by Manda Scott
My skin tingled electric-cold as the small movements of his blade shaved through fractional layers of skin over the great vessels at my throat. By the end of the search, a thin dribble of blood ran down into the neck of my sweatshirt.
He shifted his grip on the blade and moved round slightly so that we could see each other face to face. He was in the juggler’s outfit this time, not the oiled Barbour jacket, but the eyes were the same, and the tight line to the mouth. It was, without question, the man I first saw on Buchanan Street station the night Danny Baird died.
Tod Andersen. The red fox. Hunting.
He was not a big man, nowhere near as big as Cash Andrews. But where Andrews was old and his figure spoke more of the past than of the present, this man carried his life in the palm of his hand, and it showed.
Every line of his body exuded an easy, understated competence. A killer, fine-tuned to kill. And arrogant. So very arrogant. The superb, unsullied arrogance of one who knows he is the best simply because he is still alive to know it.
He stood there, balanced and relaxed, with his back covered by the trunk of the tree and his arm half curved to keep the knife at my throat, and he knew exactly what he was going to do and how he was going to do it.
Balanced, relaxed and entirely vindictive.
Bright laughter danced at the back of his eyes.
‘Danny Baird died last night,’ he said, and his voice ran neat acid beneath the surface.
I held his gaze and kept the expression out of my face.
‘Really.’
The knife twitched and the blood ran a little faster into the neck of my sweatshirt.
‘Yes, really. He was on his way to see your girlfriend. Didn’t she tell you?’ His mouth tightened in a vulpine smile and his voice feigned softness. ‘Where’s the new dog?’
I rocked my eyes across the clearing. ‘Over there.’
Tîr slunk forward from the fox trail on the far side of the clearing and lay in the grass, watching us.
‘Call it.’
‘No.’
The smile stayed in place and the knife twitched. The wet patch on my sweatshirt spread down across my shoulder. He slid his free hand into his pocket and came out with another knife, shorter and balanced to throw.
‘Call it.’
He spun the blade once into the air and I remembered a bird dying in an explosion of feathers.
No need to give him target practice.
I pushed away the memory and snapped my fingers. The dog edged forward, belly to the floor but only as far as the centre of the clearing. She stopped there and no amount of whistling, calling or snapping of fingers was going to move her.
I felt him pause, frustrated and then make up his mind. Moving round behind me, he shoved me forwards, out into the open.
‘Make it stay.’
I did my best.
She lay still until we were almost on top of her, then scooted backwards and sideways, just out of reach. Cursing, I leant forward, away from the knife, to grab her.
He let me go, his eyes caught by the blurring movement of her pale fur across the grass, and as I moved off the edge of the blade, Lee stood up from the shadows of the old cairn and lifted the truncated barrel of Malcolm’s shotgun to the back of his head and it was over.
Easy. Too easy. Such an old, old trick.
Disappointing that he should fall for it. He had seemed too much of a professional for that.
You don’t argue with a sawn-off 4.10, however fit and well trained you are. He stood stock still with both hands in plain view as I removed the spare knife from the sheath at his back and then took the pouch from his waist. He sat down where he was told to, with his back to the great cairn and never moved a muscle while I used the cording from his pouch to fix his hands round the back. His eyes gave out nothing, or his face, except once, when I found the third knife taped to his shin, and then he looked, if anything, mildly peeved.
Lee looked at me and an eyebrow flickered upwards.
‘Go for it,’ I said and went to sit down with my back to Tan’s cairn, feeling the rounded edge of the river stones dig into my back, and watched for the change, if it ever came.
Once, early on, I saw him tense against the cord, testing the ties that held him to the cairn and then scan round the rest of the clearing, as if checking for who was where. But after that, it was like watching the surface of an ice-flow; smooth, insensate and impervious to the relentless tide of questions. He knew, after all, that it was only a question of time. The only thing he didn’t know was that we were waiting with him, and for the same thing.
