Scrap Metal (32 page)

He was looking straight into my eyes. “My sins don’t show on the outside,” he whispered. “Not yet. I’m sure they will.”

“Mine too,” I told him. He opened his mouth, and I brushed a finger over his lips. “Hush. I’ve got one too now—a sin of my own.”

“What did you do, love—leave a gate open? Let the sheep onto the road?”

“No. My sin’s that I don’t care about yours. Or… Oh, I do. How could I not? But I want to bear it with you. I want to help you hide it. I want to hide with you, here or any place you want to run.”

“Nicky, it’s wrong.”

“I know. Isn’t that the point of a sin?”

He kissed me. I couldn’t tell if I was tasting his tears or my own. We lay down together, chaste as brothers. He leaned over me, stroking my hair, looking at me as if he wanted to burn my image into his memory.

“Don’t,” I said. I drew his head down to my shoulder, and after a moment’s resistance he surrendered. “You don’t have to remember me. I’ll be here.”

“How? How can we do this?”

“I don’t know.” I curled around his back. The world would have to go through me to get to him. “I just know I love you. Please give it a chance, Cam. Please stay.”

Chapter Eighteen

Seacliff could be a fortress, an island within an island. It had served as one before. A passing group of archaeology students had once noted its position and asked Harry for permission to come and look round. They’d told me the green irregular mounds that bordered the road were probably the remains of Neolithic ramparts, guarding the northern and eastern approaches. The headland cliffs took care of the other two sides. It was very defensible. The only real access was the track, and every day I thought about hanging a sign off the main gate, maybe one of the lurid ones—savage dogs, killer bulls—I’d seen landowners put out to try and keep tourists off their fields despite our proud Highland lack of trespass laws.

I didn’t. I didn’t need to cut us off physically, and I didn’t want Cam to feel trapped. The postman still came rumbling down the rutted lane. When I couldn’t put off my grocery run to Brodick any longer, I went without fuss, and beyond a brief hug made no comment on the fact that Cam was still there when I got back. I even tried to contact Archie. Our last encounter echoed in my head, and I felt bad about him, but he didn’t return my calls. I couldn’t worry about him or anything else for long. The fortress Cam and I were building between us took up all my attention. No need for padlocks on the gates. When we looked at one another, we banished the world and all its pain, raised insurmountable walls to shield one another. We made love with a tight-bound intensity that was part of our castle in the air. Nothing—not even our own dark thoughts—could get to us then. We locked doors behind us, closed curtains, held and bit and bruised each other’s bodies for hours at a stretch. We were safe.

After a fortnight or so, it started to feel like a kind of normality. We began to rescue the bits of our lives that had gone overboard, as arts and learning always did in time of war. I picked up my books again, restarted my assignments. One afternoon—it was hot, the sunny scents of St. John’s wort drifting over to me from the banks of golden flower heads—I went out to the main storage barn, and I heard for the first time since Harry’s death the sounds of hammering from Cam’s workshop.

I was glad of it. Such a sign of returning life, that vigorous clatter. I wondered what was getting knocked into shape, what sheet of metal was on the receiving end of his energies. The rhythm made my flesh resound, recalling the wild hard fuck he’d thrown into me at dawn that morning. We’d barely been awake, but that was a great time to do it, before memory or thought could kick in. I’d almost died of the sweetness of my coming, crushed and convulsing in our shared bed, sobbing out my pleasure to the pillow so I wouldn’t wake the ghosts.

I pulled my attention back to the task at hand. I’d come in here to fix the barn window. Bad rainstorms were forecast for next week, and soon I’d be harvesting hay into the loft. I’d had some glass cut in Brodick, and I’d found a tub of putty in one of the outhouses, fresh enough to smell evocatively of linseed when I opened it. The afternoon was very warm. I sometimes wished my ma had shared a bit with me about the things she believed, the ceremonies she’d observed throughout the year, but she’d said living on an island where one religion was ready to foist its ideas on me was quite enough. I knew the St. John’s wort had something to do with it, and the seeds on the undersides of the fronds of fern. If you rubbed those on your eyes, you would see the world the way you wanted it to be. I rolled up my sleeves and began to measure out the lengths of wood I’d need to make the new frames.

