In the Mists of Time

by Marie Treanor

  “Did anything happen just before he attacked you?” Aidan asked. “What was the last thing you said to him?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t remember. I don’t think I was saying anything. He did most of the talking.”

  “Did you touch him at all?” Aidan asked.

  Nicole shook her head.

  “Not even to guide him? Or by accident?”

  “No,” Nicole said definitely. A funny little smile flickered across her lips. “The police aren’t going to buy this from me, are they? Not without witnesses.”

  “Nicole, you’re as entitled to protection as anyone else!” Louise exclaimed. “And someone caused those bruises on your arm.”

  Aidan nodded, opened his mouth to pronounce, when Nicole suddenly sprang up from the window seat, still staring out the window.

  “That’s him!” she said. “That’s the man.”

  Louise and Aidan both jammed their faces against the window. Ron from the flat upstairs had just emerged from the front gate and was striding up the road, fishing rod in his hand.

  * * * * *

  “Well, at least he’s not staying in the house,” Aidan said a trifle grimly when Nicole had left. She’d said she would phone Aidan this afternoon about whether or not she was prepared to go to the police. “What do you know about this character?”

  Louise shrugged. “Nothing except his name and address. He lives in London and works for an insurance company. Or says he does.”

  “Well, it’s a start. I’ll see what I can find out.” He frowned as he reached for his jacket. “You know, it’s funny, I thought in the pub last night he was up to something. I never had him pegged as a rapist.”

  “Then you believe Nicole’s story?”

  “I’m pretty sure she’s telling the truth,” Aidan said, “at least as she sees it. Ron’ll be up on the river for several hours, I imagine, so I’ll do some digging and then go and track him down and have a word.”

  Louise jumped up. “What if he’s dangerous?” she demanded. “Shouldn’t you take Glenn or some of the others with you?”

  Aidan glanced at her, a faint smile flickering across his face. “No,” he said wryly. Of course he didn’t. As a policeman, he was used to taking care of himself, and Louise was pretty sure he’d been in some kind of special branch before he resigned.

  As he opened the front door, Louise blurted, “Thierry at the big house has offered to make us a new computer for twenty quid. I think I should go with it, don’t you?”

  “Won’t get a better offer.” He glanced over his shoulder at her. “What? You don’t usually want my opinion.”

  “You know him better than I do.”

  “Not sure I do. Likable bloke, though. And Chrissy approves of him. She’s sure he helped Izzy out with something important before he even came here. And he was in there when I needed help a couple of months ago.”

  “Well, if you’re up at the big house,” Louise said in a rush, “maybe you could tell him I gratefully accept.”

  Aidan paused. “If you’re using me as insurance—which isn’t exactly like you—you probably shouldn’t be accepting, gratefully or otherwise.”

  Damn him, he was too bloody perceptive. Except, her purpose wasn’t so much insurance as avoidance.

  “Oh never mind,” she said crossly. “I’ll sort it out myself.”

  As she all but slammed the door on him, she was already contemplating her options. Phone Chrissy, or go up to the house?

  * * * * *

  Thierry leapt up in annoyance, dragging his hand through his hair. A second anonymous email had been waiting in his inbox this morning:

  I’M CLOSING IN ON YOU. REPLY WITH THE LOCATION OF THE MONEY TO AVOID MORE JAIL TIME.

  He’d been trying to trace the source of both emails without much success. While purporting to come from the same email address, they appeared to have been sent via different and ridiculously circuitous routes that involved Russia and Nigeria.

  More worryingly, when he’d opened the second email, it had tried to install a virus. Fortunately, his own protective software had prevented that from happening. If it had succeeded, it could have given the sender complete control of his computer.

  Not that that would have mattered. There were no details on it of the missing money, or anything to do with the frauds. But it did argue that the emails weren’t just random spam.

  Thierry decided to leave the tracer software running, and grabbed the car keys from the desk. It was his turn to go to Mallaig for groceries. As he closed the door of the caravan behind him, his neck prickled.