I kept my gaze fixed on the set of his eyes and the pulse at his throat, watching for the change when his body said something different to his voice and I listened to him goading her.
‘Who do you work for?’
‘Cash Andrews.’
‘Cash Andrews is dead.’
‘So is Danny Baird. Was he good to you before he died?’
I wonder if he wants to die? Or perhaps there is some kind of killer’s instinct that tells him she has no intention of pulling the trigger. Myself, I wouldn’t be so sure.
Back to the questions.
‘Did you kill Malcolm Donnelly?’
‘No.’
‘But you know who did.’
‘I could guess.’
‘Did you kill Bridget Donnelly?’
‘Of course not.’ A voice full of injured innocence. ‘I didn’t even kill the dog. It was still alive when I left.’
If I was facing a loaded 4.10, I really wouldn’t push that close to the edge. We both saw Lee’s eyes flicker and then calm down as she took a breath.
So now he knows what hurts and what doesn’t.
Start again.
The change came soon after that. The moon had moved half-way across the gap, lighting up the clearing like a searchlight, bright-lighting the hair of the man seated against the cairn, leaving the side of his face nearest to me invisible in the shadows.
Lee was a silhouette, sharp-edged against the trees behind. She was back at the beginning: ‘Who do you work for?’ – no real answer expected and none given, except that the change was there.
This time, when the taunting voice said, ‘Cash Andrews, who else?’ the rest of him was somewhere else, searching for something beyond the edge of the wood. Or someone.
‘This is it.’ I stood up, feeling the cramp in my legs from too long in one place.
‘What?’
‘There’s someone coming. Andersen’s heard it. Time to move.’
He kept his face commendably still, but both of us knew it was true.
Lee didn’t stop to ask him. She reached down to cut the cords at his wrist and, sliding the safety off the gun with an audible click, motioned him up and out of the clearing.
We moved in single file down the hunter’s path to the river, Andersen in front, Lee following with the gun angled at the back of his neck, me behind, trying to feel what it was that was wrong. Something. The hush in the wood said that something was wrong, and the dog, who had melted into the undergrowth as we left the clearing and showed no signs of coming back to join us.
It occurred to me then, as I jumped third in line across the burn, that if I had guessed wrong and Inspector Stewart MacDonald was really the paymaster running Tod Andersen, then we were as good as dead.
He wasn’t as it turned out, but there were moments later when I wished that he had been. As my feet hit the ground on the field side of the river bank, I heard a voice I hadn’t heard since the days in the dusty lecture theatres of medical school.
‘Good evening, Dr Adams, Dr Stewart. How very convenient. We were beginning to think we had missed you.’
A cold, uninflected, voice. Used to giving orders and having them carried out.
A tall man, angular and silver-haired, in full evening dress, as he had been at Cash Andrew’s party. Totally out of place in a beech wood at midnight.
An indulgent smile under unsmiling eyes.
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And a small, effete hand-gun held loosely against the temple of my lover, who stood stiffly at his side, her eyes dripping green dragon-fire over the top of an Elastoplast mouth tape.
‘Professor Peter Gemmell,’ said Lee from my side, and the words dropped like stones into the background noise of the river.
So wrong. So completely wrong. And too late to take anything back.
He smiled at us across the water. ‘Sorry to disappoint you, Dr Adams. Don’t let it upset you. We all make mistakes.’ He transferred his gaze to the man behind us. ‘My apologies for the delay, Mr Andersen. Nothing too inconvenient, I hope?’
Tod Andersen shook his head and smiled, and this time, the flat line of his mouth matched exactly the narrowing eyes and both of them said that the past half-hour was playtime compared to what was coming next.
I remembered Tan, lying alive on the flagstones of the kitchen floor, and my guts twisted hard and painfully.
The man on the other side of the river saw me and recognized the look. The sharp smile sharpened and he stepped forward to the edge of the river, dragging Janine with him.
