The Garden of Remembrance

by Allan Watson

  At last she opened her mouth and said, ‘The police told me about the girl on the beach.’

  I shook my head. I had almost forgotten about Alison. She was unimportant. Denise was the only thing that mattered to me.

  ‘It wasn’t me, it was the old man.’

  Teri began to quiver very slightly, her internal defences beginning to fail. Her voice became a splintered croak. ‘What old man? What are you talking about?’

  ‘The old man who took Alice away. He’s been here all the time. It was him all along, don’t you understand? He was the one who made Denise ill. He stopped me from getting to the hospital to tell you about your father. He’s the one who killed the girl on the beach, not me.’

  The shaking in Teri’s limbs became more pronounced. She looked like an epileptic having a mild seizure. She took a step towards me and her voice was filled with an unforgiving rage.

  ‘Don’t you dare play games with me, Matt McVey! Don’t you dare try to confuse me with stories about old men. Can’t you see what you’ve done for God’s sake. You’ve destroyed all of us.’

  Teri began to cry, great lung bursting sobs that racked her body. In the chair, Alice continued staring into space, oblivious to the final act being played out before her. While my gaze was on Alice, Teri rushed at me and rained blows across my face. The barrier had finally been breached. I didn’t even flinch as her nails tore at my unprotected face. The pain meant nothing to me. Below my feet the music started at a deafening volume. The sound of the fiddles and accordions and drums wrapping me in their embrace. Teri still flailed at me and I was dimly aware she was screaming, but she would never reach the small space I inhabited in my mind. In time I barely even noticed she was hitting me. I took one last breath of air and submerged myself beneath the wild waves of the music.

  Sometime later the music stopped and I opened my eyes. Teri had gone and taken Alice with her. Her vengeance had not been restricted to merely hitting me. The entire living room looked as if a wrecking crew had been set loose upon it. The television set had been broken, an empty wine bottle nestling within its shattered innards. The curtains had been torn from their rails and the couch was overturned. The series of hunting pictures still hung on the walls but their glass was smashed and splintered. The coffee table was standing upended against a wall where it had been thrown. Teri’s fury had been awesome in its destructive efficiency.

  My face hurt, and when I gingerly touched it, my hand came away smeared with blood. I wondered how long I had been standing there. My sense of time meant nothing at all. The music had not only protected me from Teri, it had also purged me of all feeling. When I thought of Denise there was only a cold empty space where my grief had been. A form of emotional embalming had taken place. I spotted Alice’s Winnie-the-Pooh hair-clasp lying on the floor. The one I had bought for her on our first afternoon in St Andrew’s. It was cracked and shattered as if a foot had trampled upon it. I ran my fingers across its surface before dropping it back onto the floor. Alice would not miss it.

  A great sense of tiredness ran through me and I decided to lie down for a while. Soon the police would have my photographs of Alison McCulloch in their possession and then they would come for me. I was too tired to run away. Until then I wanted to sleep. I climbed the stairs wearily and walked into the room with the twin beds. I stood in the doorway for a moment remembering when Denise had cried out in terror that the old man was sitting on the end of her bed. It was a pity her last memories had been so unpleasant.

  I took a step towards the bed and suddenly the room stank of shit. I shivered as the arcane machinery which ran the universe cranked up a little. Without thinking I tried the handle of the locked cupboard and it turned easily. I looked into the cupboard and my mind registered only mild surprise when I saw the crumpled bodies of Teri and Alice. They had been crammed into the small space behind the louvered door. Sitting on top of them like a victorious king using his enemies as a gory throne - was Grandfather Crone. He was laughing and in his hands he held the blood slicked cane I had used to beat my wife and daughter to death.

  CHAPTER 20

  Memory is a funny thing. I’ve always had this mental image of millions of tiny sparks leaping with wild abandon from one synapse to another, like sure footed little mountain goats jumping fearlessly from high, rocky crags. An absurd notion probably, but one nevertheless I can reach out and grasp without getting dizzy from the complexity of it all.

