Adam went over to him and knelt down. One side of his head was caved in, thanks to Joe and the clawhammer, the eye socket raw and bloody, but the rest of his face had the same implacable look he had when he was alive. Adam reached out and touched his cheek, then recoiled at the rubbery feel of the flesh, already cooling, thickening and hardening. It was unbearable. First Ethan, now Luke, it was all so fucking horrific. If he hadn’t dragged them on this ridiculous trip, they’d all be safe back in the Leith tasting rooms now, winding each other up and necking a rare Caol Ila or a fresh new Ardbeg first-fill cask.
The thought of whisky made him turn. The petrol canister that Joe and Grant had been drinking from was on the floor. He opened it and took a sniff. Raw, obviously, but he wiped the rim and took a sip, sloshing it around his mouth. Fuck. They weren’t just making gut-rot here, this stuff was actually drinkable, notes of salty sea breeze and pine nuts amongst coal smoke rather than peat. He’d tasted worse, put it that way. A lot worse.
‘What the fuck are you doing?’ said Roddy. ‘Are you tasting those cunts’ moonshine?’
Adam looked guilty as Roddy grabbed the canister and took a big glug.
‘Shit, that’s halfway decent.’
‘I know.’
‘When you boys are quite finished,’ said Molly, at the table now, ‘maybe you could help me look for something useful.’
‘Like what?’
‘How the hell should I know? Something that’ll help us get out of this nightmare. Use your imaginations. I’ve never been hunted down by a maniac before, strangely enough.’
Roddy took another big drink then winced. The colour drained from his face. His shoulder had to be hurting.
Molly raked over the junk on the table. ‘This is all just crap,’ she said. ‘Nothing much we can use here.’
Roddy was resting against the back of a chair, trying to get his energy back, canister in hand.
‘Shouldn’t we have a lookout at the door?’ said Adam.
Roddy shook his head. ‘You saw how far behind he was, we’ve got ages yet.’
‘Just go over and watch out for him, Roddy, eh?’
‘You fucking do it, if it’s such a great idea.’
Adam sighed. He searched round the back of the still and found something.
‘Look.’
He brought out a large, beaten-up toolbox and dumped it on the table. The metal handles were sore against his fingers, but that meant the feeling was coming back into his hands. The heat in here was thawing him again.
He opened the toolbox. It was rammed with all sorts of stuff, wrenches and spanners, a crowbar, screwdrivers and hammers. They started sizing up weapons in their hands as Adam lifted the top section out. Underneath were a handheld power drill and a blowtorch.
‘Now we’re talking,’ said Roddy, lifting the drill out. He pointed it at Adam, pulled the trigger and the room filled with a high-pitched whiny whir.
‘Cut it out,’ said Adam, taking out the blowtorch. He turned it in his hands, getting a feel for it. It was quite flashy, like a modern hairdryer or something. He found the gas valve and turned it, then clicked the ignition and a jet of blue flame shot out the nozzle towards Roddy.
‘Easy, Tiger,’ said Roddy, backing away.
Molly took two aerosols out of the bottom of the toolbox and displayed them – one pesticide, one anti-freeze.
‘What do you reckon these are for?’
Adam looked at the moonshine canister and sucked on the chemical aftertaste in his mouth. ‘Hmmm.’
She chucked them back into the box and surveyed what they had.
‘This is all good, but we don’t have anything to match a gun.’
Adam switched the blowtorch off. Roddy whirred the power drill in the air.
‘We’ll just have to use the element of surprise.’
‘How exactly do we do that?’ said Adam. ‘He knows we’re here.’
‘I have no idea,’ said Roddy. ‘It’s just the kind of thing people say in situations like this.’
Molly sighed.
‘Well, he’ll be here soon enough, so we’d better think of something quick.’
‘Too late,’ said Joe, grinning at the barn door and pointing a gun at them.
Their faces crumpled.
‘I told you we should’ve had a bloody lookout,’ Adam said to Roddy.
‘Fuck you,’ said Roddy.
