by R. D. Nixon
He closed his eyes and breathed through the sharp pain that radiated outwards from his collarbone, and when he opened them he groaned again – this time in despair; Jamie had turned and was running back down the slope towards him. As his last chance of survival threatened to disappear in the mist, Mackenzie looked closer at what the boy was holding in his hand and felt the years peel away, leaving him breathless for an entirely different reason.
By the time he was alone again his mind tumbled in bewilderment, but as he slipped into a confused sleep, hope had begun to unfurl tentative shoots once more.
Chapter Nineteen
Inverness Airport
Sarah flung her overnight bag onto the passenger seat of the hire car and took a moment to gather her thoughts. It was roughly a two-hour drive, and the first stop was Abergarry, to pick up the gun and a few spare rounds. It shouldn’t be necessary to use the bloody awful thing, not if Don had done the job right, and as a deterrent it would be all she needed; Don had never been the most courageous of men, and according to him this sidekick of his was apparently just a lanky streak of yessir-whatever-you-say.
Driving out of the airport and back towards Inverness, she found herself looking around with an unexpectedly strong sense of homecoming. She barely spared this place a thought usually; LA provided all she’d ever wanted. Life there was fast, exciting, and even her dull job at the museum had shown her that an aristocratic manner and an accent could get her miles further down the road. Here, in her own homeland, she was commonplace.
That hadn’t always been the case though. For a while she had been the toast of the young set, with plenty of hangers-on of both sexes, and Glenlowrie had seemed a thriving estate, welcoming visitors from all over for grouse shooting and stalking. The guns would gather in the lodge in the evenings and toast her father in fine single malt, when really it was the gillies and the hardworking beaters who should have been thanked. But who would even think of the gillies when the laird was laying on the spread?
Rebelling against the tradition of the whole thing hadn’t prevented Sarah from inviting people up to the estate and laying on parties of her own; might as well reap the benefits. In return she had been invited to every event going, and on that particular night…
Sarah took a narrow exit off the A82 and tried to remember how she had felt that night, but she couldn’t. She could remember what had happened, but not how it felt. She never could; it was as if someone had sliced that part of her life away and replaced it with a typed list of events. Her father, straightening his tie in the hallway mirror, squinting through his cigarette smoke; his shocked face when she’d told him what she’d learned from Don; his refusal to tell her where he’d hidden his share, and most importantly the Fury…
He’d shown it to her once, when she was about six and throwing a tantrum over something. She couldn’t remember what she’d been so furious about, but he’d taken her to his study and golden back black silk to reveal the stone; he’d even let her hold it, examine its blazing colours and watch them merge and twist into strands of glorious fire. Then, just when she’d been sure he was going to give it to her to keep forever, and she’d felt a huge rush of love towards him for it, he’d plucked it from her hand and she had never seen it again.
Then, the night of the party, that night, Mum and Dad had been going to some shindig somewhere down the glen. Dad had been standing in front of the hall mirror, she remembered, and the label on his tie had been wrong side out. Funny how little details stick.
‘Don told me about what you did,’ she’d said, out of nowhere. She hadn’t even realised she was going to say it, wasn’t even sure if she’d believed Don when he told her, but Dad was so distant and dismissive lately, she just wanted a rise out of him. His eyes barely flickered towards her in the mirror, and he spoke around his cigarette.
‘What who did?’
‘You and Uncle Rob, and the one who died in prison. To Frank Mackenzie.’
His fingers stilled on the knot of his tie, and she knew now that Don had been telling the truth.
‘Not now, Sarah. I’m going out.’
‘Later then? Will you show them to me?’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ Dad went back to his tie, but the way his fingers were shaking betrayed him.
‘Please?’ Sarah sighed. ‘All right, I’ll make a deal with you. I’ll say nothing about the Spence stuff, if you’ll just show me that black stone again. After all, it’ll be mine someday anyway.’
The face he turned on her was suddenly pinched tight with anger and a closed, possessive jealousy as he snatched his cigarette from his mouth.
