Girl on the Landing

by Paul Torday

  After a while, I switched the engine back on and drove to the turning off the A9 and up Glen Gala another two miles, without managing to kill myself.

  As I drove up the narrow road that led up the glen, for the first time I understood what drew Mikey to this place. Although it was already the afternoon, hoar frost still clung to the branches of the trees, and at the road edges the puddles had turned to ice. The sky above was a pale, remote blue. The air was so cold it almost glittered, and I both saw and felt the silent, deadly beauty of this valley. Perhaps my senses were heightened by the increasing amounts of adrenalin my body was manufacturing as I drew closer to Beinn Caorrun. I knew that the police were not far away, and that no harm would come to me. That had nothing to do with my decision to come here in the end, my answer to the London detective’s question; I had come here because I wanted to see Mikey again. I wanted to ask him what was going on; to look him in the eye and see whether I still knew who he really was. I couldn’t bear the thought I might never see him again.

  Now came the two white stones that marked the entrance to the drive up to the lodge, and for a while I drove through the dark forest, wondering whether, at each bend, I might meet an abandoned blue Land Rover with the door open; see a man’s shoe lying upside down by the side of the track. There was nothing in my way. I saw no one among the trees. Everything was quiet.

  When I came out of the forest and on to the gravel sweep among the rhododendrons at the front of Beinn Caorrun, it had a sad, almost abandoned look to it. I knew Mrs McLeish would not have opened the place up because Mrs McLeish was not there. At first we had worried that she, too, had gone missing. Then she left a message on my answerphone in London, to say that she had gone to stay with her cousin in Troon for a while. There was no mention of when she might be back, or who was looking after things while she was away, or how I could get in touch with her. In all the years of my marriage to Mikey, Mrs McLeish had never been away from Beinn Caorrun for more than a day or two, as far as I could recall.

  I opened the car door, half wondering whether Mikey would suddenly emerge from the trees. What would happen if he did? Would the police rise up from camouflaged hiding places? Sergeant Henshaw said it was much better that I knew nothing about that side of things.

  I looked up. The sun was lower in the sky now, and I needed to unpack and warm up the house before it got dark. I had brought my warmest clothes from London. In Perth I had stopped at Tesco and bought three days’ supply of groceries. I thought that if Mikey were able to come to Beinn Caorrun, he would have come by then. I carried my suitcase and the carrier bags into the house, lit a fire in the drawing room and switched the water heaters on. I had bought a blow heater for our bedroom, something Mikey would not approve of, but I thought I might die of hypothermia without it. It took me over an hour to unpack and open up the house and by then the light was beginning to fade. I put the kettle on and went upstairs to draw the curtains of our bedroom. I switched lights on everywhere: on the landing, in our bedroom, in the guest rooms. I didn’t want any corner of the house to be dark when night came. On my way back from the bedroom, I suddenly noticed that there was something different about the landing. Someone had put a linen press against one wall, and then I remembered that Mrs McLeish had said she would get Donald to bring this old piece of furniture in from the barn, to give her more storage space. There was an odd resonance about the landing with the linen press in it, and it reminded me of an image seen long ago, since forgotten. I stood for a moment, trying to catch the elusive memory, then dismissed it from my mind.

  The kettle was whistling downstairs, so I went towards the kitchen to take it off the gas. As I walked through the kitchen door, the whistling stopped.

  I saw Mikey, his back to me, pouring the boiling water into the teapot.

  ‘Oh, there you are,’ he said without turning around, as if he were not wanted for questioning in connection with the murder of one man and the disappearance of another. ‘I wondered where you had got to.’

  I pulled out a chair and sat down before my legs gave way. My heart was hammering in my chest.

  ‘I was drawing the curtains in the bedroom,’ I said faintly.

  ‘And you’ve put a blow heater on,’ he said, turning around now and smiling at me. ‘I can hear it from here.’

