by Allan Watson
‘Yes, thank you,’ I replied. ‘Miss McCulloch was more than helpful.’
The girl slipped off the cart and smoothed her skirt down with her hands. ‘Did you know Mr McVey was writing a book, Jean? He’s a professional photographer.’
Miss Sinclair clapped her hand to her mouth and looked suitably star struck. ‘My goodness, Mr McVey, and you never even told me. Mind and let us know when it’s published and we’ll order in a few copies.’
I was so caught up in my own lie I was quite serious when I said, ‘Don’t worry, I will.’ Then after a few more pleasantries, I made my excuses and left the library. The sunlight was bright outside after the relative dimness of the library. For a few minutes I walked along the street half blinded and most likely smiling to myself like an idiot. I had a feeling of buoyancy inside me. The notion of a young, pretty girl like Alison McCulloch flirting outrageously with me had puffed up my ego until I thought my ribs might burst with the strain of it.
Then reality suddenly kicked back in and I wondered why I had fabricated all that rubbish about the book. I had acted like a stupid teenager and not a man in his late thirties. It felt as though a spell had been cast upon me while I was in the library. I had been bewitched by a glamour. I told myself it was just a combination of heat, lack of sex, and the soft velvety skin of Alison McCulloch’s bare legs. As I walked back to the flat, I tried to think of Teri, but my mind continued to imagine what Alison would be like in bed. She would be the unrestrained noisy type I guessed.
I was still fantasising about Alison McCulloch and her beautiful legs when a police car swept into Market street. I was ten yards away when it pulled to a halt outside our flat. A dishevelled looking woman got out. Her face was so red and blotchy from crying that at first I didn’t recognise her. Then with horror I realised I was staring at Teri. I had thought on Saturday that my wife looked ten years younger with her trim waistline and new hair cut. Now she suddenly looked ten years older.
She caught sight of me and her face crumpled like tissue paper. I saw Denise being led from the car by a concerned looking policewoman. She was crying too. The WPC put her arm round Denise as she led her to the front door. I hurried forward and let Teri slump against me, her sobs making her entire body quiver like a badly tuned piano string. The policewoman was giving me a look of pity and I was suddenly terribly afraid.
‘Teri, what’s happened. Where’s Alice? Oh my God, she’s not been in an accident has she?’
I thought about the swimming pool - that electric blue bogey man that had always made me want to curl up in a ball and swallow my tongue in its presence. The swimming pool. A shimmering cold God that had hungered for me since I was six years old. Unable to get at me, it had taken Alice instead. I saw her small body spread upon the flat, blue surface of the pool and the world tilted on its axis. Against me Teri continued shaking, unable to speak. A burly policeman emerged from the other side of the car and stood on the road looking awkward.
He coughed and said, ‘Mr McVey?’
I nodded, already knowing what he was going to say. The man fidgeted from foot to foot and glanced over to his colleague for some sort of moral support. He took a deep breath and straightened himself up to break the bad news to me. But it was Teri who finally pulled her tear streaked face away from my chest and gasped, ‘I’ve lost Alice, Matt. Someone took her. A man. A man took Alice away.’
Then she started sobbing again.
CHAPTER 9
We waited four hours before we had any news of Alice. Teri and I wove those long hours into a single razor sharp wire that stretched to a vanishing point in the distance. And then we walked along that wire, lacerating ourselves, drawing blood, cutting through soft tissue and sinew. The two police officers stayed and watched as we danced and swayed on the wire, a human safety net ready to catch us if we fell.
Denise had been put to bed. Once in the flat she had started shaking badly and her temperature had soared. The WPC thought she might be coming down with flu and packed her off to bed. Neither Teri or I had much in the way of soft words or mollycoddling for poor Denise. We were both too busy taking our first tenuous steps on the razor wire. Our own selfish pain blinding us from the suffering of our sick daughter.