‘You should’ve listened to your bumchum,’ said Joe. ‘He was right for once.’
29
‘How the fuck did you get here so quick?’ said Roddy.
Joe pulled car keys out of his pocket and dangled them.
‘After sending you that wee signal with the torch, I cut inland back to the road. I knew you’d think I’d follow you across the cliffs. I also knew you’d come back here. Actually, I hoped I might get here first, but no matter.’
Adam looked at Joe. His cheeks were red and there was a watery sparkle in his eyes. He looked like he was having the best time of his life.
‘Don’t kill us,’ pleaded Adam.
‘Succinct and no-nonsense,’ said Joe. ‘But completely pointless. Of course I’m going to kill you, why do you think I’ve just fucking chased you halfway around the Oa in the snow at night? To give you a pat on the back? Dickhead.’
Radio static jumped out at them.
Joe kept his eye and gun on them as he reached for the radio on his belt.
‘Yeah?’ he said into it.
The voice on the other end spoke, but they couldn’t make out what was said.
‘Half an hour’s cool,’ said Joe, winking at them. ‘I’ll have everything ready for you then.’
He put the radio back in his belt.
‘How are you going to explain all this to your mates on the radio?’ said Molly, waving an arm around the scene behind them.
Joe put a finger to the corner of his mouth. ‘They never need to know about you three fuckwits, or laughing boy over there.’ He waved the gun at Luke’s body.
He turned to look at Grant. ‘And let me tell you, no one is going to miss that arsehole, least of all the people I work with. Grantie was a liability, and we all knew it. As for the still, well that can always be fixed. There’s enough money being coined in here to make it worth our while.’
‘But how are you going to explain away our deaths?’ said Adam.
Joe sighed. ‘You really have no fucking clue, do you? I won’t have to explain anything, there won’t be any bodies. I’ll get rid of the evidence in the still furnace over there. No bodies, no crime. You cunts came to the island, then you left and took Molly with you.’
‘People will come looking for us,’ said Roddy.
‘You think so?’ said Joe. ‘You’ve got a pretty high opinion of your own importance. Even if someone does come, I just put on the friendly policeman face, say I’ll look into it, and everyone buggers off thinking I’ve got it in hand.’
Molly gave it one last go. ‘No one from the island is going to believe I just upped and left with four guys from the mainland, without a word to anyone.’
‘Then you’ll just have to be a missing person.’ Joe shrugged. ‘What else can I do?’
‘You don’t have to do anything,’ said Molly. ‘Let us go. Don’t make it any worse than it already is. There’s still a way out of this for all of us.’
Joe snorted a sickly, desperate laugh. ‘Look around you, darling.’ He waved his gun around the room. ‘Does it look like there’s a way out for me now? Does it?’
‘You have to stop all this,’ said Molly calmly.
Joe shook his head and lowered his voice. ‘I can’t stop, Molly. That’s just it. Can’t you see? I can’t stop. This is what I do now. This is who I am.’
He looked at her for a moment then suddenly snapped back into focus, raising his voice. ‘Now, I can’t believe you fucking pains in the arse are still standing here talking and not dead.’
He lifted the gun and pointed it straight at Adam.
&nb
sp; ‘You first, I think,’ he said to Adam, then nodded at Roddy. ‘Bigmouth next.’ He turned to look at Molly. ‘Then it has to be you, love. Sorry, but there’s nothing I can do.’
‘You’re not sorry in the slightest,’ said Molly.
Adam stared at the gun barrel pointing at him and felt faint. All the blood in his body seemed to pump into his head, which felt like it was about to explode. A raging gush filled his ears as he stood, unable to move. He watched Joe’s finger begin to squeeze the trigger. It seemed to be happening excruciatingly slowly. Then he saw movement out of the corner of his eye. To begin with his brain couldn’t work out what it was.
Suddenly a flood of clear liquid was spraying all over Joe and the gun, soaking him and making him screw up his eyes. He clawed at his eyeballs and the gun went off, the bullet close enough to Adam’s head that he felt the wobble of air past his ear.
