Storm Child (Dangerous Friends Book 3)

by Jennifer Young

  Hypothermia didn’t take long either, when you were soaked through and the wind chill flayed all the life-sustaining warmth from your exposed skin. Marcus’s unusual silence, his sudden strange biddability, warned me of the worst. He was a policeman, by nature and by training, a man who led, not one who stood idly by. Minutes earlier, he’d been alert and in action, yet here he was, leaning on my arm, waiting for me to guide him as if he were a child. ‘Come on, Marcus.’ I kept my voice even. ‘Let’s go. We can’t afford to hang around.’

  ‘We could wait. They said they’d come back,’ he said, through chattering teeth.

  ‘We don’t have time to wait. We can’t afford to get too cold.’ I was almost dragging him now, round a bend in the road, still barely able to see more than a few yards ahead. ‘You were right. We have to get to that cottage, and then we’ll be all right. But we have to hurry.’ Snow caught in my scarf and crept underneath the rolled rim of my woollen hat as we turned the corner into the snarling teeth of the storm. My cheeks ached with cold and the snow encrusted my eyelashes. We stumbled on in the white desert. ‘Just ten minutes. That’s all. We’ll be there in ten minutes.’

  If he had ten minutes’ worth of effort left.

  I knew the signs of hypothermia. We were both experienced hillwalkers, properly equipped, but the treacherous weather of this April day was way beyond anything we could have expected, and Marcus’s characteristic intervention to help someone else was going to cost us both. ‘Keep going. Keep walking.’

  When I realised he’d stopped shivering, my heart shuddered a little more. He was no longer an active player in our fight for life, and our survival rested with me. The snow eased off a little; the visibility improved. A hundred yards away, the low bulk of the cottage sat back from the road. So near. ‘We’re nearly there. Come on. We can see it.’

  ‘No,’ he mumbled, in a sudden moment of lucidity. ‘I can’t make it. It’s too far.’

  ‘Marcus. Listen to me. Don’t stop.’

  ‘I can’t go on.’

  ‘Yes. You can make it. Don’t stop walking.’ I hauled him forward. ‘Lean on me. Keep moving.’

  ‘Go on without me. I can’t make it. You can.’ He staggered to a halt, robbed of the last of his strength. ‘I’ll sit here. You can come back for me.’

  The gusting wind, or the cold, or my own fear, stole my breath. In better condition than he was, I would make it to the cottage if I left him slumped by the side of the road. But if I did that, the snow might blow up again and I might never be able to find him, even with help — if there was any help available to us in that unlit building. And if there was no-one there, I would die on its doorstep and he would perish on his own, just yards away.

  ‘Go on,’ he said, trying to free his arm. ‘You go. I can’t make it. You have a chance.’

  I clung to him, seized him, turned his face towards me. His blue eyes were as cold as the weather. ‘Marcus Fleming. Get your act together. Start walking.’

  ‘But you—’

  Life is sweet, and I owed mine — several times over — to Marcus, to his calm rationality, to his cool judgment, to his stubborn refusal ever to give up on me. There was no way I could abandon him, but that wasn’t the decision I had to make. My task was to determine the best way to save us both, if we could both be saved.

  If. And if we were to survive, he had to move.

  ‘I’ve been through a lot with you!’ I shouted, shaking him. ‘Don’t think I’m letting you go now, because I’m not!’

  He stared back at me, dullness in his eyes, and didn’t answer.

  ‘I’m staying with you, and you’ll do as I tell you! Keep walking!’ I dragged his arm across my shoulder and struggled forwards. The blurred edges of the house became walls, shrouded in cloud and snow, but with every step we took towards it, my lover weighed more heavily across my shoulders. Struggling under his dead weight, I fought to put one frozen foot in front of the other.

  Every moment the balance of my decision shifted. Fifty yards separated us from potential safety. Were we close enough now for me make a dash for it? Would I lose sight of him, if I did, or would I save us? In a few moments I could make the safety of the cottage, but at what cost?

  I couldn’t give up on him, even to save myself. We might both die, but there was no way I would let him die alone. I fought on, for the two of us, every stumbling step taking us closer to shelter. ‘We’re nearly there. Nearly there. Don’t give up. Not now.’