  Memory is what we are. Without it we would serve no greater purpose than single celled micro-organisms swimming in the murk. Take away our memory and we would have no intelligence, no morals, no language, no soul. We would breathe, eat, sleep, shit, fuck, and fight. But we wouldn’t live. That’s what it all boils down to. Take away someone’s memory and you take away their life.

  Really vivid memories, the ones which make you feel as if you’ve just taken a ride in H.G.Wells’s time machine, require a catalyst. The catalyst is usually the green smell of new mown grass, or the cyclic patterns of dead leaves blowing in an October wind. One moment I’m here, the next I’m gone. It’s not the surroundings that change, it’s the feeling of time. I can sense it in much the same way that a blind person can tell you the exact position of the sun in the sky. It’s like walking through an invisible door into the past. Infinite seconds pass before the enchantment fades away like a homesick ghost, leaving me with a heavy heart and the urge to cry.

  It’s curious that all these space/time memories are peaceful ones. At times they may be wistful or melancholy, but they are never violent or stimulating. I’ve a theory that it’s got something to do with adrenaline surges. Memories can’t sink their roots as deeply when the old juices are flowing. As a matter of fact they don’t take hold at all in some cases and the ones that do survive are buried alive in unmarked graves.

  There are times when the adrenaline levels get so high - reason and logic switch off, leaving us to the mercy of their insane brother, base instinct. At moments like these, memory gets wiped away as effectively as passing a cassette tape through a strong magnetic field. Think on it as a mercy killing - as the only thing worse is when these memories come crawling back up through the soil and lurch back to their owner. I should know better than anyone.

  The trial lasted five whole days and the verdict was never really in any real danger of tilting in my favour. Not that I particularly wished to be a free man. There was nothing in the outside world for me. Nothing at all. The Queen’s Council unlucky enough to be landed with my defence, made a spirited show of trying to prove that my mind was unhinged, but even he must have known his strategy was utterly futile from the hateful way the jury glared at me on that first long day in court.

  There were plenty of familiar faces in the court room. My brother James came along for the first three days, unaccompanied by Norma. No surprises there. Teri’s brother Derek attended the trial with an almost religious fervour, never missing a minute until he was thrown out by the judge for attempted assault upon me. Other members of Teri’s family also came along to see that justice was done and left satisfied. At various times DI Moore and his nasty sidekick Wilson entered stage left and said their piece. My lawyer called PC Charlie Johnstone and WPC Samantha Greaves as character witness’s for me which embarrassed the police somewhat. Old Jean Sinclair from the library was also called to the stand to say her bit. She seemed very sure of herself until I caught her eye and gave her my friendliest smile. After that she stuttered and mumbled and was even rebuked by the judge for not speaking loudly enough. An occupational hazard for a librarian I would have thought.

  Grandfather Crone was also there of course. He first appeared among the spectators, popping up where I least expected him. At one point he sat beside Derek and pulled faces at my oblivious brother-in-law. He soon grew bored with this entertainment and roamed at will around the court room. Sometimes he would sit at the council’s table with the assorted lawyers and legal gophers - occasionally lying flat across their thick legal books and y
ellow pads. At other times he would suddenly appear up on the bench beside the judge, and once even sat on a woman’s lap in the front row of the jury box. This made me laugh aloud at the time and my QC gave me a hopeful look at this display of unexplained mirth.

  The national press took a great deal of interest in the proceedings and I found myself an overnight celebrity. The way they wrote about me in their trashy newspapers you would have thought I was a monster. The criticism bit deep initially, before I took the pragmatic view that they were adding colour to the articles for strictly commercial reasons. Newspapers do have to sell themselves after all. My picture made the front page of most papers. The Japanese couple who had taken our photograph on the cliff top made a great deal of money from the snap I was told. There was something grimly amusing to see Grandfather Crone standing just to one side of our happy family shot. I always found it strange that he was never referred to by anyone. Even half out the picture he still made a most peculiar figure.

