Reginald Hill - The Stranger House

The old bastard’s doing indignation! thought Sam. How the hell is it happening that I’m sitting here all calm and this slippery sod’s getting indignant?

To hell with control! Now’s the time to start screaming!

But before she could begin, Mig spoke in a mild but measured tone. He found he was looking at Dunstan Woollass from a new and unflattering angle. Removing historic documents to protect your family name was a venial sin, harming no one. But protecting your family name at the expense of an innocent child was very different.

He said, “I think we may accept that you didn’t know the girl was pregnant, Mr. Woollass, but that’s hardly the point. Surely if you were as concerned for her future as you claim, you would have made arrangements for regular reports on her welfare to reach you. Even if not detailed, I don’t see how they could have avoided mentioning the fact that the girl died in childbirth within a very few months of arrival in Australia.”

The response came not from Dunstan but from Frek.

She said, “All my grandfather would require was a general affirmation that all was proceeding according to plan. If at some point, early or late, someone saw fit to dilute the truth, then that’s hardly my grandfather’s fault, is it?”

“You mean, not mention the baby’s birth and the mother’s death?” said Mig incredulously. “That’s not dilution of the truth, that’s criminal misrepresentation!”

Sam had had enough. She wasn’t here as a spectator in some debating chamber.

“Shut up, both of you!” she yelled. “You’re here to listen, not to join in.”

“Quite right, my dear. This is between you and me,” said Dunstan, glaring reprovingly at his granddaughter.

Oh, but he’s good! thought Mig, observing the ease with which the old man lined himself up with Sam. What must he have been like in his prime!

For a moment Sam looked a touch disconcerted to find herself allied with Dunstan, but she had a directness to match his dexterity.

“Anyway, all this crap about who told who what is irrelevant. As soon as Pam Galley’s boat sailed, that was it for you, wasn’t it? End of story. Happy-ever-after or dead-in-a-ditch, didn’t matter. You just didn’t want to know. You’d got things tidied up here. The Gowders must have been easy once you’d spelled it out in words of one syllable. Big trouble if they blabbed, an easy ride if they kept quiet. As for Pete Swinebank, you probably worked out he’d be too scared to talk to his dad. You didn’t foresee that what they’d done would eat away inside him till finally he spilled it all out to the curate. But even that fell right for you when the poor sod took himself off the board. And there you were when Pete got the news, a sympathetic authority figure telling him what he wanted to hear, that the best thing he could do now was keep his mouth shut.”

Dunstan was nodding vigorously again.

“You put things very clearly, my dear. Your mathematical training, I suppose. Except that you have not brought motivation into the equation. I wished to protect my son. He was a child too. Back then we did not have the complex network of counselors and child psychiatrists we have today. What we did have was the Church, and it was to the Church’s care in the form of a Catholic boarding school that I committed Gerry in the hope and belief they would steer him right, and enable him to mature into a decent and moral man, which all the evidence suggests they have done.”

He paused as if to invite comment on his argument. There was the noise of an engine outside and through the window Mig saw a pickup arrive. On it, supported by the Gowder twins, lay the Other Wolf-Head Cross. Its huge eye seemed to leer into the kitchen, as if deriding what was happening there. Thor Winander was driving. He swung the wheel till the vehicle faced the kitchen. Catching Mig’s eye through the window, he gave a cheerful wave, then began backing the pickup up the slope to the scooped-out niche which Mig had noticed as he walked down from the Moss. So, no marble Venus but something equally pagan.

No one else in the room seemed to have noticed. Dunstan resumed talking.

“As for the girl, little Pam, I did exactly the same for her as I did for Gerry. I committed her to the Church’s care, in the honest belief that removing her from the scene of so much distress and helping her start a new life under the tutelage of the Church’s officers and agencies would bring her to a healthy and prosperous womanhood.”

This was breathtaking stuff, thought Mig. Hadn’t the man said he’d read Law at Cambridge? What an advocate was lost when he opted not to practice!

“You really fucking got it wrong then, didn’t you?” exclaimed Sam.

“Yes, I really fucking did,” said Dunstan.

The echo of her profanity came across not as reproof or parody but as another strut in the bridge he was trying to build between himself and his accuser. And the process continued as, with his unblinking gaze fixed on Sam, he repeated his pleas in a low, urgent voice, discarding flowing periods and fancy turns of phrase.

“I admit my first priority was always my own family. I had no idea the child was pregnant. It never crossed my mind. But I don’t need to tell you this, do I? Your own powers of reasoning will have got you there. I put my family first, and if I’d thought for one moment Pam Galley might be carrying Gerry’s child, then she would have been family too. As you are, my dear. As you are. And, hard though it will be for you to believe it at this moment, I cannot tell you how much that knowledge delights me.”

This beat all. And it wasn’t mere advocacy, thought Mig. He means it! He loves Frek, but when he looks at her, he sees a dead end. Now he sees those same unblinking Woollass eyes looking back at him from the face of a woman whose sexuality he knows, courtesy of my schoolboy blushes, is not in doubt. And he doesn’t just want to defend himself, he wants to conquer.

He glanced across the table at Frek and read in her face that this was how she understood the situation too. Did she care? That he couldn’t read.

Behind her through the window he saw that Thor had got out of the cab and was supervising the Gowders as they maneuvered the Wolf-Head off the pickup. Still no one else at the table seemed to have noticed what was happening outside. In Sam’s case this was probably as well. Sight of the twins could only be a distraction, and she had plenty on her plate dealing with Dunstan.

He could see that the old man’s response had to some extent wrong-footed her. He guessed there was a lot of her priest-decking father in her. In a tight spot he didn’t doubt Sam could throw a damaging hook too. But neither violence nor mathematics was going to see her through this present situation.

He wanted to speak to her, but knew it would be a mistake. Later perhaps there would be a time for words of comfort and advice, when they were alone and close…

His heart swooned at the prospect.

Dunstan had bowed his head as if in prayer. Now he sat up straight. His eyes bright, his voice firm, he did not look a man in his eighties.

He said, “You will want to think about what you’ve discovered, what I have said. And from what I’ve learned of you in the short time of our acquaintance, you’ll want to confront Gerry. My son. Your grandfather.”

“Too true I will!” snapped Sam. “He can run but he can’t hide.”

Mig saw Dunstan wince slightly at the banality, but all he said was, “I don’t believe he’s doing either. I know for a fact that after your revelations in the Stranger, he suffered a great perturbation of spirit. He spent much of last night in prayer with Sister Angelica. In our faith only a priest can administer the sacraments, but there are times when a troubled soul needs the ministrations of a wise and spiritual woman.”