the look in those blue eyes was like nothing I'd ever seen.

“He's at—”

“Don't tell me,” said Wee J. “Just tell me he's okay.”

“He's fine,” I said. “He's safe.”

“Don't come back here,” Wee J said. “And be careful, won't you?”

I closed the window and drove away, watching him in my mirror.

“Thank you,” he mouthed, then he turned and disappeared again between the rhododendrons along the side of the drive.

“How did he know who I am?” I asked Nicky's picture. It smiled back at me. “What's going on?” Nicky just kept on smiling.