by F. G. Cottam
If he was honest with himself, it was not revulsion he had really felt when Elizabeth had briefly held his head and then taken his hands in hers. He had become a very lonely man. The intimacy he had enjoyed with Lillian had been taken from him suddenly and for ever. He had missed it too much either to try to reconcile himself, or to attempt to replace it. He was worried to distraction about his son. He was greatly afraid for Adam and, though fear was not a new emotion to him, helplessness in the face of fear was something he had never felt before. When Elizabeth had held him, he had actually felt a surge of pleasure and relief so strong it was as though for a moment his heart had slipped unbreakable chains. The revulsion had swiftly followed. And it had all been felt not for her, but for him. He had felt it for his own self-deluding weakness. And he had torn himself away and climbed the stairs to his bed shackling his heart again in harsh confinement as he took the ascending steps.
He had endured nights of cold solitude in remote and sometimes hazardous places throughout his entire professional life. He had done so willingly and without ever entertaining a single self-pitying thought. At whatever distant and hostile spot he found himself in the world, there had always been, after all, the prospect of Lillian and home, of warmth and welcome and the love of his wife and the intimacy of their sleeping embrace on his return. That was gone now and its absence was a thing he knew a part of him had always dreaded the prospect of confronting. It was his solitary fate and there was no relief or escape from it.
Walking through Geneva airport it felt strange to Hunter not to have a strategy. This was a mission more important to him than any he had undertaken in his long and sometimes distinguished military career. But there was nothing he could do, beyond turning up on time, to prepare for it. He had not really thought about the woman who called herself Miss Hall between his last, sinister sighting of her at the window of the house in Magdalena and his recounting of the story of the Bolivian incursion on the previous Friday evening. Before Friday, he had not spoken about what happened in Bolivia for better than a decade. In that time he had occasionally thought about Mrs Mallory. She had faded in some of the more disquieting particulars, over the passing interlude, like a bad dream. But her more prosaic partner, or protagonist or whatever she had been, had slipped from memory completely. It was odd, he thought now, because he was still very wary of Rottweiler dogs. Hunter always gave the breed a cautious distance on the pavement. And he was always very aware of precisely where Adam was in relation to the dog if he saw one in a park or on a beach or common. He was on his guard in the presence of the breed of canine that had almost cost him his arm. But he had never reminisced for a single moment about the woman whose strange and querulous intervention had certainly saved it.
He did not have a plan. Her self-styled emissary had been very clear on the urgency of the meeting but very opaque about its purpose. Without knowing precisely what it was Miss Hall wanted from him, he could not decide how he was going to react. A long time ago she had said she was more good than bad. As the aircraft taxied and the seatbelt sign went off, he unfastened his and he looked at his watch. It was just after noon. Their meeting was scheduled for eight. In slightly less than eight hours, he suspected he was destined to discover whether hers had been an honest boast or not.
He had boarded the flight with nothing but a single item of hand luggage. He would be through the formalities and into Switzerland quickly. He sighed, despite himself. Geneva was not an easy place to come to. Most of the places he had travelled to in the world reminded him of missions he had undertaken. But this one reminded him above all else of family holidays. His family had skied as often as they had been able to. He walked past the baggage carousels and saw his own ghost with his dead wife and Adam and his much-missed daughter, Kate, waiting excitedly for their bags and skis and boots to appear through the rubber curtain and approach them, Kate in her dungarees with her blonde hair in ballet dancer’s braids. He sighed again and dragged his eyes away. God, he missed his wife and precious daughter. He missed them so. There were just two of them now. He wondered whether Adam would ever ski with him again.
He had no plan. But Hunter did have his instinct. His hotel was outside the city, on the southern shore of Lake Geneva, a few miles from the address the emissary had given him for the rendezvous. And he was sure that he was not followed from the airport in the taxi he took there. But he was equally certain that he was seen as he emerged through the gate into the arrivals area. The terminal building did not seem especially busy and one man in particular caught his attention. He was about fifty yards away and seated, apparently engrossed in a magazine. Even seated, Hunter could see that he would stand about six-three and run to maybe three hundred pounds. He wore wrap-around sunglasses with pale yellow lenses. His shaven head was bare. As Hunter passed him, just beyond the point of closest observation, he glanced back casually, just a momentary flicker of study. And he saw that the man wore make-up. Thick panstick or foundation covered his face and scalp. He remembered Abel Gaul then, with his tobacco discoloured teeth and the gentle, North Carolina lilt of his country dialect. Hunter did not think it fanciful to suppose the make-up on the man watching him might conceal a facial tattoo. He sniffed the air. But it carried no trailing taint of corruption. It smelled of nothing at all.
The window of his hotel room enjoyed a pretty view of the lake. The room itself was as characterless and antiseptic as they always were. Switzerland was no longer the pristine country of his own youth. They had litter and graffiti now. But there was still an underlying precision and order about the place that seemed a bit joyless and defeating to Hunter. The mountains were the mountains. But the country that lay beneath them, he had always found slightly clinical and depressing.