  He looked older and even thinner than I remembered him. His face was drawn and his hair seemed to have more grey in it, though how was that possible after only a few days? He had not shaved. His clothes were the same clothes he wore for stalking: a dark grey fleece open at the neck, a plaid shirt underneath, army camouflage trousers tucked into thick socks, and walking boots. He stirred the tea in the pot for a moment and then went and took two mugs from a cupboard, and opened the fridge to find the long life milk I had just put in there. He made two mugs of tea for us and then came and sat opposite me at the kitchen table. Some fresh-cut branches with berries still on them lay on the table - rowan branches, I imagined.

  Mikey said, ‘The police sent you, I suppose?’

  I didn’t answer for a moment, then said, ‘Mikey, how did you get here? What’s going on? I’ve been so worried about you.’

  He sipped his tea without answering, and looked at me over the rim of the mug with his grey eyes. His face seemed remote now, the smile gone. Grey eyes, grey hair, grey fleece: there was something ghostlike about Mikey; yet he was real and substantial enough. I wanted to hug him before he vanished again. There was no trace of the man I had married now, nothing in this man that recalled Michael Gascoigne. This was Mikey, and something other than Mikey, as if he were still changing, receding from my grasp, and my understanding.

  ‘You still love me, Elizabeth. Don’t you?’ he asked.

  ‘You know I do. That’s why I’m here. It wasn’t the police ... it wasn’t just the police. Darling, wouldn’t it be better if I called them and you just waited here for them? Then we could sort this whole thing out. I just want you to be better.’

  ‘Better?’ he said, smiling again. ‘I am better, better than I’ve felt for years. You said you wanted to know what’s going on. I’ll tell you, because I trust you, and there have been too many secrets between us. I want you to know as much as I can tell you. I won’t tell you about how. I will tell you about why. Come outside into the garden with me for a moment, while there’s still daylight. There’s something I want to show you. It will help you understand.’

  He stood up and wandered out of the kitchen to the front door. I followed him; I had to.

  We went outside. I slipped the mobile from my pocket and checked the signal. It showed three bars: good enough. I should have rung the police. They had told me to ring them before I said a word to Mikey, but I didn’t want to ring them just yet. I needed to understand. I followed Mikey across the lawns and we stopped at the entrance to a little path between giant rhododendrons.

  The sun was just beginning to dip below the ridge over which the Falls of Gala tumbled, but there was still enough light to see. It was very cold, and I shivered and wrapped my arms around myself.

  Mikey turned and said to me, ‘They’ve probably told you by now that I killed my mother?’

  I stared at him, my mouth open.

  ‘When I was still too young to know better, I told her things I shouldn’t have. Where I went when I roamed these hills as a child, who I met, what they said to me. I trusted her, as children trust their mothers, but she went to Alex Grant and told him about me, and what I had been saying. Alex came to see me and we sat in the drawing room - Alex, my parents and me - and he started asking me questions. I was very angry, but I didn’t let it show. I waited. I waited for years. They poisoned me with medicines, until I learned to throw away the pills that Alex Grant had prescribed for me, and pretend I had taken them. Then one day my mother and I decided to go trout-fishing on the loch. I rowed the boat; she fished. I came back to shore; she didn’t.’

  Mikey turned his back on me and began to force a way through the rhododendrons. I didn’t
want to go in there with him, not after this, not at any price, but he turned and looked at me with his grey eyes and said, ‘Come on, you want to know, and I want to show you something. There should be no more secrets between us, darling.’ I followed him as though he were pulling me on a string.

  ‘Alex Grant wasn’t fooled. His instincts were good. One or two incidents had occurred in the glen, which he quite correctly decided I had something to do with.’ I shuddered. Mikey gave me a kind, remote glance. ‘You’re cold, darling,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry. I won’t be much longer. Alex knew that either I wasn’t taking the medication he had prescribed, or it wasn’t working. He came out here again one winter’s day, and asked to see my father. They went into the drawing room. I stood outside the drawing-room door, but they never heard or saw me. I can be quiet when I want to be. I heard Alex ask my father for his consent to have me put in a mental hospital. My father said he’d think about it, and let him know. Then he came to the door and called for me, and we stood outside the drawing room and he asked me, “Is it true?”’

