‘He told me,’ I said coldly.
Then he believed me. He dropped my hands and whirled around, running from the room, not noticing his daughter crying after him. I followed him, gently putting her aside. He was in the office, loading his rifle.
‘What are you doing?’ I said.
‘I’m going to get McGuire.’
‘You can’t just go and shoot him,’ I cried.
‘I can.’
Finished with the rifle, he turned on his heel and started to the door. I stood between him and the door and said, suddenly desperate for him, ‘He’ll know I’ve told you. He’ll be waiting for you.’
‘Good. I won’t have far to look. Get out of my way, Carrie.’
‘Dominic, you’re no match for him,’ I shouted. He stopped, looking oddly at me. ‘I know,’ he said softly. ‘But I can try.’
He pushed past me, turning me gently away from him with his free hand. Then he stopped in the doorway, and anger gave way to love.
He kept the rifle still in his left hand, but reached around me with his right and bent down over me. I turned to him and we shared one kiss, a beautiful bittersweet pleasure, for a moment forgetting everything that was happening to us. I twined my arms around his neck, burying my fingers in his thick dark hair. I held him as long as he let me, then he pulled away, hitching the gun under his arm, forgetting me now, forgetting everything.
He ran down the gravel path, jumping the gate, smooth and easy, looking like a soldier. I stood in the doorway, numb and silent. He swung up to the seat of the Range Rover, turned, and called softly, ‘I really did love you, Carrie.’
Then he slammed the door and the engine started with a rough roar. I shouted, ‘Damn Ireland. Damn your war.’
He didn’t hear me. He was away, the engine screaming, the big heavy vehicle careening down the slope. He skidded, crashed into the garden fence, riding up over it, flattening the wooden poles and leaving behind a scrabble of wire and the torn uprooted rambler rose. He didn’t even stop to look, but tore away down the hill with a flock of frantic sheep scattering to left and right before him.
I walked to the foot of the garden, looking at the shattered fence and the torn red roses in the mud.
I crouched down in the broken earth, crying, my face in my hands. ‘Oh, damn all the wars that fathers start and send their sons to fight.’
Chapter Sixteen
Behind me a soft whimper broke the grey evening silence. I sat up, not knowing how long I’d bent over my hands in the ruined garden. Caitlin stood alone and little in the doorway, looking for me.
I stood up. ‘Here I am, pet,’ I said, going to her, lifting her, stroking her silky hair.
I looked down the road. It was empty and still. Somewhere down there those two would meet. I couldn’t bear to think about it. And I had no time to think about it. When it was finished, one or the other of them would come back here, looking for me.
It didn’t make any difference which. Neither of them could let me leave Sron Ban alive.
I went with a strange calm back into the house. I set Caitlin down, patting her head and ignoring her hands pulling at the legs of my jeans. Our shouting had frightened her and she wanted comforting, but there wasn’t time for that just now. Then, carefully and quickly, I went around the house, collecting what I would need.
There was a heavy khaki jacket hanging in the hallway. I took it down and slipped it on. It was Dominic’s and it was too large for me, but it would do. In the kitchen I found bread and some cheese; I wrapped them and slipped them into the jacket pocket. The child would be hungry.
Upstairs I found a small blanket from Caitlin’s bed and I took that, too, folding it and cramming it into the space in the backpack under Caitlin’s seat. Then I took down her winter snowsuit and slipped her arms into the sleeves, zipping it up and pulling the hood up on her head. She whined and pulled away, but I paid her no mind. It would be cold on the hill. It was September and growing dark. The Highland summer was over and gone.
I slid her into the pack. She was happy now; she liked our walks. Then I lifted the weight up on my shoulders, my arms fitted through the heavy canvas straps. I took Dominic’s worn old shepherd’s crook from the hallway and went out, shutting the door of Sron Ban behind me.
I walked around the side of the house, around to the back, and up through the mud of the byre. I was careful to shut the gate and turn the wire loop over the pole; I would not want Angus’s black cows out on the road. Then I started smoothly walking up the long shadowy autumn hill, back up the trail the way I had first come.
