by Marjorie Orr
The crop fields gave way to birch woodland as they headed for Garve, a small, neat village straddling the road north, with whitewashed cottages sitting demurely behind low stone walls.
What am I going to do? what am I going to do? The voice was back inside her head, nagging at her like a fractious child. Jin had often accused her of winging it, flying into risky situations and assuming her quick wits and guardian angel would produce a result and an exit strategy. Why hadn’t Jin texted her? Lord knows where he was. But there wasn’t enough space in her head to worry about him as well. What she needed now was focus. The main danger she foresaw was that Paul Stone would not be there, or would blank her. She needed to prise some tangible information out of him.
Climbing up into open high land of Glascarnoch, the landscape became more familiar and less populated. Empty hillsides were covered with low-growing tufts of heather, with blackish peat bog in places and the occasional fence. The loch shone an icy blue below the snow-streaked top of Ben Dearg as they skirted round the tip. Down past a spectacular gorge, her stomach sank with the terrain. Ullapool came and went, with more white-walled, slate-roofed houses flashing past. The road narrowed to a single track. Her chest was tight.
‘Well, has all that thinking produced a plan, then?’ Herk’s voice pulled her back to the present.
‘I assume he’ll know who we are?’ she said, scraping a fingernail against her front teeth.
‘Depends on how much the security guys share with him. The one in California had our photos on his phone, which is how he cottoned on.’
‘So likely. No sense in dreaming up a cover story.’ She stared out of the window, momentarily distracted as Stac Polliadh came into view, rising up to a ragged ridge of bare rock. ‘Have you climbed that? It’s my favourite mountain.’
He gave her an exasperated glance. ‘Focus. Yes, and Cul Beg that’s around somewhere.’
She scratched her forehead, then sat up straight. ‘Appeal to his arrogance. He wants to be remembered. They all do.’
‘Doesn’t sound likely.’
‘Think about it. He may not know everything Harman has been up to, but he’s played the world for a fool for decades. No sense in going quietly into the night. It’ll be his revenge before he dies, to let everyone know just how much he suckered them.’
Herk braked sharply and reversed fifty yards into a passing place as an ancient Land Rover bounced towards them. A ruddy-faced driver in a flat cap gave them a cheery wave. Herk checked his mobile and reset the GPS before moving on.
‘No reception here. Just as well that came through earlier,’ he muttered. ‘Coordinates, I mean. Easier than road directions. GPS was never designed for wildernesses like this.’
She considered making a caustic remark about Speedy Charlie manning the base station, but decided against it.
A right turn with a walkers’ sign for Stac Grianach led along an even narrower road, winding upwards through open country, with sparse grass struggling to maintain a foothold in the poor soil. Two isolated cottages a mile apart sat in the lee of the hill, sheltered from the wind, with only a few scraggy sheep for company. A dark hulk of mountain loomed in the distance like a giant prehistoric fossil.
As the road dipped down into a valley with an elongated loch ahead, a substantial house came into view. A carved wooden sign announced Suairceas Lodge. The solid sandstone building rose two storeys, topped with a profusion of slate-topped gables over each set of windows, round all four sides. It was a complex rather than a home.
They drove up to the front on a wide, gravelled path and parked with the Range Rover’s nose pointing to the exit. Herk scrambled out first and pulled out a capacious, multi-pocketed waxed jacket from the back. Tire stretched her legs cautiously, feeling sick. Then, glancing at Herk to see if he was ready, she marched towards the front door. It opened before she could pull the antique bell rod. A tall figure, with pure white hair, in an immaculate tweed suit, gave her a sardonic look and turned on his heel. He said over his shoulder: ‘You’re persistent. I’ll give you that.’
They followed him across the tartan-carpeted hall with heavy panelling and oil paintings of stags on the wall. The sitting room overlooking the loch was furnished like a gentleman’s club, with a surfeit of green leather armchairs, more tartan and one wall dedicated to stuffed stag’s heads and curiously unreal fish mounted on varnished plaques. A slow, orchestral melody was playing that she couldn’t place.
