House. Tree. Person.

by Catriona McPherson

  “I know,” I said. “I’m sorry. I just need two things. I need you to beep Lars for me and I need you to—Actually, can you just beep Lars and I’ll ask him.”

  Surraya had already keyed the number into her phone. She waited. And then said, “Don’t start. It’s not me. Ali needs you in the main hall. Lars, I know. I’m in Group. Oh for f—” She hung up and glared harder than ever. “He’s coming,” she told me. “You better think up something good before he gets here.” Then she disappeared back inside and shut the door smartly.

  I heard Lars in less than another minute but that didn’t stop me kicking myself for not asking Surraya the other question and getting a jump on it. I was already asking as I ran up the stairs to meet him, my phone all ready in my hand.

  “What’s Sylvie’s surname?” I said, as we met on the half landing.

  “You’re kidding,” said Lars. “You got me out of a one-to-one for this?”

  “No, I got you out of a one-to-one to get your car keys,” I told him, holding out my hand, “but while we’re at it, what’s Sylvie’s surname?”

  “Bos—” Lars began.

  “Boswell!” I chimed in. “It was right on the tip of my tongue. I don’t suppose you know the address or phone number off-hand, do you? Well, can I borrow your car?”

  “Ali, what’s going on?” said Lars. “If you’ve had another breakthrough with Sylvie, you’ve got to tell Dr. Ferris. You can’t go piling off to her parents like a maniac. Look, I need to get back.”

  “Lars,” I said. “Can I trust you?”

  “You’re starting to worry me,” he answered. “But aye.”

  I stared at him, hardly knowing where to start. “Picture speaks a thousand words,” I muttered, woke my phone, dinked up the email, and hit the attachment, handing it to him as the picture started loading.

  “What am I looking at?” he said, pinching his fingers and flicking them wide to zoom in.

  “That’s the hand that was sticking up out of the ground at the Abbey,” I said.

  Lars lifted his eyes to mine then dropped them back to the picture. He stepped back and rested his bum on the landing windowsill behind him. “It’s got a watch on,” he said. “The cops never said anything about a watch.”

  “They didn’t know,” I said. “It was gone before the cops got there.”

  “Wait,” he said. “How do you know that? How did you get the picture?”

  “My kid took the photo,” I said. “But he didn’t take the watch. I just found it in Dr. Ferris’s desk drawer.”

  He stared at me. “The watch from the corpse at Dundrennan is here?”

  “Hidden in Dr. Ferris’s bottom drawer,” I said. “You can go and check if you don’t believe me. There’s no one in the office. But I wish you would just believe me.”

  “And you didn’t put it there?” he said. “You didn’t get it from your kid and plant it there?”

  “I didn’t,” I said. “It’s your choice whether or not you believe me. And my kid didn’t take it and give it to her. He says he didn’t, and I can tell when he’s lying.”

  The silence lasted until I could hear the blood screaming in my ears like a train in a tunnel.

  “I believe you,” he said at last. “But, Ali, what the fuck’s going on?”

  Relief stopped me talking until I had taken three or four big gulping breaths. Then: “I think Dr. Ferris is going to … harm Sylvie. And possibly say Julia did it, but definitely blame the whole mess on me. Tonight.”

  “What?” Lars shook his head as if he had water in his ears. “Ali, I’m trying to accept what you’re telling me. I want to, but you sound paranoid. And what’s it got to do with the hand and the watch?”

  “Nothing that I can see,” I said. “Except maybe it’s evidence that she’s ‘harmed’ someone before.” I nodded at the phone. “So, again, do you know how I could contact Sylvie’s family?”

  “Not a clue” said Lars. “Her bills get paid by a trust and no one ever visits. Not in the time I’ve been here anyway.”

  “Boswell,” I said. “Are they local?”

  “No idea,” Lars said. “But I can tell you the trust money comes from a solicitor with offices in Dumfries. So probably local, eh?”

  “I’d never get solicitors to give anything away,” I said. “But, come on—it’s Galloway.”