‘Your friend, I believe, Dr Stewart. It was extraordinarily good of you to show Mr Andersen the way to the flat this morning. Life would have been so much more complicated otherwise.’
He jerked Janine’s arm out at an odd angle, forcing the elbow into rigid extension and laid the muzzle of his gun on the back of the joint. ‘This is loaded, I promise you. I’m sure I don’t have to demonstrate. The mess would be appalling. Mr Andersen, if you would relieve Drs Adams and Stewart of their weapons . . .’
If Lee had been on her own, the balance would have held. She had Andersen, still on the end of enough fire power to make permanent damage. Peter Gemmell had Janine. Neither was so attached to the other’s hostage as to make any kind of meaningful trade-off.
But I was there, on the wrong side of the river, and it tipped the balance so far over that the bargain was made without any pause for discussion. Lee simply cracked open her gun, tipped the shells out into the river and handed it, butt first, to the man at her side. He dropped it to the grass at his feet and held out his hand for the blades; three of his own and both of Lee’s. Quick, simple and efficient.
Across the river, Peter Gemmell murmured something barely audible about women and dangerous toys and then all three of us were over at the wood’s edge and trekking back between the beeches to the clearing.
There was fresh blood on the cairn, stark black against the pale moss, where Lee had snicked the skin of Andersen’s wrist while cutting the cords. Not an encouraging sight.
Gemmell held Janine with her back to trees at the place where the path opened out and Andersen took Lee over to the mound, to sit with her back against the cairn, in the place he had been less than five minutes before.
I stood on the sidelines, my back to a tree, un-threatened but manifestly not a threat, held as much by the knife at Lee’s throat as the gun at Janine’s, an unwilling witness to the wordless war of attrition about to take place in the centre of the clearing. Tod Andersen had several scores to settle and Gemmell, with the whole night ahead of him, seemed content to let him play for a while.
The only thing I could think of was to delay the start.
I sat down, keeping my back against the ridged bark of the beech.
‘Does your son-in-law know about this, Professor Gemmell?’ I kept my eyes off Andersen and let the tone of my voice divert attention to the side of the clearing.
He nodded, as he used to in lectures, a slow dip of the forehead to show he was aware of what I was doing but was prepared to let it happen. ‘Not at all. David is one of life’s less effective hangers-on. In the right circumstances, he could have been useful. As it was, he was an unqualified nuisance.’
‘But he told you that Bridget was ill?’
‘Not quite, I answered his phone for him. He was driving off the tee when the call came through. It seemed unnecessary, under the circumstances, to pass the message on.’
‘So you did kill her? You killed Bridget?’
‘I would dispute that. In effect, the lady killed herself by eating the eggs. I merely failed to administer all of the appropriate treatment and she died as a consequence. It was very peaceful, if that makes any difference to you.’
‘Why did she take the temazepam from you? You weren’t her GP?’
‘No. But I was her brother’s friend.’
‘She trusted you.’
‘Yes.’
You complete, unmitigated bastard.
‘Why? Was she a danger to you? Did she have any idea of what you had done to Malcolm?’
‘No. But she was asking questions and not all of them had easy answers.’
‘That’s it? You killed her for asking questions?’ My voice was rising, losing control.
He sighed through pinched nostrils, his patience wearing thin. ‘Dr Stewart, do you have any idea of the financial value of these eggs? In slightly under a year, we will have made returns greater than I have earned in three decades of medical teaching. That level of revenue is worth killing to protect, yes.’
‘You’re a medic, for God’s sake. You don’t do it for the money. What happened to the sanctity of life and the Hippocratic oath?’
‘Don’t be unnecessarily naïve, Dr Stewart. You worked in a hospital once. You know the things that tip the balance between living and dying. A great deal of them centre around money. I merely made the decision more obvious. The principle is the same.’ He nodded across the clearing towards the cairn. ‘And there are a lot of ways of living that are far less pleasant than being dead. As I suspect Mr Andersen may be about to demonstrate.’
Not yet.
