by Josh Lanyon
“I’m the last of the Macaulays,” Julia said. “You’ve broken my great-grandfather, but you won’t break me.”
Calum glanced at the figure in the chair, vacant and apart, like his grandmother when she’d finally gone to senility. And he felt an unexpected surge of regret for the difficult, implacable old man he’d met.
“Eight hundred years,” Julia repeated furiously. “I’m not going to let you just take it away from us.”
Calum sighed. “Jools, you’re going to have to—”
“Don’t bother!” Julia hissed. “You were meant to be my friend, and you didn’t tell me. And let’s face it…if he didn’t give it to the press, you did. You— I want both of you to get out!”
“I didn’t give…”
“Shen said no one knew. Just the family and both of you!”
“And, possibly the killer,” Calum pointed out.
“Oh, the killer called the press?” Julia sneered. “After leaving a priceless object behind in a Tesco bag?”
Calum’s face heated under her mockery. He opened his mouth to defend himself again, but instinct had already stolen the breath from his lungs seconds before he understood why.
His blank eyes met Julia’s. She turned and stalked impatiently toward the back of the room.
“How did you know Tormod put the piece in a Tesco bag?” he asked.
“Shen told me,” Julia snapped. She didn’t turn around.
And the jarring something that had been worrying at his subconscious resolved into perfect, unwanted clarity.
“How did you know Tormod sent the newspaper pictures to Adam? Or what they looked like? No one saw them but me and Adam.”
His eyes had fixed on Julia’s straight, slim back, her disarranged chignon, as she bent to tidy something. He felt numb. There was an easy explanation. He just had to wait for it.
In his peripheral vision, he registered Adam’s head jerking round to look at him in shock, but Calum couldn’t drag his eyes away from Julia’s back.
When she turned around, though, he saw that she hadn’t been tidying.
One of Uilleam’s shotguns was held straight and level in her arms, the twin black holes of the barrel trained between him and Adam, the gun-cabinet door wide open behind her.
And he thought…how the fuck could he have forgotten that cabinet?
He’d blundered into this as everything else; off-balance from the start, everything too close to home.
“You used to be a hotshot policeman in Glasgow…”
He’d gone soft here. Trusting and complacent, too involved in his own misery, his instincts blunted by familiarity.
He dragged his eyes up from the twin black holes of the barrel.
He was still lying in that hotel bed, fast asleep and dreaming. He was going to wake up and laugh about all this with Adam.
In the dream, Julia’s face was twisted with an emotion that looked like grief, but how could he believe anything about her? She was a brilliant actor. How could he have forgotten that too?
Except he hadn’t. He’d just trusted her, like his own family.
“It’s loaded,” she said. “Three shots, as usual. You were meant to be taken off the case, Orly.” Her voice trembled. “After that story, you had to be.”
“I was,” Calum said. He sounded stunned even to his own ears. “I came to see if Uilleam was all right.”
Julia’s laugh sounded desperate. “Fuck, of course you did. You always do the right bloody thing.”
“Cal…” Adam’s chair scraped on the lino floor as he shoved it back from the table, making to stand. The gun swung fast to point at him, and the expression on Julia’s face was feral. No tears for Adam.
“Don’t!” Calum lurched forward at once, a deliberate movement to drag her attention back to him. “Stay still, Adam.”
Adam looked ashen, but he subsided back into his chair. “Cal, for fuck’s sake…”
“I know,” Calum said. His eyes fixed on Julia and the gun, a mouse in front of a cobra.
He’d gone to a seminar once on hostage negotiation. Just…they were the hostages.
Stage one. Listen actively.
“Tell me what you want, Julia.”
She eyed him wildly. “Want? I want you not to have come! I want both of you to have left before…”
“You know who killed Tormod?”
At some point, Kevin was going to come in with the tea, and she couldn’t cover three people. Just so long as she didn’t shoot when the door opened.
She made a sound of desperate amusement. “What d’you think?”