He stood with his back to them and said: ‘I would offer you tea, but I have sent the staff away. What do you want?’
‘I want to tell your story,’ she replied, hoping her voice sounded more robust than she felt.
‘Tcheuch,’ he said, half-laughing and half-coughing. ‘Many people have tried in the past and have failed. What makes you think you’ll be different?’
He turned towards her, holding onto the polished shutter on the edge of the window and she could see deep crevasses on his face, down each side of his aquiline nose. His eyes, the colour of dark agate, were glittering but sunk in wasted flesh. His cheeks, flushed in places, were sallow in others.
Moving out of his eye line, she sat down on the edge of a leather sofa facing the window and, when his attention moved to Herk, switched on the tape recorder clipped in her top pocket. Without bothering to ask, she lit a cigarette and contemplated him.
‘You’re dying,’ she said, ‘and broke. You’ve fooled the world for a long time. I thought you’d like to set the record straight before you go.’
‘Why should I talk to you?’ He gave her a scathing look, moved to the nearest armchair and sat down with a sharp intake of breath. ‘You know nothing,’ he spat out. ‘A flim-flam writer with a murderer for a father.’ Her heart froze and she swallowed. Her eyes held his gaze as her brain kicked into gear. Two can play at that game, she thought.
‘You were born in Arles-sur-Tech to a mentally unstable mother, a prostitute, and an unknown father,’ she said flatly.
He half-rose out of his seat and fell back, his face twisted.
‘You were brought up in a Pyrenees mountain village, then Barcelona, then there’s a blank until you stepped self-created into a stellar career, stepping over a few bodies on the way. And you never abandoned your mother.’ She smiled icily. ‘Some might say you deserve credit for having pulled yourself up from nothing.’
‘You,’ he barked, waving a bony finger at Herk. ‘A brandy. That cupboard.’ He sat awkwardly, half-slumped, protecting his stomach.
Two goblets, each with an inch of amber cognac, were laid on the table between them. She nursed the glass balloon between her hands and took a sip. Stone leant forward with difficulty, extending a thin, heavily veined hand to grasp the glass. He took several sips while she waited.
‘Your mother?’ she prompted after a few minutes.
‘She saved my life,’ he said harshly, avoiding her eye. ‘She did what was necessary to feed us.’ He sighed. ‘Then she went mad. Well, maybe she always was mad. But she was all I had. I owed her.’
‘Your father?’
He gave a snort. ‘Who knows? Arab, French, Spanish. Could have been any of dozens. I never thought to pursue the matter.’
His shoulders were drawn inward and one knee trembled, causing his foot to twitch. The solid granite ashtray on the table appeared to fascinate him. Then his gaze roamed aimlessly round the wall of stuffed trophies. The music came to a lingering, mournful finish. The silence hung suspended, with only the querulous wail of a curlew battling the wind outside. Another rougher cry could have been a stonechat.
Richard Strauss, she thought triumphantly, ‘Metamorphosis’, that’s it. In memoriam of Germany’s defeat. What was she doing, letting her mind wander? The oldest trick in the book was to look beaten and ill. He was bluffing. Pinning her eyes on his lowered face, she willed him to look at her. Finally he looked up, tightening his lips into a faint smile, and waved his empty glass at Herk. He made a beckoning gesture to continue her questions so she plunged
in.
‘The drug research? One drug to destroy the memory of your past and the other to extend your life indefinitely.’
‘Neatly put, my dear,’ he replied, his heavy-lidded eyes impenetrable. He breathed in hoarsely. ‘Though not strictly accurate on all counts. Immortality was never my aim. I just wanted my mother to be sane. But she moved from madness into dementia, so I never had a sensible conversation with her.’
‘What did you want to ask her?’ Tire leant back taking another sip, the brandy running warmly down her throat, trying to think how to work Harman into the conversation.
‘Why she put me through… everything she put me through. She could have given me away. Instead she perverted me. Brothel, asylum. I had to be very strong to survive all that. But it haunts me and I wanted rid of it before I died.’
‘You tried the drug yourself?’ she said.
He shook his head. ‘No, the results from the guinea pigs we tested on were not satisfactory. There were damaging side effects.’
