Here the painted markings stopped but there were soft verges to either side, high with bracken, and she would feel the ground change underfoot if she veered off, so she strode along to the gates and slipped through them, feeling instantly safer to be inside the cemetery walls. She didn’t know if she could really see the dark shape of the church looming ahead of her or if she only imagined it because she knew it was there, but she smiled anyway.
Jackie had forgotten something; all of them forgot something when they teased her or asked her, worried, if she was frightened to be there alone. This place was a sanctuary. It was out amongst the living that people could hurt you. Here, where all were at rest, passion spent, troubles ended, she was safe.
She hurried around the path to her cottage. “Evening, Todd,” she said. “Evening, Archie. Evening, Etta, wherever you are. I’ll find you tomorrow if it’s a nice day.” She would buy some flowers, she thought. If she was going to live here permanently, she would learn everyone’s birthday from their tombstone and make sure they had some flowers on the right day. There was nothing morbid about that. Then she remembered Lowell saying that the dead should be gone and the living present.
So perhaps she should forget Todd and Archie and them. Perhaps she should invite some living people round for a party, make some noise and mess. Did she know enough people to make what you would call a party?
She opened the porch door, clicking the light on and slipping through quickly, before too much of the chilly damp swirled in with her.
As she turned to lock up she saw a sheet of paper pushed part way through the letterbox.
See that? she told herself. One of your friends has been round while you were out. She plucked it free and opened it.
People say their blood freezes. Sometimes that their heart is in their mouth. Jude felt it differently. To her, it seemed that all her blood raced to her middle and pulled her heart, heavy and bulging, down into her gut. Every other inch of her except that hot weight was empty and tingling.
NINETEEN
Let the dead rest.
—Norma, Elsie, Archie, Etta, and Todd
The paper was roughly torn from a pad, lined in blue with a red edge to the margin. The pen was a red biro, pressed in hard so that the words could be felt, like Braille, as well as seen. And there was a dark blob at the start, telling Jude this pen was not used every day, that it had been plucked from a cup or scrabbled out of a drawer.
Her first thought was a throwback to her life before. She turned to the phone to dial 999. Then she remembered she couldn’t call the police. Not tonight, not ever again. She carried the note to the kitchen without shifting her grip, got a plastic sandwich bag from the rack—one-handed, thanking Todd for his nifty kitchen system—and dropped the note inside.
She washed her face, brushed her teeth, and climbed into bed. The nooks and shelves of Todd’s ingenious headboard were filled with books now as well as the little stack moved from the attics at Jamaica House: the Douglas, the Allingham, the plane crash, Rebecca, and Midnight’s Children.
There was everything from the new Ian Rankin (bought at Tesco’s and hidden from Lowell) to another O. Douglas find—Eliza for Common—got online by Lowell for her and lied about, she was sure. She had Danny: Champion of the World for comfort and Gravity’s Rainbow for a challenge. There was The Brothers Karamazov to cure insomnia and two Ian McEwans to remind her of home, although to be sure his London was not hers. There was an early Anne Tyler—The Clock Winder—that she had somehow managed never to read and the last PD James, which she would save as long as she could bear to.
But she didn’t so much as glance at a single one of them. She sat up against her pillows with the covers drawn to her chin, staring out the window at the blackness, thinking.
It had to be Jackie. Etta and Archie and them, she’d said. Who else could it be? But why? What was going on?
She woke once in the night, starting awake after a dream. Her head had fallen sideways and her neck was stiff. She shuffled herself flat and turned the bedclothes away from her shoulders to cool off. She had been dreaming about the fog. Hearing footsteps and chasing after them only to realise that they were behind her and really she was running away.
She turned over on her side. The sky had cleared. Outside her bedroom window she could see two stars in the black and could hear the wind rattling the catch. She thought about getting up and stuffing it with paper, then thought about the note in its plastic bag, downstairs on the kitchen worktop. Let the dead rest. And the next time she opened her eyes it was morning, a glittering blue day.
She stood at his bedroom window and looked down. All the better to see what was laid out below. The tips of the grass were white with frost and all around, in a series of dots and loops, were footprints. Someone had walked on the grass in that drenching fog last night and the flattened blades had frozen in place.
God, for a phone to take a picture! Jude tried to memorise the placing of the footprints and then bundled herself into warm clothes and hurried downstairs and out.
She told herself the feet could have belonged to a relative who came in the afternoon on an innocent visit, or even to a graveyard enthusiast. They existed, she knew. And she told herself that of course a visitor—relative or cemetery buff—would want to read the legible gravestones and would ignore those whose words had worn away. But she didn’t believe it. For one thing, there was no stopping and starting in the prints, no evidence of a search.
There was no denying it after two trips up to her bedroom to look down again. The footprints led from the path to Todd, to Archie, to the grave of a Norma Oughton, to Etta Bell, to another one full of an entire family of people called Day, and then back to the path again, closer to the cottage, to deliver the note.
Jude put the kettle on and went upstairs. She leaned her head against the window and looked down, watching the sun come up behind the distant trees and the frosted grass warm and darken until the footprints melted away.
