Storm Child (Dangerous Friends Book 3)

by Jennifer Young

  ‘I’d talk to him myself. But this isn’t going to be sorted by having a row.’

  ‘I never thought I’d hear you say that.’ She laughed, but her brow creased as if she were thinking.

  ‘We’re all grown-ups,’ I wheedled. I loved my father, but his domineering behaviour fired me up, and our relationship was littered with bitter rows and tearful reconciliations. My only option was to play the penitent with my mother, to seek her advice and approval, even when she must know — as my dad would surely know — that there was no way I would give up Marcus without a fight. Andy had talked about sacrifice, and maybe there were times when it was worth sacrificing something good for something better. I would swallow my pride for Marcus. ‘How can I persuade Dad to give him a chance? The last thing I want is to fall out over it.’

  ‘I don’t want you to learn your lesson the hard way.’

  I thought briefly of the faith I’d once had in Eden. ‘I already have done. Do you really think I’m going to make that mistake twice?’

  She called the waitress across and asked for more tea, and when we’d finished fussing over the various different types available and were left with the wreckage of the cake stand, she turned the conversation to Eilidh’s upcoming wedding and what a charming, suitable fiancé she’d managed to procure. I was relieved when it was time for me to settle the bill and walk her down to the station in time for the four o’clock train.

  ‘Can you talk to Dad?’ I asked her, as the clock ticked towards her departure. ‘Please? For me?’

  ‘Come over to Sunday lunch next week, Bella,’ she said, giving me a hug as we paused on the platform. ‘I think you’re making a huge mistake, and I’m not promising anything. But at least a week might give me a chance to talk to him.’

  I walked away from the platform with a sense of relief, already reaching for my phone to text Marcus. I hadn’t won my mum over, but nor had I thrown everything away.

  Chapter 15

  ‘Are you worried about my parents?’

  ‘No. That’ll all come out in the wash.’

  Of course, we’d chewed over my meeting with my mother, sharing our frustrations over the lack of any definite confusion until there was nothing more that we could say. But now, on Sunday morning, we moved on to tackle something else that hung over us.

  ‘I love your optimism,’ I laughed at him, but he didn’t respond in kind. When he chose, he could present so neutral a face to the world that he was hard to read. Even his silences were nuanced, even the blankest expression he could present might fool the world, but in the few months I’d known him, I’d learned to read him. He watched the road ahead as I drove, tapping thoughtful fingers on his lap until I, too, fell into silence, as his uncertainty transmitted itself to me.

  ‘If you’re uncomfortable about this,’ I said, as I turned my little Fiat off the A9 and dropped down into the town of Pitlochry, ‘we don’t have to do it.’

  ‘Is this you angling to stop and have a cup of coffee?’ He found a laugh. ‘We can do that afterwards. When we’ve earned it.’

  I wouldn’t have minded a cup of coffee, but I could tell that Marcus was set on visiting the scene of the accident before we did anything else. With a pang of regret, I drove past café after café, just beginning to fill up with the Easter holiday visitors. ‘It’ll be busy later.’

  ‘We’ll find somewhere. There’s no shortage of coffee shops.’

  Indicating right, I stopped at a set of traffic lights to allow a tourist coach to squeeze past, leaving only inches to spare in the gap between me and the cars parked on the other side of the road. Heaving a long sigh of relief once the bus was safely past and the lights changed, I turned, setting the little car up a hill that I’d never normally have asked of it, and fell back into silence.

  Only until we’d left the town. ‘Be honest. Does this really bother you?’

  ‘It’s bothering you,’ he observed with uncanny accuracy, ‘isn’t it?’

  My heart rate had increased as we left the last of the cottages behind and the first flush of spring green heather appeared on the hillsides. Memories didn’t let you go that easily, and it’s never easy to come back to a place where you nearly died. I should have learned that before. I should never have suggested it, or told him I’d changed my mind and that that it wasn’t a good idea. If I’d stopped to think about it, instead of going over and over that meeting with Mum as if we could change it, we might have stayed behind. It wasn’t as if I didn’t know a mistake when I made one. ‘We don’t have to do it.’