‘Children, you mean?’ she snapped.
He shrugged and pouted. ‘They were derelicts from broken homes, abusive parents. Worth nothing. They got a holiday out of it.’
Don’t let anger cloud your judgement, she told herself, digging her nails into the palm of one hand. His arrogance and indifference made her want to physically attack him. Instead, she said quietly: ‘And Louis, your stepson?’
He made a dismissive gesture. ‘Spoiled brat. His mother doted on him. I was just getting on my feet financially then. I couldn’t let a child wreck it.’
‘Why did you kill her?’
His eyebrows lifted in surprise. ‘She was getting troublesome about money. She called me tessoro at the beginning but she didn’t mean it. Just Italian gush and then she defied me once too often. I slapped her too hard and she feel onto a stone path. So I had her body dropped into a lake nearby where she used to swim.’
‘Poor bitch,’ she replied with feeling, putting down her glass before she broke the stem. ‘So you grabbed what you wanted and condemned little Louis to a worse childhood than yours.’
A short laugh rasped across the table. ‘You are too sentimental, my dear. I wonder you’ve got this far,’ he said with a sneer. ‘I could have got rid of him as well. He had a chance.’ The dark eyes reminded her of a cockroach: pitiless, sly, alien.
Aware that she was getting tired from the sparring match that was the subtext to his confession, and wary of his motives, she forced herself to ask: ‘And Erica Smythson?’
He laughed out loud, ‘Oh, no. You’re not pinning that on me. Have a barrister murdered in central London? Whatever you might think of me, I’m not stupid.’ His mocking smile indicated he’d scored a point. Her jaw tightened.
‘But Jack Greengate is innocent?’ she prompted, unwilling to let go the advantage.
He cleared his throat, hesitated and looked at his feet before saying with a disinterested shrug: ‘Possibly. I really don’t know anything there.’ His jaw muscles tensed, marking a hard line up his sunken cheeks. Her eyes never left his face as she followed his twitches and edginess. Finally, he shook his head: ‘Your friend’s death was someone else entirely.’
‘Who?’ she said, her throat tight.
The eyelids hung heavily, half-masking his basilisk stare that slid over her, deflecting any interaction. One knee started to tremble again and his attention wandered upward to a stag’s head with fourteen-point antlers spread out in a majestic arc.
‘Tell me,’ she hissed, unnerved by the prospect that all her chasing around had been after the wrong people. He started to look bored, so she racked her brains to find an oblique way in. All she could see in her mind was Harman in the orange jacket.
‘He doesn’t take after you, your son? Not cast from the same mould.’
He leant forward to take a cigarette from her packet on the table. His bony hand made her shrink back. He lit it, had another sip of brandy and gave a cold chuckle.
‘Oh, how wrong you are. He couldn’t be more so. He’s my mother’s son.’
‘You’re brothers?’ she said, startled.
He ran his tongue round the inside of his teeth and hesitated, then said roughly: ‘Yes, and he’s my son.’
Her stomach curdled and she stopped breathing for a moment. He watched her discomfort with a flicker of a smile. Then he said: ‘Not quite what you think. I provided the... wherewithal, and she was inseminated. She was in her late forties then, but she was obsessed with having another child. To be honest, I never thought she’d get pregnant, let alone have it grow up. She went completely mad after that. He never knew and I sent him abroad to school.’
That was a curve ball, she thought, sitting back stunned. Not only revolting, but an indication he was as bad, if not worse than Harman.
‘You know he’s selling these memory drugs, illegally, on the darknet with Rupert Wrighton?’
‘And what if I do? They have made considerable sums of money; well, my son has. I no longer have any need for money given my limited time left, otherwise I would have demanded my share.’ He gave a cynical laugh.
He was being much more open than she had expected. Surprisingly so, for a man who had gone to such lengths to bury his past, and always exerted maximum control. What was he up to? He took pleasure in pulling other people’s strings so why was he laying it all out on a plate for her? An uncomfortable chill crept up through her belly. He was playing her, she was sure of it, giving with one hand what he intended to take away with the other.
