He pulled into one of the spaces, grabbed his camera and small rucksack and stepped out, making his way quickly back to the bridge.
As he passed a large gastro pub on his left, built around an old pebbled courtyard, a vision of a woman popped into his mind. A pretty woman, but no sooner had it appeared than it was gone.
He recognised her immediately. It was the woman in the bedroom that he had murdered. He turned to look at the pub. Had he been here in this gastro-pub with that woman? When? The day he killed her, or sometime before? How did he know her? Was she a girlfriend or a one-night stand? A prostitute? Who was she?
He shook his head and started to walk towards the bridge again.
A voice called his name. Only it was not his name. It was something else, which he didn't quite make out.
Involuntarily his head turned in response to the call, but when he spun around there was no one there. No one had called his or any other person's name. Behind him the nearest person was about forty metres away.
Had he imagined the voice? Was it a memory from the past, or did it happen just now?
He turned once more towards the bridge and carried on.
Checking the traffic on either side of him he crossed the road, and within seconds was walking across the river, suspended high above its cold, dark waters by the metal support of the world's very first iron bridge.
In the middle of the bridge he turned around to look at the side of the river he had just come from.
Suddenly there was an incredible, overpowering sense of déjà vu. But it was different than that: it wasn't a feeling as if he had been here before. It was a feeling of certainty, a feeling of complete and absolute fact that Peter had been here before. Even lived here.
Instinctively he knew that if he now looked to his left and further down the river on the left hand side, that he would see large, brick cooling towers.
He did. And not surprisingly, they were there.
In front of him, rows of cottages hung to the side of the gorge which sloped steeply up the hill.
Behind him on the other side of the bridge, there was open space that went up to a forest...As he looked at the forest he felt a chill pass through him. There was something about that forest, something special, even threatening...he didn't know what yet, but the forest was in some way significant...and he knew he would have to discover why.
His heart was beating faster now, and he felt clammy and slightly dizzy.
Looking up at the forest, immediately his eyes were drawn to the left, to a small group of buildings that hung to this side of the gorge. It was as if he was looking for a building, a house, something specific, amongst the group. His eyes focussed on a small building at the top of the hill, in the middle of the last row of houses.
He shivered.
Peter was shaking now. Sweating. He felt dizzy.
A voice spoke in his head, a woman calling his name, but again not a name that he could recognise.
Then the world went black, and Peter fainted.
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Peter opened his eyes to find a crowd of five people all gathered round him, the face of a pretty middle aged lady bent over him and gently stroking his face, trying to coax him back to consciousness.
"Ah...welcome back," she said. "How do you feel? Are you okay?"
"I don't know,...I think so..." Peter replied, slowly raising himself up into a sitting position.
"Do you want me to call a doctor or an ambulance?" she asked. "I just live across the road, so I can if you wish?" she volunteered.
"No," Peter said, feeling better. "I will be fine. I think I probably just need to get something to eat."
Peter smiled reassuringly at the rest of the crowd, and pulled himself up on the railing of the bridge, standing up and brushing himself down.
"Are you visiting Ironbridge?" the lady asked, pulling a large Alsatian to heel by his collar, and patting it on his neck.
"Yes...yes, I am. I'm just down from Edinburgh to follow up on a story that might have connections around here. I'm a reporter with the Edinburgh Evening News."
Peter offered the lady his hand. Making local connections was always a great asset in getting inside news on any story. The lady may be able to help him. "My name is Peter. Thank you for your help and concern...it's much appreciated."
"Kayleigh." She replied. "I'm Kayleigh. And don't worry about it, as long as you are okay now?" She smiled, took a small step away as if to leave, and then turned back towards him. "I just live over there... Would you like to come over for a sandwich and a coffee? My husband and I have been living here for years and we know a lot about the community. Maybe we can help you? And Alex is from St. Andrews. A fellow Scot. He'll be glad to catch up on any local news."
"Thanks for the offer, it's really appreciated. Would it be okay, if I maybe knock on your door in thirty minutes? I was just on my way somewhere and I need to do something first. That would give me the time I need, ...and then I may also have a question for you, which you could help me with, from your local knowledge?"
Kayleigh smiled back. "That would be fine, if you still want to."
She pointed out her house again, smiled and walked away. Peter watched her go, checked the ground around him to make sure he had not dropped anything, and then hurried across the bridge following in the same direction as Kayleigh, but hurrying up the hill past her house, on up to the group of houses that he had seen from the bridge.
When he got to the top of the hill, where the houses finished and the forest started, he reached into his rucksack and pulled out the photographs and his sketches of the bridge that he had drawn from his dream. He inspected them carefully.
Looking back down the hill with the houses in front of him, the angle of the bridge that he had sketched was quite close to what he could see from where he stood now. Turning to his right, he looked along the row of houses and then closed his eyes, trying to re-conjure up the image in his mind that he had seen when looking from the window of the bedroom down to the bridge. He walked along the road a bit, past the first few houses, climbed up onto a wall, and again looked down past the house and gardens in front of him, back towards the river.
