Chapter 25
Saint Helen’s is in darkness. I slip in the back door, lock it behind me for what it’s worth—who the hell knows who’s got keys to this place—and go straight up the small stairs to the dead room.
I shut this door too and lock it, then I put the light on, squinting against the brightness.
It feels as if I’ve been in the dark—of rain, tree shadow, tunnels of junk, the lorry cab, the nursing home and Bunny’s gloomy hallway—for hours now.
But the bright light is soothing, once my eyes have adjusted.
It’s warm and sane and all around this room are familiar objects.
Even the smell of the new panels reminds me of home, although here in the cool of a Scottish summer, it’s fainter than it was when Kai and I put it up last time, the plastic reeking until our heads ached.
I pull my laptop down from the desk onto the floor beside me and log in.
It takes me less than a minute to download a VoIP softphone and dial, praying it’ll be that same dispatcher when I get through.
“I’m home now,” I tell her. “Saint Helen’s, Dunblane.”
“I remember.”
“I’ve discovered six dead bodies buried at Lord’s Yard in Menstrie,” I say, trying to stay as calm and measured as humanly possible.
She doesn’t answer. “I can give you the names of some of the people involved. Not all, because I’ve forgotten them, but John Lord, Shelley Lord, Chloe Crozier, David March, Aileen—no that’s a lie.
There are three more and I know where they work. ”
“I think I will request that safe-and-well check on you, Lindsay,” she says.
“I hoped you would.”
“Don’t you worry anymore. You stay on the phone till the officers get there and we’ll take care of everything.”
I keep the line open but I can’t just sit there, so I grab the small polka dot hammer with the screwdriver hidden in the false handle that I brought in here to bang picture hooks.
It was always mine, along with a pink measuring tape and flowery pliers; feminine tools that wouldn’t migrate to the workshop along with the sharpest scissors and handiest little knives.
Aching with memories, I crawl towards where the window was and, not pausing to think, I lift the hammer and bring its claws down hard on the soundproofing board, making an instant ragged hole that I pull outward, once again sobbing.
Not because of hacking at my precious dead room, more basic than that, more animal.
It’s the simple act of violence upsetting and dismaying me.
It’s the first hint of how badly I’m coming apart and how long it’s going to take me ever to put myself back together again, after this.
If there is an after this. Right now, it doesn’t matter.
I want to see that message that’s hiding behind the boards, fresh and sharp and so obviously not left over from someone’s childhood years ago.
I hate myself for how quick I was to crawl back into stories again.
It might have saved me when I was a kid, but I’m a woman now and I’m ashamed.
I want to torture myself with how I should have faced facts.
I could have saved Peggy months of horror.
I steel myself, raise the hammer again and drive another hole in beside the first one.
Underneath I can already see the old wallpaper.
I peer at the top of the skirting board and the edge of the linoleum.
There it is. I was right. There are the little chips and flecks of white, even some splinters of yellow wood, lying where they fell, where they lodged, when Peggy scratched that desperate message into the paint.
I contort myself to see the words but they’re lost in the shadow of the windowsill, in the dark of the soundproofing. I lift the hammer again.
I’ve made one more decent hole when I hear what my hammering and sobbing have disguised until now.
It’s Chloe. “You won’t tunnel out, Lindsay,” she shouts, muffled by the panels on the door but audible. She must be yelling at the top of her lungs. “You’re trapped.”
“Can you hear that?” I say into the laptop mic.
“I hear you doing something,” the dispatcher says. “It sounds like you’re breaking things.”
I say nothing, just keep gouging at the boards and ripping away bigger and bigger chunks until I’ve uncovered part of the window.
Chloe must hear me scrabbling at the glass because she shouts again. “Look out, by all means, if you’re planning to climb down a drainpipe.”
I cup my hands around my eyes and rest my head on the glass to peer out into the dark garden.
David March is standing there, arms folded, staring up at me.
How could I ever have thought he had a kind face, a warm face?
He’s wearing a sneer and his eyes look half shut, as if he’s bored with what he’s caused, as if it’s tiring him.
“Can you hear that voice?” I ask the dispatcher.
“Are you hearing a voice, Lindsay?” she asks me.
“The door’s locked on my side, Chloe,” I shout. “How am I trapped, exactly?” I’m trying to sound strong and angry, although my voice is reedy even to me.
