by John Burke
THE SECOND STRAIN
John Burke
© John Burke 2002
John Burke has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published in 2002 by Robert Hale Limited.
This edition published in 2018 by Endeavour Media Ltd.
Table of Contents
PART 1: COUNTERPOINT
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
PART 2: FALSE RELATIONS
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
PART 3: DEADLY DISCORD
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
What passion cannot Music raise and quell?
(Dryden: St Cecilia’s Day)
Part 1
COUNTERPOINT
Chapter One
Any town the size of Kilstane must over the years acquire any number of skeletons in its cupboards. But even the dourest and most pessimistic inhabitants would hardly have expected to find one walled up in the tower of their most cherished seat of learning.
And when the tower gave up its secret, there was a more recent casualty. It would be quite some time before Adam Lowther would dare make jokes about the shattering effect of his wife’s top notes.
*
The late April rain had been beating a fierce tattoo on the front windows, and wind howled along the narrow pend below. He was trying to drown it out by listening to a CD of Takemitsu’s sea music, but those gentle oceans were no match for a braw Scottish gale rampaging in from the Borders valley. When the doorbell rang he thought at first it was just an odd discord made by a sudden gust against the glass of the side door. But it persisted. Who the hell would want to be out on a night like this? Possible that Nora might have forgotten her front door key — it wouldn’t have been the first time — but it was far too early for her to be back.
He went downstairs and braced himself to hold the door against the wind funnelled under the low roof of the pend.
The light above it shone down on Deirdre Maxwell.
Whenever they came across each other in the Buccleuch Arms, her bright golden hair was most often newly washed and shining, sometimes pulled back into a pony-tail held tight with a scarlet ribbon, sometimes loose and dull but at the same time agreeable in its untidiness. This evening, if she hadn’t been wearing that familiar green raincoat of hers, you’d have thought she was standing in a shower with the jet full on: her blonde hair had darkened into sodden streaks before she reached the shelter of the pend, while water still trickled down her forehead and into her eyes.
‘I thought you’d be round at the pub.’ She made it sound like an accusation.
‘In this?’
‘I was wanting to talk to you.’
Nothing for it but to open the door wide and let her in. She squeezed against him in the confined space, dripping against his sleeve and on to his slippers before climbing the flight to the first-floor sitting-room. Inside, he took her coat, making himself even damper in the process, and took it out to drape over the back of a kitchen chair.
When he came back she was blinking at herself in the mirror over the fireplace, shoving her hair back and then wiping her hand down her jeans. He handed her a box of tissues and turned off the music. She sat down, dabbing at her face.
‘Adam, we’ve got to talk,’ she said.
‘Have we?’
‘It’s time we did. About us. And about Duncan and your Nora.’
‘What about them?’
Even from several feet away he could smell the whisky on her breath, and could visualize her sitting there in the Buccleuch Arms on her usual stool, in her usual position slumped against the edge of the bar, chain-smoking and glancing petulantly from side to side. Sometimes she would be eager to talk, sometimes hostile towards anyone who tried to chat her up. Right now her mood was as sticky as her hair, and resentful. Obviously she had been waiting for him to show up in the pub, which he often did when Nora was out rehearsing; and when he didn’t she must have fretted herself into quite a state to want to walk this far in this weather.
Perhaps he ought not to have offered any more drink, the way she was, but it came automatically: ‘You’d fancy a dram?’
She shrugged in pretended indifference, but then held out her hand for the glass of Glenmorangie, gulped it down in two breaths, and went on again.
‘What are they up to, those two?’
He kept it light and level. ‘So far as I know, they’re up to the usual Wednesday practice.’
‘Practice?’ Her voice grated. ‘Should be perfect at something by now, after all that practice.’
‘Come off it, Deirdre. You know it’s all to do with the festival and —’
‘Bloody festival. Bloody rubbish. Just an excuse. People are starting to talk, ye ken.’
No, he didn’t ken. He said: ‘In this town they’re always dreaming up some nonsense to keep their silly little minds occupied.’
‘You should never have let it start. Why couldn’t you accompany Nora? You’re a better pianist than my dismal Duncan any day.’
‘Thanks. But it’s like teaching your wife to drive a car. Best to let someone else cope with the aggro. And in this case her music isn’t the sort I’m best at. Duncan gets along with her much more smoothly than I would.’
‘That’s just the point. Don’t you see?’ She had taken a cigarette packet out and was looking for an ashtray. ‘It’s all right if I smoke, isn’t it?’
‘Nora doesn’t like the smell.’
‘Och, dear me. And it would never do for her to come home and wonder who’d been here, would it?’ She stared up at him, and her swing of mood confirmed that he ought not to have given her that generous tot of whisky. ‘Isn’t it about time we gave her something to wonder about?’
‘Deirdre —’
‘I’d like to hear you say that with a bit more meaning.’ She stretched out her arms to him and tried to stand up, but couldn’t manage it without using her arms to push against the sofa.