My back was to the door. As usual, getting the numbers right on anything was soaking up all my attention. I was aware of my cat watching me solemnly from a nest of sacking on the bench nearby, but only as a rolling wave of sound, a rich purr that blended itself with the sunshine and the ongoing clatter from the studio. The odd symphony soothed me. I let my mind drift. Ten millimetres made a centimetre, and a twelve-centimetre pane would need five millimetres left clear each side for framing, so…
Oh, come on, Nichol—it’s decimal, a system invented so people like you could at least count it off on your fingers…

The purring stopped. I glanced up. My sleek cat had turned into a spike-furred demon. Her ears were laid flat to her head. She was on her feet, back arched, little jewel of a face contorted into a terrible hiss. I swung round to see what had caused this transformation, and so was just in time to avoid being shot in the back by a total stranger.

He looked ordinary. I’d have passed him in the street. The only strange thing about him was the pistol he was pointing at me, and I knew fuck all about handguns, but I was fairly sure the cylinder round its muzzle was a heavy-duty silencer. I was still half in my other world, of dreams and attempts at mathematics—my first reaction was a sharp sense of annoyance, at myself as much as this random thug. I knew I should have blocked the track.

I said, calmly enough, “Can I
help
you?”

He took me in. “Och, I do beg your pardon,” he responded pleasantly, his accent a genial Glasgow burr. “I’m not here for you, though that would have been a hard way for you to find out. You bear a strong resemblance from the rear.”

I was catching up, or I thought I was. Maybe I looked more like this man’s image of Cam than Cam did himself these days. I knew I would be scared in a minute. He hadn’t lowered the gun, and his eyes were cold.

“You’re Bren McGarva.”

He grinned. Only when it was out did I realise how fucking stupid I’d been. I could have bluffed this out, whatever the hell it was. If he was here on the off chance, if he was working his way round the south Arran farms, I could have feigned never to have heard of or seen Cam. But only someone who knew him would know that name.

“It’s all right,” my gunman said, almost soothingly, as if reading my thoughts. “I wasn’t in any doubt. I’m not McGarva, though. You don’t send a shark after tadpoles like Cameron Vaughn.”

Vaughn
. That was a nice name. That fit him, I thought, and I was glad he was Cameron still. “He’s not here,” I tried. “He was for a while, but he was in some kind of trouble. I sent him away.”

“Oh, right. Yes, you look like the type who’d banish a poor runaway.” He paused, attending to the music of creation still pouring from the studio, enough to wake the dead. “God, is that him in your workshop? Is the wee punk still making his piles of rubbish? He did like to think he’d amount to something more than Bren’s errand boy one day. He did like to think he could escape.”

I thought fast. We were facing one another in the same barn where I’d pointed my own gun at Cam on the night when he took shelter, in more or less the same positions, and it probably served me right. I’d told him a lie then, and Cam had believed me. “I don’t know what you’re on about. That’s one of my brothers at work in the shed, and he’ll have the bloody hide off you when he sees what you’re doing.” I decided to go the whole hog. “There’s three of them. They all carry rifles.”

Maybe I’d lost the knack. He just looked amused. “You
had
a brother,” he said. “A mother, Caitlin, and a grandfather, Harold, all recently deceased. So I know all about you, you see, and I know that’s Cam Vaughn crashing away in your barn, because he’s been here since February, when you fired a farmhand to make room for him.”

Kenzie
. A chill stole down my nape. Kenzie, who had disappeared from the island like a guilty dream. I could have wished Harry back again, to help me rue that day’s work if for no other reason.

“Wrong farm,” I said stubbornly. “That’s Nichol Seacliff you want. He lives up the road.”

My visitor jerked the gun at me. “Enough. Go and fetch Cam, Nichol Seacliff. Nice and quiet, mind, or I’ll go and fetch him myself.”

I could hear an engine. Only someone who lived here in the world’s-edge silence would notice it, especially under the racket Cam was making in the shed. To this guy’s traffic-deadened ears it would mean nothing. I didn’t know what it might mean to me, but I went for one last stall. “May I tell him who’s visiting?”

“Well, I have’nae brought my business cards with me, but if you tell him it’s his old pal Baird from Easterhouse, that ought to bring him fast enough.”

Tyres crunched on gravel. Baird heard that all right. A moment later we were staring at each other as a car door banged and the main yard gate squealed wide.

