‘Is there anything we can do?’
‘Nick isn’t a bad guy, most of the time. It’s just that he can’t bring himself to believe that this kind of thing can happen in his own community.’
‘Then he should know better. Because that’s always how it happens. In plain sight.’
‘Yes, you’re right. And he’s a very proud man. He hates challenge, and he hates criticism. He won’t let go of his theory until you prise it from his cold, dead hands.’
It was an unfortunate choice of phrase. ‘Doesn’t he see? Jan must have been somewhere all winter.’
‘I’ve told him. Nerissa’s told him. We can hope he listens in the end. Maybe he’ll think about it and change his mind. I hope he does, because I don’t think that poor kid can be the only one out there.’
I thought again of the bleak isolation of the Perthshire hills, how easy it would be to find yourself cut off there. ‘And if he doesn’t listen?’
‘If he can persuade himself that someone’s been sheltering the kid, then he probably never will. If that happens, I’ll hand it over to you and you can get your crusading boss on it.’
Then, perhaps, Andy would be less antagonistic towards my private life and see that it needn’t hold me back. With that demon exorcised, Marcus and I could get to work on my family. ‘That was a terrible lie you told Eilidh.’
‘It was worth it, to see her face.’ He laughed. ‘Do you think I made a good impression?’
I considered. Joe was clearly taken with him, and Eilidh finding it harder than she’d expected to dislike him. ‘There’s hope.’ But my dad would be an altogether different matter. I allowed my mind to dwell once more on the girl tailing me. ‘Did you see someone outside the pub just now?’
He looked back, but saw nothing to make him raise an eyebrow. ‘As usual, I was too busy looking at you.’
‘A blonde in a blue coat. Curly hair. I’ve seen her outside my flat.’
He looked again, more keenly, but there was no sign of the girl. ‘Okay. Maybe she lives locally.’
‘I thought that, until I saw her outside my office this afternoon. Waiting for a bus. But it came, and she didn’t get on it. I went out to speak to her, but she’d gone.’
He didn’t say anything, just thought about it.
‘I don’t know who she is,’ I went on, ‘although Eilidh thinks she recognises her. She thinks she works for Dad, and I’m pretty certain it was him who sent her.’
His arm tightened around me. ‘Seriously?’
‘Seriously.’ My dad was a born conspirator, as well as a man used to being in control in his own domain. ‘I’m sure he sent Eilidh tonight, too. She reckons the girl is one of the people from his office. He must have realised I might be serious about you.’
He let that admission slip past, too obviously irritated by the idea that someone was keeping tabs on us. ‘Remind me what age we live in. Not one where parents have a right to run their adult kids’ lives, anyway. That’s not okay.’
‘Of course it isn’t okay. But now I know what he’s up to, it’s actually pretty straightforward. I’ll go over and see him tomorrow and tell him exactly what I think of it. I wasn’t going to mention it, but I thought I probably ought to.’
‘I’m glad you did.’ We’d reached the main door to his flat by then, and he pushed open the door. ‘The lock’s broken. I’ll need to get that fixed.’ He had too many enemies to be comfortable with open doors. ‘Do you want me to come with you?’
‘No.’ We entered the main stair and plodded up the three flights of stairs to his flat. ‘I’ll deal with it myself. He’ll be fine in time. He’s just bluff and bluster. He doesn’t really mind if people stand up to him. He loves a fight. It’s the boxer in him.’
‘That’s fine then. I’ll think of it as a Saturday off.’ He winked at me. ‘Wall-to-wall football on the telly. That’s something you don’t let me do very often.’
‘Think of it as a treat,’ I said, taking off my coat and hanging it up, before I turned back towards him. ‘Now, which do we do first? Omelette, wine — or bed?’
Chapter 27
The drive from Edinburgh to the hills above Pitlochry took the better part of two hours. Cas seemed determined not to repeat his earlier mistake and turned off along a network of side roads, avoiding the town, so it wasn’t until the car was safely beyond the lights of the town and the security of darkness embraced them that Celina had the courage to confide her fears. ‘Why did we go there today?’
