Shrike (Book 2): Rampant (22 page)

"That's never a good opener, David," I say, straddling a bench to face him. I drink half my water bottle in one gulp, then wipe my face with the towel.

He ignores my comment. "I don't know how much Ross told you about our relationship."

I start at that, folding my towel across one leg. "Nothing at all, actually. I just thought you'd gone on a couple dates."

"It was more than that. We got…close." David's eyes don't meet mine, and his huge body is still and seemingly calm under the fluorescent lights of the gym. 

So much of David's behaviour makes sense to me with this admission. Ross begging me to tell David of his innocence. David's lateness and his remark that he almost didn't come to our training session. Neglecting to mention that he was training Taog. 

"I'm sorry." I don't know what else to say, and from David's face, I don't need to say much else. 

Any sweat on his brown skin has long since dried. He looks like he could step out of this room and onto a cover shoot for GQ. His face, though, tells another story. The droop of his eyes, the way he won't look at me. He frowns as though he's trying to make a decision he doesn't want to have to make.

I try to think of what it could be. He needs a break. He doesn't want to train me anymore. He wants to ask me about Ross. 

"I think he did it," David says, and the blood rushing in my brain chases away my speculation.

Of all the things I expected, it wasn't that. I hear the ocean, and I have to remind myself I'm already sitting down. I feel I might fall. He sounds so sure. Until that moment, I haven't realised just how much I hoped for Ross's innocence. For his lover to so certainly eschew his innocence…

My fingertips feel numb, and not from punching a bag for the last hour.

When I can finally speak, my voice sounds tinned and far away. "How can you be sure?"

I will David to say that he's not sure, that it's just a feeling, that it's anything that can be explained away or rationalised. 

"He talks in his sleep," David says.

I close my eyes, watching the zig-zags of indigo light behind my eyelids. Deep breath in through my mouth, out through my nose. I try to steady my voice. "What did he say?"

"It was always just snippets. A white room, he'd always talk about the white room."

The lab. But plenty of rooms are white. "What else?"

"He always spoke of the smell of roses. He'd talk about roses most of all."

"De Fournay dabbed rosewater on her temples every day at two-thirty," I say automatically, because that part of her schedule always came immediately before she summoned me to her office to berate and chastise.

David nods. "He told me that when he was awake. Not the time of day, but that she used the stuff. At first I asked him to explain what he said, in a playful way."

Lovers and pillow talk and teasing about sleeping habits. "There had to be something more than that, David. De Fournay gave all of us nightmares, and I imagine my killing her—" I still call it that, even though it was she who pushed her finger back on mine to trigger the bullet that popped her head like a balloon, "—affected everyone at Hammerton."

"He mentioned that man, Frost. The one who set the bomb. He mentioned helping a queen with a big project. And some rubbish, a muckle white box guarded by a dragon. At least I thought it was rubbish…"

David's still talking, but I've stopped listening. Any remaining hope I have shrivels into a withered husk. 

No one who hadn't been down to the lab would know what was down there. If Ross had never been there, he never would have seen the wee portable bed where Sofie de Fournay came for treatments, nor would he have seen the stuffed seal that was Sofie's comfort object. And he wouldn't have known, not without seeing it firsthand, that above that wee portable bed was a photograph of a dragon statue from Annamaria de Fournay's Cambridge garden. The photograph faced the centre of the lab, right where they placed the bomb meant to rip the heart out of Edinburgh. A muckle white box guarded by a dragon.

"He did it," I whisper. "Ross. He did it."

My quiet words stop David mid-sentence, and his mouth drops open. He swallows, his densely muscled throat contracting like a boa constrictor choking on a rabbit. 

"When did you put it all together?" I ask.

"The morning of his arrest." David's eyes drop to his feet, and I know. I know why he won't look at me.

"You rang the bobbies," I say. He doesn't have to answer for me to know it's true. I remember overhearing Trevor arguing with someone on the phone, saying that some kind of evidence wouldn't hold up, that they needed more than a simple transcript. "You took notes on what he said, didn't you?"

