by Manda Scott
Oh bloody hell. I really am losing my grip.
I pushed the heels of my hands to my eyes and kept pushing till the stars turned red. Then I let go and watched them flare back down through the spectrum to black. When I could see again, he was still standing there, on the other side of the breakfast bar, watching me.
‘How did you know it was me?’ I asked.
‘The entire department knows what was said.’ He shrugged. ‘It just took me a wee while to work out who might have said it. Don’t worry,’ he crinkled a bit of a smile, ‘they didn’t think to take your name and nobody else knows you well enough to work it out for themselves.’
Thank you so very much.
I stared into the heart of the fire and watched further fragments of reality crumble around me. This time yesterday I had a friend I valued, a client I cared for and a career that looked as if it might be going somewhere. And Nina Crawford had a home. And an outside chance of holding herself together.
MacDonald lifted the lid of the Rayburn and recovered one perfectly toasted cheese sandwich. A halo of toasted cheese hung around him as he came back to sit by the fire. He laid the plate on his knee and cut the thing into squares with a kitchen knife.
‘What can we do?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know.’ He popped the first square in his mouth and chewed on it, ruminating, like a sheep, ‘So as far as my colleagues are concerned, there’s no question but that the lassie did it herself.’ He paused for a second mouthful. ‘The only question is whether she did it with malice aforethought, so to speak, or whether she just had a wee bit of a brainstorm and didn’t know what she was doing.’ He stopped for a second bite. Bubbles of warm chutney dribbled down the edge of one finger. He licked it off with catlike precision. ‘I thought maybe you might be able to cast a bit of a light on things,’ he said.
A red kitten clawed at the leg of his moleskins. He drew out a long string of cheese, blew on it to cool it down and rolled it into a small, kitten-bite-sized ball. This is one of the other ways we differ, MacDonald and I. I might let the dog on the bed, but I don’t feed animals from the table. I think if you asked him, he would say he didn’t either but the cats have him just where they want him.
Clearly, I’m not a cat.
I picked up the sibling kitten and sat in the other chair with the dog warming my back. She sighed in her sleep and laid her nose in the crook of my arm. If she’s really in season, I’ll need to start covering the furniture.
‘Nina Crawford’s been a client for close to eight years,’ I said, so he knew, then, as much about us as he needed to know. ‘She’s brilliant. She’s driven. She’s one of the best surgeons around. She’s also very, very unstable and she knows it. The two things in her life that stop her falling apart are her cat and her cottage. She’s just lost both of them and she’s right on the edge of a break-down. There’s no money in the world would be worth that kind of heartache.’
‘Aye, well, there’s more in the world than money, right enough.’ The kitten clawed its way up his leg and waited by his plate for the next offering. He rolled another ball and made it follow his hand back down to the floor. ‘And is she “unstable” enough, would you say, to do it to make some kind of statement?’
Oh God.
I was out of it when you came to the cottage the other night. That’s why I came home …
‘No,’ I shook my head slowly, ‘she’s never been that “unstable”.’
I am such a bad, bad liar.
‘That’s what I thought.’ My kitten joined his for a toasted cheese-fest on the floor. He pulled a handkerchief from a hidden pocket in the moleskins and wiped both hands free of grease. ‘But, under the circumstances, I think she might need something a wee bit more concrete than that if she’s to stay clear of trouble.’
With MacDonald, it’s what he doesn’t say that is usually the most important. At that moment, he was putting a lot of effort into not saying all kinds of things.
I collected the plates and took them over to the sink. There’s a small leaded window set in the wall above that sink at just about eye height. From there, you can see out over the duck pond to the foot of the ben and beyond. I peered out, looking for riders and tried not to listen to any of the things he wasn’t saying.
I don’t like being rail-roaded.
I don’t like being made to feel responsible.
I don’t, at this moment, want to become any more involved in the life of Dr Nina Crawford, equine surgeon, friend and client. Ex-client.