We sat together on the couch like we had that morning, back when all we had to worry about was ghosts and broken sewage pipes and cold bacon sandwiches. Teri was initially too distressed to tell me how she had lost Alice, but eventually the words unstuck themselves from her throat and slithered out. She said that after swimming, she and the girls had walked around the shops in South street. They had gone into one of those super-saver mini-markets where everything cost a pound. I remembered it well from standing outside the window the day before. The shop was an Aladdin’s cave of dusting cloths, gaudy plastic jewellery, scouring pads, miniature kiddie hairdryers, kitchen rolls, water pistols, window polish, and dolls that looked like Barbi’s retarded cousin. A cornucopia of household cleaning items and cheap plastic toys, designed to suck in housewives and their avaricious offspring.
Teri clutched tightly at my arm as she told me this, her nails digging into my skin as if she needed to anchor herself to something. In between sentences she cried some more and the police woman volunteered to make some tea. I felt desperate for a cigarette.
‘I was holding Alice’s hand, Matt. I swear to God I was. You know how busy that shop is and I’m always frightened Alice gets lost in a crowd somewhere. I turned round to say something to her and all I was holding was a tin of furniture polish. But I know I had been holding her hand! I swear it.’ Teri’s voice rasped into a shrill screech and she let go of my arm to bury her head in her hands.
I wished that I could have felt as bad as Teri did. I wanted to visibly show my grief as if to prove to the police officers that I too was a caring a parent like Teri. But I was encased in ice. On a cold, flickering screen in my head, I watched a reconstruction of what it must have been like in the shop, the mind-camera moving to an extreme close up of Teri’s face registering surprise, then confusion, and finally utter heart rending fear as the cold, hard truth dawned upon her. The picture was grainy and slightly out of focus, but I saw it clearly enough. The look of anguish on Teri’s face should have made me weep along with her but something inside me had hardened and petrified.
I looked at Teri through eyes cloudy with flecks of black ice. Her face was red and blotchy, puffy around the eyes. Her lips were swollen as if she had been biting her lip. She looked ugly. A part of me demanded that I comfort her. Hold her and share the burden of her terror. Alice belonged to both of us; a collective responsibility. Blame could not be apportioned.
Another part of me wanted to punch her stupid blotchy face until it bled. Teri had deliberately excluded me that afternoon, played her spiteful little mind games just to demonstrate that she held the upper hand in our marital dispute. I did blame her. She had been the one who lost Alice, not me.
The policeman sitting uncomfortably on the edge of an armchair broke the rest of the bad news to me. One of the women serving at the tills beside the front door of the shop remembered seeing a girl fitting Alice’s description leaving in the company of an old man. The shop assistant had assumed the man to be the girl’s grandfather.
The old man again.
As the policeman told me this, I forgot about hating Teri. The ice in my head was squeezing and crushing my thoughts and the mind screen behind my eyes became a Japanese shadow screen, back-lit with jerky silhouettes. One of the shadows was raising a club and raining blows upon its companion. A Punch and Judy show performed in the sweeping darkness of a terrible eclipse.
Something was happening within me. Rusting, salt encrusted memories were being raised from the sea bed of my consciousness. I felt them sway and groan in the dingy gloom of the black water, loose debris falling from their holed and corroded hulls. I heard the screech of toiling winches and felt the unbearable strain of the lifting chains as they dragged the memories ever upwards. These memories ha
d been deliberately scuttled and sunk, and now they rose like dead ships towards the surface. I waited for them to break the water. I was on the verge of remembering something very important.
From downstairs, a loud flurry of fiddles and accordions cut through the heavy chains like a spray of acid and the memories sank once more to the silt of the sea floor. Snare drums rattled and hammered, the beat kicking the music before it like a sadistic taskmaster. The breaking of the chains snapped something else inside me. Something much more delicate. I began to yell and curse and shout. I remember knocking over the coffee table and trying to kick in the TV set. The two police officers restrained me and forced me back onto the couch. Calming me. Telling me to cool down. They were understanding about my outburst. They thought I was just another high-wire walker who had lost his nerve and crashed to the ground. Even Teri put aside her own pain to hold my hands in hers. At that moment I felt inconsolable. I had lost my answers. Answers that might have let us find Alice.