The road rushed up towards them, a dizzying tunnel of night that seemed to suck them into it, like a black hole. ‘God knows. Dougie has this bee in his bonnet. I don’t know what it’s meant to achieve. I don’t know what he’s going to tell us to do next. But we’ll do it. It’s easier.’
From the car window, Celina saw nothing as they approached the farm. Even the lights in the bunkhouse were enclosed behind shuttered windows. She put a hand to her head in confusion, unable to purge her memory of the woman’s face. Every time she saw it, she was tempted by its innate goodness, by the way it revealed someone she could walk up to, who’d help her if she only had the nerve to ask.
Things couldn’t go on the way they were. It was obvious that Cas was lying to her, and that whatever he’d got himself into with his undesirable friend could only end in disaster for all of them. If she had any sense, she’d look after herself, but somehow her heart ached for Cas’s unhappiness.
‘Is it because they might help us find out where Jan is?’
‘I doubt it.’ He refused her the reassurance she sought.
The hard edge to his tone troubled her. Celina was a good liar, so she instinctively recognised lies in others. She’d begun to think she might love Cas, even as she realised she was in his power just as Jan had been, just as the others were. Now he was lying to her, and with that untruth about her brother hanging over them, she was less sure of her feelings. She wished she’d reached out to that girl, after all.
‘I should tell you. Something happened today.’
‘What?’ He’d turned the car off the road a while before, and now took them up the last part of the long journey, the unmetalled track to the farmhouse.
She licked her lips. In front of them, the headlights pierced the darkness while the pale grey disc of a mist-shrouded moon hung low in the sky. ‘I think she saw me.’
They’d reached the end of the track now, and Cas slammed on the brakes harder than the terrain demanded. ‘Bugger! Are you sure?’
‘Yes.’ She choked back fear. ‘I thought she might have seen me at her office, but I wasn’t sure. And then outside the pub tonight, she definitely saw me. She pointed me out to the other girl she was with.’
‘Goddammit.’ His tone was tense.
‘There’s more.’ She rushed through it, knowing it would only make everything worse. ‘There was a policeman at her office today. But he wasn’t interested in me. He walked right past me and never looked.’
‘Maybe it was a routine meeting.’ Cas seemed to be reassuring himself as much has her. ‘Maybe someone’s had their fingers in the till.’ She sensed that he was practising for when he had to confess this unwelcome news to Yer Man, and her heart went out to him. ‘I told Dougie this would happen, but he wouldn't have it. Thought we needed to keep an eye on them. As if it was going to do any good. But that’s what he’s like. No bloody judgment. Can’t change his mind until it’s too late.’
Then why did you go along with it? she wanted to ask him. Why do you let him bully you?
She sat and stared out at the dark yard, the low bulk of the unused farm buildings, the hills whose tops, in the moonlight, still showed the last streaks of snow. What she’d believed was a sanctuary had, in the end, become a prison for all of them — even Cas. Jan, for all his simplicity, must have understood that something bound Cas into evil rather than good, even as he’d protested about how he was helping them. That must be why he’d made a break for it, and God knew what had happened to him.
That evening, Fate had offered her the chance to do the same, and she hadn’t done it. All she’d had to do was go into the pub rather than loiter outside it. Her lack of English didn’t matter. She could have stood in the middle of the crowded pub and shouted out, and someone would have understood her, or found someone else who did. Courage was what counted, and unlike Jan, she’d fallen short.
‘Is it really bad?’ she asked him tentatively.
He didn’t answer, digging out his phone instead and flicking it on. ‘Dougie.’ And then he was off in some long ramble in English.
She got out of the car and went to the cottage. Opening the door, she switched the lights on. It was well after ten o’clock, too late to light the fire. Instinctively understanding that if there was anything she could salvage from this situation, she could only do it by anticipating Cas’s every whim, she poured him a hefty measure of whisky. By the time she’d done that, the door opened, and a blast of cold air accompanied him inside.
