Twenty-Seven

There wasn’t much to go on. Twenty-fours years ago Scarlet McFarlane had lived on Methven Street in Perth and had registered a birth from there. The chances that she’d still be at the same address all these years later were slim to nil. But what else did I have? And when else would I get the chance to drive all the way to Perth and see? I was working the next day, and I had a wedding on Sunday.

I topped up with petrol at Kirkcudbright and got myself a pie and a pint of milk to keep me going—the instant coffee was fizzing inside me and the adrenalin wasn’t helping it any—then I turned north and put my foot down.

It wasn’t until nearly two hours later when I saw the sign for Stirling University that the idea occurred to me, but I swung over into the inside lane, indicated, and shot up the slip road before I could reconsider. It was a maze, like every college or hospital always is, and I looped around for nearly ten minutes, until I was beginning to feel stupid and telling myself my schedule was tight enough without wasting time on this wild goose chase. Then I saw a sign for the Sports Centre and took the narrow winding road to what must be its car park. It was a car park, anyway, and there was the stadium right over my left shoulder. I pulled into an empty space, ignoring the sign—A permits only, no guest parking—and looked around.

At nothing. Behind me was the stadium, in front was the athletics track. To either side were more buildings with parking and clumps of those bushes that always get planted around car parks, the red ones with the thorns and the shiny ones with yellow splashed leaves. Stig would know what they were. I got out of the car and stood up, looking beyond the sports grounds. The land sloped away in front of me to a row of scrubby trees—hard to tell what they were at this time of year with their bare branches. Behind them, across a valley, were more boxy buildings that must be another part of the university. I locked the car and started walking around the edge of the car park. I was looking for a memorial, I suppose. A man had died here, and maybe there would be a plaque or a little sculpture or something. In memory of Nathan McAllister, who died here on May Day 1995, in the place that …

But I couldn’t guess what it would say.

I walked all the way round, finding nothing, and only noticed the man when I was almost back at my car. He was bending over the bonnet as if looking in the window.

“Hey!” I shouted, starting to jog towards him. “What are you doing?”

“Looking for your permit and not having any luck,” he said, standing up and glaring at me. He was dressed in a grey uniform with a crest on his top pocket and he was holding a pad of forms and a biro with its lid off.

“Oh,” I said. “Parking? I was just here for a minute.”

“There’s five-minute drop-off parking over by the Alpha Centre.”

“It was the sports centre I was after,” I said. I was studying him as I spoke. He looked to be in his sixties, and that amount of personal affront at a parking misdemeanour was the sort of attitude that came from long association with a place. “Well,” I added, “the sports centre car park anyway. Because this is where that boy died, isn’t it? Years ago?”

His eyes flashed, but at least he put his pad of forms away. “You a relative?” he said.

“Cousin,” I said. “But I live in Australia and this is the first time I’ve been back since it happened. I wanted to find the spot and maybe say a wee prayer.”

“Aye, well,” said the man. “You’re nowhere near it. Here, follow me.”

He led me to the far corner, to the last space, looking out between the trees across the valley.

“It’s the longest walk to the buildings from here and the spaces fill up from the other end, so it was gone ten before somebody pulled in alongside and saw what had happened.”

“Poor Nathan,” I said. “No one ever found out why he did it, you know. My auntie’s never been the same since. I saw her a couple of days back and she’s a shell, so she is. Just a shell.”

“Aye, well,” said the man. It seemed to be his favourite comment. “There’s copers and there’s quitters. If he had thought on his poor mother before he did it, she’d be a happier woman today. But then, she brought him up and made him what he was.”

Even to me, a stranger, this sounded like the most cold-hearted, smug-faced drivel anyone could think up if they were paid to try. If I really had been Nod’s cousin, it would have been unforgivable. To compose my face and get my voice under control, I turned away.

“And as to why he picked here,” the man went on, speaking to the back of my head, not caring if I was praying apparently, “nobody had a single clue. He had no association with Stirling. He had no reason to be here upsetting staff and giving us grief. But that’s the same thing again, isn’t it? Selfish. Like them that throw themselves under trains and never think about the drivers.”