“Who the hell is that?”

I held his gaze steadily. “It’s hard for me to tell from here.”

“Then go and look. Get rid of them, fast. I’ll be listening. One word out of place and I’ll put a bullet in your spine.”

I went out, hands in my pockets, as casual as anyone could wish. My acting skills weren’t great, but if I stuffed it up and Baird shot me, at least the sound might give Cam some warning. I was prepared for the postman, a delivery, at worst maybe a spot check from the veterinary inspector.

What I got was Archie Drummond, parking up his great unmissable police truck right in the middle of my yard. He didn’t see me. He appeared to be deeply involved in a quarrel with his passenger, who, when she pushed open her door and climbed down, turned out to be Shona Clyde.

She stamped round the front of the vehicle and intercepted Archie as he got out. “Seriously,” she said, clearly in continuation of an ongoing argument, “think twice about this, Archie. You’re not gonna do any good here by—”

“Good afternoon,” I greeted them, and they both wheeled to face me. “Everything all right?”

Shona recovered first. “Oh. You’re there, Nichol. Yes, everything’s grand. You’ve been a bit scarce around town, that’s all, and we just thought we’d drop by and see you.”

“That’s nice. I tell you what, though—could you come another time? I’m a bit busy, and—”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake.” That was Archie, frowning in disgust. “Busy doing what? Your precious bloody farm boy?”

“
Archie,
” Shona snapped. “You promised to sort this out nicely.”

“I know. But I’m so bloody sick of his infatuation with this lad, Sho! I’ve got to tell him.”

“Tell me what?” I asked because it would have looked odd if I hadn’t. I hoped the answer was short. The postie or some poor random delivery guy would have been bad enough, but somehow I’d ended up with the three people I cared most about within ten yards of me, all in range of Baird’s gun. “Come on, Archie. I really haven’t got time to talk.”

“Fine. Then shut your mouth and listen. Joe Kenzie’s living in Glasgow now. He phoned me the other week and said he had some information. Your Cameron’s face—his and a couple of others—is plastered all over the Easterhouse estate on wanted posters. They’re after him in connection with a fucking gangland murder. An old man, Nichol, knocked off for nothing more than his telly and his wristwatch! So—”

“Joe Kenzie’s a crackhead.”

“I know. He was selling me this story, not giving it away. You think I’d dump this on you without checking? But it’s true. Your bonny student’s from Larkhall, not a Dumfries college. He’s nothing more than a lying wee hood.”

Shona grabbed his arm. “Button it,” she growled. “Archie, you sod. I know you have to tell him, but not like this. You said you’d be kind.”

God, how was I going to get rid of them? “It’s all right, Shona.” The clanging from the shed had stopped. That meant Cam was at the welding stage. That in turn meant that any minute now he’d need fresh air, a break from the heat, and he’d be out here too. “I know about Cam.”

Archie’s mouth dropped open. “What?”

“I know who he is, what he did. He told me.”

“Then…what in the name of Christ are you doing keeping him here? You used to know right from wrong, Nicky Seacliff. You might have started shagging me before they lowered the age of consent, but other than that you were the primmest, most upright bloody—”

A gun jabbed hard into my back. I jolted in shock but bit back a cry. I lifted my hands, for all the good that would do. Shona and Archie were recoiling, staring past me at Baird, who had obviously had enough of our island soap opera. “Fuck’s sake,” he snarled. “You little bastard—how the de’il did you manage to call the police?”

I closed my eyes. “I didn’t,” I said dryly. “They just have the most amazing bloody timing. Archie, is it your fault this guy’s here?”

“What? No! Who is he?” I could see him trying to morph back from jealous ex into police officer. He wasn’t doing a very good job, but at least he was stepping in front of Shona, shepherding her behind his back. “Now, Nicky, you’re a hostage. Just keep calm. Don’t antagonise…”

“Baird,” I supplied for him tiredly. I didn’t feel like introductions. “His name is Baird. Bren McGarva sent him.”

“Bren… Oh, shit.”

“Means something to you, does it?”

“Yes. Kenzie told me about him. But I didn’t… I wanted to see you first. I just made some enquiries.”

Baird gave a short grunt of amusement. “You twitched Bren’s web, copper. He’s got threads of that running all the way to the top of the Strathclyde police. That’s all it took.”