Hartsend (25 page)

Rumours are spreading through Hartsend. Passed like a virus from one human host to the next and minutely altering, they are turning back on themselves and turning again, until they become quite different from their original selves.

In the Primary School the staff complain that the children are becoming increasingly excitable. The place is already something of a fortress, has been since Dunblane, with cameras, tall locked gates, and staff patrolling the play areas at lunch time, but Miss Calvert has now had to send out reassuring letters. She is certain that the rumour about High School pupils selling drugs disguised as Love-Hearts through the Primary railings is completely without foundation. Vigilance, she assures all parents is high. The security devices are in working order. All the same, she suggests that children if not accompanied by an adult should walk to and from school in groups if possible.

The bank, the chemist's, the fish-shop, and the baker's are all abuzz, and in the heart of the village, Dr MacKinnon, after a quick word with the other doctors, has asked the Practice Manager to mail a firm reminder to the admin staff about confidentiality. Mindful however of the old maxim – a secret is something you tell one person at a time – his hopes are not high.

High on the hill, Mrs Crawfurd has chosen to ignore the whispers on the wind. Besides, she is preoccupied with her own thoughts. Too much time has passed to inquire about the mystery blonde. To ask now would be ridiculous. As far as she knows, the woman has not called again, but she cannot be sure. She is beginning to doubt her own judgement. When Dr MacKinnon had said, ‘‘Duncan is looking rather morose these days. We have to cheer him up. If he took an old friend like Lesley Crosthwaite out for dinner, I think that would do him a power of good.'', she had acquiesced, but Duncan had come back that evening in a very angry mood, and she is afraid to ask why in case it makes things worse. In fact, Duncan is becoming rather annoying. She feels herself becoming tense when they are in the same room and he doesn't speak.

Life is beginning to confuse her on many different levels. A neatly ironed handkerchief, was lying with the post behind the door one morning, and the postman denies all knowledge of it. Mrs Flaherty is still unwell and has stopped coming to clean, which is not good. More curiously, the Spode ‘Camilla' sugar bowl has disappeared. Did she herself put it somewhere? A few days ago she found her pension book in the fridge without the least memory of how it got there, and just recently, when she looked at her old school photographs, she could not immediately recall the other Prefects' names.

 

Down in the Dirty Duck, where memories tend to linger, and where the regulars energetically maintain a weary, cynical consensus about wives, politicians, footballers and life's other disappointments, there is a new swelling sense of outrage. Many of the pub's patrons are underdogs, done for by their genetic inheritance, unfairly treated by fate or baffled despite their own best efforts. They, out of all Hartsend, are the ones most instinctively sympathetic, most vocal, most outraged by the intelligence that someone is preying on the children of the village, for who is treated more unfairly, who is more regularly baffled in this life than a child?

The child was found, before anyone knew she was lost, by local man Albert Falconer, aged 43, who had just come off night shift, and whose habit it was to exercise his two Alsatian dogs on the edge of the golf course before going to bed so that they wouldn't wake him mid morning. The brief exposure to silence also helped him to relax, washing the din of the factory out of his head. Albert was a single man of quiet habits, one of a family of eight children, who enjoyed spending time with his siblings and their offspring, though as he liked to say, the dogs were less bother, they went to bed when they were told and didn't ask so many questions.

As always, he carried a large torch by which to see his way, a walking stick, for no real reason except that he liked a stick in his hand, and plastic bags to scoop up the dog dirt, because he wanted no trouble with the green-keepers. In truth, he felt a sense of ownership and responsibility when he walked through the grass. He had lived in the village all his life; he and his two older brothers had played in these fields before they'd become a golf course. There was a thin layer of frost on the ground, but Albert remembered proper winters, when the small loch in its middle had frozen. His elderly father spoke of even colder winters, when the waters had frozen long and hard enough for a bonfire to be lit, and bonspiels held.

The younger dog had run ahead and didn't come when called. Its barking grew more energetic. Albert shouted again, thinking it had found a rabbit or an injured bird. When he came close, he told it to be quiet. It switched to growling. The old dog went forward a few paces, then stopped, looking back to his master, back to the young dog, echoing its low growls.

