The Guest House

by David Mark

  ‘Company doing it is A Thasgaidh Ltd. Hope you don’t think me nosy but I had a wee look and they’re registered in Jersey. That’s the Channel Islands, and I only hear their name when it’s to do with something dodgy. The address given is a firm of accountants, but the directors are two women. An Alice McCall and an Ailsa McCall. I tell you, if I had my time over again I’d love to be an investigator. Either way, I’m hoping they need a cleaner…’

  I drank it all in, bouncing Lilly on my knee and whispering the “giddy-up” song in her ear while she giggled and pretended she was on an out-of-control horse. Theresa had been delighted to hear about the posh cars I’d seen heading for the castle and even more excited to learn that one of the work vans had taken out the wall.

  ‘We should go up there, don’t you think? Go and demand payment and say you’ll get the papers involved if they don’t sort it out. In fact, I’ll go. As your representative, like. Give them what for, and maybe have a poke around while I’m up there…’

  I declined the offer. Sorting out the wall was low on my priority list. In fact, the only thing that seemed to matter right now was Bishop. He’d pretty much dropped off the face of the planet. It’s not that I’m desperate to win his heart or to get some kind of answer for the cold-shoulder treatment – I’m genuinely worried. He’d wanted to tell me something the last time I saw him and I hadn’t been in the mood for listening. I’ve tried to call him but his phone isn’t connecting, and I sent a Facebook message to the mum of one of Atticus’s school friends, who lives on the same stretch of property as Bishop. She reported back that she didn’t even know the house was occupied, and that she’d never seen anybody matching his description, let alone noticed their absence.

  I’ve had the same everywhere I’ve tried. The pubs he’s mentioned, the library, the canoe instructors down at Strontian that he told me he’d got to know pretty well. Nobody had seen him, and the canoe instructors remembered so little about him that I think they were only humouring me when they said they remembered him at all.

  So where does it leave me? I mean, he’s a grown man, and he briefly flitted into my life, and now he’s gone again. What do you do in those circumstances, eh? I’ve thought about mentioning it to the community police officer but I can just hear myself trying to explain the situation and I wince when I imagine their face as I outline just how concerned I am that a man has dumped me and moved on.

  So I do nothing. I play with Lilly. I look after the guest houses. I check my phone and try to find a way to stop Callum making good on his threats to come and visit the kids. I’m not ready for it. They’re not ready for it. The wound is still too raw; too open. Whatever Lilly says, it’s better for her to be kept away from toxic people.

  I’m sitting at the kitchen table, enjoying half an hour of me time, listening out for the moment when Lilly will wake up and start shouting “booby”, when I hear the first siren. I figure it for an ambulance at first. We hear them a lot. There are always people crashing into the loch or hitting trees, and the tree surgeons have a nasty habit of falling off branches at this time of year. But one siren becomes two, then three, then four, and in a moment I’m at the window, watching a full convoy of white-blue cars careering around the bend; blue lights casting eerie strobing shapes onto the silver-grey water.

  Mr Roe is in the kitchen when I turn back towards the room. How the hell had he done that? The door was closed. Locked, even. I hadn’t heard a sound. And now he’s standing, perfectly still, looking at me, his head angled slightly to the right, as if he were a bird who has heard a worm beneath the ground. I feel gooseflesh rise all over my body. I realise how much he unnerves me. I don’t know if it’s his appearance or something more primal than that. He just gives off something that feels, well, wrong. It’s as if he vibrates at a different temperature to any other person I have met.

  ‘Oh, you scared me,’ I say, beginning to gabble. ‘Was there something wrong? Do you need something? I didn’t hear you come in…’

  He doesn’t speak. I fall silent, staring at him the way he stares at me. I consider myself. Jeans, jumper, hair in a great bird’s nest twist. If he’s been beguiled by my appearance then he’s done most of the work in his imagination.

  He’s breathing hard, as if he has exerted himself. He’s wearing a battered raincoat over a padded shirt and corduroy trousers, but if he stretched out his arms he’d pass for a scarecrow. He’s a dreadful colour; a shade that makes me think of uncooked chicken. And he seems to have cut his own hair. There are clumps missing; red patches on his scalp, open weeping sores. I thank God the kids are at school, while at the same time wishing, for the first time since I kicked him out, that Callum were here.

