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.
It was Magnus who was left to deal with it. He rolled Catriona up in the rug and took her into his room. There was blood but not so much of it. He put the doll and the rabbit back in the box under his bed. When people came looking for Catriona he was out in the garden, slicing up the weeds with his long handled hoe. No, she's not been here. And when they came back later and asked his mother she told them the same thing. No one noticed the missing rug. Why would they? They seldom came into the house.
When it was dark, he unwrapped the rug so Catriona was lying on her back in the middle of it, he untied her ribbons and spread out her hair. Then he carried her up the hill. It was a cloudy night. No moon. Raven black. The men still searching for her were on the headland and along the cliff tops. He could see the flashes of their torches but nobody saw him. They were at the coast and he went inland. Then he left the girl there on the heather, her face turned to the rain and went back to the house for a spade, a good sharp spade. He went up the hill again and he buried her in the peat bank and covered the spot with loose rocks.
It was dawn when he'd finished and 'was on his way home. It was summer then and the nights were still short.
But still nobody saw him. In the house, he cut up the rug with his mother's scissors and threw it on the fire a piece at a time. His mother stayed in her room until it was all done, and then she came out and made the porridge for his breakfast as she always did. They never spoke of it. Only when the policemen came for him and she said, 'Tell them nothing.
'That was how it was,' he said, when at last the words had stopped and the scene had faded in front of his eyes.