She was angry with him, yet when she saw the look on his face, she couldn’t help feeling sorry for him. ‘Here. Take this.’
He took it without a word, took a sip, and then drained the rest. His face was set in a mask of cold, graven dread. ‘I needed that. Good girl.’
‘Is there anything else?’
‘No. I’m off to bed. We have an early start in the morning.’
*
Cas barely slept. Lying beside him, Celina, too, suffered a disturbed night of bad and broken dreams. She was an optimist, and life had always held the lure of a rosy future, but she could find no positive spin to put on this. A worst-case chasm yawned in front of her, one that offered her the choice of deportation or prison; in either one, she would not just be without Jan to protect, but without Cas to protect them both. Even she was astonished by how much that prospect terrified her.
‘Can’t you sleep?’ she whispered to him, as the clock on the bedside table turned towards six o’clock.
‘You can tell?’ He turned over and slid an arm around her.
‘What’s the matter? Is it because she saw me? What are we going to do?’
He lay there for a moment, as if he were weighing up how much to tell her. ‘Dougie says we have to get rid of them.’
His heart beat against her. ‘Kill them?’ Her own blood roared in her ears.
‘What’s the alternative?’ he said, in a voice that was dead. ‘They’ve seen you. They’ll guess something’s up. Maybe the policeman was something to do with it. Maybe not. But even if he isn’t, they’ll make the connection sooner or later. And then we’re—’ He paused, as if he were fighting against the malicious influence of Yer Man. ‘In trouble,’ he concluded.
‘But they might not.’ She was pleading with him, as if he had any power when she knew he had none.
‘I told Dougie at the time. We shouldn't have got involved. They’d have gone away, and the police wouldn’t have followed it up. I told him we’d end up in trouble. But he can’t hold off interfering. He thinks he’s God. I should never have got mixed up with him in the first place.’
‘Then why did you?’ But she didn’t have to look far to have a good guess. Everything came down to money. ‘Are you in debt?’
He groaned, as if in physical pain. ‘Is it that obvious?’
‘You could sell the farm.’
‘And then where would we go? And anyway, the pittance we’d get for it is less than I owe him.’
She struggled to comprehend. What he had was more than she imagined it possible for her ever to own. ‘There’s the other farm.’ That was the one where they worked in the summer, twenty miles or so away.
‘That’s in hock, too. That’s what an expensive divorce does for you. She took everything but the shirt off my back.’
‘And the café? You own the café?’ He’d told her about that, and she’d been impressed by his property portfolio.
‘The ex-wife part-owns it. It makes money in the summer, but not enough.’
So, Yer Man’s money was the controlling factor. He was the man with the ideas. He would be the main partner in the business, the crooked business of cheap labour on the fruit farm in the summer and any kind of business at all in the winter. And cunning, too, because they never went anywhere twice, always in different combinations, and the stuff they took was always high value and easily disposed of.
There was a part of Celina that wanted to respect Yer Man for his shrewdness, a part that appealed to her as the pure art of the survivor. But he didn’t need to survive. In him, necessity became mere greed, seasoned by his taciturn cruelty. Money got you into trouble as quickly and easily as it got you out of it.
Cas must be as afraid of him as she was. Her heart softened, even as she scorned his weakness. ‘It isn’t that bad. Whatever you’ve done, it isn’t that bad. And you tried to help us. If you hadn’t, we’d have been sent back home. None of us want that. You did your best for us, but now it’s over. We should give ourselves up.’
He sighed, a long, bad-tempered sigh. ‘If it were that simple.’
‘But you can’t kill people. You just can’t.’ Not that girl with the kind eyes. ‘It’ll make everything worse.’
He pushed himself up on one elbow, turning away from her to look at the alarm clock. ‘It’s a pity your brother didn’t realise that.’
‘What do you mean?’ Panic rose within her.
