The Hidden Eye

by Oliver Davies

  “But not a bat to the head,” I said with a smirk.

  Some of the bloody confidence fell from MacPherson’s face. “What?”

  That was when his daughter smacked him upside the head as hard as she could. Surprise slid across his face for just a moment before he crumpled like his strings had been cut. Bee stood over him with the bat still raised as if shocked that that had worked. Then things descended into chaos. The only good thing is that no one started opening fire. Who knew who would get gunned down if we did?

  I raced Kingston to Alexis, but it turned out he had a different target than I did. Instead, he looped one arm around Bee’s waist, knocking her bat away with the gun, and scooped her up, draping her over his uninjured shoulder as she yelped and pummelled his back.

  “Put me down!” she yelled, but her words had no effect on him. He made a beeline for the hidden door that she’d left open.

  Fletcher ran towards him as I pushed myself back to my feet, but he slammed the doors in our faces. Fletcher started yanking books off the shelf, trying to find which one would trigger the mechanism. By the time she found the right one, Kingston and Bee were gone, swallowed up by the massive house and its warren of corridors, hidden and otherwise.

  I crowded into the narrow passage behind her as if I could somehow pierce the empty darkness better than she could and glean some clue as to where they had gone. “Shit,” I spat when I realized there was nothing. “Call Dunnel. No one leaves the estate.”

  Fletcher got out her phone and saved the recording before she dialled Dunnel. As she waited for an answer, I went to check on Alexis. The young woman still knelt in the same spot, staring down at MacPherson’s prone form. Her eyes were wide, her mouth a little slack, and her hands shook where they lay against her thighs. There was a trickle of blood on the back of MacPherson’s head, but he was clearly still breathing, so I ignored him for the time being and crouched down in front of Alexis.

  “Hey. You’re okay now, alright?” I didn’t touch her. She’d been grabbed and pushed and held so many times in the past hour or so that I figured she probably wouldn’t like to add to that pile, even if the gesture was meant to be comforting.

  The sound of my voice drew Alexis’s gaze from MacPherson’s body up to my face, but it was as if there were little weights tied to her eyes. They kept trying to tip back down to look at the floor. “Bee?” she said quietly, face crumpling with worry.

  “Kingston took her. But,” I raised a finger and went on quickly as a mixture of guilt and fear and horror took over Alexis’s features, “he won’t hurt her. She’s his only bargaining chip.”

  As cold as Kingston was, he was clearly smart. He would keep Bee alive, try to ransom her for his freedom.

  MacPherson stirred, groaning as one hand twitched in a feeble attempt to push himself into a more upright position. I decided to be a good neighbour and help him out. I grabbed the back of his jacket and heaved him upright, slamming him against the side of his desk harder than was absolutely necessary. He grunted, eyes still glazed from the blow to his head, and he struggled to focus on my face.

  I snapped my fingers in front of his eyes a couple of times, and he blinked, squinting at me. “What… happened?” he said slowly. His fingers went to the back of his head and came away wet with blood. He winced.

  “Kingston took your daughter.”

  He stared back at me as his addled brain tried to comprehend my words, so I repeated myself, speaking slowly, overenunciating each word.

  “Kingston. Took. Your. Daughter.”

  Lightning crackled through MacPherson’s eyes, clearing the fog away, and he began to fight to get to his feet, his control over his limbs loose and watery. I shoved him back towards his chair, and he fell into it with a thump that pushed the wheels back a foot. I pointed a finger at his face. “You’re under arrest. You’re not going anywhere.”

  Fletcher stepped up beside me, shoving her phone in her pocket, her face was a mask of frustration. “Dunnel’s forming a perimeter, but he doesn’t have enough people with how large the estate is.”

  “Do you have any idea where he would take her?” I asked MacPherson, but his entire world and all his power had just been swept out from under him, and he’d lost himself in the fallout, unable to answer me.