“What’s that over there?” I said, pointing at the distant buildings, more to shut him up than because I cared.

“That!” he said. “That’s nothing to do with the university. That blot on the landscape’s not part of the campus at all. That’s the hen house.” He gave an unpleasant laugh.

“A chicken farm?” I said, turning back to him.

He laughed ever harder then. “Good one,” he said. “Naw, that’s the women’s prison, love. That’s Cornton Vale.”

I thanked him. I was so happy finally to have made a connection that I really did feel grateful. He took it as no more than his due and waved me on my way.

Cornton Vale, I repeated to myself. The prison where Cloud Irving was sent for her drug offences. Nathan McAllister died looking right at it. Moped died at the Devil’s Bridge, Jo-jo at another, Edmund died near a second huttie, Alan by a sculpture of Adam and Eve. And Nathan McAllister died right here looking at the place where Cloud Irving’s troubled life finally tipped and went off the rails forever. I had them all connected at last.

The only problem was that none of it made sense. There were no motives, no reasons, no suspects, no way to make one whole story. I turned my mind resolutely away from what Miss Drumm had told me—there was no place for devils and curses here with so many lost and so many still alive but hurting. There had to be a rational explanation. There was the car, for one thing. The car that Stig and April had heard that first night and Rain hadn’t. And the question of why BJ Tarrant had opened a school. There was the fact that Stig knew or suspected something he couldn’t even bring himself to say. There was a story emerging; I hoped it wouldn’t be the true one.

I shook the thought away and tried to focus my mind on what I might discover at the other end of this journey. Of course, Scarlet McFarlane might be dead. If she had married in England and changed her name, then died afterwards, Lynne wouldn’t have found her. But maybe she was alive, and maybe the Perth address from the time her baby was born was her parents’ place, and maybe they’d tell me where she was, or at least take my number and get her to ring me. And maybe—this was a stretch, but I couldn’t help it—everyone talked about The Scarlets as if they were a pair, and Rain/Rena Irving had said they were curled up together sharing a sleeping bag the night that Moped died—so maybe they were best friends. Best Friends Forever, like youngsters say now. And maybe in their case it had really meant something, and when I found one I would have found the other. I didn’t hold out much hope, but I pressed on anyway.

The tenement on Methven Street, when I found it, looked much more like somewhere a girl would have digs while she waited for her baby than somewhere her parents would make their home for all their married life. It was two streets back from the main shopping precinct, with businesses below and flats above and, although some of the stairs looked trim enough, this one with its scuffed paint and lopsided rush-blinds was definitely bedsits, or at least private lets. Great for transients but pretty hopeless for me. I opened the front door, went upstairs anyway to 4C as Lynne had told me, and knocked.

It took a long time for it to be opened, but one good thing about a bedsit is that there’s a good chance whoever lives there doesn’t have a job and doesn’t get up very early either, so I wasn’t surprised when eventually I heard slow footsteps approaching, a pause while the person inside looked through the peephole, and the clink of the chain being taken off.

It wasn’t who I was expecting. The woman who stood there was neatly dressed in a soft cream fleece and stretchy leggings with crocs on her feet. Her hair was brushed smooth and her face was made up with blue eye shadow and pale lip gloss. She was enormously pregnant, impossibly pregnant, carrying her belly in front of her like a snail carried it shell on its back, the rest of her looking insignificant behind that massive billow.

“I’m sorry to disturb you,” I said. She smiled and shook her head. “I’m looking for someone who used to live here.” She shrugged and shook her head again. “Scarlet,” I said. “It was a long time ago, but I just wondered … Can you understand me?”

“No English,” she said. “Thank you.”

“Oh,” I replied. “I see. Well, good luck with the baby,” I said, pointing. She ran her hands over the expanse of soft cream fleece stretched across her front and smiled. Then she shut the door and I heard her footsteps retreating again, their slowness making sense now. I imagined her waddling back to her seat and easing herself back down from where she had struggled up and was sorry I had disturbed her.

