by Lari Don
But what about him? If I screamed for the police, what would happen to Ciaran Bain?
Well, what about him? I don’t think he did kill Viv, not on his own. But he certainly killed that policeman.
If he wasn’t locked away now, he would kill again. It was too easy for him. Kick crack smash thump and someone else was dead. Just like Viv.
I stood up and felt my way to the door, then raised my fist.
Ciaran Bain, 30th October
He died surprised.
He felt no fear. I’d kicked the gun out of his hand and his hand away from the phone, but he wasn’t scared. He’d been up against much worse than some oik from London. He was lowering his centre of gravity, getting ready to fight, expecting to win. He wasn’t even afraid of getting hurt. Not afraid of much more than bruising his knuckles on me.
So when he finally saw my boot coming towards his eyes and realised I was about to smash his face, he wasn’t afraid. There wasn’t time. He was just surprised.
Then my boot hit his face and his skull hit the stone and he died.
I didn’t know anything else about him. He’s in my head forever now, but apart from his misplaced martial arts confidence and his assumption I was from London because I got off the London bus, I knew nothing about him at all. I touched him with my feet not my hands and only for three brief moments, three fast kicks. I didn’t read a lot from him. Except his death.
But the feeling of sudden surprise, then the sudden absence of anything at all, were pounding at me. The surprise and suddenness and absence were fogging my brain. The crashing rushing blackness of death was suffocating me and I couldn’t breathe.
I didn’t mean it.
I didn’t mean it. I wasn’t kicking to kill. It wasn’t that hard a kick.
But when you kick a man in the head, you have no business being surprised if he dies.
This felt different from losing myself in Vivien’s death. I lose my sense of myself in her death. But I was completely aware of being trapped in this moment of Borthwick’s death. Was this the punishment I deserved, for my first real murder? Held forever in the dark and sudden limbo of his surprise.
But I could hear something.
A thump. Not a body landing on the ground, but a hand pounding.
I didn’t care. I couldn’t breathe past this continuing and constant sudden surprise. It was surrounding me, choking me, darkening my eyes and my brain and my lungs. This was exactly what I deserved.
Lucy Shaw, 30th October
I banged on the door, but there was a screech of car wheels at the same time. No one would hear my pathetic knocking past that noise.
I lifted my fist to hit the door again, once there was silence outside.
I couldn’t see anything. Not my fist, not the door. Not the stone bench I’d been sitting on. Not the boy at my feet.
But I could hear him. His breathing was slowing, stuttering.
How long had he been lying there? It must have been longer than the twenty minutes he was inside Viv’s death in the carpark.
I couldn’t hear him any more.
I knelt down. On one of his hands. Whoops. I lifted my knee and moved his hand away.
He was freezing.
I put my hand out, found his chest and unzipped the leather jacket. Something clattered out, so I padded my fingers around on the floor and found a phone. Probably the phone he had stolen from the man outside. I put it in my pocket.
Then I put my ear to his chest.
No breath. He wasn’t breathing.
What should I do?
If I didn’t want to be trapped in here with a dead body, I had to get him breathing again.
I didn’t want to give him the kiss of life. I really didn’t want to. I’d seen him throw up this morning. Also, given his major issues about touching, the shock of my mouth on his might kill him rather than save him.
So I thumped his chest a couple of times and heard a great gasping breath.
Then I grabbed his hand and started talking.
He’d told me hating him worked best, but I didn’t have the energy to hate anyone. So I just talked. “I’m scared, Bain. I’m bloody terrified. Will you stop hiding inside your head and come back, please.”
His breathing was ragged, but at least he was getting some air. I kept talking, kept thinking, from my hand to his.
“You’re the only one who can get us out of here. And you don’t want to die here. Inside a statue is a ridiculous place to die. Daniel would piss himself laughing.
“And I’m scared of the dark. I think you know, because you gave me the torch before you went all wobbly. But I didn’t put the torch on, in case the police saw the light round the door.
“I’m scared of your family too. They might be creeping up on us right now. I need your weird sixth sense to know what’s out there. I’m afraid of the dark in here and the dark out there and I’m afraid of the people looking for me.
“I’ll tell you what else I’m scared of.”
His right hand was warming up. I found his left hand and rubbed it.
“I’m terrified of you. You nutter. You killed him, then you went through his pockets, like some medieval soldier looting bodies on a battlefield. And you didn’t collapse until it was safe, so maybe you have more control than you think. I’m totally terrified of you. But I’d be more scared of you dead than alive, so will you please wake up.”
His hand moved in mine.
“Bain. Please. Come back.”
He coughed and pulled his hand out of mine.
I backed away to the stone bench, hoping he wouldn’t remember anything I’d said.
He coughed again. I heard scraping sounds as he sat up.
“If you’re…” he gasped. “If you’re that scared of the dark…”
He had heard it all. Damn.
“If you are that scared, let’s go up the steps a bit and put the torch on. Then it won’t shine round the door.”
I’d thought I was sitting on a low bench. But he was right. When I reached behind me, I could feel the start of a spiral staircase, leading up towards the statue.
