Bitter Water (33 page)

They crashed over the bed, yelping with the impact on their shins, and clattering in a heap on the floor. A long blade spun away from one of their hands. It looked like a bayonet. For an instant I thought about diving after it and confronting them. But the odds were too much in their favour. I plunged for the door leading back up the stairs to the entrance hall. I tugged the door but at this time of morning it was still locked. I sprinted back and down the other stairs, my feet slapping and sliding at every step. I could hear the men gasping and pounding behind me.

I broke back out into the great pool arena, brain racing and trying to visualise an escape route. There wasn’t one. At least not one that I’d reach before the shod hunters caught me up.

I had one stupid thought. There wasn’t time for a smarter one. I ran round the pool, past the diving board and over to the far side. I took a clean run and leaped out into the pool. I caught the trapeze bar with one hand, swung and got the other fingers round it. I was spinning and swaying like a drunk, but I pulled myself up and then flung my legs up and backwards over the bar so that I was perched on my stomach. My PE sergeant would have been proud of me. With the last energy of the chase I hauled myself up the ropes until I was standing on the bar. By the time the two knifemen got to my side of the pool the lateral swings had stopped. I was rocking gently backwards and forwards, just out of reach. I was some six feet in the air and a crucial four feet away from the pool’s edge.

The knifemen scampered round to my side and stood panting, gazing up at me and clutching their weapons. They looked puzzled, as though I’d set them a hard sum and they couldn’t remember their tables.

It was a precarious perch. I was the proverbial sitting duck. If they had guns they’d hardly miss. I could already picture my punctured body floating in a widening circle of red. The Committee would have a fit.

I had time to inspect their blades. They were bayonets but sharpened and honed to thin murderous edges and points. If they’d been
throwing
knives, the men could have two good goes at spearing my bare body and leaving me dead, or wounded enough to drown. Bayonets have all the weight in the handle and if chucked, it was pretty random which end would hit first.

I also hoped they wouldn’t want to try the same jump as me. They could leap for the next trapeze along and then do some fancy swings to get within range, but they were muscle men; more circus strong men than acrobats. I was king of the castle and they were the dirty wee rascals that I’d be able to kick into the pool if they tried. It was still two against one but I was counting on human nature. They were fully clothed; I was in trunks. Folk don’t like getting wet in their clothes. Nor wrestling with someone in water. Or getting trapped in a pool if someone else arrived.

Hell, they might not even be able to swim.

I didn’t recognise them. And they seemed too well built to be members of the Marshal gang. But I’d know their pug faces again. If there was another time. They paced back and forward a couple of times, brandishing their glinting weapons. They seemed to be getting angrier all the time.

‘Come on in, boys. The water’s lovely.’

I thought I might have overdone it, that one of them was going to take a leap at me. But then the brighter of the two saw the long pole with the hoop on the end for rescuing kids from the deep end. He got hold of it and was swinging it out to hook me and draw me close. I dived from my perch and headed underwater to the centre of the pool, hoping my simple theory about them not wanting to get wet was right. I surfaced to the sound of the fire alarm crashing through the building.

The fisherman flung his pole into the pool in disgust. They sprinted out of the door and were gone. I gave them a count of thirty and began swimming to the side. I was just hauling myself out when old Robert stumbled through, clutching his bloody head. He sat down heavily on a bench when he saw me.

I got towels and cleaned and bandaged his head wound. I supported him to his office and phoned an ambulance. I was just putting the phone down when one of the other early-morning swimmers stuck his head round the door.

‘I say, Brodie, what the devil’s going on? The front door’s wide open and the fire alarm – my God!’ He’d just seen Robert.

‘Bill, isn’t it? We’ve been robbed. Two men. They beat up Robert and chased me. Can you look after him while I change?’

I gave him no choice with his answer. I darted out of the office and jumped into my trousers and shirt. I took a quick look at Robert as I ran for the front door.