Maybe a neighbour, I thought, turning round and looking across the landing at the opposite door. I thought I heard a noise inside when I first knocked, but no one came, not even to look through the peephole. Maybe they only ever had trouble, never good news, knocking at the door.

I looked up the stairwell. There was one more storey above, two more flats in all, and I had come this far, two hours driving and two hours back again. It would be silly not to be thorough. So I grasped the banister and started to climb the stairs.

I knew I had hit the jackpot as soon as I turned onto the top landing. One of the flats was the same as the two down below—dulled paint on the door and the glue from old stickers partly peeled off again, but the opposite door was exactly what I was looking for. Its plastic mat, its wrought-iron trough on spindly legs with the plastic begonias, its polished brass name plate—Thomas—and the brass lock plate, knocker and handle all glittering to match it; even the fanlight above with its arch of ruffled net and its small bowl of dried flowers picked to fill the space the arch left bare—everything proclaimed that here lived a resident of many years’ standing, one who could not possibly fail to have a view of the neighbours whose housekeeping lagged so far behind her own. I rang the doorbell, resisting the urge to pull my cuff down and polish the button after my finger had touched it. This time the footsteps sounded right away, the soft thump of slippers. The pause as their wearer peered through the peephole was a short one, but this time the door opened a crack with the catch still on.

“I’m not buying anything and I’m not changing my gas and electric,” said a reedy but firm old voice. I could see one eye behind the lens of a pair of spectacles and below it a very firm mouth, pursed so that the flick of pink lipstick it wore looked fluted around the edges.

“I’m not from a company,” I said. “I wanted to ask you about one of your neighbours.”

The door banged shut. She took the chain off and then threw it wide.

“Are you from the letting agency?” she said. “Because I don’t know where to start. That lot over there come and go at all hours and the minute they’re in the door they’ve got the music on. Downstairs is as bad—tromp tromp in their work boots and they’ve no need to be wearing them because none of them work. None of them are up before noon and then the telly’s on till the small hours. I don’t even know what they can find to watch. And as for her!” The little woman jabbed a finger down and across the landing.

“She seemed nice,” I said. “As far as you can tell when she doesn’t—”

“She doesn’t!” said the woman. “Not a word. The good Lord alone knows where she’s from, but she doesn’t understand a single word I say to her. And that man of hers is not much better. Please and thank you and good morning and good night, but that’s it. And he’s out twelve hours a day. It’ll be worse when there’s a new baby screaming the place down and kicking up mud in the back green.”

“It’s not actually any of current neighbours I wanted to ask about, to be honest, Mrs. Thomas,” I said. “But it was a young girl with a baby, right enough.”

“Another one of these whatever they are?” she said. I had to bite my lip on the retort. What they were—more than likely—was citizens of an EU member state, and it sounded as if the husband of the girl in the soft cream fleece worked long hours every day and had a courteous word for his neighbour when they passed on the stairs.

“No, she was Scottish,” I said. “This was a while back, mind you.”

“Aye, it would have been,” said Mrs. Thomas. “You’ve to hunt to find a Scot getting given these flats these days. So what was her name then and when was she here?” I opened my mouth to speak, but before I had the chance, she changed her mind. “Look, away you come in,” she said. “Come and sit and I’ll get the kettle on. There’s no use standing here letting the dust blow in on my good carpets. For they’re no better at closing the front door than they are at sweeping the stair.” This last was delivered in ringing tones, in hopes, no doubt, that the deadbeat neighbours would hear it and be chastened. Then she drew me in with a hand on my arm, shut the door behind me, locked it, and applied the chain.

The sitting room, at the front with the big bay window, was stuffed with furniture. Good ugly post-war furniture, skinny chairs with wooden armrests and a gate-leg table with a matching sideboard. Mrs. Thomas settled me and went through to the small kitchen, shouting over her shoulder as she fussed about, making tea.

“What was the name, dear?” she said.

“Scarlet McFarlane,” I said. “But it was twenty-odd years ago.”

“Twenty years is nothing when you get up as far as I am,” she said. “Of course I remember. It’s not every day you have two Scarlet women living underneath you. Ho! But, mind you, there was never a lad coming or going in the time they were here. Just the two girls and then the baby. And then the trouble and they were all gone.”

