Twenty-Three

“I’ve never so much as shot a pop gun at a sparrow!” Lowell said. He shook his head and muttered at them for a while and then roused himself. “Jude, my dearest, you need to change and have a hot drink. I’ll make cocoa while you go and get into a dressing gown, and then let’s talk this over, shall we?”

Jude shot a look at Eddy.

“She is quite safe, my dear,” Lowell said. “I admit I’m surprised to be accused of several brutal murders, but she is a teenager, and I believe teenagers have regularly charged their fathers with as much and more. Still.” He gave them both a stern look over the tops of his spectacles then turned away.

“I worked in the nursing home,” he began, a few minutes later when Jude was back in a tartan dressing gown and woolen socks, scratchy but warm on her numb feet. She had a towel wound round her head and had wiped her make-up off roughly, leaving her face tingling.

“My father wanted to punish me for the snub of my neglecting medicine. But, one! That was when I was a boy. When I was at school. Dear me, how could he compel me to take a job at a nursing home when I was a grown man with my mother’s money and my bookshop to run? It makes no sense. What were you thinking?”

“I said we needed a timeline,” Eddy said, sulkily.

“And, two! I worked in the kitchens, chopping carrots and scrubbing out pots. I didn’t have anything to do with the old people. Good heavens, I’ve no aptitude for anything of that nature. And Lord knows I could never pass any of the certificates.”

“We met Billy McLennan’s care assistant and she’s worse than you,” Eddy said.

“And, finally, three! The five people Eddy named all died at home.”

Eddy drew a breath to quibble again and then said, “Oh.”

“Why aren’t you angrier?” Jude said.

He gave her a smile that crinkled up his eyes. “I find you impossible to be cross with when you’re wearing my dressing gown,” he said. “And also, dear me, it’s our old friend the grain of truth again.” He brought a perilously full mug of cocoa over to her and set it down gently. “There was a bit of a scandal, you see. Dear me, yes. I mean, it was averted—”

“Hushed up, more like,” Eddy said.

“But there was talk. Of course, this was long before Harold Shipman.”

“Who?” said Eddy.

Lowell tutted and nodded at her phone lying on the kitchen table. Eddy tutted back at him, but she grabbed it and her thumbs started flying over the keys.

“My father was a terrible father but a wonderful doctor,” Lowell said. “He was ready to retire, but there were a few old patients he didn’t want to see swept up into the new wave of appointments and care teams. He hung on until they were gone. And of course it was a single-handed practice, and he signed the death certificates.” Lowell gave them a significant look. “You would have seen what else they all have in common, wouldn’t you?”

Jude shook her head.

“Well, my dear, of course, they were buried. No cremations. So one signature was all that was needed.”

“What are you saying?” Jude asked him.

She had barely started her cocoa, but Lowell drained his and went to the dresser for the bottle of malt whisky and two glasses.

“Jesus Christ!” said Eddy, still staring at her phone. “Is this for real? This guy was a doctor and he murdered like hundreds of people!”

“And of course the other thing they all had in common is that they were widows or widowers or single. They lived alone with no one who’d want them to linger.”

“So your dad offed a pile of oldsters and covered it up,” Eddy said. “Like that Shipman did too.”

“No,” Lowell said. “But he was accused of it. He was accused by the family of Lorna McLennan.”

“But Lorna McLennan was in the nursing home,” said Jude. “It caused a family feud.”

“Indeed it did,” said Lowell. “The faction who wanted her left in her little flat blamed the care home staff.”

“That would be Jackie,” Jude said. “She told me.”

Lowell nodded. “And the faction who had pushed for her to be in the home blamed my father. Both sides wanted a post-mortem to shut the other side up. They knocked off before it got quite that far, but by then the talk had started and there was no stopping it. Lorna’s family, unable to blame the home or to accept responsibility themselves, needed a whipping boy.”

“Shower of shitbags turned round and bit him,” said Eddy, like a glossary.

“He was horrified,” Lowell said. “He threatened to recant every death certificate he had signed for a burial in the whole of the time he practised here. It was too bad if the bodies had been cremated, of course, but he threatened to rescind every other one and have all the dearly departed exhumed and autopsied. It was a dreadful time. Such a stain on … Well, I daresay that’s terribly old-fashioned.”

“How many did they dig up?” asked Eddy. “You’d have been right in there, snapping away.”

“I am interested in the history of grief and its changing—”

“Oh blah blah blah,” said Eddy. “How many?”

“None,” Lowell said. “He changed his mind. Instead he retired, moved away, never visited the town again, and could barely speak its name.”

“Holy shite!” said Eddy. “He called their bluff, didn’t he?”

“That is what I concluded,” said Lowell, sounding weary. “I think one of the sets of relatives knew that a post-mortem would raise, dear me, yes, awkward questions for them, and begged my father not to go ahead with his threat.”

“And whoever it was,” Eddy said, “Jackie phoned them last night and then they went round to Jude’s and put the note in her door?”

“Note?” said Lowell, springing upright in his seat like a stepped-on rake. “What note? Show me.”

Jude groaned, catching hold at last of what had been tickling her. “I was right!” she said. “I should have brought all the books. I left it behind.”

“What note?” asked Lowell, sounding very stern.