  Paranoia, he told himself, induced by the emails. And yet the sixth sense born in prison, where he’d learned to look out for the guys who meant him harm from innate malice or boredom, was now in overdrive. Somebody was watching him, and not from the house. Perhaps from the trees behind the yard.

  Resisting the urge to turn and look, Thierry locked the door of his caravan. He didn’t usually bother. For one thing, most of the people who lived in the house would have no problem with a caravan lock; for another, he’d grown to trust their code of privacy. Ardknocken House was the antithesis of prison.

  Casually, Thierry walked around the caravan and headed towards the house instead of the garage. Something might have winked in the trees—binoculars, perhaps?—but he saw no one.

  Walking into the kitchen, he greeted Jim distractedly, and cast a quick glance at the window before discounting it. Too many obstacles blocked his view. He strode through the kitchen to the hall and leapt up the stairs two at a time. Although it would be easier to see from any of the back bedrooms, he ignored them all and instead shut himself in the bathroom.

  Here, the window was covered by Venetian blinds, since the glass was unfrosted. Thierry parted them with two fingers, allowing himself a view between the caravan and the trees. Yes, there was that wink of light again: sun on glass…

  Thierry waited patiently. In prison, he’d avoided trouble when he could. He’d been used to waiting for it to pass by. Of course, sometimes it didn’t…

  A figure emerged from the trees, striding towards the house confidently enough for any casual observer to imagine he’d every reason to be there. It could have been any of the house residents. Only it wasn’t. As he drew nearer, Thierry saw that he wore a backpack and carried a fishing rod.

  Either the guy was lucky, or he knew the routines of the house, such as they were. At this time of the morning, everyone was busy about their own business. He was easily seen from the house, of course, but no one had time to waste gazing out the window. For most of the residents, it was still enough just to have a window.

  Thierry’s breath caught. He knew the man; he’d seen him before…in the pub last night. In fact, he’d been watching Thierry too closely for comfort, though Thierry had paid little attention at the time. He’d been too aware of Louise’s presence in the pub to think much about anything else. But this guy had spoken to Aidan, said he was staying at the B&B.

  Thierry’s gut twisted. He didn’t like that for any number of reasons, most of which had to do with Louise.

  As if he had every right, the man strode through the yard, straight past Fergus’s caravan to Thierry’s, where he paused, set down his fishing rod and delved into his pocket. It took the guy very little longer to pick the caravan lock than it would have taken most people to get in with a key.

  “Got you,” Thierry murmured aloud. There was a time to avoid trouble and a time to face it. In prison the facing had got a lot easier with Glenn behind him, but he’d already learned the hard way how to stand up to the bastards just to avoid worse. Somewhere in prison, he’d lost fear. And he certainly wasn’t afraid of this guy, who’d no right to be in his caravan.

  He’d stroll down there and have a word.

  He was about to release the blind when another figure entered his line of vi
sion, coming from the kitchen door. A woman. His heart lurched. It was Louise, and she walked straight up to his caravan and knocked.

  At any other time, he’d have rejoiced. But the fear he’d thought long buried now raged through his heart with a vengeance. He bolted out of the bathroom like a bullet, almost flattening someone—Charlie—on his way past, and ran for the stairs.

  “Can’t be that bad, can it?” Charlie called after him. “Should I give it half an hour?”

  Ignoring him, Thierry hurled himself down the stairs.

  * * * * *

  Louise had decided on a personal approach to Thierry. She’d drop in on Izzy, and speak to him on her way out. So as soon as Cerys arrived, she left the B&B and walked up the hill to the big house. Here, however, her plan went awry. Chrissy, encountered as usual at the front of the house, told her that Izzy and Glenn were out for the day.

  “Damn,” Louise said mildly. “That’ll teach me not to phone first. I can see you’re busy, Chrissy, so I won’t keep you. Um…”

  Chrissy grinned at her. “Go straight through the kitchen and out the back door. He’s in the middle caravan.”

