Stronger Than Death

by Manda Scott

  ‘Where is it?’

  ‘Whitecraigs. Go out past the Burrell and head towards Giffnock; I’ll talk you through it after that. Just keep your eye out for anyone else heading the same way.’

  ‘Because?’

  ‘Because I think we might be having company. That was Jessica’s second call of the day. Lee phoned in and asked her for the same directions earlier on this morning.’

  Whitecraigs is the south side’s ‘desirable’ zone, a discreet suburb with three golf courses and one of Glasgow’s bigger parks enfolding a select maze of residential streets. We pulled into a discreet, chestnut-shaded cul-de-sac running up the edge of one fairway and drove carefully past a row of sandstone mansions until the road ran out. Professor Randolph Duncan, widower, moved on his retirement to one of the smaller residences at the very end of the road. It nevertheless fills a half-acre site and has, judging from the outside, at least two reception rooms.

  ‘Eighteen.’ I pointed at the number, written longhand on the sign. ‘This is us.’

  His car was in the drive: a vintage Daimler, rebuilt by hand in a succession of on-duty evenings. Lee came home with the story of it one evening when we were students, in the days when she still found everything he did a potential source of inspiration. Dee pulled in behind it and we sat in the sunlight, beyond the reach of the chestnuts, with the engine and the air conditioning still running. There was no sign, on the street or in his driveway, of her car or her bike. We waited a while, reluctant, for no obvious reason, to leave the cool security of the car. Two houses down, a woman in her late twenties bribed a matched pair of toddlers into the back seat of a Rover. She reversed down her drive and out on to the main road without ever once looking in our direction. No point, then, in asking the neighbours if he’d had company. This is not the kind of road where they divulge the neighbourhood secrets to passing strangers. The rest of the houses stayed quiet: the mid-day, lunchtime quiet of a summer afternoon in a land where the patterns of domesticity have remained unchallenged since the Empire was young. Mothers raise children; wives make dinner—for one or ten or twenty as the need arises; daughters learn to sit with their knees together to take dictation; boys play rugby at fee-paying schools and, later, chair meetings wearing the old school tie. The millennium will never touch them.

  I looked up the curved length of the driveway to the fresh paint of the front door. I have been to visit this man once before, in another time and another place. He held a party for Lee after she passed her first set of surgical papers. Even then, I felt out of place, as if I’d moved into someone else’s reality. The sensation hasn’t altered with age.

  ‘I suppose we should go in.’

  ‘If you say so.’

  ‘You don’t have to come.’

  ‘No. But I will.’

  The front door stood ajar. Nevertheless, I stood on the grey sandstone of the step and rang the bell. No answer. I counted ten and rang again. And again. I turned my back to the door and looked idly down the long slope of drive. Down at the bottom where it joined the road, the gravel sprayed out, leaving the dark, earthy scar of a tyre-mark. A single, narrow tyre. Not a Daimler. Not a car of any sort. Don’t think. Just don’t think …

  ‘Dee …’

  ‘Mmm?’ She had her thumb on the bell for a fourth ring.

  ‘Forget it. He’s not going to answer. Come on. We’re going in.’

  It was a cool house. The tall, cool rooms had well-tended plants hanging from unexpected alcoves. Airy blues and watered greens and mirrors enhanced the space. He wasn’t downstairs. He hadn’t been downstairs for some time. He cleaned, or someone cleaned, and the same someone watered the jasmine and the trailing ivy but left no imprint on the cushions, no papers, read or unread, on the coffee tables, no water in the kettle. Upstairs he had slept in the bed but had not yet found the time to make it. He was not in the bathroom, nor the guest bedroom, nor …

  ‘Kellen.’ A whisper. A cracking, whistling whisper forced out through a throat too tight to scream. ‘Kellen …’

  He was in the study and it was Dee who found him.

  Oh God … Oh please God not that …

  He was hanging. Hanging and swaying, his feet bare inches from the floor, his face, his whole head, turgid, his tongue forced forwards between grey-purple lips, his eyes bloodshot and bulging … Oh God … I felt the rush of the vomit hit the back of my mouth and got the window up just in time. Beside me, Dee leant forward against the desk, her weight on her hands, her head hanging down so that her hair brushed the wood. She breathed hard through rigid teeth.

