It was only a ten-minute drive from Bannockburn to his flat, along roads he normally enjoyed, but Connor had lost his taste for it.
It had been the worst kind of visit. She was there and she was not, as though she was in a darkened room with a single swinging light bulb, the harsh glare stripping the shadows from her mind for precious moments, then plunging her back into darkness and confusion. She had ranted, she had cried. She had hugged him, asked how he was, then looked at him with nothing but addled pleading in eyes that were growing dull and too used to tears.
It had started three years ago. Small things at first. An inability to finish her beloved Times crossword. Forgetting where she had put her reading glasses or the cigarettes she insisted she no longer smoked. But his mother had assured him Ida Fraser’s condition was manageable. His grandmother needed a little more help around the house. That was all. Nothing for Connor to worry about. Certainly no reason for him to come back from Belfast to check up on her.
Looking back now, Connor wondered how much of his mother’s reluctance for him to come home was based on a desire not to disrupt his life, and how much on her desire for him not to see his gran. Because if he’d seen her, he’d have known. Before it was too late.
Nothing much happened for the next few months. Connor would make his regular calls home, speaking either to his mother or his gran. They told him everything was fine, and he put the stress he heard in their voices down to the new circumstances they were finding themselves in. After all, Ida Fraser had always been a fiercely independent woman, her determination forged in the sixties, when being a single mother abandoned by her husband was still seen as a failing and a social curse. To have to accept help from her daughter-in-law – whom she regarded as not good enough for her darling son Jack – must have put pressure on them both, especially since darling Jack would no doubt pull his normal disappearing act as soon as things got tough.
Over time, it faded from being an issue into a fact of life. His gran was getting on a bit: she was bound to forget things. And by then Connor had his own problems to deal with in Belfast, and the issue was forgotten.
Until that night. And that call.
He remembered it all too clearly. He was down in the Cathedral Quarter of the town, trying to calm the sting in his knuckles and the panicked clamour of his thoughts with Bushmills and Harp. He’d been ignoring the phone most of the night: Karen was calling and he didn’t know what to say to her. Didn’t have the words.
But then he’d glanced at the screen and seen a different caller. Gran – mobile. Connor had experienced a moment of vertigo, the room tilting nauseatingly as adrenalin flooded his veins and burnt away the blurring effects of alcohol. His gran never used her mobile. Barely knew how to turn the thing on. He had a sudden image of her lying on the floor in her living room, surrounded by the wreckage of the table she had crashed through, reaching for the mobile in her pocket, calling the one person she knew would always answer.
He was out of the pub before he knew it, phone clamped to his ear, the cold of the night only partly to blame for the chill he felt deep in his guts.
‘Hello, Gran? You okay? Listen, if there’s—’
‘Connor, son,’ she said, cutting him off. Her voice was level, rough with tears she had long since exhausted. ‘I’m sorry to call you this late at night, but we have to talk.’
‘What? Gran, what’s wrong? Are you—’
‘It’s your mother, Connor,’ Ida replied, her voice a blunt, hard thing of extended consonants and flattened vowels. ‘I’m sorry, son. She asked me not to tell you, not to worry you, but it’s getting bad now. And you have to know.’
‘Know what?’ Connor asked, his lungs leaden, the air around him hard to inhale. ‘Gran, what’s—’
‘Call her,’ Ida said. ‘Get her to tell you, son. But please, just come home.’
He didn’t bother calling, instead booked the first flight home. Knew it was bad the moment he walked through the front door.
His mother was in the living room, wrapped in an oversized cardigan that only emphasized how much weight she had lost. She had always been a small, vital woman, her hair flame red, her porcelain skin dappled with freckles, flares of red in her cheeks and across her neck. But the woman in front of Connor that day was dull, anaemic, her hair peppered with grey, her skin waxy and parchment thin. Only her eyes were familiar, the brilliant green of the pupils refusing to give in to the yellowing of the whites.
She didn’t speak when he knelt in front of her, just leant forward and wrapped skeletal arms around him in a feverish hug.
Bowel cancer, the doctors said. She had kept it quiet to start with, dismissing it as just an infection, something that would pass. But it hadn’t passed. And now, with the cancer having spread its black, snaking tendrils through her, there was nothing to be done.
Claire O’Brien Fraser died three weeks later. And while the loss devastated Connor and his father, it had pitched Ida into the abyss.
The doctors said the stress of Claire’s death had exacerbated Ida’s dementia, increasing its severity. But Connor knew better. His mother had been his gran’s tether to reality. And with her gone, she was adrift in her own mind.
Connor went home, glad to be away from Belfast and the nightmare it had become. After a stint in Edinburgh, he moved to Stirling, using some of the inheritance his mother had left him to place his gran in the care home at Bannockburn. The rest he used as a deposit on the flat and the car. If his father objected, he said nothing to his son. Not that that was a surprise: Jack Fraser had been clear all his life that Connor was a bitter disappointment.
Home for Connor was a garden flat on Park Terrace, close to the affluent King’s Park area of the town. The street was wide and lush, with manicured gardens and carefully trimmed trees. The house Connor’s flat was in reminded him of the care home, the cream sandstone now seeming to glow like amber in the evening sun.
A narrow driveway led off the road to a parking bay at the back. Connor pulled into it, switched off the engine, grabbed his kitbag from the boot, then descended the small stone staircase to his flat. He unlocked the door, disarmed the burglar alarm and stood in the silence for a moment. Satisfied nothing had been disturbed, he made his way down the hall, past the kitchen on his right and a bedroom on his left, to the living room. It was a large space, the far wall dominated by floor-to-ceiling patio windows that looked out onto a small paved area and granite wall that the previous owners had disguised with a miniature Japanese garden.
He dropped his bag, took a breath. Switched on the TV, more to drown out the silence than from any desire to watch anything. The news channels had moved on to other stories, but still he saw the words ‘Stirling’ and ‘horror murder’ more than once on the ticker at the bottom of the screen.
He went back to the kitchen and poked his head into the fridge. Nothing. Shit. He’d meant to stop on the way back, get food for the weekend. And beer. After his visit with his gran, and what he had to do next, he needed it.
He hadn’t had the heart to tell her. She was too confused, too fragile. Or maybe that was cowardice. Either way, it had to be done. This weekend, he was going to clear out her home, get it ready to put on the market. He didn’t want the money for himself, but he did want it to make sure her care was provided for. But, with her dementia stripping her of her memories, how could he tell her he was about to remove any physical reminders of her life by packing up her home of thirty years?
He stepped back into the living room, stared blankly at the TV as he tried to work the tension out of his shoulders. He had been bracing his neck the entire time he had been with his gran, almost as though he was waiting for her to throw a punch.
He sighed, then headed for his bedroom and the kitbag that was packed and ready. A workout was what he needed. Something to take his mind off his gran, his mother and the past. The report for Lachlan Jameson could wait.
He changed and headed for the door, hefting his bag over his shoulder. The gym was only a half-mile away, and the walk would serve as his warm-up. He set off down the street, already running through the workout he would subject himself to.
He didn’t notice the figure across the road, watching him from the shadows. Didn’t hear the whisper that drifted into the night.
‘Hello again, Connor.’