Through the kitchen we walk, with me two steps ahead of him. I begin calculating whether I could make it to the front door before he brought me down—but he’s bigger than me and faster, too. When we pass by the alarm pad, with its panic button, he calls out sharply, “Dinnae,” and I know that for all I might now pretend to be delighted with him as a brother (Can it really be true?), however much I might play for time, he won’t be fooled. He’s too smart for that. I climb the stairs slowly, and for once they don’t creak. Perhaps this is exactly what the Manse has been waiting for.
At the top of the stairs I turn for my room, but he calls out sharply. “Uh-uh, Ailsa. Your room, I said.” I stand blinking for a minute, and then it dawns on me that he assumes I’ve been sleeping in the master bedroom. It would be a natural assumption. He didn’t see that in all his watching, I think, and it feels like a small victory. He hasn’t quite been the omniscient observer he thinks he is. I turn for Carrie’s room, and he says encouragingly, “In you go.” The tote bag over his shoulder isn’t quite empty, but it doesn’t seem to have much in it. The bones must already be in place.
How did he get in? Not that it matters now.
It’s already dark outside, and Carrie’s curtains aren’t drawn, but for once I fear what’s in the Manse far more than the blackness beating at the windows. I take a small step forward, then Jamie pushes me and I stumble forward two more. I don’t think I have the courage to look around the room, yet I know I have to. Jamie has switched on the small lamp on Carrie’s bedside table. “You’re a clarty besom, you ken,” he’s saying disapprovingly, but I have eyes only for the heap on the bed. My brain is slow to resolve the lights and shades into recognizable shapes, even though I know what I’m about to see. “I had to make the bed. You’ll have to be much tidier when we’re living together; I cannae abide a mess. Anyroad.” He flings out a theatrical hand. “Say hello to Daddy.”
It’s a skeleton, just as I knew it would be—or at least it’s most of one. The major bones have been laid out in a decent approximation. They’re very clean, but an off-white color. I wonder if there’s a color in the swatch downstairs that would match, and press a hand to my mouth to dam a hysterical sob. I’ve been avoiding looking toward the head of the bed, but as my eyes travel up past the pelvis, past the collarbones, I see that there’s a skull after all, turned sideways on the bed as if waiting for whoever might enter the room. “The skull . . .” I whisper. Now I can’t take my eyes off it. The weak lamplight is throwing cavernous shadows into the eye sockets and the disturbing nasal gash. There are some slightly crooked teeth still attached in the mouth.
“Oh, this is the real one. I got the other one on eBay. I bet you hadnae a clue you can buy human remains right off the Internet. Some people are fair sick in the head.” He shakes his own head. “The finger bones Callum found were his, though. I cannae think how I missed them.” He frowns, evidently annoyed at that slip. “This is his favorite place to be, you ken. I like to bring him here as much as I can.”
“How do you know . . . that it’s him?” My mouth is too dry; it’s difficult to speak. The teeth, a whiter shade of ivory than the bone in which they’re set, humanize the skull in a way that makes it even more disturbing.
He laughs. “I always kent it. I found him first, you see. I ran away, and that’s when I found him. It was fate. Glen was furious at me for running away; he fair lost it when I came back. More than tanned my arse, Fi will tell you that. Child abuse, it was.” His jaw is tight. “No wonder I ran away. But the point is, I found him first, as I was meant to, and I found his wallet. Credit cards dinnae biodegrade.” He smiles a slow, secretive smile with the half of his mouth that’s nearest the lamp; the rest of his face is in shadow. “D’you ken what else I found?”
I do. I’m already ahead of him. “The diamonds.” I doubt he’s ever traded a day in his life. I should have made the connection already; he had none of the paraphernalia—extra screens, Bloomberg keyboards and the like—that I saw at the desks of the financial geeks in the newsroom.
“Top of the class!” he crows. “You’re a smart one, Ailsa. Runs in the family, I guess. I didnae ken what they were or what they were worth until I got older. And it took a fair while after that to figure out where to go to trade them. If I’m honest, I spent too much at the beginning. And the way house prices have been rocketing . . . But I’ve kept enough to buy this place if it doesnae get bid up. And let’s face it, who else would want it with all the stuff that goes on here?” He suddenly grins again. “I should really thank Morag; she gave me the idea.”