  ‘Why, Kellen?’

  ‘Because he was there at the start. He was the start …’

  ‘But she can’t—’

  ‘She can. If she can stick sux into Hillary Murdoch and watch her die, she can hoist him up there and …’ And then another wave of nausea. Thin, sour fluid poured out between my fingers. Jets of it ran hot and acid down my nose. I choked and fought to breathe and thought of dying, of suffocating, of strangling, of drowning in my own vomit, of the slow, slow death of hanging. You need a long drop to break the neck if you’re going to die fast from hanging. Randolph Duncan had no drop at all. His chair lay overturned beneath him, one leg askew as if the violence of the kick had fractured that as well. Oh God, Lee. What have you done?

  ‘Kellen?’ Dee was still leaning on the desk, white and glass-eyed, staring at the body as if she expected him to speak. She nodded towards him, her eyes not moving from his face. ‘Kellen, look.’

  I looked. The air from the window was spinning him slowly round on the end of the rope, presenting his head in profile. A perfect circle the size of an old silver sixpence showed black at his right temple. When he spun back, the exit hole on the other side was wider, more the size of a half-crown with irregular margins and a halo of crusted black. Behind him and to the left, clots of blood and paler tissue marked a broad fan across the sponged eau-de-Nil of his walls.

  A gunshot. The final, bloody full stop. As if she got bored of watching him die. Or had a reason to cut it short.

  I am so slow, sometimes, in sensing danger. Then, when it comes, it overwhelms everything; that sudden, flooding wash of terror that leaves me with tunnel vision, light-headed and incoherent. I looked at Dee. She looked at me. We both looked at the body. We were standing in a room with a man dead by gunshot. Nowhere, on the desk, on the floor, on the upturned seat of his chair, was there any sign of a gun.

  I stepped back, slowly, until I felt the solid, bulletproof brick of a wall at my back, signalled Dee to do the same. The hanged man, suddenly, was of no consequence at all.

  ‘You think she’s still here?’ Her voice came, stilted, from the far side of the window.

  ‘I don’t know.’ I slid down the wall. I think better when I make a smaller target. ‘I think we’d know by now if she was.’ I eased my mobile from my belt. ‘I think it’s time we called the cavalry all the same.’

  I found a tissue in one pocket, cleaned my fingers, my nose, my mouth, fumbled with the buttons to bring the phone off key-lock and bring up the number for MacDonald. His work number, not his home number. I rehearsed, briefly, the apology, for after it was over. Stewart, I’m sorry. You were right. I was wrong. I didn’t want to believe she could … The phone rang loud in the tense, airless silence. A single word flashed up on the display: LEE.

  ‘Lee?’

  ‘Kellen?’ Her voice was distant—beyond the normal distance of a mobile. As if she was dreaming, or drunk, or drugged.

  ‘Lee … what are you … ?’

  ‘I’ve found your friend. He was right. It is an E5. I thought you’d like to know.’

  What? ‘Lee … where are you?’

  ‘Don’t worry, Kellen. Everything’s fine.’

  The line went dead.

  ‘I’m going with you.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You were planning to walk?’

  ‘No, but …’

  ‘Exactly.’

  We stood o
n the drive. The Daimler baked quietly in the sun. The shadow of the chestnuts inched up the gravel and flowed into the imprint of the tyre. A faint smell of vomit clung to my clothes. Dee put a hand in her pocket. ‘It’s my car we’re driving.’ She held up the keys. ‘I come or you walk. Myself, I think we’re wasting time; it’s a long enough way up to Knapdale as it is and the day’s not getting younger.’

  It was long. She drives more like Lee than like me and still it was long. We met the new weather coming in from the coast: a lifting of the heat so we could turn off the air conditioning and still breathe; the beginnings of a breeze bending the grass at the side of the road; a real, sea-blown wind carving white horses on the tops of the waves. I slept intermittently, a broken sleep of twitching shadows—worse, probably, than staying awake. Just before we turned right for Knapdale, I called in to Sandy at the farm and told him where to send MacDonald to find the body of Randolph Duncan. I didn’t tell him where we were calling from or where we were going. He had the sense not to ask.

  ‘Stop here.’ We were at the turn-off for the headland. The main road pulls hard right; the track carries straight on. In the angle between the two, sheltered from the road by a row of young larch, there is space for a car. ‘Tuck it in behind the trees.’

