Briarbank

Chapter One: A House She Had Never Seen

The call came on a Tuesday, at ten past nine in the morning, while Phoebe Straiton was standing in her kitchen deciding whether the last two slices of bread were bread or something else.

"Miss Straiton? My name is Shona Turnbull. I'm a solicitor in Galashiels." A calm voice, unhurried, with the flat clarity of someone who says difficult things for a living. "I'm phoning about your uncle. George Heriot. He was known as Geordie."

Phoebe put the bread down.

"I don't have an uncle," she said, and then, because that wasn't true, only convenient, "I mean, I've never met him."

"He died three weeks ago. At home, in his sleep, so far as the doctor could tell. He was eighty." A pause, precisely measured. "He left a will. You're the sole beneficiary."

Outside, a bin lorry hissed and groaned along the tenement street. Phoebe watched a gull walk along the wall opposite with the confidence of a landlord.

"Beneficiary of what?"

"A house," said Shona Turnbull. "And everything in it. I should warn you that there's rather a lot in it."

Six weeks earlier, Phoebe's contract at the city archive had ended. She had spent three years in a basement with a cotton-gloved patience most people found baffling: cataloguing the papers of shipping firms, sorting hospital ledgers, coaxing damp-stuck letters apart with a bone folder. She was good at it. She was, as her line manager had said while carefully not meeting her eye, exactly the sort of person they would love to keep if funding existed. Funding did not exist.

Since then she had applied for forty-one jobs, been interviewed for two, and got neither. Her boyfriend Dougal had moved out in February, taking the good frying pan and leaving a rectangle of unfaded wallpaper where his record shelves had been. Her savings had gone from a cushion to a rumour. She was thirty-one years old and she had begun, in the small hours, to do sums that ended in her mother's spare room in Ayr.

So when Shona Turnbull said the word *house*, Phoebe sat down on the kitchen floor with her back against the cupboard and asked her to say it again.

"It's called Briarbank," the solicitor said. "It's in the village of Kildarroch, in the Borders. Your uncle designed it himself, in 1972. He was an architect — quite a well-known one, for a time. Are you familiar with his work?"

"No."

"No," Shona agreed, as though she had expected exactly that answer and was quietly noting it down. "Miss Straiton, may I ask — is your surname a family name?"

"It's my grandmother's. My father changed it." Phoebe heard herself say it and felt the old dull snag. "He was Ewan Heriot. He became Ewan Straiton in 1994, when I was one. He never explained why and my mother never told me. All I ever got was that he had a brother in the Borders and they didn't speak."

"I see," said Shona Turnbull, and something in the two words made Phoebe certain that the solicitor saw a great deal more than she was going to say on a telephone.

They arranged to meet at the house on Friday.

The drive took three hours because the hatchback did not believe in hills. It was a nineteen-year-old Corsa with a temperament, and Phoebe had learned to manage it the way you manage a nervous horse: gently, and with constant conversation. She came out of Glasgow into rain, and out of the rain into the wide green emptiness of the Borders, where the hills came up in long smooth backs and the road ran between hedges just breaking into leaf. Mid-March. Lambs in the fields, small and violently white.

Kildarroch turned out to be one street, a bridge, a church with a squat tower, a shop, and a pub called the Darrock Arms with a hand-painted board. The river ran below the bridge, brown and quick with snowmelt, loud enough to hear through a closed car window. Phoebe slowed to read a sign: KILDARROCH. PLEASE DRIVE CAREFULLY. Someone had stuck a strip of tape over the word CAREFULLY and written SLOWER in marker.

The lane to Briarbank climbed out of the village between beech trees, turned twice, and stopped.

She had expected a cottage. Perhaps a bungalow with pebbledash and a leaking conservatory, something that would sell in a week to a family from Edinburgh.

What stood in front of her was built into the hill like something that had grown there.

Briarbank went sideways and downwards at the same time. From the lane, all you saw was a low wall of pale grey stone, a slate roof at an angle that felt wrong until you looked longer and it began to feel inevitable, and a door of dark oak set deep in the stonework. But the ground fell away sharply beyond it, and as Phoebe walked to the edge and looked down, the house unfolded — three storeys of it, stepping down the hillside in shelves and terraces, glass on the south face taking the whole valley, a chimney like the stem of a pipe, a low bridge of stone crossing from an upper terrace to the hillside itself. Timber weathered silver. Moss on the north slopes of the roof. Rowan and hawthorn crowding in on all sides, and briars — of course, briars — thick and black and thorned, in a great tangle along the eastern wall.

It looked like a house designed by someone who had wanted to be able to walk out of any room and vanish.

Phoebe stood in the wind with her hands in her sleeves, and a feeling went through her that she could not name at the time and identified only weeks later, when it was too late to do anything about it. It was not delight, and it was not greed. It was recognition. As if she had been handed a book in a language she didn't speak and understood, immediately, that she was going to learn it.

A silver estate car came up the lane and parked neatly behind her Corsa. The woman who got out was about fifty, in a good coat and unglamorous boots, with short grey-blonde hair and a document case under her arm.

"Miss Straiton. Shona Turnbull." Her handshake was brisk and dry. She looked at the house rather than at Phoebe. "He built it at twenty-eight and he never built anything he liked as much again. That's not my opinion. That's what he told me, roughly annually."

"You knew him well?"

"I was his solicitor for nineteen years." A very slight pause. "Which is not the same thing. Shall we go in? I should warn you about the stairs."

The front door opened into a passage of stone flags and then, without any warning at all, into space. Phoebe came out onto a gallery and the house dropped away beneath her: a great double-height room, the glass wall streaming with grey afternoon, and a staircase of oak treads running down the side of it with no handrail on the open side, only a black steel rope at hip height. Below, the valley. Above, a ceiling of exposed beams like the inside of a ribcage.

And everywhere, on every surface, in every direction: things.

Books in stacks four feet high. Books shelved and double-shelved and lying open on chairs. Architectural models under a film of dust — churches, housing schemes, a hospital, a thing like a spiral seashell that Phoebe could not identify. Rolled drawings in tubes and rolled drawings not in tubes. Boxes of correspondence, some labelled in a small upright hand, most not. A kitchen with a stone sink and one plate, one bowl, one glass, one mug on the draining board, washed and put ready, waiting for a man who had not come back for them.

Phoebe stopped in the middle of the great room, turning slowly.

"There are eleven rooms," Shona said, "and I have never been entirely sure that's the correct number. He liked a house you couldn't hold in your head all at once. There are two staircases you'd expect and one you wouldn't. There's a door in the study that goes into a cupboard, and a door in the cupboard that goes onto the hillside. There's a lower level below the kitchen that he called the workroom. The heating is oil, the oil tank is three-quarters full, and the roof, remarkably, does not leak. That's due to Robbie Drumlanrig, who has kept the outside of this house alive for eighteen years, and whose invoices you will find in the second drawer."

"How much is it worth?" Phoebe asked, and immediately hated the sound of it.

Shona Turnbull did not seem to mind. "To the right buyer, a great deal. It's a listed building — Category B — by a named architect, in good structural order. To the wrong buyer it's a cold, strange, inaccessible house forty minutes from a railway station, full of a dead man's paper." She set her case down on the long table. "There is, however, a condition."

Rain came against the glass in a soft rush, and away below, at the bottom of the valley, Phoebe could see a bend of the river, and the trees along it bending all one way.

"Go on," she said.

"You must live here," said Shona, "for sixty days."