Chapter Thirty-Seven

‘Hello, Frank,’ says Stella, her face pale, eyes huge and hair all over the place. She follows Gareth into the room, pulling the eiderdown around her. ‘Gareth says you’ve seen my grandmother? You know where she is…’ On Stella’s feet, a pair of old hiking socks, way too big.

‘My socks!’ Frank says, pointing and laughing.

Stella looks down. ‘They’re all I could find,’ she says. She makes no attempt to return them. ‘How’s my grandmother? Where is she, can I see her?’

‘I’m sure she’ll see you, but we’ve got…er…things to be sorted first.’ Frank glances at Gareth then looks at Stella. ‘I mean, she’s sent me here with strict instructions.’

‘Sit here, Stella,’ says Gareth, ‘Have my chair, I’ll get another.’ Gareth stumbles a bit as he crosses the room and tries to laugh it off. Frank looks at Stella and shrugs. He nods his head sideways, indicating the empty bottle lying on the floor.

Frank looks up at Gareth as though he expects him to leave the room. Stella’s good at picking up on cues. She’s had to be. She’s Muriel’s daughter.

‘He’s alright,’ says Stella, sitting down in Gareth’s chair and pulling the eiderdown closer about her. ‘I’ve told him. I’ve told him all of it, haven’t I, Gareth?’ She looks at Gareth. ‘I think we can trust him. Are you to be trusted, Gareth?’

‘I can make myself scarce, if you prefer...’ Gareth articulates each word carefully. He puts the chair down at the other side of the room and plonks himself down on it, a silly grin spreads across his face.

‘No need, as far as I’m concerned,’ Stella is not bothered. ‘Frank?’

Frank shrugs.

‘Don’t worry,’ Stella says, ‘Gareth already knows about the baby.’

‘Bottom line is what you’ve done with the baby’s body, Stella…’ Frank says.

Stella interrupts, emphatic, ‘I like that!’ she says. ‘Me? I haven’t touched it. How don’t you know where it is, since you’re the one that buried it?’

Frank had feared the worst and now the worst was happening. Gareth leaves the room to fetch some firewood and as soon as he is gone, Frank leans over to Stella and says in a loud whisper, ‘What if he talks? What exactly have you told him? You know he’s under a professional duty.’ Frank is very obviously trying not to get agitated. ‘You know the papers are looking for you?’ Frank fishes in his pocket and pulls out Page 2, hands it to Stella. She waves it away.

‘I already know all that,’ she says, ‘and it’s why Gareth came here. To warn me. To protect me.’

‘They’re on the scent, and that Macalinden is going on about the baby.’

‘Well, what if they are? It’s no secret that I’ve been released. It was bound to come out sooner or later.’

‘Stella! You better not have dropped me in it.’

‘Stop thinking about yourself, Frank. What is it about you blokes? You’d think you were the centre of the universe.’ Stella sounds like Muriel, that tart edge to her voice. ‘Anyway,’ she says, adjusting her tone, ‘I’ve already made up my mind. I’m giving myself up as regards the baby. As soon as this snow’s gone, I’m turning myself in and, in the meantime, Gareth won’t talk.’ Stella is emphatic, ‘I can absolutely assure you of that. I’ve made as certain as it’s possible to be certain.’

Gareth comes back into the room, carrying a few bits of wood in the welt of his jumper. ‘That really is the last of it,’ he says. ‘What were you saying, Stella? Did I hear my name?’

‘Cold air seems to have sobered you up, man,’ Frank says.

‘I was saying you’re not going to tell anybody anything, are you, Gareth? Frank here is worried, you being a Probation Officer and all. I told him you’re not going to say a single thing to a single person, that you’ve no intention of doing anything of the sort. Isn’t that right, Gareth?’

‘I have nothing but your interests at heart, Stella. You know that.’

‘There, that’s settled.’ Stella cups her hands to her face and blows on them.

‘None of this settles the question of the baby’s body,’ Frank says. ‘If the polis have already got that… Anyway, you don’t need to be thinking of giving yourself up for that, Stella. That’s not what your grandmother says. She says it was Muriel who killed Baby Keating. It wasn’t you at all.’

Stella is silent for a few moments.

‘But she said it was me. She said all along it was me. That night of the séance…’

‘I didn’t know till now, Stella, believe me,’ Frank says. ‘It was Muriel who killed the baby. Muriel lied to you. That’s what your grandmother says. Muriel never let on to me – I swear it. She always maintained it was you.’

‘Muriel? Why would Muriel have done that? Why did she make people – why did she make me – think I was to blame?’ Gareth moves out of the chair to let Stella sit down. ‘It all came back to me, Frank, that night at the Boarding House, about the séance and everything. To think I believed her, I really believed her. I thought I must be some kind of monster. I thought they should lock me away for good.’

‘Is that why you dug up the body?’

‘What? I never dug anything up.’

‘That hole in the kitchen floor. I filled it in.’

‘I never made that hole, Frank. It was there when I came here, on the day Muriel died.’

‘Christ,’ says Frank, ‘was it there that long ago? So someone’s had that body all this time. If it wasn’t you, Stella, who the hell was it? Did Muriel get rid of it before she died? Is that what happened? But why the hell would she do that? Where would she have put it?’

