Chapter 19

‘Paddy!’ It was too loud to shout in the street, in a small town. But then that was too fast to run. And I’d made him stop, at least. He’d stopped as if I’d shot him. I took darting looks all around as I loped up to him. Whoever it was would know something was wrong, if they were watching.

‘Have you been?’ he hissed at me, as I caught up with him outside the office door. ‘Out to the house? To Widdershins?’

‘I’m just on my way to scoop up the girls and go now,’ I said. ‘Tell me what’s wrong. But calm down. People are staring.’ I didn’t know that for sure but I could feel eyes on me and, as I spoke, Abby was nosing a little blue car out of the carriage arch at the side of Dudgeon’s, slowing to cross the pavement. She wound her window down as Julie stepped out the front door and locked it.

‘Paddy?’ Julie said. ‘More trouble?’

‘Get in,’ Paddy said. His voice was grim. ‘Finnie, get in.’

As he bundled me into the back seat, I mouthed, ‘What’s wrong?’ to him again, but he shook his head.

‘Are you coming with us?’ said Julie, sliding in beside me.

‘Let’s just get away from here,’ Paddy said. He clambered into the front seat beside Abby, clutching the two briefcases like lifebelts.

‘Paddy, what is wrong?’ I asked a third time.

‘Where to?’ said Abby, before he could answer me.

‘Go to our house,’ said Paddy. ‘The gate lodge. I don’t want any of this within a mile of our offices.’

‘What’s “this”?’ said Julie. ‘Something you found at St Angela’s?’

‘Something I didn’t find at St Angela’s,’ Paddy said. ‘A dog that didn’t bark.’

‘So … paperwork?’ I said, sitting back as my breath left me. ‘Irregularity?’

Paddy looked at me out of the corner of his eye but said nothing.

I could feel Julie’s antennae quivering so hard the tension filled the whole of the car and I was sick with it before we were out of the town and onto the cut. The fug of Julie’s nicotine and the perfume she used to mask it was bad enough, the stale smell of Abby’s bad suit didn’t help, but the sweet-sour reek of Paddy’s panic was worst of all. I’d never smelt anything like it before, except with my mum on the worst night of her worst crash when she ran with sweat and trembled.

‘Are you okay?’ Abby asked him at one point, but he laughed and then was silent. We were all silent until we got there.

‘Come in, come in,’ I said. It was starting to spit with rain. ‘I’ll put the kettle on.’

Paddy carried the two bulging briefcases inside and dumped them on the coffee-table in the living room, then fetched the brandy bottle and four tumblers and set them down with a rap on the hearthstone.

‘For later,’ he said. ‘Abby, dig into that lot and tell me what you think.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake, Pad,’ I said. ‘Just tell us.’

‘I want a second opinion,’ said Paddy. ‘I went in cold this morning. I want to know if a second pair of eyes comes to the same conclusion.’

‘Is this some kind of test?’ Abby said. ‘See if I’m up to snuff? Lovatt never sets me tests.’

‘Just see if you feel the same about your dearest darling Lovatt after you’ve read that,’ said Paddy.

‘With you all standing over me, drumming your fingers?’ Abby said.

‘Look,’ I said, probably too loudly, ‘Abby, why don’t you go through to the bedroom. You can spread all the stuff out. I’ll bring you a cuppa. And then Paddy can tell Julie and me what the hell’s going on before one of us bursts.’

‘I’ll second that,’ Julie said. ‘I’ll carry one of the cases through for you.’ Even at a moment like this, if there was a neb at our bedroom going, Julie didn’t want to miss it. I rolled my eyes at Paddy and got a ghost of a smile in return before the shutters came down again.

Five minutes later, we were all settled, Abby propped up on the bed, fanned folders and printouts all around her, a cup of tea and a plate of biscuits on my bedside table for her.

Julie and I were on the couch and Paddy was standing in front of the unlit fire, chewing his lip, getting his thoughts in order. I twitched the throw off the sofa back and offered it to Julie. Our Edinburgh flat had been as draughty and cold as Edinburgh flats usually are, so maybe it was dread, or maybe it was the darkness, this all-day darkness that I’d never get used to, but the cold of the house was getting into my bones, and Julie’s bones were so near the surface, she must have been freezing.

‘I don’t know where to start,’ Paddy said.

‘Just start!’ I yelped at him.

‘Right,’ he said. ‘Right. Well, okay. I found out who the board of directors of St Angela’s are. That was the first thing.’

‘And?’ said Julie. ‘So?’

‘Tuft Dudgeon is the finance director,’ Paddy said.

