Dark Angels (41 page)

‘What difference would killing you make–your life’s almost over as it is?’

‘But you’ve hated me for years–think of the satisfaction you’ll get laughing on my grave.’

‘I’ll laugh on your grave anyway–and I will get more pleasure knowing that you will have to live with the knowledge that your line ended at my hand.’

‘Why must I die?’ I asked.

Strangely, I knew that this was the correct question, the question that my grandfather expected me to ask.

‘The Templars discovered scrolls under the Temple of Jerusalem. These scrolls showed that Jesus had married Mary Magdalene and had a child. After Jesus was crucified, Mary Magdalene and her daughter went to live in France where they were protected. The bloodline of Jesus runs in the Merovingian line–one of the families that contain this blood are the St Clairs or Sinclair as they are now known.’

Lord MacGregor stopped and looked at his daughter-in-law.

‘History says that the Templars protected the Holy Grail–and that the holy grail is a cup or a chalice. We believe that the old word for womb is chalice–the Holy Grail was the womb of Mary Magdalene. The Sang Greal is the Royal blood that is carried in these families descended from Jesus and Mary Magdalene.

‘My husband carried the Sang Greal–his mother was a Sinclair. I could not allow these pregnant girls to desecrate the blood–to preserve the Holy Grail their wombs had to be cut out.’

Her face was earnest, like a zealot carrying out the word of God.

‘And you must die because you are an abomination–the child of a whore carrying the blood? It’s unthinkable.’ The knife moved up to underneath my chin cutting my skin. She was playing with me, shredding the skin on my neck as she moved the knife up and down.

The blade nicked my jawbone as she fell backwards.

The stone that Joe had dropped on her skull fell to the ground before he untied me.

I’d never been so pleased to see the renegade old bastard in my life.

‘What took you so long?’ I shouted at Joe. As I pulled my ripped shirt about me, he handed me his jacket, the sleeves of which ended six inches past my fingertips.

Lord MacGregor lifted the knife from the gravestone. A ceremonial dagger with a twelve-inch long blade, the handle was inlaid with twenty-four carat gold, carved to resemble leaves and a bursting spring bud.

‘She obviously wanted to carry out a ritual murder to mark the death of a great warrior or king–it’s an old tradition, one that she has warped to suit her own ends.’

‘Where’s Fishy?’ I asked Joe.

‘C’mon…I’ll show you.’ He picked Lady Arbuthnot up like a sack of potatoes and swung her over his shoulder. It was dark now and I held onto Lord MacGregor as we walked behind Joe to his Jeep Gladiator pick-up truck. He pulled back the retractable canvas roof, and there lay Fishy bound and gagged. Unceremoniously he threw Lady Arbuthnot in beside him. Joe handed me the dagger as he pointed with his finger to the jugular vein on her neck.

‘Hold it here.’

Hard and emotionless his voice would have cracked glass.

Opening the passenger door, Joe pulled down the glove compartment and took out a camera.

‘Say cheese,’ he said, poking Bunny MacGregor until she turned to face him. ‘We owe this to a dying pal–it might be the only justice he gets.’ And as I thought of Duncan lying in the hospice, and her other victims, I was sorely tempted. The white flash scalded my optic nerve. Tears ran down my face as I spoke.

‘Promise me the court won’t be too lenient with her.’ I stuck my face in Lord MacGregor’s ear; he was now sitting in the front passenger seat beside Joe.

‘A problem with this case is that society doesn’t see women–particularly elderly women as serial killers, but ten to sixteen per cent of all serial killers are women. Many of them are elderly carers preying on the weak and infirm–their first weapon of choice, like Bunny’s, is poison. That’s why she used heroin. The girls were drugged with heroin, and then she tortured them. They died from the overdose not their injuries because Bunny dissected them post-mortem.’ I paused to catch my breath and tried to shut out the images of those poor girls flooding my mind.

‘God, Joe–how could I not have seen the links? She kept Fishy onside by providing him with enough material to make a paedophile think he’d died and gone to heaven. She killed those girls, and then she finally tracked me down with Roddie’s help. When Kailash knew what was going on, when Moses got word to her,
she came back from Amsterdam. All the while, Bunny MacGregor was watching me through Fishy–he was the one who visited her when her husband died, he was the one who ran me off the road and then kept the whole threatening theory going by saying someone had got his mobile number.’