‘I don’t know, Frank. All I know is that the hole was there the day I came here, the day I found everything ransacked and Muriel gone and out there on the cliff. When I went to find her, she kept wailing and saying the baby’s gone and I didn’t know what she was talking about, but I see now. She meant Baby Keating.’

Frank explains to Stella what Ruby’s told him about Muriel’s strange relationship with infants, how Billy took his own life after the teenage Muriel accused him of ‘interfering’ with her, how Muriel’s father had saved her from a lifetime of shame by doing the abortion himself, how the family secrets had festered on across the years, one piling on top of the other, fragments of truth swamped by supposition.

‘And now my grandmother’s saying Muriel killed Baby Keating, killed him for the same reason she couldn’t keep me? I can’t take this in,’ Stella says.

‘Nobody knew what you knew, what you remembered.’ Frank leans forward, rests a hand on Stella’s shoulder.

‘Murdering seems to run in my family…’

‘Now, now, stop that. Stop it this minute. There’s nothing to be gained by going down that road.’

Frank stands up and walks to the window and back again. It seems to him that the room’s gone stuffy, despite the broken window. He goes back to the window and opens another. He has to bang it with the palm of his hand where the paint has stuck. Stella is sitting by the stove weeping quietly, wiping away tears with the cuff of her jumper. Frank has never seen her give into weeping before, not even when she was small.

‘We’ll never know all the whys and wherefores, Stella,’ he says. ‘Ruby was more interested in laying the whole thing to rest than finding out the truth, if such a thing can ever be found…’

‘Quite right’ Gareth interrupts. ‘And that’s what we should be doing now, if I may say so. Drawing a line under all this, so we can each get on with our lives.’

Frank shakes his head. He wishes Gareth would shut his stupid, drunken mouth. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He doesn’t know the half of it.

‘You can put all that business about the baby to rest now, Stella,’ Gareth is gabbing on. ‘That’s all in the past now, Stella. No more of this giving yourself up stuff, alright? Isn’t that right, Frank? It’s all over with.’

‘Well, not exactly all over and done with.’ Frank says.

‘I want to see my grandmother. I want her to tell me all this herself,’ Stella says.

‘You can see her,’ says Frank, ‘but not yet. I know exactly where she is. I can take you. But not right now. First we have to… We’ve got other things to do, before we go on down to Brighton.’

‘Like what other things?’ says Gareth. ‘I say we get gone from here as soon as the weather lets up. Eh, Stella?’

Stella looks up as Frank gets to his feet, scraping back his chair. She sees that look on his face, she knows this is not the end of anything. The eiderdown has slipped off her shoulders and she’s shuddering, whether from cold or emotion, Frank can’t tell.

‘She’s exhausted, man, can’t you see?’ Gareth says.

Frank paces the room, hands thrust deep into his pockets.

‘I appreciate your concern, Gareth, it’s very touching, but fact is we don’t have the luxury of time. You know as well as I do that the press rats will be sniffing under every dung lump until they get what they want. Until we can find out for certain what happened to the baby’s body, we’re up to our necks, well and truly, up shit creek without a paddle. And I’m including you.’

Gareth interrupts. ‘Now who’s the paranoid one? If anyone was going to open their mouth about that, Frank, they’d have done it long before now. I mean, man, we’re ten years on...’

‘Because Stella’s out, that’s why. Wake up, Gareth. Anyone decides to mention the séance, or the baby, there’s a load of juicy scoops those hacks – especially that Macalinden bloke – would give their right arms to get hold of…’ Frank’s voice tails off.

‘What are you suggesting, then?’

‘Hedy. Hedy Keating, the baby’s mother,’ Frank explains for Gareth’s benefit, ‘isn’t that far from here, according to Ruby. I’m suggesting that we find her and warn her to keep her mouth shut. It’s the very least we should do. She was in on it from the start, she’s got as much to lose as the rest of us. The original story was that the baby disappeared from his pram outside the house. Hedy can confirm that and…’

‘And how do you propose we persuade her to keep her story to herself, eh?’ Gareth looks worried, ‘Now look here, Frank. I can’t afford to be getting involved in any dodgy goings on.’

‘A bit late for that, Gareth,’ Frank laughs. ‘But seriously, I can make it worth Hedy’s while. Ruby’s got money. She says she’ll hand some over to keep Hedy quiet. Take it or leave it, Gareth. But it seems to me you’re not exactly in a position to pick and choose.’

Gareth shrugs.

‘And that’s about as much as we can do,’ Frank says. ‘After that, you’ll be free to go.’

Gareth’s in a corner. He’s made a mistake – a big one – and he’s going to have to do something to repair it. Harry Callahan might have thrown his badge away, but Gareth’s not going down that road. With the material he’s got, and the thinking he’s done, Gareth knows he could write a brilliant Case Study, but he’s not going down that road either. It’s time to stand up and be counted. It’s time to apologise. It’s Gareth’s turn to confess. He should go back to the office and tell Geoff everything and face the music, take whatever’s coming to him. But Gareth can’t even do that, not without making trouble for Stella, and for Frank. They’ve no idea of the turmoil he’s in. All they think about is saving their own skins.