  There was fight left in him; he managed to stumble on. Every yard took longer than before, every step was harder, but as we fought our way up the path, hope reared up within me. ‘Just another minute,’ I begged him. ‘Keep going. We’ll do it, I promise. We’ll make this together.’

  His silence was as heavy as his weight upon my shoulders, as fear upon my heart. With the last of my strength, I almost carried him the last few yards, stumbling in the deep snow, unable to see where the path might lead and staggering towards the cottage door. And just as I, too, stopped shivering under the cold hand of hypothermia, we made it into the porch and I leaned on the bell.

  I never believed in luck, unless you count the conviction that if you have the courage to act on your beliefs, you make your own. But on this occasion, even as the doorbell unleashed its incongruously merry chimes in the heart of the darkened cottage, I knew that fortune favoured us. At the end of the nightmare, our luck was in.

  I had time to draw two breaths on the doorstep before the door opened a crack. The wind nudged it further and then someone — a middle-aged man in a Michelin man’s layers of jumpers — flung it wide.

  ‘Hypothermia!’ he shouted back over his shoulder, even as he disengaged Marcus’s arm from across my shoulder and drew him inside to a place that was not warm but at least not so fatally cold. ‘Two cases! One looks severe!’

  I almost passed out with relief, closing my eyes for a second and leaning on the doorframe as Marcus was torn from my arms. Even before I’d opened them again, the inhabitants of the cottage had wrested events out of my hands and taken them into their own. A woman appeared from nowhere, and pulled me inside. Behind her, a fire cast leaping shadows along the hallway towards us. ‘It’s all right. You’re going to be all right.’

  But it wasn’t about me. ‘Oh God. I thought we were going to die. There weren’t any lights on.’

  ‘The power’s out.’ She slammed the door behind me, cutting off the wind, sealing out the blizzard. ‘Don’t worry. There’s a fire in the living room.’

  ‘But what about Marcus? He’s so cold—’

  ‘He’ll be fine. I’m a doctor. You’ve fallen on your feet. Now, stop worrying about that. Come in and let’s get you warm.’

  Marcus and I were saved.

  Chapter 3

  ‘Can you give me a hand at the tables, Cas?’ Balancing a tray against her hip and juggling two mugs in her other hand, Lidia turned towards her employer amid the chaos of the Lochty Café’s Sunday morning rush.

  ‘In a minute.’ Cas waved a hand to signify willing, but he made no move to help. He was the boss; she wouldn't challenge him any further, so he turned his back on the café to give him a little privacy. But his search for the phone signal, weakened by the weather, drove him further from the security of his office and out to where someone might hear him. Judging the risk to be greater inside the café than out, he stepped out through the glass door and into the grey street.

  The phone rang and rang, so long unanswered that he was beginning to break into a sweat at the thought of the message he’d have to leave. And then, at last, someone snatched it up. ‘Cas.’

  ‘Dougie.’ Cas licked his lips, his throat dry. Maybe leaving a message would have been the easiest thing to do. ‘Glad I got you.’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘Down in the town. The road wasn’t easy, but I got there.’

  He held the phone away from him, partly to shield himself from the barrage of bad language that would inevitably be blurting out o
f it, and partly to nod to an incoming customer. ‘Glad to see you made it into town, Sandy. Snow bad up your way?’

  ‘Aye, but there’s a reason I’ve got a four-wheel drive. Nothing keeps me away from my Sunday brunch.’

  Cas waved the man into the café with his best smile and returned to his call, taking a few steps up the street, where he was out of the hearing of his regular customers. ‘Sorry about that. It’s difficult to talk right now without being overheard.’

  ‘Then get somewhere where you can.’

  With a shrug, Cas walked up to the corner of the street and dropped down towards the bus station. Under his feet, the snow turned to slush. Spring snow was always soon gone, and the council, who had no time for its pristine beauty, had gritted the life out of it, all through Pitlochry. ‘It’s fine now. I can talk. Is everything in hand at your end?’

