Leo looked rather downcast at this prosaic but convincing explanation.
‘Ketamine is a powerful animal anaesthetic, and causes hallucinations in humans. Could it have been used to dope Helen?’
‘No. Apart from an over-the-counter antihistamine taken for an allergy her TR was clean.’
‘TR?’
‘Toxicology Report. Try again, I’m afraid.’
Leo suddenly slapped his head in exasperation.
‘What?’
‘I’m being a damned fool. Assuming it was the killer who tried to run me over last night, that rules George out altogether.’
‘How?’
‘Because I saw him, still out searching, just before the Land Rover was driven at me. By the way, I just saw Lex Dreghorn creeping around, near the lochside. Pretending he was out hunting.’
‘How do you know he was pretending?’
‘Just a feeling I had. Is he a suspect?’
‘We’re keeping an eye on him, but most of all we’re keeping an open mind.’
Leo left the Portakabin, pondering the growing suggestion that his efforts were akin to urinating in high winds. And he suspected that DI Lang was becoming less and less enthusiastic about his being around Loch Dhonn. He walked back to the hotel, shivering in the cold, before taking a disconsolate luncheon of chicken confit in duck fat with sauteéd potatoes. The hock he had ordered was overly chilled, the meat was a little teuch, and the fat had congealed around the potatoes to create an unsightly accompaniment. Yet Leo couldn’t be bothered complaining to chef and instead wearily padded off to his chamber, feeling rather deflated.
He missed Fordyce’s company, and at some level he felt vexed over the possibility that he had somehow led his friend on. He comfort-ate his way through an entire layer of Orange Creams and then felt rather sickened by the sugar overdose. He would open a bottle soon enough, then it would be room service for an early dinner, following which he would drink enough Ballantine’s to coax himself off to sleep.
He built a wood fire in the grate, loaded Levitsky versus Marshall 1912 into the chess engine and marvelled at the poetry and audacity of the majestic queen sacrifice. He visualised the spectators showering coins of gold onto the table as Levitsky conceded. Such chess embodied something Leo hugely admired in human endeavour: the ability to combine craft with artistry. He was never quite comfortable with the manner in which western academia clung to the classical division of arts from sciences, and the way that psychology still felt it necessary to marshal personalities into some latter-day version of the humours. To him, God’s creation had to be understood in terms of its sublime beauty as well as its awesome scale and complexity. Another great player, Marcel Duchamp, proved the point: the great surrealist artist turned chess master.
Leo gazed into the dancing flames in the fireplace, then lay back on the bed, and fancied for a moment that he was Marshall, playing some Faustian chess match against whichever diabolic foe had killed Helen. And he lamented the fact that, unlike the grandmaster, he couldn’t seem to see one move ahead, let alone five. And he wondered what the endgame would be, fantasising that it would involve a decisive thrust, a glorious flourish of genius on his part which would go down in history and be studied for years to come.
30
THAT night Leo dreamed of a massive, golden bird – an eagle, in flight over a midnight sky.
The cold firmament is illuminated by starlight, and the bird glides effortlessly and majestically. It scans the ground a mile below, not for prey, but for its destination. This is the eagle of Saint John the Evangelist, a messenger to mankind. It happens upon a loch, long and jagged, like a shard of broken glass. The eagle’s eye glints with recognition. It swoops lower now, the water flashing by below, over islands, towards the head of the loch. There, perched upon the steep northern bank in the shadow of a great mountain, is a church. The eagle checks its direction with a slight shifting of its wings. It hunches now to lose altitude, then plummets rapidly. The magnificent creature circles the building, then takes a final dive towards the open main door.
Inside now, the Victorian nave creepy, lit by the faint flicker of votive lights in the far aisle. A whoosh of air, the eagle enters and lands on the cold stone floor. Struts over to a marble plinth and hops onto it. It then turns a hundred and eighty degrees, folds its wings and raises them above its nape, and becomes perfectly still. A change has come over it – it has metamorphosed into a lectern of solid bronze.