The bridge that he could see now, and the image in his mind, seemed very similar.
His heart started to beat faster.
He looked around him, suddenly feeling as if he was being watched.
There was no one there.
In total, there were about thirty houses in the street.
On the other side of the road, a wooden fence separated him from the start of the forest. Crossing the road, he swung himself over the fence and walked a few metres further up the hill and into the woods.
Turning and looking back down the hill, from this higher vantage point he could now see over the tops of the houses sloping down the hill. A spasm of excitement shot through him, as he realised just how close the picture in his mind matched the view of the bridge that he could see now. It wasn't perfect...but almost...
He scanned the other houses in the street, guessing that from where he had been standing on the wall in the garden of the fourth house that he probably needed to go another four houses further along the road. He hurried through the edge of the trees about twenty metres, turned and surveyed the valley below him again.
Bingo.
The view of the bridge seen through the gap between two of the houses directly beneath him was uncannily similar to his mental 'photograph'.
The vision in his dream had been from a first floor window, and from his vantage point in the forest a few metres higher up, he was slightly higher than the first floor. When he looked down now, if the curtains at the front and back of the house had been open, he would have been able to see straight through the first floor windows and down into the valley beyond.
The eighth house in the street was undoubtedly the house that had been in his dream.
A shiver shot through Peter. Involuntarily h
e turned around and looked at the forest behind him.
Again, he felt as if someone was watching him. As if there was something back there, lurking behind him. Perhaps almost urging him to take a few steps further back into the forest, deeper into the trees...
Peter shuddered.
He felt suddenly cold. It was an eerie feeling. Sinister. Slightly scary.
He shook his head and walked quickly forward, leaving the shadow of the trees, climbing the fence and stepping back onto the tarmac of the road.
Walking across the road, he switched on his digital camera and took a few snaps.
He stood at the side of the eighth house in the street, examining it from the front and side elevations.
There were two doors at the front of the house. One obviously going into a ground floor maisonette, with the second door going upstairs to a two bedroom flat.
Almost immediately another thought hit him. 'It wasn't that obvious...Two bedrooms?...How did he know that?"
He looked at the front doors again, his eyes drifting towards the one on the right.
A red door. Now closed.
Peter closed his eyes and tried to focus on the door, forcing himself to try and imagine what lay beyond: flowers. The smell of flowers.
A picture of flowers popped into his mind.
In a blue bowl, on a wooden floor.
Which was sitting in the vestibule, between the front door and another door beyond: a white door with small patchwork panes of square glass.
A girl. Smiling. Laughing. Turning, Climbing a set of stairs in front.
A bedroom at the top of the stairs...
Breasts.
Naked legs.
Blood.
Fuck, lots of blood.
Peter opened his eyes immediately, the intensity of the picture in his mind's eye shocking him with its immediateness and vivid detail.
He reached into his rucksack, pulled out a bottle of water, drank some and then splattered some onto his face.
Taking out his notebook and a pen, which he always found afforded him an air of respectability as a reporter, he opened the garden gate and walked the few metres to the front of the house.
Not knowing what to expect, but also realising that unless he started asking some questions, he wouldn't find out anything, he rang the bell and stepped back a few paces from the door.
Who would answer? Someone who knew the killer? A friend? A relative of the killer?
How would they react when he told them why he was here?
What was he going to tell them?
He waited.
He thought for the first time, seriously, about what he was going to say...
"Hi,...I was just passing, I was just wondering... did you know that there is a dead body upstairs in your back-bedroom?"
It sounded ridiculous.
He looked at the door.
No one was coming.
He rang again.
Still no one came.
He rang the bell on the other door that belonged to the ground floor maisonette.
Also no answer.
He walked around the side of the house, pausing momentarily to see if anyone was watching him from the street.
No one.
Quickly, he hurried along the small path that went around the side of the house to the garden at the back. Looking up, he stared at the window on the first floor,...and froze.
For a second he could have sworn that he could see someone -a tall broad shouldered man-, looking out of the window...He stepped quickly backwards towards the side of the house, half expecting for the window to be opened and for someone to shout something at him.
Nothing happened. Plucking up the courage he stepped forward and looked up again, and did a double take as he discovered that the window upstairs was actually boarded over by large commercial metal shutters. The sort that people used when boarding up a house for a long time, or when the building was derelict.
There was no window to look at. A second ago it would not have been possible to see what he had seen. The window was covered over.
He lifted his camera and took a few photographs of the house, the window, the garden, and the top of the bridge below, which from this angle on the ground floor was barely but just visible.
Returning to the front of the house, he knocked on a few more doors, determined to find someone home, but with no luck.