  Someone knocked hesitantly on the office door, and Fletcher and I spun around, an extra jolt of adrenaline racing through my veins. Mary MacPherson poked her head into the room, closely followed by her son. Her eyes widened and her hand flew to her mouth when she saw Fletcher and me standing there, Alexis on the ground, and her husband slumped in his chair. “I--what’s going on? We heard--was that a gunshot?”

  “Mrs MacPherson, Raymond, please step inside with your hands raised,” I ordered. “Your husband is under arrest for accessory to murder on three accounts as well as attempted murder.”

  A shocked sob wracked Mary’s frame as she did as she was told, and Raymond looked a little sick. They both moved into the room, hands over their heads, and I waved for them to move to stand by MacPherson. Mary’s arm twitched like she wanted to touch MacPherson’s shoulder, but I gave her a sharp look, and she kept it in the air.

  “Kingston took your daughter hostage,” I continued. “We don’t know where he’s taking her. Do either of you have any idea where they might go?”

  “Kingston? Your bodyguard?” Mary looked at her husband with fear and hurt scratched into her face, muddled in with a healthy dose of confusion. “Why?”

  “Your perimeter won’t catch them,” MacPherson finally said, coming back to himself just a little though his voice was bland and faraway. “There’s a tunnel leading under the estate and outside the fence. My great-grandfather installed it, paranoid about sabotage and betrayal. Kingston knows where it is.”

  Again with the secret tunnels. They were going to be the death of me.

  “Where does it let out?” I asked.

  “Martin Avenue. They’ll be long gone by now though.” MacPherson’s inflection never changed, but Mary choked, and she dropped her hands to hug herself, Raymond hesitantly wrapping one arm around her shoulders.

  “Call Dunnel again,” I said to Fletcher. “Have him send someone out there.”

  “The entrance looks like a drain cover, but it’s not,” MacPherson added.

  Fletcher took the information and was soon on the phone with Dunnel again, placing it on speaker so I could hear both halves of the conversation. “Send someone to Martin Avenue. Tell them to look for a drain cover. Kingston may have escaped that way.”

  “On it,” Dunnel replied. “I’m on my way up to you.”

  “Is there anyone else in the building?” I asked MacPherson as Fletcher hung up.

  It was Mary who answered. “At this time of night, it’s just us.”

  “I need the three of you to think. Where might Kingston go?” The more time we wasted here, the further away he’d get, and the harder it would be to catch up.

  “I don’t know where he’s going, but I might have a way we can find out,” MacPherson said. He’d finally regathered enough of his wits to be useful to the conversation. Dunnel entered the office as MacPherson was ordering the last of his thoughts. I glanced at him and gave him a silent nod of hello, not wanting to derail the conversation. Dunnel approached quietly and stood behind me with his arms folded and a stony expression on his face, directed at the MacPhersons. “If Beatrice has her phone on her, you can track it. Even if it’s been turned off. I--” he coughed into his hand, “I installed some serious spyware on it.”

  “You’re the worst, you know that?” I said before I could stop myself.

  MacPherson glared up at me, fingers clenching around the armrests of his chair. “For caring about my family’s safety?”

  “For invading their, not to mention the entire city’s, privacy,” I corrected.

  “Everything I did, I did for love of Inverness,” he shot back, his haughty demeanour returning faster and faster as the haze disappeared from his
eyes.

  “Your version of Inverness doesn't exist anymore,” I said. “And that’s more than okay.”

  “Callum.” Fletcher put a hand on my shoulder, pulling me out of the argument with MacPherson that I was fully ready to get into, and she raised an eyebrow, reminding me to get back to the task at hand. “Now’s not the time.”

  I took a deep breath and pushed my anger down. “Show us the software.”

  “Is there spyware on my phone, too?” Raymond wondered. Mary had both her arms wrapped around him, using him to keep herself upright. I motioned that they could sit, and they sank onto the bench by the hearth as one unit.

  “Yes. Now be quiet, son,” MacPherson said. He glanced up at me and raised an imperious eyebrow. “May I use my phone?”