‘Sorry, chaps. Must run.’

I left Bill’s protestations in my wake and ran out of the door into the soft light of morning. Last night I’d been asking myself who’d be attacked next. Who’d be next to die? The question welled in me. I had the answer. As I pumped up the hill towards the big house at Parkside the panic kept my aching lungs gasping away. I stumbled up the steps with my legs gone. I rammed my key into the door and ran into the hall.

‘Sam! Sam! Are you there?’

I dived down into the kitchen. It was dark. I ran back up into the hall again and heard a door open upstairs.

‘Brodie! What on earth’s the matter?’

I stopped, panting, at the foot of the stairs and gazed up at her. She stood there, hands on hips, in her dressing gown, in all her disapproving glory. I turned and sat down on the bottom steps until the nausea cleared. She walked slowly down to join me. We sat together, like kids banished from the front room. She took my hand.

‘Douglas, what is it? You’re shaking.’

‘A daft notion. That’s all. It’s OK now.’

‘Tell me.’

I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to bring the fear back. I inspected her face. Her eyes were tired but clear. She was sober. She was coming through this latest setback. This was Samantha Campbell. I told her. She listened, nodding, and then she said, calmly, ‘Well then, maybe it’s time we took a wee holiday.’

FORTY-FIVE

W
e made our preparations there and then. I freed the sleek Dixons and the heavy Webley from the gun cupboard and stuffed as many shells into the game bags as I could. We packed two soft leather holdalls with enough clothes to last a week and emptied the whisky cabinet. We stowed away two good pairs of binoculars. We left the fishing rods behind. Reluctantly.

By eight thirty, we were standing, supping tea, crunching cheese on toast, dressed in our rough tweeds: Sam in her own set of well-cut green jacket and matching plus fours, and me in her father’s hand-me-downs. We laced up thick brown brogues and donned rough flat caps and I saw a new side of Samantha Campbell, perhaps the Sam side. We smiled at the sight of each other – a pair of ghillies – as though we were off on a great adventure. Though her pale skin was stretched tight over her fine facial bones, she already seemed brighter. Action always helps.

I phoned my mother to let her know I’d be away for a few days. Or at any rate, I phoned her neighbour Mrs Cuthbertson and listened to a lot of shouting up and down the entry before my mum’s breathless voice came on.

‘What’s wrong, Douglas?’

‘Nothing, nothing at all. I just wanted to let you know I’m going away for day or two.’

‘A holiday? You could do with one.’

‘Aye, a wee trip.’

‘Just yourself?’

‘No. In fact I’m going with Samantha.’

‘Oh, Douglas. I’m that pleased. She’s a nice lassie.’

‘She is. You’re all right, Mum? No funny visitors lately?’

‘Just every neighbour in Bonnyton to hear about my trip to Glasgow. You ken what they’re like.’

I truly did.

‘Have the local bobbies been round? Are they keeping an eye?’

‘If I’ve made one pot of tea I’ve made twenty.’

‘Don’t give them shortbread or you’ll never see the back of them.’

We packed the Riley with our gear, rolled out of the garage and headed west. In half an hour we were passing through Balloch and winding along the bonnie banks of Loch Lomond. We met only one other vehicle: a motorbike and sidecar of the Royal Scottish Automobile Club and got a smart salute for sporting their Saltire badge on our radiator grill.

As we drove I thought with relief about getting Sam away for a few days for safety. She was now sangfroid personified but I felt that at any moment she could break. And disappear back into a bottle. The last few months had been hard enough on her without these new horrors intruding. It might also be a chance for the pair of us to spend quiet time together and see what we had. I had a guilty thought about Morag in all this. Should I tell her I was going off for a few days with another woman? Did I owe her that much? Was there any way she’d understand or believe me if I said I was doing it to avoid getting murdered? I wasn’t 100 per cent sure of her answer if I gave her the choice.