‘No, she’s not,’ Julie said. ‘She can’t be.’

‘And Lovatt is the chief,’ Paddy said.

‘He can’t be!’ Julie said. ‘He’s the lawyer. He can’t be on the board too.’

‘Abby’s looking at the articles right now,’ Paddy said.

And at exactly that moment we all heard Abby’s voice, muffled by the two closed doors but clear enough. ‘Holy shit!’

I laughed but Julie’s face fell. ‘I’ve never heard Abby say worse than “bum” in three years,’ she said.

‘And the rest of the board are … Well, who knows?’ Paddy said. ‘Maybe they picked them out of the phone book and maybe they found the names on gravestones, but they don’t exist. That’s what I’m actually trying to tell you. St Angela’s doesn’t exist.’

‘Doesn’t…?’ I said. ‘So what has Simmerton Kirk been raising money for?’

‘Of course it exists,’ said Julie. ‘We’ve had summer gala days and Christmas treats. We’ve seen the kids’ videos. What are you talking about?’

‘There might have been gala days,’ Paddy said, ‘and there might have been Christmas treats, but whoever the kids at them were, they weren’t adopted through St Angela’s Agency.’

‘No, of course not,’ Julie said. ‘They’ve all got very complicated health needs. And they live all over the country.’

‘You mean it’s a scam? It’s a front? They’ve been embezzling all the money and now they’ve … scarpered?’ I managed to say, as Paddy’s eyes flashed. Ended it all, was what I had nearly blurted out. Been caught and punished, was what I really thought.

‘But this is ridiculous,’ Julie said. ‘Why would they have company papers if it was all a scam? What is it that Abby’s reading?’

‘Oh, the evaluations are all real,’ Paddy said. ‘The home checks and psychological studies, the police checks on prospective parents. They’re all real. But there are no kids. There are no adoptions. There’s something very strange going on that I don’t understand. I hope Abby does.’

‘Paddy,’ Julie said slowly, as if she was talking to a drunk, ‘we have a slide show of kids running on a loop in our offices.’

‘A slide show that we got from St Angela’s,’ said Paddy. ‘Which doesn’t exist. And I want to go back to something else you just said. About the parents being all over the country. That’s true. They were in Scotland to start with. All of their evaluations are done in Edinburgh or Glasgow but none of them live here now. They’re in Somerset and Lincolnshire. They’re in Wales and the Isle of Man. Some are in Southern Ireland or scattered around the EU. There are eighty-four families that have supposedly been paired with a special-needs kid through St Angela’s and every single one of them has moved a long way from where they were when the adoption started.’

‘That makes no sense,’ I said. ‘That’s the very time when you need to be near your family, isn’t it? Your mum and any random aunties? Adopting a disabled child must be hard even with all the help in the world. Why would they move away?’

‘Aren’t people’s names in the files?’ Julie said. ‘Can’t we just phone them up and ask them who handled their adoption? It’s obvious something’s going on, but we can come at it from the other end.’

‘I tried,’ Paddy said. Before he could say more, the door opened. Abby was standing there with a sheet of paper in her hand. It fluttered because she was shaking.

‘I don’t get it,’ she said. ‘What does this mean? It all looks normal and proper, everything above board, except the names of the board directors. There’s no way Lovatt can serve on the board and Tuft shouldn’t be fundraising if she’s their finance officer. But never mind that. I don’t understand why everything just stops. All the pre-adoption stuff looks fine and then it all just … stops. They all … disappear off the radar.’

‘We were just saying,’ Julie said. ‘We need to start at the other end. With the parents.’

‘And I was saying I tried,’ Paddy said. ‘That’s what I was doing all morning, as soon as I realised something was seriously wrong. I picked the most unusual names and tried to find numbers for them. And when that didn’t pan out I tried to find Facebook pages or Twitter accounts. Instagram. Then I looked for them on the forums they might have joined. Cerebral palsy, muscular dystrophy, whatever. Couldn’t find a single one. Eighty-four families and not a single member of a single one has a personal or professional website, a social-media account, or a mention in the press. They don’t exist. St Angela’s doesn’t exist. And I have no idea why not.’

Abby came in and sat down in the armchair. ‘What will we do? Call the police?’

‘We were going to the house to make sure they’d really skipped,’ said Julie. ‘Will we still do that?’

Paddy looked at me, waiting for me to weigh in. Something was bothering me. Something he’d just said had snagged on a little nick in my mind somewhere. I stared at him, trying to bring it to the surface. Social media? Was that it?

‘None of them moved to Brazil?’ I said. But that wasn’t it either.