“Who killed him, Jools?”
“Don’t call me that!”
“Did you kill him?”
Julia’s breath shook, but she didn’t deny it.
“Why? You loved him.”
“Because it was my life or his!” she burst out. “God, you wouldn’t understand! You chose this. I went from the brink of everything to…nothing. I had a major agent, did you know that? Even as a student, he was getting me calls for TV, theatre…he’d contacted people in LA. They said I was going to be huge! A huge star. And look at me. I’m cleaning up piss and shit and drool and watching other people living through a fucking screen. And that’s meant to be it, every day until I die? Forever and ever amen?”
“Fuck, Julia! You chose as well, to come home for your mum.”
“I had no way to stay on! No money to pay someone to look after her or get me through my course. And my family just expected me to give up my ‘silly ideas’ and do my duty. And then, after years of this bullshit, I find out they’re as rich as fucking Croesus, and they’re sitting there, letting me and Mum live in misery because they’re too primitive to know superstition from reality.”
“How did you find out?” Adam asked, as if he understood they had to keep her talking. “Only the son who succeeds was supposed to know.”
She scowled. “And the son told me. Tormod. The day after Granny told him. He was distraught. It should have been Mum. She was the eldest child by five years, but they had to wait for the boy.”
“But Tormod was going to sell it,” Calum said. “And he’d have shared the money with you. Why would you kill him when he was trying to get out too?”
“Because he wasn’t,” Julia snapped. “He gave in. Just like you did.”
Calum said, “So…all the stuff about LA…”
“God! He was too afraid of life to do anything brave. Seanair Uilleam had been badgering him since he was eighteen to get married. Have a son. But he’d held out, the only time he ever stood up for himself. Then Granny told him about the pieces and showed him the queen, and the pathetic bastard thought he had to. Like a sacred charge. I couldn’t talk him out of it, never mind convince him to sell.” She glared venomously at Calum. “He really was like you. In every way.”
Something about the way she said it made Calum ask, “What do you mean?”
Her face contorted into a sneer. “I mean, he was gay and spineless too!”
Calum’s breathing stopped. He should probably have been appalled that he felt more stunned by that, than Julia pulling out the shotgun in the first place.
And then it made sense.
“You contacted Adam. And you used an email address that would point the finger at Tormod.” Her silence was a reply. “You chose Adam specifically to throw me. Because…you knew I’d lead any inquiry for the first couple of days, and I’d fuck the investigation up for good if you could distract me.”
And those insinuating emails, throwing him more off-balance… God, she’d planned it all; used all she knew against him.
She sniffed hard. “Why are you so surprised? Anyone who saw the two of you together could tell.” Despite himself, Calum shot a glance at Adam, but Adam was staring at Julia as if he couldn’t believe his eyes. “I knew your reputation as a detective. So yeah, I knew I had to get past you first. But I should have known better than to think love would slow you down.” Her voice rang with spite. “Self-
sacrifice is what gets you off.”
“You’re not really in a position to lecture anyone about love,” Adam said. “Are you?”
Julia swung the gun toward him.
“Tormod didn’t borrow money,” Calum blurted. “Or gamble.”
Ask questions that move the discussion forward, his mind parroted. He was sure that had been the next point on the PowerPoint slide at the seminar. Establish trust so that you can work on a solution together.
But in the real world, all he could do was play for time.
Where the fuck was Kevin?
Maybe they’d laugh about it afterward, he and Kevin. How Calum had got it so disastrously wrong, he’d had to rely on his prime suspect to save him.
But then Julia glanced at the door, and Calum realized with a sinking heart that she was waiting for Kevin to come in too. To pick them all off together in the same room.
Three shots.
“A friend in Glasgow sent the emails about the debt,” Julia said. “I told Tormod they were money scams. To ignore them.”
“God, Julia.” Calum was only just beginning to understand how intricate it had been. “Premeditation isn’t even in it. You planned everything to the last detail.”
