Neil stared at him. ‘Shot himself,’ he repeated, dazed. ‘Dear God! Are they … Are they both dead –?’
Jack shrugged. ‘She was still alive. Just. Bill here rushed her to Aberdeen in the helicopter with our doctor.’ He shook his head, barely able to speak. ‘She’s critically ill. I left the gun in my office … I never dreamed he’d come back for it … It never occurred to me. Not for a second.’ His hands were shaking badly. ‘I don’t know what possessed him. Dear God, I just don’t know.’
‘When did it happen?’ Neil didn’t know why he asked, but suddenly it seemed important to know.
Jack shrugged. ‘An hour ago perhaps – I don’t know. Perhaps more. Bill just brought the doc back from the hospital. We all heard the shots. We were round the side, sledging in the snow with the wee lassie –’ His voice broke and he put his head in his hands.
‘Clare!’ Neil stared round suddenly. ‘Where is Clare?’
Jack shrugged. ‘She’s not here. He came back alone, Mr Cummin said.’
‘Cummin? Rex Cummin? What is he doing here?’ Neil’s eyes narrowed.
‘He was here with Mrs Cassidy. Clare seems to have asked him for Christmas too –’
Neil found that he was shaking suddenly. He sat down next to Jack. ‘Do the police know?’
Jack nodded. ‘Bill got them on his radio.’
‘I can understand Paul Royland killing himself, I suppose – but his sister? Why in God’s name try to kill his sister?’
‘God knows.’ Jack shook his head.
It was as they were walking towards Jack’s little office that Neil saw Clare’s mink coat lying on the chair. It was covered in blood. For a moment he stood staring at it in horror, then he turned back to Jack, his face pale. ‘Where did that coat come from?’
‘Mrs Cassidy was wearing it,’ Bill volunteered. ‘The hospital told me to bring it away.’ For a moment all three men stood looking down at it, then at last Neil spoke. ‘Paul Royland thought he was killing his wife,’ he said softly.
‘You mean it was a mistake?’ The broken voice from the staircase made them all look round. Rex was standing there, his eyes red, his whole body slumped with anxiety. When they took Emma to the hospital the doctor had quietly insisted that he stay with Julia. He didn’t want the distraught man in the small cabin of the helicopter with them. ‘Emma knew – she knew he was capable of killing Clare. That was why she begged me … she begged me …’ His voice broke and he shook his head, unable to go on.
‘Well, we’ll never know for sure,’ Jack said at last. ‘Come on down, man. We all need a drink.’
He poured them all triple whiskies in the bar.
Rex was shaking his head again and again. ‘The bastard! I should have realised … I left him alone in the office … I never saw a gun there. It never crossed my mind he was in that mood …’ He drank deeply from his glass.
Behind them there was a faint ping as the phone was at last reconnected. None of the four men noticed.
‘My poor, beautiful Emma.’ Rex was growing maudlin. ‘She was so pleased with herself in that coat. She was standing in front of the mirror, preening like a child in a party dress. I told her I’d buy her a mink of her own. I’d have bought her the world.’
‘How is the little girl?’ Jack asked, suddenly reminded of Julia.
Rex shrugged. ‘The doctor is with her now, and your Mrs Fraser. He said he’d give her something for the shock. I don’t know how to contact her husband. He’s out in Singapore or somewhere. I know Em was trying to ring him … She still loved him you know. If he’d even nodded she wouldn’t have come with me. She’d still be OK.’ He did not notice that he was talking in the past tense.
Neil moved over to him and punched him gently on the shoulder. ‘Come on, man, you mustn’t blame yourself. She’ll be all right –’
‘It was the piece of paper that sent him over the edge, you know.’ Rex looked at him blindly. ‘He told me the sale to Sigma was a fraud. He implied that there was something dubious about his negotiation with Sigma, which could invalidate the sale. Then he gave me a document he said his wife had signed, authorising him to sell it to whoever he wanted. Clare hadn’t signed it at all. It was some woman called Isobel …’
Neil stared at him. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Of course I’m sure. God knows who she is, but she sure as hell doesn’t have the authority to sell this place to me.’
