The Burn

Sarah Crosbie

The big house was standing empty for years before she came back. She came from America. But according to the newspaperman she had owned the house long long before. The big house stood at the end of the street, less than a hundred yards from the river. There was not much the people in the street could tell him. The old woman never spoke to them at all. She had always lived alone surrounded by cats and dogs. Sarah Crosbie. It turned out that the house had been there about two hundred years. This bit of the river had been a ford at one time. The foundations were much older than the rest of the building. Somebody called Rankine had rebuilt it and the date 1733 was discovered above a side door at the back. This Rankine was famous. The newspaperman was looking for people called Rankine to see if they were related. He thought the old woman might have been a descendant. But nobody knew. People kept away from the big house. If a neighbour or somebody ever had to go to her door she always kept them waiting on the front step. When the McDonnell Murders were going on back in the ’20s a group of locals barged their way inside the big house door. They found a body behind a bricked-up chimney-piece down in the basement. A man’s body, dead for many years. Nobody knew a thing about it and neither did the old woman. She had not been in the place long at the time. The police thought he might have died from natural causes and judging by the tatters of clothes he could have been a building worker or something.

When she went into hospital the newspaperman tried to gain entrance to the big house but he was refused on certain grounds. Workmen arrived the next day and they barred the place up.

It was eighteen months ago she turned up at the police office. She was in a bad state. She told them people were in her house, they had done things to her. But she would not say what things. Policemen returned to the big house with her but saw nothing suspicious. Next day a health-visitor called on her and she was admitted later on to the geriatric ward at Gartnavel Royal. A few women from the street took a bunch of flowers up to her but she just stared at the ceiling for the whole visiting hour. And it was after this the newspaperman began coming around. He goes to see her in hospital as well once or twice.