The hazelwood curled over me in a dark tunnel, bringing evening on faster. When I reached the top of the hill, I paused once, looking back over the black waters of Loch Broom. Mist was rising over the gullies and burns that broke the wide hillside. I shifted the weight, easing my shoulders, and turned, walking out onto the moor, where the cold grey wind was softly blowing. In the fading light I could see the shadowy outlines of the bones of the old peat road, following its ancient way over the heather.
The wind was dropping and darkness was coming down when I reached the gate, and the Sron Ban road.
I had approached carefully and cautiously, glancing uneasily down the winding grey length of it, following the line of the telephone poles with my eye. This was the most dangerous of places for me; anywhere along that road might be Kevin McGuire, or Dominic, done with the other and looking for me.
I threw a quick longing glance at the square outline of the phone booth. I could call from there, if the phone was working, and reach the police. They might get here before my pursuer, whoever he was. But they might not. And to use the phone I must stand for long minutes in the open, in clear sight of any driver from either direction. I dared not.
Passing that last link with the world before Braemore, I scrambled over the barred gate and ran, Caitlin’s weight bouncing on my shoulders. As my feet hit the hard surface I had an awful vision of Shona Anderson, as I had seen her, on the road, in a darkness like tonight, and running, running from a fast-coming invisible danger. I ran, too, and kept running, struggling up the soft uneven ground until a smooth ridge of heather and worn stone lay between me and the road.
Caitlin cried, scared by the jolting, and I, exhausted, sank down on the softness of the heather, letting the weight of the pack rest on the ground. I talked to her over my shoulder, reaching around and catching the baby hand that pulled, worried, at my hair.
Then I got up and began walking, as steadily as I could over the rolling uneven ground. I could only guess my direction, angling it for safety away from the road, out over the endless rolling moor. Ten miles. Ten miles. I kept walking, leaning against the weight, as the night came down, thick and starless, and the hollows between the ridges began to fill with white mist rising from the wet mossy ground.
My feet splashed, wet and cold in black water. Once I went in, in cold water and cold mud up to one knee, braced quickly, using Dominic’s crook for balance, and jerked myself backward. After that, I went much more slowly. The dark waiting bogs were as deadly as my pursuer, and even more terrifying.
I felt my way, using the crook like a blind man’s stick. It wasn’t good enough; my feet met rocks and hollows that the crook skipped over and I fell once, and then another time, feeling my ankle twist and only saving breaking it by a lucky shift of my weight. I knew then I had to stop.
I comforted myself with the thought that the dark, which hid my path, also hid me. A flashlight would have lighted the ground, I knew. But a flashlight in this vast blackness would have drawn my pursuer’s eye like a flare. Knowing that, I had left it on the shelf at Sron Ban. One less thing to carry, one less weight I had thought the stars would help me; the dim sky had then been clear. I had not counted on the rising, curling mist.
Stopping in the darkness, I turned and listened. The night was still. I heard low noises, like animals, or night birds. But nothing else, nothing human. I shrugged. He would be alone, the man who followed me.
Alone, with no one to speak to. Why should I hear him?
The ground rose before my feet and against the dim sky I saw the outline of a low ridge, and something else, of a familiar common shape. A chimney breast. Alone, without the walls that had once joined around it. A ruin, a shell of crumbling stone that had once been a croft-house. The hills held many. Life here had once been fuller and happier than it was today.
I had stumbled on the last broken remnants of an ancient home. Tonight it would once again be a shelter, roofless though it was.
Caitlin’s warm weight against my shoulders was sagging with sleep. I stepped through into the low rectangle of stone, through the gap that had been a doorway. Near the chimney breast the walls remained, fragmentary, a few feet high. I sank down on my knees on the soft, sheep-nibbled grass. I leaned over, my back aching.
Then I slipped the pack off, trying not to wake the child. She stirred and whimpered as I lifted, her from the canvas frame. But then as I wrapped her round and round with the blanket and snuggled her down on my lap, she buried her face against my rough clothes and slept again.
