Peter May - Coffin Road

‘Mrs Carr?’

‘That’s me.’

‘I’m looking for Billy, Mrs Carr. We were research fellows at the Geddes Institute together.’ Karen knew she was taking a chance.

‘He’s not here. What did you want with him?’

‘Billy said if I was ever in trouble I should look him up.’

The woman chuckled. ‘That’s oor Billy. Generous to a fault.’ Then her smile faded. ‘Are you in trouble, lass?’

‘My father died a while back and my mother’s in hospital. The bank’s repossessed the house and I’m looking for somewhere to stay for a few nights.’ Karen had no idea where any of this was coming from. Spontaneous fiction. But she understood that she needed to win this woman’s sympathy if she was going to get any information from her.

‘Aw, jings, that’s tough... What did you say your name was?’

‘Karen.’

‘Karen. Your story’s not that different from mine. My man died, too, and I have cancer of the lung. But at least I’ve got my Billy to look after me. No idea what I’d have done without him.’ She opened the door wide. ‘Come away in.’ And Karen saw, as she walked into the hall, that Mrs Carr was dragging an oxygen tank behind her on a wheeled contraption not unlike a shopping trolley.

The woman closed the door and led Karen through to a small sitting room that gave on to a kitchen in the back. A gas fire sat in the original tiled fireplace, and although it seemed to be on low, the room was stiflingly hot.

‘Sit yourself down, lassie.’

Karen perched on the edge of an oxblood leather settee and looked around the room. Two leather recliners flanked the fireplace, and a sheepskin rug covered the carpet in front of the fire. A cat had stretched out on the rug and was fast asleep. In the corner by the window, a large flatscreen TV stood on a table next to a sleek, low cabinet housing a high-end stereo system. Mrs Carr parked her oxygen and eased herself into the recliner nearest the kitchen. Just that small effort left her breathless. An array of remote controls and an iPad cluttered a small table at her right hand, and Karen was shocked to see a packet of cigarettes and a lighter on it.

‘Not sure there’s much I can do for you, Karen. Billy’s away the now and I don’t know when he’ll be back.’ She tilted her head and gave Karen a good looking over. ‘Were you and he...?’

‘Oh, nothing like that. Just friends.’

His mother seemed relieved. ‘He’s a good boy, my Billy. My only regret is he never finished his studies. He’s got brains that lad. Not like me, or his faither. Not sure where he gets it from. But he’s smart.’

‘Yes, I know.’

‘I don’t suppose you would have some notion of why he quit?’

‘The Geddes?’

‘Aye.’

‘I’ve no idea, Mrs Carr. He was there one day, and not the next.’ She recalled and repeated her godfather’s words. ‘Never did find out what happened to him.’

‘Aye, well, he got himself a job, that’s what happened to him. More interested in earning money than studying. But he’s done well for himself, the laddie.’ She looked around the room. ‘Got me all this. And a man to do the garden. And minicabs to take me back and forward to the Royal. I canny complain, Karen. He’s been good to his mammy.’

Karen nodded her appreciation of Billy’s sacrifices for his mother. ‘I don’t suppose you could tell me where I can find him?’

A shadow flitted briefly across her face. ‘I’m very sorry, Karen, but I canny. He made me promise.’

Karen frowned. ‘Promise what?’

‘Not to tell anyone where he was.’

‘Why?’

‘Och, lassie, I’ve not the foggiest idea. He can be a funny one sometimes. He’s working up north somewhere, and he told me if anyone came looking for him I wasn’t to say a word about where he is.’ She stole a guilty glance at Karen. ‘I’m sure he didn’t mean you, right enough. But I wouldn’t like to give out his address or phone number without asking him first.’ She nodded towards the iPad on the table beside her. ‘He got me that so we could keep in touch by email.’ She said email as if it might be some foreign, and therefore highly suspicious, word. ‘I’m not very good at it. But I’ll send him one tonight to ask if it’s okay.’ She seemed embarrassed by having to put Karen off and eased herself out of her chair. ‘You’ll take a wee cup of tea?’ A distraction.

Karen said, ‘Oh, don’t trouble yourself, Mrs Carr. It’s alright.’ She started to get up, but Billy’s mother waved her back into her seat. ‘No trouble at all. I was just about to make one for myself anyway.’ And she dragged her oxygen off into the kitchen.

Karen sat awkwardly on the edge of the settee and wondered what she was going to do now. Billy would know immediately that Karen wasn’t a fellow student from the Geddes. She stood up and glanced almost sightlessly around the room, a sense of panic rising inside her. This was her last hope.

Mrs Carr was gabbling to her through the open door, and she could hear her banging about in the kitchen. There was no point in staying for tea and meaningless conversation. This was a dead end. In every possible way. She was about to turn and slip quietly out of the door when she spotted a postcard sitting prominently on the mantelpiece next to the clock. It was a Highland scene. A loch. Mountains rising up behind it. Pine forest. On an impulse, she lifted it down and turned it over. It was addressed to Mrs Agnes Carr, and the message was written in biro by a spidery hand. Hi Mum, here are my new home and email addresses. Keep them safe...

When Mrs Carr came to the kitchen door to ask if Karen took sugar or milk, the girl was gone. And so was the postcard.

I hate hospitals. I don’t know why. Some bad experience in my past, I expect. But there it is, an odd mix of feelings. Fear and sadness. No. More than sadness. Depression. And that smell. Always that smell. Antiseptic. But something else, too. Something sharp and unpleasant. If death had a smell, then maybe that’s how I would describe it.

They gave me a CT scan earlier. Looking for brain damage to explain my memory loss, I guess. They have poked and prodded and X-rayed and asked me endless questions, and now I have been sitting here in someone’s office for the last half hour or more, staring at posters on piss-yellow walls. Looking at them, but not seeing them. I couldn’t tell you what a single one of them was declaiming, or selling, or warning me to avoid.

There is a desk and a filing cabinet, and a window looking out over a car park. Beyond that, I can see the road rising up to the great interior expanse of the Barvas Moor. When you drive that road, it seems as if there is no end to it. The moor stretches off as far as you can see in every direction. Flat, featureless, except for the scars of the peat-cutting near the roadside. In the very far south, the mountains of Harris are just visible on the distant horizon. And when you have driven for half an hour, you will see the Atlantic washing up along the west coast in a fury of white froth whipped up by a wind that has blown itself in anger across 3,000 miles of uninterrupted ocean.

It is strange how I am remembering these things now. Things I must have seen and done. And yet I am still without any sense of who it is that I am.

The door opens and a man in a white overall steps into the room. He is quite tall, and maybe around my age, or older. I can see that beneath his overall he wears a T-shirt and jeans. His hair is unconventionally long for a medical man. Reddish in colour, and luxuriant once, perhaps, but thinning now a little across the top. He has a warm smile, and the freckled complexion of someone who spends time out of doors. I have not seen him before.