‘I wish to God I’d never shown you that bloody thing,’ he whispered harshly. ‘If you’d not been screaming like a wee banshee, fit to give your mother and me migraines… Now away and let me finish getting ready.’ He glanced down the hallway in both directions, to ensure they were still alone. ‘And if I hear you’ve breathed a word of what that bloody copper has said, then both of you will find out what a fucking big mistake he’s made.’
So Sarah drove off to her house party, where she got very, very drunk, but no matter; it was a sleep-where-you-fall-down party, the best kind. Glittering with good cheer on the outside, brittle with hatred and resentment on the inside, she eventually wandered out of the house into the snapping wind, hoping it would clear her head of the growing anger.
Her head did clear, but only of the fuzzy blanket that the alcohol had draped over everything, and it allowed a chink of light through, and an idea with it. The stone was sure to be in Dad’s study, and since he was out, what other chance would she get to turn the place upside-down until she found it? She glanced over at where her car sat, with around twenty others, on the field adjacent to the house. She was clear-headed…all right, a wee bit tipsy perhaps, but not completely jaked. Besides, she was used to driving these roads, and it was late; hardly anyone would be about. She could be home within the hour, allow another hour or so for searching, and still be back here before Mum and Dad came home. Teach the bastard to hide something like that from her. Teach him to bloody keep it to himself, when it was her own inheritance!
Slipping away from the party was easy enough; everyone was either giving it everything on the ‘dance floor’ – Girl, I wanna make you sweat – or lip-locked with someone else. That tart Donna Kilbride was wrapped around Craig Lumsden, and just wait ’til Craig’s girlfriend found out... Sarah hoped she’d be back to see the fallout from that one.
She free-wheeled down the dead-straight drive with her lights off, picking out the edges only by the occasional lurch onto grass, and when she reached the gate she switched the lights on, pulled her fags out and lit up, grinning into the night as, unnoticed by anyone, she started towards home.
An hour and a half later she was no longer grinning, or even smiling. There was nothing here that she could see, and not really anywhere else to look. There just literally wasn’t anywhere the Fury could be hidden; Dad wasn’t one for towering bookshelves or sliding panels in the walls; the house itself might be a sprawling mess of cubby-holes and ante-rooms, but the study was a square little box with a desk – all the drawers of which were accessible – an ashtray, and a never-used blotter purely for show. On top of the filing cabinet were a few lever arch files with dates written on their curling-stickered spines. That was pretty much it.
Hung on the back of Dad’s chair was his everyday woollen jacket, the one he wore around the estate, and Sarah felt a surge of renewed anger at the sight of it; no-one knew Glenlowrie was in fact falling into ruin, or that the staff they brought in for parties were only hired for the night. Only the agency staff themselves knew, and were fed the line that it was the regular staff’s night off. To hear Dad speak you’d think he dined on quails’ eggs for breakfast, and was piped in to a ten-course dinner every night. He still swanned about the place like the lairds of old, complete with beat-up wellies and this patched jacket, as if he actually did anything. Throwing his weigh
t around along with his money. By the time Sarah inherited the place there would be nothing left. Unless… Sarah’s heart thumped suddenly hard. Mum and Dad were out. No-one had seen her arrive…
Calmly, as if watching someone else, she fished out her cigarettes and lit one, but instead of replacing the matches in her own pocket she slipped them into the breast pocket of her Dad’s jacket. Then she pulled the chair a bit closer to the desk, then closer, until it was drawn right in so the back touched. She didn’t do anything else for a moment, just smoked and thought. Smoked and thought.
Eventually, dreamlike, she pulled the ashtray towards the edge of the desk and balanced the half-smoked cigarette on it. Burning end facing outwards. Wool would not ignite, she knew that, but matches would. She glanced at the clock: only eleven-ish; by the time Mum and Dad got home in the small hours the house would be too far gone to save. For a heartbeat she considered getting a few things from her room, but just as quickly discarded the notion; it would only look suspicious, and she owned nothing precious enough to risk that. Thanks to her dad.
