To look at, Simmerton Parish Church was pretty typical early Victorian. Short steeple, double doors, stained glass. There’s one in every town, left over from when the Church of Scotland was the biggest cheese around. Back in those days, the only competition was some wee St Joe’s or Our Lady, half the size and none of the swagger. These days, Joe and Mary are doing fine, Muhammad too, peace be upon Him, and all those Protestant churches are feeling the chill. They hang on as places of worship in towns like this, or get turned into climbing gyms where gentrification sweeps through, carpet shops where it doesn’t.
Sometime in the seventies, at a guess, Simmerton had bought up the plot next door and added an ugly brick hall. Then, within the last decade from the look of it, they had bought the plot on the other side and built a glass and steel extension for a charity shop and café.
When I came down for my interview the place had been deserted, shop and café closed, hall empty. Too late for Brownies and too early for AA. But it was humming with life this morning. It soothed me. I could hear voices in the vestry, the familiar sound of the minister talking someone down from misery or outrage. Music seeped out from the hall, loud and simple, made for babies to clap-a-handies to. And, in the café, there was my rich seam, at the table nearest the service area, with folders open and sheets of notebook paper ripped out and crumpled up. There was no mistaking a church committee. It was so ordinary and so familiar ‒ so much part of life where things make sense and elderly devoted couples don’t hack each other to shreds with knives ‒ that my throat ached with swallowed howls.
‘Finnie!’ said the only man there, standing and coming towards me with his hand out. ‘I recognise you from your mug shot.’ The minister had asked for a close-up and I guessed he had put something in the parish letter or maybe even stuck me up on a notice-board.
‘Here we were, thinking if you were late today we could have ourselves sorted before you came!’ said a small woman, almost completely round except for her little legs and little short arms that looked as if she wouldn’t be able to clasp them across her front.
‘Are you elders?’ I addressed the question to the last of the three, Shannon, my neighbour, who was sitting at the foot of the table, knitting something lumpy and porridge-coloured on a circular needle.
‘Ho!’ said the round woman. ‘No, we’re the volunteers, aren’t we, Adam?’
‘We are the volunteers,’ the man agreed. ‘I’m Adam Webb. This is my lady wife, Sonsie. And Shannon Mack.’
‘Yes, I met Shannon yesterday.’ I smiled and sat down in the empty chair opposite her. The head of the table, more or less. ‘You’re the committee who raised the funds to pay for my job for its first year? Shannon, yesterday you were asking me what a deacon does. Were you … Were you checking up on me?’
Sonsie – if that could actually be her name in a million years – started rumbling. But Shannon put down her knitting and laughed. ‘I’ve only been on the committee for seven minutes,’ she said. ‘Adam and Sonsie weren’t even sure if they could vote me on, just their two selves. I liked what you said yesterday. I didn’t know there was anything like that going on here. But when you told me there was, I decided I wanted in.’
I could have wept. That was the quickest I’d ever recruited a volunteer in my puff and it was all for nothing. By the time the truth came out about Lovatt and Tuft, this parish would be in ruins.
‘You’ve done a grand job for such a small committee,’ I said, turning away from Shannon. Adam smoothed his moustache with the side of one index finger, but not in a villainous way. I thought he was comforting himself. His wife looked angry.
‘We’re not that small,’ she said. ‘There’s someone missing. Mrs Dudgeon is the chair but she’s … in the wind.’
‘Dudgeon?’ I said. ‘The same Dudgeon as the lawyer? My husband told me he’d sloped off on a posh holiday.’
‘I could kill the both of them!’ Sonsie burst out.
I had done so well, keeping my mind from coiling up the drive and into Widdershins that morning. The vision of them was beginning to loosen its grip on me and, as long as I didn’t think about it, I could almost forget they were up there. But Sonsie’s words smashed through it all. I felt sweat prick at my lip and my brow, and I knew my hands, splayed on the table, were seeping a dark print onto its pale surface. I couldn’t move them, but sitting there like I was at a séance wasn’t much better. And Shannon was watching me, her knitting abandoned in her lap. If I fainted again, there was no chance of her believing I was okay.
‘Sonia!’ her husband said. At least the name made sense now.
‘Ocht, I don’t mean it,’ Sonsie said. Shannon had started knitting again. I leaned forward, pretending to be fascinated by the pattern but really wiping away my handprints with my jacket sleeve. I was wearing my God suit, plain black with a dog-collar. It comforted me like Adam’s trim moustache did him. ‘I’m very fond of Tuft,’ Sonsie went on. ‘That’s Mrs Dudgeon’s name, Finnie. Tuft. She’s been good to Simmerton. And she saved Lovatt’s life, more or less.’
There it was. The story Shannon hadn’t told me. The story Julie hadn’t told me.
‘Sonsie, there’s no need—’ Adam began.
‘There’s every need,’ his wife said. ‘Finnie needs to know what she’s dealing with. If you don’t want to hear it, you can go and do something else. There’s three boxes to be sorted before the shop opens.’