In the light of the torch Albert saw something half in, half out of the shallow stream. A bundle of clothes, he thought. Another lazy git, too idle to take their rubbish to the dump. He went over to pull the daft dog away. A second look, and his heart failed him. He knelt down, heedless of the wet soaking his corduroys. His vision blurred. Only when the young dog began whimpering did he realise how tightly he was twisting its collar. Albert had never married, never had children, but it made no difference, not with this before him. No difference at all. Not with this.

‘‘Hello, Father,'' the barman said. He was holding the phone to his ear.

The Reverend had given up trying to get the man to call him John, or Mr Smith.

‘‘The room's all ready. And the food's to hand, though I doubt you'll have many in tonight.'' The man spoke hurriedly, as if his mind was elsewhere.

This was the fourth meeting of the Men's Pie and Pint Night, held in one of the upstairs function rooms. He had persuaded Dr Gordon to talk about Overcoming Stress but some of the regulars had sent their apologies, the weather was so foul. He'd wondered about cancelling the evening. The news about the dead child had depressed the whole village, including himself. It seemed almost wrong to talk about anything else.

It looked as if the weather had kept even the usual clientele away. The immense TV had been switched off, and the background music, normally loud and pulsating, had been muted, so that the rain could be heard battering hard on the stained glass panels of the upper windows. Two women sat at the far end of the bar, and an older man was working the slot machine. All three looked up and immediately lost interest.

‘‘I'm on the phone to the polis,'' the barman said. ‘‘They're all on a mission, Father, off to deal with the bastard that killed that wee girl from. …'' He broke off to speak into the phone.

Moments later, the street door opened. Dr Gordon, one elbow against the inner door, gave his umbrella a vigorous shake before coming fully into the room.

‘‘That's some night out there,'' he began.

Smith held up a hand to quiet him, as the barman hung up the phone.

‘‘What's wrong?'' Gordon asked.

‘‘I was just telling the Father here, somebody said he knew who'd done it, they'd known him from the old days, known him for a fucking bastard, excuse my French. So they're off to Whiteford to sort him out.''

 

The Reverend forced himself to unhunch his shoulders and relax his grip on the wheel. He didn't enjoy driving at night, and bad weather made him nervous, gusting wind and darkness and the windscreen wipers at full speed making not much of a difference. Gordon's Lexus was heavier, far better equipped for this kind of weather, but the good doctor had come to the pub by taxi, anticipating more than one pint with his pie.

‘‘Maybe this is a mistake,'' he said, not taking his eyes off the road. There was a car in front of them, but not near enough to illuminate the winding country road and it was impossible to put the lights on full beam with cars coming towards them round the bends.

Gordon said, ‘‘Did we have a choice? I should warn you, though, I'm not the heroic type. My usual role in a fight is to stand well out of the way with my eyes shut. Ouch,'' he exclaimed as they encountered a flooded patch, cascading a sheet of water over the field beside them.

The minister didn't consider himself the heroic type either. His own last involvement in a brawl had been twenty odd years earlier in a pub in Malaga. He could recall little of it, having been drunk at the time, but he'd a lasting reminder in the form of back pain that recurred when he least needed it.

‘‘Hopefully the police will be there before us,'' he said.

‘‘Don't count on it. I had a patient a couple of weeks ago. Manic depressive and off his meds. He told me on the phone he was going to slit his wrists, and mine if I tried to stop him. His social worker was elsewhere and occupied, no surprise there, but the police said they'd be within the half hour. So I sat outside in the car.''

‘‘And?''

‘‘They weren't, so I went in.''

‘‘That sounds heroic to me.''

‘‘It's all role play. I'm very convincing. I should have been on the stage. Anyway, I'd seen a lot of him at the start of the week, and we both knew he didn't mean it.'' He made a sound between a cough and a laugh.

They stopped at a crossroads. Two miles to their destination, according to the sign.

‘‘You said you knew this man?'' Gordon asked.

‘‘I know the family. Not very well.'' Saying more would take him into deeper waters. He didn't want to go into explanations that involved Harriet. She had begun speaking to him again, but not with any enthusiasm. Most of the time he didn't know whether she was listening to anything on her iPod, or whether the earphones were merely a declaration of mutiny.