‘He didn’t tell you. I’d have known if he had. You’d have given yourself away. They were interrupted one day, when they were doing a job. He must have panicked, hit the woman. She died. It was on the news.’
Her heart slowed in her chest, as if she herself were about to die in sympathy. ‘Honestly? Is that why he ran away?’ Jan hadn’t confided in her, and that meant she’d let him down.
‘God knows why,’ he grumbled. ‘We should just have handed him in.’
She wanted to shake Cas. He should have been more of a man and protected Jan as she’d trusted him to do, when that was part of the unspoken bargain they’d made.
‘Every way you look at this, we end up in prison.’
He swung his legs over the side of the bed, pushing the clock away as if by doing so he could stop time and save them all. ‘Only if we get found out.’
‘But we still have to find Jan.’
His sigh was one of pain and loss. ’There’s something I need to tell you. I’m sorry, kochanie. He didn’t make it.’
Her heart stilled, her blood running as cold as the streams that flooded down off the hills. Hadn’t she always guessed that? ‘Was he caught in the snow?’
‘Yes.’ He sat still, his back to her, as if he didn’t dare look her in the eye. ‘That’s why the couple called the police. They found him.’
‘Then they’ll come and find us.’ Breathing deeply, she looked up to the grey-shadowed ceiling. In the first of the morning light, a cobweb, burdened with dust, swung like a pendulum from the light shade. ‘We’ll go to prison.’
Spurred into action, Cas got up, foraging in the chest of drawers for some clothes. ‘No. I can’t.’
‘You’ll come out, in the end.’ Prison, which Jan had so feared, was nothing like as bad as death.
‘Aye, I’ll come out. Probably sooner than I deserve. But I’ll be ruined.’
‘Does that matter?’ But of course, it did. She knew what it was like, the fear of being poor. It was why they were all there.
‘My grandfather came here with nothing. He came to help build the dams, and he built up a business. He was respected in the community. My father, too. And I am. People know me. They think I’m a successful businessman.’
The two farms, the café. The property portfolio which, in the final accounting, belonged to someone else. Money was easy to lose. Self-respect was irreplaceable. ‘We don’t have to kill anyone to save your pride, Cas.’
‘I said that to Dougie,’ he said, in soft desperation. ‘But he wasn’t having it, and he was right. The only way we don’t end up in prison is if those t
wo never get the chance to tell what they saw or to identify us.’
Sitting up in bed, pulling the duvet round her as if it offered her any protection, Celina reviewed her future and found it bleak. ‘The police will come after us anyway.’
‘I said that to Dougie. He thinks they won’t. Because the detective owes me money, and it’s in his interests to tie things up without involving me.’
‘Then it’ll be all right.’
‘No. Because now someone else knows, and they might start asking questions.’
She turned away from him, numb. What choice, what chance did she have now? And how could she ever forgive him for his part in Jan’s death?
There was only one option left to her — to play along until something presented itself, until a chance came for her, at last, to look after herself.
Chapter 28
There was no sign of the blonde girl outside my flat when Marcus and I left for the station the following morning. Although, Marcus had observed with his customary obsession with accuracy, that it didn’t mean she wasn’t there, but only that she might have got a little bit smarter. She wasn’t in sight when he dropped me off at Haymarket to pick up the rail replacement bus service to Glasgow, and nor was she in evidence at Glasgow’s Queen Street station when I arrived.
Rather than lend support to Marcus’s assessment, it only confirmed my own suspicions. My father, knowing where I was and that I was coming to meet him, had no need to have someone follow me.
He was late. Saturday was the day he helped at the boxing club where Liam and Finlay trained, so I’d expected it. Nevertheless, I grew increasingly angry as I waited, sitting in the window of a café on George Square where I could see him coming and be ready for him. Oh, and visible enough to raise two metaphorical fingers at his blonde watchdog, should she turn up.
Storm Child (Dangerous Friends Book 3) Page 18
