by Peter May
Braque’s blood had turned rust-brown, coagulating on the tiles, but still red where Niamh had lost her footing in it, smearing it all across the floor as she fell.
Seonag had not moved from where she lay heaped up against the wall. There was a small pool of blood around her head. Niamh found her eyes wandering across the floor towards her, feelings for the girl who had been her best friend all through childhood frozen now. Paralysed. Her way, perhaps, of coping with the unthinkable. “Is she dead?” she asked Ruairidh.
He shook his head, indifferent to her fate. “I don’t know. I don’t care.”
Niamh turned to look at him, still in shock, still struggling to come to terms with the impossible. “Are you going to tell me now?”
He hung his head and shook it slowly from side to side. “I was never having an affair with Irina, Niamh. I’d commissioned her to make a dress for you. For our tenth anniversary. Something special. Something unique. It was Seonag who got me your measurements. She was the only one who knew. It could only have been her that sent those emails.”
Niamh’s face creased in confusion. “What about the explosion? If it wasn’t you in the car . . . Who?”
Ruairidh closed his eyes as he remembered. “Georgy Vetrov. I’m assuming he got the same email you did. Thought me and Irina were lovers. We were sitting at the lights, and the door flew open and Georgy was pushing a gun into my face. Ordered me to get out of the car. When I did, he hit me with it. Hard. I went spinning off into the dark between those workmen’s skips at the side of the road. I was just getting to my feet when the car pulled away from the lights and blew up. I was protected from the worst of the blast, but still knocked off my feet.” He turned with eyes appealing for forgiveness. “All I could think was that I should have been in that car when it exploded. Me. That someone had just tried to kill me. And that but for Georgy I would be dead.”
He paused and drew his knees up to his chest, arms around his shins, lost in the moment.
“I did a stupid thing, Niamh. I suppose I just wasn’t thinking straight. But I thought if someone wanted to kill me and they knew they’d failed, they were probably going to try again.” He screwed his eyes up tight. “I should have turned myself over to the police straight away. But I didn’t. I ran. Up a back street, then along behind the hotel to the far end of the square.”
In the quietest voice she said, “Have you any idea what you put me through?”
He dropped his head in shame. “I think I do. I’ve watched you almost every minute of every day since. I saw them taking you away from the square that night. And I suppose even then I could have owned up to the truth. But I didn’t. And from that point on, it seemed there was just no way back.”
She gazed at the bandage on her hand. “I’m trying to decide whether I still love you or hate you more than I’ve ever hated anyone in my life. Even Seonag.”
He was silent for a long time. Then he said, “I followed you in a taxi to the police building on the Quai des Orfèvres, and sat in a café on the other side of the river for hours until you came out.” He glanced at her. “With that guy. I had no idea who he was, but you seemed strangely close. And then you went for a drink together.” It had clearly been preying on his mind.
“Dimitri,” she said, all emotion spent now. She felt consumed by emptiness. “Irina’s brother.” She looked at Ruairidh. “It was you that was following me when I left to go back to the hotel.”
He nodded. “You’ve got to understand. Someone had just tried to kill me. I had no idea why. It was possible, perfectly possible, that they might try to kill you, too. I promised always to keep you safe, remember?”
She looked at him long and hard, unable to decide how she felt. Whether to be furious or forgiving. “How could you follow me that whole time? In Paris. Back here to the island. You had no money, no passport.”
Guilt washed across his face. “Don’t be angry with him,” he said. “I needed help. And he’s my brother.”
“Donald?” Niamh was incredulous.
“I phoned him. I had some cash in my wallet and checked into a cheap hotel in Pigalle. I knew I couldn’t use a credit card. I did have my passport, but I couldn’t use that either. Donald was . . .” Ruairidh sighed deeply. “If I think you’re going to give me a hard time, Donald just about crucified me. He did everything in his power to make me change my mind, to go to the police, but I knew there was no way back. Not then. So I made him promise to look after you, keep you safe when I couldn’t.”
“It was you who phoned me at the hotel that night?”
He nodded. “I wanted so much for you to know the truth. And I just couldn’t . . . couldn’t find the voice to tell you.”
“And you took my iPad when I was out with Lee.”
“I still had my keycard in my pocket.”
“But why?”
“I needed that email. So Donald could get his IT people to try and trace the sender.”
“So how did you get home?”
“The night before you flew back to the UK Donald hired a car and drove me overnight to Calais. Smuggled me across the Channel in the boot of his car, then hired another for me on the other side. He made the return crossing on the next ferry and was back in Paris by morning. He must have been wrecked.”
Niamh recalled how strangely Donald had behaved. She had put it down to grief, and the Scottish male predilection for burying his feelings.
“I drove all the way home, but left the car parked beside a rental cottage at Skigersta and came out here on foot. I’ve been living in the bothy. Just watching. Waiting. Donald’s guy traced the IP address of the emails to the library right here in Stornoway. But we had no way of confirming who’d sent them.”
Niamh shook her head in pure frustration, exasperation welling up inside her. “Jesus, Ruairidh!” She gazed across the floor at the body of Sylvie Braque. “That poor woman might still have been alive if you hadn’t taken off on this crazy deception.”
“And you’d have been dead,” Ruairidh said. “Seonag would have killed you. And I might not have been here to stop her. She tried to kill you on the cliffs. I couldn’t see who it was. Just the shadow of someone climbing down to push you into the sea. And then I was too busy trying to pull you out of it.”
Niamh dropped her face into her hands and felt tears burning her eyes.
