by Manda Scott
Sandy stepped carefully round the soft mud in the gateway and pulled the gate shut. We leant on it together, sharing the short space of peace; the weak April sun and the new buds of the hawthorn, the call of the blackbirds and the harsh answering cackle of the magpie, the sight of the mare and her foal, exploring the first new grass of the springtime under the trees at the top of the hill. The foal shied at the waving shadows of the hawthorn, testing his feet, winding up to a full-blown buck. Beside me, Sandy sucked in a breath, a rare kind of smile lighting his face.
‘He’ll make you proud of him, that one.’
‘If he lives.’
Darkness shadowed the edge of his smile. ‘D’you think he’ll not?’
‘I don’t know, Sandy. He’s well enough now and Steff checked him over this morning. I don’t think he’s going to give out on us tonight. But if the mare goes down with whatever the others have gone with, I wouldn’t hold out much hope for the foal.’
‘But that’s why we brought her home.’
‘I suppose it is.’ And the rest is too complicated to think about now. I turned my back to the field and sat down in the drying grass at the base of the hawthorn hedge. ‘It’s all we can do. Get her out of the site of infection. That and watch her for signs of it starting. I want a round-the-clock watch for at least the next week. Hourly checks overnight. More if it looks rough. Do you think we can do it?’
‘For Rain?’ He didn’t sit down, his knees wouldn’t wear it, but he turned and leant back on the fence so his head was only just above mine. I felt the touch of his hand on my head. ‘For Rain and her wee man, Kellen, we can do anything. There’s Kate and there’s Alec Saunders and wee Jack, who works with Duncan. All three of them are sane and able for a good night up. Between them and you and me, we can see to it that there’s one of us here while she needs it.’
‘I’ll take tonight,’ I said. ‘We can sort out the rest of the nights after tomorrow. I’ll need someone here by the time I have to leave for work.’
‘No problem. I’ll be here by seven anyway. You talk to Kate when she comes back from the ride. See if she can do some of tonight for you. I’ll go off and find wee Jack now. I’ll see Alec in the morning when he comes in for the ten o’clock ride. Does that sound OK?’
Very. ‘It sounds wonderful, Sandy. But I thought you were going out this afternoon?’
‘Aye, well.’ He was hoarse, then. Shy, like a child bringing a gift. ‘I was going to see a man about a mare. Nothing big. I called him and put it off till next weekend.’ His hand fell lightly on my shoulder. Squeezed once through all the tension to the bone. ‘I’ll be off now. You try and get some sleep when Kate comes back.’
‘Thanks, Sandy.’
I watched him walk his bow-legged walk down the path through the orchard to the yard. There’s something very pleasant about reliable people. Sandy Logan is so very reliable.
I spent the next couple of hours in the yard. Not for any special reason but that there was no one else there. It’s a rare thing to have the place to myself at a weekend in the trekking season and I badly needed some space and time on my own to think. Or not to think. Whichever came easier.
There’s a cupboard on the wall in the tack room that we use for storing wormers and the basic drugs that Ruaridh leaves us for the horses. Twenty minutes’ work on the clutter inside it made room for the drugs and treatment sheets I’d brought from the vet school. I arranged the various bottles in order along the shelf and then spent a frustrating half-hour hunting down a padlock in the garage; a remnant of the brief period when every gate and doorway on the farm was double locked and rigged with intruder alarms. I don’t have enormous faith in padlocks as a way of stopping folk getting at what they want but they’re good enough to stop wandering members of the public from opening cupboards and borrowing bottles of penicillin because they want a souvenir of the Campsies and they like the colours on the label. The locals wouldn’t do it but the tourists have an odd idea of what’s included in the package when they come in to hire a horse for the afternoon. It’s one of the more tedious spin-offs of being part of a service industry.