  ‘What is it, Mr Roe?’ I ask, some steel in my voice. ‘I’d rather you didn’t just let yourself in like this – you really did startle me…’

  He raises a hand to his mouth. Puts his index finger to his lips.

  ‘I’m sorry?’ I ask, annoyed. I don’t get shushed. Not in my own bloody kitchen by a guest. Not a bloody chance. ‘You’re shushing me now? I’m not sure this is working out, Mr Roe. I’d rather that…’

  He puts a hand in his pocket. Pulls out a mobile phone. Lays it on the table in front of him.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he says, under his breath. ‘Those coppers. All that racket. It’s your friend.’

  I narrow my eyes, confused. I feel my heart begin to race. There are jangling bells in my head. ‘My friend? I don’t understand,’ I stammer, and start to move towards him. He picks up the phone. Flips his thumb across the screen and calls up a photograph. With a look akin to apology, he flips the phone and shows me the image.

  I recognise the blue mesh of a lobster pot; the black, barnacle-encrusted bars; the orange buoys that dangle down one side. The contraption is set up on a strip of jagged rock; the background half sea, half sand.

  Inside, a head, severed at the neck. Dark hair. A mouth hanging open, slack-jawed, tongue protruding like the tail of an eel. The eyes are gone. There is a deep slash to the left cheek, sugar-dusted with sand. And the top lip has been chewed away, revealing the top row of teeth.

  Gold teeth…

  ‘Jesus,’ I say, and it takes an effort of will not to let myself start to shake. I look at Mr Roe uncomprehendingly. ‘How? When…?’

  He puts his finger to his lips again. Jerks his head towards the top floor. ‘She sleeping? Little one?’

  ‘Yes, went down a bit ago,’ I begin, not understanding.

  ‘Good,’ he says, and puts the phone away. ‘Then you’ve time for a walk.’

  I feel the mean little smile twist my lips. ‘A walk? Mr Roe, are you out of your mind? You’re showing me a picture of a head… You expect me to just leave Lilly and come with you for a walk…’

  He looks at me with something like regret on his face. Then he reaches into another pocket and pulls out a canister. It’s black, and he has his finger over the nozzle. I recognise it from TV. It’s CS spray.

  ‘Yes,’ he says, nodding sadly. ‘Yes I do.’

  12

  On Ardnamurchan the fog closes in like a mouth. One minute the view is the quicksilver lake and the distant, purple-brown mountains across the loch. The next there is nothing but a stony grey darkness that moves in eerie, liquid swirls. Sometimes it seems as though some higher power has decided to simply change the channel and plunged our little world into static. I always expect something ethereal to emerge from the mist: a Viking longship, perhaps, or a collection of bedraggled Jacobites off to claim the throne.

  I stand in the shadow of the back door, leaning against the damp wall, the door half open so that if Lilly cries I can dash to her side. My heart is thudding. I know people say that, but I’m not being overly lyrical. It really does feel as though somebody is thumping the pedal on a bass drum inside my chest. I feel all tingly inside my skin and there is a high, keening whine inside my head that makes my teeth hurt. I’m sweating, but I keep shivering, as if I’m running a fever.

 
Mr Roe is standing beneath the big ash tree, watching me closely. The spray has disappeared back into the pocket of his coat but we are both very aware of its presence. I know that the best thing to do is slam the door, lock it behind me, grab Lilly and call 999. I know there are police on the peninsula today and I doubt they would take kindly to a local being threatened by a holidaymaker – and an English one at that. And yet I don’t really believe that Mr Roe will hurt me. Call me naïve, but I think he would only use the spray as an absolute last resort. And I saw how he looked at Lilly: a real gentle benevolence in his sore, weeping eyes. More than anything, I want to know why he just showed me a picture of Bishop’s severed head.

  I tremble as I think it, biting down on my lip until I taste blood.

  ‘He’s dead?’ I ask, when the silence has become unbearable. ‘Really? That’s him?’

  I see a sudden glow of red emerging from the fog and realise he has lit a cigar. When he exhales it’s a vile, rasping sound, as if he is guzzling up the last of a milkshake through a straw.