Norma Oughton, she had learned from the gravestone, was ninety when she died in 1983, the widow of the late Frank, who was buried there too, along with a stillborn child from the spring of 1925. She was the beloved mother of Frances and Peter, and a grandmother, a great-grandmother, and “blessed among women.”
There were even more Days in their plot. Following the patriarch Hamish in 1947, there was a wife, two young children, an elderly son in 1973, and finally the son’s widow, Elspeth Day née McLennan.
Bathed and redressed a little later, she sat down at the table with her coffee and made a few notes: Bell, Patterstone, Day, Oughton, Jolly. She wrote McLennan in brackets because although Auntie Lorna had no headstone and hadn’t been listed in Jude’s note last night, it hadn’t escaped Jude’s notice that Elsie Day was a McLennan by birth. She added the dates, starting with Norma Oughton in December 1983 and ending with Todd himself in May 1985.
Then she looked at her watch and stood up. She should get into work. She needed to ask Lowell about this, if she could work out how to do it casually.
In the meantime, though, was she really going to leave these scribbles lying around when someone had been snooping last night? Of course, the footprint-maker hadn’t been inside, but these locks were decades old. There was no way of knowing how many duplicate keys had been cut over the years and kept in drawers and junk bowls all over this friendly little town.
She took her own scribblings and the plastic bag with the warning in it and carried them upstairs. She slipped them both into the most innocuous, the least enticing, of Todd’s books: the middle volume of three in a series of collected essays. He had won the set in 1915 as a prize for Sunday school attendance. No one would look there.
“Let the dead rest,” she repeated to herself as she made her way to the middle of town, wondering again how she had managed to get lost last night. If the note hadn’t been signed with those names she would have thought it meant her own dead. Except that she was letting them rest, wasn’t she? She had kicked over
their graves and run away, barely giving them another thought. Eddy was the one trying to bring the dead back to life, looking at photographs of Miranda and searching in her dark places for secrets. She remembered Lowell saying although the prevailing view is … How did it go?
Then, without her willing it, her feet slowed down. There was something tickling at the edges of her brain. She almost had it as she turned onto the main street. Then, distracted by a cluster of people outside the Post Office, she let go of the thread and the whole idea was gone.
There were four of them; five, counting a baby in its pushchair. The baby’s mother was at the centre of the group, beside her a retired man with a bag of morning rolls in one hand and a Scotsman under his arm. Slightly aside were two women, dressed in velour for walking, with water bottles.
“What’s up?” Jude said, trotting across the road towards them. All four swung round at the sound of her voice. Even the baby leaned forward and craned around the hood of its pushchair.
“The Post Office is shut,” said the young woman. “Till they can get someone out to open it.”
“Is Jackie all right?” said Jude. Jackie had been there all day, every day that Jude had been in Wigtown.
The young woman narrowed her eyes and said nothing.
“It’s okay,” said one of the velour women. “She’s at Lowell’s, working.” She turned to Jude. “Jackie’s collapsed.”
“If you must know,” the young woman added, with puzzling belligerence.
“Collapsed? Inside?”
“Last night,” said the man. “She’s in the hospital in Dumfries. Typical government outfit. No one here to take over. It’s my pension day.”
“What time last night?” said Jude. She wasn’t heartless, and she liked Jackie, but the fact remained that someone was out in that fog and they hurried away from her when she hailed them. And someone had been at her cottage with the note. And Jackie was one of the only three people who had heard her talking about the dead. Archie and Etta and them.
“Half six,” said the other velour woman. “Why?”
“Just that I was in the shop at six o’clock when she was closing.”
“And was she—?”
“She was fine.”
“Aye well, she barely made it home before she went down,” the young woman said.
“Poor thing,” said Jude. “What ward is she in, do you know? For a card?”
They all unbent a little at that, her proving that she might be from London but she knew how to behave.
“HDU,” said the young woman. “Sedated.”
Jude nodded, shared a solemn look, and then carried on towards the bookshop, thinking.
Lowell was there already, seated at the computer, with a catalogue open and the phone crooked against his shoulder.
“Have you heard the news?” Jude said. Lowell put the phone on speaker, unleashing call-centre music, and set it down. “Jackie at the Post Office has been rushed into hospital. HDU. High dependency unit,” she added, as he blinked at her. “One down from Intensive Care. That’s not good.”
“And so it begins,” Lowell said. “We’re all the same age. When one’s peers begin to drop from their perches …”
Jude ignored him. “Where does she live?”
“Hm? Oh, right here in Wigtown. Seaview, off Harbour Road.” It was the south-eastern tip of the town.
“And she doesn’t drive, does she?” Jude said. “She walks in and out?”
“We’re always hearing about the benefits of exercise. But a woman in her sixties working hard all day and walking home in that nasty fog …”
Jude had stopped listening. There was no way Jackie could have made it up to Kirk Cottage and back to Harbour Road between six and half past. Not even on a mild summer evening when she could stride out with a following wind, and certainly not on a night like last night, where you had to feel your way. It couldn’t have been her who put the warning letter through Jude’s door. That left …
“Eddy,” Lowell was saying.