In the end she just took a bottle of wine from the cellar and left. By then the matches in the jacket had caught, the nylon lining was starting to melt down over the chair, and the desk was beginning to smoulder. She could actually hear crackling, and as she pulled the front door carefully closed behind her she wondered why she wasn’t fearful, or regretful, or any of the things she’d expect from anyone else.
The rest of the night had passed in a weird kind of a blur, she remembered now, as she turned in to Abergarry’s main street. She’d gone to her friend’s house, this very same friend who was helping her today, and he had agreed to provide her alibi for the night; as childhood friends the same age, growing up together, no-one would think it surprising they had finally spent the night together. But in truth neither held the slightest attraction for the other, though their friendship was long-lived and solid.
They had drunk the wine, and speculated about what might be happening now up at Glenlowrie, and at some point during that long, strange, disjointed night, he had said something that drew together everything she knew and remembered, and gave her a sudden flash of insight into how her father had hidden his share of the Spence collection, if not precisely where.
It was only the following morning that she’d learned, with a hammer-blow of shock, that Mum and Dad’s dinner party had been cancelled. They had retired early instead, and consequently perished, overcome by the smoke that had risen directly up through two floors into their room. Abruptly all thoughts of the jewels, and even the Fury, had been blasted clear out of Sarah’s head, and all the missing emotions had tumbled back: crushing guilt, terror at discovery, grief for her mother, regret for her father… But, she had been interested to discover, simmering beneath it all was anger.
Now she would never find her inheritance. If there had been anything of that nature in the house, it would surely have turned up during the fire investigation, the same one that had so quickly laid the blame at Duncan’s feet… Or rather, his fingertips. His yellowed, nicotine-stained fingertips. But the estate had yielded nothing bar some small parcels of land, which were sold for development, and a few ruined crofters’ cottages. So Sarah had taken what was left, and run.
Two phone calls, that’s all there had been, between old friends locked into conspiratorial silence. Just two. After twenty-four years. One from him to her, with the news she thought she’d never hear, and a little later she’d returned it to say she was coming back. Now she was here, and she wondered if he would recognise her immediately, or if both of them had changed too much in the intervening years.
She was surprised to find the door unlocked, but she pushed it open and stepped inside, and was relieved when the man who looked up and smiled was as instantly recognisable as her own face. ‘Hello, Ben.’
‘Sarah.’ He came over and drew her into his arms. ‘Welcome to Cameron and Son.’
She hugged him back, suddenly feeling trembly. ‘I can’t believe it’s come to this,’ she mumbled into his shirt. ‘Have you got it?’
‘Aye. Come through to the back.’
He led the way into his workshop, and Sarah looked around, oddly comforted by the sights and smells. ‘Remember when you and I would watch your dad making his wee models and things in here, in the summer holidays?’
Ben reached down a box from the top of a cupboard and laid it on the worktable. ‘I was surprised you had the patience back then.’
‘I only stuck it because you kept making me laugh,’ she pointed out.
He opened the box, though with some hesitation, and drew out his father’s handgun. She eyed it a little apprehensively.
‘Ammo?’
‘It’s loaded now, but I’ve no spare. I’ve no permit, so I couldn’t get any.’
‘That’s fine.’ She took the gun, and studied it while she searched for a way to ease the awkward silence. ‘I suppose nowadays you’re making your kids laugh, instead of me, while you work.’
‘I have different memories of this place now,’ he said quietly, and she bit her lip.
‘Of course. I’m so sorry. Finding your dad like that... I can’t imagine how awful it must have been.’
‘What a way to ruin a perfectly good holiday weekend,’ he said, but the shadow in his eyes belied the jokey tone.
