The Turn of the Key(73)

“But . . . the poison garden,” I said slowly. “They did just ignore that, right?”

“The poison garden?” He looked at me, startled. “How do you know about that?”

“The girls took me in,” I said shortly. “I didn’t know what it was at the time. But my point is they’ve done the same thing there, haven’t they? Shut the door, forgotten about it?”

“Well,” Jack said slowly, “I . . . well, I think that’s a bit different. They’ve never been as hands-on in the grounds. There’s nothing up there to harm anyone, though.”

“What about the writing?”

“Aye, that’s a bit weird, I’ll give you that.” He took a long gulp of tea and frowned. “It looked like a child, didn’t you think? But according to Jean, there’d been no kids in the house for more than forty years, when the Elincourts moved in.”

“It did look like a child.” My thoughts flickered to Maddie, then Elspeth, and then to the heavy manlike tread I’d heard, night after night. That had not been the step of a child. “Or . . . like someone pretending to be a child,” I added slowly, and he nodded.

“Could be vandals, I suppose, trying to creep people out. It’s true the house was empty for a long time. But then . . . no, that doesn’t make sense. Vandals would hardly have boarded up behind themselves. It must have been the previous owners who did that.”

“Dr. Grant . . .” I paused, trying to think how to phrase the question that had been hovering at the edge of my mind ever since I had read the newspaper article. “Did you . . . I mean, are you . . . ?”

“Related?” Jack said. He gave a laugh, and shook his head. “God, no. Grants are ten a penny up here. I mean, I suppose we’d have all been part of the same clan back in the day, but there’s no connection between our families nowadays. I’d never even heard of the man until I began working here. Poor bastard killed his daughter, isn’t that the story?”

“I don’t know.” I looked down at Petra, at the soft vulnerable curve of her skull beneath the thistle-down hair. “I don’t know what happened to her. She ate poison berries according to the inquest.”

“I heard he fed her some experiment from his dabblings. That’s what the folk in Carn Bridge’ll tell you if you ask.”

“Jesus.” I shook my head, though whether in denial or disgust, I wasn’t sure. There was something inexpressibly upsetting about hearing the suggestion in Jack’s cheerful, matter-of-fact voice, and I wasn’t sure what bothered me most—the idea that Dr. Grant might have killed his own child and got away with it, or the fact that local gossip had apparently tried and condemned him as a murderer in the absence of any concrete proof.

It seemed impossible though that anyone would poison their own child, and it hardly fitted with the wild, grief-stricken face I’d seen on the web. He looked like a man destroyed by his own pain and despair, and all of a sudden, I felt a fierce urge to defend him.

“The article I read said that Elspeth accidentally picked cherry laurel berries thinking they were elderberries or something, and the cook made them into jam, not realizing what they were. I can’t see how that could be anything more than an accident.”

“Well, the folks round here would have you believe that he was—” He stopped, looking at Petra, and seemed to think better of whatever he had been about to say, even though she was too little to understand any of it. I knew how he felt. There was something obscene about discussing such horrible things in front of her. “Well, never mind. Not a pretty story, either way.” He drained his cup and put it neatly in the dishwasher, and then gave a little wry smile, very different from the warmth of his usual broad, expansive grin. “There’s a reason the house was empty for a decade before Sandra and Bill brought it. There’s not many from round here would have lived at Struan, even if they had the money to renovate it.”

Struan. The name from the article gave me a little prickle, a reminder that whatever Sandra and Bill had done to erase it, this house had a past, and that people in Carn Bridge remembered it. But Jack was continuing on, untroubled.

“What d’you want me to do about it, then?”

“Me?” I asked, startled. “Why do I need to decide?”

“Well, it’s your bedroom it opens onto. I’m not a superstitious man, but I wouldn’t fancy sleeping next to that lot myself.”

I shuddered, unable to help myself.

“Yup, me either. So . . . what are my options?”

“Well, I suppose I can board it up, leave it for Sandra and Bill to decide when they get back. Or I could try to . . . tidy the attic up a wee bit.”

“Tidy it up?”

“Paint over some of that writing,” he said. “But that would mean leaving it open. I mean, I could lock the door, but it wouldn’t be worth boarding over the inside again, if we were planning to go back in. I don’t know how you feel about that.”

I nodded, biting my lip. Truth be told, I didn’t want to sleep in this room again, and in fact I wasn’t sure if I could. The thought of lying in that bed, listening to the creak . . . creak . . . of the boards, with that demented writing just feet away from me behind nothing more sturdy than a locked cupboard door . . . well, it creeped me out. But the idea of boarding the room back up didn’t seem much better either.