  ‘If you’d rather, we can go back to Pitlochry. I don’t want to put you through this if it’s going to upset you.’

  If we did that, he’d leave me in the café and go on alone. Somehow, we’d performed a complete reversal of the situation, and my idea, for which he’d shown no great enthusiasm, had become his crusade. Once committed, he wouldn’t turn back. ‘We’ll go on. We’re almost here now.’

  In just ten minutes, we passed the cottage where we’d stumbled over the edge from certain death into life. ‘Half a mile,’ I said, with my mouth dry, and snatched a glance at him before returning my eyes to the road, ‘wasn’t it?’

  He was staring out of the window at the landscape. ‘Yes. This is it, I think.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ I pulled the car off at the side of the road a little way further on, at the first place that the road allowed.

  ‘Not exactly.’ He got out, stuck his hands in his pockets, and looked around.

  I joined him, with a shiver that was nothing to do with the weather on what was, after all, a fresh spring day. On the night of the accident, the snow had rendered the whole landscape completely different to its normal look, removing any distinguishing features and crushing it into a homogenous canvas bereft of any colour, but all that was gone. A week of sunshine had stripped that snow away, leaving only a few stubborn streaks at altitude. Tiny white flowers freckled the grass verge, and a warm breeze rippled across the landscape. ‘We’ll never find anything. Everything’s changed.’

  ‘Not everything. We should still be able to see where we came off the road. They’ll have made a hell of a mess getting the car onto the truck. It’ll be a while before nature reclaims that bit of damage.’ He frowned into the sunlight. ‘It was definitely near here. Maybe a little bit further on.’ He hesitated for yet another moment before he began striding along the road.

  ‘Will there be anything to find?’ I asked him, breathless from my attempts to keep up. ‘There wasn’t anything in the first place. There was only the car. If there was anything, they’d have found it.’

  ‘I’m sure you’re right. But there’s still one thing that troubles me about this. I won’t be happy until I know what happened to that poor kid.’

  ‘We weren’t imagining it.’

  ‘I don’t believe we were. But belief isn’t enough. You know that. I know it. You must have proof, or at least be plausible enough to persuade people that it’s worth their while to go and look for some. And there isn’t any. We don’t have any witnesses except for you and me, and all the things we saw might — just — be a figment of your imagination.’

  It was true, but I resisted the brutal practicalities, the cold logic that defied feeling. ‘Then what are we looking for?’

  He sighed, standing on the side of the road, peering down. ‘Realistically? I don’t think we’ll find anything. The only thing that could possibly be conclusive is if we find my jacket somewhere between here and the cottage. Then I’ll accept that I took it off myself.’

  ‘You don’t think we will find it.’

  ‘No. But at least if we try, I can set my mind at rest. Look. This must be where we came off the road.’

  Churned-up mud at the side of the road marked the spot where the truck had parked to winch his car back up onto the road. The deer had come from that side of the road, scrambling up the bank and into our path. I tiptoed towards the edge where the bank dropped away into the gully. This was where I’d stood
to flag down the car. This was where the driver had laid his hand on my arm. I hadn’t imagined it. Any of it. Everything that had had happened that night might be beyond proof, but it was real.

  Marcus scrambled down the scarred, muddy slope, looking along the glen in the direction we’d struggled. There was no speck of bright red to lead us to his missing jacket. ‘Lucky we didn’t come off a few yards earlier on. We just missed that drop there, down to the river.’

  I didn’t follow his gaze. I didn’t understand why, or how, but I turned instead to look at the scrape in the ground where we’d found that poor, inadequately dressed being, not quite man, not quite boy. And my heart, for a second, stopped. ‘Marcus.’ My voice was barely a whisper. ‘I think I’m seeing a ghost.’

  He was beside me in a second. ‘Step back. Let me see.’