There’s an odd kind of refuge in anger. A wilful escape into righteous resentment at the unreasoned and unreasonable and the general unfairness of life. When I came down from the Hawthorn paddock, I was feeling a kind of dead resignation that bordered on peace. By the time I had finished sorting the tack-room cupboard, I was seething. Pissed off to the back teeth with tourists who lift things that aren’t theirs. With the Sunday hang-around kids who leave the tack room looking like the fag end of a rave. With Kate, who hadn’t bothered to bed down the foaling box when she knew I was coming in with a mare and foal. With Sandy. With Rain. With the foal. With the weather. With the fork I was using to make up the bed in the foaling box. With the bales of straw that fell off the barrow. With the faulty handle on the water bucket and whoever it was that should have fixed it. With the bolt on the door that wouldn’t slide shut when it was all bedded down and I wanted to leave the box. With the dog who buggered off early and left me to finish tying up hay-nets all on my own. With the ducks wandering mindlessly across the yard. With the bit of angled iron I use to pull off my boots outside the back door which always, without fail, scrapes a layer of skin off the inside of my ankle and leaves me swearing for weeks. With whatever disorganised son of a motherless camel left the back door open and let all the heat out of the kitchen. With the unwelcome, unwanted, unasked-for poacher’s assistant of an off-duty police officer who was standing there in my kitchen, leaning back against my Rayburn, nursing a mug of my coffee with one hand and teasing the red kittens with the other; who was dribbling a crumpled ball of Post-it paper across and across the breakfast bar between their legs as if Sunday afternoons were made for staying in and drinking coffee and playing with cats and seducing my dog into a warm chair by the fire and not bothering even to come out to the barn and say hello.
Some folk have absolutely no sense of timing.
I screwed my jacket into a bundle and threw it at the dog. Stewart MacDonald. ‘What the fucking hell are you doing here?’
‘Just passing.’ He nodded agreeably. ‘Coffee?’ He was pouring it anyway.
‘Need you ask?’
He looked at me sideways and carried on pouring. ‘Sandy’s well pleased with your colt,’ he observed peacefully. ‘He and Duncan are up there at the forge planning the next three generations.’ Duncan is MacDonald’s brother. The man who owns the chestnut three-quarter bred that is father to Rain’s colt. The local farrier who is child-by-default to Sandy Logan. As I am, possibly, to MacDonald.
‘If I hear right, he’ll be covering every mare in the village before he’s turned five.’ He spooned sugar into one of the mugs.
Oh, really?
‘Interesting, isn’t it, how men find they need to project all of their sexual inadequacies on to a horse?’
‘Is that right?’ He handed me the coffee and took the kittens to play out of harm’s way by the fire, leaving me to the heat and space in front of the Rayburn.
The coffee was black, too weak and not nearly sweet enough. I threw in some more sugar and fought my way past two New Zealand rugs into the pantry for some milk. He was waiting for me when I came back, sitting in his chair by the fire, the kittens laid out along either knee, their heads hanging over the edge into space. The dog still had my chair, a special concession to the prevailing temper. He doesn’t believe in dogs on the furniture, MacDonald. Neither did Bridget. I only ever saw Tan share a bed with her once and that was when she was dead. His successor, without Bridget to sort her out, has learned softer habits. As far as I’m concerned, there’s more than enough room for both of us on any of the chairs in the house. And there’s something very pleasantly uncomplicated about sharing one’s bed with a dog.
I stirred the milk into the coffee, watched it form thick curdled clumps on the top and flung the whole lot down the sink. I didn’t want coffee anyway. I wanted tea. And something to ea
t and a chair by the fire and some kind of space to sort myself out. You wouldn’t think it was too much to ask.
I clicked on the kettle and made myself a fresh mug of tea. With two sugars. And no milk.
‘She’s in heat,’ said MacDonald, completely out of the blue, ‘did you know?’
‘What?’
‘Your pup,’ he said carefully, ‘she’s in season.’
‘My pup? You mean my three-and-a-half-year-old bitch? Our three-and-a-half-year-old bitch?’
