The door opened; Zoe glanced up and saw that another face was staring at her, unsmiling, in the mirror. The young barmaid, Annag, reached up and adjusted the pineapple of hair balanced on her crown, her eyes critically appraising Zoe all the while.
‘You’re the one who’s taken the McBride house.’ The girl’s accent was broad, rough-edged. ‘Brave,’ she added, cocking one thinly pencilled brow with an air of challenge.
‘It’s Mick and Kaye’s house, I thought,’ Zoe said mildly. ‘Aren’t they Drummonds?’ She did not ask why she should be considered brave, precisely because she could see that the girl was dying to tell her.
‘It’ll always be the McBride house round here,’ Annag said, with a meaningful look. She had an oddly flat face, Zoe thought, and wide, with all the features cramped together in the middle, like a puppet of the moon she had once seen in a kids’ show. Too pale for that unnatural shade of black dye, she added, in her head. This girl’s attitude seemed to provoke a mean streak in her, as if they were both in high school.
‘I’m afraid I can’t pronounce its real name,’ she said, forcing a smile.
Annag muttered a word deep in her throat that Zoe assumed was Gaelic, but sounded nothing like the way it looked on paper. ‘It means “resting place”,’ she said.
‘Oh. That’s nice.’
‘You think?’
Zoe looked up and saw that the girl was smirking openly. A strange chill ran through her as she understood. Clearly, the person who named the house had not stopped to consider its double meaning. Or perhaps they had.
‘Give us a lend of your lippy.’ A pudgy hand stretched out towards her, open; bitten fingernails painted flaking green. Zoe hesitated. Was this a normal thing to ask a stranger? She had grown up without sisters, without a close group of girlfriends; as a result she was possessive about her belongings and a little fastidious, bewildered by the kind of women who presumed all feminine items should be held in common. But she couldn’t think of a good reason to refuse without implying that she considered the girl unhygienic. Reluctantly, she passed the lipstick over. Annag stretched her mouth wide, drew on a red circle, smacked her lips together and pouted, apparently pleased with the result.
‘Why am I brave, then?’ Zoe asked, as if this small intimacy might now entitle her to answers. ‘I guess it’s haunted or something, right?’ She tried to make it sound jokey, as if she were happy to play along, but a look of guilt slunk over Annag’s moon face. The girl concentrated on the lipstick, twisting it all the way to the top and down again.
‘I only meant – staying out there on your own. In the middle of nowhere. That’s brave, for a woman.’ She reached inside her top with one hand and twanged a stray bra strap into place. ‘Not that I’m saying— I don’t mean …’ She turned to look at the real Zoe beside her, instead of at her reflection. ‘Whatever folk say about it, you didnae hear it from me, okay? Mick’ll bloody kill me.’
So Mick had warned this girl about telling whatever tales clung to the house. Had everyone else in the town been given a warning too? Charles Joseph apparently had, though he didn’t seem to feel inhibited by it. What could be so terrible that Kaye and Mick genuinely feared it might drive a tenant away? It will be one of those stories like the ones people used to swap at high school slumber parties, Zoe thought: like the one where the girl hears the banging on the car roof and it turns out to be her boyfriend’s head. And that’s what you get for coming to the ass-end of nowhere, she reminded herself: people who take that stuff seriously. But she found that, however dumb the story might be, she didn’t want to hear it on her first night.
‘But I haven’t heard anything,’ she said.
‘Then you’ll sleep soundly in your bed, won’t you?’ Annag flashed her a smile that seemed to contain some element of private triumph, before walking out. As the door banged behind her, Zoe realised Annag still had her lipstick in her hand. She considered going after her, asking for it back, but decided against it. There was no point making an enemy of this girl, who already seemed to resent her presence. But if she was honest, it was because Annag reminded her of the hard-faced girls who had given her hell in high school, and she despised herself for her own cowardice. She made a note to stay out of the barmaid’s way as far as possible. Out of everyone’s way. She caught her reflection’s eye with weary contempt, and slowly wiped away the bright slash of lipstick with a tissue.
Even in the dark, the house looked imposing. Mick had installed motion-sensor security lights at the front; a white glare leapt out of the blackness like a prison searchlight as the Land Rover descended the last slope and rounded the curve of the drive, Mick raising a hand to shield his eyes and swearing under his breath. They lit up a rambling house of three storeys, tall Gothic windows along the first floor, diamond-paned glass, pointed eaves over the windows in the attic, several tall chimneys and a hexagonal turret jutting up from the roof. A warm light glowed from one of the windows on the ground floor. As Zoe swung herself down on to the gravel, she could hear the booming of waves in the darkness beyond the house.
‘Kaye’s left you a few bits and bobs – bread and milk and whatnot,’ Mick said, lifting her suitcase down from the trunk. ‘Should see you right for breakfast. She’s done a wee folder too, telling you where to find everything – it’s got our number on and a few others you might need. I was thinking I could come by tomorrow before lunch and show you the other stuff. How the generator works, where we store the logs, all that business. Then, if you like, I’ll bring you into town so you can go to the supermarket.’
Zoe murmured her thanks, only half listening. She craned her neck and stared up at the night sky. A brisk wind chivvied scraps of cloud across the face of the moon; behind them, an extravagant scattering of stars glittered across ink blue wastes. The seabirds sounded subdued here, their cries reproachful. ‘Why do people call it the McBride house?’
Mick froze, for a heartbeat, in the act of setting down her art case. ‘McBride was the fella who built it, back in 1860.’ He sounded unusually stiff.
‘Was he a relative?’
‘He married my great-great-aunt. It passed to her brother, my great-great-grandfather. Been in my family ever since. But the name stuck. Now,’ he said, forcibly cheery, ‘let’s get this lot inside and you can settle in.’
He carried her cases into the wide entrance hall, set them down at the foot of the stairs and immediately flicked on all the lights he could find. Inside, the house smelled of new paint, furniture polish and the heavy floral scent from an extravagant vase of lilies that stood on a wooden chest opposite the front door.
‘Beautiful flowers,’ Zoe remarked, to fill the silence.
‘Oh, aye. Kaye did those.’ Mick seemed distracted, his eyes flitting around the hallway as if he half expected to see someone appear from one of the doors leading off it.
‘That was such a kind thought – will you thank her?’ It was gone eleven, by the grandfather clock in the hall; Zoe had lost all track of what time her own body thought it was, but the whisky sat heavy in her stomach and she was struggling to keep her eyes open. She wished he would hurry up and leave.
‘I will. Well, then. There are your keys. Those are the front door. The ones for the back are on a hook in the kitchen.’ Mick dropped a weighty keyring into her palm, dug his hands into the pockets of his leather jacket, then took them out again as if unsure what to do with them, glancing back at the front door. He seemed reluctant to go, but at a loss as to how to prolong his visit. For one awful moment, Zoe wondered if he was hovering for a tip, but it didn’t seem likely. ‘Shall I take these up for you?’ he asked, his gaze alighting on the cases.
‘Oh,