He kicked off his shoes, discarded his coat and jacket and unbuckled his belt, then lay on his back on the bed. He still had hours to kill. He thought of Abel Gaul again, with his open face and the feral alertness that had failed to save him in Bolivia. They had all died. He was the only one left alive. Of course he was. What was the point of Mrs Mallory’s curse, if he was not still around to witness his son’s torment and destruction?
He thought about Bolivia, about the specifics of the mission and its aftermath. He had told Elizabeth every detail he had been able to recall. But now he searched his memory for anything important he might have missed. It was not pleasant to do this. And it was exhausting. But it was necessary, he knew. He pictured every scene as the mystery and horror of it unfolded and he heard in his head afresh every spoken word. When he had done this and knew that his mind offered nothing further to discover in the past, he slept where he lay for two oblivious hours.
Elizabeth’s home was a small cottage overlooking a stream about four miles south of the village where she rented the two room breeze-block building that housed her surgery. The surgery was functional, utilitarian. Her cottage was stone with ivy clinging to it and leaded windows, and a heather descent that grew quite steeply down to the run of the water. The cottage had been vacant for a long time before she had bought it, on her return to Scotland and home after her disastrous period with the Red Cross. It had been somewhere between badly run-down and completely derelict. Restoring it had been a full-time job for the six months after Grozny. And the distraction of that had been exactly what she needed.
Then, after she moved into her new home and acquired her surgery and started to practise as a GP, the sound of the stream had been just what she needed. When she got into bed at night, she discovered its watery trickle had a narcotic rhythm that lulled her gently to sleep. Her mother had lent her the money for the cottage deposit. And her mother had lent her the money to buy the lease on the building that became her surgery. Both sums had long been repaid. But the total loan had not been without risk. Not everyone in the vicinity responded positively to their family. There were those who would rather endure illness than have someone with her bloodline treat them. Highland memories were long and sometimes unforgiving. That was something Elizabeth
was reminded of as she approached her door at dusk on the Monday evening, a few hours after Mark Hunter passed on his way out of Geneva airport.
A cross had been crudely daubed upon her front door. The door was original, as old as the cottage, gnarled and knotted and weathered by time. The cross was about three feet high and had congealed and was turning a brown colour in those thinner stretches where it had dried. Elsewhere it was still red and sticky and, up close, carried the odour of the abattoir. It was relatively recent, this work. She looked at her watch. She had returned home for a change of clothes for tomorrow. She was on her way to the Hunter house to take care of Adam overnight. The nanny finished at six. Elizabeth could spare the ten minutes or so it would take hot water and a hard bristled brush to scrub off the offending symbol. Not that the symbol itself was offensive, of course. But the sentiment that had inspired this piece of spiteful mischief was very offensive. Oh, well. She had lived in rural Scotland for too many years to be traumatised any longer by its prejudices. A cross daubed in animal blood was still some way off an arson attack carried out while she slept inside. She had taken her keys out of the ignition on parking her car. They were looped by their key ring over her thumb. She resisted the temptation to look behind her like someone spooked and afraid. A strong breeze gathered at her back and she felt its force push her towards the wood and its new sign, glistening where it had been painted thickest in the last of the twilight. It was recent and cowardly work. Everyone knew the hours she was away from home. Everyone knew that she lived in the cottage alone. She found the key to the door and let herself in to get her change of clothes.
The timing of the attack left little room in her mind for doubt. But she wanted whatever reassuring corroboration she could get. So Elizabeth drove well beyond the speed limit on her journey to the Hunter house, making time for a quick diversion to the Black Boar, the pub to which she had sent Mark on Friday evening for his less than jolly night out. The landlord, Andy McCloud, was behind the bar as he always was, polishing a glass, his cheeks red in the glow of his generous fire and with a plaid lumberjack shirt rolled to his elbows. Behind him, arcane and curious whisky brands were lined up on a shelf ready for the tourists who never came. He saw her and approached the spot she chose at the bar cautiously. There were only two other customers present this early in the evening, both regulars, and they were out of earshot. He knew something. He knew everyone and everything, she thought.
‘What’s your pleasure, Doctor?’
She would get to the point. ‘Someone left a message for me at my home. It was unwelcome. A serious insult totally uncalled for.’
‘Unless it was a warning,’ he said.
‘Meaning what?’
He hesitated. When he spoke, his voice was a murmur. ‘Not everyone thinks a woman with your ancestry a fitting antidote to the troubles of the family on the hill.’
‘What’s the word, McCloud?’
He leaned forward. He had been a policeman before he had been a publican. He was honest and fair to a point, but he was local to his core. He would betray no names, she knew.
‘You are treating our war hero, Colonel Hunter, for depression, yes?’
‘No. I am not.’
McCloud blinked at this contradiction of what someone had told him and he had clearly believed to be the truth. ‘That’s the story. He is depressed as a consequence of losing his wife and his little girl. What man would not be? He cannot reconcile himself. It has made a recluse of him. You are treating him. And ever since you’ve been doing so, the boy has been having nightmares so bad he’s too disturbed to attend to his lessons at school.’
‘That’s the rumour?’
‘It’s what I’ve heard.’