“Trouble?” I said, with a cold, sinking feeling inside me.

“Post-natal depression they’d call it these days,” said Mrs. Thomas. She was back already, as if the kettle was kept constantly on the boil and the tray set. I hadn’t seen those brown smoked-glass teacups since I volunteered at the charity shop ten years ago, and even then we used to get stuck with them. “Baby blues it was when I was a young mother,” Mrs. Thomas went on. “Not that we had the time. Slopping around in a housecoat and letting the baby scream. When I had mine, I was up, curlers out, along the street with the baby in the pram for an airing. Cooked breakfast, lunch, and dinner for Mr. Thomas and knitted every stitch they wore. I couldn’t stand to live that laxadaisy way these girls go on now.”

“So the trouble was depression?” I said. I took a cup of tea and a biscuit, balancing it in my saucer.

“And if somebody had nipped in quick and had the kiddy away to a good home, it might have worked out just fine in the long run,” said Mrs. Thomas. The cold feeling was spreading through me. “But three times she left that poor mite lying and came home without it, until finally one day it was gone for good.”

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, it was all over the papers here,” Mrs. Thomas said. “I’ve probably still got the clippings from the Courier but goodness knows where, because I’ve been meaning to turn out that big cupboard since I put the tree away last Christmas and devil if I’ve got round to it.”

“But can you remember the gist of what happened?”

“She took the baby out in its pram, must only have been a month old the first time. Then she came back screaming and wailing saying someone had stolen it. Stolen the pram with the baby in it. There was police, neighbours out searching, the works. And then it turned out the poor soul was right outside the shop where she’d left it. She’d walked away without it and then caused all that stink to try and cover up after herself. You wouldn’t credit it, would you?”

“Well, sleepless nights can leave you quite … ” I said, before Mrs. Thomas withered me with a look.

“So you can well imagine that the second time it happened, we were a bit more thingwy about it all. Oh, the police came back, but there were no neighbours out scouring the streets, and that time she got taken to the station and given a talking to. Got a social worker, if you don’t mind, who—wait till you hear this—had the cheek to come knocking on my door.”

“What for?”

“Assessing,” Mrs. Thomas said. “Assessing the environs. Seeing if we were good enough for that piece to live beside or if she needed a shift.”

“I can see why that would be offensive,” I said, wondering how badly she was garbling what the social worker had actually said.

“The third time she left the kiddy out lying somewhere, she kept quiet, but there was letters stuffed down the folds of the pram hood, and the woman that found it lying there abandoned—away up the back of the swing park where it might have been hours before someone passed—anyway, she saw the address and brought it back again. Young Scarlet hadn’t come back from her jaunt and it landed to me. She was a very nice woman, well-dressed and neat—a lot like yourself dear—and she knew it was safe to leave the baby with me.”

“What did you do?” I asked.

“What could I do?” said Mrs. Thomas. “I phoned the police, of course. And the lot of them—all three—were gone within the week. The baby to Social Services and the two girls, I don’t know and I don’t care.”

“Heavens,” I said. “What a sad story.”

“I never saw hide nor hair of either of them again for twenty-two years,” she went on.

“Twenty-two?” I said. “Then what?”

“Then two years back I was in DE Shoes, just browsing,” said Mrs. Thomas. “And there she was. I knew I knew her, but I couldn’t just place her at first. Then she saw me and I haven’t changed much. Her eyes flashed and her face turned as white as a sheet, and it was then that I knew who I was looking at. There she was, bold as brass, helping a kiddy try on winter boots.”

“DE Shoes in Perth?” I said. “Two years ago?”

“It’ll be two years come Christmas.”

“Thank you for the tea,” I said. “I’m going to have to rush off, but you’ve been very helpful.”

“Here’s your hat, where’s your hurry,” said Mrs. Thomas behind me. “You’re as bad as the rest, madam, with those manners!”

She was still clucking and fussing after me as I pulled her front door shut behind me and trotted downstairs to the street, holding on to the banister, trying not to turn my ankle on my wedge heels, praying that it wasn’t too good to be true.