Stranger at the Wedding

by Jack G. Hills

  As the consequences of his actions multiplied, Ricardo suddenly wished he’d just gone to fetch help and owned up to his own inadequacies. That would have been his best option but it was too late for hindsight… the police would want to know why he’d carried a dead body all this way if he wasn’t guilty of some crime… maybe he’d attacked the man and then got cold feet when he’d realised he’d killed him. Ricardo could see how it would look and how bad it might appear to the authorities and then there was his visa... that had expired two months ago but he’d failed to mention it to Henri or apply for an extension… Shit! Shit! Shit!

  Looking all around for a way out but knowing now that there was no going back, Ricardo with all the meticulous skill of an experienced criminal and pickpocket, bent down and casually went through each of the man’s pockets.

  The sum total of his loot was a credit card, a single twenty pound note, three pounds and fifty six pence in change and a small card with a number printed on one side and a photograph of an ivy covered wall on the other. Disappointed at his haul, he nonetheless stuffed the Visa card and cash into his pocket. The other card which had no monetary value and which Ricardo could see no possible use for, he popped back into the bloodied shirt pocket.

  Now if he was to make good his escape and leave the town before the attack was discovered, Ricardo knew that rather than let the body be found quickly, he needed to hide the corpse and give himself a head start.

  The rear door of the helicopter was staring him in the face as he stood up and as Ricardo knew all too well doors always led to places where you could hide. Without thinking further and knowing time was now of the essence, he grabbed the handle and breathed a sigh of relief as the black glossy door swung effortlessly open.

  Walking the mile or so back to his flat, Ricardo kept wherever possible to the shadows cast across the pavements and narrow cobbled lanes by row after row of fisherman’s cottages. The very last thing he needed was someone remembering the young man with bloody soiled clothes walking hurriedly home late at night and reporting the sighting to the police.

  As he darted in and out of the many dark doorways and alleyways, he hoped that with luck and a following wind, it would take most of the following day before they found the man’s body and reported it to the police… if he was lucky Henri might even close the restaurant out of concern or maybe the police would insist it was shut as part of their investigation. Whatever happened elsewhere, he decided to go into work as normal and then try to get the afternoon off, so he could catch the bus to Truro or Penzance and use the man’s card before it was reported as stolen.

  By the time he’d arrive at his poky flat outside of town, he’d covered every possible scenario and talked through all the potential pitfalls and problems. The last one and the one that had given him most cause for concern was the fact that he didn’t have the man’s PIN number, so the only way he could use the credit card was if he found a shop that still used the old counterfoil system. A shop like the small grocery store just down the lane from his flat… the old lady hadn’t had the electronic device installed and the shop would have been the perfect place to use it but he was too well known and the woman was such a sweet old dear. No Truro was bigger, more anonymous and he was sure that he’d find at least one shop where a PIN number wasn’t required and if not, there was always the clientele of the Cornish Arms, just on the outskirts of the city. He’d been told they could help with his visa at a price…perhaps they might do a swap… one visa for another.