“Tonight, I waited and waited for you to come back from the funeral. I didn’t see Seonag arriving. She must have left her car somewhere. Cuishader, maybe. And come the rest of the way on foot.” He nodded towards the prone form of Sylvie Braque. “But I saw her car arrive. She went in and didn’t come back out. Then, when you arrived, I thought I should come and see what was going on.”
For the longest time, they sat without a word passing between them. An unspoken agreement that they should wait until the power returned, when they could call for help. Rather than head off into the night, and the storm, leaving Seonag here alone with Braque, alive or dead. The torchlight had faded now to a feeble yellow. Eventually Ruairidh picked it up and got stiffly to his feet. “You want some water before the light goes?”
She nodded, and he headed towards the kitchen. She saw only the most fleeting shadow flit through her line of sight as Ruairidh rounded the breakfast bar, his back towards her. She screamed at the top of her voice. “Ruairidh!”
He spun around as Seonag flew at him, knife in hand, and felt the blade sink into the soft flesh of his neck. He saw her face, distorted by madness, streaked with the blood that matted her hair all down the right side of her head. And he grabbed her knife hand, swinging it out and away from his body, forcing it down. It was her own momentum that propelled her on to it, and he felt the blade slice through soft tissue before hitting a rib that deflected it upwards and into her heart. She fell, a dead weight, at his feet.
Niamh was across the room in several strides, stepping over Seonag’s body to retrieve the torch and shine it on Ruairidh’s wound. She saw blood oozing through his fingers, wher
e he pressed his hand against it.
“Don’t know how bad it is,” he whispered. “Guess she missed the artery.” He paused and managed a pale smile. “I’m going to be in trouble, amn’t I?”
And suddenly the lights came on. Blinding them. They stood blinking in surprise and shock, and Niamh realized in that moment, however much she had to forgive him, however insanely stupid he had been, she still loved him. Still loved that little boy who’d rescued her from the bog up on the Pentland Road all those years before.
CHAPTER FORTY
It would be some time, they were told, before they would be allowed to return to the house at Taigh ’an Fiosaich, but Niamh had the sense that no matter how it might clean up, the stain of blood and death would always haunt their home.
They signed into the Royal Hotel under the curious eye of the receptionist, who couldn’t take her eyes off the bandaging on Ruairidh’s neck. There couldn’t be anyone in Stornoway who did not know by now what had happened out on the moor south of Skigersta in last night’s storm. Or at least some version of it.
They had both spent most of the day being interrogated separately and giving statements at the police station in Church Street. Senior officers from the mainland were apparently on their way. Niamh and Ruairidh had been warned not to leave the island.
George Gunn, it seemed, had never made it back to Stornoway the previous evening, detained at Uig until late by a tragic accidental death on the cliffs at Mangersta, and staying there overnight. It was only on his return in the morning that he had picked up Braque’s message and watched the video.
Lee Blunt’s car had been found in a ditch near Hushinish, Blunt himself unconscious but alive.
Once in their room, they drew the curtains and sat in disconsolate silence. Who knew how long it might take to get over something like this, if ever. It was some time before Niamh finally got to her feet to search her bag for the slim parcel in its brown paper wrapping that she had intended to give to Ruairidh in Paris. She held it out to him and he looked up in surprise.
“What’s this?”
“Maybe the only bright spot anywhere on our horizon,” she said.
He frowned, then took it and tore away the wrapping. He looked up in consternation. “A compendium of Scots Gaelic Christian names and their history?” It was the tiniest booklet.
She said, “I was afraid, after she pushed me into the sea, that I might lose it. But they scanned me at the hospital this afternoon while you were still with the police.”
His eyes opened wide. “But I thought . . .”
She nodded. “I know. Me, too.”
He stood up. “You really are?”
“Yes.” And she felt his arms around her, pulling her close and holding her tight in a way she had thought he never would again. And it felt like life had given them a second chance.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My grateful thanks for their help in my researches for this book to: Margaret Ann Macleod, Brand Development Director, Harris Tweed Hebrides, for her knowledge of weaving, and her insights into growing up on the Isle of Lewis in the Eighties and Nineties; Brian Wilson, Chairman, Harris Tweed Hebrides, for allowing me access to the mill; Mark Hogarth, Creative Director, Harris Tweed Hebrides, for his introduction to Première Vision in Paris; Iain Finlay Macleod, Breanish Tweed, for his insights into building a successful weaving enterprise; Annie Macdonald, Carloway Mill, for rescuing the mill and allowing me access to it; Simon Scott, Factor, Grimersta Lodge, and his team for taking me round the lodge and explaining the workings of the estate; Anna Murray and Donna Morrison, for their observations and anecdotes on island life; Derek Murray, for his tales of gate-stealing, and who took me out across the moor on a foul day to introduce me to the delights of Cuishader, Bilascleiter and Taigh ’an Fiosaich, which became such important locations in the book; the entire team at Comunn Eachdraidh Nis (Ness Historical Society) for their help and friendship, and access to historical and geographical information about Ness; Alasdair Macrae, funeral director, Stornoway, for his invaluable insights into island funeral customs; Derek Macleod, weaver, Carloway, for taking the risk of letting me try out his loom; George Murray, retired police officer, for advice on island policing; Dr. Steve Campman, Medical Examiner, San Diego, California, USA, for his advice on forensics and pathology; Tatiana Lebedev, Russian fashion designer, for allowing me access to her Paris workshop and boutique; and a special word for Professor Joe Cummins, emeritus in genetics at the University of Western Ontario, Canada, who provided scientific advice on many of my books over the last twenty years. It was Joe who inspired me to write Coffin Road in defence of the bees. Sadly Joe passed away last year. RIP.
Peter May
January 2018