‘If you will excuse me, I must go to lie down.’ His voice had subsided to a tired croak, and he wiped one hand against the sweat drops on his forehead, before standing up with an effort. Tire rose to move away from him, putting a chair between them. As he walked stiffly to the door, holding onto the wall for support, she said: ‘You know who had Erica killed?’ Then she cursed herself for sounding as if she was pleading.
He paused without turning round and replied, sighing: ‘I have a name somewhere. The lawyers dug out some information which meant nothing to me. But it is in other papers at the keep I am renovating. If I am well enough tomorrow I can look it out. It isn’t far. We can talk then.’
There was the sound of footsteps, a door shutting, then silence. Herk had a look of watchful suspicion on his face and she shot a questioning glance his way.
‘I don’t like this at all,’ she said.
‘Me neither. All too pat. Let’s go.’
They stepped out into the hall and the door clicked shut behind them. Herk suddenly held up his hand, as a faint crackling from the alcove beside the front door increased in volume, until there was a swoosh of flame on a line across the carpet, searing up to the stone ceiling canopy, blocking their exit.
‘Fucking booby trap. C’mon,’ he said, grabbing her arm.
They tried several doors, all of them locked including the one they had been in. The smoke was becoming unbearable when she finally found one open door at the back, through to a butler’s pantry that led to worn stone stairs down to the servants’ quarters. At the bottom there was a long dismal corridor with locked doors down one side. A faint glow of daylight came through an open door at the far end beside curved stone stairs leading upwards. They ran towards it and into a long, narrow room, which had small, slit, grilled windows at the end, only to turn rapidly when the door slammed shut behind them.
Stone’s voice was muffled by the solid oak between them. ‘Enjoy your confession, my dear. The staff will let you out.’ His laugh echoed up the winding stairs.
The room was bare apart from an ancient wooden table against one wall, standing on giant flagstones. Herk walked across to the door and sniffed the lock. He said calmly: ‘He’s doused that in petrol and something else, so shooting the lock out won’t be sensible. Whole thing could blow up.’ He turned round. ‘And even if I could get the bars off these windows, they’re too small to get through.’
Sagging against the table, she said weakly: ‘He said he’d sent
the staff away. It could be weeks before anyone turns up.’
Herk methodically scanned the floor, walls, ceiling. She followed his gaze until she was dizzy.
‘Trouble with these old houses,’ he said, ‘they’re built to last.’ He sniffed and added: ‘But there’s always a weak spot somewhere.’
‘You’re sure? Prisons don’t have weak spots. They used to wall people in till they starved. Immurement, it’s called. Vestal virgins in Roman times who misbehaved...’
‘Would you stop blethering?’ he snapped. ‘And help me drag the table over there. There’s a damp patch on the ceiling above the door. It might have rotted what’s above.’
With the table in place, he started hammering on the edge of a cracked flagstone with his heel, trying to break off a sliver. She watched for a moment and asked: ‘Wouldn’t a knife be easier?
He shook his head. ‘I’ve only got a combat knife. It needs something blunt to scrape away the plaster.’
With a grin, she handed him her Swiss Army knife. He took it without comment and stood listening. Only when there was the faint sound of a car driving away did he climb onto the table. After half an hour’s scraping, he was coughing and covered in grime and white dust and there was a gaping hole in the ceiling.
It took another four hours of chiselling and banging, with the knife and a chunk of stone she had managed to prise loose from the floor, before he broke through plaster and brick to rotten timber planks. He found a strong enough handhold on a stone ledge to swing up one foot to batter the wooden struts into the adjoining room. The light was fading fast, so he demanded a torch from his jacket, before hauling himself up into the gap, and through with a thud onto the floor next door. She heard a door open and his steps receded into the distance.
Pulling her Barbour tightly round her, she shivered in the darkness, aware that she was frozen through. She smoked a cigarette down to the filter before he returned. There was a scrape of furniture moving and his head appeared.
‘Put that damn thing out. Away from the door, it’s flammable,’ he said. He then scrambled back to give her a hefty push on her bottom to get her up to the hole and through.