  I took a step to the side so he could roll his chair up to the desk and pick up the phone lying by his laptop. It took him a minute to get logged into the app and pull up the information on Bee’s location. I plucked the phone from his hand, ignoring his huff of protest, and Fletcher and Dunnel crowded in close behind me so we could all watch the screen.

  The red dot in the centre of the blank map blinked and blinked and blinked as it searched for a signal, and I grew ever more nervous as the moment stretched. Surely, Kingston would have smashed her phone or tossed it out the window, even if he didn’t know about the spyware. The map materialized around the red dot, and it began to move, headed towards the edge of town on the A82.

  “Looks like we’re in business,” I said, hope blooming in my chest, and Fletcher grinned fiercely. “Dunnel, will you secure Raymond and square things away here for us while we go after Kingston?”

  “Do you want to take backup?”

  I glanced at Fletcher as I thought about it. “I think this time backup might do more harm than good. Harder to sneak up on him, more bodies getting in the way, more targets for Kingston.”

  We wound our way down to the ground floor, moving as fast as we could without actually running. I wondered what would happen to the estate after MacPherson was convicted. Mary truly didn’t seem to have any idea of what he had done. Would she stay in the huge, empty house that didn’t seem to hold much of her in it, or would she go somewhere else? Would she even be able to figure out how to get by without MacPherson there? She almost seemed the type to waste away without an external force telling her what to do.

  I was glad to step out into the night air and leave the heavy pall of the estate behind. Other officers, simple shadows in the dark, roved the trees and grounds, searching for a quarry that was no longer here. They’d done the same thing as we had when they arrived and left their vehicles at the end of the drive, probably mostly because I’d blocked the entrance when I parked, and so Fletcher and I picked up the pace, jogging down the gravel road.

  My car was right where I’d left it, conveniently boxed in by three other vehicles. I chucked MacPherson’s phone to Fletcher so that I could dig out my keys, and after I started the car, I swung it in a wide arc off the road, dipping into the shallow ditch so I could ease around the little blockade. The tyres slipped and struggled on the grass, but I pressed down on the accelerator and eased the clutch until we made it up the incline and back onto the drive. Then I snapped the siren on and took off, following Fletcher’s directions into the night.

  Seventeen

  “Where is he?”

  “Still on the A82.”

  Kingston had about a ten-minute lead on us. Fletcher figured that he would be going at or just above the speed limit, not wanting to draw attention to himself since he probably figured we had no way of following him. Hopefully, that would give us a chance to catch up with him.

  Two car chases in a night had to be a record for me.

  With the siren on, I was able to push our speed until the car began to feel like its own beast, barely under my control, my knuckles white on the steering wheel, my calf and foot tense as I continuously pressed down on the pedal. Fletcher watched the scrolling map with an unwavering stare, tracking the little red dot that was Bee’s phone, and once we got on the A82, she didn’t need to keep directing me. We were both waiting for that moment that Kingston finally turned off the road.

  The dark night swallowed the landscape just beyond the reach of my headlights. It was as if the world outside the road simply didn’t exist anymore, gobbled up by a vast and insatiable creature. There was an odd sensation in my gut. My adrenaline was fading, but it warred with its demise even as it began to lose its battle against time and inactivity, knowing that there was more to come, wanting to be ready. Anticipation fluttered across my skin, growing and fading and growing again as the car ate up the tarmac, unable to keep itself, to keep me, steady.

  “He’s stopping,” Fletcher said some twenty minutes later.

  My adrenaline spiked, gaining another pair of legs to stand on. “Where?”

  “By Loch Ness. Urquhart Castle.”

  That gave me pause, and I took my eyes off the road long enough to give Fletcher a confused look. “Why would he be going there?”

  “I have no idea.”

  I shivered. What was Kingston doing at Loch Ness? My mind made connections that simply weren’t there. He knew my father. He knew something about my father’s disappearance. He’d killed my father. He was associated with the person attacking my father in the photo. He’d been the one shooting at me as I fled the Kraken’s houseboat. He’d been, he’d been, he’d been. I shut the spiral of jumbled thoughts down. I needed to stick with facts, not wild, unfounded theories.