‘And spread?’
He put his towel down, placed his polished glass carefully on the bar. ‘I would have hoped you knew me better.’
Elizabeth stood straight. She blew a stray strand of hair away from her face. Her voice was not discreet, now. It was loud. ‘If that nonsense is what people really believe, wouldn’t calling ChildLine be more effective than painting my door in fucking pig gore?’
McCloud just looked at her. But she was fairly sure she had got her message across. Her response would reach the perpetrators. She did not think it would halt their campaign. Her mother had once endured something similar and she knew how the story unfolded. Poison pen letters would come next. Excrement would arrive through the post. Her car might be vandalised. They might nail the head of their slaughtered pig to her door or daub a pentagram. Windows would be smashed in the depths of the night. A bit of shouting and sarcasm would not stop it. Mark Hunter might help her do that, though, when he got back from Switzerland. He was the sort of man who would repay a favour. And she thought him truly formidable. Most important, though, his son was her patient. And no amount of bigotry and physical interference would prevent her doing all she could to enable Adam’s recovery.
Despite her resolve, Elizabeth pulled to a halt outside the Hunter house feeling shaken as well as indignant. Her home had been violated. And by extension she had too. She pulled down her sunshade to look in the small mirror backing it and switched on the interior light to examine her reflection. She was still struggling with the implications of what she had revealed to herself at the stable at her mother’s house on Saturday. The cross on her own front door was not as troubling as that. But it was particular to her, intimate in its scorn and distaste. She composed herself in the mirror. She looked all right. Children could be extremely sensitive to stress and anxiety in adults. Adam needed her to be carefree and calm. She did not think she looked very much like a witch. There could be a hint of hauteur about her appearance when she pulled back her hair and made herself up. It was the shape and colour of her eyes, she supposed. But despite her bloodline she did not think she looked blackly magical or even malicious. Outside the car it was fully dark, the night moonless. She looked towards the warm illumination of the house. There would be the smells of cooking and a roaring fire within. She hoped to God there would be no nightmares, no ancient, rusty voices emanating from the sleeping boy in Mark’s absence. She hoped the crone whose call he’d answered was a woman of her word. She smiled in the mirror. And her reflection smiled back at her, unconvincingly. She snapped back the sunshade, switched off the light and got out on to the gravel. It was five minutes to six.
The phone rang in Hunter’s hotel room at 7 p.m. and it was reception to tell him that a visitor awaited him in the lobby. He knew it would be one of two people. It would be Miss Hall’s emissary or it would be the man from the airport whose face wore a masked tattoo. He stood up from the bed, from where he had taken the call using the phone on the bedside table. He had showered and was dressed in a lounge suit for his audience with the fat sorceress. He had been tying his tie knot when the phone rang. He had no weapon. He had no uniform inside which to feel confidently clad for combat. But he felt secure enough in himself. He was skilled at half a dozen sorts of unarmed combat and had used them all his professional life, distilling what he considered most practical and lethal from each. A man weighing three hundred pounds would try to grapple him to the floor and kill him with a choke hold. But a man weighing that much lacked mobility and Hunter would knock him cold and break his neck before he got the chance to take him down.
He took the stairs because emerging from the lift gave him no perspective on what its doors would open to reveal. He pushed through the fire door. It was not the airport sentinel. Only one man waited, seated in the lobby. He was attired formally, in evening wear. Over it he wore an astrakhan coat and hat in a matching grey. He was tall, but he was very thin and was scrabbling absently at a set of worry beads. Hunter approached him. The man saw him and stood up. He was quite pale and his face cadaverously gaunt. He blinked and looked around. He seemed afraid. But there was no one else present, no one lurking. Hunter was combat alert now. And he would have sensed the danger.
‘I am the Comte de Flurey,’ the man said. He made no offer
to shake hands.
‘Sir,’ Hunter said. He did not know the protocol for a French count. He considered France a republic and French aristocratic titles a silly affectation. But then Miss Hall’s emissary had already signalled an inclination towards pomp over the phone.
‘May I say how very sorry I am about your son’s ordeal, Colonel.’
‘Why are you here? I have the address.’
‘I am to drive you, if you will permit me.’ The Comte gave a short bow. Hunter pondered the offer. It deprived him of the security of a taxi driver as solid witness to the journey he was about to take and its destination should he fail to return. But the hotel staff had anyway seen the Comte. He was not an inconspicuous man.
‘The house is high above the lake, remote,’ he said. ‘The route is not straightforward.’
‘All right,’ Hunter said. He walked across to the reception desk to cancel his cab. He slipped the key to his room into his pocket. The hotel would have others. But it was still a precaution, of sorts. He turned back to the Comte. ‘Let’s go.’
Chapter Five
The car was not her glossy Palmetto bug of a limousine. It was a mundane Mercedes people carrier in the metallic silver ubiquitous on Europe’s roads. Hunter hesitated for a moment over whether to get in beside Miss Hall’s emissary or behind him. But practicality was more important than etiquette, and so he got into the front passenger seat. He did not particularly want a conversation with this man. But he did want all the information he could amass before they reached their destination.