Chapter 19 #3
As I sat in the kitchen of the TARDIS-style cottage, I noted this with surprise. In fact, it was less that she hadn’t redecorated and more the absence of any decoration.
The house looked like a small two-or three-bedroom home from the street.
But in reality, it was a labyrinth-style warren of rooms on the ground floor with more of the same upstairs and an attic on top of that.
There were about five living rooms and endless doors to spaces that probably had no use, and cupboards, and priest-holes, and Christ only knows what else.
There was also a distinct lack of furniture.
When Arabella lived here, it had been full of tasteful-slightly-not-quite-shabby-enough-to-be-convincingly-authentic-shabby-chic furniture and knick-knacks.
Huge ornate lamps, overstuffed sofas, east Asian ornaments, antique Persian rugs, and umbrella stands that probably cost the same as the rent on a flat in a Glaswegian tower block for a year.
Katrina’s limited décor was much more British. Middle class. Little old lady. She had a few plants, some books. A couple of plain tables.
“Still moving in?” I asked as she busied herself, back and forth, checking her first aid kits.
She glanced around. “Oh, aye. Did a clear-out before I left. It’s all up in the air. Can’t decide what to do with it. My late husband took control of decorating our old house. It was all very … military.”
“He was in the army?” I asked.
She nodded. “Forty years.” She went to a different room and brought back a silver-framed photo. A man and a much-younger Katrina on their wedding day.
Her husband was a ramrod-straight-backed man with a small moustache and a barrel chest. He didn’t exactly look like an easy-going, joyous kind of bloke. “That’s my Andrew.”
“You look happy together,” I said, which seemed the most innocuous thing to offer up.
She smiled tightly.
“You must miss him terribly?”
She nodded a little. And then came towards me. “Right, you’ve a wee gash on your head, oh and a horrible scar, goodness, what’s that from?”
I jerked away. “Ah, an old accident.”
“Looks recent— oh. Gosh, my apologies. I just realised.”
It was my turn to smile tightly. “I have these kinds of run-ins semi-regularly,” I said, trying for a joke.
“I hope not,” she said. “Right, I’ll get the antiseptic. This is going to sting.”
I gripped the chair underneath as she went to work. From the spot he’d taken at the doorway, Kenny panted at me happily.
“He’s a lovely dog,” Katrina offered breezily as she poured acid onto my head and dug about with a blunt ice-pick.
I winced and clenched my teeth. “Yup,” I said, trying to open my jaw so I could form words. “Ghhhhh” was about as much as I could do. After Dhapinder had driven off, Katrina had taken one look at me and demanded I get in her car, and she’d driven me to hers for a check-up.
“I have a full first aid cupboard,” she’d said when I demurred. “No, you need to have those grazes looked at.”
So, we bundled in because Katrina wouldn’t take no for an answer.
“Do I want to know what that was really about?” she’d asked as we’d driven back to the village.
“Um, once I figure it out, I’ll let you know.”
“Will you go to the police?” she asked. I hadn’t given her an answer.
Now in her kitchen, she was busy getting leaves out of my hair and dabbing at me with cotton wool. “She really tried to run you off the road?”
“I think it was a case of mistaken identity,” I said. “She seemed to think I’d done …” It clicked. “Sorry, one second, I need to check something.”
I took my phone out and played the voicemail that Sonia had left me yesterday, which I’d never got around to listening to.
“Arden!” came Sonia’s disembodied voice. She sounded panicked. “I’ve done something really stupid. Holy shit, what was I thinking? I thought it would be easy. Oh God, they’re totally gonna know it was me. Call me, I’m freaking out!”
The message ended. I banged my phone on my forehead, thinking hard.
“Friend of yours?” Katrina asked.
I nodded. Ow. “Who apparently doesn’t listen and doesn’t have a single shred of self-preservation.”
“Oh, dear.”
“Innit?”
“I’m glad that I passed by when I did,” she said. She looked down at the stun gun on the kitchen table and shuddered. “No idea what that woman would have done if she’d been left to her own devices.”
“Yes, thank you. And sorry to interrupt your day out … walking?”
She smiled. “I’d been to the beach, a nice ramble along the cliffs, really brushes away the cobwebs.”
“Lovely. I should give it a try,” I said.
I caught her looking at the photo again. “Can I ask you a question?”
She nodded as she moved from my head to my arm. She had a bowl of warm water and was washing off the dirt and crud to reveal that the skin on my arm was grazed. It stung like hell.
“If you could do it all over again, would you get married and do it the same?”
She thought for a second. “Yes, yes, I would,” she said.
“My Andrew, he wasn’t the easiest man, but he was a good man.
I … how do I put this, well, it was the nineteen-eighties, and you may think, oh, modern times.
But, well, it wasn’t, not really. Anyway, my first husband” – I gasped, and she nodded – “we married straight out of school. He was a squaddie. Anyway, it wasn’t a great marriage.
He liked a drink. We tried for a baby for many years and then eventually, when I was already in my thirties, over the hill in those days, I got pregnant with my Rabbie. ”
“Your son?”
“Aye, my Rab – well, we named him after his dad, but I always called him Rabbie, his middle name, after my father. And there are some things I’d do differently there. But, you know, in the beginning, my ex loved being a dad, up until he didn’t. And then it was time for us to leave.”
I nodded in sympathy. “My mum had to do the same.” As much as I never wanted to see my mother again, I couldn’t blame her for her actions in those early days. She had three young kids and a drunk husband. It was eat or be eaten, in her view, and she chose to be the hunter.
“So, you left your ex and found Andrew?”
“Yes, and Andrew was older than me, already in his forties. Never married. But a bright career. An officer. Very senior. Oh, for a girl like me with a wean and no man, it was a godsend. He was a good provider. We lived in a lovely big house; I never worried about bills again. Yes, it could have been a better marriage, and no, we weren’t some great love story. But he was all I needed.”
“So Rabbie followed his stepdad into the army?”
She nodded. “Dad. Andrew adopted him. But, yes, straight into the officers, oh, so proud of him.” She blinked back tears.
“I’m so sorry, Katrina. I didn’t mean to dig up painful memories.”
She waved away my concern. “It’s good to talk. It helps, actually. You’re a lot easier to talk to than Odette bloody Douglas, who is always around trying to get every detail of my life out of me.”
I shuddered.
She left the room again and came back with a different picture. “This is my Rabbie.”
She showed me a handsome young lad in full army uniform posing for a picture. “Well, hello,” I said.
Rabbie had been very striking looking with incredibly high cheekbones and almost Asiatic eyes. Chestnut curls were visible under his beret. “He modelled in his teens, you know? His father was Chinese-Malay.”
“He must have had them lining up down the street.”
“Oh, of course.” She gave another of her sad smiles.
“Thank you for telling me that, Katrina,” I said sincerely. “I hope the fresh start in Lilbury will be helpful for you. For all its quirks, I decided to stay here after Tarquin and all that, and I’m glad that I did.”
“Yes,” she said. “Lilbury’s been just what I needed.” She smiled. “I like you, Arden. You’re one of the good ones. I’m glad you haven’t got too mixed up in all this nasty business. Best you keep it that way.”
She put the photo of her son back down, and his eyes looked up at me as his mother fussed, tending to my wounds.