Then it came to me in a rush. Muscular dystrophy and cerebral palsy. The online forums. That really was a good place to look for someone who’d been missing for years.

‘One of them’s real,’ I said. ‘There was at least one adoption through St Angela’s years ago. Two, actually.’

‘Shannon!’ said Paddy. ‘Finnie, get her on the phone.’

‘I already am,’ I said, dialling her number and trying to think what to say.

I hung up before I had punched in all the numbers, though. ‘I’ll go along and tell her to her face,’ I said. ‘We can’t just summon her, like a witness for the prosecution. This is real for Shannon. This is potentially very real. Paddy, tell them while I’m getting her.’

I unhooked his waterproof coat from its peg and shoved my feet in my big socks into his wellies. Then I left, pulling the door closed behind me. It was true what I had said about Shannon. If the story of St Angela’s was chapter after chapter of adoptions that hadn’t happened and children who’d disappeared forever, then the lead she believed she had on finding her brother had just evaporated.

The rain was getting determined now. I put my hood up, my head down, my hands deep in Paddy’s coat pockets, and scurried out between the gateposts and along the puddling lane to Shannon’s cottage. It was wetter than you’d think it could get when there were trees so close on either side. Shouldn’t they give some protection? Or did the rain collect on their branches and funnel down even harder into the gap between them? It felt that way: a curtain of rain I had to push my way through, only to find another wave of it and another. I blew upwards to get rid of the droplet on the end of my nose.

There were so many different kinds of cold in Simmerton. There was the middle-of-the-night bone-chilling cold, when Paddy’s muttering disturbed me and getting up for a pee was such a torture, getting back into bed so luxurious. Then there was the crisp morning chill that felt as refreshing as splashing your face. This soaking, seeping cold was something else. It was airless and lifeless, making me fight for each breath, as though I was gulping something heavier than oxygen down into me and pushing it out again. And all the smells of the forest seemed to grow plump on this dead seeping cold: the wet earth; the sharp stink of pine; the bad-breath belch of everything slowly breaking down under there in the dark of the trees. My stomach rolled. Mushrooms, Shannon had said. Bags of rotting leaves, Mr Sloan had said. Don’t ask, Paddy had said. Don’t make me tell you.

I heard the dogs before I saw them, high-pitched yips and busy panting. Mr Sloan was just closing his front door, juggling the keys, the leads and the poo bags. Making a proper job of it too, turning the mortis lock and trying the handle to check it was locked.

‘Hiya,’ I called. ‘They keep you at it, don’t they?’

The terriers nearly pulled him off his feet trying to get to me.

‘Best thing about owning a dog,’ he said. ‘Gets you out of the house twice a day, come rain or shine. Where are you off to?’

‘Just being neighbourly,’ I said. ‘Going to pop in on—’

‘You can’t come in here,’ he told me, his voice rising. ‘Myna’s making jam. She can’t be disturbed when she’s got jam boiling.’

‘Her ankle’s all better then?’ I said.

‘Even I’m banished on jam days,’ he said. ‘My, but it’s worth it. Rhubarb and ginger from our own rhubarb. I’ll drop you in a pot when it’s labelled up.’

‘Lovely,’ I said. ‘Doesn’t she mind being locked in?’

‘She doesn’t like to be disturbed when I’m not there,’ he said. ‘So don’t you go thinking—’

‘It’s Shannon’s I’m headed for,’ I said. ‘Have a nice walk.’

‘That I will,’ he said, though he still looked rattled.

‘Did you catch the gardener up at Widdershins?’ I asked. ‘You were going to see if he knew about this Brazil trip.’

‘I’ll need to get on,’ was all the answer I got. ‘Bracken here’s got her legs crossed and I don’t like them going in the garden. If you’ll excuse me.’

I let him go and watched him until the dark swallowed his pale anorak and the two little straw-coloured blobs of dog. I hoped it really was Mrs Sloan’s choice to live as quietly as she did.

But I needed to forget Mrs Sloan and think about Shannon. She was definitely in. The old windows had steamed up with condensation and the lamplight behind them was a bleary glow. The chimney was smoking too, the rain turning the sweet smell of burning wood into something rank.

She answered the door before I’d even knocked. ‘Saw you coming,’ she said. ‘Come in, come in. Take that wet coat off.’ She sniffed and swallowed. I didn’t know if she had a cold or had been crying: those sunglasses hid so much.