Adam heard a voice screaming at him and turned to see Roddy shouting, but couldn’t work out what he was saying. Roddy was pointing at Adam’s hands. He looked down and saw he was still holding the blowtorch. Roddy waved the moonshine canister at him, showing him it was empty. That’s what he’d thrown in Joe’s face. Seventy per cent alcohol right in his eyes.
Adam’s fingers fumbled as he tried to turn the gas nozzle of the blowtorch, eventually hearing the hiss. He looked at Joe, who was righting himself and opening his eyes, red raw and tear-stained. Adam clicked the ignition and heard the soft whoosh of blue flame in his hands. He lifted the blowtorch over his head and hurled it at Joe, whose eyes just had time to focus on the swirling blue flicker heading straight towards his doused head.
Joe ducked but it was too late, the body of the blowtorch hitting him on the cheek, the flame igniting his head in a sucking whump of sound, his whole upper body engulfed in flicking blue and orange heat that Adam could feel on his own face from a few yards away.
Adam stepped back as Joe staggered screaming towards them, gun waving around. The gun went off and they all scattered, then it went off again and again as Joe stumbled into the table, knocking chairs flying and clawing at the burning flesh of his face. The fire spread downwards until his whole body was bathed in persistent, consuming flames, the rancid smell of it making Adam retch.
The gun went off two more times as Joe staggered desperately towards the door, collapsing onto his knees and dropping the gun, his arms still flailing around. He slumped sideways onto the ground and began rolling backwards and forwards but the flames kept hold, turning his clothes and skin to a charred and bloody mess. Eventually he stopped rolling, and his arms fell to his side, but the flame kept burning, reluctant to give up such a willing host.
The three of them watched as Joe burned. Molly ran up and kicked the gun away from the body. She backed off and they stood, unable to speak, wary in case something insane happened like Joe suddenly springing back to life. It took five minutes for the fire to burn itself out, during which the three of them stared intensely at the flames, the blackened lump of flesh and exposed bone beneath. They covered their noses from the sickening stench.
Eventually Roddy spoke. ‘Fuck me.’
‘Is he definitely dead?’ said Adam.
Molly walked over and looked impassively at the burnt-out corpse. She lifted a boot and kicked him hard in the face, bits of crispy, charred flesh flying free.
‘He’s dead, all right.’
30
Adam stood over Joe’s body, pointing the gun at the blackened and deformed face. His hand was shaking. He gripped the gun in both hands but it still trembled.
‘This is for Luke, you fucking cunt.’
‘Stop!’ shouted Molly, knocking his arm as he pulled the trigger.
The bullet ricocheted off the concrete floor and zipped past Roddy, who flinched.
‘Jesus fucking Christ,’ said Roddy. ‘Watch it, for fuck’s sake.’
Adam looked at Molly, confused, the gun limp at his side.
‘I just wanted to …’
Molly shook her head.
‘I thought you’d understand,’ said Adam. ‘After what he did to you.’
Molly frowned at him. ‘We have to think clearly. We don’t want to leave any evidence.’
‘Evidence of what?’ said Roddy, tooting more charlie from his case.
‘That we were here.’
Roddy laughed and looked round at the carnage. ‘It’s a bit late for that, don’t you think?’
‘Not necessarily. If we leave a bullet in Joe’s body, then it’s obviously murder. If he just burned to death, it could be an accident. We have to think about the situation we’re in here.’
‘What situation?’ said Roddy, sniffing. ‘We take the police car and fuck off out of here sharp.’
‘And go where?’
‘Fucking anywhere.’
‘It’s a police car.’
‘So?’
‘So how do we explain that we’re driving a police car?’
‘What does it fucking matter?’ Roddy swayed and sat down on the floor, clutching at his shoulder.
‘We have two dead policemen on our hands. We can’t be seen just driving their car around the island.’
Adam shook his head. ‘But Grant was an accident and Joe was self-defence.’
‘You think people are going to believe that if they catch us joyriding their squad car?’