Our immediate destination was Tarbet, halfway up the 26-mile loch, along the A82. Sam had stayed there often, as a girl and as a young woman, when she and her parents had gone shooting and fishing by the loch. We reached it in an hour and a half by the old Highland road.

The Tarbet hotel is built on a fork on the road where it branches west to Inverary and Oban, and north to the Grampians. Its grounds run down to the loch. The bulk of Ben Lomond stands guard on the eastern side of the water.

The baronial pile sat heavy and proud in the weak morning sun. We pulled into the car park and I shut off the engine. We gazed out over the loch, our eyes drawn up the rising mass on the other side, blotched with purple heather.

‘We could just go straight on, Sam. Crianlarich is bonny this time of year. So is Fort William,’ I suggested.

‘“By Tummel and Loch Rannoch and Loch Aber, I will go . . .”?’ she sang in perfect key.

Unable to match her voice, I spoke the next line, ‘“By heather tracks wi’ heaven in their wiles
. . .
” Why not?’

She heard the seriousness in my voice and didn’t say anything for a long moment. Then she sighed.

‘You know we can’t just run away.’

I wound the window down and lit a cigarette. Something bubbled up in me. It had been fermenting for weeks.

‘Why not, Sam? Why not? For six years they trained me to be the best killer I could be, and I was. I was one of the best. A natural, maybe. Now I want out. I want to be a journalist. I want to write. Study Eliot again. But they didn’t teach me how to get back there. No one gave me a compass back to civvy street when I handed back my uniform. Every time I reach for a pen or a book someone pulls a gun on me. And I react. So what do I do now, Sam? What do I do?’

She put her neat hand on my arm. ‘Douglas, my dear, you can’t hide from yourself. You’re not the type to sit back and let others fight your battles.’

‘Really? No choice? I’m tired of taking on the world. Tired of leading from the front. Of fighting. I’m just a reporter, remember? All that pen mightier than sword stuff?’

‘If
you
don’t, who will? If
we
don’t?’

‘You’re not going to hit me with Burke, are you?’

She laughed. ‘All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing? That one?’

‘Define
good
, then. We argued about it for days back in our first year at Glasgow. We thought it was grand stuff. It was simpler then.’

‘Oh, it’s still simple, Douglas. But we’re not.’

I sat and smoked. I hated hearing her arguments. For she was right, of course. It seems there’s no escape from your nature. Finally I said: ‘You know what really scares me, Sam? I miss it. Some of it. I miss the surge of terror and fierceness in the morning going into battle. Leading two hundred men against an SS division. Testing myself against the best fighting machine the world has seen. Knowing that not all of us will come back. That I might not. But for that moment feeling so alive that death would be a fair bargain. And now the worst thing I face every day is my typewriter keys sticking! I need to find a way of purging those feelings or . . . or I – will – blow – up!’ I hit the steering wheel with every word.

She squeezed my arm then asked quietly, ‘Purging or accepting?’

I stared through the screen at the great timeless mass of Ben Lomond. Accept I had a duty to use my talent for war? Is that what Sassoon and Owen did when they went back to the Front? Poet
and
soldier. Each with two heads, two hearts?
Was
it that simple? Maybe.

‘Besides, Douglas, you’re a tidy person. There’s unfinished business here.’ I flung my fag end out and looked at her. ‘Kismet?’

‘If you like.’

‘Shall we see if we can book lunch? And a room?’

‘As in
one
room?’

‘Sam, I’ll sleep on the floor but I don’t want you out of my sight.’

‘So this is gallantry, not seduction?’ She was smiling, coolly.

‘Practicality, Mrs Smith.’

‘Oh God, can’t we at least have a more interesting name?’

It wasn’t much of an objection.

The waistcoated porter jangled his keys. ‘I’ll show you your rooms first, then bring you up a pot of tea, Mr and Mrs Carnegie. No relation . . .?’

‘Sadly, no. But it gets us into all his libraries,’ I said.