  “Right?” said Lars. “Naebody here except three old farmers and a dead sheep.”

  “Can’t be that many Boswells anyway.”

  “Why not go to the poli—Oh yeah,” Lars said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Angelo.” We were silent for a moment. “Hey, you know, you never said what your other two girls were called. As well as Lola.”

  “Maddie, Lola, and Saran,” he said. He smiled. He knew I had mentioned his girls to get under his skin, make him think like a dad. “You reckon something’s set for tonight, eh?”

  I smiled back to tell him I knew he knew. “Will you stay on? Watch Sylvie?”

  “Course I will,” he said. “Who wouldn’t?” He gave me a grin, one that showed the black caves in his mouth where his molars should be, and for some reason I hugged him.

  “You’re not going to do anything daft,” he said, into my hair. “You’ll take care, eh?”

  “I’m only going to find Sylvie’s family and tell them … Well, tell them she’s talking for a start and tell them I’m worried she’s not safe.”

  “We could all lose our jobs,” Lars said, letting me go and stepping back. “But if you’re right about Dr. Ferris being mixed up with the corpse, we’re all going to lose our jobs anyway.”

  When he lifted the chain from round his neck and held it out to me, I thought he was giving me a good luck charm. A blessing on my quest. “My car keys are in my locker,” he told me.

  The soldier in the kiosk lifted a hand and gave a lazy wave as I went by. I answered with a bibb on the horn as I slowed, wondering which way to go: Kirkcudbright was closest, Castle Douglas was biggest, Dalbeattie was where I knew people well enough to march up and start asking who remembered a family called Boswell. Then, cursing myself for a fool, I threw the car into reverse, pulled back to the kiosk again, and climbed out.

  “La—Oh, I thought it was Lars,” the soldier said.

  “I borrowed his car,” I explained. “And I was wondering if I could borrow something of yours too.” He stood up, stood to attention really. He made me think of a gundog, aquiver from his crew cut to the toes of his shiny boots to give me whatever it was I wanted from him. “Can I look up a number in one of your phone books there?”

  He gave them a glance as if seeing them for the first time. “They’re all out of date,” he said.

  “Out of date’s what I’m after,” I told him. “Fifteen years out of date, if possible.”

  We both set to, rummaging through them two by two—a phone book and a Yellow Pages for each year. The oldest one was from thirteen years back. I plucked it out of the pile and stifled a sneeze at the dust it let go.

  “If you don’t mind me asking,” I said, “why have you got these?”

  “Never got an order to discard them,” the soldier said.

  I busied myself looking for the start of the Bs so he couldn’t see the look on my face. And there it was! Boswell, Col. & Mrs. R., White Bay House, Kirkcudbrightshire. And a number.

  “Found what you were looking for?”

  “I’ll just put this number in my phone,” I said.

  “Or just—” said the soldier, ripping the page out and handing it to me. I really didn’t get the army.

  White Bay was round the estuary down towards the next headland. These little lanes, there was no way you could afford to take your attention off the road, but I couldn’t resist it. I put the number in and put my phone in the stand on speaker when I heard it ringing out.

  “Hello
?” said a voice after the fifth ring. A stern-sounding voice, posh and confident. Another one.

  “Ah, hello,” I said. “Is that Mrs. Boswell, by any chance?”

  There was a hesitation, long enough for me to think that of course the family had moved on. That this was whoever bought White Bay House from them. Then the woman said, “Yes? Who is this?”

  I shot my hand out and killed the call. I couldn’t do it on the phone.

  Pulling over into a driveway I got my SatNav up and punched in White Bay House, then stared dumbly, with a chill creeping over me, when the answer came. White Bay House wasn’t on White Bay on the next headland. It had got that name because it looked across the estuary at White Bay. My map app told me my destination was 0.3 mile away and in current traffic conditions my journey would take 1 minute. I was actually parked at the mouth of the drive to Sylvie’s house, where her mother still lived, fifteen years of no visits later.