I leaned back against the cold stone, my feet on the old hearth damp now with dew. I thought about all the fires that had burned there, the hard-working hands that had warmed around it after the work of the fields. They were all dead, all of them, long ago.
The mist settled down low, as the night got colder, and the stars came out again, a high roof over the high country of the moorland. In the starlight I could see, over the ruined front wall, the thin spreading branches of the rowan tree, guarding the house from evil. Its heavy hanging clumps of berries were dark shadows now in the starlit lace of leaves.
I tightened Dominic’s jacket around me, shivering, clutching Caitlin for her warmth. My eyes were closing; sleep would come in spite of everything. Then through the leaves of the rowan tree, I saw the lights. I jerked awake, for a moment thinking I was found. But they were far away, and not the kind a man can carry in his hand.
They were over the far ridge, pure white light, not like the stars, not like anything real. There were three of them, in a still pattern, hanging over the black hill. Dominic was right, they weren’t frightening at all. They were beautiful and holy, in the branches of the rowan. I wondered, were they for me?
Chapter Seventeen
When I woke, grey true daylight lighted the rowan tree, bringing a dull red to the berries, a pale yellow-green to the turning leaves. It was morning; in the cold and the dark, I had slept.
I sat up, straightening my stiff, aching back. Caitlin woke, wide-eyed and happy, as only children do. She wiggled around on my lap, looking at where we were, not really bothered by the strangeness of it all. Oh, Caitlin, I thought, for you life is so simple, your safety so easy. Or so you think.
She was only safe as long as I was. I must go now, in the dim light, before the sun was up and flooding the hills with relentless brightness. I reached into the jacket pocket and found the cheese and bread for Caitlin. She ate them happily, not minding the dampness of them.
When I slipped her into the pack, she was ready and willing for another long bouncy walk. But my muscles stiffened with sharp pain as the weight fell again in the familiar way. I picked up the crook, glad for it, finding some strange comfort in the fact that it was Dominic’s and he had carried it so often in his own hands. Why should the thought of him be comfort to me, I thought, when it could well be him with the gun behind me.
I had been walking for half an hour when I turned and saw in the first long shadows of the low sun the man on the hill, walking slowly after me. I froze. He was on my skyline. On a ridge. I was below him, lost in the shadows, and he did not see me. Yet. The clear sun behind him made a black shape of him, the rifle in his hands showed as a sharp line.
He was close already. I glanced away over the moor.
There were miles and miles, sweeping and terribly open. I could not run without being seen. And once seen, I could not outrun him, a strong man unencumbered by the weight I carried. And armed.
The low wet gully of a burn ran near me. At points it was deep, the black stream five feet below the surface of the moor. I ran to it, through the shadows and leaped down, splashing in the water, slipping on mossy rocks. Where the stream had meandered, the bank was carved and cut, an overhang of sand below the peat, and the peat topped with heather like hair.
I crouched down under the overhang, where the ground smelled wet and rotting, slipping the pack off. Caitlin protested, as I lifted her out, and I whispered to her, begging her to be quiet. I found some small stones shining with mica and gave them to her. Thankfully I watched her become absorbed with them, picking at the silvery flecks with her tiny fingers. I pulled her back under the bank, praying that she wouldn’t lose interest and begin to fuss and cry.
The silence of the moor came down around us. There was no wind. The stream splashed very softly. I saw a small frog jump and a water bug. And then suddenly I could actually hear his footsteps, the soft thudding of heavy boots on the heather-covered ground. He was near, very near. I shut my eyes and prayed it would be Dominic. For all Kevin said of him, I believed he had mercy in him. He wouldn’t kill me, not after a night to think about it. Not here in front of his baby daughter.
Suddenly I could see the man. Just his head and shoulders over the curve of the hill and the bank of the stream. The sun poured down on him, bright gold, the hair, red-gold, the sheepskin jacket the same rusty colour. Kevin. I didn’t have any fear at all. I thought of Dominic, scared and courageous in the doorway of Sron Ban. I couldn’t think of anything else.
Kevin walked slowly and purposefully along the hill by the gully, the rifle easy under his arm. He might have been stalking deer.