I crawled up a dozen steps. I heard him coming after me. A murderer, crawling upstairs after me, in the dark. My skin was prickling.
“It’s ok,” he said. “There’s no need to be scared of me. I couldn’t strangle a kitten right now. Not even a cute ginger one. I feel like… like death.”
I sat on the next step.
“Put the torch on,” he said. “No light will leak from here.”
I switched it on. It shone right in his face. He flinched.
I laid the torch on the step and angled it at the wall. Not pointing at me, not pointing at him.
No one spoke for a moment. I looked at my hands. He slipped those ridiculous gloves on again.
“Thanks, Lucy, thanks for waking me up. That was… I nearly…” He took a deep breath, got control of himself. “Thanks anyway. That was gentler than last time, and the first time you’ve said ‘please’ to me.” I saw a flash of his teeth as he smiled. He was recovering already. He’d be at kitten-strangling strength any minute now.
But he put his head in his hands. “I didn’t mean it. I wasn’t aiming to kill. It was just an unlucky shot, him cracking his skull against the stonework. I’ve used that move dozens of times and no one’s had more than a headache… Do you believe me? That I didn’t mean it?” He looked up at me.
“It doesn’t matter if I believe you. What matters is he’s dead, and you killed him, and all the other policemen won’t care that you didn’t mean it, they will just care about catching you − catching us…”
“The other policemen? You don’t know, do you?”
“Don’t know what?”
“I looked in his wallet…”
“Yeah. You stole his phone and his money, you grave-robbing ghoul.” I remembered him bent over the body and I moved a step higher up.
“I didn’t steal his money! I needed to know who he was, because Scottish
cops don’t wave guns round like that.”
“Was he a London cop?”
“No. This is much worse than a murder hunt. He was MI5. Security Service. Spooks. Spies.”
“MI5? Spies? Why would spies be interested in you?”
“Your nana worked for them, didn’t she? That’s why you only had her notes, not the full report, because the report was for Military Intelligence, for the wartime security service, wasn’t it?”
I nodded.
“So what if the official report was destroyed or lost after the war and now the spooks want the same page of the report that my family do? The one with the real names? What if they’re searching for these mythical mindreaders, hoping to pick up where your nana left off and use us for experiments…”
“Or spying.”
“Or whatever. But we won’t be used. That was the whole point.”
“The whole point of what?”
He angled his wrist to the light. “It’s not even midnight. We can’t leave yet, the police are still out there. So I’ll tell you my family history and what I think MI5 want. Let’s see if your highly educated brain can make more sense of it than I can.”
CHAPTER 29
Ciaran Bain, 30th October
So I told Lucy our family history.
“My great-grandfather Billy was a fortune-teller, like his dad and his granny and so on back for generations. In the 1930s and 40s, Billy worked in fairgrounds during the summer and variety shows in fleapit theatres during the winter.”
“A fortune-teller? So can your family see into the future?”
I laughed. “Don’t be daft. No one can see the future. But if you read someone’s mind as they come into the caravan, you can tell them what they want to hear.
“The mediums we’ve had in the family can’t speak to the dead either. No one really wants to know what it’s like to die, they just want to believe Auntie Irene is still thinking about them.
“It’s not magic, just a secret ability that a few people used to make a living.
“My family scraped by as fortune-tellers for years. When the war started, Billy was too skinny and rickety from a carnie family upbringing to be conscripted. But then he was caught up in a sweep of psychics, mediums and fortune-tellers, taken down to England and experimented on.
“He used to tell us all nightmare stories about it. Our parents still tell the wee ones if they won’t go to bed they’ll be sent to the braindrainers and the lady in the white coat.
“Most of the psychics the senior scientist tested were frauds. Billy had genuine skill, but didn’t want her to realise that, because he knew how dangerous that could be. It was only a few generations back that two of our ancestors had been burnt in tar barrels for witchcraft. Billy used his mindreading skills to make a living, but he was always careful not to be too accurate, not to terrify people.”
I told Lucy how Billy had tried to fool her nana into thinking he wasn’t psychic so that he wouldn’t be sent to mindread the enemy, how those wrong answers had provided the evidence to land him in prison as a conman, and how he’d realised that the criminals he met inside might pay for his skills once he was out.
“But the gangs he worked for never found out how he tracked people or discovered information,” I said. “Billy trained up his children, they trained up their children and it became the family business. But now the people who gave him the idea of becoming a spy are catching up with us.”
“Maybe they read the article in the Chronicle,” suggested Lucy.
“Maybe. That’s how we found you. Perhaps the spooks have kept tabs on your family since the article, hoping genuine mindreaders would turn up to destroy the evidence. Probably they still fancy having psychic spies doing their dirty work. But we don’t work for anyone else, and we certainly don’t work for MI5 spooks. My great-grandfather protected his family from that, and I will too.”
“My nana tried to protect you as well.”
“No, she didn’t,” I said quietly. “Your nana caused this mess. She experimented on people. She forced us into this business to protect ourselves. Your nana has been our bogeywoman, the monster under our beds, for four generations.”