Neil smiled grimly. ‘Not now perhaps,’ he said slowly. ‘But she owned it once, with every last stone, and had she but known it, the oil as well.’
Chloe, after cudgelling her brains for five minutes to remember the name of the organisation, had got the Earthwatch number from directory enquiries. Jim Campbell, working late before he closed the office for the Christmas holiday, told her that Neil had gone to Duncairn.
Jack took the call in his office and then came back to the bar to fetch Neil. ‘It’s a Mrs Royland, Neil. Not Clare. I haven’t said anything.’
When Neil at last hung up he went back into the bar. ‘Clare is at Airdlie. I’m going straight back there before this damn snow gets any thicker. Geoffrey Royland and his wife will come up here as soon as I get there, to take care of Julia. Can you all cope till then?’ His face was grim. Chloe had been incoherent on the phone after Neil had told them the news, and Geoffrey when he came on the line was almost speechless with shock. The story they had gabbled to Neil about Clare when they finally remembered made little sense. He did not ask for them to clarify it. He wanted only to get to her as quickly as possible.
‘Whatever has happened we can’t leave till he gets here, Geoff.’ Chloe was in tears. ‘And we have to find Clare. We have to.’
‘Emma.’ Geoffrey had collapsed on the edge of the sofa. ‘Why Emma? Paul loved her.’ He glanced at his watch. The hospital had told them to ring again in two hours. Emma was in the operating theatre and in a critical condition.
‘Paul obviously had no idea what he was doing, Geoff.’ Chloe was trying desperately to pull herself together now. She had never seen her husband go to pieces before and it frightened her. ‘Did you reach David?’ She had been in the dining room looking for the brandy when Geoffrey rang his brother.
Geoffrey nodded dully. ‘He’s flying straight to Aberdeen. He says we’ve got to keep this out of the papers, Chloe. Will this chap Neil cooperate?’
For a moment Chloe stared at him, speechless. Was that really the most important thing he could think about at this moment? She took a deep breath. No, that had been David speaking; Geoffrey was too shocked to know what he was saying. She sat down on the arm of the chair and put her arms around him. ‘All Neil Forbes cares about is Clare,’ she said gently. She had liked what she heard of him on the phone. ‘He might not care about us, but he won’t do anything to upset her.’
‘But where is she?’ Geoffrey had been about to set out to look when Chloe’s anguished cry had brought him back to the phone from the porch. He was still wearing his rubber boots and heavy overcoat. ‘We have to find her.’
With both was the unspoken thought: there could not be another death.
* * *
The cold had cleared Clare’s head. She stared around her, suddenly frightened. It was dark and all around the whiteness of the snow hid the features of the land beneath the starlight. She was shaking like a leaf. The thin coat she had snatched from the hall stand gave her little protection over her nightdress, and her feet were numb in the thin slippers.
She had climbed well away from the road. Behind her the hill rose, its whiteness broken only by the blackness of rocks and the gaunt shapes of the Scots pine. The snow flurries quickened, and the air was full of the sound of the wind.
She turned round, trying to still her panic, trying to see her own footprints in the snow, but they were gone already, the marks filled and blurred almost as soon as she had made them.
How had she got here? She wasn’t aware of having left the house. All she remembered was the need for human company,
for Chloe, even Geoffrey, to comfort her. And someone else. Who was it she had been looking for so desperately? She had forgotten now, and distracted by her whirling thoughts she had strayed up on to the hillside behind Airdlie and not even noticed that she was climbing.
‘Go down. The road must be down there.’ She spoke out loud to herself into the roar of the blizzard. ‘And go slowly. I’m bound to come to the road. It must be there … It must be …’
She walked on for half an hour, getting colder and more tired every moment. Twice she fell, soaking her coat, and the second time she had to force herself to rise. Suddenly she was crying. Casta. Where was Casta? She wouldn’t have allowed her beloved mistress to get lost.
Neil peered between the stubby wipers of the Land Rover and gritted his teeth. Only another ten miles to go, then he would be with Clare again. The concentration required for driving through the blizzard had driven all thought of everything save Clare out of his head.