“What idea?”
“To scare you so you’d sell at any price. But now I dinnae need to buy it after all. You and I will share it.”
I should tell him he can have it, he can have the whole thing—except that he can’t. The thought runs up against an unexpected wall inside me. He cannot have the Manse. This house is not for him. I look at the door again, assessing my chances, but he’s moved a step or two to block my exit. “Pull the curtains,” he orders sharply, and I do, wondering if I can leave some kind of sign at the window, except there’s no point. Nobody travels along this road. We are a mile from our nearest neighbors, one of whom happens to be the person terrorizing me, and he has my phone. Even if I could get it from him somehow, the reception is abysmal in every room but this one. I need to find a way to take the upper hand from him. It’s not going to be through strength. What if I stand up to him? What if I refuse to play his games?
The bathroom door is thudding. Actually, it’s not the only one thudding now. The wind must have shaken another loose in its frame.
“I have a suit for him. A blue one, pin-striped, very smart. I didnae have the time to put him in it tonight . . . But aye, I always knew it was him,” he says, as if answering a question I haven’t asked. “Fi didnae know who he was; I threw his clothes and shoes in the river. But Glen wouldnae let me go anywhere alone for a wee while after that, so I had to pretend to find him again with her. I had to make it our secret.” He smiles, and says conspiratorially, “You could convince Fi of anything back then since she couldnae tell what was real and what was made up. I told her I took the blame for something she did when he tanned me. I told her it would be even worse for me next time, and it was all her fault, that she owed me.” Oh God. Poor Fiona. She’s been living with a psychopath all these years, and yet she’s the least well equipped person to figure that out. I feel a wave of shame about every piece of blame I have laid at her door, but now is not the time to dwell on that. I need to figure out how to get away.
Jamie frowns with half a forehead. “You should lie down.”
“Wh-what?”
“You need to lie down. Is this any way to greet your old man? Lie down.”
“No.” It’s not convincing enough. I try again, and the word comes out with a strength I don’t feel. “No.”
He sighs. “You dinnae want to make me cross with you, Ailsa.”
“Or what?” I demand. I glance at the en suite bathroom, calculating my odds of getting in there and locking the door—if it has a lock?—and he smiles at me.
“Ailsa,” he says, shaking his head. The golden lamplight moves across his face and back as he does so. “You’re smarter than that.” He frowns a little. “I expected to have to gie you some time to adjust, but even so, you’re disappointing me. I didnae want to do this.” He reaches into the empty tote bag—the almost empty tote bag—all the while keeping his eyes on me, and pulls out something long and dark and metallic.
Dear God, he has a shotgun.
Adrenaline races across my skin in an electric wave. “Jamie, you don’t—”
“Dinnae presume to ken what I want to do. Shut it and get on that bed.”
I sit down on the bed, hard, then awkwardly lower myself onto my back, trying not to disturb the bones in the center, but my weight spills them toward me. I want to close my eyes, but I daren’t lo
ok away from Jamie. “That’s right,” he says encouragingly, the shotgun held casually in one hand. He seems very relaxed with it; I can’t imagine he wouldn’t know how to use it. I know absolutely nothing about guns. I can’t tell if it would shower me with pellets or blow me in half. Is it even cocked? How would I know? He leans over me and adjusts the skeleton; I can feel him placing some of the bones into a macabre embrace of my torso. A wave of extreme revulsion hits me, like the feeling I had with the fly carcasses, only one thousand times magnified. “Now, aye, that’s it . . . Now, turn your head.” I start to tremble uncontrollably, straining my face away from the bones. “The other way.”
I turn my head back to find that the skull is mere millimeters from my face. My own nose is almost in the gaping nasal cavity. There’s a roaring in my ears. My head is blocking most of the lamplight, but for a moment I think I see something moving within the eye socket, something glistening and white, wriggling and writhing like the larvae from the broken branch, and then I can’t help it: the roaring increases and the panic breaks through and I can hear myself start to keen in terror. And Jamie starts to laugh.
My father is waiting for me. I thought it was the other way round.