In the distance I heard a sound, low, indefinable. Kevin must have heard it, too, because he turned, looked queerly up, and then started backing away, walking slowly, until he disappeared from the line of my vision.
The sound was louder, a fluttering sound like wind in trees, but there were no trees. Then louder still, an engine sound. A car? Here? A Land Rover perhaps. But that wasn’t right; the sound was above, pulsing. I’d heard it before somewhere.
Why did it make me think of Danny? Then the fluttering became a roar, filled with the thumping drone of the engine, the sound of the jungle, the sound of Vietnam. A helicopter; here where there had been no one, no one but me and my hunter. Suddenly we were not alone.
For a moment I clung to my hidden safety, and then I took my gamble and leaped up and scrambled onto the bank, under the wind rush of the machine, hanging black like an air dragon over the heather.
I swung my arms, and shouted, my hands over my head. Someone saw me, a dark hand within the shadowed window acknowledged with a quick short wave.
Kevin saw me, too. He whirled at a short distance, where he had been running, whirled and stood and raised the rifle to his shoulder.
But the helicopter was coming down, fast between us. The purple flowering tops of the stiff heather flattened out, blowing away from it. Kevin lowered the rifle and turned to run.
The door swung open as the machine touched softly, bouncing gently on the uneven ground. A man leaped down, his head bent under the whirling blades, the downwind whipping the blond hair wildly beneath the tight purple headband. My hand came up to my mouth and I shrank back against the crumbling bank of my gully.
‘Oh, not you, too, gentle Seumas,’ I whispered. But it was Seumas, as he always was, embroidered jeans and purple caftan, the only difference the heavy dark leather gun belt pulling in the flowing freedom of the cloth. He was drawing the gun already as he leaped down toward me.
All of them, even the helicopter, incredibly it seemed the whole world was wrapped up in their game. I reached for Caitlin, crying beside me. But Seumas didn’t come for me.
He crossed the ground beneath the flickering whir of the blades in two low crouching bounds. Then he straightened only slightly, as Kevin faced him, and he took aim, bent low, holding the handgun in
the stiff double-handed modern way.
‘Drop it, or I fire,’ he called, calm and professional.
Kevin stood only a moment, the rifle half-raised, judging his odds with quick precision. Then he dropped the gun, kicking it away toward Seumas, hands raised easily, in his own way equally professional. Once again I realized that he’d done all this before. It was an old game and he knew all the rules. Lose this round and go to court. Another day, another game. I hated him.
The blades of the helicopter were still, lightly drooping. Two other men climbed down, holding drawn guns. Strangers, but I had seen them before; yesterday, the two men in tweeds, strolling the heather with binoculars. So they, too, had had other prey than fox and deer.
Suddenly there was no sound other than the soft voices of the two men and the empty sad wail Caitlin was making. I gathered her up and stood numbly watching as the two strangers stood over Kevin, one holding a gun on him, the other searching him for further weapons.
Seumas came quietly walking across the soft heather, his arms outstretched to me. I didn’t understand anything but he looked kind and safe. I leaned against him, the child between us, shaking and crying.
Eventually I looked up, smearing the wetness from my eyes and said, ‘How? Are they police? And you?’
He smiled wryly. ‘I’m with Scotland Yard. Never trust your eyes, love.’
I still understood nothing, other than that I was safe with him; that was enough for now.
‘Where’s Dominic?’ I asked, searching his face.
He pulled away a little, looking quietly down at me. He brushed the side of my face with his fingers gently, saying, ‘He’s dead, Carrie.’
I had known it, but hearing it still cut me apart. I leaned my head against the rough purple shirt, saying, ‘I killed him.’
He drew back, turning my face up, whispering, ‘What are you saying, lass? It was nothing to do with you.’
‘It was,’ I said. ‘I sent him to Kevin. I told him what Kevin had been doing. How he’d double-crossed him with the guns. I knew Kevin would kill him, but I sent him anyhow.’
Highland Fire: captivating romantic suspense full of twists Page 18