The door slams shut and the resultant gust blows out some of the candles. A shadowy male figure is silhouetted in the meagre light. He is armed. He steps closer, closer, closer.
Leo woke up with a gasp, his heart racing, the knowledge that something profound was about to occur weighing upon him heavily. Again he felt that his vision had been curtailed by some mysterious and sinister influence, that it had been cut short before some final chapter had unfolded. His mind raced to where he recognised the church from. The leaflet – of course! The one he had pretended to browse while eavesdropping on the Mintos’ argument. What was that weird kirk called? St Finnan’s? No, St Fillan’s. Leo leapt from his bed and switched on the centre light. He flung open the wardrobe and searched his evening jacket for the leaflet – bingo! Eagerly, he spread it out upon the dressing table and scanned it. It was all tourist information about the history of the building and the finer points of its architecture – not data desperately relevant at this precise juncture. Leo flipped it over; a little map detailed the location of the kirk. It was just outside a little village called Scalpsie, which sat at the head of Loch Dhonn. Leo would have to follow the road to the top of the loch, then take a left in the direction of Oban for half a mile.
Quickly, he dressed, wrapping up well. He thrust the leaflet, his torch and his detective’s kit into his shooting coat and set off, closing his door softly and creeping down the carpeted corridor, under the watchful gaze of a huge mounted deer’s head. It had only just gone midnight but the hotel was already still with sleep. A familiar feeling of darkness – a combination of weariness and dread – filled Leo’s consciousness, exacerbated by the comedown from the previous evening’s whisky.
The cold air pinched his face as he stepped into the freezing night. He strode directly over to a squad car inside which sat two policemen on sentry duty. He tapped urgently on the driver’s side window. The glass, which was misted with condensation, slid slowly down. Leo found himself looking into the face of the taller of the two officers with whom he had spoken on his first day at Loch Dhonn. His short pal was dozing on the passenger seat but came round as soon as Leo began speaking.
‘Look here, you’ve got to take me to Scalpsie, at the top of the loch,’ he exclaimed, immediately regretting the unintentionally haughty cadence.
‘Sorry, sir, we’re not a taxi service.’
‘It’s important. I think someone might be in danger.’
Constable Shorty eyed him with bemusement. He spoke to Leo in a rather offhand manner: ‘We’re under strict orders to stay here. There’s a brutal murderer on the loose, remember?’
‘And besides,’ said Lofty. ‘The DI’s fuming with you. Says we’re not to cooperate. I’d stay out of his way, if I were you.’
Damn, thought Leo. Lang must have found out I visited the Addisons. Sodding, buggering, bloody shithouses.
‘Look, I beg of you, couldn’t just one of you splendid fellows take me there, and the other can remain to stand guard? You see, I’ve got good reason to believe that a serious crime is about to be committed at St Fillan’s Kirk.’
‘What good reason would that be, sir?’ asked Shorty.
Leo realised that the conversation was pointless and stood beside the car as the window slid back up, plotting another course of action. It would take the best part of an hour to walk to Scalpsie, by which time he might be too late to foil whatever the dream had been warning of. If only he could procure some means of transportation – a car, a boat, even a bicycle. That’s it – a bicycle! Leo re
membered seeing Paul the barman chain his to a drainpipe at the side of the hotel. He hot-footed it round and made a small exclamation of triumph as he saw the pushbike gleaming gloriously beneath the arc lamps. He looked from left to right, then tried the lock, but it was properly fastened. Nonetheless, Paul had opted for a bottom-of-the-range security device, and Leo withdrew the wire cutters from his detective’s kit and began chewing at the flimsy cable. In less than a minute he had reduced it to shreds.
‘Sorry, Paul,’ Leo muttered as he switched on the rear and front lamps, ‘but I’m commandeering it for a higher purpose.’
The bike tick-ticked as he wheeled it into position. He mounted it in a rather ungainly fashion, wobbled for a few feet as the front wheel thrust from side to side, and then gained enough speed to glide brazenly by the police vehicle in the car park, and up the driveway towards the road, the gravel popping under the tyres.
