'Who did you make the promise to?'
'My mother.'
Tell them nothing.
'She's dead, Magnus. She'll never know. Besides, she loved children, didn't she? She'd want you to help Cassie.'
'She loved Agnes,' he said and added, though he knew he shouldn't, because you shouldn't speak against your mother, 'I'm not sure she loved me.'
'Tell me what happened that day. When Catriona ran up the hill. It was the school holidays, wasn't it? One of those blustery, sunny days?'
'I was working in the field,' Magnus said. 'Cutting hay. I had nearly finished and then I was going to do some gardening. We had a garden in those days at the side of the house where there was a bit of shelter. I don't bother so much now. I only keep up with a few tatties and neeps. Then I had greens in the spring, cabbage later, carrots and onions.' He paused, sensed that the man from Fair Isle was getting impatient, though nothing about his face had changed. 'I saw the girl running up the hill. She had a bunch of flowers in her hand. I always liked it when she came to visit and I thought I'd take a break. Have a cup of coffee in the house.' He looked up defensively. 'There was nothing wrong with that, was there? To take a break and talk tothe girl.'
'Of course not if that was all you did.' He said nothing.
'Will you tell me?' Jimmy Perez said. His voice was very quiet, so quiet Magnus had to strain to hear it and his hearing was very good. Not like some old folks. Not like his mother who'd gone deaf in the end. Thoughts were racing round in his head. Pictures of Catriona and of Agnes when she was ill and his mother braced in her chair by the fire, the knitting pin trapped under one arm, clicking away in that sad, unforgiving way she had. And of sitting in Sunday school as a boy, the rough wooden chair full of splinters that rubbed in the back of your knees, looking up at the dust caught in the light coming from the long window.
Listening to the things they were taught by the minister. That the only way to find happiness was through the forgiveness of God. Not really understanding the words, not all the words, but glimpsing the meaning of it occasionally like shapes in the fog. And later not believing any of it.
He decided not to tell the detective, but when he opened his mouth, it all came out.
'She danced up the bank with the flowers in her hand and I knew she was coming to see us. She would never have thought that she might not be welcome/
She had her hair tied up with two ribbons. . ! He held his hands at the top of his head to show what he meant. '. . .
Like horns, maybe. I was in the kitchen by then, my hands washed, ready for some coffee. She came right in. She never bothered to knock. And you could tell that she was full of mischief that day. Could it be the wind? When it's windy you see the children rushing round the playground and so noisy sometimes you can hear them from my house. My mother was knitting. I could tell she didn't want Catriona there. Some nights she didn't sleep so well. I think she just wanted to be left alone that day. She'd had a bad night and she wanted to sit and knit in peace!
'But you wanted to see the child?'
'I liked to see her,' he said. 'I gave her a glass of milk and a biscuit. But she said she didn't want milk; she wanted juice. We had no juice in the house. She wouldn't settle. Some days when she visited she would sit and draw a picture, or when mother was in the mood they would bake together. That day she was all over the place, opening drawers and looking into cupboards. I suppose she was bored. She said she was bored! He spoke in a puzzled voice.
Boredom was an idea he found hard to understand. Here in the police station he hated being locked in, and he worried about what was going on with his land at Hillhead, but he wasn't bored.
'So she left?' Perez said. 'Is that what you're telling me? She was bored so she left. Where did she go? Who did she see?'
There was a silence. 'Magnus?'
'She didn't leave,' he said. 'She went into my room and starting looking in there for things to play with! He remembered the girl pushing open the door, bouncing on his bed, her head thrown back, laughing, the horns of hair flying. His confusion as he watched her, watching the small brown body, glimpsing her knickers as her skirt rode up.
'She shouldn't have done that. Not without asking first!
'No,' the detective agreed. Magnus expected him to ask another question then, but he didn't. He sat looking at Magnus, just waiting for him to go on with the story.
'I'd kept some things which had belonged to Agnes,' Magnus said. 'You remember, I told you about Agnes. She was my sister. She died when she Was still a girl. She caught the whooping cough. My mother had asked me to get rid of them. She didn't want them in the house. But I couldn't bear to.
They were in a box, which I kept under my bed! Except when mother did the spring cleaning. Then I had to move them. He didn't tell the detective those details. He didn't think he'd understand what it was to have just one secret, one thing only for yourself. 'Catriona found them. There wasn't much. A soft toy. A rabbit. And a doll with long hair. That was all Agnes had. It wasn't like these days when the children have so many toys! 'You didn't want her to play with them,'
Perez said.’ Because they'd belonged to Agnes!
'No!' Magnus wasn't sure how he'd make the policeman see how it had been. 'I liked to see her playing with them. I was afraid she'd laugh at them, because they weren't like the toys she was used to. But she didn't. She took the doll in her arms and held it. She rocked it as if it was a baby. Agnes used to do that.
She used. to rock the baby and sing to it. Catriona didn't sing, but she was gentle with it. She asked if she could brush its hair. She wasn't a bad girl. No, not bad. She just had too much spirit. They didn't know what to do with her!
'What happened next?' the detective asked.
Magnus shut his eyes, not to recapture the scene, but in an attempt to block it out. But he couldn't block it out.
There it was playing in front of him, and when he opened his eyes again he could still see it. His mother appearing suddenly at the door, the horsehair belt holding the knitting needle still round her waist. Give that to me. Reaching out and grabbing for the doll. The girl, defiant, enjoying the scene she was making, the fuss all around her, doing a kind of teasing jig, with the doll held above her head. Not understanding, because how could she? Agnes was never mentioned in the house after her death.
Mother must have held on to the memory in her fierce, unforgiving way, but Magnus was never allowed to speak of her. So Catriona would never even have known of her existence. It's my dolly now. Magnus gave her to me.
The icy hatred in his mother's eyes when she turned and looked at him. Then the girl trying to dance her way out of the house, skipping and laughing.
But she never made it to the door. Because his mother had reached for the scissors. They were the scissors she used to snip the wool when she was knitting, and cut the cloth when she was sewing. Not big scissors, but narrow-bladed and very sharp. And then the girl was still and dead, looking almost like a doll herself, lying on the rag rug in front of the fire. His mother had raised the scissors above her head and using both hands thrust them down to kill Catriona.
Catriona had made a little sound, hardly a cry at all, taken a small step and fallen on to the rug. Magnus had remembered his mother making that rug, cutting up the scraps of old clothing and pulling the material strips through a piece of sacking with a crochet hook. He'd knelt down on it to look at Catriona, turned to his mother, looking for guidance. What should they do? They had no telephone but he could run to the Bruce house. His mother had spoken in her quiet firm voice. She shouldn't have played with Agnes's toys. Then she sat back in the chair and continued her knitting.