  I was being tried on three counts of murder. Teri, Alice, and Alison McCulloch. The Crown worked hard to hang poor little Denise’s death at my door too, but the doctors never did ascertain what strange disease killed her. They would have written down the symptoms assiduously in their notebooks in the hope that some other unfortunate with the same illness might chance along to provide them with new research material.

  The Depute Advocate started the ball rolling at ten o’clock on a sunny Monday morning. He built up his case methodically and in a very matter of fact fashion. He took his time and spared the jury nothing. The developed film from my camera was passed around the jurors. After seeing the prints, the hostile glares turned into looks of abhorrence and loathing. I had seen the prints when Moore and Wilson once more had me in their iron clutches. There were some good shots of the Rock and Spindle. It made stark and dramatic viewing wreathed in fog. I was pleased with them. Of course there was also the shots I took of Alison lounging topless against the rock. She looked very young in the photographs. The remainder of the prints proved to be an unofficial black eye for the Dundee police force.

  After bludgeoning Alison to death with a large stone, I had taken a dozen or so photographs of her mutilated body. From the order of the shots, the prosecution reasoned that at several points I must have put the camera down to commit new atrocities upon the corpse before getting back behind the lens again. Someone in Dundee police force had been sloppy sending the film for processing. It was two o’clock on the Thursday afternoon before the photo lab phoned them in a blind panic. Teri and Alice had already been dead eight and half hours by that point. If the police hadn’t screwed things up they could have been whisked safely away before I ever reached the flat in St Andrew’s. They could even have developed the prints quickly enough to prevent me from leaving the station in the first place. A Mother and her five year old child dead, and all because someone had forgotten to write ‘Urgent’ on the envelope.

  The press almost flayed the police alive at the time. Both Moore and Wilson were very appreciative of these allegations and passed on their thanks to me by way of a series of brutal beatings, so expertly administered that I suffered not a single bruise to show to my solicitor. The attempts of the Dundee constabulary to make amends for their fuck-up, ended in what was the one humorous point during the trial. Even the pious, grim faced jury broke into laughter.

  Up until that moment the prosecution had been rolling forward like a well oiled machine. Evidence was produced with timed precision, and witnesses brought onto the stand when their presence would create the most impact. Overall it was a polished and professional performance from the Crown boys. Then the Depute Advocate made the mistake of asking for tapes of my grilling in the Dundee police interview room. Transcripts of the interview were passed around the jury while a technician set up a hi-tech audio system and slotted the tape home. He switched it on and the blaring fiddles and accordions of Jimmy Shand and his Band blasted through the court room like a Caledonian hurricane. When the technician finally managed to kill the volume there was complete silence for a few moments before the vacuum was filled by derisive laughter. Pleased with his joke, Grandfather Crone danced a merry jig in front of the jury box but I was probably the only witness to observe that.

  The American golfing tourist with the bad taste in sweaters was brought in and questioned about the night he claimed to be drugged or hypnotised, perhaps both, and coerced into confessing to a murder he didn’t commit. He had long since been cleared of any involvement and set loose back onto the St Andrews fairways if he ever chose to do so. He had travelled all the way back from Chicago in order to give evidence against me. He almost broke down and wept when telling the jury of his sleepless nights since finding out he had been set up as a grim courier, carrying Alison’s fingers in his pocket.

  After he was dismissed, two top notch psychiatrists were called upon to verify that the American showed definite symptoms of post-hypnotic stress. They were very convincing. What little good Jimmy Shand and his Band had done for my chances was eaten away by the time the head shrinkers left the stand.

  More photographs were passed around. This time official police photographs of Teri and Alice. Two women on the jury wept aloud when they saw them, and one man had to be excused to vomit in the corridor. The prosecutor asked for the coroner to take the stand and talked the man through his autopsy reports. The injuries I had inflicted upon Teri and Alice made horrendous reading. That was when Derek could control his anger no longer and vaulted the low rail, intending to do me damage. The policemen flanking me in the dock stopped him before he could lay so much as a finger on me.