Leo was struck by how laborious the task of cycling felt compared with his youthful days when he would take off by himself into the Campsie Fells and Fintry Hills upon the second-hand Raleigh Rebel his father had procured for him, with its scarlet frame and white-walled tyres. The thought evoked some unpleasant memories: the other youths in his street shunning him or teasing him relentlessly for having a girl’s bike. It wasn’t a girl’s bike – it had a crossbar – it just lacked the kudos of the Grifters, Choppers and racing bicycles with drooped handlebars that they possessed. In fact, his saddle bag and basket proved extremely practical for adventuring, and he used to love leaving the melting tar and white dog shit behind as he headed off alone towards the fragrant meadows and sun-dappled dells.
Thankfully, there was a shortcut some way before the T-junction at the Oban–Fallasky highway, a path beaten for anglers that skirted the north-eastern shore of the loch and which took several hundred yards out of Leo’s journey. The ground was frozen as hard as ceramic and it started to snow lightly. The slender sickle moon in the heavens shed only minimal light and it felt decidedly odd to be riding a stolen bicycle across open countryside in sub-zero temperatures in the dead of night – not to mention a little eerie. But he dutifully stuck to his task, just as he had done on many, often thankless, previous occasions. Leo was encumbered with his fair share of human flaws, yet for some providential reason he had been vested with this strange and awful power of visions. He was still haunted by the disaster that had followed the one occasion when he hadn’t acted upon their content. Therefore, ever since he had been resolute in answering the call, using it for good and in the service of others. Yet he wished that he wasn’t always required to undertake tasks such as this on his own. The sardonic lyrics of a World War I song came to mind: ‘We’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here . . .’
Suddenly, he heard a rumble of footfalls: bare soles, brogans and deerskin ghillies upon an ancient road. There, to the north, was Lachlan – who would fall upon the killing ground at Culloden – at the head of a column of his beloved kinsmen, lightly armed, and clad in green and red plaid. They marched towards the gathering at Glenfinnan, towards the true heir’s rallying call. They marched into the great valley ahead, into shadow.
‘Fortis et fidus!’ exclaimed Leo, remembering that noble clan’s motto and the honourable role it played in the ’45. And the spectral vision indeed fortified him, which was just as well because he had to pedal hard to reach the road again, and even harder to haul himself over a humpback bridge which spanned a little river. He was almost at Scalpsie now, and he hoped that he wouldn’t have to face any exertions once he got there; he was utterly exhausted, and last night’s Ballantine’s had risen in his gut to make him feel slightly bilious.
He freewheeled through the village itself, which gave him the chance to catch his breath somewhat. He then rolled into the churchyard through an open gate, stopped and dismounted. He listed his complaints: his head felt light, his mouth was as dry as a cinder, there was a searing sensation in his lungs, his legs burned with lactic acid, and his hands were sore from gripping. He leaned the bicycle against a tree, switched off its lamps, switched on his torch, and quickly scanned the leaflet again in the vague hope that it might bestow some key scrap of information about the church which might help him, before walking past a pair of graves, ironclad against body snatchers, and going inside.
St Fillan’s Kirk had been conceived by Lord Kenneth MacArthur, the Grey Lady’s great-grandfather, whose own father had part-designed Fallasky House. It was located outwith their ancestral lands, but MacArthur, a keen amateur architect and antiquarian who was a devotee of the Church of Scotland, bought the plot of land with the purpose of dedicating a kirk there to the glory of God and as a gift to the locals – whose nearest Presbyterian place of worship then was in Fallasky, five miles away, this now being the beginning of the traditionally Episcopalian/ Catholic end of Argyll, where the old ways had been kept alive by the heather-priests. MacArthur was keen to put his own talents to good use in the project and contrived almost all of the structure. He furnished it with fine artefacts including an ancestral tomb of carved stone in which his dead father was installed, an oversized statue of Malcolm Canmore at rest (replete with a decidedly un-Calvinistic finger-bone relic), and an array of stunning stained-glass side windows which told various chapters from Scottish history and heraldry. MacArthur even helped to cut the very granite from which the church was built with his own hands; boulders of it were rolled down from the scree slopes of Ben Corrach, which began just across the road. Yet for all of his vision, philanthropy and romance, MacArthur was also a hopeless eccentric, and tacked on various architectural styles to the gothic core of the kirk, which lent it a crazily eclectic and at some points downright ugly complexion. For many visitors such foibles, such as the exterior’s series of bizarre gargoyles, merely added to the charm of the place; to purists such as Leo they spoiled it, and under different circumstances he would have pondered how much he preferred the more harmonious unorthodoxy of the European Baroque.