I sniffed too, coming from the soaking cold into the fug of the woodstove. The incense was even stronger, and the curry smell was sweeter, with something eggy underneath it. But it faded when we were in the living room with the door closed. Shannon sat down and picked up the lumpy knitting on the round needle. It was six inches longer than it had been yesterday and I thought what a cosy life it was, living in this snug little cottage, with the radio burbling and her knitting. She should have a cat. Or a couple of dogs, like Mr Sloan, as well as her chickens. Something to curl up with that she didn’t kill for the pot. Her couch was clear today, the bedding folded neatly on a stool in the corner. I had a flush of guilt for embarrassing her and spoiling such a harmless little treat as a duvet and DVD habit.

‘Well?’ she said.

I hadn’t realised how long I’d been sitting there in silence. When I started speaking, what came out was as big a surprise to me as it was to Shannon. ‘Paddy was adopted out of the care system, like I told you. And he kept it quiet. So did his mum. And then he got this partnership pretty young. Too young, if we’re honest. And too easily, after kind of a rough patch. Then I got offered this job. That was a bit of a turn-up too. Like you said. Remember? That deacons were usually in troubled parishes. Not places like Simmerton. So, when I tell you what I’m going to tell you, don’t think I’m not involved in it somehow. I’m not meddling in your business. Or not yours alone. It’s my business too.’

‘Have you found something out?’ Shannon said. ‘About Sean.’

‘Indirectly. Just listen and then you tell me.’

I relayed everything Paddy had discovered, and what Abby made of it. Shannon did listen. She took her glasses off once and wiped her eyes, but she listened without interrupting.

‘What’s so special about us two, then?’ she said, when I had finished. ‘If most of the adoptions fell through before the placements were complete, how come I got my lovely mum and my happy home? What’s it all about, Finnie? Do you see what the pattern is? Because I’m damn sure I don’t.’

I shook my head. ‘We’re going to have to hand it all over to the cops anyway.’

‘No!’ said Shannon. ‘Won’t that mean Dudgeon, Dudgeon and Lamb closes down?’

‘Probably,’ I said.

‘So Paddy loses his job?’

‘Yep, and my job’s a goner anyway.’

‘Don’t you want to try to … weather it?’ she said.

I stared. Wouldn’t she crawl over hot coals to get answers? Why would two strangers’ jobs count in her reckoning?

‘Anyway, is it definitely a police matter?’ she said.

So that was the problem, was it? Shannon didn’t think her life would stand up to official scrutiny. I could hardly judge her for that.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘There’s corporate irregularity going on, if nothing else. St Angela’s is as bent as a three-pound note, obviously. And if we can prove that Lovatt and Tuft have gone for good—’ I stopped myself. It’s unsettling the way the stories we tell ourselves take hold. I was halfway to believing what everyone else believed, forgetting what I’d seen with my own eyes. ‘If they’ve really gone,’ I went on, ‘the cops will be able to start looking at the financial irregularities too.’

‘You think Tuft embezzled all the funds that were raised?’

‘They can’t have charged the adopters,’ I said, ‘can they? Not if they never handed over any kids.’

‘I don’t know,’ Shannon said. ‘Maybe the fee’s for hours of work, regardless of outcome. Like a private detective.’

‘But if it’s a charity, do they actually charge at all?’

‘I don’t know that either,’ she said. She was silent for a moment. ‘What’s it all about?’ she went on at last. ‘Most scams, you can see what the scam is. What’s the scam here? What’s the point?’

I shook my head. ‘It’s got to be something to do with what happened to Lovatt’s family,’ I said. ‘It’s too much of a coincidence that someone loses his kids like that because of a parent that can’t deal with her health problems and theirs, then spends the rest of his life helping kids with serious health conditions find new parents. Or pretending to.’

‘I suppose,’ said Shannon. Then she stopped talking and gave me a look I couldn’t have fathomed with a week to ponder it. ‘Don’t laugh,’ she said.

‘Unlikely.’

‘And don’t tell anyone I said it.’

I flicked my dog-collar. The starch made a stiff ping and she smiled.

‘That’s definitely what happened?’ she said. ‘It was definitely Lovatt’s ex-wife – whatever her name was – who killed the kids and herself, and not that Lovatt killed all of them?’

Immediately, I could feel the pull of it. Whoever it was had had a motive, and revenge is as good a motive as any. But what about the decades in between?

That was bothering Shannon too. ‘If we’re right, though,’ she said, ‘we’re saying he atoned all these years by running an adoption agency.’

‘Fake adoption agency,’ I said. ‘Which makes no sense.’ I wished it did because the other idea tugging me towards it was worse by far. ‘There’s another possibility,’ I went on at last. ‘But I don’t want to talk about it.’

