Scotland Hard (Book 2 in the Tom & Laura Series) (38 page)

“It is nearly midnight and we have a job for the Laird tonight, out on the loch.”

“Get away with yer,” Rhona said laughing. “What sane Scotsman would row out on the loch at this time of night and in this weather too? You’ll be lucky to come back with the two you go out with in this cold, kilt or no.”

“Does she mean us, or is she referring to yer family jewels Alan?” one of the men asked in amusement.

“He couldna lose you two, even if he tried,” Rhona replied with a smirk. “As for the others, I hear tell they’re small and shriveled from lack of use.”

“Now who’s been telling you tall tales like that, Rhona Freer? We can quickly settle that if you’d like.” MacTavish reached for the front of his kilt with both hands and gripped the seam running along the bottom getting ready to lift it.

“Away with all of you now. You’ve nothing to show me, Alan MacTavish, that I haven’t seen before.”

“Are you sure you can handle the English scum?” MacTavish asked. “Though I’m pretty sure the boy has no balls to speak of.”

“Well there you are wrong, Alan MacTavish, because I’ve seen his and they would grace a bull and no mistake. It is a pity he’s a liar and a thief, because were it not for that I’d surely be eager to tup him.”

“He is an Englishman and they are all liars and thieves. The bottom of the loch would be the best place for them.”

Rhona frowned. “We are not murderers here, Alan MacTavish and don’t you forget it. A good beating is all these two deserve and I’m sure the Laird will see they get it.”

This amused the other men who burst out laughing before MacTavish told them to be quiet.

“Take care of yourself, Rhona,” he said brusquely, “Innocence is not always rewarded, not even in
Scotland
.”

49.
      
Death

“I gives up,” Ebb said sitting down on the bottom step of a spiral staircase. “We ‘ave been looking for ‘ours now an’ I’m sure we been ‘ere before.”

“I thinks you’re right, Ebb,” Tricky said, sitting down besides his friend. “I’ve no idea ‘ow to get back to the others either. You’d ‘ave thought the silly cow would ‘ave given us some clue as to where to look.”

“This castle is too big,” Ebb complained. “An’ every place looks the same.”

“At least
Alice
ain’t bin blasting me ‘ead off with ‘er messages.”

“Someone’s coming,” Ebb said urgently. “Up the steps, quick.”

The two boys barely made it out of sight before a group of men walked down the corridor below them.

As soon as the men had passed, Tricky whispered softly to Ebb.

“Let’s follow ‘em. Maybe they’ll lead us to the girls.”

The boys tiptoed down the staircase and followed the men, always keeping one turn behind them. This was something that Ebb excelled at, because if he got it wrong in the future he didn’t have to look in the present.

“They’re openin’ some door,” Ebb said without bothering to actually look.

Ebb was suddenly out of breath and doubled over.

“What ‘appened?”

“Went to ‘ave a look. I ‘ave to do it in less than five seconds or it really ‘appens,” Ebb explained breathlessly.

Tricky had seen Ebb do this before back in Smee’s house, but had forgotten about it. Ebb would run down the corridor
in the future
, look at what someone was doing and then run back. Provided he returned within five seconds, he did not need to actually do it, but he had still seen what there was to see.

“It’s that bloke Saunders an’ ‘is two ‘enchmen. They’ve got ‘em all tied up an’ gagged,” Ebb explained in a breathless whisper.

“I thought that Saunders worked for McBride?” Tricky asked, puzzled by this unexpected turn of events.

“Maybe they fell out with each other?” Ebb suggested. “Are we goin’ to see where they take ‘em?”

“Might as well, seein’ as ‘ow we ain’t findin’ Miss Scream-an-Shout.”

Ebb walked around the corner and Tricky followed him confidently. If Ebb thought it was safe then it most certainly was. The group ahead of dragged the three bound and gagged men down an underground passage leading through the hill. The passage led to a small jetty, which thrust out into the loch. There was a large rowboat moored alongside it.

