Deadly Code (Rhona MacLeod #3)

by Lin Anderson

Rhona found a bottle of whisky in a cupboard beside the fireplace in the sitting room. She poured two glasses of the pale golden liquid and handed one to Andre.

  He grimaced slightly, missing his usual ice and soda.

  Rhona ignored his distaste. If he was so keen to be Scottish, let him drink whisky the way it should be drunk.

  She threw back her own dram and immediately poured another, waiting for Andre to say something, determined not to be the first to explain her presence.

  Andre looked as if he was carefully planning what he was about to say. He would reveal the minimum. Alternatively he would tell her a pack of lies. She would have to decide which.

  ‘Look …‘he began.

  Rhona hated that word. Sean always said it when he was trying to get round her, or persuade her to his way of thinking.

  Andre’s face suddenly cleared as though he had made up his mind to come clean.

  ‘I came here to look for MacAulay.’

  ‘MacAulay?’ She thought about that. ‘You think the man who lived in this cottage was Dr Fitzgerald MacAulay?’

  When he answered, his voice was certain.

  ‘I know he was.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Come with me.’

  He led her through to the kitchen. The black range sat in a deep alcove which would once have housed a low peat fire with a cooking pot suspended above.

  The stone lintel was well worn. Hundreds of hands had touched it over time. In the centre of the long single stone was a carved symbol. A symbol she recognised.

  ReAlba … the Men of the West.

  ‘The symbol’s all over the place once you start looking. There’s one outside too.’

  He opened the front door.

  This time the ancient stone symbol was broken by the wind and the weather, but Andre was right. She hadn’t noticed it when she walked in, but once you knew what you were looking for.

  ‘Why was he here?’

  ‘To work.’

  A feeling of dread crept over her. ‘On what?’

  A gust of wind slammed against them. The Inner Sound seethed, the heavy swell cresting in white foam.

  ‘We’d better get inside,’ Andre said.

  He bolted the door against the strength of the wind.

  ‘I have to get back to the car,’ Rhona said, suddenly remembering about Eilean Fladday.

  ‘You’d better wait until the storm blows over.’ Andre suggested, ‘then I could take you round to Brochel in the boat and you could pick up your car.’

  ‘How do you know where my car is?’

  Andre smiled. ‘Where else would you park it? And no. I haven’t been following you. I didn’t even know you were on the island.’ He laughed. ‘You must have seen the look on my face when you loomed up in the cave.’

  He had looked stunned. But by what? Not by the fact that she was on the island. She suspected he already knew that. No, Andre was only surprised to have found her in the boathouse.

  Rain beat at the tiny windows of the sitting room. A blast of wind moaned across the roof, sending peat ash to scatter at their feet. It would be difficult enough driving between Brochel and Arnish without the walk up the steep path to the castle.

  He read her thoughts. ‘At least you could sit in the cabin of the boat and stay dry.’

  She wavered.

  ‘Why don’t I see if I can boil a kettle and we can have something hot to drink while we wait for the squall to die down. It’s getting pretty chilly in here.’

  She nodded, letting him wander through to the kitchen to try and turn on the calor gas and boil some water, while she contemplated just how much Andre knew.

  He had been quick to show her the ReAlba symbols but he hadn’t mentioned how he’d got into the cottage in the first place to find them. Rhona’s mind flew to the skylight catch in the upstairs bedroom. Had Andre been the one to break it?

  Andre arrived five minutes later with two mugs of coffee.

  ‘The granules were solid in the jar, but it smells alright.’

  It smelt better than alright. The chill rose from her wet feet and sent a shiver through Rhona, making her teeth chitter.

  ‘Hey, you’re frozen.’ Andre sounded concerned.

  ‘I’ll survive.’

  ‘Maybe I should light the fire?’

  Rhona suddenly had an image of Andre keeping her there. Persuading her to wait until the rain lessened. Making her coffee, lighting the fire. All classic delaying tactics.

  ‘The coffee will warm me up. Then I really will have to go.’

  He nodded. He was giving up, for the moment.