He had never been to Airdlie before. Leaning forwards, his eyes straining in the darkness he tried to make out the turning, seeking the gateposts between the whirling flakes in the headlights, following Geoffrey’s garbled instructions. Twice he stopped, then at last he found it and set the old Land Rover up the long drive.
Every light in the house was blazing as he came to a halt at the foot of the steps. There was a police car parked beneath the trees. Chloe was at the door before he had turned off the engine.
‘Clare is still missing; we can’t find her! Thank God you’re here.’
‘Still missing?’ Neil ran up the steps to her. ‘What do you mean missing? Missing where?’ He felt as if his heart had stopped beating.
‘I told you on the phone!’ Chloe sounded faintly hysterical. ‘She went out this afternoon – we came back from the station and found the door open. I just don’t know where she could have gone! There was no car to take; nothing. She was on foot!’
Neil glanced behind him into the night. ‘The police are looking?’
Chloe nodded miserably. ‘And Geoff is out with them. I shouldn’t have left her, but she was asleep, and I thought she would sleep till morning, and she had been so calm; so rational. I thought it must have worked …’
‘What must have worked?’ Neil was already turning and running down the steps. He paused at the bottom and looked back at her.
‘The exorcism. To get rid of Isobel.’
‘Oh my God!’ For a moment Neil stood motionless. ‘Poor Clare.’
‘Find her, Neil. Please find her.’ Chloe was anguished.
Neil scowled. ‘I’ll find her,’ he said grimly.
He threw himself into the still-warm world of the Land Rover and backed it round, heading once more for the drive. Only at the bottom did he stop. Left or right? He had no way of guessing. If Clare were on the road she would have been found by now. On foot she could be anywhere.
Clare woke suddenly. She hadn’t realised that she had been asleep. She was kneeling in the snow, feeling its soft whiteness drifting round her. She stumbled to her feet with a sob. Where? Which way? Her strength was almost gone. The snowflakes were clinging to her hair, stinging her eyes, sliding down her neck; her face felt stiff and frozen. Brushing the snow away from her eyes with a numb hand she stared round, trying to see through the white-out, frowning. Something had moved, there at the edge of her vision. She turned towards it in desperate hope. Was that a figure, there in the darkness beyond the snow?
‘Help! Please, help me.’ Her voice was not much more than a whisper. ‘Where are you?’
It was there again. A shadowy figure, almost invisible in the snow. Clare staggered towards it, floundering through the drifts. ‘Chloe? Chloe? Wait! Please …’ Her voice was busky with exhaustion.
She staggered on a few steps, and the figure seemed to drift ahead of her, moving steadily down the hill. ‘Wait! Please, wait!’ Clare was almost running now. Her breath was burning in her throat, her heart pounding painfully behind her ribs. Her foot slipped and she almost fell, then she was on her feet again and suddenly the ground beneath the snow was hard and even, and she realised that the dark shape she had seen close at hand, rising out of darkness whipped to white, was a telegraph pole. She was back on the road.
‘Chloe?’ she whispered. ‘Chloe?’ She looked round for her guide, but the figure had vanished. She was alone.
There was a sudden total silence in the nearly empty bar as Clare pushed open the door of the lonely roadside inn and staggered in. She was painfully aware of how she must look; her hair was soaked and wild, her coat saturated and stiff with snow, her shoes caked, the long nightdress she wore beneath the coat torn, and dragging on the ground.
‘Please, I must phone –’
Her voice came out as a husky gasp as she made her way unsteadily to the bar.
‘Over there.’ The girl behind the bar looked at her with suspicion and obvious dislike.
‘I haven’t any money.’ Clare was near to tears.
‘Well then, you’d better write a letter, hadn’t you?’ The girl smiled at her customers, expecting admiration for her wit.
‘Come on, Kirsty, what about a bit of Christmas spirit, eh?’ A man further along the bar slid off his high stool. He came and stood beside Clare. ‘You look all in, lass. Are you all right?’ He had a kind face, weathered to a thousand wrinkles. ‘Let me buy you a drink.’
Clare collapsed on to a bar stool beside him. ‘I got lost in the snow. I was up on the hill, then someone – a woman – led me back to the road, but she wouldn’t wait –’ The words tumbled out incoherently.