Shannon quirked her head, considering me. When the idea hit her, her mouth fell open a little and her lip trembled. ‘You mean,’ she said, in a small voice, ‘he started out by killing his wife and children because they had Huntington’s and got a … taste for it?’

‘That’s what I mean,’ I said. ‘Angel of Death. If you were that kind of monster, getting access to children no one wan—’ I couldn’t say it. ‘Well, setting up a fake adoption agency would be a good first step.’

‘But it’s not possible.’ Shannon’s voice was so soft now I was basically lip-reading.

‘No,’ I said, feeling the relief flood through me and leave me tingling. ‘Of course it’s not. There has to be a plainer answer. That’s why I came to you. Because you don’t fit any of the worst patterns, do you? Lovatt did the legal work for your adoption and here you are.’

‘But it would explain something.’ She was on her feet, stowing her knitting in a bag by her chair and kicking off her slippers. ‘It would explain why they’ve scarpered.’

I nodded. It would explain why whoever it was had hated Lovatt and Tuft enough to kill them too. We needed to have their bodies discovered, get the police onto this and all of it would unravel. And when whoever it was was found – if it was the relative of some lost child – they’d probably get a therapist, a bit of community service and a round of applause. I know that’s what I’d vote for if I was on the jury.

I was deep in this daydream when Shannon dropped the bomb. She was pulling on her boots and winding one of her long scarves round her neck, changing her indoor cap for a waterproof hat with a brim all round.

‘I can think of an even better way to connect his own kids dying with all those other ones,’ she said. ‘Better than the Angel of Death thing.’

‘What?’

‘He got rid of his ex-wife and two kids that were doomed to Huntington’s?’

‘The story is she killed herself and them.’

‘Bear with me. So he sets up an adoption agency to place children who’re hard to find homes for. Disabled children. Unwanted children. They go through all the motions and … he sounds the parents out.’

‘Sounds them out about what?’ I said, even though deep down I thought I knew.

‘A permanent solution,’ Shannon said.

‘No,’ I said. ‘No one would do that. No one would even think that in their darkest moment.’

‘You sure?’ Her mirror lenses showed my face to me, owlish and stupid-looking. ‘You telling me you’ve never seen anything in your life that rotten?’

My head was starting to pound. I’d seen something only days ago that was worse than I could fathom but violence is quick. What Shannon was hinting at, with a half-smile on her face, was slow and careful and had to be impossible.

‘What about the parents who said no?’ I asked, hating how desperate my voice sounded. ‘Some of them would be bound to say no.’

Shannon was nodding, the smile spreading across her face. ‘Early on, I’m sure. While they were finding their way. Then they’d get a feel for it, don’t you think?’

‘But Paddy didn’t find anyone.

‘From the early years – when more kids really did get adopted – there’s more chance of the names having changed. Divorces, deaths, kids renamed in their new families. It would be easy for a few successful cases to slip through Paddy’s search. And then later on, when Lovatt and Tuft got better at identifying clients who’d be interested in their service – their real service, I mean, not the cover story – of course there aren’t any records. Of course those people changed their names.’

I closed my eyes, sick and dizzy just from the thought of it. I could remember Tuft saying how she approved of the morning-after pill, but not of scans and testing. I’d thought she meant that Lovatt’s children had deserved a life. Maybe she meant their supply was drying up. She couldn’t, though. No one could. It was unthinkable.

‘Why are you grinning?’ I said, when I finally opened my eyes again

‘Because here I am,’ said Shannon. ‘Even if it’s true, here I am. Living, breathing proof that my birth mother said no to Lovatt’s offer. And that means Sean is still alive.’ I tried to smile back at her. ‘Are you okay?’ she asked me.

I hadn’t realised I was rubbing my temples. ‘Just a headache,’ I said. ‘I need some fresh air maybe.’

I stood up and started buttoning myself back in, pulling my hood down close around my face, to scurry the few hundred yards to the lodge. Then I did what I had done the last time. Confused by the nooks and crannies of that cluttered little cottage, with its draped curtains, I went to the wrong door. I swear it was an accident. But I saw the flash in Shannon’s eyes, as I turned the handle.

‘It’s locked,’ she said. ‘Lot of expensive equipment.’

‘For your online video-streaming business,’ I said.

‘Look, I know we’ve been thrown together,’ Shannon said, ‘but when you get right down to it, I barely know you.’

‘Hey!’ I said, hands up and stepping back. ‘Don’t let the dog-collar fool you. I don’t care what you’re doing in there. I’ve got bigger things to worry about than anything behind that door.’