It’s not my fault if her home got burned down. However it happened.
There was a weekend’s accumulation of plates and pans waiting in the sink. More than enough. I washed and he waited and eventually he got the message.
He stood up and collected his jacket from the back of the chair.
I felt the draught as he opened the door and turned, the last of the plates dripping in my hand.
He was standing peacefully in the porchway, looking out across the moor to where the first of the returning riders was just coming into view.
‘Gary Mitchell runs a racing kennels out on the Dumbarton road,’ he said. ‘He’s got an ex-Waterloo Cup winner standing at stud if you want to go and have a look. Nice black dog. Name’s Jupiter’s Joy. If you tell him I sent you, he’ll know who you are.’
‘Thanks.’
He pulled on his jacket. ‘I’ll may be drop in and see the wee colt in the morning.’
‘Fine. Sandy’ll be here after seven.’
‘Right.’ He stepped out of the door and then stepped back again, nodding towards the dog. ‘You’ll be wanting to keep her on a lead for a wee while now,’ he said, ‘Unless you want her covered by every penile substitute that happens past.’
He whistled quietly to himself as he left.
9
A half-hearted sunset lit up the western side of Bearsden as I turned in through the lower entrance to Garscube Estate and followed the tyre marks of three fire engines and a police car along the dirt track that leads to the out-buildings of the university farm and from there along a smaller track, little used before the weekend’s excitement, that leads through a five-bar gate and up the slope to Nina’s cottage. As far as I know, there hasn’t been anything bigger than a pedal cycle along that lane since the day she moved in. When the furniture lorry left on the evening of the move, she shut the gate and never went near it again. Her car is parked permanently in the vet school car park and visitors get used to the five-minute walk down through the trees and out by the path that runs along the side of the river. The only reason I know the lower route is that I was one of the three people helping her to shift the furniture on the day she moved in.
The cottage stood in darkness, shaded by the massed rhododendrons and the overhanging birch. I stood for a moment, feeling oddly dishonest, as if the mere fact of being there in darkness was a confession of liability.
It was quiet. Country quiet. Not what you’d expect on the edge of the city. The river splashed gently somewhere out of sight. I expect the toads were calling if I had any idea what they sounded like. If there was anything else alive, the noise of the car had warned it to silence. Somewhere, if I thought about it hard enough, there was traffic on the switchback.
In front of me, the cottage was a chaos of burnt wood and water. The smell of soaked fire lay like a blanket across the clearing and a layer of wood ash made shadows even where the dusk light was falling. I found my torch in the back of the car; too small and with batteries that were long overdue for a change. Every time I use that torch, I swear that I’ll buy a new one. It still lies somewhere under the driver’s seat.
The dog followed me out of the car, sneezing on the updraughts of ash that swirled around us as we jumped over the stone of the wall and across the uncut lawn to the back door. In the dark, it looked more desolate than it had in the daylight with the bustling activity of the fire team around it. Desolate. Derelict. Wasted. Someone had tied the back door shut with baler twine beca
use they’d taken the lock for forensics, ‘Just in case’. A pane of plywood blocked the upstairs window like a shop front after a ram-raid.
I held the torch in my teeth and tried to undo the knot in the twine. When that failed, I picked up a piece of glass from the grass under the window and cut the knot out altogether, leaving two bare ends of twine hanging free so that I could tie them again on the way out.
Inside, the kitchen was a wasteland. A dozen pairs of booted feet had left indelible marks in black on the sanded oak of the floor. The rugs in the living room were beyond repair. The stairs looked as if someone had fallen at least once, on the way up or the way down and used the banisters as a crash barrier on the way to the floor. The bedroom, predictably, was a cave. A windowless, airless, smog-filled pit. And dark. So very, very dark. A dark that sucked. Took the torchlight and swallowed it whole and gave out sounds in its place. Soft. Hidden. Painful. The final keenings of heat-tortured wood. The whispers of falling plaster. The guttered groans of timbers shifting suddenly in the roof space. This place has stood for nearly three hundred years. Generations have lived here and died here and the cottage has never changed. It doesn’t like the intrusion of fire. It hates the intrusion of men afterwards. The air held something close to loathing about it.