He walked through the gloomy chancel, passing gnarled carvings, vulgar candelabras and the eagle lectern from his dream, then entered the semi-circular ambulatory of the apse, some of his natural fear dispelled by his admiration for this part of MacArthur’s folly, with its double pillars and narrow arches. Indeed, he was momentarily transfixed by the effect the thin moonlight had upon the apse, as it filtered through tall clear-glass windows and fell delicately upon the cold stone. He felt like a figure set within a Victorian steel etching, trapped in a lovely silver and black world.
Suddenly, a pane of glass to his right shattered violently, instantly snapping Leo out of his reverie.
‘Murder! Murder!’ he bellowed, realising he had been shot at. As he was yelling he switched off his torch and dashed behind a pillar, approximately out of what he supposed was the line of fire.
‘Who the hell is down there?’ sounded a male voice, from high up in the kirk’s roof space.
‘It is Leo Moran,’ Leo began, his voice breaking with fury and fear. ‘Whoever you are, the police are on their way. They know where I am. You shall be arrested. I claim sanctuary. Do you hear me? I claim the sanctuary of this sacred place!’
‘Leo? Is that you?’
Leo recognised the voice and peered out. ‘Craig? Come down – show yourself!’
‘What the fuck are ye doin’ here?’
‘I could ask you the very same question, young man! Though I should do so without profaning the Lord’s house.’
Leo came into the open, his heart slowing now, an almost ecstatic sensation of relief coursing through his body. Hutton noisily clambered down a rickety set of wooden stairs from a small choir loft. Suddenly, they both heard a motor engine being gunned outside and a vehicle’s tyres screeching as it sped off.
‘Shite, he must have heard us! He’s gettin’ away!’ wailed Hutton as he skipped down the last few steps, hurdled the rail and rushed towards the exit.
‘Who is getting away?’ Leo exclaimed after him,
before uttering a sound of exasperation and following.
Outside, the pair looked on as the unmistakable profile of a Land Rover pick-up roared through the village and over the humpback bridge. Hutton raised but then lowered a weapon – a fearsome-looking crossbow – quickly realising the futility of taking a shot from such a range.
‘Murderer!’ he yelled instead.
‘What the devil is going on?’ asked Leo, shocked by the rage that had suffused the young man’s features. ‘That’s Robbie’s Land Rover, and he’s no murderer!’
‘I know, but the man who’s drivin’ it is.’
‘And who might that be?’
Hutton turned to him. ‘Lex. I was told he was comin’ here.’
‘Who told you he was coming here?’
‘Robbie texted me.’
‘Do you mind if I see it? The text message, I mean.’
Hutton displayed the message: ‘The murdering bastard Lex will be at St Fillan’s Kirk at some time after midnight.’
‘Can you forward this on to my phone, please?’
Hutton thumbed in Leo’s number as he dictated it and pressed send. A few moments later Ludwig informed Leo that the text had arrived.
Leo regarded the crossbow which was now pointed at the ground. ‘Great Scott, man, you fired a bloody bolt at me!’
‘I’m sorry, I thought ye were Lex.’
‘Craig, I am gravely concerned that you are going to do something incredibly unwise and quite possibly unjust.’
‘Unjust?’
‘We don’t know Dreghorn is guilty. He may be a bounder and he’s not exactly my cup of tea, but that doesn’t mean he deserves to die.’
‘Thon bastard did it. Robbie wouldnae lie. And anyway, I’d already suspected it.’
The Ghost of Helen Addison Page 19