Chapter 20
None of this makes any sense.
None of this tonight makes even a tiny bit of sense.
I try hard to focus, as I roll along through the empty countryside.
I haven’t had anything to drink since the wine with dinner—that cup of tea doesn’t count—and my throat is so dry it sticks shut when I try to swallow.
My head is aching too. It feels like a kitchen drawer, jammed shut on its load of batteries and adaptors and ballpoints and bag clips, or a plastic basin full of junk mail.
It feels like a dented old biscuit tin, rattling with stale KitKats and Twixes that I’m trying to prise the lid off.
Sort it through.
Aileen Murdoch knew me. David, this is Lindsay, she said.
She brought David the boys. Are the kids in the café? he asked her. And they were. I saw them minutes later.
Chloe knew Aileen and she knew the story. So you’re the husband. Well, well, well.
Chloe! I try her number but she’s not answering.
Probably on a date with “love you too,” and she couldn’t help me anyway.
Because Aileen in the garden centre was a completely different woman from Aileen tonight.
The garden centre and the nursing home, I remind myself with a lurch in my chest. The nursing home where Peggy went so I could buy her house.
The house that didn’t go on the open market and doesn’t show up in “recently sold” and was emptied of its owner and all her things so very quickly.
But not by John, I remember. I can still trust him. And suddenly, I want to go home. Since home doesn’t exist anymore and was thousands of miles away even when it did, though, I’ll make do with Lord’s Yard.
It’s getting dark earlier and earlier, like it always did, I suppose, but I got out of the way of it, all those years in Hawaii.
Right now, the clouds over the Ochils are purple and bruised looking and the shadows are deep grey.
Here and there, there’s a tree whose leaves are starting to turn, not brown, not yet, but the green is fading.
The verges and hedgerows are overgrown and getting tangled, long stalks battered by rain and never going to stand up again.
They’ll die where they are, in souring hanks.
Menstrie is deserted. Two girls in hairnets hang over the counter at the takeaway, looking out for business through the open door.
There must be someone drinking at the Phil Inn—I hope so for the landlord’s sake—but there’s no one smoking outside.
Not even a dog walker lingering. And the big gates are shut at the junkyard.
Which seems even stranger when, after I get them open, I see two extra cars parked inside. Shelley comes out onto the step, activating the security light.
“Come in this way,” she says. “Poker night.”
“I always come in that—”
“He’s in a bad mood because they’re a man down,” Shelley says. “Come and hang out with me.”
“Can you play poker with three people?” I ask, as I go in through the door she’s holding open. She gives my arm a rub on the way past, as if she’s comforting me.
“I’m just grateful he didn’t ask me to make the numbers up,” she says. “What’s the matter, Lindsay?”
“Is it that obvious?” I sit down at the kitchen table, still covered with dinner dishes. “Two different things—because life can go wrong in two ways at once, right?”
“At least two,” she says.
“Okay, first, I think there’s something wrong with me buying that house.”
“Bit late now!”
“I don’t mean I regret it. I mean I think it’s not above board. Thank God John had nothing to do with it. I wish David had had nothing to do with it either. Because I’m trying to believe he’s a competent professional and so it must be square but . . .”
“But?” says Shelley.
“But then there’s the other thing. He hasn’t been straight with me on a personal level.”
“Oh?”
“About his ex-wife. He said she was this old school friend from the same class as Chloe and me, and the school friend said she was his ex-wife too. But his ex-wife is a totally different person with a new partner that’s nothing like he said his ex’s partner was like and I just don’t get why he would tell such a weird lie.
Or her either. Because she was definitely backing it up. ”
“How did you find out?” Shelley says. “I mean, yeah that is weird but how did you bust them?”
“I met the real one,” I say. I don’t have the energy to go into Sean’s arm. And my pride is stopping me from telling her David ran out on our date night.
“Yikes,” Shelley says. “Do you want a drink?”
I shake my head. “Driving.”
“Cuppa then,” she says, going to the kettle and reaching for that box of disgusting tea she nevertheless got me hooked on.
“Nothing, thanks,” I say, sharply enough that she fires a look at me. “So you agree it’s weird then?” I carry on. “It’s not just showing off, or hanging back or being a two-timing get or anything normal? It’s really off the wall.”