“What?”
“I was worried about her last night. She locked herself away and wouldn’t talk to me. Not even to assure me she was well.”
“She probably had her earphones on,” said Jude. “She probably didn’t hear you.”
“She heard me,” Lowell said, rather grimly for him. “When I threatened to break the door down she finally relented. I’ve no idea what she was doing in there.”
Jude nodded absently and then let his words in. “In where?” she said. None of the attic rooms had locks. It had worried her at first until she’d taken a long hard look at Lowell, blinking mildly behind his spectacles and apologising for passing her on the stairs.
“She was in the carsy,” said Lowell. “I told you. Locked in the bathroom with the water running.”
“For God’s sake, Lowell!” said Jude. “She was having a bath. Of course she didn’t want to talk to you through the door.”
“The downstairs carsy,” Lowell said. “Are you listening? There is no bath. And yet she used every scrap of hot water. I could hear the tank belching and glugging—absolutely empty. I worried for the boiler.”
Jude thought about it for a minute. If Eddy wore a silicone belly next to her skin all day and maybe at night, she would have to wash it sometimes. But why she didn’t pick a time when Lowell was out was a mystery. Then again, she might not have foreseen him banging on a locked bathroom door and demanding to be let in. She had a dismissive remark upon her lips when she thought the better of it.
“What time was this?” she said.
“Once you’d gone,” said Lowell. “About half an hour after you went home. Why?”
Because, thought Jude, if she had gone home without getting lost, she would have been safely inside by then and, if Eddy had climbed out the bathroom window and come to leave a note, Jude would have found it this morning.
But why would Eddy care about Todd and the rest—Etta and Archie and them. The them she now knew was Norma Oughton and Elspeth Day. How would she even know their names to write on the note?
“No reason,” she said. “And as to what she was up to, do you really want to know? She could have been waxing her legs, waxing anything really. Pore strips?”
“What are—?” said Lowell. Then he held up a hand. “Don’t tell me. Well, well, yes, I see. Dear me. I should probably apologise to her then for scolding her.”
“Or just leave it,” Jude said. “Least said soonest mended?”
“Indeed,” Lowell said. “Let peace descend.”
Jude smiled, offered to make coffee, and was half turned away before his words hit her.
“Let there be light,” she said, turning back.
Lowell pushed his glasses up his head and looked at her from under a wrinkled brow. “One would never argue with that sentiment, my dear,” he said, “but I’m not sure I quite understand the force of it here and now.”
“What is that?” said Jude. “It’s not a … I mean, you’re not saying, Oh go on, let there be light, will you, just this once?”
“Hah!” said Lowell. “No indeed. No indeed. God save the queen isn’t God? Save the queen, won’t you, old chap? No, it’s not a command—how very perspicacious of you. It’s a relic of an earlier time when English was rather better off for grammar than it is these days. It’s a subjunctive, my dear.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Expressing wishes or desires or hopes or—”
“Oh, right!” said Jude. “Yeah, that’s right, isn’t it? It’s like, I hope God saves the queen. I hope there’s some light. Got it.” But it wasn’t firmly embedded. She had to go quickly to the kettle corner, fill it under the tap, and stay out of Lowell’s way while it boiled, thinking it through.
The note. Let the dead rest, she decided, might not be an order at all. It might be a hope. It might have been someone telling her to keep digging, so that those who were resting ill could eventually rest easy. In fact, that made a lot more sense. Why would anyone war
n her off and at the same time tell her the names she was trying to find out?
She poured water into the mugs, turning sharply away as the sour hit of the coffee granules reached her nose. She would have to do something about this kettle and jar of Nescafé if she really was going to stay here. On the heels of that thought, all the reality she had pushed back came flooding in again and she was struck still, standing there like a stone in the dark corridor.
What was she doing? What was she thinking? The last thing she should do was attract the attention of someone who might want her to leave this perfect hiding place. If the note was a warning, she should heed it. If the note was an invitation to poke around in a dormant nest of adders, she should ignore it. The only reason she should be looking at gravestones at all was to find that elusive young woman, born around the same time as her and dying before she had worked or signed on for benefits or got a driver’s licence or done anything that would get in the way of Jude becoming her, staying in Wigtown, and starting over.
She would fill the bookshelves of her cottage with all Todd’s volumes, just for fun, just because he had eclectic tastes and a way with words. It didn’t have to be connected to anything, or mean anything, or put her in any danger. She told herself that as she went into the dead room for the morning. Lowell was on the desk and she was determined to make a proper dent in the mountain today.
She had a false alarm with a bag full of hardbacks from the early eighties. They looked like books you’d want to read before you die—David Copperfield, The Great Gatsby, The Count of Monte Cristo—but they had the stickers she had come to loathe, like barnacles after all these years. And also in the bag were knitting patterns for babies’ bootees and bonnets and People’s Friend annuals for ten years stopping in 1983. Not T. Jolly’s taste at all.
QUIET NEIGHBOURS an unputdownable psychological thriller with a breathtaking twist Page 18
