by Jane Renshaw
You’d think he was asleep, were it not for the thin red line of a ligature mark around his neck.
She took a deep breath, the irrelevant fact going through her head that about half of all victims of strangulation showed no external signs of it. Not even petechiae in the eyes. It wasn’t the first time she’d seen someone who’d died violently, but this was a man she had known. This was someone Hector had known and disliked, whose home he was in the act of burgling...
‘I suspected there was something off when I arrived,’ Hector continued, conversationally. ‘When I went to shut off the electricity supply and the alarm system, I found that someone had already done so.’
She straightened, and turned off the torch. ‘Is there CCTV?’
‘Yes. Four cameras, covering the outside of the castle.’
‘So they shut off the electricity to disable the cameras. It was premeditated.’ She stared at him.
‘It would appear so, yes. But not by me. I must point out that there are surely any number of alternative suspects.’
‘What are you going to do?’
‘That rather depends on you.’
‘Okay.’ She tried to slow her breathing. ‘I do believe you. Apart from anything else, you’d have to be incredibly stupid to kill him under these circumstances.’
‘Thank you.’ He pocketed the torch. ‘So now, if you’ll be on your way, I’ll, uh, deal with the situation.’
‘How?’
‘Well, obviously I can’t leave him here with your colleagues about to storm the place. A murdered corpse left lying around in the property you’ve told them I’m burgling... It doesn’t look good, does it?’
‘Oh, excuse me for doing my job!’
‘I’m not blaming you. Just stating facts.’
‘How on earth are you going to get yourself and – and him – out of here without being caught?’
‘It’s a terrible cliché, but I’m afraid there’s a secret passage – at least, there’s a series of cellars ending in a short passage into a cellar with a hatch over it. An escape route for the castle’s inhabitants in case of siege. The Twat and Perdita, I think, were unaware of its existence or the Twat would have secured it.’
‘So how did you know of its existence? Don’t tell me Black John came to you in a vision?’
She sensed his smile. ‘In 1915, great-grandmother Hettie, whose infant son inherited Pitfourie on the death of her husband, had death duties to pay...’ He smiled. ‘Sorry, other people’s family history is excruciating at the best of times.’
‘Excruciating is certainly the word. Cut to the chase.’
‘She sold Drumdargie to the Jarvies, but kept copies of some of the paperwork. So we have floorplans in our archives.’
‘Handy.’
‘Very.’
‘How are you going to get him up through a hatch? He’s no featherweight.’
‘I have a rope.’
‘I’ll help you.’ And as he started to say something: ‘No, I’ll help you.’ If she hadn’t turned up in a Pitfourie Estate Land Rover, there would have been no signs of activity at the castle and Campbell and the team wouldn’t be primed to spring. ‘We have to hurry.’
The Twat was heavy, but they were both fit and strong. It didn’t take long to lug the body down the stairs to the hall on the ground floor.
‘Cellars are through this door,’ Hector was saying, pushing it open and turning back to heft Weber’s shoulders, when the room was suddenly flooded with light.
‘Don’t move!’ said a strident voice. ‘Stay where you are and raise your hands!’
It was impossible to see properly beyond the blinding light being shone through the window to the left of the door, but Claire could make out the shapes of several men. And that was Campbell Stewart’s voice.
‘Damn,’ said Hector.
For a moment they stared at each other. Then she dropped Weber’s feet, and Hector was grabbing her, pushing her through the cellar door, slamming it shut behind them.
‘The way I see it,’ he said, breathing a little rapidly, ‘you have two choices. You can stay here and try to make out you were trying to apprehend me...’
She slumped back against the door. ‘So what was I doing helping you move the body?’
‘That might be a little hard to explain.’
‘And my other choice?’
He shone his torch down into the void below. ‘Run.’
She ran.