Adam wasted no time getting out of the room. His crêpe-soled shoes squeaked across the café floor and we heard him speed up as he headed towards the other end of the annexe.
Sonsie laughed. ‘Adam doesn’t trust the shop volunteers. Three years ago someone took delivery of a box of coasters with a cracked one and they glued it instead of returning it. He nearly had a fit.’
‘Army background?’ I said. There was something about the little moustache and the twinkling short hair above his shirt and tie.
‘Worse,’ said Sonsie. ‘Bank manager. I’m his second wife. We’re just like Lovatt and Tuft that way. Except there’s no heroics. Adam did a painting class at night school and I was the life model. Three years after his first wife ran off and left him. They didn’t have children. But he’s been a wonderful father to mine and he’s born to be a grandpa. He’s taught four of them to drive and they all passed first time.’ She sat back and it turned out her arms could meet in the middle. She clasped her hands and said, ‘So that’s me.’
There was a wisp of emphasis on the last word. I took it and ran. ‘What d’you mean by heroics?’ I asked. I glanced at Shannon to see if she knew.
‘Poor Lovatt,’ Sonsie said, sitting forward again. ‘We’re nearly the same age, you know. Except I spend half my life in that dratted salon trying to hide the fact.’ She waited for one of us to praise her. Shannon gave a low whistle and Sonsie patted her curls. ‘Like I said, Tuft and Lovatt have no children. But Lovatt had children. He was a bachelor – oh, for years. Years and years. Then he came back with a wife and they settled at Jerusalem and had a little boy and a little girl. They’d be grown-up now, of course.’
Shannon was concentrating on a complicated bit of her pattern, tracing the instructions with a forefinger and murmuring to herself. Whatever was coming, she knew it already.
‘Then Lovatt’s wife was taken ill,’ Sonsie said. ‘His first wife. She was a beauty. Very different lines from Tuft. She was Amazonian, like a thoroughbred. English, of course. Peaches and cream. Clean-limbed. Yes, she was just like a thoroughbred racehorse. And I know it shouldn’t make a difference, but it does.’
‘What was it?’ I said. ‘Cancer?’
‘Huntington’s,’ said Sonsie. ‘She went from striding about the high street in her riding boots to walking with two sticks just like that.’ Sonsie snapped her fingers. ‘Her lovely hair. She had this chestnut hair all down her back in big curls. It went like straw at the end.’
‘Poor Lovatt.’
‘Poor Denise!’ said Sonsie. ‘That was her name. Denise. Not a very smart name, I always thought. It didn’t really suit her. She was a very well-connected lady. Except she wasn’t. Do you see what I’m getting at, Finnie? Do you, Shannon?’
We both shrugged.
‘It’s genetic, Huntington’s is. Only her father had died very young in an accident so she didn’t know it was in her family. But once she found out … Well, as I say, she was very well connected in one sense. She had lots of doctors in her social circle. And money. She had money. She had all the money, as it happened. Lovatt had the house and she had the cash.’
‘So … the doctors gave her the best of care?’ I said. I knew it was nothing so innocent. I had no idea where she was going, though. If I’d known I would have fled the room before I heard it.
‘See, you’re not allowed to be tested for it until you’re eighteen,’ Sonsie said. ‘There’s no cure anyway. And some people say, “Why find out? Why meet trouble halfway?” Well, Denise Dudgeon saw it differently. She didn’t think she’d still be alive, or at least not compos mentis, when the children were eighteen. So she leaned on her doctor friends and she had the tests done.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Were they okay?’
Shannon’s knitting had slipped off her lap onto the floor and she hadn’t noticed.
‘They weren’t,’ Sonsie said. She had tears in her eyes. ‘They both had the gene.’ I sucked my breath in over my teeth. ‘So one night, when Lovatt was away from home, she gave them each some sleeping tablets and she took some sleeping tablets and then she lay down with them and set the bed alight with paraffin. She burned Jerusalem House back to the stone.’
I couldn’t breathe.
‘Wickedness,’ said Shannon. ‘They could have found a cure by the time the children showed symptoms. I mean, they haven’t. But she wasn’t to know that.’
I gulped at the air but my throat was closed. It made sense now – Lovatt’s specialism, Tuft’s fundraising. St Angela’s. He had seen his own wife kill his children instead of letting someone stronger look after them. That would be enough to turn any man’s life into a mission. It made sense of something Tuft had said too, about scans and genetic testing and how she loathed them.
‘And because it was suicide,’ Sonsie was saying, ‘the insurance wouldn’t even pay out on the house. That’s why Lovatt and Tuft live up in the dower house by you, Finnie. Finnie? Are you okay?’
I balled my fist and used it to thump myself in the middle of my chest. The shock of it kick-started my breathing.
‘Oh, that poor, poor woman,’ I said.
‘Tuft?’ said Sonsie.
‘Denise,’ I said. ‘She must have been in such torment.’
None of us had noticed the door opening. The minister made all three of us jump with his pulpit voice.
‘Sonsie,’ he thundered. ‘I’m ashamed of you.’