  ‘Be best if you just listen, love,’ he says, quietly. ‘I know you want to get back to the nipper and I’m in no state to be standing around shivering. So two ears, one mouth, yeah?’

  I’m too pissed off to respond, and he takes my silence for consent.

  ‘Your Bishop,’ he says, accentuating the “B” so it sounds as if he’s popped a bubble. ‘I could ask you how well you know him, but I’ve been here a good few days now and it’s pretty clear you don’t know him at all. He’s sweet on you, I can see that. Can’t blame him neither – you’re a balm to sore eyes, though I doubt you know it. I’ve known lasses like you all my life. Pretty as a sunrise and you spend your lives worrying about your hairstyle and your fingernails when all you’ve got to do to get whatever you want in the world is offer up a smile…’

  I hear myself laughing, softly: a humourless noise that daubs the words “go fuck yourself” into the fog.

  ‘Bishop and me, we come from the same sort of world. I’m not trying to be enigmatic – I’m too old for all that bollocks – but let’s just say we’ve had one or two dalliances with bad people. And the thing about people like us is that we recognise ourselves in other people. I can walk into any bar and know which bloke knocks his wife about; which one to speak to about getting a knock-off TV; who to go chat with if I’m after a line of Charlie or want somebody’s kneecaps knocking down to their socks. It’s a gift, I suppose. And me and Bishop, well, we saw it in each other first time we clapped eyes on one another.’

  ‘In my kitchen?’ I ask, baffled, remembering the way the air had fizzed with toxic masculine tension as Bishop pushed his way past me that last day. A feeling rises up: a great surge of paranoia. Had Mr Roe followed him? Was that what had led to the grotesque picture: Bishop’s head in a barnacle-encrusted cage.

  ‘Wasn’t the first time, love,’ he says, and through the fog I can just make out that he is shaking his head. ‘Bishop’s the reason I’m up here. With you.’

  I feel my heart beating harder. I don’t have the first clue what he means. He’s a holidaymaker. A paying guest. He’s retired from some job in shipping and is on Ardnamurchan to practise his wildlife photography. I make out a change in the set of his mouth. He’s smiling, watching me run through what I know about him.

  ‘The van driver who did your wall,’ he says, changing the subject so quickly I feel as though I need to throw out a hand and grab hold. ‘He told you what they’re doing at the castle. I heard him say. Private hospital, yeah? Well, Bishop’s something of a middle man on what will be a very lucrative venture. He’s here to make sure everything goes smoothly before the first guests arrive.’

  ‘He’s in computer security. He said so…’

  ‘He’s into a lot of things,’ says Roe, drily. ‘He’s a fixer, is Bishop. Whatever problem you’ve got, he’ll find a solution. Need six brand-new Teslas by Friday night? He’ll know a guy who can drop them off for you. Lady friend got footage on her mobile phone of you up to no good with her at the works party? He’ll get it back. Got a shipment of contraband you want getting through the docks without inspection? He’ll find a friendly face.’

  I look at him accusingly. ‘He’s a drug dealer? And you were his inside man?’

  He laughs at that. Laughs full and throaty, then turns away and spits something into the bushes. ‘All sounds a bit melodramatic when you say it, love. But yes, we’ve encountered one another before. And we’ve both considerably improved one another’s bank balances. Don’t be calling him a drug dealer though. He’s not. He’s just good at helping drug dealers with their problems.’

  I shiver, as a harsh gust of wind bends the branches of the trees and stirs the fog. For a moment all I can see is the hollows and contours of his face and in the half-light he is more corpse-like than ever.

  ‘The photo,’ I say, flatly. ‘You showed me his head…’

  ‘This morning,’ he replies, inhaling smoke. ‘Fisherman at Ardtoe pulled it in. Called the police once he got back to shore, and not before he took a few pictures for posterity. I’ll say this for the Scots, you may be mean but you’re eagle-eyed when it comes to a business opportunity. The fisherman was on to the news desk at the Record before he even rang the cops. Sent them this picture as an appetiser.’

  ‘And how did it come to you?’

  ‘I have friends in low places,’ he says, and grinds his cigar out on his licked palm. He pockets the stub. ‘Look, I don’t know what Bishop’s done to piss people off and I can’t say for certain that it’s definitely him, but it damn well looks like him and he sure as hell hasn’t been answering his phone, has he?’