  His policeman’s voice. Incapable of moving, I stood where I was. In front of us, just as he’d been on the night of the storm, lay the figure of the young man. Wrapped in Marcus’s jacket, he sprawled in the same pose as when we’d first seen him, one arm thrown desperately forward as if he was struggling to scale the bank towards safety. But safety, this time, was beyond him. Unlike the previous Saturday, this time he was unquestionably dead.

  ‘But he—’ My voice died away on the spring breeze. There was nothing to say.

  Marcus stood and stared for a long moment. I could see him, scanning the place, committing every detail of it to his memory. With his gaze fixed on the body, he reached into his pocket for his phone, checked for a signal, found none, snapped away, photo after photo. ‘We’ve trampled over all the evidence, I imagine.’

  ‘How can you be so hard-hearted? That poor kid—’

  ‘Yes,’ he said gently. ‘I do know. But he’s dead. Rigor mortis has passed, so he’s been dead a long time — forty-eight hours at least, probably longer. There’s nothing we can do for him now except find out how he got there.’ He placed an arm under my elbow, guiding me away up the bank and onto the road. ‘And find out who did it.’

  ‘Who did it? You mean you think—?’

  ‘I don’t think anything,’ he backtracked. ‘All I know is that he was in no state to make his own way back here after those two men took him away.’

  ‘Then they must have brought him back.’

  He shrugged. Back up on the road, he looked down at his phone again. ‘I might get a signal further along. Where it’s a bit higher.’

  ‘I’ll run along there and call.’

  He looked down at the body below us, then along the road. For the first time, I saw him caught in a moment of indecision. ‘Take the car.’

  ‘Why? I can walk.’

  ‘Then stay where I can see you.’

  He thought there was danger. I breathed deeply, as if I might be able to scent it, but there was only the freshness of the spring air. What had he seen? Some signs that the body hadn’t been there long? To my eye, there was no living creature on the landscape other than a stray bird, buffeted by the wind. ‘Can’t we leave him?’

  ‘I’d rather we didn’t. It’s unlikely that he’ll disappear again, but I don’t want anyone else telling me this is a figment of my imagination.’

  I almost ran along the road. It was a hundred yards before I got a signal, and I put in the call without taking my eyes off him, standing keeping watch over the dead body. We were vindicated, but even at that distance, I could tell that Marcus thought there was much more to it than an accident.

  *

  The police arrived about twenty minutes afterwards, tearing along the road with blue lights flashing, as if by doing so they could make some sort of difference. By then, Marcus and I were getting chilly, sitting in the Fiat sharing a brutally difficult silence, though he kept his hand closed over mine to offer me all the comfort words could not.

  ‘Where’s the body?’ The first car skidded to a halt, and three men — two of them policemen in uniform, the third in plain clothes — leapt out of the front passenger seat.

  Marcus, with a sigh, opened the door of the Fiat and got out. ‘Down there.’

  The plain clothes man scanned the scene, turned to his colleagues. ‘All right. Have a look.’ The breeze had brought a pink flush to his pale cheeks as he turned a choirboy’s baby-faced smile on us. ‘And you…how did you come to find the body? It’s not exactly obvious, is it?’

  ‘I was looking for it.’ Marcus caught himself up, corrected himself. ‘No, that’s not right. I was looking for something, but I didn’t know what. Not that.’ A pause, as he and the man eyed one another up. ‘I’m Marcus Fleming. This is Bronte O’Hara. You?’

  ‘Riley.’ The officer ran a careful eye over him, as if sharing this kind of information was a risk. ‘DCI Nick Riley. You’re not local, are you? What brought you up here?’

  I got out of the car and came round to stand beside Marcus. ‘We’re from Edinburgh. We crashed our car up here last weekend.’

  Nick Riley’s face flickered with only brief interest, but then he turned to Marcus and laughed. ‘Ah, of course. You’re the detective who couldn’t describe any details of what he claimed he saw. Is that right?’

  Marcus tucked his hands into his pockets. His face wore that familiar closed expression, but this time I could read his fury from the slight narrowing of his blue eyes. ‘That’s correct.’