  ‘Am I looking after the kid, you mean?’ Dougie Henderson laughed, but as usual the laugh didn’t signify any particular mirth.

  He was a hard man. Cas, who wasn’t, shivered a little bit too easily, glad that his business partner was at a safe distance. ‘That’s what I meant.’

  ‘I’ve got everything under control. You can trust me. What do you want?’

  Sticking his free hand in his pocket, Cas turned over the contents — a couple of coins, the remnant of a ticket from the car park. The ticket gave him comfort as he picked away at it. ‘There’s talk in the café. Maybe it isn’t true, but I thought I’d better let you know.’

  ‘What kind of talk?’

  ‘That couple.’ Cas hesitated, haunted by the image of the girl in his rear-view mirror, her hands held out imploringly towards them as he’d driven away. ‘Someone says they survived.’

  ‘Survived?’ A contemptuous laugh mocked him. ‘They can’t have survived. You saw the conditions. You saw the state they were in. And there was no-one else out on that road last night. Found dead — aye, I’ll believe that. But not survived. Thought you’d know better than to listen to the fucking gossips you attract to that café.’

  To his irritation, Cas spotted another customer, hurrying on the way to the café to exchange news with his Sunday-morning mates. Nick Riley was the last man he wanted to see. It didn’t matter that Nick was always friendly towards him, or that he never asked too many questions, or that he kept his job in Perth well away from his home in Pitlochry. He was a policeman, and just then the very thought was more than Cas’s nerves could take. ‘Here’s Nick.’

  ‘Get rid of him.’

  The man wasn’t to be diverted. ‘Cas. Going well?’

  ‘Fine, fine.’ Raising a hand in apology, Cas smiled the briefest of smiles. ‘I’ll be in the café in a moment. See you then.’

  Nick always made a point of stopping to chat. And so he should: it was always wise to keep on the right side of someone when you owed them something. With that in mind, once his inconvenient acquaintance had rounded the corner and disappeared towards the café, Cas hastened to placate Dougie.

  ‘It’s rumour on rumour. There’s a story that they stumbled into a cottage, and the folk there took them in. One of the guys there walked down to the Greaves’s this morning to see if they could let the police know about the accident. Sounds kosher to me.’

  Maybe Nick Riley knew about it, though if he did he didn’t seem perturbed. And he wasn’t on duty. Better to settle for traumatic uncertainty than risk drawing the wrong sort of attention to himself.

  Dougie’s bad temper, for once, manifested itself in silence rather than foul language. In the moment during which he waited for the storm to break, Cas took a second to reflect. It hadn’t been easy to drive away and leave the couple — for God’s sake, they’d been trying to do the poor kid a favour — and his better self relaxed a little at the news of their survival. His conscience was anything but clear on a good day, and the burden of two dead Samaritans would have been too much for him. There would be a price to pay, but he could continue to think of himself as a good man, even if he was one who did bad things.

  ‘You’ll need to sort them out.’

  Cas dared to laugh. He’d never expected anything else of Dougie, whose life ran along a track of knee-jerk violence. You’d think he’d have learned by now, but it was probably too late. ‘Sort them out? What you want me to do?’

  ‘Well, you’ll hardly be paying them to keep quiet, will you? Not with all that money that expensive bitch you couldn’t keep hold of is taking you for.’

  Brave at a distance, Cas stiffened. ‘Don’t talk about Gilly like that.’ Because she hadn’t been bad, and he’d loved her for long enough to retain some loyalty towards her. Sure, he felt bitter about her, but he had a right to. He didn’t need Dougie Henderson muscling any further in on that particular problem.

  ‘I don’t want them to tell anyone what they saw last night.’

  ‘Then you do it. It won’t be hard to find out where they are.’

  ‘I can’t deal with it. I’m halfway to Perth. For Christ’s sake, Cas. Do you think prison’s a holiday camp? It’ll break a man as weak as you. If you fancy it, just let them go. If not, sort them out. An accident. Whatever.’