  The murder weapon was never found, although the pathologist had made an accurate assessment as to what blunt instrument had inflicted the killing blows. As his opinion was made clear to the court, Grandfather Crone spun and twirled the ebony cane like a well practised majorette. The moment was not lost on him.

  Eventually the Depute Advocate declared his side satisfied that the pertinent facts of the case had been laid out for the jury’s evaluation and stepped down from the judicial pitching mound to well earned pats on the back from his team. Grandfather Crone raised his hands above his head in a victory salute before applauding the prosecutor as he sat down at the lawyers table. My man stepped up looking confident although he must have known it was a lost cause by then. When he called on his own pet psychiatrists and began warbling on about how much stress I had been under, both prior to and during the holiday, I became bored and tuned out.

  The court room in front of me faded as another such room superimposed itself and came into sharp focus. There were no thrill seeking public filling the galleries in this new room. Even the press were banned from scribbling their short hand distortions of the truth. The only spectators present were mum and one of her brothers. Etiquette demanded that a child on trial for murder is at least allowed a small portion of moral support. There seemed to be an awful lot of doctors in the room, all with their own opinions on my mental state.

  They made me tell in every small detail, why I had suddenly attacked my mentally retarded Grandfather with his own walking stick. Up until then I had kept mum’s part in things absent from my account. The doctors however had known all along there was more to my story than just a sudden violent brainstorm. They were clever. They waited until I was up on the stand, when I was most vulnerable to their twisting questions, before going for the kill. As they wore me down to a weeping, sobbing wreck, I tried to convey to my mum with my eyes that I was crumbling. I tried to warn her to get out of the room before the doctors opened up my head for all and sundry to look into.

  She didn’t catch the drift of my silent pleading. She sat where she was beside my uncle, unaware I was about to crucify her. As my resolve not to say anything about Grandfather Crone’s special medicine eroded like soft chalky stone, she only stared slackly back at me, probably puzzling over why her son had killed her father, bashing his head in until his brains leaked through the breaches in his shatter
ed skull. It must have been hard for her, but not as hard as what came after.

  The doctors trussed me up tightly with their incantations of psycho-babble and Freudian cant, and when I was completely at their mercy, they squeezed me with all their collective might. I sang a high, clear note that drifted through the court room shocking everyone who listened. I told them everything they wanted to hear. I told them of how I had heard mum taking Grandfather Crone into his room and how I had sneaked along the hall and listened to what took place behind the closed door. I was crying so much at the end that I barely saw my mother stumble to her feet and run madly from the court.

  The judge kindly called for a recess and suspended the trial for the remainder of the day. I was allowed to go home that day with my uncle, accompanied by two watchful policemen. When we arrived, mum wouldn’t answer the door, and the three grown up men beside me shared concerned glances. After fifteen minutes of shouting through the letter box, they finally decided to kick the door in. They never actually mentioned the word suicide but I understood intuitively what they were scared of. One of the policemen smashed the door open with his first blow, and before anyone could stop me I rushed past them all and into the hallway.

  The first thing that hit me was the strong smell of shit - and then I saw the feet dangling directly on level with my eyes. Two black shoes lay on the carpet beneath the feet as if they had been casually kicked off. Mum was hanging from the top of the banister, a thin washing rope wrapped around her black tube-swollen neck. As I craned my neck back further to look at face, her legs suddenly swung in a sharp arc, but I knew it was not mum who was moving, it was me as I collapsed screaming on to the floor. Even as I was carried from the house, little graves were being dug inside my head and certain memories nailed into plain, unadorned coffins. By the time I came to, the burials had been completed and I had a gaping wound in my brain from where the memories had been neatly sliced away. When I was deemed well enough to return to the stand, I was still so catatonic that the judge decided I was unfit to stand trial. It was abandoned and I was taken back to hospital.