  I wiggled Lars’s car back and forth so it wasn’t blocking the way and then, dinking it locked, I set off on foot. I’d rather have the walk down the tree-lined drive to plan what I was going to say and not bring her out at the sound of a car before I was ready.

  But what was I going to say? I could always just throw Julia under the bus, tell Mrs. Boswell that I thought Sylvie was in danger from another patient at the hospital. If I accused Dr. Ferris without solid evidence I could end up in court for slander. But what if I told the woman that her daughter had been talking and laughing? Had been drawing, revisiting the start of her long illness? What mother wouldn’t want to hear that?

  I could see something glinting through the tree trunks now. I couldn’t work out if it was glass or water. There was a lot of it, if it was glass. I slowed down a little and made sure I was in shadow as I rounded the last corner and looked at the place Sylvie had called home.

  My breath stilled in my throat. It was a cube of windows, flat-roofed and featureless, standing on stilts with a spiral staircase leading down to a garage tucked in below. I couldn’t even see the door from here. What I could see, though, was a pine tree—or a fir tree maybe, a Douglas fir tree? I didn’t know many plant names—growing up through the middle of it as if the house had been thrown round the trunk like a fairground ring.

  She had drawn it. A square for the house and a line for the tree it was built round. That sketch was nothing to do with the Mercat Cross at all. I leaned against the nearest trunk, trying to make sense of it all. I had accused Angelo of lying to me, rehashing a story he had heard in his doctor’s consulting room instead of telling me what had really happened. But maybe the truth was he had told Dr. Ferris and she had rehashed the story to me, telling me it was Sylvie’s tale, using it to explain the sketch so I wouldn’t know the truth of what she was trying to draw.

  The cube of a house and the line of a tree growing through it.

  And, of course, the person. I traced it on the shiny banded bark beside my head. A square and a line up and down and a line straight across. There was only one way I could think of a person as a horizontal line in the middle of a house. Finally, I thought I knew what Sylvie was trying to tell me.

  The sound of a slamming door sent me darting behind the birch tree to hide in its shade and peer round it. Someone had come out of the house and was walking across the deck towards the spiral staircase. The woman, lumbering down the stairs, leaned over the banister and clicked a key fob to start one of the garage doors opening. I pulled further back into the shadows.

  I would know her anywhere, from her walk, her bulk, her haughty profile, and her frizz of hair. It was Mona Swain. Julia’s mother. She squeezed up the space at the side of the garage and wriggled herself into the driving seat of a scuffed BMW. Once she was out on the drive she dinked her buttons again to close the garage door and put the outside lights on, for later, then she drove away.

  Twenty-Two

  Memories burst like flour bombs in my head as I stood there. Dr. Ferris saying, “Now, Sylvie really has been here ten years; gosh, more like fifteen really.” Julia screeching, “I killed my father?” and then mumbling, “I didn’t say it. I heard it.” And Angel’s voice was in there too: “No one told me, Mum. I was there.” And Sylvie’s face breaking into such a wide grin as she bumped across the rough grass and then whispering, “Ju,” and, again, whispering, “Ju.”

  But remembering is something you can do anywhere. You can only look for a body in its grave. I had to move.

  I was certain the house was empty, but I rang the number again to make doubly sure, and heard it in both ears, from my phone and through the glass walls of the cube. It would be a cheerless place to live in a typical winter if the windows were flimsy enough to let the sound of a ringing phone through. Stupid sort of house to build in a Scottish forest whichever way you looked at it. Winters here, you wanted to batten down and sit round a fire, not rattle about in a see-through biscuit tin with the rain hitting it on all four sides and the leaves dropping on the flat roof.

  I clicked off and waited a moment then, bent at the waist, I scurried over the bit of clear space between the trees and the house and ducked in amongst the stilts, past the garage, to get to the middle where the pine stood tall and, if I was right, the corpse of … someone lay buried at its roots.

  It could have been striking if it was in Japan or if Mona Swain was the type who cared what people thought. But the gravel had sunk as the years went by and the tree roots had pulled up into claws, not to mention the mats of soaked leaves blown against the house supports and left to rot there.