“Someone pushed it through my door last night,” Jude said. “But I’ve left it in Macaulay’s essays. In the cottage. I’ll go and get it tomorrow. Eddy, I told you I needed all the books.”

“And what did it say?” Lowell demanded. “Describe it.”

“Well,” Jude began, “it was cheap pape—”

Eddy gave a long low snort that made her cough. “If you had a phone you could have taken a picture,” she said. “Get a bloody phone! Get a dealer’s burner if you don’t want to register, but for Christ’s sake!”

“Cheap paper,” Jude said again, “sticky red biro—you know what I mean? Dark blobs?” Lowell nodded and Eddy rolled her eyes. “And it said, Let the dead rest. And then listed their names, like they’d signed it: Etta, Archie, Elsie, Norma, and Todd.”

“In that order?” said Lowell.

Jude squeezed her eyes shut. “Norma, Elsie, Archie, Etta, Todd.”

“You’re sure?” said Lowell. Jude mouthed the names over to herself again and then nodded. “Because what I’m thinking is that whoever sent the note would put the most salient name first, do you see?”

“No” said Eddy. “What’s salient mean?”

“Norma Oughton,” said Jude. “Are there Oughtons still around?”

“Oh yes,” said Lowell. “I should say there are. The Oughtons own a dairy farm over towards Monreith. Frank and Peter, the two brothers, run it between them. But when old Frank died he left his wife Norma in charge and she made a good age.”

“Ninety,” said Eddy, who was studying her phone.

“The brothers were itching to modernise, but the old lady stuck with the way her dear husband used to do things.”

“You’re not seriously suggesting … ?” said Jude. “Seriously? Two men would kill their mum to get … ”

“An automated milking parlour,” said Eddy. Then blew a raspberry at their looks. “I went to a lot of Young Farmers’ barbecues for the free cider.”

“And does Jackie know them?” Jude said. “Would she have been likely to phone them yesterday and warn them that I was sniffing around?”

“Jackie knows everybody,” said Lowell. “Well, everybody knows everybody, dear me, yes, but I think Jackie was a bit of a childhood sweetheart of Frank Oughton, in our schooldays. Young Farmers’ barbecues and all that, dear child, as you say.”

“So, let me think this through,” Jude said. “That would mean … ”

Eddy, impatient, interrupted her. “You freak out Jackie, she phones up Frank and freaks him out too. He freaks her back. She goes home and collapses. He comes into town and puts a note through your door.”

“But I heard someone walking,” Jude said. “Not in a car.”

“Well, he’d stash his car in case anyone saw it, wouldn’t he?” said Eddy.

“And I think it was a woman,” said Jude.

“High heels?” Eddy said. “Maybe he was in disguise.”

“No, not high heels. It sounded like wellingtons, but small feet.”

“But wellies!” Eddy said. “That’s pretty much a farmer’s dress code, isn’t it? What size are the Oughtons, Dad?”

“Wiry,” Lowell said. “Not tall. And besides, there are wives. I remember one of the Oughton wives being rabid to get out of a cottage and into the farmhouse. The old lady wasn’t cold before they cleared it and got the decorators in.”

“Shite!” said Eddy. She threw her phone down and ran her hands through her hair. Distracted as Jude was, she still noticed the heavy silk of it spilling over the girl’s hands and flowing down. “Forget it,” she said. “It makes no odds that Norma-Oh was first on the note. I just checked the engraving on the headstones and that’s the order they died in. Norma to Todd. The end.” She sighed. “Can I have one sip of whisky? God, never mind! The face on you.” She sighed again. “Why do you think Lorna McLennan’s name’s not mentioned?”

“Good question,” said Jude. “I never noticed before because I’m working from Todd’s notes, and they stopped when he stopped. Obviously.”

“One hundred reviews to write before you die,” said Eddy.

“What do you mean, Todd’s notes?” said Lowell.

“I’ll bring the books down and show you,” Jude said. “Todd Jolly wrote reading notes in his book club selections and they morphed into a sort of diary. But it stopped before Miss McLennan, of course.”

“And then with her death, everything stopped,” Lowell said. “The end of an era. No more Dr. Glen in Wigtown.” He took a long swallow of his whisky. “It was a terrible time. My father in an interview room in Newton Stewart, answering questions. Oh yes, it got that far. Lorna’s family said he made an unscheduled visit the day she died. It was mischievous nonsense, but he was ashamed. He had nothing whatsoever to be ashamed of, but still he was ashamed.”

“How did it get sorted out?” said Eddy. “If it got as far as the cops, the families backing out would make no odds.”

“Mrs. Hewston gave him his alibi,” Lowell said.

“Ahhhhh,” said Jude. “That explains a lot.”

“Were they having a roll in the hay?” said Eddy. “Your dad and Mrs. H.?”

“They were doing a stock take of the dispensary,” Lowell said. “My dear child, life is so very much less action-packed than you seem to be expecting. I hope you don’t find it dull as the years begin to roll by.”

If he had known what was in store in the days to come, if anyone of them had known even a fraction of it, he wouldn’t have spoken so lightly of dullness, as though dullness were not welcome. When quiet days came again, it would be a long time before anyone found them unrewarding.