  After all he thought, as he stripped off and climbed in his miserly cold shower, none of what had happened had been his fault.

  ~~~~~

  Patrick Fitzgerald lifted the black Hughes 500 helicopter off the helipad just after five o’clock. It had still been dark when he’d walked from the hotel and thrown his gear onto the front passenger seat and as the aircraft rose slowly above the rooftops of the town, he could just see the new day breaking over the horizon far out to sea. He’d made the same flight north many times since he’d added the Black Isle Hotel on the Firth of Cromarty to his small chain of boutique hotels and was sure that if need be he could have made the flight blindfolded through a snowstorm.

  Rachel walked back into the hotel’s reception just before ten o’clock the following morning. After Henri had sent Tom back to the hotel with Ricardo as his guide and crutch, they’d rushed upstairs and had spent the entire night entwined in each other’s arms either sleeping or making love. Henri had been just as considerate a lover as Rachel remembered from the first time they’d slept together and she’d not spared a moment’s thought for Tom, except to hope that he woke the next morning with a hangover and headache that resembled the eruption of Krakatoa in its ferocity.

  She’d only found the hotel key as she’d been looking in her bag for her emergency lipstick before she’d left the restaurant by the rear kitchen door… but rather than worry about how Tom might have gained access to the room or where he’d slept, all she could manage was a wry smile, as she pictured her bedraggled husband waking up underneath some bush in the gardens or on a bench in one of the many shelters that were dotted around the old harbour.

  Wherever it had been and however uncomfortable it had felt… he deserved every single rotten second of it she’d decided, as the man behind the desk beamed a smile in her direction.

  “Good morning Mrs Cox. How was your stroll?” He asked looking at the clock and realising that the couple had just missed breakfast. “I didn’t see you at breakfast this morning… perhaps I could ask chef to prepare something for you now? You could take it in the lounge.”

  “That’s very kind of you… I am rather famished.” She stopped mid stride, as another thought crossed her mind. “Do you know if my husband managed breakfast?” She wasn’t particularly bothered either way but if Tom had missed the opportunity to gorge himself then it could happily only mean one thing… he’d had to sleep outdoors and hadn’t managed yet to drag himself back to their room or the hotel.

  “I don’t think so.” He said in a slightly bemused tone. He didn’t like to say it out loud but thought it strange that the man’s own wife didn’t know what he’d been doing. “Would you like me to ask the chef if he can manage two breakfasts?” He added as an afterthought.

  “No that won’t be necessary, thank you… Actually, he had rather too much to drink last night and …” Suddenly the lady’s predicament became all too clear to the hotel’s manager. They’d had a tiff last night… probably about his drinking and he gone off in a huff and hadn’t come back to the hotel last night… no doubt he’d found some other pillow to lay his head on.

  “I wouldn’t worry Mrs Cox, he’s probably out right now having a brisk walk to clear his head. He’ll probably not even remember last night… It’ll be just one blur from start to finish. Now let me get someone to bring you some tea.”

  “But Henri, he can’t have gone back to the hotel last night.” Rachel said worriedly. She’d waited until lunchtime for Tom to reappear but when he hadn’t and no one in the hotel had seen him since the previous night, she’d phoned Henri and then had gone straight round to the restaurant.

  “He must have. After you called I spoke to Ricardo, he says that he left Tom outside the hotel… he was a little unsteady on his feet but apart from that he seemed fine.”

  “Did he see him actually go into the hotel?” Rachel asked hopefully but knowing that it can’t have been possible… not unless Tom had done his own impression of Raffles and even in her wildest dreams she couldn’t imagine him as some suave, sophisticated cat-burglar. “The reason I ask Henri is that he didn’t have a key.”

  “So if he didn’t have a key and nobody at the hotel let him inside… where is he?”

  Before Rachel could answer, Tom’s mobile phone vibrated in her hand. She’d brought it with her just in case Tom realised he’d left it behind, but as the mystery of his apparent disappearance grew she’d simply forgotten that it was glued to her hand.

  “Is t
hat Tom?” Henri asked pointing to the mobile. Rachel opened the text and read the message.

  ‘Where the fuck are you, the conference call was twenty minutes ago. Daniel’

  “No.” She said. Her blank expression worried Henri more than the thought that Tom might be dead. “It’s Daniel from Tom’s office, apparently he had a business call planned for this morning.”

  “And?” Henri asked unsure as to the significance.

  “And… now I know he really must be in trouble...”

  PART TWO

  THE AWAKENING

  Summer 2009

  “I pray you, do not fall in love with me, For I am falser than vows made in wine”

  William Shakespeare: As You Like It

  The longcase clock, which had stood on the same flagged floor for two hundred years had just struck midday when the stranger walked into the hotel’s reception. The fire, which was roaring away in the cavernous stone inglenook seemed to mesmerise him like a hypnotist’s watch, as he hobbled ponderously across the room towards its warming welcoming flames, which danced and flickered in the grate.

  The hotel, like the eighteenth century timepiece was old and well built. It had stood proud and resolute for years against whatever bad weather and wintry storms the turbulent North Sea could throw in its direction. As a sign of the owner’s wealth and his dynastic ambitions, the Victorian mansion had been constructed of granite, hewn from a quarry on the outskirts of Aberdeen and shipped along the coast by barge. The blocks of stone, whose surfaces had been rubbed smooth and shiny by an army of stonemasons, were hard and impermeable to the constant lashing that they received from the salt laden rain, which swept in from the coast on the prevailing cold, north easterly winds.

  The private estate and gardens had been judiciously sited inland away from the coast, and whilst it was invisible to prying eyes, the gothic mansion’s pair of imposing iron gates and granite stone pillars, which kept vigil on either side, were the perfect signposts for weary houseguests and ideal deterrents to even the most myopic of unwanted visitors.

  But the person who had commissioned the building wanted nothing left to chance and had instructed the architect to build into the right hand gatepost a huge block of the blackest granite he could find. The final clue as to what lay beyond the heavy, imposing gates and the long sweeping drive, which disappeared into the forest of pine trees, was the name of the house. Carved deep into the stone and finished in gold paint, it menacingly declared:

  BLACK ILSE

  HOUSE

  Inside, the stark granite walls that had been party to many secrets over the years, were covered in an array of ornately framed paintings depicting various hunting scenes, magnificent wild stags and a plethora of family portraits of some long extinct industrialist’s dynastic ambitions. The man and his seed having been scattered over the fields of Flanders, leaving only a grieving wife to continue the line, which finished shortly after the end of the war in what the local newspaper called a ‘tragic shooting accident’ but which in reality was merely a cry for peace from a lonely woman bereft of the people whom she had loved so dearly.

  The various trophies and paintings of that bygone era had been dressed, like a cellar of fine vintage wines, in a thin layer of grimy dust that had been laid down year upon year by the continuous burning of the estate’s fallen Scot’s Pines, supplemented with copious amounts of the local sulphurous coal. Their pristine colours, which once greeted owners and visitors alike, had been sullied and dulled into mere dark shades of their former glory and the small details thought important by the artists, had been lost under the layers of grimy lacquer. Over the years, armies of ardent cleaners had tried and then failed to keep pace with time but the dirt, unlike the numerous owners, had refused to be moved on, until after years of trying no one seemed to bother anymore and the paintings like the house had been left to their own devices.

  Above the fireplace and taking pride of place over everything else in the magnificent high-ceilinged hallway, was the portrait of the Red Deer stag known locally as ‘The Emperor’… a beast of such size and power that Landseer’s ‘Monarch of the Glen’ looked like a fawn by comparison.

  But if the painting itself wasn’t sufficient to impress the most sceptical of visitors who might have thought the artist had overplayed his artistic licence, then the Emperor’s mounted head, crowned with its set of branched and tined antlers that surpassed any seen before or after its death, was now hung on the wall above the hotel’s reception desk, from where the trophy could leave no one in any doubt, as to the size and power of the great beast.

  The girl looked up from the computer screen upon hearing the whirring sound of the helicopter lifting off from the nearby helipad. Mr Fitzgerald’s visit had been shorter than normal but he’d been pleased with everything and the bookings were way ahead of the previous year. He’d informed the hotel staff, at their routine staff meeting, that he wasn’t due back for another two months, as he was taking a well-earned break in the Caribbean. Whilst some had been envious of the man’s success, Martha Monroe had been happy for him… he deserved a rest after all the hard work and hours that he worked. If it hadn’t been for Patrick Fitzgerald, none of them would have had a job and the hotel would probably have been left to fall into rack and ruin… but some found it easier to criticise than be grateful.

  As the noise of the rotors drifted away into the distance, her attention was drawn to the man who was stood staring at the fireplace. There was an unfamiliarity to the man that was exacerbated by the dishevelled state of his clothes, which suggested a rough and tumble in the woods rather than a quiet gentlemanly stroll around the grounds of the exclusive hotel.

  As if he could feel her eyes piercing the back of his head, he tucked the card, which he’d just found outside by the black helicopter, into his pocket and turned around to face Martha. He’d no idea what the small card meant but it looked and felt important.

  His face was swollen and bruised, like a bare-knuckle fighter that had just lost a fight. The blood had dried dull red and where it had previously streamed down his face in torrents, it now resembled a dried up river delta, which spread all the way from the bloody source on the top of his head down to the many smaller tributaries that were splattered around the front of his jacket.

  Her involuntary gasp at the man’s appearance, drew the attention of one of the residents, who was sat near the desk reading the daily papers.

  “Are you alright Martha?” The man asked in a kindly sort of way.

  “Yes, thank you Colonel Macdonald.” She replied, as she stepped out from behind the desk and walked reassuringly towards the stranger.

  “Excuse me.” Her tone was kind and filled with concern, not only for the man but the hotel’s other guests, who if they saw the man staggering down the corridors in such an apparent state of distress, might think the hotel was being used as the setting for some horror film.

  “Are you alright?” But the man said nothing in reply. Instead, he simply turned his gaze away from the fire, forgot about the card and looked vacantly at the girl. His eyes, normally the windows to anyone’s soul, were empty and void. It was like looking into a bottomless pit… a vacuum of space where time and reality were mere figments of his imagination.

  “I don’t know.” He replied. But his reply wasn’t aimed at the girl, merely the voice that he’d heard.

  “Where have you come from?” She tried again in a kindly tone, whilst reassuringly gently massaging his arm.

  “Out there.” He replied pointing back towards the open door. As he turned his head to follow his finger, Martha saw more clearly the cuts to his scalp and the congealed mats of blood that stuck his hair together. Her first thought was that there must have been an accident out on the coast road and that the man had stumbled across the fields and woods searching for help. She reached out took hold of his hand.

  “Come on, come with me and I’ll get some help for you.” She said, firmly guiding the man towards the office and away from
any unwanted glances or questions. Like a zombie following its prey, the man meekly stumbled after her.

  “Dad…its Martha. I need you to come to the hotel immediately. Yes right now. A man’s just walked into reception covered in blood. He’s been in an accident I think and he needs help and medical attention.”

  Dr Monroe had lost little time in driving the short distance from his surgery in the town out to the Black Isle Hotel. The widow McPherson hadn’t been too happy to have her consultation over her bunions cut short but as the physician had left the surgery, she’d called out that she’d see him same time next week and as if to confirm the appointment, he’d merely waved his hand without looking back.

  “Who is he Martha… do you know?” Her father asked, as he swiped the penlight across the man’s eyes to see if his pupils were reactive. The man just sat mute, as if he was caught in some trance-like state but more worryingly for the doctor was the fact that his dishevelled patient’s pupils didn’t dilate or constrict when flooded with light.