Saunders and his guards were forced to get into the boat. Something Tricky thought they seemed unusually reluctant to do. The men untied the boat from the jetty and began to row the boat out across the loch.

“Funny time for a boat trip,” Tricky opined once the boat had disappeared in the darkness.

“Listen,” Ebb urged.

A man screamed in terror out in the middle of the loch, and then all was silent.

“Bloody ‘ell,” Tricky said and fell to the ground as if poleaxed. As always, Ebb was already behind him, ready to catch him and lower him gently to the ground.

“Perhaps you should call him again?” Edith suggested primly. “It has been a long time.”

“Tricky hates it when I do that,”
Alice
responded, trying to match Edith’s more refined speech patterns. “If he is close then my messages will knock ‘im out, just like they did to you three.”

Lucy was sobbing somewhere nearby. None of the girls could see each other and none of them chose to hold onto any of the others.
Alice
felt that her bottom had frozen with the cold and was wondering if she would be able to walk when she tried. She leaned over in Lucy’s general direction, following the sound of the sobs, meaning to give her a comforting pat.

Gwendolyn felt a questing hand push her over. She instinctively reached out to steady herself from the blow and her hand touched the cold stone floor.

The room instantly lit with torch light and Gwendolyn felt her eyes smart. A man holding a blazing torch stood a few feet from her while looking up at a cast iron candleholder set high on the wall. He reached for it and using his body weight twisted it through ninety degrees.

There was a loud grinding noise and some of the stones in the wall rotated into the room, revealing a door. The door was about three foot high and about eighteen inches wide.

The man with the torch ducked down and stepped through the door holding the torch ahead of him. He seemed to be able to stand up on the other side because the torch light suddenly dimmed. Then the stone door creaked close, and in the fading light, Gwendolyn saw that the candleholder was rotating back into its original position.

“Sorry Gwen,”
Alice
said as she gathered she had found the wrong girl. Gwendolyn’s woolen top being distinctive enough for
Alice
to realize she’d made a mistake.

“There’s a secret passage out of here,” Gwendolyn said breathlessly, her news causing Lucy to stop weeping.

“What, where?”
Alice
asked urgently.

“You have to turn the candleholder on the wall. It opens a small stone door in the wall.”

“There’s a candle ‘older on the wall?”

“I noticed it when Madam put us in here,” Edith said from the darkness.

“I couldn’t even find the wall in this dark, let alone a candle ‘older,”
Alice
pointed out.

“Me neither,” Gwendolyn admitted in a disappointed voice. She couldn’t see it either and it was high up on the wall. She would need to jump to reach it and that would take forever in the dark if you did not know exactly where it was.

The four girls sank back into silence and despair.

“Gwendolyn, when you had this vision, you could see the room as if it was daylight?” Lucy asked.

“The man was carrying a lit torch, so I could see by its light,” Gwendolyn explained.

“Why don’t you touch the room again and use the light to go over to the candle holder?” Lucy asked. Again, there was a period of profound silence.

“I would have never thought of that, but I don’t know if what I see is my visions are in the same place as reality,” Gwendolyn said after giving the matter a little thought.

“It can’t ‘urt to give it a try,”
Alice
opined.

Gwendolyn got into a crouching position and touched the floor. The vision started to repeat itself as they always did. Sometimes if there was more than one vision to a particular place they appeared randomly. However, in this case there seemed to be only the one.

Bent over so she could continue to touch the floor Gwendolyn began to move towards the man and the candleholder. Then she hit something lying on the floor and fell over, and the room returned to darkness.

“That hurt,” Lucy complained, rubbing her aching leg where Gwendolyn had ploughed into it.

“You are not in the vision,” Gwendolyn said giggling from where she lay. “I can only see things that
are not there
, remember?”

“Get on with it,” Edith ordered impatiently.

The second time of trying, Gwendolyn reached the wall without incident and was able to rise to a standing position by touching the wall. To get to the candleholder she would have to occupy the same physical space as the man in the vision, at least if she wanted to be in the right position when she jumped.