‘Ben, I’m so sorry—’
‘The festival wasn’t that great anyway though. Would have been better if you’d been there, but I suppose you were off with your officer friend. The one that’s currently trying to screw you in a whole other way.’ He looked embarrassed, suddenly. ‘Look, you must be knackered. Are you sure you won’t stay awhile, maybe have a cuppa to give you a boost?’
She shook her head. ‘And you’re not to ask me anything about this. Promise?’
‘I don’t think I want to know.’
‘Thank you.’ She put a hand on his arm. ‘For telling me about Don, I mean, and what he’s up to.’
‘Aye, well, when that DS Mulholland came into the shop, I remembered what you’d told me, the night of the fire.’
‘You were the one who helped me make that connection,’ Sarah said. ‘I’d never have guessed where the jewels were.’
‘You still don’t know,’ he reminded her. ‘Not exactly.’
‘No, but at least now I know what I’m looking for. And it meant I was ready when Don called with his so-called deal.’
‘How did you know there was supposed to be a flaw though?’
‘Rob Doohan told me. Between you both you’ve saved me from making a huge mistake.’
‘Have we though?’ He looked at her, concerned. ‘All this really does seem a bit…extreme. Even for you.’
‘Even?’ Sarah laughed; she couldn’t help it – he’d always brought out the lighter side in her. ‘Ah, why couldn’t we fancy each other, Ben?’
He shrugged. ‘I suppose because Justine was always out there waiting for me, whether I knew it or not.’
‘Are you saying you believe in a higher power?’ she teased, slipping the gun into her bag.
‘Just fate, I suppose. And you’re with the American, so it’s all worked out.’
Sarah fought down a stab of guilt, with the best weapon at her disposal: justification. If Andy had only done as she asked, and hadn’t gone digging and learned about the fire… ‘All worked out,’ she agreed. ‘Justine’s a lucky lady.’
‘You’re going to be careful?’
‘Of course. I told you, it’s a deterrent, that’s all.’
‘Then why ask for more ammunition?’
Sarah sighed. ‘Ben—’
‘No, you’re right. None of my beeswax.’
‘It’s protection, okay?’
‘Then let me come with you.’
‘And do what? We’ve got one weapon between us, and you have a business and a reputation at stake. Look, Don’ll fold just as soon as he knows I’m aware of his stupid little game. Then we’ll draw up a new deal, and he’ll have a
better measure of me.’
No mention of a kidnapped child, or a murdered boyfriend… That was the kind of thing that would tip even Ben Cameron’s scale from earnest, helpful friend right over to appalled citizen and father; he would never condone what she had done in the name of her inheritance, even if the boy emerged unscathed. Which she couldn’t guarantee either. She wished she had some of Ben’s faith in fate.
‘I’ve got to go,’ she said, with real regret. ‘Thank you so much for this.’
‘Don’t bring it back. I’ve wanted to get shot of it for a long time, but haven’t dared hand it in.’
‘I don’t just mean the gun.’
‘I know.’ He came back around the counter and put his arms around her again. ‘Just watch out for that Mulholland bloke, okay? There’s something about him.’
‘Like what?’
‘Something’s…missing. I don’t think he’d think twice about putting a bullet in you.’
‘Then it’s a good thing I’ve got this.’ Sarah patted her bag, hoping her smile hid the sudden lurch of nervous queasiness. ‘Right. I’ll be away. You finish up here and get back to Justine. I’m sure she’s wondering why you’re working on a Sunday.’
‘I sent her and the boys away for a few days,’ he said. When she raised an eyebrow, he added quietly, ‘I told you; I don’t trust that Mulholland one inch.’
Chapter Twenty
Bradley followed Mulholland back into the cottage, unsettled by the new light in the sergeant’s eyes; if he had seemed unnervingly cold before, now he looked like glittering danger wrapped in the tall, thin frame of someone Bradley barely recognised. The gun was tucked away out of sight, but he knew it had not finished its work today, and for the first time, he questioned his decision to make Mulholland carry it. It was all very well not wanting to risk his career, but everything seemed to have taken a sinister side-step into a world where careers were the last consideration.