Hen's Teeth

by Manda Scott

  The ambulance arrived a good ten minutes after he left. They parked it in front of the gates and Inspector MacDonald borrowed the keys so that they could carry the body out the long way: through the hallway to the living room and out of the front door, thereby avoiding the kitchen. The policemen carried her, all three of them, clattering downstairs in their duty boots, making not quite enough noise to wake the dead.

  We followed them out on to the drive. Not for any more concrete reason than to see her go. A last goodbye. Something to fix the fact of death when all of it felt like a passing nightmare. I drifted out in Caroline’s wake, aware that the young WPC was beside me. For support, perhaps. Or to see that I didn’t do anything untoward.

  Both of us watched as Caroline, the most obviously bereaved, stood on the tailgate of the ambulance and slid her hand under the blanket to ruffle the tangled hank of oak-dark hair that hung over the edge of the stretcher.

  It wasn’t, on the face of it, a particularly emotional gesture, but the blue flare of the emergency lights spun round as she did it and so my last memory of Bridget, whether I like it or not, is an upside-down ghoul-white grimace framed by a regulation NHS blanket. The kind of thing to haunt dreams for eternity.

  I left Caroline with the policewoman and withdrew to the warmth of the kitchen. The other two followed me in a minute or so later and we shared yet another silent cup of coffee, each of us lost in a world of remembered death.

  Inspector MacDonald came back in as the ambulance left. He stood in the kitchen doorway, where the dithering firelight pushed age and the time of night into the crags beneath his eyes. His voice was brisk all the same.

  ‘Right then, ladies. That’s it for tonight. I’d appreciate it if you didn’t move anything from the bedroom. We’ll be back for a wee look round first thing in the morning.’ He bent down to pat the dog, his eyes on me. ‘I take it you can see that the lady here gets some sleep, Dr Stewart?’

  Maybe.

  ‘I’ll do what I can.’

  ‘Good.’ He nodded. ‘I’ll be off then. Don’t worry, I can see myself out.’

  He did just that and a moment or two later we heard the two Land Rovers grumble to life and grind their way up the drive towards the village.

  We waited, riveted by the noise, until the last exhaust crackle had faded into the distance. I reached out then, giving her contact, trying to make the real unreal, to make the world all right. Caroline stood stiffly in my arms, her face set, holding tight to the edges of self-control.

  ‘The ponies,’ she said, ‘they need feeding.’

  And so, at somewhere around 2 a.m., kitted out in boots and old jackets, we went out to the barn to feed the ponies.

  Nothing had changed. Nothing ever did. Eight years on and it still smelled of creosote after the crazy summer when the four of us took the cow byre and turned it into the best set of loose boxes this side of the Clyde. There were still centuries-old cobwebs in the corner where the power hose didn’t quite reach. The streaks of bird shit and patches of dried beet pulp on the walls were possibly a touch thicker than they had been, but not so that you’d really notice.

  The ponies were still in the same places, still with the same smell and the same feel. Perhaps a little more grizzled. Midnight had turned into a pale grey dawn. Tarquin had acquired a few more saddle marks and a couple more over-reach scars on the backs of his legs, and there was a new Connemara filly where Rain had been. I took time to make friends, feeding her a scrap of Polo Mint from the lining of the jacket pocket.

  We worked together, a full displacement routine, filling overfull water buckets, retying bulging hay nets and feeding a barn full of ponies already somnolent after at least one late feed. They nuzzled warm half-questions into my hair or my pockets or the small of my back and I patted back a non-answer or rubbed it in under the base of the mane as each one wanted. ‘Nothing for you. Keep peace. Be kind later.’

  And please don’t get colic. Just this once, take a change in routine and don’t throw a gut ache. Please.

  I had just reached the end of my line when I realized that Caroline had gone.

  I looked round for her, wishing desperately for the charade to be over so that we could go inside and talk. And cry. And find out what really happened. And begin to put the world back together.

  ‘Caroline?’ I called into the shadows outside the box. ‘Are you there?’