Fine fingers of fear traced their way up my spine and squeezed tight in my throat. The dog flattened her ears to her skull and pushed carefully past me on the way downstairs. She’s not often wrong.
I shook my head, once, to clear the air and then stepped over a fallen lintel and into the room. The place that was her bedroom before the catharsis of the fire. The torchlight played games with the shadows as I swung it around, changing sizes and textures and adding odd dimensions to the looming outlines of things that used to be furniture. Some things were far beyond the shadow-play. Like the bed. The bed was, quite simply, not there. She sleeps on a futon. She used to sleep on a futon. They are not resistant to fire. I could see the space where it had been and no doubt if I were a trained fire officer with the benefit of daylight, I could tell you which bits of blackened fibre had been the duvet. I could probably have told which bits of the mess were the wall as well. She kept the bed hard up against the wall and the wall was cow-dung plaster. Horse dung perhaps. Whatever they used to make walls in the days when building materials were largely organic and came from the land. Either way, it wasn’t any more fireproof than the bed. There was no longer a wall where there had been a wall. Instead, a gaping hole stretched from the floor up to the ply-boarded window and led through into the loft space. I angled the torch beam inside. Five years of lecture notes and a decade’s worth of conference proceedings sat in charred, sodden bundles. There are easier ways of letting go of your past.
She didn’t do this as a way to let go of the past. Nina Crawford could throw these things in a skip tomorrow and not notice they were gone.
I would like to believe she didn’t do it at all.
I came here looking for something and I am not finding it.
I know Nina Crawford. In every way possible, I know her. I know the structure of her days and the unformed terrors of her nights. I know the intangible promises of her childhood and the tangled realities of her adult life. I know the shape of her scars and the taste of her tears and the ragged edge of her voice in extremis. If I had never been in her bedroom, still I could map out the places of things. Somewhere in all of this, there is a footprint. Something to say if someone, anyone, else was here in the space between a midnight phone call and a fire at dawn.
All I have to do is find it.
I stood in the centre of the room, switched off the torch and worked out in the space around me where everything ought to be. The bed with the hard mattress for her back and the pillow heading eastwards because if it’s facing any other way then the nightmares are worse. The phone, within hand’s reach of the head of the futon so she can lift it without waking up. The watercolour of Sgurr nan Gillean on the wall to the left of the window. The curtained alcove on the far side of the room where she hangs her clothes. The pine-backed mirror on its stand in one corner. The chair for the one-eyed killer cat because even she wouldn’t dare let it on to the bed while she slept. The chair further back against the wall where she hangs her clothes after work. The lamp.
I clicked on the torch again. The thread of the beam wove around the room. Bed, phone, picture, chair, mirror, chair, clothes. All of them there in shadow. Scorched black on paler black.
Nothing missing.
No footprint.
There has to be something or else why am I here?
A second circuit. Everything in place. Except that the chair for the cat is back against the wall and the small curved reading lamp is sitting on it.
There is no reason for the lamp to be over there. You couldn’t plug it in. There’s only one socket in Nina Crawford’s bedroom and that’s at the head of her bed. Put in by the university electricians at her instruction so that she could have a light at night. For reading. For reading papers and journals and letters of referral and writing notes for lectures in the morning. She couldn’t sleep if she didn’t read something before she slept. And she never switched off the light without checking that the cat was on his chair by the bed. Some folk have security blankets. Nina Crawford has her cat.
The beginnings of a footprint.