I could feel the floor beneath my feet vibrate as the music tried to saw through the wooden joists. Marie’s Wedding swooped and soared down below, the fiddlers playing to an insane tempo. The policeman, whose name was Charlie Johnstone, let go of me when he was sure I wasn’t going to trash the living room any further. He told me to sit tight while he paid a visit to our downstairs neighbour. A few moments later I heard his fist strike against the door at the bottom of the stairs and his voice boomed, ‘Police! Open up!’.
The music halted immediately. Twice more Johnstone tried to persuade our rowdy neighbour to open the door before giving up and climbing the stairs again. He shrugged his shoulders and made a wry face. ‘At least the music’s stopped,’ he said. ‘I must have given the idiot a fright.’
I nodded silently to him. Whether the music started up again or not was irrelevant. It had done its work. The WPC, who insisted we call her Samantha, excused herself and left the room to check on Denise. When she returned, neither Teri or I enquired of our daughter’s well being. We were back on the wire.
The hours passed with interminable slowness. Every time the police radio spat out a burst of static the wire vibrated, cutting cruelly into the soles of our feet. The police woman offered to make us something to eat, but my stomach had constricted to something the size of a golf ball. I was watching the light outside the window, studying the gradual deepening of the sun’s rays. If we were still sitting there when it grew fully dark I would presume Alice lost to us forever.
Just when it seemed my sanity was about to slide off the edge of the world, PC Johnstone responded to a unintelligible hiss from his radio and retreated to the kitchen. Teri and I twisted upon the wire, flaying ourselves while waiting for the policeman to return. When he did he wore a smile a mile wide.
‘We’ve found your daughter! She’s safe and well. The sergeant says that not a hair on her head has been harmed.’
Samantha rushed across the room and threw her arms around Teri. Both woman were crying. I stood and stared blankly at Charlie Johnstone, hardly able to comprehend what he had told us.
‘She’s all right?’ My voice was a shaky croak.
Johnstone nodded excitedly. ‘Safe and sound, Mr McVey.’
Laughter burst from me; a jagged expulsion of pent up terror. Johnstone laughed too and grabbed hold of my hand to shake it vigorously. If the music had suddenly blared into life below us we would probably have danced a jig together.
When I finally found the breath to speak I asked him, ‘How? Where?’
His reply made me want to suck back the laughter, his words detonating bombs inside my head.
‘They found her in Kinburn Park. She was sitting on a bench in the Garden of Remembrance. Someone’s bringing her back right now.’
Johnstone and his huge beaming smile vanished from sight and once more I was staring at Denise’s drawing. Her symmetrical, green garden.
The Garden of Remembrance.
CHAPTER 10
I slept with Denise in the twin bedded room that night, and as I lay in the darkness listening to her strained breathing, I felt guilty over the way she had been neglected while Alice was missing. She must have been so miserable trapped in this bedroom all by herself, worried to death over her missing sister and coping with her own illness, and not once did Teri or I climb the stairs to see how she was. When I think back on that summer, that is the moment that still haunts me. The killings are wrapped in shadow. Murky images, grainy focus. They register nothing with my emotions. Remembering the way we abandoned Denise, however, still makes my heart hurt.
Alice being returned to us should have been a happy conclusion to the day. Instead it only marked the start of an unhappy evening. The fun was just beginning. Two policemen brought Alice home in a car. She was half asleep and smiling as if savouring a secret only she knew. There were euphoric scenes as she was carried over the threshold like a tiny five year old bride by the bulky policeman. My show of joy at her safe return was every bit as heartfelt as Teri’s. We were like two rival Hogmany revellers, hugging and kissing and talking utter rubbish. The police officers quietly left to let us get on with it.
I had recovered from my shock at the discovery of the Garden of Remembrance. Perhaps the revelation was intended to push me further down that road to mental illness. Instead, it had stilled the whispering voices in my head, voices of dissent and unreason. For the first time I had something substantial to hang on to. The old man, and where he lived. He had given me one clue too many. I didn’t yet understand the significance of the Garden of Remembrance, but it was a big enough step forward to make me think I was close to solving the enigma.