He said: ‘It’s never been like that, and you know it.’
‘You had one hell of a way of looking at me in the street when we were still at the Academy.’
‘Every lad looked at you.’
‘Yes, but you . . .’ She aimed for the ashtray and sprayed ash on the fireside rug. Abruptly she coughed: ‘Nora’s never really settled in here, has she?’
‘It’s all still a bit strange to her,’ he admitted.
‘After four years? Christ, how long does she need?’
‘Look, I’ll get the car out and drive you home.’
‘Bloody gallant, aren’t you?’
He had always enjoyed her company in small doses, but never fancied her. He was trying to find some way of saying this that wouldn’t be offensive, when the doorbell rang again.
This time it was Duncan Maxwell.
He said: ‘Where the hell is she?’
Adam Lowther had no reason to feel guilty, but that accusing tone of voice was as bad as Deirdre’s had been a little while ago. And then Deirdre coughed again, and Adam found himself saying ridiculously: ‘She came in out of the rain.’
‘I don’t believe this.’ Duncan stormed past him and pounded up the stairs into the sitting-room. ‘What’s going on?’
‘Nothing,’ said his wife, ‘unfortunately. And what’s been going on with you? And Nora?’
‘That’s what I’m here for.’ He was a big, broad-shouldered man, and took up a lot of space as he swung towards Adam. ‘About Nora. Where is she?’
‘She’s with you.’
‘I wouldnae be asking if she was, would I?’
‘I don’t get it.’ Adam tried to find a secure space for himself on his own sitting-room carpet. ‘She went out to the practice —’
‘She never showed up.’
‘That’s crazy. Where else would she have gone?’
Equally baffled, only still more so by the presence of his own wife, Duncan stared from one to the other. ‘Look’ — he swung back on to the offensive — ‘just what is going on?’
‘I was just going to drive Deirdre home when you —’
‘Oh, you were, were you?’
Deirdre snuggled down deeper into the sofa, looking pleased rather than scared by the blundering antagonism for which she was apparently responsible.
A sudden gust of wind thumped against the front of the house. It was followed by another ring — this time the telephone.
‘Mr Lowther?’
‘Speaking.’
‘Mr Lowther, Kilstane Hospital here. Please don’t be too alarmed, but I’m afraid your wife has been involved in an accident.’
‘She’s . . . an accident . . .?’
‘Nothing to be too upset about, sir. Fortunately it’s not too serious. But if you’d like to come up and see her —’
‘I’m on my way. But what happened? How . . .?’
‘She must have been passing the Academy,’ said the woman’s level, soothing voice, ‘when the tower collapsed. A few stones hit her. Caught her only a few glancing blows, but she must have been lying in the rain for some minutes before the noise brought someone to investigate. But she’ll be fine, Mr Lowther, just fine.’
*
By the next morning they were talking of letting Nora out. Only a few scratches and bruises, and a slightly sprained left ankle. Her husband could collect her late that afternoon.
Propped up in bed, Nora looked pink and demurely healthy, but wistful — just the way she had done after her miscarriage three years ago. The dressings at her neck and the blue bruise above her left cheek only emphasized the whiteness of her throat and the lightness of her pale brown hair. She accepted his kiss as a well-deserved trophy. He felt a rush of affection for her. She was so transparent, and for a moment as vulnerable as the pensive young widow he had married. It was rather sweet to see how she was already intending to enjoy herself. Everyone would be commiserating with her; out of hospital, she would be a centre of attention.
‘I’ll pick you up at three.’ He leaned over and kissed her, and she responded with more than the usual routine peck.
‘That’ll be lovely.’
He drove back round the curve of the hill and down towards the Academy. The side road past the school gates, a familiar short cut which Nora must have taken a score of times recently, had been closed off by a red and white barrier. Beyond it a JCB was manoeuvring into the yard and poising itself above the hard hats of three workmen picking their way cautiously around the fringes of the rubble.
The tower and its school bell had been the gift of a nineteenth-century pupil who had gone on from Kilstane to make a fortune from Indian railways and wanted a memorial to himself in his home town. Tacked on to the original foursquare Academy building, it sported a cupola on top which some said made it look like a distillery. Others, more widely travelled, preferred to call it Italianate and even used the word ‘campanile’ to impress their acquaintances. Most of the townsfolk referred to it as MacLean’s Stump.
Now it really was little more than a stump, with most of its stones strewn widely over what had been the schoolyard until the authorities decreed that pupils should be bussed some miles away to a larger school, leaving the premises to be converted into a furniture store.
Adam parked near the junction and ducked under the barrier.
Two fellow members of his committee were already there, inside the yard, close to railings which had been slotted into place around the rubble. An impartial observer might have considered it wiser to set the railing between the two of them rather than allow them both on the same side.