  Rhona nursed the mug, enjoying its warmth. She would have tipped some whisky into its blackness, if she didn’t have to drive to Arnish and examine a body part which might or might not belong to Fitzgerald MacAulay.

  ‘You said you thought your father was working here?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where?’ She took in the small sitting room, the low ceiling, the tiny windows that hardly let in any light.

  ‘Not in the cottage. Somewhere else on the island.’ He paused. ‘I thought at first it might be below in the caves. After all he could bring it in by boat.’

  ‘Bring in what?’

  Andre shrugged. ‘Everything he needed for his laboratory.’

  ‘A laboratory?’ she said, disbelievingly. Yet it made sense. If MacAulay wanted peace to work away from the American and British governments, he could do a disappearing trick and end up here as a writer with a wife and children. Then he could work undisturbed. She remembered what Mrs MacMurdo had said about no children being allowed near the cottage. Spike’s isolation.

  Andre looked at her curiously. ‘What?’

  In that split second Rhona decided not to mention Spike. Even if Andre had been asking around and had found out MacAulay was living here with a family, that didn’t mean he knew that Spike was on the island now.

  ‘I just thought of the things he might have been working on.’

  ‘Yes.’ Andre’s face clouded. ‘That’s my biggest worry.’

  Half an hour later, the squall was over and a ridiculously blue sky filled the small window. They rinsed their mugs and stood them on the draining board, suddenly conscious of their intruder status.

  Rhona made sure the front door was locked before she followed Andre to the trapdoor and the steps to the boathouse. It made her feel slightly better about prying in Spike’s house. If only she could speak to Spike properly, she was sure she could find out if Andre was telling her the truth.

  Rhona sat in the cabin while Andre guided the boat out of the cavern. She realised why he had gone past the entrance, then had reappeared. The opening was guarded by two stone pillars.

  ‘You can’t enter from the north,’ Andre explained. “There’s too much rock near the surface. You have to go past the pillars and come in from the south.’

  Rhona was silent, wondering just how Andre knew about the rocks and how often he had been in the cave.

  ‘Before you ask, I know about the passage because of the maps sitting above your head.’

  It sounded like a truce.

  ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Mrs MacMurdo from the Post Office gave me a key to the cottage.’

  ‘Mrs MacMurdo gave you a key!’ Andre laughed. ‘That’s a lot more than I got when I visited the Post Office. I suppose it helps if you’re local.’

  He was giving her the chance to tell him why she had come to the island.

  ‘You were right,’ she said. ‘There was a tattoo.’

  He waited for her to continue.

  ‘It was above the ankle. I wasn’t sure what it was, so I removed a layer and came up with a digital image.’

  ‘I see.’

  He looked upset. Rhona realised what the news might mean to him personally.

  ‘You should know that a week ago, Mrs MacMurdo received a postcard from the man who used to live in the cottage. The postcard came from America.’

  ‘What?’ There was no mistakin
g his honest surprise this time.

  ‘So the foot may belong to someone else,’ she said.

  ‘But I thought…’ He stopped. ‘So MacAulay’s still alive?’

  ‘You can’t be sure MacAulay was the one living in the cottage. Mrs MacMurdo says the man’s name was MacLeod. He was a writer. He had a wife and …’

  Andre waited for her to go on. She didn’t.

  ‘And children.’ He finished the sentence for her. ‘He had a wife and children, Rhona. The wife killed herself after the youngest child died. There was another boy, Donald, around fifteen years of age.’ He paused. “That’s who you came looking for, Rhona, wasn’t it?’

  Chapter 24

  The walk along the cliffs left Spike tired, cold, and sick with worry for Esther. He realised all the time he had been staying with her in Glasgow, he had been putting her in danger. Now it had happened. The bastards had her and it was his fault. Why the fuck had he come back here?

  He buried his hands in his pockets and concentrated on the path, picking his way through a mix of rough scree and sea pinks that clung bravely to the salty rock ledges.