‘Brodie?’ Lord MacGregor jumped in. ‘There is no way that she will be tried–or go to prison. We simply couldn’t allow the scandal.’

‘You mean she’ll just be allowed to walk free?’ I asked.

‘No; because as long as she is alive and at liberty then your life is in danger. She’ll be placed in a private, secure hospital where she will be watched and guarded twenty-four hours a day.’

‘Not much justice for the kids she killed and abused,’ I shouted.

Poking his finger in his ear, Lord MacGregor answered.

‘Justice must not be done–it must be seen to be done,’ he quoted his son at me.

What would happen if the general population knew that Lord Arbuthnot of Broxden, Lord President of The Court of Session was a paedophile and that he did not stop at murder to protect his liberty and reputation?

The question roiled around in my head like an angry black sea.

Finally, I said, ‘I guess the truth wouldn’t be good for business.’

‘That’s an understatement, my dear. That’s why the Enlightenment didn’t support me earlier–to be fair I
don’t think they believed the allegations and they thought they could contain his worst excesses.’

‘Well they were wrong,’ I snapped, ‘and children died because of their mistake.’

‘Brodie, I don’t think you can blame them–it’s not the organisation that’s bad. It was one individual–my son and your father–who was rotten to the core.’

‘So I will suffer for the sins of my father?’

The thought chilled me, as I continued. ‘They say in the Bible that the sins of the father shall be visited even unto the third and fourth generation. Will my unborn children be punished?’

‘Don’t be foolish, girl–the Bible was talking about syphilis. Now you get some sleep.’

The banging from the back had stopped.

‘What are we going to do with Fishy?’ I asked.

‘Don’t worry about him. As his colleagues would say, he’s going away for a very long time. I intend to contact the Chief Commissioner as soon as I get a signal.’

‘What are you going to charge him with?’ I asked.

‘He’s already been charged,’ he replied.

‘I never liked the man…but in truth I would never have pegged him for a beast.’ Joe shook his head in disbelief.

‘Well, you always say that unless you’ve got that sin you can’t see it in others but in his case it was true.’

I knew that Fishy would be placed before a ‘friendly’ judge; bail would be denied, he would be pressurised into pleading guilty, and then be sentenced for a very long time, but I still couldn’t believe what he was; what
I’d lived with. I was a lawyer. I was a reasonably intelligent person. I was a woman. Why did I not see it? What was lacking in me that I could so easily live with someone like that, be their friend for years, and yet pick up nothing? Maybe at the moment it was better for me to focus on my own failings rather than the fact that I had shared my life with someone so twisted.

‘Sleep now–I’ll take care of the baggage–you still have to appear before them tomorrow.’ I was convinced that I would not doze, but the car was warm and I was exhausted. I did not even wake when Joe carried me into the house.

I slept the sleep of the righteous dead.

There was nothing to rouse me from my slumber. I knew that Joe was dozing on my sofa, and his presence made me feel secure in the midst of what had turned into a living nightmare.

Any time I did stagger to the loo, or rolled over to get comfortable, he was there like a flash. I had taken the nondescript pills which Malcolm had left for me and a wave of peaceful doziness washed over every part of my body. Flashes of what had happened broke through–how could they not?–but the time for unravelling my history, my lineage, could wait.

By the time morning broke through, I had given up on pretending that I wanted to be anywhere but beside Joe. So many cups of tea and coffee, followed by plates of buttery toast and bowls of soup, had been brought to me by him that the mountain of untouched offerings indicated what my words denied. I was not all right, and I didn’t know whether I would be ever again–but I was alive.

Joe stroked my forehead as I lay swathed in his
arms, and I know that I wept many times. As the light of Monday’s dawn crept through the wooden blinds in my living-room, I sat up knowing that the day ahead would change everything forever. I had given little thought to what was going on in other parts of my new world as I slept–I had no idea what my grandfather or mother were doing (how those normally innocent titles of family ownership confused me), but I doubted they had spent any time resting. The only thing that I knew was that my request to gather the Nobile Officium would not be ignored.