Down a steep flight of stone steps, this one straight rather than spiral. And then they were in the cellars – vaulted stone ceilings, a smell of cold earth and pond water – and running past a series of ancient-looking dusty oak doors as the sound of glass smashing came to them, faintly, from above.
They were breaking a window.
‘In here.’ Hector opened a door into what seemed to be a cupboard, but there was a yawning black square of darkness in the wall under the shelving, which Hector crawled through before turning and offering her his hand. ‘Hope you don’t mind spiders.’
The packed-earth floor was treacherous with small chunks of fallen masonry, on one of which she banged her knee as she crawled through. Hector reached past her to swing the concealed door closed behind them. It seemed to consist of a heavy oak frame into which stonework had been mortared and plastered, by some centuries-dead mason, to match the walls.
They were in a narrow shaft along which they had to crawl – and yes, there were a lot of gritty cobwebs that clung to her hair and face and shoulders – but which soon opened into a small chamber. There was a crude, short flight of steps up one wall that seemed to lead nowhere, but Hector jumped up them and pushed open a hatch, through which the fresh night air flooded.
He boosted her up, and she found herself lying on pine needles. She was in a wood. The cellars must run far beyond the footprint of the castle. She could hear voices, and see bright lights through the trees. Not far away.
She wriggled along the ground, deeper into the trees, and when she stood and turned, she saw that Hector had closed the hatch behind them and was swiping earth and pine needles across it.
‘What do we do now?’ she hissed.
He came to where she was crouching behind a tree. ‘Sorry about this,’ he said, as if apologising for running out of milk. ‘But I feel that our best move is probably to lie low for a while; we’ve a better chance of coming out of this unconvicted of murder, on my part, and accessory after the fact, on yours, if we can present Campbell with the real culprit.’
‘And how exactly do you propose we do that?’
‘I’m not saying it’s going to be easy. But you like a challenge, don’t you?’
‘Oh God.’
He had taken a phone from his pocket. ‘I’ll get Gavin to meet us up the road. Bring some warm clothing, skis, et cetera.’
‘Skis?’
‘It’s about time you saw a bit more of this wonderful country than can be appreciated from the path between Pond Cottage and the House.’
‘Right. Thanks. This is exactly how I dreamt of spending Christmas in Scotland – skiing through the wilderness in the dead of night, pursued for a catalogue of sackable offences – not to mention crimes – by my erstwhile colleagues, in the company of – of –’
‘Don’t hold back.’
‘ – a criminal!’
And the worst of it was, she couldn’t feel bad about it. She couldn’t feel any of the things she should be feeling – guilt, shame, fear, desperation. All she could feel was a strange sort of euphoria. She wanted to jump up and down. Grab him. Shout, like a child.
‘Well, but it’s not all bad, surely?’ He slipped the phone back into his pocket, dipping his head to look between the branches at the activity around the castle. ‘I mean, come on – a secret passage? We’re in bucket list territory here. And wait until we’re up in the hills under the stars... wait until you see the sunrise reflected off the slopes of Loch na Gar –’
‘If you think I’m going anywhere with you, yo
u’ve got another think coming!’
42
It was paraffin, not petrol, that smell. The orange glow was from a paraffin heater, like the one Grandpa had in his greenhouse. Karen looked at it for a while – a minute, five minutes. She might have slept again and woken, and slept and woken. She couldn’t tell.
She was lying on hay, not grass. She was in a barn or something.
But how?
She remembered sitting at the table feeling weird, really weird, and then...
Ade.
She remembered Ade, lifting her.
Ade had brought her to a barn? Why?
She tried to look around, but it was dark apart from the glow of the heater.
‘Hello?’ she said. Croaked. Her mouth was so dry. ‘Ade?’
And then she was waking again, waking from the dream she’d had on a regular basis since she was ten years old. It was the bank holiday weekend when she’d gone to stay with Dad in Vienna. She’d been super-excited (a) that he wanted to spend time with her and (b) that she was going to Vienna. Maybe she could go to one of his concerts.