Shelley frowns at me. “Of course it’s being a two-timing get!” she says. “What else? He’s got a side piece and he doesn’t want you to know about her, so he says she’s his ex-wife to explain her away. Tosser.”
“But . . .” I say. I’m so exhausted I’m beginning to feel light-headed.
I can’t get my thoughts in order, but I know it’s not as simple as Shelley’s making out.
David and I hadn’t even met, that day at the walled garden when he pretended Aileen was handing over the kids to him.
“Look, I better go,” I say instead of trying to explain any of it.
“It’s late to be landing on you and I’m knackered. ”
“You’re family,” Shelley says. “Not a visitor. But you do look pretty wrecked, if I’m honest.”
We both stand and she seems like she wants to say more. She’s tussling with herself.
“Are you okay?” I ask her.
“Me? Oh, can’t smile wide enough, me,” she says. “I go with the flow. Better than drowning.”
Then she seems to realise what a beyond-peculiar thing that is to say and she starts getting bustly, clearing the table and making good night and mind-how-you-go noises.
“I recommend it,” she says as she walks me to the door.
“Go with the flow, Lindsay. By the time you realise you’re in the river, it’s too late to climb out anyway. ”
I stop on the top step, gripping the railings and looking out over the parked cars and John’s Portakabin. “Don’t suppose there’s any chance you’ll tell me what you’re on about?”
“Nothing in particular,” she says. “It’s general advice. Drive safe, eh?”
But even after she goes back into the house I stand there. I’m right where she’s hung that gong from the railings and my fingers trace the cable ties and the holes in the lip of the big brass disc, the rough edges where the drill bit came through.
Why is that bothering me?
I know why it would have bothered Kai. He wasn’t a fusspot, not the kind of man who would repack the dishwasher or care how I folded his shirts if I was doing the laundry, but he took a quiet pleasure in a good job well done.
He wouldn’t have drilled through from the back to the front for a start.
And he would have smoothed off those rough edges no matter where they were.
But it’s more than that, isn’t it? Because why didn’t this gong already have a way of hanging up without Shelley having to drill holes through the rim, backwards or otherwise?
And why does a gong have a back and a front anyway?
They don’t usually hang off the railings on a front step.
They’re usually freestanding. Why has it even got a rim, if it comes to that?
I bend right over and look at the thing properly, at the carving of leaves and flowers, and the slight buckling here and there.
And it’s not the railing cutting into me that makes me feel sick suddenly.
This isn’t a gong at all. Shelley repurposed it but it’s actually the top of one of those tables, whatever they’re called.
And suddenly I remember the sound of my mug hitting it when I set it down, so I can see why she got the idea.
But this is not a gong. Just like that biscuit tin isn’t a replica.
I knew it wasn’t. The daughter of John Lord can tell genuine stuff from faked repro.
I march over to the other door and blat it open, not caring about a stupid poker game.
“You swore on Zak and Nicky’s lives you didn’t clear Saint Helen’s,” I say. “Why? How could you?”
John is sitting where he was the last time, a cigar held in his knuckles to keep the lit end away from his cards. I’ve got a better view of him because the guy with his back to me is missing. The other two are there though. I stall on the doorstep.
It’s Farmer George, the estate agent. And Nicotine Ned from the nursing home. I stare at them and they stare back, just as blankly, at me.
“Lindsay, Lindsay, Lindsay,” John says. “Didn’t Shel tell you to keep out of our way?”
But this is my brother and he can’t be for real about that tone. He sounds like a gangster. Not a junkyard owner, husband and father. I can’t take his act seriously, but I can’t quite dismiss it either. I shift my gaze back to the other two.
“I knew I recognised you,” I say to Farmer George. “I looked in the window the night I arrived. I saw you. And as for you?” The nursing home guy cringes under my glare and turns to my brother for help.
I turn back that way too. “John, what’s going on?”
“Not very bright, your baby sister, is she?” says Farmer George. His voice is dripping with scorn and I feel the first flicker of actual fear.
“Lindsay, let me introduce my business associates, Robert Walker and Eric McAllan.”
“Business—?” I say. “John, you’re a scrappie. What business have you got with a nursing home? Overstock?” Nicotine Ned snorts at this. And right enough, why would the sale of overstock make them all act so shifty? And how could overstock involve an estate agent?