  God knows what I thought I would see. But if one corpse could rise and reach up out of the ground, why not two? I walked around the tree. Definitely some kind of conifer, I thought, once I was close enough to smell the sharp gin-stink of its fallen greenery under my feet. The litter of them was deep and rotten and hadn’t been disturbed for years. I looked up into the canopy of the tree, a dizzying cross-hatch of bare branches. Were both lines the tree? Was I making too much of everything?

  I stopped and leaned back against the rough bark. Because Lars was right: it did sound insane. It sounded crazy that Dr. Ferris was mixed up with the corpse at the Abbey. Was it possible, I asked myself, that the watch wasn’t there in the drawer at all? I’d been hearing things that weren’t there for years; maybe I had started seeing them too. So scared for Angel, desperate to get all the trouble away from him and onto someone else. Anyone.

  I started, stumbled, and went over on my ankle hard. My phone was ringing and this stupid ugly house acted like a trumpet so the sound boomed up into the empty air.

  “What?” I hissed, jabbing at it. “Jesus!”

  “Als?” said Marco’s voice. “What’s up?” I took a few breaths to calm myself down. “Ali, what is it?”

  “What the hell?” I said. “Oh, shit, my foot! What do you mean ‘what is it’? You phoned me, Marco. What do you want?”

  “What’s wrong with your foot? And where are you? You sound like you’re in a cave. I phoned you back, Ali. I missed a call and Mel said you were trying to get me.”

  “Where are you?” I said. When he didn’t answer, I swept on. “Listen, go home. I don’t want Angel to be on his own.”

  “Aw, come on,” Marco said. “Not this agai—”

  “I’m not asking,” I said cutting him off. “I’m telling you that our son can’t be on his own. If you won’t go home I’ll get someone else.”

  “Ali, seriously. What is going on?”

  “Well, I’m not going to be home tonight,” I said. “So there’s that.”

  “Oh-ho! Open marriage time, is it?” Marco said. I didn’t answer. I took the chance to hold out my phone and get a picture of the cube.

  “I’m doing a night shift,” I said, with the phone back at my ear. “You need to take care of Angel while I take care of someone else. And another thing. I need get to the bottom of it all.” I was out from under the ho
use again by the time I got through my little speech, striding up the drive towards Lars’s car. I had never felt stronger or surer in my life.

  “The bottom of what? Ali, you need to get a gri—”

  I hung up. More than half of me thought he was right. I was imagining things and seeing things and there was no way that any of this could really be happening. Surely. I couldn’t trust myself, I had learned that years ago.

  I slowed and stopped and stood there. I’d been taught that years ago. Had I learned my lesson? I put my hands over my face to shut out even the dim light under these glowering trees. I tried to stop the sound of the wind and its cold breath on the backs of my hands, and get myself down to the plain truth inside all the madness. The hard ground under my feet.

  I punched Marco’s number and he answered after half a ring.

  “And I want to name our daughter and have a memorial to her,” I said. “Just so you know.”

  Dr. Ferris’s car still wasn’t back when I arrived at the Hall, neither in its usual space nor at the far end chosen for her quiet getaway. I parked and went in, still striding, still sure. Dr. F, crossing the main hall with a stack of folders in his arms, stopped and quirked his head at me.

  “You seem filled with purpose, Ali,” he said. “Having a good day?”

  “Very,” I said. I walked past him so he had to turn and face the light from the landing window. I needed to watch his face while I said the next bit. I was pretty sure he wasn’t a part of whatever his wife was up to, but I’d be able to tell from his eyes when I told him what I had to say.

  “Sylvie,” I said, “has been talking.”

  He went through a frown, a big blink, and a hike of his eyebrows up into his hair, then a beaming smile spread over his face. “Sylvie?” he said. “What did she say?”

  I gave the grin back to him. “La-la, Ju-ju, La-li, and sshh,” I said.

  “Oh!” He covered his mouth with his hand and I could see his eyes shining. “Am I the first one you’ve told?”