“Nonsense. She protected your great-grandpa’s privacy. She put everything in code and she was really angry with Viv for contacting the local paper. She tried to take your secret to the grave with her.”
I knew I was offending Lucy, but I wanted to give her as much truth as I could. “She didn’t do that because she was being nice. She did it because she was scared. That’s why she stopped researching. She wasn’t protecting mindreaders to help us.”
“How do you know?”
I pulled the letter from my back pocket.
“That’s the letter from Grampa’s book!” she said angrily. “You stole it! Did you read it?”
“Of course I did! What kind of irresponsible idiot would leave this kind of information sitting there unopened? She was writing to her old assistant, the other braindrainer. I needed to know what it said. Do you want to know too?”
Lucy paused, then nodded and took the letter from me. She picked the torch up and read it.
“He threatened her? He threatened her family? That’s why she left the university? She always told us it was because she couldn’t get any funding.” She sighed. “Our whole family history seems to be sliding out from under me tonight. Nana must have been really scared. This guy Lomond must have been terrifying. But why didn’t he just kill her, like your uncle killed Viv?”
“I don’t know. Malcolm would have killed her. But Billy was only just starting off as a criminal. Perhaps he wasn’t as ruthless then, as he was when I knew him.”
“You knew him?”
“Yes. He only died seven years ago. The family must have honoured his promise of keeping watch for any mention of your nana’s research. That’s why we rushed down here, that’s why we interviewed you, that’s why we grabbed Viv.”
“So your Billy killed Viv, even after he was dead. He carried out the threat he made last century.”
“No, I killed her, by letting her see my face. I have to take the blame for that.”
“Do you? Really? We’ve got all night, Bain. Tell me exactly what happened.”
So I did. I told it as straight as I could, the grab, the Q&A, the conversations with Roy and everything I’d read in the files. Not to scare or shock Lucy this time, but to share it with her.
Once she’d blown her nose a few times, she started thinking it through. “So that’s why she hid the copy in the urn. That never seemed right to me. If she’d wanted to hide it from the family, she could just have hidden it in her sock drawer. But she hid it in that really gross place because she was hiding it from you. She was scared of you, because Nana had told her… How much had Nana told her?”
“We’ll probably never know. Enough that Vivien was scared, but not so much that she was prepared to destroy the notes completely.”
“I wish she had.” Lucy wiped her eyes.
“So do I. Then I wouldn’t have her death in my head.”
“I don’t think you should carry her death around like that, Bain, because it really wasn’t your fault.”
“Yes it was. She had to die because she saw my face, and she saw my face because I was careless. It was my fault.”
“No. Now I’ve heard the whole story, I think your mum and uncle would have killed her anyway. Viv was making a connection between them and Lomond. She knew too much and was guessing the rest. She was a risk. They wouldn’t have let her live.”
I rubbed my hand over my face, where the mask had been. “But Mum… but Malcolm… they said…”
“They let you think it was your mistake that killed her, but it wasn’t.”
“Why would they let me think that? Malcolm might do it to torment me, to get control over me. But why would Mum…?” I shook my head. “Even if the mask thing wasn’t what killed her, I still have to take responsibility. I did grab her. It is still my fault.”
> “If it’s your fault, then it’s my fault too. Isn’t it? When your mum interviewed us, I said that Viv argued with Nana, that she hadn’t wanted to destroy the notes. I pointed your family at Viv, didn’t I?”
I hesitated, then nodded.
“You already knew that?” She was crumpling the old envelope in her hand.
I nodded again.
“You’ve said some pretty horrid things to me today, Bain. Why haven’t you said that? Why haven’t you said Viv’s death was my fault as much as yours, or Billy’s, or anyone else’s?”
“Why didn’t I use the strongest weapon I could find to hurt you? Maybe I was saving it, for when I really needed it.”
“Or maybe you’re not as ruthless as you think.”
The torch flickered. The battery was running out.
“But the guy outside,” I muttered. “He was completely my fault.”
Lucy frowned. “Nothing you’ve told me explains the man out there. Why were MI5 in Edinburgh too? Are they here protecting Uncle Vince?”
I laughed. “Protecting your family? The spooks were using your family as bait to catch a family of freaks. And the first thing that guy did was point a gun at you.”
She paused, dealing with a rush of remembered fear. “So why are they here? Do they know you’re Scottish?”
“No. I didn’t get much from that spook when I… when I…” I took a deep breath. “When I kicked him, all I got was he believed that I was a London oik, and that he could take me in a fight.”
“His mistake.”
“His last mistake. He didn’t know anything about me or my family.”
“So how did they know to look for us getting off that bus?”
“Presumably someone has noticed you’re missing from home, and has noticed a break-in at your grampa’s flat, so perhaps MI5 have worked out that you’re involved with us, and that you might come up to the last family address. They’re probably staking out Edinburgh airport and rail station too. So I have to warn my family.”
“Your family? But they’re trying to kill me!”
“Yes. But you aren’t as much of a threat as MI5. Once I let them know the surveillance teams are spooks, you’ll slide right down the list of priorities.”