  ‘Are we there?’

  ‘No. But the track’s dried out again; we’ll make too much noise if we drive any farther. We’ll leave the car here and walk the rest.’ It is, after all, only a mile.

  Her car is grey, the colour of clouds after rain. I walked back to the main road and looked in through the trees. Not overly conspicuous but you’d see it if you were looking.

  ‘Dee, if you want to stay with the car …’

  ‘Forget it, Kellen. You’re not going alone.’

  ‘Fine. Walk where I walk. Watch the noise.’

  The track was dried and rutted. The mud cracked and crumbled underfoot. Ageing birch spread greenery across the path; long, soft feathers trailed over fear-jarred skin. A cock blackbird, hand-tame from the caravans along the coast, followed us from branch to branch, clucking insults with every fresh tree so that anyone listening would know exactly where we were. Threats and empty promises of food both failed to buy it off. It took a steady twenty minutes to reach the place where her car had been and then, not long after that, the gap for Eric’s bike. Both were empty, although I took time, going down on hands and knees, pushing through the underbrush, to search for drips of oil or new-crushed grass or any of the other small signs of her passing. I found nothing but that isn’t to say there was nothing to find. She isn’t stupid, and if I know what to look for, it’s because she has taught me. Besides, a place like this could hide half a regiment and you’d never know it. All you have to do to become invisible is to stand still.

  The heat pressed more closely. The trees swayed in the wind, cracking branches higher in the canopy as if she walked above our heads. The birch gave way to planted pine, dark ranks that cut the sunlight into thick-filtered bands. The blackbird took umbrage and left. I walked on more slowly, with more care, watching for the dead wood underfoot. Still I missed it, the big one, the branch that cracked like a pistol shot and left me holding a trunk for support and spitting bile at the shadows. Dee, a pace behind, stepped over it as we moved on. I felt her voice in my ear, the sound of it lost in the noise of the trees: ‘Do you think she knows you’re coming?’

  ‘I hope not.’

  ‘But you’re sure she’s here?’

  ‘I’m not sure of anything.’

  Sooner than I thought, the trees ran out and the shadows with them. I spent long minutes just standing, listening, feeling, sensing nothing before I stepped forwards on to the bleak, sun-swept space of the headland. The wind pushed in from the sea, salt-fresh and steady, running long, cool fingers through my hair. Ahead of us, the old rowan shivered, the very top of it nodding inland. I turned round, scanning the tree-line and the edge of the cliff for the bike, for her climbing gear, for a sign of the woman herself. I saw nothing and less than nothing. The whole of the cliff-top, from horizon to curving horizon, was empty.

  ‘She’s not here.’

  I’ve found your friend.

  ‘She has to be here.’

  ‘Then where?’

  He was right. It is an E5.

  ‘On the ledge. She’s on the ledge. Where we found Eric.’

  I turned round, put my hand to her arm. ‘Let me go down on my own now, will you? Please?’

  The way down the cliff was worse than I remembered. Twice I have gone up and down this path, once in total white-out, once at dusk with a body, and neither time has it seemed dangerous. Perhaps with her there as a guide, it wasn’t. On my own, with her waiting somewhere ahead of me, it became a lethal, winding snake, curling round the contours of the cliff in a series of U-bends in a way planned by nature over centuries to give her all the cover she could need. I kept one shoulder to the vertical wall of the cliff for support and tossed stones, small stones, round the worst of the blind corners and across the mouths of the deeper clefts. Even so, each step forwards felt like a wilful decision to die. I stood, once, on the wrong side of a gap I had forgotten existed, on a stretch of ledge where the rock narrowed to less than the width of my outstretched arm, and I gave serious thought to turning round and going back. Only the memory of her voice on the mobile, the odd distance, the slurred effort in the words, moved me on. Don’t worry, Kellen, everything’s fine. Another lie on top of many. If nothing else, I want to know why and for how long she has lied. I jumped the gap. I tossed my pebble round the corner. I waited for the crack and echo of a gun. It didn’t come. I kept going.