There’s no pretending ownership over this one, she’s a two-man dog. She always has been. Except possibly before he brought her here. Then she would have been his alone. ‘I thought you and Ruaridh had decided she wasn’t ever coming on heat?’
‘Aye, well,’ he shrugged a loose shrug, ‘looks like we were wrong.’
‘Congratulations.’
And doesn’t that just make the weekend perfect? A bleeding bitch on the furniture for the next three weeks.
Marvellous. I must have broken a mirror and nobody thought to tell me.
MacDonald was looking over at me, smiling a kind of shy, paternal smile; the kind you save for your youngest daughter’s first wedding. ‘I was thinking,’ he said, circumspectly, ‘that maybe we could think about having pups. Duncan’s got a friend with a good coursing greyhound at stud. The lass is a grand hunter and she’d make a rare dam for a lurcher …’
I think I have had just about enough of this.
‘Stewart, I think it’s time you left. I can’t handle any more. I don’t want any more horses. I don’t want any more dogs. I didn’t particularly want any more cats but they turn up on the sodding doorstep without bothering to ask. Life is too bloody complicated. We have a brand-new day-old foal out there that might not live to see the end of the week and Sandy Logan has already planned its sex life for the next decade. I don’t need you wandering in here with your testosterone out of control, waving the nearest penile substitute you can lay your hands on just because there’s a bitch might be up to standing for a dog. I’m not having any more. There’s too much going on that we can’t handle already. Too much that’s out of control. It’s not on. OK? The answer’s no.’ I paused for breath and a mouthful of tea. ‘And I really do think you should go.’
I looked out across the room. MacDonald was sitting in his chair, the kittens still on his knee and he was watching me with a kind of curious intensity. Balanced somewhere between horrified fascination and morbid concern, the way you would watch your sister, the trapeze artist, try out a new act on the first night without a safety net.
I’m not keen on heights. Particularly not without a rope to break the fall.
The black hole that had been hovering just over my shoulder for the whole of the day finally closed in somewhere around my solar plexus. The floor dropped out from under me and, underneath that, there was nothing at all. I stepped off the edge and began the long, long fall to nowhere.
I put my mug down, very, very carefully on the counter and I stuck my hands in my pockets. I chewed a line of skin off the inside of my lip. I breathed and counted down from fifty, in odd numbers. I came round to the front face of the breakfast bar and I sat down with care on the cold, quarry tiles of the floor with my knees up to my chin and my hands locked round my legs. It was only then that I realised that I was shaking all over.
MacDonald leant over the edge of his chair carefully, so as not to displace the kittens, and he patted me on one knee. ‘Do you want to talk about it?’ he asked.
I don’t discuss my relationships with MacDonald, I never have.
He has seen whatever he has seen and he has never yet made any comment. He spent long enough watching Janine while she changed her mind on a daily basis and then packed up and left the farm to go back to Rae. He spent another three months after that watching me make a total idiot of myself with one of his junior colleagues and he said nothing at all when she and Caroline moved together to a brand-new flat on the south side. He just turned up three days later with Sandy Logan and the pair of them helped me put my life back together.
MacDonald knows more about what goes on here than almost anybody else I know.
But we don’t talk about it. Ever.
There really isn’t any point.
I stood up and went over to sit on the bench by the window and started opening the mail that had accumulated in the two days since I was last at the farm.
‘Tell me about the dog,’ I said. ‘The greyhound.’
There was quiet for a while. I felt his eyes on me and said nothing.
‘Aye, well,’ he leaned back in the chair and stroked the side of his nose, the way he does when he’s working his way round to something else, ‘there’s no rush. She’ll not be ready to stand for a week yet, at least. I’ll maybe get a picture of him and a copy of his pedigree and drop it in sometime.’
‘Fair enough.’ I slid the paperknife through the envelopes and tried not to think of tearing sheets. ‘Are you staying for lunch?’ At four o’clock in the afternoon.
He had the decency not to look at his watch. ‘No, no,’ he said. ‘I’ll be going in a minute. I just called in to see how you were.’