  ‘The bantams have gone.’ Her voice was tight, like a cheese wire.

  She was there, somewhere in the dim light of the forty-watt bulb at the end of the barn, oddly ethereal in the shifting shadows. Her body never quite followed her mind in the transition from town girl to farming woman.

  Chickens came very low on my list of priorities.

  ‘Forget it. We can find them in the morning. It’s time you came inside.’

  I bolted the last door in a hurry and got to her just as the control broke, the hard lines on her face folding finally, turning her back into the woman I used to know.

  I took her back to the kitchen, made her coffee, then sat with her on the floor by the fire, holding her, keeping her boundaries solid while the first real waves of grief pulled her world apart.

  It was a pattern set in a childhood long past, when my house was the one at the top of the hill and hers was one of the huddle in the valley. It snowed one Sunday morning, the first real white-out I remember. Everyone under the age of fifteen and a fair few over forty were out on the slope, making the most of the glass-packed snow. Caroline Leader was an iced-blonde waif, another anonymous kid in the mass of sliding figures. Our plastic-bag sledges rammed head-on halfway down the slope and she rolled the rest of the way to the bottom in a slither of mushed grey snow. She grazed her knee and cried on my shoulder. Her mother was out, because her mother was always out, and so it was me that washed the knee clean, wrapped it with a torn-up tea-towel and then took a new friend home for tea. I was five years old at the time, her senior by eighteen months.

  Later, at school, she cried over the passing boyfriends and consoled herself with the problem pages of the Jackie filched from my school-bag. Later still, when it wasn’t boyfriends any more, she followed me through the identity crisis and out the other side, dry-eyed and peaceful, trusting me to lead the way safely. And then afterwards, when the first new experience crumbled to nothing, I still provided the shoulder and she still cried on it. Lovers may come and go, but your friends are with you for ever. Something like that.

  So it was easier than it might have been, to sit there with my back against the big chair, rocking her gently back and forth, listening to her grieve over the woman who was my lover first.

  Now and again, I fed another peat brick on to the fire so that I could keep my eyes on the flames and not have to think.

  We slept there, in the kitchen, in the end. There seemed no need to wake her when the place was warm and lacked any immediate ghosts. I found spare bedding in the airing cupboard, banked up the fire and held her curled up tight in my arms as she cried herself out and then slept.

  The cats slid down from the Rayburn and came to form a cordon, keeping the ghosts at bay until the dawn came and the siren call of the local rodent population drew them back out to the fields. Quite a long time after they left, I let go of the crowding memories and fell into a cramped and uneasy sleep. A cold nose behind my ear and a blast of dog breath on my face brought me back to time and space.

  I reached out and found fur. The nose shoved again, more urgently, and a mass of dog hair draped across my eyes. Tan. He has a way with words.

  ‘Time to go out, huh?’ I spat out a mouthful of collie hair and was half-way through inching myself out of the tangled mass of bedclothes when I realized that I was alone.

  ‘Caroline?’ I looked blearily around the room.

  ‘Here.’ She sat on the tall stool by the Rayburn, dressed in clean jeans and a fresh white shirt with a towel slung round her neck and her hair still damp from the shower. The gold necklace lay quietly along her clavi
cles, no longer a useful index of a pulse.

  The dog began to wash behind my ears. Very sweet, but not quite what I needed just at that moment. I slid back under the covers.

  Caroline watched, faintly amused. ‘Ignore him. That’s his alarm clock routine.’ She snapped her fingers. ‘Tan, get lost.’

  The collie gave me one last wet smacker and then retreated sedately to the foot of the stool.

  I writhed out of the clutches of the duvet, feeling each of the joints in my spine as they uncreaked, and then wandered over to stand with my back against the Rayburn, warming out the knots while Caroline produced a mug of coffee.

  ‘How are you?’ I asked after the caffeine had filtered through to my brain.

  ‘Better. Better than last night anyway. I’ve been up to the bedroom and had a look round.’