  She was there in the end, in the place she should have been, and all the more surprising for that. I turned one final corner and found her sitting in the shade of the overhang, not far from where Eric had fallen. She sat with her back pressed to the cliff, one leg pulled up to her chest, a resting place for her forearms, for her chin. Her eyes were closed, the lashes dark against the sun-white skin. Sweat pasted strands of black hair to her forehead and made wide circles under the arms of her singlet. A long, livid graze ran the length of one forearm, fresh blood crusting black at the edges. The beginnings of a bruise shone blue at the elbow. A tiny half-sized friend hung limply from one hand. There was no gun.

  ‘Lee.’ No movement. No response.

  I said it again, louder. ‘Lee.’

  She lifted her head and peered at me, narrow-eyed, flicked the sweat from her eyes and peered again. I am a mirage, a product of the light. ‘Kellen,’ she said, and her voice had the same distance as the mobile. ‘I thought you might come.’

  ‘Lee, I … What’s happening?’

  ‘I found the friend.’ It rocked in her hand. Dry, idle mockery, loosely done.

  I looked at the rock above her head. A blank, overhanging wall, like the rounded face of a blown glass vase, polished to perfection. If there was a space for a friend, it was beyond where I could see it. He was right. It is an E5.

  I nodded upwards. ‘You climbed it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Alone?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why?’

  A shrug. A twist of a grin. ‘If he could do it, I can do it.’ She laid the friend on her pack, put both hands flat to the rock behind her and pushed herself upright. The movement cost her more than it should have done, as if she was halfway to concussion, or losing blood. I wasn’t close enough to check the size of her pupils. There was no fresh blood on the ledge.

  I took a step forward; ‘Lee, what have you done to your—?’ and I stopped at the sudden change in her eyes, in her face, in the tightened snarl of her smile.

  ‘Who did you bring, Kellen?’ Soft, so very soft. And dangerous.

  ‘What?’ I turned round. Behind me, the ledge was empty. ‘I didn’t …’

  ‘MacDonald.’ A weary distaste. ‘Tell me you didn’t bring MacDonald.’

  ‘Lee. I wouldn’t …’

  ‘She brought me.’ It was
only a step to come round the corner and she must have been listening. It is not a big ledge, after all. Dee turned the corner and stopped there, hands in her pockets, leaning sideways against the rock. In a moment, she sat down on a small shelf of stone, a natural seat. Her shadow stretched forwards, almost to my feet. ‘We found Professor Duncan,’ she said.

  ‘Really? Spectacular, wasn’t it? The good Inspector will have a field day with that one.’ The black eyes flared: darkened coals in white skin, growing whiter in the sun. She focused them on Dee. ‘I spoke to Sarah,’ she said. ‘She sends you … her love.’ She let out the breath and let go of the rock and slid, with poor control, back to the flat of the ledge, biting hard on her lower lip as she straightened her leg.

  ‘Christ, woman, your ankle …’

  ‘Tibial fracture. Comminuted, closed.’ The smile was no longer a smile, just a tensing of the lips. ‘Two, maybe three fractured ribs and a leaking spleen, I think, so we’ll not drag this out any longer than we have to, shall we?’

  Her climbing pack lay to one side, the top flap open, her belt and her spare walking boots spilling out on to the rock. She reached inside and pulled out a small rectangular pouch, of the size to hold crampons. Out of that, she drew the gun.

  Silence. Complete and perfect silence. The sun and the wind and the sea were as nothing. The pressure of it drove away thought, crushed reason, froze everything in a single, static moment.

  All the promise of life and it comes to this.

  ‘Lee, you can’t …’

  Metal spun on metal. A fluid, well-oiled, killing sound. I looked up into black eyes made grey with fatigue, with loss of blood, with whatever insanity drove her this far and still further. ‘Professor Duncan’s,’ she said, loosely. ‘The late, great, supremely arrogant Professor Duncan. The rest of the country has a total small arms ban and he, of course, can do what he likes. This’—she let the tip rise up and fall back down again, as if on a string—‘is his father’s revolver. Regimental issue, cleaned often, never used. Until today.’ She spun the chamber a second time, then flipped the barrel round, reversing the grip so that the black mouth pointed inwards towards her sternum. I reached forwards on instinct: ‘Lee. No!’ and, bending, she slid the thing across the ledge, deftly, accurately, to finish at my feet. The harsh scrape of metal on stone echoed down off the cliff long after it came to rest.