Without warning, the living-room door pushed open, and Kevin shouldered his way in, bearing the same flowery, heavily laden tray.
“Tea,” he announced.
“Run!” Calum yelled. “Run!”
But instead, Kevin froze in the doorway as the gun moved in a smooth arc, covering him, then Adam, then Calum, and back.
Kevin gaped at it. “What are you doing?”
“It’s the only way,” Julia said.
“You can’t be serious,” he pleaded.
“I have a plan.” Julia swung the shotgun back to its place between Calum and Adam.
Kevin said wearily, “You always do.”
And Calum’s last hope extinguished. He hadn’t been wrong about everything, after all.
“He was your intruder,” he breathed. It was all suddenly so clear. “You lied about the timing to give him an alibi. To confirm the murderer was your imaginary loan shark.”
Julia gave a tired laugh. “And there’s the smart detective I heard so much about,” she said. “We just…staged it an hour before I said, to give Kev time to get here. I changed the clocks in Mum’s room and pretended to be unconscious for as long as it took, after Kev hit me. Mum didn’t even register much of it. And you came here and cemented Kev’s alibi.” She sighed. “Kev’s all that’s kept me going for the last year, you know. And you, Orly.”
Kevin moved to the table and set down the tray carefully before reaching down into his boot and, with an air of casual habit, pulling out a closed knife. He pressed it, and a long, wicked blade shot out. A flick knife. Illegal. Lethally sharp.
Julia gestured at Adam, then at the corner of the room by the door. “Hold him over there.”
Kevin nodded and moved behind and to the side of Adam’s seated figure to press the tip of the blade to his throat.
Calum jerked forward, but the gun now fixed on him alone. No more hope of distraction. His senses felt elevated, sight and hearing and smell.
It was two against two. Armed against unarmed.
Calum watched in agony as Adam eased to his feet, taller than Kevin by a few inches, the knife point held expertly against his lower jaw. And it made still more sense.
“He cut Tormod’s throat,” Calum accused.
“No,” Julia countered. “It had to be me. My DNA’s already everywhere in the house. I used Granny’s Marigold gloves.”
And somehow that was the most disgusting thing Calum had yet heard from her. Julia interpreted his expression well. Her mouth tightened. She didn’t seem to enjoy his repulsion.
“You’re so shocked,” she sneered. “After all you’ve seen? I acted cutting a throat in a play once. It didn’t feel that different in real life. He sat down in his chair, talking. I was at the sink, behind him, washing up. I grabbed his hair and did it. It was quick.” Calum could see her defensiveness was translating into bravado. Perversely, trying to shock him. “I’d borrowed his car so anyone who saw it, would think it was him when I arrived at the house. Then after, I walked down the side of the croft where Shen couldn’t see, and Kevin picked me up. No one noticed. Even in that gossip pit. I could have talked my way out if they had, but we got all the luck.”
And Tormod—Lucky—got none.
“Why didn’t you just steal the queen and sell it?” Calum asked in despair. “You’d have been rich enough on that. No one had to die.”
“But Tormod would have known it was me,” she said, as if it was obvious. “And he’d have told Granny and Seanair Uilleam. I didn’t want them to hate me.”
Calum stared at her in disbelief, then at Uilleam, long gone inside his own head.
“And I’d never be told where to find the other pieces,” Julia went on reasonably. “I had to force their hand. So, I set it up to look like Tormod had been ready to sell, and I left the queen for you as bait. I got Adam in”—she shrugged—“then called the paper with Adam in place to take the blame. Tormod was the roadblock. He’d never sell the pieces, even if the whole world knew about them. But without him, the secret would pass to Mum and then me, like it should have anyway. And if the government won’t play ball with us, I have people willing to pay almost anything if the pieces are authenticated by the British Museum. And that’ll happen when the queen’s officially examined. There are places all along the coast where we can get things out when the fuss dies down. I’ll look after all the family, though. They’ll never have to worry about anything again.”
And then there was nothing more to say. No more revelations or distractions.