“Not long now, sweetheart,” the dispatcher says. “They’re on their way and they’ll be there soon. Don’t shout. And don’t go breaking things, eh? Case you hurt yourself.”
Chloe is trying to tell me something else at the same time though, and I can’t listen to both of them. So I kill the call.
“—trapped because you won’t get past me,” Chloe is bellowing at me, so loud that the bass of it is distorting the vowels: “Want Gat Pahst My.” She sounds like an ogre from the fairy tales we read when we were kids together.
A real ogre this time. “I’ll stay here as long as I have to,” she shouts.
“We’ll take shifts. You’ll starve in there, Lindsay.
Poor Lindsay. Poor grieving stupid Lindsay, boo-hoo-hoo. ”
“Why do you hate me?” I shout at her.
“I don’t hate you,” she bellows back at me, but her voice is thrumming with rage.
“You’re in the Way. You’re Spoiling it. And you’re too Stupid to Live.
You’ve run away from your Phone and locked yourself in a Dead room, Lindsay.
You’ve trapped yourself in a Dead room. You’re hiding, cut off from the World.
You might as well be in a Cave, Lindsay. You might as well be in a Tomb.”
She really has never listened to me. She wasn’t interested and so she never gave a moment’s thought to my job or how I might do it. She thinks I’m air-gapped from everyone who could help me.
So it’s half because I want to see her face when the police come that I open the door.
The other half is because I still don’t understand and I need so much to understand something.
She is standing four-square at the top of the stairs, her head hanging down, her mouth hanging open.
There is drool darkening her T-shirt and sweat showing under her arms too.
“Chloe,” I say, more gently than I feel. “Why was I useful? Why did you need me to take this house from David and then give it to John?”
But even just the way I’ve put the question together begins to give me a glimmer of the answer. Only it can’t be that, can it? It can’t be something so grubby, so small.
“We didn’t need you, Lindsay,” she says. “Nobody needs you. We needed your lovely clean American insurance money. How the hell could a junkman afford Saint Helen’s? A widowed sister from Hawaii is another thing completely.”
So it really is that tawdry and that shameful. And why am I surprised? These are people who care more about the price of a house than the life being lived in a home.
“So . . . you cooked this up after I decided to come back?” I say. “Since spring?”
“And the funny thing is you’re not even kidding,” Chloe says. “No, Lindsay, I cooked this up starting two years ago, when I knew the handy widow was on her way.”
“On my way?” I repeat. “But I didn’t decide to come home till—” Then it hits me, and I can feel all the blood draining out of my face. She sees it too and raises an eyebrow. “The widow was on her way . . . because . . .”
“Brain tumours, Linds,” she says. “We were getting worried about all the cash stacking up, knowing if we really got into the swing we were hoping to, then we’d need an accomplice who wasn’t right here in the nanny state.
Of course, recently, John got greedy and decided he did want you here, so he could get this house as a bonus.
But back at the start, when John told me his little sister, my old friend, was ripe for a bit of sympathy, and I remembered what a complete pushover you always were, I decided I could probably stomach being your rock for a few months to get you onside. ”
“You’re a monster,” I say.
“If I’d known it would be nineteen months!” says Chloe.
“You really are a complete monster.”
“Yeah well, it takes one to know one,” she says.
“You’re so self-absorbed you never even questioned whether someone who’d scraped you off her shoe eight years before would be up for wiping your tears and listening to your endless whining.
Of course you didn’t. Like you never questioned why I couldn’t stand being near you and Mr. Incredible in your heyday.
‘Oh come to Hawaii, Chloe, you poor little failure. Come and marvel at my wonderful life, Chloe, you hometown joke.’”
“You-You were jealous of me?”
“I was sickened by you.” But she’s raising her voice again. She’s lying.
“Jealous of me? Of me getting to be happy? After the childhood I had?”
“Oh, don’t forget the childhood, boo-hoo-hoo. How could anyone forget your childhood, Lindsay? You never stopped bloody living it! Storybooks and nicey-nice and someone to take care of you. Poor guy. At least I got away from you.” She smirks. “Or maybe he was happy to get his escape too.”
But I can’t bear any more and I slam the door on her cackling, evil face then go to sit on the floor and sob my life out of my chest before I break in two.