  Better, perhaps, to be broken than to come out of jail a hardened case, as Dougie had done. But it wasn’t prison that troubled Cas. It was the humiliation that would accompany it. When he and Gilly were first married, she used to tease him about the farms and the café, the network of business contacts, the dinners and the shooting invitations that came with his position in local society. Later, as the marriage soured, she mocked him for being a big fish in a small pond, and his love of that status came to irritate and constrain her. It didn’t matter any more what she thought of the pleasure he took from other people’s respect — she’d gone — but that respect was still important to him. ‘Maybe they’ve reported it already.’

  ‘If they have, the police would have picked you up by now. You need to get to them before they do. They won’t be able to give a statement until tomorrow at the earliest. So, now’s your chance.’

  Cas flipped the phone off. ‘I’ll do it later,’ he said into the ether, safe in the knowledge that Dougie couldn’t hear him. He turned back to the café to help Lidia at the tables and, if he couldn’t avoid it, engage in polite and meaningless conversation with Detective Chief Inspector Nick Riley.

  Chapter 4

  Nature, recovering from her temper-tantrum of the night before, raised a benign morning by way of an apology. When Marcus pushed open the kitchen door, sunlight greeted him. Weak but undefeated, it poured through the kitchen window onto the worktop and spilled off it onto the floor and, in the distance, the wearily white hills rested against a pale blue sky.

  He’d dressed in someone else’s clothes — ill-fitting, but better than nothing and, above all, warm — which he’d found laid out in a neat pile for him beside the bed. His own clothes hung, damp, on a pulley above the stove, while a young woman — her slender figure and dark hair vaguely familiar from that kaleidoscope of madness and confusion that was all he could remember from the night before — leaned against the worktop, her hands curled round a mug of coffee. Turning, she set it down onto the surface and moved immediately for the kettle. ‘Marcus, wasn’t it? You look as if you could do with a cup of something hot. I’m Asha, by the way.’

  ‘Coffee would be great.’ He picked over the information that he could recall, sorted it, placed it in context and understood. She was a doctor. Talk about lucky. ‘Thank you.’

  She flicked the switch and set the kettle on its way to a rising crescendo of steam. ‘Thank heavens the power’s back on, or we’d all be suffering from hypothermia. How are you feeling this morning?’

  He stretched a little to test how great a toll the drama of the night before had taken on him. His ribs ached, and his whole body was strained under the effort of fighting the storm’s iron grip. ‘Feeling a bit achy and old, since you ask.’

  ‘Yes. That’ll be the crash. But you were lucky. There’s no lasting damage.
’

  ‘I’m not going to complain about a few bumps and bruises.’ He stretched again, gauging the damage where the airbag had hurled him backwards in his seat. ‘It could have been a whole lot worse.’

  Asha splashed boiling water into a mug. ‘You’ve had a good long sleep, but you’ll still be tired. Hypothermia can be hard on the body, especially when it’s advanced. Luckily, you’re young and fit.’

  In the full glare of the April sun, the kitchen was warm, but nevertheless he shivered. ‘Did Bronte tell you what happened? About the accident?’

  She nodded. ‘Yes. Penny — my mother-in-law — walked down earlier this morning to see if she could find someone to let the police know. The phone signal’s back now, so you can call them yourself, whenever you’re ready.’

  ‘She told you about the kid we found?’

  ‘Yes.’ Her face took on a sombre expression. ‘That looks like a serious misjudgment on the part of the men who helped you out. They must have thought you’d be all right, but there was no way you’d have survived if you hadn’t made it here. I don’t imagine the police will be too impressed, either, especially if they’ve spent the night looking for you. Happily for you, you were travelling with your own guardian angel.’

  Yes. He owed Bronte, and he’d never forget it. At the thought of her, a smile trespassed across his lips. ‘I’ll call them, if I haven't lost my phone.’

  ‘It’s over there.’ Asha nodded to the kitchen unit where his phone lay on the table, next to Bronte’s. ‘How do you take your coffee?’

  ‘Just black.’ He picked up his phone and switched it on. A bleep signalled the late arrival of a jokey text from a mate about the previous night’s football. There was no sign that anyone had realised they might be caught in the storm, not so much as a passing enquiry. ‘I’ll call the police in a moment, once I’ve taken a cup through to Bronte.’