  ‘You’ve been trying to contact him too?’ I ask, trying to keep up.

  ‘He’s the one who brokered the deal, love. He’s the one who’s got a big chunk of my retirement fund and who’s had me kicking my heels in your guest house since the turn of the year.’

  ‘And you said it’s to do with the hospital? The castle?’

  I hear him sigh. It’s as if he wants me to put the pieces together without him actually having to tell me anything.

  ‘I’m not a well man, love. You’ve probably spotted that. I won’t bore you with the details but my lungs are fucked and my liver’s on its arse, which are both medical terms. And because I’m fifty-five and my blood’s more pus than platelets, I’m a long way down the list of recipients for a transplant. I’ll die before my name gets anywhere near the top of the list. And I don’t think I’m ready to die just yet, Ronni.’

  ‘How does that involve Bishop?’

  ‘He fixes problems,’ explains Mr Roe, softly. ‘He can find you a donor, if you pay the right price. And I reckon another ten years of life is worth every last penny, don’t you?’

  I say nothing, letting all the tumblers slip into place. ‘An illegal transplant? That’s what this hospital is going to be offering?’

  ‘Not on paper,’ he says, and I hear a dry smile in the dark: a rustle of parchment touching flame. ‘On paper it will be a private medical facility offering all sorts of holistic care; rejuvenation procedures and certain cosmetic surgeries. But for specialist clients, it will be offering up life.’

  My stomach becomes a fist. I feel coils of wire around my guts. Everything seems too cold, too loud, too close. I find myself about to ask where the donated organs will come from. I stop before the words leave my mouth. ‘You’re buying the body parts?’ I whisper, and it leaves a foul taste in my mouth. ‘Buying organs from people who need money more than they need their insides?’

  He shrugs, conveying in one simple gesture all that he seems to feel about the world and his place within it. ‘You’d do it, wouldn’t you? One of your kids was going blind, you’d buy a black market cornea if you had the connections to make the deal. Your Atticus needs a heart transplant, you’d sell everything you had to get him what he needed – even if you had to carve the heart out of somebody else using a spoon.’

  I shake my head, protesting
, but the truth of his words is inescapable. I know what I would do. I know what anybody would do.

  ‘You can’t buy a heart,’ I say, petulantly. ‘You can’t donate a heart – you need a heart…’

  He stands still, not speaking. I suddenly feel very empty, and terribly sad.

  ‘Bishop,’ I say. ‘Why have you told me about what’s happened to him?’

  He moves quickly, appearing in front of me like a vampire emerging from theatre smoke. He gives off a reek of true foulness, as if something inside has rotted all the way down to mulch. ‘There will be coppers here, Ronni,’ he says, softly. ‘Coppers asking questions. How well did you know him? What was the nature of your relationship? When did you last hear from him? And because you’re a good sort you’ll want to help. You’ll be truthful. You’ll be honest. And very quickly the coppers will find that he’s been using you as a way to keep himself entertained while he waits for the first patients to arrive. And then they’ll seize your computer and your phone and they’ll start digging through every aspect of your life, and they might just find that a Nicholas Roe in Room 3 has a criminal record for all sorts of nasty shit, and then they’ll get all excited and start digging around into my life, and that may just piss all over my one and only chance of getting the operation that will keep me alive.’

  I cock my head, face twisting, unable to fully comprehend what he’s saying. ‘You want me to stay quiet so you can still get your transplant? Your illegal transplant! A set-up run by the sort of people who might just have cut a man’s head off and thrown it into the sea? Are you insane?’

  ‘The people behind the new venture – they aren’t the sort to run and hide at the first sign of trouble. They’ve got half a dozen very well-connected people lined up for operations within the first few days. Myself included, though I’m nothing compared to some of the people who are buying themselves another slice of life. And if you tell the coppers about you and Bishop, you’re setting them on a road that will end with me unable to get what I need. And without what I need, I’ll die, love. And I don’t expect you to care too much, but I have family, and mouths to feed, and sins to atone for. So all I’m asking is that you be as uncooperative as you can be, and I’ll see to it that you’re compensated.’