I put on my court armour and a further barrier of make-up. Leaving Joe behind, I left my flat and headed for the Royal Mile, walking the first mile to clear my head. I hailed a taxi when I felt ready and blocked out the driver’s chatter about roadworks and the state of Edinburgh as much as I could, finally arriving back where so much had already taken place.

They were waiting for me.

I ascended the stairs weighed down like Christ on the Via Dolorosa, burdened by the knowledge that I was going in to plead for my mother’s life. The sound of my feet as I climbed the bevelled steps was hollow and heavy like lead coconut shells.

I shouldn’t have been surprised when I saw that Joe had got there before me. He had no doubt bribed his own taxi driver to go quicker. He sat on a chair at the foot of the staircase and did no more than wink at me as I walked by. There was no need for anything else–we knew each other too well. He would always
be there for me, and at that moment, I planned to always be there for him.

The room I was going to was far above him, high in the WS library. The stairwell had a soaring ceiling but it was unpretentious, a part of the building that only the initiated see. When I reached the top, I stopped to catch my breath. Like a fish on land, I gulped the air around me greedily to no avail. Swaddled in barbed wire, my side hurt marginally more than the rest of my body, which was saying something.

Shifting from foot to foot outside the door, I harvested my thoughts.

The walls were at least a foot thick, the door was old, white and heavy. Inside the room, the greatest legal minds in Scotland sat waiting for me. I hoped that they were nervous, for I had it in my power to destroy them. I wanted to, but it was like the sword of Damocles; if I took that course of action I would be acting like a suicide bomber. One thing I could guarantee was that the message would not get out.

I had instructed my grandfather to convene the Nobile Officium, the oldest court in Scots Law, one that is rarely used. Its origins are found in ancient Roman law, there is a three-fold test that must be applied to summon the Nobile Officium.

Firstly, there has been or there is the possibility of a miscarriage of justice. Secondly, the circumstances are extraordinary or unforeseen. Thirdly, intervention does not interfere with legislation.

Knocking once on the door, I entered without waiting for their permission. It was an unprepossessing
room in need of a paint or at the very least a dust. An eighteenth-century walnut bookcase covered the back wall, it almost reached the ceiling and I paused to consider how the servants had fetched it up those stairs. The upper half of the bookcase was glass fronted, all the books were leather bound first editions, naturally the titles were tooled in gold.

Three old men, like tortoises without shells, watched me as I walked across the fraying Abusson carpet. The judges sat at a plain oak bench table, their backs to the long Georgian sash and case windows.

The new Lord President sat in the middle, his hooked nose and high cheekbones gave him more than a passing resemblance to his great-grandfather. I knew this because an oil painting of his ancestor was on the wall, and its eyes seemed to follow me as I moved to take my seat.

For the first time I understood that in some quarters it could be argued that my lineage was the more august since my great-grandfather’s portrait was hanging on a wall that people actually looked at.

The clock showed that it was 7a.m., we were alone in the building. The Law Lords wore no judicial robes. Their bespoke suits were sombre. They continued to eye me suspiciously, but no emotions were betrayed on their faces.

A sorry sight.

I caught a glimpse of my reflection in the glass. My face was bruised and swollen. Malcolm, who had arrived to tend to me, at Joe’s request this time, did not have time to apply the leeches to reduce the swelling, which
was considerable. Malcolm had, however, gently washed my hair, and he was unable to conceal his horror as the sink filled with my red locks. My hairstyle today was not up to his customary standard; it was somewhat unusual as he had attempted to cover bald patches the size of ten-pence pieces.

‘Ms MacGregor?’

The new Lord President had called me by my father’s name. I knew that it was not a mistake, he was acknowledging the unspoken facts. By that simple gesture the Lord President let me know that it was within judicial knowledge that I was the daughter of their colleague, and a thirteen-year-old girl.

My grandfather came up behind me and stood at my right hand side.

‘Ms MacGregor?’ the Lord President said again. ‘We have been briefed on this matter before us.’ He nodded at my grandfather. ‘And as the matter is sub judice we have decided to refer it back to the court of first instance. This case will be dealt with in court nine in the usual manner.’