  Gods. Could I have done that? ‘And?’

  ‘And . . . all sorts of things.’ She stared at me hard, the fine blue patches under her eyes tightening up. ‘I need your help, Kells,’ she said eventually.

  Good. Very good. Too many think they can cope on their own for too long.

  I waited, trying to decide if I was too close to offer useful, objective therapy.

  ‘She didn’t just die, Kellen.’

  Oh dear.

  Some things are obvious beyond words. And sometimes curiosity overrides common sense – in answering late-night telephone calls, for instance. There is the odd occasion, however, when common sense wins hands down and this is one of them.

  If the rest of the world wants to know how Bridget Donnelly died, then the rest of the world can do the finding out. I know my limits. In this case, I am a therapist and nothing else.

  I reached out, finding her hand, and squeezed her fingers. ‘Caroline. Love. Denial’s a first line of defence, but—’

  She jerked her hand away. ‘Don’t give me that therapy shit, Kellen Stewart. I am not one of your fucked-up clients. She’s dead and it wasn’t an accident. I called you last night because I thought you might still care enough to help. If you don’t, that’s fine, you can get the hell out of here . . .’

  I didn’t say a word but she stopped anyway, a thin line chiselled across her brow.

  Perhaps I wasn’t the best person to call.

  ‘Oh, shit, Kells. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be.’

  I turned and looked out of the small leaded window over the sink. A waddling mallard led a late brood of ducklings in single file to the pond under the hawthorn hedge. Even the ducks hadn’t changed.

  I took a deep breath and turned back. ‘I’d better go.’

  She let me hunt down my jacket and dig my shoes out from under the bench and sat there without moving. It wasn’t until I reached the kitchen door that she turned and slid off the stool.

  ‘Kellen?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Please don’t go.’

  I could have opened the door then and gone out. Out into the sunshine and the early morning frost. Away from the ghosts of the night and the past. Free.

  Only ‘I need you’ said my long-lost childhood friend.

  And what woman was ever born who did not need to be needed?

  And so, finally, we talked. Caroline made another pot of coffee, built up the fire and took me through the events of the previous day. It was an average mid-September day: three treks of varying lengths in the foothills of the Campsies – mostly late-season tourists and the odd local schoolkid with ‘time off’ from school. None of them had been out of her sight for long enough to go to the house and back.

  The farrier had turned up late in the afternoon to shoe one of the ponies and so it was dark by the time she had realized that the rest of the herd had not been fed and that her lover was not around. That was about six o’clock. It took her less than five minutes after that to find the body. She called me after midnight. In between, she lost six hours sitting with her fingers on a pulse, trying to make it go. Time does odd things sometimes.

  The police had been overwhelmingly courteous and were obviously well acquainted with the domestic arrangements before they arrived, which says a lot for the value of village gossip. The GP with the fake tan and the designer haircut was not someone she recognized – an extra hand on loan from one of the big Bearsden practices, filling in while the local doctor was off on maternity leave. He had performed a cursory examination and confirmed the fact that Bridget was dead, but that was about as far as he got before I walked in and brought the show to a close.

  ‘What do you want from me?’ I asked when Caroline had ground to a halt.

  I thought she hadn’t heard, but then she disappeared into Bridget’s office at the back of the house and came back with a cardboard folder. She hunted through it, pulled out a scrap of paper and tossed it across to me. ‘Read that.’

  It was a page roughly torn from a pocket diary dated the first week in August. An untidy hand had scrawled across it in black biro: ‘Bride: Look after these for me. Please. Back soon. Thanks. M.’

  Even had I not recognized the handwriting, there was only ever one other person in the world besides me who called her Bride.

  I looked up at Caroline. ‘Malcolm?’ I asked.