  The sea pounded on the shore in a grey-white foam, sending its drumming echo up the cliff face. The wind was coming from the Northwest, biting into his skin every time he looked up from the path. To his left, the mountain rose like an ancient volcano.

  Spike thought of the cottage and the loch and what had happened there. What he had done to Esther. He drew his hands from his pockets and examined them carefully in the clear morning light. Dark-spotted like a lizard, the skin shrivelled and old, they told Spike what he already knew. That it didn’t matter what happened to him now.

  It took him two hours to get there. When he emerged through the hole in the ancient rock, the sun split the clouds and its long rays dropped on the cottage. Spike suddenly remembered his mother. He had tried to help her, but she didn’t want him, because he wasn’t hers. He was something else, something she didn’t want to discuss, or even look at. Something amoral, something evil. An abomination before God.

  He shook his head, throwing the image at the sky, and descended the last few yards to the cottage, his mind a blank.

  The gargoyle symbol of his abomination sneered at him from above the door. He ignored it and went round the side, pulling himself onto the roof via the water barrel. The tiles were damp and slippery from the rain. He held onto the ridge and crept sideways like a crab.

  He had planned to smash it, but when he got there the skylight was open. Spike eased the glass back and dropped into his mother’s bedroom, hoping that whoever had arrived before him wasn’t still there.

  He stood like a statue, only his eyes moving over the familiar pieces of furniture. The room was as unloving as it had been when he left, the cot like an empty coffin in the corner. After five minutes of silence, Spike decided the cottage was empty.

  He made his way through the sitting room without looking round. Who had been here after he’d left that night? His mother’s bedroom hadn’t been soaked by the heavy rain, which could only mean the broken catch on the skylight was recent. Spike wondered if Mrs MacMurdo had sent the lady doctor to look for him when he hadn’t turned up at the Post Office, then he remembered Mrs MacMurdo had a key.

  The only other person who might have come after him was Maley.

  The corner of the store room had been cleared, which meant the bastards knew about the trapdoor. But his father had never brought anyone to the cottage. No one except Mrs MacMurdo had ever been in the place. Any meetings his father had with Maley’s scum had been far away from here. His father arranged for the drugs to be brought in by sea. He stored them until Maley’s men arrived from the mainland to collect them. That was the arrangement. What Maley did with them afterwards didn’t matter to his father. He had organised the money to fund his work.

  And his work was all he fucking cared about.

  Spike threw back the trapdoor and stared down into the darkness. The smell of damp and salt poured out. Damp and salt and the stink of human sweat.

  He didn’t have a chance to step back before two hands gripped his ankles and jerked him downwards, smashing his head against the rock wall and knocking him unconscious.

  ‘Tell us where it fucking well is.’

  Maley was speaking in a singy-songy voice, mimicking Spike’s West Highland accent. Spike didn’t answer. Instead his eyes darted round Maley and his two heavies to the deck of the boat, looking for some sign that Esther was here.

  A nod from Maley and a fist came straight at Spike. He flinched, expecting another smack, but this time the hand stopped short of hitting him and squeezed his jaw together, pushing his unwilling tongue out between his teeth.

  ‘Well.’ Maley’s voice had transformed into a sneer. ‘The teuchter’s got a fucking tongue after all.’

  Spike didn’t care about the sneer. He didn’t care about the taste of blood in his mouth or the trickle of urine that ran down his leg. He just wanted to know that Esther was okay.

  ‘He’s pissing himself.’

  They were laughing, like three weird sisters cackling together about what they would do next.

  Maley opened a box at his feet, laying the lid back so that Spike could see the array of sharp instruments. Spike didn’t want Maley to see his fear, so he concentrated on the shadow of Dun Caan, rising like a black fortress above the island.

  ‘Right,’ said Maley. ‘Let’s ring the bastard.’

  Maley grabbed Spike’s tongue and yanked it forward.

  ‘Not too far back. We want you to be able to speak, don’t we?’ Spike screamed as something pierced the side of his tongue sending a burning blast of pain up his jaw. In his head he was shouting Jesus, Jesus, Jesus… while his mouth ran bloody dribble over his tongue, round a metal ring and onto a chain that now linked him to Maley.