‘The police have the details of Malcolm’s body, Gemmell. And the bloods from Anatomy. They can prove enough to pin you down with those. Especially if all three of us go missing.’
‘No,’ he said flatly. ‘I don’t think so. Grant us a modicum of forethought, Dr Stewart. You will not “go missing”. You will merely be found to have died in a house fire. And Dr Donnelly’s body is no longer in anatomy. He has, finally, joined his sister in the everlasting fires of the crematorium.’
‘Did you kill him too?’
‘Effectively. Again, he ate the eggs of his own accord, but I had impressed upon him the consequences for his sister and his immediate family had he refused to do so. The man was also asking questions of the wrong sort. It appears to be a family habit. As does wasting time.’ He turned back towards the clearing. ‘I believe we have one or two of our own to ask Dr Adams before we have to go into the farmhouse. Yes, Mr Andersen?’
The red fox smiled his slow, vulpine smile. A creature of very few words, the fox.
All attention focused on the cairn and on Lee sitting in front of it, her hands untied, the knife hovering loosely at her throat.
Gemmell moved Janine until he could rest his gun hand on a branch and have it aimed neatly at the small of her back. ‘Very simply, Dr Adams, if you attempt to move, the lady loses her spinal cord. Is that clear?’
She nodded, tight-lipped. Her nostrils flared white at the edges.
‘Good. Apparently a young man by the name of Danny Baird was trying to sell you information. We need to know who put him in contact with you. Would you care to tell us about it?’
The muscles on her jaw tightened fractionally and her mind moved behind a steel wall.
‘No.’
And so the questioning began. Not because they really needed to know the answer, but because they had the time and the opportunity and they wanted to play. All I could do was watch and wait.
It wasn’t pretty. Tod Andersen’s understanding of anatomy was as comprehensive as it was functional and he was not constrained by the need to fake a legitimate death.
He kept the blade of his knife resting along the line of her jugular and dragged her left arm up on top of the cairn so that the hand lay, palm up, on the mossed surface of the roof stone with the fingers angl
ed viciously over the edge. One knee came up to pin her wrist in place and he rested his free hand on the edge of the stone next to hers.
This is not the kind of thing I can watch.
Grinding my back hard against the tree behind me, I turned my eyes on Janine instead, willing her not to do anything to change the stakes. Neither Gemmell nor Andersen said anything more, but I watched as Janine’s eyes stretched wide and bulged over the Elastoplast tape and I knew, without ever having to look, when it started.
Later, I watched her vomit into the gag and fight to swallow silently without choking. The faint acid smell of it drifted across the clearing towards me. I thought hard about the physiology of gastro-intestinal disturbance and very little at all about the possible causes of spontaneous emesis in an otherwise strong-stomached woman.
Later still, I felt something change and turned to look at the cairn. Lee’s head turned towards me and her eyes met mine, wide, black and empty. An endless tunnel to nowhere. She shifted her gaze so that she was looking over my shoulder into the wood behind, then down to the grass at my feet and back up into the wood again in a single, clear message. Then Andersen had hold of the index finger and her eyes closed.
The wren died when it sang. I should have told her that.
For a single eternity, nothing happened. The silence was, in its way, more frightening than anything that had gone before.
I looked again and saw Tod Andersen bend to speak in Lee’s ear. The bulk of his body hid whatever was happening on top of the roof stone but the joints of her arm were locked at impossible angles and he was braced as if weighting a lever.
I didn’t hear what he asked but I saw her shake her head once, emphatically, and then, before he could move, she jerked round, twisting her neck sideways on to the knife blade that was still there, tight against her jugular.
Blood welled black along the line of the blade.
Gemmell shouted.
Janine passed out at his feet.
Andersen cursed and jerked his arm away, dropping the knife. Too late.
A life for a life. Maybe.
The noise in the clearing was enough to cover the noise of movement. I stood up and stepped back, sliding in between the trees at my back, crouched down and was invisible.