  Louise stuck out her tongue and followed the directions.

  The kitchen was empty, although she could hear voices coming from the dining room close by. Walking out into the watery sunshine just beginning to peek through the grey clouds, she was very conscious of the beating of her heart, the jitters in her stomach. Ridiculous. She was only going to ask the guy to do a job for her, as she would any other tradesman or craftsman… Only, she’d screwed this one in a moment, surely, of insanity, and it had been so bloody good she really wouldn’t mind repeating it.

  Except that she wouldn’t.

  Trying to haul her disordered thoughts together and at least preserve the appearance of calm, she walked up to Thierry’s caravan and took a deep breath. A fishing rod was propped up by the door, and someone was moving inside. Before she could chicken out, she raised her hand to knock—and had to jump back as the door swung outward.

  Not Thierry but Ron stood there, looking almost as shocked as she was. However, he recovered faster, picking his jaw up to smile. “Hello there!”

  “Hi,” Louise said weakly, very aware that this was the man who’d attacked Nicole in the mist. “I was looking for Thierry.”

  Ron’s smile broadened. “Coincidence—so was I. He isn’t here, though. What do you want with the old scallywag?”

  Louise blinked. “You know Thierry?” She certainly hadn’t got that impression from them in the pub last night.

  “Just a bit,” Ron said easily, stepping out and shutting the door.

  His gaze fixed on her face, not exactly threatening but rather worryingly intense. “Been meaning to ask you about another mutual friend—girl I saw visiting you this morning. Do you know where she lives?”

  The blatancy almost deprived Louise of breath. “Of course I do,” she ground out.

  “I need to have a word with her,” Ron said easily. “A phone number would do.”

  Louise stared at him. “No,” she said, “it wouldn’t. I know what you did to her on the hill, what you tried to do.”

  For an instant, his eyelids closed down, perhaps covering guilt, or even shame. Then his gaze met hers once more, quite steady and expressionless.

  Panicking for Nicole, Louise stepped nearer to him. “You don’t go near her,” she said harshly. “You don’t speak to her. You don’t even look at her!”

  He didn’t seem to be annoyed. Instead, amusement lit his eyes. “Or what, Miss Grieve?” he mocked. “Or what?”

  There was barely time to feel the implicit threat in his words and his attitude. A shadow fell over them, a shadow with presence that slipped around the front of the caravan and stood suddenly beside her.

  “Or you deal with me right now,” Thierry said steadily. “And in the long term with everyone in this house and in the village. You’re in my way.”

  Ron, whose gaze had moved to Thierry, still betrayed no fear, or even surprise, beyond the involuntary parting of his lips. He said, “I mean to be.”

  “Then you’ll have to try a lot harder,” Thierry said, reaching for the door handle.

  Ron stepped aside. “You want to be more careful who you associate with,” he murmured to Louise as he brushed past her and walked away.

  “Why was he threatening you?” Thierry demanded without taking his gaze off Ron’s back.

  “He wasn’t really. He was threatening a friend of mine. The girl we met on the hill in the mist.” She flushed, since what they’d done in the mist was never very far from the front of her mind. “He attacked her and she got away, and now he’s just had the nerve to ask me where she lives!”

  “Distraction, probably,” Thierry said.

  “He was in your caravan,” Louise told him.

  “I know. That’s why he was distracting you.”

  “He isn’t a friend of yours at all, is he?”

  “No,” Thierry agreed. “I’d say definitely not.”

  “You should call the police. He’s staying at the B&B, at least until I throw him out. In fact, the police will be looking for him soon anyway. Hopefully, Nicole will make a complaint against him this afternoon. She has to, now he’s asked about her.”

  “Well, let’s leave it to Nicole. The police don’t really jump through hoops for men like me.”

  “Why was he in your caravan?”

  “Looking for something, I expect.” He glanced at her, and a smile flickered across his lips. “Don’t look at me like that. There’s nothing illegal in there. Though I suspect he was hoping there would be. Are you okay?”