It was then he remembered the offer of tea and a sandwich.
He took one last look at the house, and hurried back down the street towards the gorge.
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Five minutes later he was sitting at a kitchen table in a small country cottage, a ham-sandwich and a boiling cup of tea in his hands, being watched intensely by the mournful brown eyes of an enormous Alsatian, whose his head was cocked to one side, with a large, wet, drooling tongue hanging lazily out of the corner of his mouth.
The cottage was probably a couple of hundred years old, and the kitchen was like a picture straight out of a guide book for perfect thatched cottages, exactly what you would imagine when you thought of a quaint, English cottage in the countryside. Bright white and blue cups and saucers hung on hooks on the wall and lined a wooden dresser, a large Belfast sink, stone slabs on the floors, low ceilings with wooden beams, a red-bricked Inglenook fireplace where once upon a time a large cauldron or copper pot full of soup would have been simmering on a wood fire...the works. It looked great. Perfect. Almost too perfect.
"So, Peter," Kayleigh said, pulling back a seat and sitting down opposite him. "Fire away. How can we help?"
"Aye lad," a big voice boomed from the kitchen doorway behind him. "If you want to know anything about Ironbridge, Kayleigh and I are certainly the people to help you!"
Peter turned, doing a double take as he saw Kayleigh's tall husband coming into the room, ducking down through the old small doorway, one large hand outstretched, and the other holding a flat, policeman's cap.
"A policeman?" Peter asked, without thinking.
"Aye. I'm Alex, the local bobby. I'm just going on duty..."
Peter swallowed hard.
Things were just about to get interesting.
Chapter Fifty One
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The Craigmillar Estate
May 1st
4.30 p.m.
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Mr Wallace walked slowly through the front door of his house, closing the door gently behind him. He took his jacket off in the hallway, walked into the kitchen and boiled the kettle. He poured himself a cup of tea, took two digestive biscuits out of the tin, and walked through to the front room.
Setting the biscuits and the tea down on the table beside his armchair, he walked across to the curtains and drew them closed. It had only been three weeks since the council had finally come around and fixed his broken windows, but already someone had thrown another stone that had broken the top pane of glass, cracking it from one corner to another.
When Mr Wallace returned to his armchair, he turned himself around, and eased himself slowly back into the chair.
He didn't notice that he had forgotten to switch the reading lamp on. He quickly forgot about the tea and the biscuits.
Instead Mr Wallace sat there in the dark.
Lost in his thoughts.
A single tear built up in the corner of his left eye, and finally spilt itself over the edge, gathering momentum and running down the side of Mr Wallace's face.
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The news at the Doctor's had not been good. It had not been what he was expecting, and had come as quite a shock.
One to three months. Possibly less. That's what the doctor had given him.
It was hard to believe that after all the years he had spent dodging the bullets, openly facing death on a daily basis, that a silent killer was going to get him, sneaking up insidiously inside him and slowly squeezing the lif
e out of him.
A cancerous 'sniper's bullet' was heading his way, silent and deadly, that he was not going to be able to dodge.
The doctor had mentioned words that he had not understood: "hospice" being one of them. It sounded like hospital.
Mr Wallace had already made up his mind that he was not going there. He hated hospitals. He was not going to end up writhing in pain in a cold, dark, lonely room, with no one there to hold his hand and help him over to the other side.
Mr Wallace was a soldier. A fucking soldier... He deserved to die in 'action', bravely, doing something that had some meaning.
He coughed.
Was..., was a soldier.
He reached for the tea, and sipped it slowly, hardly noticing that it was stone cold.
His thoughts drifted back to his days in the army.
What a life he had led.
What fantastic places he had seen.
For a second he thought about going to get his Victoria Cross so that he could sit and hold it in his hands like he often did at night times, when he would think back and recall better days.
Then he remembered that it was gone.
Outside in the street he heard screaming and shouting. Some kids swearing and mouthing off with the courage that their drugs gave them.
Life on the estate had got worse in the past couple of months. Living here had become even more hellish than before.
Since that bastard Big Wee Rab had done his place over, nicked his VC and scarpered, things had got out of control.
Incredibly, the days when Big Wee Rab had been in charge now seemed like 'the good old days'. Since then the boys from Porty had moved in. Rab had been a right big bastard, but almost harmless in comparison with the havoc that the Porty boys had brought to the estate. Drugs were everywhere, crime was a hundred times worse than before, and no one, no one felt safe, even in their own homes.
What the fuck were the police doing about it?
Fuck all! That's what!
Whatever the excuse was, lack of resources or commitment, whatever it was, the effect was the same: the estate had once again become a no-go area that the police avoided unless they came together in force.
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Neil Wallace was a brave man. Living like a mouse in a hole was no way for an ex-member of Her Majesty's Forces to exist.
BOX SET of THREE TOP 10 MEDICAL THRILLERS Page 24