She didn’t.
But in her dream, she did.
Instead of spending all of Saturday and most of Sunday alone in his apartment because he was too busy with work, the dream Dad took her to rehearsals and let her try out the various instruments, and all the players in the orchestra were kind and said she had an obvious natural talent. And he took her to a park in the afternoon and they had lovely ice cream, and then they went shopping and he bought her a bag shaped like a big strawberry and a floppy straw hat.
Then in the evening she did go to one of his concerts, and at the end one of the musicians got her from her seat at the front of the stalls (because Dad had made sure she had the best seat in the whole concert hall) and gave her a bouquet to take to him, and she went up on the stage and he kissed her and said, ‘Thank you, my darling girl.’
In real life he had never bought her a bag in the shape of a strawberry. He had never bought her an ice cream. He had never called her his darling girl. Never never never, and he never would.
◆◆◆
It was ridiculous, to be wobbling along on cross-country skis in the moonlight, in the tracks of this man who was on the run from the police for murder, and to be thinking to herself that this was what life should be. This was what it should mean to be alive: adrenaline pumping, body responding, heart soaring. A mad, headlong dash across a frozen wilderness.
Not that Claire was dashing, exactly. She was an experienced downhill skier, but this was her first time on cross-country skis, and she was discovering that it wasn’t as easy as Hector made it look. She’d tumbled into the snow half a dozen times, and, although she was beginning to find a rhythm – and when she did, it was the most exhilarating feeling ever – she found she couldn’t sustain it for long. Even a slight change of direction seemed to throw her off her stride.
And it wasn’t quite a wilderness. They were following a track, of sorts. But the moon-washed hill dropping down to their left was wild moorland dotted with hardy, gnarled trees – pines? – and to their right a heathery bank rose up. Ahead, hill upon hill upon hill, receding to the night sky and the stars.
There wasn’t a house in sight.
If she lived to be a hundred, she knew this would be one of the moments in her life she would remember.
She shouldn’t be feeling like this.
It was wrong.
She knew that. Of course she knew that.
Back there a man was lying dead, and all she could think about was how fun this was? It was probably nothing to him, a man being dead – it was an inconvenience, an amusing incident, even, an excuse for this, this adrenaline rush, this adventure. But she wasn’t like that.
What was she doing?
What would Grannie say?
His voice drifted back to her, something about tea, and at the top of the rise he stopped, and shrugged off the big backpack, and drew out a chrome flask. And as they shared the hot strong tea, drinking alternately from the cup, she looked off at the dim shapes of the mountains against the stars, very conscious of his silent presence at her shoulder and the exhilaration that was coming off him in waves.
‘That one’s Loch na Gar,’ he said, eventually. ‘And before you ask, yes, it’s a mountain, not a loch. To confuse the Londoners.’ And in a soft, clear baritone, he sang: ‘Years have rolled on, Loch na Gar, since I left you...’ He laughed. ‘Byron. I forget the rest, apart from the last line...’ And again he sang, with exaggerated drama, gesturing at the mountains with the hand that wasn’t holding the flask: ‘The steep, frowning glo-ories.... o-of daaark... Lo-o-och... na Gaaaar!’
At this moment he was like a character in a Byron poem himself: this super-fit, tireless, laughing-eyed man standing with the mountains behind him in this wild land of which he seemed so much a part –
‘Would you like a Twix?’ he said.
She snorted.
And when they had each eaten one, and he had repacked the rucksack, she asked: ‘How much further is it?’
‘Another half a mile at most.’
She was conscious almost of disappointment. ‘It feels like we’ve been doing this forever.’
‘For someone who’s never attempted cross-country skiing before, you’re doing remarkably well.’
She felt herself colour, in the dark, at the compliment. But she was doing pretty well, physically at least, in the circumstances. She pulled up the cuff of her glove to glance at the luminous dial of her watch. Five past four in the morning.