The thought of that brought goosebumps, though people had passed through her before in visions. She knew the spirit would feel like a cold wind inside her body and her memories of it were far from pleasant.

Gwendolyn steeled her mind and restarted the vision by taking her hand away from the wall, standing in the right position and touching the wall again. When the man’s hand reached up for the candleholder, Gwendolyn jumped and caught hold of the end of it.

“I have it!” she shouted. She hung there for about a minute, swinging gently from side to side. The holder did not move.

“I am not heavy enough to work the mechanism,” Gwendolyn told her friends in despair.

“We needs to ‘elp ‘er,”
Alice
told the other girls. “Let go for now. Gwen, and we will join you. Could you blather on about somethin’ so we can follow your voice?”

Less than a minute later, all four girls hugged each other in the dark.

“We needs to give ‘er space to jump an’ then hold onto ‘er an’ pull,”
Alice
pointed out. “Can you grab it with both ‘ands?”

“I can try.”

It took them four goes to force the candleholder to turn. By that time, all four girls had bleeding hands from scraping them against the wall. However, the grinding sound of the ancient mechanism finally moving was a great encouragement to them.

“I can lead you to the door in the wall, but how will we see anything beyond that?” Gwendolyn asked.

“We follow your vision,”
Alice
explained. “With a bit of luck it will take us all the way to somewhere we can get out, an’ show us ‘ow to do it as well.”

“This is the first time I have ever had a useful vision,” Gwendolyn told them with considerable surprise.

“No, that ain’t right,”
Alice
corrected her, “This is the first time you ‘ave known what to do with your visions. That ain’t the same thing at all.”

James Saunders could not believe he was about to die. He had been chewing on his gag for hours and his jaw ached from the effort. All he had to do was say the right word and this horrible misunderstanding would be over. When these men heard he was from the Brotherhood they would untie them and take them back to see Lord McBride. One word was all it would take. He chewed at the gag with increased determination as the rowers pulled the boat over the still waters to the middle of the loch.

Joe and Mick were contemplating their fate with grim appreciation. They had both killed many people. Joe was particularly fond of killing young women. He liked the way they squirmed when they first saw the knife in his hand, and the way they jerked convulsively as the last of their lifeblood squirted out from their torn necks. Neither of the men saw the irony of drowning in a Scottish loch, it simply seemed unfair.

Mist rose in clouds from the loch, a consequence of its unnatural warmth. Heated by the reactatrons, the loch had become a veritable fog machine, especially on cold winter nights.

“Aye, this should be far enough,” MacTavish, told his men and they stopped rowing. “Tie those rocks to their legs good and tight. The Laird does-na want any of them floating up later and disturbing his view.”

“The fish should find them appetizing enough,” one of the men pointed out.

Strong hands gripped the three bound men and started to tie rocks to their legs. Joe and Mick kicked out, but all they got for their trouble were fists driven hard into their bellies. Saunders continued to chew at his gag. He was almost all the way through it.

The three prisoners were forced into a standing position. MacTavish stood up at the front of the boat to say a few words.

“Even a Sassenach should have words said over him when he is about to be sent to his watery grave,” he intoned solemnly.

“Aye, like,
die English scum
,” one of his men said and laughed. The other men in the boat also found this particularly funny.

“Now, that would be a little harsh, Jimmy,” MacTavish said. “We are all God’s creature in the end. Who could say we’re not?”

Saunders finally cut through the gag with his teeth and spit it out. His mouth was dry and jaw aching so he simply spoke the magic word, “Brotherhood.”

“Aye, that’ll do too,” MacTavish agreed. “Throw him over the side.”

Saunders gave a wail of despair cut short as he was pulled underwater by the stones tied to his feet.

Joe and Mick struggled against their bonds, but to no avail. Each was dropped into the waters where they disappeared without leaving any trace of their passage.

“Let that be a lesson to you. Even an Englishman in his last moments can call for brotherhood with his last words. It’s a pity he had to spoil his exit with that final wail.”