  “Yes, I’m fine,” Louise said, slightly surprised to discover her fingers shook as she pushed them through her blonde hair. “He seems to have made me angry.”

  “Come into the house,” Thierry invited. “Chrissy will give you tea—”

  “Chrissy’s busy,” Louise interrupted. “I’ll just walk back down to the village.”

  “I’ll give you a lift. I’m on my way to Mallaig.”

  Louise glanced at him, her heart beating now not from outrage or fright but from a new, insidious excitement.

  “All right. Thanks.” Feeling she was taking some huge step into the unknown, she turned with him towards the garage.

  Chapter Five

  “He left his fishing rod,” Thierry observed. “Aptly enough.”

  She was silent, her brain leaping in circles as she followed him around the side of the house, past the vegetable garden where a couple of familiar men were digging and sowing.

  “Haw, Froggie!” one yelled. “Don’t forget the Coco Pops!”

  “As if!” Thierry called back. “What?” he added, catching Louise’s gawp. “Coco Pops are very popular round here.”

  In the garage, Thierry politely opened the car door for her, and she climbed in. She hadn’t expected the sudden sense of intimacy as he sat beside her, fastening his seat belt, twisting around as he reversed out of the garage. She tried not to look at his hands on the wheel, on the gear stick. He turned in front of the garage and guided the car down the driveway to the gates.

  “Why did you want to see me?” he asked as they emerged onto the road.

  “Oh, just to take up your offer. About the computer. I came up to see Izzy, so I thought I’d tell you in person.” Too much information. Stop talking. She bit her lip to keep her mouth still.

  Thierry nodded. It was only a short drive into the village. The thought of it ending filled her with a mixture of relief and panic. The silence stretched. Thierry flickered a glance at her.

  “There’s a saying here about the elephant in the room. I think we have one in the car. It won’t go away until we talk about it. We can have a cup of coffee and clear the air. If you like.”

  Louise listened to the beats of her hea
rt. “All right,” she said at last. “The tea room or the B&B?”

  “Wherever you prefer. I wondered if you’d be more comfortable away from the village. I’m going to Mallaig anyway.”

  Her heart seemed to leap as she turned her head to look at him. He kept his eyes on the road as they entered the village. She imagined all the eyes in the tea room watching them, the ears straining to overhear. Or the curtains twitching as they entered the B&B where her parents were, and Cerys, who was hardly above gossip.

  “Maybe Mallaig would be best,” she said breathlessly.

  Thierry nodded and kept straight ahead for the coast road. Rather to her surprise, Louise relaxed back into her seat, mulling over the recent encounter that had brought her here.

  “What’s the connection between you and Nicole Graham?” she asked.

  “There isn’t one. I don’t know her.”

  “But you do know Ron.”

  “Actually, no,” Thierry said a trifle grimly. “Though I think he might have emailed me a couple of times.”

  “What about?” Louise asked, frowning.

  “An old crime. Do you know who he is, what he’s doing here?”

  “He’s on a fishing holiday, with a permit from Ardknocken House to fish this stretch of the river.”

  “Does he fish?”

  “He brought me a couple of trout the first day. We had them for breakfast. He’s from London.”

  “Is he a policeman?”

  “He says he works in insurance. Why would the police be searching your caravan?”

  “Old crimes,” Thierry said again.

  She looked at him curiously. Since Izzy had taken up with Glenn, she’d grown more used to the idea of reformed hard men. There was an air about all the ex-cons at the house that was half-watchful and half-ready for a fight which never happened. She understood it came from their pasts, and from prison, but in the eighteen months since they’d been here, it had never, to her knowledge, spilled out.

  Thierry was watchful too, but there was something…different about him. He was strong, as she knew from their straining embraces on the hill, and his casual hands on the wheel looked capable of taking care of himself if he had to, but there was none of the suppressed violence that hung around Glenn like the remains of an old coat. If she’d known nothing about Thierry, she’d have thought him, in every sense of the words, a gentle man.