  ‘Mmm.’ She sat down carefully in the chair by the fire and busied herself teasing knots out of the dog’s coat. ‘He turned up out of the blue on a Saturday afternoon a month or so ago. I was out with a ride and Bridget had gone into the village to get some batteries for the radio. He passed me on the lane as I was coming back. He couldn’t drive past the whole ride and pretend not to see us, but I don’t think he wanted to stop. He looked . . . strained . . . preoccupied. A lot worse than I’ve ever seen him. All he would say was that he’d brought us some hens for the farm and he’d come back later to explain what was happening. When I got home, there were six bantams in a basket in the porch and the note was on top.’

  I tried to imagine Malcolm deliberately dumping half a dozen chickens on his sister. The mind boggled. ‘I bet Bridget was thrilled about that.’

  ‘She was all right. She doesn’t . . . didn’t . . . hate chickens as much as she used to.’

  ‘And has Malcolm been back to explain yet?’

  ‘No. And he won’t be coming now.’ She gave up on the collie’s coat and stood up, shoving her hands in the pockets of her jeans. Her voice, when she spoke, had a new edge.

  ‘He’s dead, Kellen. Malcolm’s dead. They found him in his office the morning after he was here.’

  ‘What? Caroline, no!’ I found myself back at the window, counting mallard chicks and breathing too fast. When I turned back to the fireplace, all I could see was the back of her head.

  Bridget’s brother was the driving force behind most of my professional life. From the night when he chaperoned me through my first full twenty-four hours as Junior House Officer on duty in his medicine ward, he had been there: a steady baseline, a friend in the camp, an icon of sanity in the insane world of hospital medicine. He made me coffee and taught me medicine. He brought me sandwiches late at night in the wards and taught me politics. He opened the magical doors into research so that I could walk away from the clinics and still be a doctor if I wanted. And, in the end, he was one of the few people who had really understood when I pulled out of medicine for good. To have him dead and for me not to know was, quite simply, unthinkable.

  I stayed by the window watching the wind play across the surface of the pond. Caroline had retreated into the depths of the armchair, hugging her knees to her chest and chewing a rag-end of hair. She looked about fifteen years old and very scared. I caught her eye this time and held it.

  ‘When did he die?’

  ‘The twelfth of August.’

  I don’t believe this.

  ‘That was six weeks ago, Caroline. Why in heaven’s name didn’t you tell me before this?’

  ‘You were out of the country, Kellen. There was no way we could get hold of you.’

  ‘Did you try?’

  ‘Of course we did.’ He
r voice was a fingernail on glass. ‘Bridget spent hours on the bloody phone trying to track you down. We had the consul all ready to put out a radio message for you, but we’d run out of time by then. You wouldn’t have been able to get back in time for the service. She cancelled it just before the broadcast.’

  I kept my eyes on the pond and counted the leaves floating on the water.

  ‘It wouldn’t have taken much to leave a message at home,’ I said eventually. ‘The machine was always on, even when we were both away.’

  ‘And would you have wanted to come home to a voice on a machine telling you that Malcolm was dead and you’d missed his service and all that was left was a stone? Would you? Really?’ She shoved herself out of the chair and across to the window, making herself a silhouette against the morning sun.

  ‘You’ve got to believe me, Kellen. We spent more time talking about that than anything else. Bridget was going to offer to stay away from the service so you could go without having to meet her if that’s what you wanted.’ She spun round to face me, her features animated more by pain than by anger. ‘Have you any idea what that would have cost her?’

  I don’t want to think about that.

  ‘Well?’ Her voice was like a cat’s, sharp and full of accusation. ‘Have you?’

  ‘I can guess.’

  ‘Right. So back off.’ Her lips were a thin-drawn line. ‘Where the hell were you anyway?’

  ‘In Oregon. I needed space.’

  ‘So you got your space. Maybe it was better like that. The service was at the Tron. There’s a stone at the family ground in Blairgowrie. You can visit any time you like.’ She ran out of steam suddenly and leant back against the window sill, tired and drained again.

  ‘This is your kind of thing. We were going to call you as soon as we heard you got home . . . but Bridget . . .’ She looked up at the ceiling and through it to the empty bed in the room above. ‘She didn’t want to disturb you until we were sure.’