  Mikey paused and looked up at the sky, smiling at some memory that had crossed his mind. He looked down again, down at me, and then down at the long, bleached grass that grew in the little clearing we now stood in, surrounded by a tangle of giant Ponticum and tree rhododendrons. Mikey scuffed the grass with his foot.

  ‘Before Alex was gone I had made my plan. My father stood in the drive, waving Alex off, just as he did for any visitor who made the journey out to Beinn Caorrun, and as he walked back to the house, I shot him with the estate rifle. In those days gunrooms were never locked. All I had to do was go in and get the rifle and the ammunition clip, and chamber a round. It wasn’t what you might call a sporting shot, at less than fifty yards, but it did the job. A .275 high-velocity bullet will drop an eighteen-stone stag at a hundred and fifty yards just like that, and this was only a thirteen-stone man.’

  Mikey scuffed the grass some more, parting it to show what lay beneath.

  ‘I dragged him in here and bled him out and gralloched him, to give him the same rites of departure as he had taught me to give a stag. Then I hid the rifle on the hill. I was not sure what to do next, but then the weather turned and a blizzard blew in. I waited for a few hours and then rang the police and told them my father had gone missing, hind-stalking on the hill.’

  I was fascinated by Mikey’s right boot. As he continued to dig at the ground with his foot I could see brown bits of wood; no, not wood, something else, a ribcage perhaps, and the long thigh bone of a large animal: a thirteen-stone animal.

  ‘On his gravestone, when he was finally declared legally dead, I had engraved the words “Gone but Not Forgotten”. Everyone thought it was rather touching, if not very original. But as you see,’ said Mikey, poking the old bones beneath the rhododendrons, ‘he is forgotten, but not gone.’ He looked at me with that curious new smile of his.

  ‘They looked everywhere - every yard of the mountains between here and God knows where. But they never searched these rhododendrons, right in front of the house.’

  I started to back away from Mikey, then stopped and said, ‘And Alex Grant, where is he?’

  ‘He’s gone.’

  ‘Where is his body?’

  ‘He doesn’t need it now.’

  I kept edging away from Mikey, but didn’t take my eyes from him.

  ‘Don’t worry, darling, don’t be afraid,’ he said softly. He followed me slowly, as if he were conscious that any sudden movement would panic me into a run.

  ‘And Stephen Gunnerton?’

  Mikey stopped and frowned.

  ‘Yes, the psychiatrist. He was my jailer, my tormentor. After my father went missing I became very depressed. I couldn’t look after myself for a while, and the day after the funeral, despite everything, Alex Grant managed to get some sort of legal order to have me put in a hospital. I was too unwell to resist. Even Ellie wouldn’t help me. I suppose I was pretty far gone by that stage. That’s where I met Stephen Gunnerton. Between them, Alex and Stephen knew a lot about me by the time I got out of there. What they didn’t know, they guessed. No one ever accused me of any crime. There was no body, no evidence and no obvious motive. But they wouldn’t allow me my freedom until they had done a very thorough job of poisoning me with their drugs.’

  We were on the lawn now, and the sun had dipped below the ridges. Frost had started to form upon the lawn.

  ‘She told me it would be best if I dealt with Alex and Stephen,’ said Mikey.

  ‘Who told you?’ I asked, bewildered.

  ‘Lamia. The Lamia.’

  ‘Who is that?’ I asked, looking around me as if this Lamia were about to appear. It was absurd, because I knew that everything was going on in Mikey’s head, and nothing and no one would appear, except the police, as soon as I had a chance to use my mobile. I didn’t dare do it in front of Mikey. Maybe he would consider it a final act of betrayal and deal with me as he seemed to have dealt with everyone else. I looked into his eyes, trying to understand how much of what was behind them was still human.

  ‘Oh. She’s usually about somewhere. She’s never far away.’