TWENTY-THREE
Breathe. And again. And again. Slowly the roaring recedes.
Oddly, it’s Jamie’s laughter that brings me back to myself. The skeleton is not the horror here. That skeleton is my father; he would not and could not hurt me. The horror is Jamie. There is nothing writhing in the skull. These bones can’t hurt me. They are just bones.
I hear Jamie behind me, still laughing. “You shoulda seen yer face. But now, that’s better, aye? We could be happy here.” He sounds wistful. I wonder if he has ever been happy. But in an instant, his mood flips. “You’re not being very grateful. You should be thanking me: I’ve kept our dad for us for all these years, so we can be together.” I wonder when he removed the bones from the cave. Not three weeks ago, that’s for sure; Jamie probably hasn’t been to that cave in over a decade. I would think he has been taking very special care of this skeleton for a good long time. “You, me and our dad—it’s how it’s meant to be. We can be happy here in the Manse.”
“Jamie—”
“Say it.”
“Say what?”
“Say it!” He’s yelling, and it’s terrifying. He’s armed and unhinged and unpredictable, and it’s utterly terrifying.
“It’s how it’s meant to be, we can be happy here, it’s how it’s meant to be, it’s how it’s meant to be . . .” The words are tumbling out of me on repeat, so fast they barely make sense.
A sound comes from outside, a purr of an engine. “Shut it!” snarls Jamie, and then seconds later, I hear the unmistakable crunching of gravel. I turn my head from my father’s, and Jamie snaps off the lamp and crosses to the window, flicking the curtain aside. I start to get up.
“Not so fast,” he barks, and the faint gleam along the shotgun’s barrel pivots in my direction, freezing me in the darkness, half sitting, half on one elbow. Some of my father’s bones have slipped against me. One knobbly bone end has slipped under me, pressing into my hip.
My father’s bones. A Schrödinger’s cat experiment no longer. He is dead, he has long been dead, he can only ever be dead . . .
Now is not the time for that.
“It’s Fi. Took ma fucking jeep again. Bint.” His accent is getting stronger, and he looks flustered. He hadn’t counted on an intrusion. It would be the perfect distraction to use to somehow get the upper hand, except that if Fiona is here, Carrie will surely be with her . . . “And Carrie, looks like.”
“She has a key,” I find myself muttering, horrified dread pooling in my stomach. Should I shout, scream? What can I do to safely turn them away? The jeep’s engine has already cut off. Now there’s the sound of a car door slamming, once, twice, and footsteps crunching on the gravel.
Jamie visibly makes a decision. “C’mon, we’ll have to go down. Put that lamp on again. Hurry up!”
I make a show of fumbling for the lamp switch, trying to buy time to think. How will he hide the shotgun? Will he even bother to hide it? The bright light of the hallway after the dim lamplight makes me blink. As I start down the stairs, Carrie and Fiona have already entered the front door and are on their way to the kitchen. “Ailsa? Ailsa?” Carrie is calling. “Have you seen Callum?” She turns when she hears me on the lower stairs and comes back along the hallway, Fiona at her shoulder. They’re right by the alarm panel, with the utterly useless panic button. “There you are. Oh, Jamie, too, hi. It’s Callum—he’s disappeared. Is he here?”
“No, I haven’t seen him.” What is the right amount of concern to portray? I glance back at Jamie. I think he has the shotgun hidden against his side, inside his jacket.
“Let’s go into the kitchen and attack this logically,” Jamie suggests. Carrie and Fiona turn for the kitchen, and as I follow them, passing the alarm panel, Jamie breathes into my ear from behind me, Dinnae you be doing anything stupid.
“How long has he been missing?” I ask when we get in the kitchen. Nobody sits down.
“Not long, I think,” says Fiona. She can barely stand still; she’s almost pacing on the spot. Carrie puts a gentle hand on her upper arm. “Dad said an hour max. I was so sure he’d be here. He was really worried about you being here on your own . . . Maybe he’s somewhere between here and home; it’s wild out tonight.” Her eyes won’t stay still, as if they need to keep roving, searching. She runs a frantic hand through her thick hair and breathes out unsteadily. The two doors upstairs thud, and her eyes flick upward, startled.