Councillor Enoch Buchanan’s vans advertised his trade as Builder, Funeral Director and, in sinister juxtaposition, Heating Engineer. He had short red hair and a short temper, and the doom-laden voice of a Wee Free preacher, accustomed to predicting heavenly retribution at breast-beating sessions of his church. He set himself up as a sternly incorruptible man who was nevertheless charitably prepared to bring dignity to the funerals of folk of any denomination other than Roman Catholic, but would not himself set foot in a Church of Scotland or Episcopalian place of worship. Rather than lay himself open to contamination he would wait impassively outside — in the hope, it was rumoured, that the Lord’s holy lightning might strike the unrighteous within and thereby give His righteous servant Buchanan a bit more trade.
‘If my tender for the restoration had been accepted,’ he was raging now at full volume, ‘this shambles wouldnae have happened.’
‘If your work all those years ago hadn’t been skimped, just like those rickety houses you built on the marsh, my men wouldn’t have had to cope with such shoddy fabric.’
William Kerr was in his late twenties, and away at school had acquired an English accent which infuriated Buchanan even when the younger man merely said ‘Good morning’ — which he frequently did in a slightly condescending tone.
‘If we’d been allowed to use my methods instead of yon fancy —’
‘Methods? It took me way over time and over budget to undo all the damage your cowboys did way back, and get the whole place safe for the concerts.’
‘Safe, would that be? Except that yon tower’s come down. And where does that leave our festival?’
Adam reluctantly joined them at the railing. ‘There’ll have to be an emergency committee meeting.’
‘Aye, there will indeed. And I’ll ha’ plenty to say. And right now I’ll be awa’ to ring Sir Nicholas. Though likely he’ll be down here the moment he hears.’
‘I doubt it,’ said young Kerr smugly.
‘And why would ye be doubting it?’
‘Something else you’ve overlooked. He’s on his way up to Sutherland, remember? To see about bringing Erskine back.’
‘Erskine!’ Buchanan glared at the crumpled masonry as if someone had just tossed a further load of rubbish on top of it.
Adam Lowther felt a twitch of anger. He had had to work hard to persuade the locals that Daniel Erskine had become a great man and ought to be honoured in his birthplace. But still there were groups of diehard Philistines who remembered only the malicious rumours about the man, and still resented the idea of him being welcomed to the festival.
One of the workmen picking a cautious way round the ragged edge of stonework still standing came to a halt. He steadied himself with a wary hand against the uneven stretch of low wall, and peered over it. Then he waved frantically.
‘Mr Kerr. I think you’d better . . . can you come round here, sir?’
Ignoring Buchanan’s contemptuous grunts, Kerr eased his way between two sections of railing and trod carefully through the jumbled fragments. It took him a full thirty seconds to take in what he was seeing. Then he straightened up and stared back at Buchanan.
‘There’s something here,’ he said, ‘that really does date back to your restoration work.’
Emerging from the debris was the bone of a human elbow, jutting up as if to brace itself and heave its owner out into the open air. Half covered beside it was what might have been a fragment of shoulder-blade impacted into a twist of metal and a lump of concrete.
There would in
deed have to be an emergency committee meeting.
Chapter Two
Within a couple of weeks of agreeing to become Chairman of The Kilstane Gathering committee, Nick Torrance had known that he had made a mistake. Now, all these weeks later, irritation at his own gullibility nagged at him all the way through what should otherwise have been a heartwarming choral concert in the Usher Hall. That night he slept badly, driving through a half dream so that he was already tired when he set out on the actual journey. Just how many more complications had he let himself in for?
It ought really to have been Adam Lowther on this road, crossing the Forth Bridge and accelerating along the motorway through Fife. Lowther was the one who worshipped Erskine’s music and could have answered any challenge on it. Amazing how much tightly controlled enthusiasm there could be in that lean, lanky frame. He always looked so puzzled, slightly diffident; but once he got his teeth into something, they really got a grip.
But would Erskine have let him in over the doorstep?
Or, rather, would Mairi McLeod have let him in?
Nick could only hope that Mairi, after so many years, wasn’t going to be one of the complications.
Before leaving Black Knowe he had slotted three CDs into the player in the Laguna’s boot. One was a recital of Erskine’s orchestral rhapsodies, to help prepare him for the encounter. When he was clear of Perth and traffic had slackened off, he reached for the selector and began with The Storm Child, the legend of a child with green strands of skin washed up after a shipwreck, writhing in agony when christened, and continually summoned back by the voices of her sisters until at last she returns to the sea during another gale.
Above an insistent, threatening rhythm the main theme depicting the girl was a pentatonic melody, supplemented by the sisters’ voices in a perverse-sounding organum of thirds instead of fourths and fifths. The isorhythmic lurches made it difficult to concentrate. It wasn’t easygoing in-car listening: too intricate to be followed through the pulse of the engine and the buzz of tyres on the road. After ten minutes Nick gave up and switched off.