‘I’m fine.’
‘So I see.’ He still had a sleeping kitten draped across each knee. He stood up, lifted them off, and laid them down on the hearth rug, curled round each other in a tangle of red tabby limbs. ‘And how’s your friend?’ he asked. ‘The one with the burned-out cottage?’
I forget, sometimes, that he has the Strathclyde police at his fingertips. You would think that on a Sunday, the grapevine would twitch a tad slower than that.
I ran my eye down the first of the bills and then shoved it on to a paper spike on the counter top. A spike heavy with other, unpaid bills. I have to be pretty desperate for something to do before I start writing cheques. This afternoon, I could pay every bill we’ve got.
I looked up and realised he was still expecting an answer.
‘She’s fine,’ I said.
‘Is that right?’ He crossed the room and crouched down in front of me, in much the same way Matt Hendon crouched down by his man-eating German shepherd. He took the letter knife from my one hand and the half-cut envelope from the other and he laid them both down on the bench beside me. He waited until I raised my head to look at him and then his eyes were level with mine.
He has five different shades of grey in those eyes. And a small, spherical patch of black caught down in the outer corner of the left one that shivers sometimes, when he’s laughing, or trying not to laugh. Just at that moment, it hung absolutely still. A fly caught in ice.
‘And do you think she’ll still be feeling fine when she finds the insurance aren’t paying for her home?’ he asked softly.
Oh shit.
I need to eat.
There was cheese in the fridge and relatively new bread in the bin. The chutney in the cupboard had a thin veil of blue on the top but the layers underneath seemed relatively healthy. The combination wasn’t particularly appetising but it did something towards lifting my blood glucose to the point where I could think straight.
I made another two rounds of the same and took it to share with MacDonald.
‘Why?’ I asked as I sat down. ‘Why wouldn’t they pay for Nina’s cottage?’
He inspected his sandwich and then took it round to the Rayburn, placed it neatly on the toasting grid and closed the lid.
‘Because they’re tight-fisted bastards and they aren’t in the business of being ripped off,’ he said. ‘They’ll maybe pay if it’s negligence and they’ll pay if it’s arson. So long as it was someone else that lit the fire. The one time they won’t pay is if she did it herself in which case she won’t get a penny.’
‘She didn’t do it herself. The duvet caught on a heater. The fire chief said so.’
‘He did. But the heater was standing right close up to the bed which seems a mite odd in the middle of April. If it was an accident, it was hellish convenient and, reading between
the lines of your lady friend, she doesn’t sound to me like the kind of person to make that kind of accident.’
My lady friend. Bloody hell. Stop fishing. ‘She’s a client, Stewart.’
‘Is that right?’ He knew that. You could hear it in the sound of his voice. ‘So then would you care to pass comment about her mental health?’
Dear God. I don’t believe this.
‘No, I would not. That’s confidential information, Inspector MacDonald. And even if it wasn’t, it’s none of your sodding business. I thought you weren’t planning to stay?’
‘Maybe not.’ He leant forward on the breakfast counter, his weight on his elbows, watching me. His stare became uncomfortably fixed. ‘I didn’t come here to fight with you, Kellen.’ He has a way of rounding his vowels when he’s stressed. Just then they were very round. ‘It’s not my case. Garscube’s not on my patch, you know that. I just thought maybe you could do with someone on the other side who might have a different view on things. If it doesn’t matter that much, then, no, I won’t stay.’
He chewed the edge of one fingernail, watching still.
Behind him, hot chutney mixed with molten cheese on the Rayburn. The smell of it spread out across the room, warm and wet and savoury-sweet.
He’s careful with his words, MacDonald. It pays to listen.
‘What kind of a different view?’ I asked. ‘Different from what?’
‘Different from the one currently taken by my colleagues.’
‘Go on.’
‘They think she did it herself, Kellen,’ he said simply. ‘And they’re not stepping out of their way to prove otherwise.’ His voice took on a different edge. ‘Not after what you said to them this morning.’