‘‘Mr Smith?''

‘‘Yes.''

‘‘The Doctor's asking for you. Can you come with me please.''

‘‘I've lost my hat,'' he told the Police Sergeant's back, immediately realising how pathetic and pointless this sounded. He could explain death and hell with logic and conviction, but all he could talk about here was the fact that someone had knocked his woolly hat off.

 

They'd shouted, trying to get through the crowd. Dr Gordon ploughed into them but he himself faltered after a glancing blow left him hatless, unnerved by the looping wail of sirens, the cries and calls of neighbours, the barking of stray dogs. Before he knew it, Gordon was out of sight and he was alone on the edge of the disordered mass of bodies.

Now he followed the Sergeant up a badly-lit stairwell, which smelled of damp and burnt fat and pee. Even here there was a lot of noise echoing around. He felt, rather than saw, those they had to squeeze past, all wet like himself, some with heads down, some in black raincoats and police caps, one bulky man in a soaked tee-shirt who was doing most of the shouting, and at the top, a woman in uniform, her face impassive, her one glance memorising everything about him.

The room seemed full of people. All the lights were on. He called Gordon's name and the man's head rose from behind a toppled armchair, followed by the rest of him. He'd taken off his overcoat and pushed up his shirt sleeves. ‘‘Your man's going to be all right. Probably. I don't know if he'll hear you. He's coming and going a bit.''

Had Gordon himself been hurt? His curls were dishevelled, and he was holding himself awkwardly.

‘‘That's the ambulance now,'' someone said above the other voices, and for a moment there was silence while everyone listened.

 

Gordon insisted on staying with the injured man, deferring to the paramedics in all else. His earlier cheerfulness had gone and his face seemed ghost-like to Smith in the crisscross of headlights and yellow streetlights. The wind had dropped but the rain was still falling.

‘‘No, I'm fine. There's no need,'' he told the Reverend. ‘‘You go home and get on your knees.'' As the ambulance door closed, he gave a half lift of his hand and a brief nod.

Smith tried later to think what exactly he'd done after that, and couldn't, although he did recall a plain clothes officer taking some details, and asking him questions. Then the Sergeant came over. Actually he was a member of the Church, he said, introducing himself, grown up through the Sunday School and the BB, though he didn't get along much, what with overtime and shift work and that. They'd made several arrests, he said, though many of the culprits had disappeared into the night as soon as they'd heard the squad cars. They would probably all be well-known characters. It could have been much worse. They'd used fists and boots, not knives. They might have tried to burn Flaherty out, endangering the lives of all the building's occupants. They'd been drinking but were not as drunk as they might have been later in the evening. The doctor's intervention had given the man a chance.

‘‘How did you know what was happening?'' the Sergeant asked.

‘‘We were in the pub. Pie and Pint night.''

He watched the Sergeant consider whether or not to delve deeper.

‘‘Aye well, it's going to be a long night for some,'' the man commented at last. ‘‘Drive home carefully, sir.''

All the slow, cautious way home, Smith listened to loud music on the radio, afraid he might fall asleep at the wheel. When he reached the manse and checked his watch he was astonished to see that it was closer to four than three am. Every part of him was exhausted. He took his sodden shoes off in the kitchen, went upstairs, stripped, and fell into bed without his usual scrupulous brushing and flossing of teeth. He tried to pray, as was his habit, but couldn't manage more than a few words. God and the dental hygienist would have to forgive him.

When he woke, he was surprised that he'd slept so well despite all the night's events, only to find, glancing at his phone, that it was just after five. He switched on the light. They had promised to use email and not to phone one another. It wasn't expensive to phone, but hearing her voice made the separation unbearable. He had never been good on the phone, not when it mattered. Skype wasn't much better. He always felt afterwards that no-one had said what they meant to say. Now he stared at the other half of the bed, flat and forsaken, and dialled the sunny side of the world. It rang a few times, then his father-in-law's voice, formal, but having lost none of its Scots accent, told him no-one could come to the phone, but please leave a message.