The torch dimmed as I fixed it on the chair, the batteries pulled in the last few scattered electrons and threw them, one at a time, at the dark. A dampened match would have given more light. I stepped carefully over fractured floorboards to the wall and found, mostly by feel, that the lamp was, indeed, too far from the bed to read by. Almost half the length of the room away. And not plugged into the wall. In the final few seconds of torchlight, the pins of the plug glowed back smoke-encrusted brass, a final shimmer of warmth in the cold and the baleful dark.
And so the light was moved before the fire. And the chair with it. Nina wouldn’t do that by accident.
But there’s nothing here to say she didn’t do it deliberately.
I stood in the gloom and listened to the whispers of the broken room. Here, in this place, I could begin to have nightmares too. If I stayed here long enough, I could begin to build pictures of anything. Here, I could think the unthinkable and believe that it happened.
A displaced lamp is not a footprint. Not enough to say if Nina Crawford simply lost it after four nights without sleep or whether she had, after all, found a new way of fighting the nightmares. Fire is a very cleansing thing. I can’t imagine it ever being a good way to go but then I wouldn’t inject air into my antebrachial veins, either. Or try to cut out my scar with a scalpel blade.
I thought I knew her.
I don’t really know her at all.
She could have been trying to die. She could simply have been too tired to think. Or she could have been trying to rid herself of the encumbrance of the cottage. As a prelude to something else more permanent.
And if I can’t tell, how in heaven’s name is anybody else supposed to know the difference?
I felt my way out of the room and down the stairs. The dog was waiting for me in the kitchen doorway, her pale coat blackened to normal collie colouring by the smoke and the falling ash. She shoved her nose against my wrist as I stopped to tie the baler twine, a cool canine reminder that we had outstayed our welcome.
We’d outstayed it before I ever stepped in through the door.
The sun was long gone and the car was waiting in darkness beside the woodshed. A thin layer of cloud hid whatever moonlight there might have been. White light filtered through the trees from the streetlamps on the switchback and mixed with the harsh sodium orange from Bearsden. Enough to see by, more or less. I made a final circuit of the garden, looking for something more concrete than a shifted lamp. Something to take the whispering nightmares and make them somehow less damning.
I was grubbing around in the glass beneath Nina’s bedroom window, trying to work out if it was broken before, during or af
ter the fire, when the dog whined. Not her hunting whine, but something almost as urgent. I hopped over the wall and found her by the woodshed with her nose jammed through a six-inch gap in the base of the door. She whined again as I got there. The woodshed snarled back. They started up a dialogue; dog and shed. The dog stood, almost on point, wheedling promises through half-closed lips, her face jammed midway to her eyes in the jagged space near the hinge where the wood had rotted away. The shed hissed something viciously uncompromising that ended in a spit and a slash and a yowl of pain from the dog. She jerked suddenly backwards. Beads of blood welled like dark warts along the side of her nose. She sat down on her haunches with her nose a safe distance from the wood and she whined again.
Very telling. There aren’t many cats who, given the relative security of a closed shed door, would find it necessary to attack a dog. I put my head down near the gap and risked a look in. A muscled shaped moved somewhere in the gloom.
‘Don’t go far, Killer,’ I said. ‘Help is at hand.’
I don’t smoke and I don’t sit in my car any longer than I have to, but I carry a cigarette lighter in the glove compartment because, on the whole, it’s a more useful source of light than my torch and I carry a travelling rug in the back seat of the car to protect the upholstery in case I ever have passengers who object to dog hairs on their clothing. I dug the lighter out from under the mass of old service contracts, dragged the rug off the back seat and then let the dog into the car, ignoring, for the time being, the combined effect of fur, fire-smoke and blood on the furnishings.
The woodshed door was damp and swollen and the hinges were rusted almost solid but it gave way to a couple of kicks and a hard shove with a shoulder. The cat lay sideways at the hinges, pushed that way when I opened the door. A wreck of a cat in black and almost-black with a single black-in-green eye that glared hatred at me in the gloom.
‘Killer, old pal. Good to see you, too. Are you hurt?’
