if anything should ‘happen’ to Mary – a prediction which, while her brother himself put little store by it, Mary seemed strongly inclined, indeed resolved, towards – then she would not need to let it concern her. Of course her brother and his wife would bring up little Harry as their own. The ‘promise’ was made more to put her mind at rest than as a real promise as such.
When Harry was two his mother met and was ‘swayed’ by a man only two or three years older than herself, one Viktor Shukshin, an assumed dissident who had made his way to the West in pursuit of a political haven, or at least political freedom, such as Mary Keogh’s mother had done in 1920. Perhaps Mary’s fascination with Shukshin was due to this ‘Russian connection’, but whichever, she married him late in 1960 and they lived at the house near Bonnyrigg. A linguist, Harry’s new stepfather had been giving private lessons in Russian and German in Edinburgh for the last two years; but now, all financial problems set aside, he and his new wife gave themselves over to a life of leisure and personal interests and inclinations. He, too, was greatly interested in the ‘paranormal’, encouraging his wife in her psychic pursuits.
Michael Keogh had met Shukshin at his sister’s wedding, and again, briefly, while on a touring holiday in Scotland – but after that . . . only at the inquest. For in the winter of ’63 Mary Keogh died, as she had predicted, at only thirty-two years of age. Of Shukshin himself Hannant had only ascertained that the Keoghs hadn’t liked the man. There had been that about him which alienated them; probably the same thing which had attracted Michael’s sister.
As to Mary’s death:
She had been a skater, had loved the ice. A river within view of the house near Bonnyrigg had claimed her, when she had apparently fallen through thin ice while skating and been swept away. Viktor had been with her but had been unable to do anything. Distraught -almost out of his mind with horror – he had gone for help, but. . .
Beneath the ice, the river had been swollen, rushing, at the time of the accident. Downriver were many little backwaters where Mary’s body might have been washed up under the ice, remaining there until the thaw. Lots of mud had been washed down out of the hills, too, and this had doubtless covered her. At any rate, her body was never found.
Within six months Michael had fulfilled his promise; Harry ‘Keogh’ had gone to live with his uncle and aunt in Harden. This had suited Shukshin; Harry had not been his child, and he was in any case middling with children and did not feel inclined to bring the boy up on his own. Mary’s will had made good provision for Harry; the house and the rest of her estate went to the Russian. To Michael Keogh’s knowledge, Shukshin lived there yet; he had not re-married but gone back to giving private tuition in German and Russian. He still gave lessons at the house near Bonnyrigg, where he apparently lived alone. Not once over the years had he asked to see Harry, nor even enquired about him.
Dramatic as his family history might seem, still, all in all, Harry Keogh’s beginnings had not been very remarkable. The only matter which had made any real impression on Hannant had been Keogh’s grandmother’s and mother’s predilection for the paranormal; but that in itself was not very extraordinary. Or there again . . . perhaps it was. Mary Shukshin had seemed convinced that Natasha’s ‘powers’ had been passed down to her, and what if she in turn had passed them down to Harry? Now there was a thought! Or there might be one, if Hannant believed at all in such things.
But he did not.
It was an evening some three weeks later, four or five days after Keogh had left Harden Modern Boys’ for the Tech., when Hannant stumbled across one final ‘oddity’ concerning the boy.
Up in Hannant’s attic he’d long kept an old trunk of his father’s containing one or two books and bundles of old papers, dusty bits of bric-a-brac and various mementoes of the old man’s years of teaching. Having gone up there to fix a tile loosened in a brief storm off the North Sea, he had seen the trunk and admired it. Stoutly constructed, its dark body and brass hasps and hinges retained an olde-worlde appeal. It would create a very handsome effect beside the bookshelves in Hannant’s front room.