‘OK,’ said Roddy. ‘So we take the car and go see that old guy Eric you talked about. Tell him what’s happened, let him sort it out.’
Molly considered this for a moment. ‘Just because he’s not involved, doesn’t mean he’ll be able to make this go away.’
‘All right, then,’ said Roddy. ‘We take the car and drive to the outskirts of Port Ellen, then dump it and walk into town.’
Molly narrowed her eyes as she thought about this, then walked over to Joe’s smouldering corpse. Thin trails of acrid smoke drifted from the body. She knelt down and tentatively touched his melted jacket pocket with the back of her hand. She held the pocket open with fingertips and moved her hand in carefully. She found something and snatched it out, muttering under her breath at the burning sensation in her hands. She dropped the item on the floor, shaking her hand. It was Joe’s car key, the plastic moulding melted all over the metal ridge of the key.
‘That’s that,’ she said.
She went over to Grant’s body and searched through his pockets.
‘Nothing.’ She looked at Adam and Roddy. ‘Either of you two geniuses know how to hot-wire a car?’
‘I skipped that class at uni,’ said Roddy.
Adam just shook his head.
Molly got off her haunches with a sigh. ‘Well, it looks like taking the car is a non-starter.’
She walked over to them. ‘OK, let’s think about this.’ She seemed to be talking to herself more than them. ‘We’re in an illegal still with two dead policemen. We know other cops are involved in this operation, but we don’t know whether they’re from the island or the mainland. We have no idea how far this reaches. There are others coming soon to pick up a delivery in a boat.’ She looked over at Joe’s corpse, at the radio on his belt. ‘We can’t use the police radio, even if it wasn’t melted, because they’ll almost certainly be listening in.’
Silence for a moment, just the quiet thrum of machinery.
‘So what do we do?’ said Adam.
Molly gave a tight smile.
‘I think there’s a way out of this.’
Adam looked around. ‘How? When they find this unholy mess, they’ll come after us.’
Molly looked at him. ‘Not if they don’t know we ever existed.’
He was numb and exhausted, his brain frozen mush, but Adam began to see what she was getting at.
‘Joe didn’t mention us to them, did he?’ he said.
‘Not as far as we know.’
‘So …’ His mind stalled. ‘So what are you saying, exactly?’
Molly took a deep breath. ‘OK, here’s how I see it. We have two dead cops
, both burnt to death. So far, no bullet wounds.’ She looked at the gun in Adam’s hand. ‘We have more dodgy cops on the way who probably don’t know about us. So, we remove all trace of ourselves, set fire to the whole place, then when they arrive, all they find is a tragic accident, one they won’t report because it involves implicating themselves in an illegal operation. A dangerous illegal operation, making the accidental fire all the more plausible.’
‘But won’t they see our tracks in the snow?’ said Adam.
‘Not if we don’t give them reason to look for tracks,’ said Molly. ‘And if we’re careful.’
‘So how do we get back to civilisation?’ said Roddy.
Molly considered this for a moment. ‘We have to go back to the Audi and wait to be found.’
‘What?’ said Adam.
‘It’s the only way,’ said Molly. ‘And we have to take Luke’s body with us.’
‘Wait a minute,’ said Roddy. ‘Apart from the logistics of carting a dead body miles around the coast at night, he’s got a bullet in his head and half his skull missing where Joe took a hammer to it. How do we explain that?’
Molly shrugged. ‘We have to take him with us. He can’t be found here, otherwise the whole thing is a bust.’
‘OK,’ said Roddy, ‘we have to take him, but what about his head?’
Adam glimpsed over at Luke and felt sick. ‘The skull damage could’ve happened if he was thrown from the car. It doesn’t look too different to what happened to Ethan.’
‘And the bullet?’
Adam rubbed his forehead. ‘We could set fire to the Audi with his body inside, maybe?’
‘Come on,’ said Roddy. ‘You guys have seen CSI, right?’
‘That’s a television programme, Roddy, this is real fucking life here.’
Molly nodded to herself. ‘Roddy’s right, we have to get the bullet out.’
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