  ‘They say a man’s best friend is his dog, and you just became my wee pet mongrel.’ Maley waved the chain in Spike’s face. ‘And you know how they train dogs, teuchter? They pull on the lead every time it doesn’t do what it’s fucking well told.’

  Maley smiled and ran the chain through his hand in agonising jerks until his face was within spitting distance of Spike.

  ‘We have been in every fucking cave on this fucking island, except the fucking right one. Your nutcase of an old man hid the stuff somewhere and you know where it is. So you are going to take us there. Understand?’

  The boat was on the move, the beat of the engine drumming the side of Spike’s head. His tongue throbbed and the back of his throat ached with the effort of keeping his tongue outside his mouth.

  When his smarting eyes followed the chain to its end, he found a padlock wrapped twice round the deck rail. Even if he managed to free his hands and feet, the only way he was going anywhere was with a key.

  And he wasn’t going anywhere without Esther.

  The trouble was, he wasn’t even sure Esther was on the boat. He had come to momentarily as Maley’s men dragged him down the tunnel and dropped him into the motor launch tied up in the boathouse. Then they must have hit him again, because the next thing he remembered was Maley screaming at him and pushing the ring through his tongue.

  Spike looked about him, recognising the power and style of the boat that was slipping its way along the familiar coastline. This boat was money and plenty of it. If Maley was making this amount from dealing, he was doing better than alright.

  But this wasn’t Maley’s boat, Spike knew that. This boat belonged to someone more powerful than Maley. Maley might be looking for the last drugs delivery but he wasn’t the one financing the search. That someone had to be one of the racist American bastards his father was always mouthing on about.

  All the time his father had been spouting racist crap about white Celtic supremacy and the return of the true Gaels to the west coast, Spike had tuned out. He had got used to the quasi-religious rantings, the obsession with all things Celtic, the hatred of Blacks, Jews, and anyone who couldn’t trace their des
cent from some mythical ‘Men of the West’. It was like fucking Highlander gone mad.

  Trouble was, until that last night in the boat, Spike hadn’t realised how serious it all was.

  Maley might think it was all about the drugs, but he was wrong. The drugs just helped with the financing. Spike almost laughed. Because Maley, stupid bastard that he was, had no idea what an important cargo he was really carrying.

  Salt lay stiff on Spike’s face, cracking his lips. He would have given anything to lie face down in dark Loch na Mhna and fill his burning mouth with her cool peat waters.

  He closed his eyes and thought of Esther standing by the loch, the baby in her arms, her face full of the beauty of the place; and he vowed that he would give up everything, including himself, to make sure she was alright.

  The cloud cover had thinned and a pale sun blinked down from the clear northern sky. In this swell it would take them a couple of hours to get to the cave. Ten minutes after that, Maley would know Spike had lied to him.

  But if he was right, Maley would never reach the cave. At least not in two hours. Maley would have to hole up somewhere within the next half hour. He might have the use of a fancy boat, but Maley sure as hell did not know west highland weather.

  Spike watched as the horizon began to change; blue to grey and slowly to black, while a northwesterly wind danced across his parched lips, chafing the dried skin, making it beg for the rain that would follow soon enough.

  Chapter 25

  The salmon cages filled the sea loch like the grid map of an American city, platforms serving as sidewalks. Rhona stopped the car on the brow of the hill, resentful at this incursion of industrial fishing on the free waters of the loch, yet knowing that anything that filled the empty village houses with residents other than holiday home owners was a bonus.

  She had left Andre at Brochel. They had parted badly. She would not tell him where she was going or why, and this time he could not follow her. Wherever his vehicle was, it wasn’t at Brochel and Rhona did not look back as she climbed the hill from the castle and met the Arnish turnoff.

  The two-kilometre road to Arnish was rough and narrow, but still a tribute to the postman who had built it himself after the council had refused to help his community. Twenty-two years of pick, shovel and wheelbarrow. By the time it was finished, the other families had gone, leaving Calum, the road builder, alone in his village.