So I hugged and kissed Alice while Teri made peanut butter sandwiches. The police had warned us not to press Alice with questions about her abduction. Tomorrow would be soon enough to open that particular can of worms. What Alice needed most was her belly filled, a good night’s sleep, and to be smothered with our devoted love. The sandwiches and love we gave her in abundance. The good night’s sleep however was out of our hands. An hour later, Alice dozed off in an armchair, a half eaten sandwich still clutched in her small fingers.
As we listened to her soft snores, Teri’s face lost its excited glow, and became gravely serious. ‘I don’t want to spend another night in this house Matt. Why don’t we just pack the car and go home. The four of us. If the police want to ask Alice questions tomorrow they can travel down to Glasgow. I can’t take much more of this place.’
I had expected Teri would suggest leaving and had my objections armed and ready. I couldn’t possibly leave the flat just yet. Not when I was within touching distance of the old man. He no longer frightened me. I was excited and intrigued.
‘We can’t go tonight. Look at Alice, she’s exhausted. She needs a decent night’s sleep. We can’t just throw her in the back seat for a two hour drive.’
‘She can sleep in the car can’t she? And besides, what are the chances of getting a full night’s sleep in this house?’
I wanted to explain to Teri how I now had the scent of the old man hiding in the Garden of Remembrance. I wanted to tell her that he would leave us alone from now on. I was on his case and was going to track him down to his lair.
Instead, I said, ‘Both us are exhausted. What happens if I doze off at the wheel and crash the car? Leave it until morning. We can go first thing. Okay? Nothing is going to happen tonight. I promise you that.’
Teri looked as if she intended to keep fighting her corner, but then she shrugged tiredly as if realising the futility of the argument. After all, she couldn’t drive, and at that time of night there were no more buses to Glasgow had she wished to push the issue to its extreme limits.
‘Tomorrow then,’ she said in resigned voice.
I carried Alice upstairs and laid her in the bed next to Denise. Teri followed me and we exchanged guilty looks as it suddenly occurred to us that we had another daughter, who because she had been out of sight, had ceased to exist for the past five hours. Denise was fast
asleep, but her breathing sounded ragged and her normally pale features were brightly flushed. Her blonde hair spread across the pillow was darkened with sweat. Teri laid her hand on Denise’s brow and made worried, clucking mother hen sounds, her maternal skills returning as if they never been away. She looked at me with a mixture of shame faced guilt and concern.
‘Matt, she’s burning up. We need to phone a doctor.’
I fetched my mobile from my jacket and was surprised to see that the battery was dead although I’d charged it before leaving on Saturday morning and hadn’t used it since, except to text my brother James. When I showed it to Teri she gave me the sort of look that implied that once again I had let her down badly. A small spark of resentment flared up as Teri had never owned a mobile due to being paranoid over the health hazards involved with them and in turn never allowed either of our daughters to use them. Therefore she had a bit of a nerve blaming me for not being able to produce a fully functional mobile phone at the drop of a hat. I might have pushed this feeling of resentment further, but I was tired and felt the beginnings of a headache ignite into life. I didn’t relish the idea of going out and searching for a public phone box and then trying to persuade an emergency doctor to pay a house call for what was most likely only a bad cold.
I said as much to Teri who looked uncertain and fetched a wet sponge from the bathroom with the intention of cooling Denise down with a bed bath. She handed me the sponge while stripping back the duvet and pulling Denise’s night-gown up past her chest. I was glad that Denise was still wearing her underwear. I had not seen her naked since she was four years old. There comes a time when fathers cannot bear to gaze upon their daughters naked and exposed. It evokes such feelings of confusion and unexplainable shame. I sometimes fear that in the darkest corner of all men’s hearts, we really do harbour the desire to ravish and kill our children. Perhaps it is a biological flaw. A festering time-bomb buried deep inside the right hand side of our brains; an aneurysm of the psyche.