The last stage in hostage negotiation: influence and change behaviour. But Calum had no cards to play. Just an appeal to reality.
“You know you can’t shoot us. One murder’s bad enough.”
Julia’s face twisted. “Oh, Orly. What would anyone sane choose? Pay the price for one, or get away with three?”
Calum’s gut turned over.
He raised his chin. “But you won’t get away with it. People know we’re here,” he lied. “And believe me, when you kill a police officer, they don’t go easy.”
“But Seanair Uilleam’s going to do it,” Julia said. “He shouldn’t have these guns. He’s far too old and irrational, and he thought you told the papers about the chess piece. That you’d come to take them. Kevin and I were in the kitchen. We couldn’t stop him in time. And then he slipped into…this state. They won’t punish him. He’s far too old. And I’ll take care of him.”
And Calum understood then that he and Adam really were out of luck. Julia had a strategist’s mind, taking all her opportunities, turning them to her advantage. And she could get away with it. He could see how she would.
“Let Adam go,” he said, though he knew it was hopeless.
He felt icy-cold suddenly. Everything had slowed. The scent of peat burning on the fire was more powerful and pungent than he’d ever smelled it before. The sun, struggling through the two small windows, was blinding, like twin floodlights. A bird was cheeping directly outside. It must be on the windowsill, to sound so loud.
“Turn round,” Julia said softly.
Calum didn’t move.
“Turn. Round!”
“Cal!” Adam screamed, and lunged away from Kevin.
Calum stared into Julia’s eyes. In his peripheral vision, he could see Adam being yanked back by Kevin’s hugely muscled arm and forced to his knees, the knife at his neck. A line of blood was forming on his throat.
Well, that’ll fuck up forensics, Calum thought with distant satisfaction.
“I want you to remember my face,” Calum said, but his own voice sounded far away to him, echoey and strange. He thought the bird was louder.
His lungs felt too heavy to breathe.
These were the last few seconds of his life.
Julia�
��s expression contorted, but she raised the gun a few inches to make sure of her aim.
“I did this in a play too,” she said distantly.
Despite himself, Calum looked away at the last instant, because given a choice, his final sight on earth had to be Adam.
The shotgun roared.
Adam’s face twisted in a scream of horror and grief, drowned by the deafening blast. Calum flinched and braced.
But instead of agony, there was a fall of brown snow.
It took him a stunned second to look upward, ears ringing. Tobacco-stained plaster dust was sprinkling down from the gouged ceiling, and Uilleam, discounted in his chair, had twisted around, half risen, and he was wrestling with the barrel of the gun, trying to keep it pointed upward.
Julia had both her hands on it, trying to pull it from Uilleam’s grasp, but somehow he clung on, indomitable, even as Calum leaped forward and grabbed the barrel too.
The smell of gunpowder and old plaster was sharp in his nostrils. His ears buzzed and rang.
It took seconds of struggle to yank the gun away from both of them, the old man and his great-granddaughter.
Then Calum swung around, dragging Julia with him with one hand, pushing her where he could see her.
Adam still knelt on the floor, but both his hands were locked on Kevin’s wrist and muscular forearm, trying to force the blade away from his throat as Kevin strained to hold it there.
Calum pointed the gun at Kevin’s chest. He yelled, “Armed police! Drop your weapon!”
Kevin’s eyes were wild with panic. But Julia screamed suddenly, “Don’t! He won’t shoot!” and darted toward Kevin, toward the door, right into the line of fire.
Calum aimed for the floor inches in front of her and pulled the trigger.
The shocking violence of the blast, the explosion of splinters, froze everyone in place.
“I have one more shot,” Calum said, “and I’m going to take out one of your legs or his shoulder if you don’t both raise your hands and stand down. I’m not fussy which one of you I blow bits off.”
His eyes were on Julia, though, all the way through her slow, panting understanding that he meant it, and then her reluctant obedience as she raised her arms, her face contorted with distress.