‘Get the lady a Scotch, Kirsty,’ the man commanded. He held out his hand to Clare. ‘I’m Duncan Macdonald. I farm up by West Mains.’
Clare had hardly heard him. ‘Please. Can I phone?’ She was shivering violently.
‘The phone, Kirsty – the bar phone. I’ll pay,’ Macdonald commanded, ‘and get the lady a blanket, she’s soaked to the skin.’ Pouting, the girl obeyed, slamming the phone on the counter, before disappearing into the back room to bring a tartan rug.
It did not occur to Clare to phone Airdlie. There was only one person she wanted and that was Neil.
The receiver was lifted the other end at Neil’s flat. ‘Neil! Thank God! Oh Neil, please, can you come. Please.’ She could feel the tears threatening again. She did not know how he could get to her; she just knew she needed him.
There was a moment’s silence, then a woman’s voice spoke. ‘The beautiful Clare, I presume!’
Kathleen settled herself comfortably on to Neil’s bed and rested the telephone on her knee. ‘How are you, Mrs Royland?’
She stressed the last two words.
‘Please, where is he?’ Clare’s hand was shaking on the receiver. Behind her Kirsty and the customers at the bar were all listening with undisguised interest.
‘Before I tell you, you answer me one question, Clare Royland. Are you really pregnant?’ Kathleen had seen the answer in the cards; she didn’t want to believe them, but they had spelt it out – birth and death in the same spread. And again, death and birth. The cards still lay on Neil’s kitchen table. The death was so persistent that she had rung Neil at Duncairn that afternoon, and he had told her what had happened.
‘Yes.’ Clare’s answer was monosyllabic.
‘And is it true that it’s Neil’s?’
She had screamed at him when he had told her.
‘Yes.’
‘So, your husband’s death could not be more convenient!’ The lilt in her voice was mocking.
‘My husband’s death …’ Clare repeated the words dully.
‘Didn’t you know?’ Kathleen felt a sudden stab of vicious pleasure. ‘He shot his sister and then he shot himself, this afternoon.’
‘No –’
‘Yes. So you have your widowhood for a Christmas present, Mrs Royland.’
Underneath she was terribly afraid. She knew she had lost Neil now. He would never turn his back on a child, and now that the woman w
as free … She gave a bitter smile. Whatever else happened she was going to blight the relationship with her last breath if she could.
Clare was staring at the rows of bottles behind the bar, not seeing them, not seeing anything. ‘You’re lying. Paul’s not dead!’
‘Oh, but he is.’
‘No –?’ It was a plea.
Abruptly the receiver was taken out of her hand. Macdonald put it to his ear.
‘Who is this? What are you talking about? You’ve upset this lady very badly!’
Silently Kathleen laughed as she put down the phone.
‘Come on, lass. Throw back that whisky. I’m driving you home.’ He put the glass into her hand.
Obediently Clare swallowed. The whisky was like a shot of adrenalin through her veins. She straightened, trying to focus her eyes. ‘She said my husband had shot himself.’ Her tone was conversational.
‘Aye, I heard.’ He looked grim. ‘She hung up on me. Come on, if you’re ready.’
It turned out that he knew Airdlie and he knew Archie and Antonia. Clare had roamed a long way across the hill; it was nearly ten miles back, by road. When they arrived there were two police cars in the drive.
‘It looks as though they’ve missed you,’ he commented as he swung his car in next to theirs and climbed out. ‘Mrs Royland is in my car,’ he called out as a young constable approached him. ‘She’s in a bad way.’
The police, exhausted and despondent after two hours of fruitless searching, were having a council of war with Neil in the hall before setting out into the dark again. It was Neil who carried her indoors and up to her bedroom, Neil who peeled off her wet, frozen clothes and put her to bed; then he told her again gently about Paul and about Emma, who was still hanging on to the brittle thread of life in hospital in Aberdeen. He did not tell her that they suspected that Paul had thought he was shooting her.
She cried most for Emma, and for Julia and Peter. For Paul her sorrow was more complicated. There was guilt and anger and regret and last of all relief. The memories of the good times would return later and then maybe she would mourn, but not now. Not yet. It was too soon and too sudden.
Kingdom of Shadows Page 83