“We’ll find him,” Carrie tells her earnestly. “We will.”
“He’s a smart cookie. He’s not going to have done anything stupid.” I don’t know if Fiona even hears me. She’s suddenly much more still. Only her head moves, looking round, as if trying to make sense of something. “We should go out and look for him. With torches. We should go now. Split up and cover more ground.” If only I can get us all outside. Outside, surely Carrie will be safe. “Carrie . . .” I’m willing her to look at me, as if I could somehow telegraph the danger we’re in through my eyes, but she refuses to turn away from Fiona. “We have to go.”
“Safer in pairs, actually,” Jamie counters. He’s leaning against the kitchen doorway. The gun must be propped just out of sight, perhaps resting against the doorframe on the hallway side. “Ailsa and me, and the pair of you. With mobiles—for all the bloody use they are round here.”
“Shouldn’t we leave someone here?” Carrie asks.
“No, we should all go,” I say quickly. There’s not a chance Jamie will leave me here, and I can’t see Carrie separating from Fiona, the state she’s in. “If we leave the front door open, he can come straight in if he comes here. We can even leave a note to explain.”
“Well, dinnae write anything complicated,” Jamie says, and I hear the meanness in his voice that’s been hiding all along. Carrie looks at him in slight shock, then her eyes pass briefly over me, but she won’t allow them to stop. The fight still hangs in the air for her, but I am far, far past that. Centuries past that. In contrast, Fiona’s eyes are entirely fixed on me.
“Let’s go,” I insist.
But Carrie catches sight of the genetics report that Jamie left on the table. “What’s—?” she starts, but Fiona breaks in.
“Oh my God,” Fiona says quietly. She’s still staring at me, the blood draining out of her face. Even before she says anything, I can see that she knows what’s going on. I don’t know how, but she knows. “It’s that time.”
I whirl round to Jamie, hoping I can shove him, knock him off-balance, anything to get him away from the gun, but it’s too late. In one fluid movement he’s reaching behind him and slightly to one side, grabbing the smooth barrel, hitching it up into firing position in the same hand, then reaching for me, an easy grab because I’m mov
ing toward him anyway. Which is how I find myself with my upper arm in his grasp and a shotgun butting at my stomach. I close my eyes briefly then look across the kitchen at Carrie’s shocked face, her hand at her mouth, half cutting off a shriek.
“I’m sorry,” I say helplessly. Her eyes have finally met mine. She shakes her head mutely, one hand still at her mouth. In my peripheral vision, Fiona is reaching out an arm to her, murmuring something, but my eyes can’t leave Carrie. For a moment, the Manse is entirely still, shocked, but then the creaks and bangs and loud rasping breaths return, more frenetic than ever before. The Manse is furious.
Carrie removes her hand from her mouth, and her shoulder moves in that strange wriggle it does whenever she slips into another skin, and for a moment I think I might break in two, because I know her now. I know who she is and what her movements mean, I know the trail she leaves through the house, I know how she sleeps, I know all of these things, and yet I have a shotgun trained at my stomach. “What is going on, please?” she asks, very politely but very calmly. It’s the persona she has chosen to assume. I suppose it’s as good as any other.
“Yes, what’s the plan, Jamie?” I say, taking Carrie’s cue. Find a person to be, someone capable. Someone tough. Surely one of my splintered selves is up to the task. “Or should I say, little brother?”
“I’m not sure I understand,” says Carrie, again in her absurdly polite tone.
“Jamie has been getting a little genetic testing done. Apparently we’re siblings. Half siblings, anyway.”
“I don’t . . .” Carrie starts, but she trails off. She does understand. She’s worked it out.
“Surely you can see that this is over? You’re not really going to shoot all three of us, are you?” I ask him, aiming for a conversational tone. I don’t pull it off. There are cracks in my delivery.
“He isnae going to shoot you,” says Fiona. The certainty of her words is echoed in her pale, fiercely determined face. She wears the same expression as Callum when we climbed the stairs together to find the bones under Carrie’s bed. There’s a part of me that believes in her, that believes that she knows. I wish all of me could. “That isnae how this ends.”
The Missing Years Page 30