  We’d cut Kingston’s lead down to about five minutes, but I increased our speed even further. There weren’t many places for him to go now--he’d kind of boxed himself in against the loch… but there was an anxious curl in the back of my mind that I didn’t like. He obviously knew something that we didn’t.

  “The turn’s coming up,” Fletcher said, and I slowed since I couldn’t see much in the dark, flipping off the lights to make the approach. I barely caught sight of the turning in time to hit the brakes and spin the wheel. The back tyres lost traction on the road for a second, and I fought with the car as Fletcher braced herself against the door. The vehicle struggled to find purchase on the gravel as the tarmac disappeared, but I gave it a burst of speed, and the tyres caught, launching us forward.

  A small tributary fed into the loch, and we followed it slowly down the hill. A few minutes later, Kingston’s car came into view, parked right at the edge of the small car park where the gravel turned to grass. It was empty and the lights were off. I parked opposite it and shut off the engine, climbing out into the cool night. It had just started to drizzle, the spray light and chilly on my face. I walked over and peered through the window of the other vehicle, checking to make sure if there was anything of note, but the interior had been cleared out.

  The gravel path leading down to the castle, currently invisible in the dark, didn’t hold any footprints, but it was the only way that made sense in this otherwise perplexing situation, unless Kingston had abandoned the car and doubled back towards the road. I doubted that.

  So Fletcher and I went that way. The crunch of the gravel under our shoes seemed unbearably loud in the quiet night, accompanied only by the distant lap of waves over stone. Twenty steps in, I broke down and turned on my phone’s torch. With the clouds covering the moon and stars, there was absolutely no light to show us the way, and I didn’t want one of us to fall and break an ankle or wander off the pass and miss our target, maybe even stumble right into the loch if we were really unlucky.

  The bright white light burned my eyes for a second after it clicked on, and I squinted, waiting for my pupils to adjust. The rain glistened in the beam, the drops of water so small and fine that they seemed to hang, suspended, in the air. The torch couldn’t pick up the castle yet, so we continued down the hill, my ears straining for any sound of movement while I wished there was some way he wouldn’t see us coming.

  The ground levelled out, and we crossed a narrow wooden bridge ov
er a stream, passing through the outer wall of Urquhart Castle and into the small field just beyond. Low stone walls, crumbling and gleaming in the rain, marked where the rooms of the castle would be if they were still standing, the most intact portion was the tower in the corner closest to the loch. A paved path led us there, but before we started down it, I swept the torchlight around the ruins, searching for traps or tricks or even any sign that Kingston was here. I woke a dark bird up, and it took to the air, cawing in annoyance, but that was the only sign of life amongst the rough and tumbled stone.

  Fletcher tapped my shoulder and pointed towards the tower, and we set off towards it since it was the only real place to hide.

  “Kingston?” I called as we walked. He could already see our light. “Bee? Are you here?”

  “Cal--!” Bee called the first half of my name and then was cut off abruptly, her voice emanating from the squat tower. Fletcher and I began to run, our footsteps pounding against the stone. I dashed up the short flight of stairs carved into the hill two at a time, following the path as it turned towards the tower’s open arch.

  Kingston appeared out of the shadows, leaning against one side of the arch and blocking our way, his hold-out gun held casually in one hand, pointed towards the ground. He squinted slightly as I shone my light in his eyes, Kingston’s own pistol in my free hand.

  Kingston then raised a hand to shield his eyes, a languid smile on his lips. “So good to see you again,” he drawled. “It’s been so long.”

  “It’s over, Kingston,” I called. Fletcher and I stopped with about ten metres between us, the shallow rise placing Kingston slightly above us.

  “I’ll decide when it’s over,” Kingston said. “If I’m honest, you’ll have to kill me to stop me. I won’t go to prison. It’s not really my scene.” His smile grew so that it showed off one shape canine. “Lucky for me, neither of you really seem the killing type.”

  I wanted to contradict him, but he had us dead to rights there. I also couldn’t suggest that we’d let him walk if he let Bee free because he’d know in an instant that I was lying about that.