  ‘Then perhaps you’re one of the policemen who didn’t send someone out to look for us when we were reported missing?’ I snapped at Riley, overcome by the tension.

  He turned towards me, his appraising stare not altogether friendly. ‘Trust me, Miss O’Hara, you weren’t reported missing. If you had been, we’d have found you.’

  Marcus’s lips twitched, just briefly, into a smile, before they returned to a more sober expression. ‘If I can look on the bright side. If there is one. All least now we know that our story should be taken seriously.’ He smiled at me, encouragingly.

  Riley, too clearly, took that as a criticism. He scowled. ‘That’s one interpretation. There are others that occur to me.’

  ‘Such as?’ I demanded.

  ‘From what I understand, you barely made it to safety yourselves. You’d never have got there if you’d had to take him with you. Perhaps it suited you both to leave him out in the snow.’

  ‘How dare you?’ I shook off the restraining hand that Marcus placed on my arm. ‘Leave him out, in conditions like that? What kind of people do you think we are?’

  ‘I don’t know anything about you, Miss O’Hara, but Sergeant Fleming’s reputation precedes him. People in his line of work are notoriously ruthless.’

  Marcus, now, was as angry as I was, though he struggled to hide it. ‘Yes. So determined to save myself at his expense that I gave him my coat in sub-zero temperatures in a blizzard.’

  Riley shrugged that off. ‘It’s quite clear that you saw something. If you could have given us a more detailed description, that might have helped.’

  ‘Or you might have made a reasonable search of the area when you came to check the accident scene.’ Marcus could only take so much. ‘The poor kid isn’t hard to spot. I presume you did send an officer up here to supervise the removal of my car?’

  The policeman still looked like a choirboy, though by now one in the throes of an adolescent sulk. ‘You can consider yourself lucky I’m not looking at charges over dangerous driving.’

  He hadn’t answered the question. ‘Did anyone look?’ I demanded. ‘You know we reported it. You know we did.’

  ‘I’m not responsible for what my junior officers do,’ he flashed back at me. ‘Now. If you wouldn’t mind, perhaps I can have the story from the beginning.’

  *

  ‘He doesn’t really believe we left him to die, does he?’ I asked Marcus, when we’d finally escaped from the straitjacket of DCI Riley’s hostile attentions and made it to the safety of a café in Pitlochry.

  He shook his head. ‘No, of course he doesn’t. He was just being bolshie. Though, in fairness to him, he has a point. I
f the car hadn’t come along, we would have left the poor kid. We had no choice.’

  My stomach pitched at the thought of the choice we might have had to make. ‘But not without doing something for him. We’d have got him in the car. And you gave him your jacket. We’d have done everything we could.’

  ‘Nevertheless, we’d have left him, because if we hadn’t, we’d all have died. I’m sure Riley understands that. In fact, I’m sure that’s the advice he’d have given us.’ He gave me a curious look, almost abashed, and I remembered the impossibility of leaving him, how I’d have chosen to die in his arms.

  ‘Then why make a big deal of it? It wasn’t our fault.’

  ‘Because they ballsed it up. Bluntly. If we were reported missing, they should have followed it up. If we weren’t reported missing, they should have taken our story more seriously when I called them on Sunday. He knows that, and he may or may not be the officer responsible. My guess is that he is, and that was a classic tactic to put us in our places.’ He scowled over his coffee.

  ‘He surely won’t follow that up?’

  ‘No. As you correctly pointed out — if we’d left the lad there that night, he’d still have been there when they came to move the car. That won’t look good for them, will it? Poor kid. Though even if that was the case, he’d have been dead by the time they got to him.’

  I curled my hands around my coffee mug. The café was warm and the sun spilled in through the windows, but I was cold. A shiver crept through me, chilling me to the marrow. ‘I can’t bear to think of it. That poor boy, dying all alone in the snow.’

  ‘I know. But we did what we could.’

  ‘It wasn’t enough. I wish we could have saved him. And then, to find that dreadful man accusing us—’