  I turned then and ran into the house, slamming the front door behind me and locking it. Then I ran up to our bedroom and locked that door too. I took out my mobile phone. On the screen it said ‘Searching for Network’. The signal had, inexplicably, disappeared. I pressed it anyway. Nothing happened.

  I turned off the blow heater so I could hear better, and stood and listened. The house was absolutely silent. No creaking floorboards, no slamming doors, nothing except the distant rumble of the Falls of Gala. A wind sighed through the trees, and wrapped itself around the house, rattling the window frames. All was silent again. Then someone spoke right outside the door and I almost jumped with shock. A girl’s voice, clear and silver as moonlight: ‘Let’s go in and see her, shall we?’

  Mikey’s voice replied, ‘No, Lamia. Leave her alone. I don’t want any harm to come to her.’

  I was fascinated. Mikey was speaking to himself in two quite different voices. It made every hair on my arms stand on end, as if a wave of static had passed through me. The silver voice laughed.

  ‘What are you? Her guardian angel?’

  Mikey’s voice said: ‘She’s bearing my child. Get your hand off the doorknob.’

  I started with shock. How could he know? I wasn’t even sure myself yet. I was late by a few days but it had happened before. As soon as he spoke, though, I knew the truth of what he said.

  I was still clutching the mobile, and I saw that first a single then a double bar had appeared. I was picking up a signal. I pressed send, and kept pressing it again and again, while I had the chance.

  The girl’s voice said, ‘Don’t wave your stupid rowan branches in front of me. You think that will stop me? The trees have no power in winter. You must give her to me like the others.’

  Then there was a hissing noise, louder than a steam engine, like a huge serpent coiled outside the door. I began to scream. The hissing stopped and then there was a single soft blow on the door, but its force was such that the oak cracked from top to bottom and it seemed to me as if the whole house shook. I went on screaming, or perhaps it wasn’t me now that was making the noise, but it was a wailing that came from somewhere outside. The room pulsated with light, blue and white, and I realised I was hearing the sirens of several police cars as they pulled up outside. I backed towards the window and risked taking my eyes off the door for a second to look out. Men were spilling out of the cars, and torch beams searched everywhere. More powerful lanterns shone out of the woods around the house. I waited.

  Then there was shouting and the thunder of many foot-steps on the stairs and on the landing outside. Somebody hammered on the door and shouted, ‘Police!’ I didn’t move. It might be another of Mikey’s voices. Another man called, ‘Mrs Gascoigne, are you in there?’ and I recognised the voice of Sergeant Henshaw. I made myself cross the room and unlock the door. DS H
enshaw stood there, with two armed officers wearing flak jackets and helmets with torches strapped to them.

  ‘Where is he?’ asked the sergeant. ‘Which way did he go?’

  I shook my head. I could not speak.

  18

  It’s about Survival, Not Love

  The night I last saw Elizabeth was the night I last saw the Lamia. She stood there on the landing, as familiar to me as a dream I’d had many times, but I refused her what she wanted from me. I would not let her pass. Perhaps there was something cathartic about that act of resistance, because I have not seen her since. Maybe she was a hallucination, after all, just like the others, and not some ghost or demon. Maybe she was the price I had to pay for not taking my medication and reclaiming my life.

  She was more real to me than any of the other delusions I had experienced: her black gaze, her clear voice, seemed beyond my own invention. She was real, persistent, terrifying. In the end, though, perhaps she was just what Stephen Gunnerton used to call a ‘command hallucination’. When I defied the Lamia that night in Beinn Caorrun, maybe it was some aspect of my inner self I was confronting, and Elizabeth was spared. That night I had been Elizabeth’s guardian angel, my one and only act of goodness. I remember the dark-haired girl turning on me and hissing at me like a cobra: indeed, for a moment her green dress seemed to wrap itself around her and flow into a serpent’s form. Then she was gone, and I was outside the house, moving silently past the unseeing network of watchers, out into the Forest of Gala.