Gavin had appeared at the appointed rendezvous two hours ago with warm clothes, food and skis. He’d driven them through the dark landscape until Claire had been hopelessly disorientated. And then they had got out, she and Hector, and he had shown her how to attach the skis to her ski boots. Unlike downhill skis, they were attached only at the toe, allowing you to sort of kick the ski in front of you as you went.
As Gavin’s tail-lights had disappeared into the trees, they had struck off up a snowy valley on what Hector had assured her was, under the snow, a track that would take them to a remote cottage on the very edge of the Pitfourie Estate where it bordered Aucharblet among the foothills of the Grampian Mountains. A cottage that Campbell Stewart, it was hoped, was unaware existed. A cottage with no road to it, no electricity and no running water.
Exactly the sort of adventure she used to long for, as a child, as she devoured all those books about kids heading off into the wild.
You’re on the run from the police for aiding and abetting a murderer, Claire!
‘Adventure’ was one word for it she was pretty sure Phil and DCI Campbell Stewart would not be using at her trial.
There was no way this could possibly end well. For her or for him.
And yet, and yet...
It was as if they had left the world behind, as if they were living so completely in the moment that it had fallen away, with all its problems and worries and complications, as if their lives had crystallised to this, this moonlit escapade, and all the rest was a dream.
Soon, too soon, she was following him round a curve in the contour of the hill and the landscape was opening out to a high valley, with a little cottage set into the hillside in the foreground, a river far below, and the hills and mountains laid out, layer upon layer, like a stage set before them.
She gasped.
In the sheeny moonlight, it was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. He turned and smiled at her, and said, ‘Reidpark. Prepare to travel back in time,’ and kicked off to glide down the slope ahead of her. She followed, completely out of control, and when he stopped, she cannoned into him and they fell together, laughing, a tangle of legs and skis and ski poles.
She disentangled herself as swiftly as possible before he got any ideas.
The cottage had a little wooden porch sticking out from the front. They set their skis upright against the wall just outside the door and then he reached up to the gutter to produce a
key, opened the door, handed her a torch and stood back to let her precede him. Behind a sprigged curtain there was another solid timber door which opened into a narrow hall, a passage, really, with a very steep little staircase heading off, parallel to the passage, to the upper storey.
She turned left.
And yes, it was like travelling back in time. The light from the torch showed her a black cast iron range, an old pine table, mismatched chairs, and a recess, with a curtain drawn to one side, filled by a high bed – a box bed, she thought they were called. The air was frigid. He struck a match and lifted the glass chimney from the oil lamp on the table, touching the flame to the broad wick.
A soft glow filled the room.
He knelt then at the range, took a couple of candle stubs from a bowl next to it, lit them, and pushed them through the grill in the middle to where a fire had been set with paper and sticks and logs.
‘Paper will be damp,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘The idea is that the candles give it a kick-start.’
‘And I thought the Aga was scary.’
On either side of the fire were chunky doors, like the doors on safes. Presumably those were the ovens. And on top of each oven was a smooth expanse of metal, on one of which sat an old-fashioned brown enamel kettle.
‘Does this place belong to you?’
‘Yes. Don’t worry, we’re not compounding our crimes by squatting.’
‘How many people know about it?’
‘A select few. But don’t worry, none of them are going to go clyping to your colleagues about where we might be.’ He stood. ‘I’m going to get water from the well.’
‘There’s a well? Won’t it be frozen?’
‘It’s deep enough not to be.’
She went with him back outside, kicking her boots through the snow, and round the back of the cottage, through the little yard bounded on two sides by a stone-built shed and a wooden one. He opened the door of the wooden shed, releasing a heady whiff of creosote, and collected two metal buckets and a rope. He led her up behind a dry-stone wall to an incongruous rectangular structure made out of concrete, in which was set what looked like a round manhole cover with a handle. Hector pulled this cover off and she shone the torch down into the depths of the well.