"At first it was just a wee joke, a way to take the piss out of him because he made fun of my snoring. You know, like that American bird in England who made a website dedicated to her husband's sleep-talking and goes on chat shows now. Something he'd have a laugh at later. But that morning was the first time I told him about the white box, and he immediately clammed up and snapped at me to leave it alone. I just thought he was a bit sensitive to teasing, but when I told him I'd burn the notes, he changed." David sways on his feet, his stoic demeanour cracking. 

"Changed how?"

"He went into a rage."

I try to picture rageful Ross and fail. I've never so much as seen him cheesed off. Peeved at most.

"He started tearing through my things, looking for the notes I'd mentioned. When he couldn't find them, I thought he was going to come at me. But he didn't. Probably for obvious reasons."

Obvious reasons is one way of saying that attacking David Menzies is a bit like mounting a bare-knuckled, full-frontal assault on a brick wall.

My head feels heavy, as if each progressive sentence from David has added a stone to the weight of my brain. "And the police know all of this."

David nods. "I need some time away, Gwen. I care about you, and I know this is a rough time for you as well, but I can't keep going on like nothing's wrong when everything's wrong."

I know what he means all too well. Unfortunately, I haven't the choice. "So you're leaving."

He gives me a wry not-a-smile. "I can't leave the country, but I'm going to stay with my granny in Pitlochry for a while."

"Have you told Taog?"

"I was going to ask you to do it."

That's me, Edinburgh's official bearer of bad news.

I wonder how much more before I break under the weight of it.

I make it home and have enough time to shower before my pizza arrives. Taog sends me an excited text saying he's found something, and I wish I didn't have to tell him what David's told me. He'd want to know, though. I'm sure he'd also want to know that I let Granger roam free, and as much as I want to tell him, I can't make myself do that. 

He takes the information about Ross better than I had hoped. My hair's still damp from my shower, and our plates are littered with nibbled pizza crusts, and Taog greets the news with more pragmatism than I could.

"The courts have to build a case against him. Sleep talking is not exactly forensic evidence."

"Fingerprints are." 

Taog nods, and the subject drops. I think of Ross's face when he told me to tell David that he didn't do it. Now that moment has taken on a sinister cast.

"What did you find, Taog?" I need a distraction. Anything. 

"I compiled a list of words that turn up in Andrew's letters. I included any words that I thought could be a surname or a profession. Any I wasn't sure about, I looked up in the White Pages online, including any locational cues. He talks about Kelvingrove in that letter there—" Taog points, shuffling papers aside, "—and the surname Park in Glasgow turns up over a hundred matches."

"That's a thin lead, Taog."

"Aye, all of them are thin leads. Until I cross referenced them with Tasha's list of possible names associated with Britannia."

My eyes want to bug out of their sockets. "Why haven't I seen that list?"

"It's hundreds of people long, Gwen. It's people who have been shown to have sympathies in that direction or whose names turned up over the years. She doesn't show it to many people, and I think she's rather embarrassed about it, actually. She knows it's not likely to be very useful. Britannia are so good at keeping mum that she thinks the list is only a couple ticks above speculation." Taog angles his laptop toward me. "Here it is. I highlighted the relevant names."

Frost is there, but that was confirmed in September. Aside from Frost, I recognise the names Park, MacLeod, Brown. "MacLeod? He actually mentioned MacLeod in the letters?"

Taog has put sticky notes on all the letters, and he pulls one out of the stack and hands it to me, pointing to the second paragraph.

I sometimes lie back and mak clouds on the ceiling in the whorls of the paint. It reminds me of Inverness, how the sky is always changing.

"Since when does Andrew write Scots words like mak?" 

"Since this letter, and only this letter."

Mak clouds. MacLeod. Andrew is one smart lad. Was. Was one smart lad. 

Taog goes on. "He does this in each letter. A name with a place. Always a name with a place. And between them, I think he was trying to tell us where Britannia has infiltrated. Holyrood. St. Leonard's."

I balk at the latter, thinking of Trevor. Is the reason he doesn't want to believe me about these letters because someone's whispering in his ear not to trust me? Or could Trevor be a Britannia plant?

The thought makes the pizza in my stomach consider coming back up. 

"You've done a brilliant job here," I tell Taog. His hazel eyes crinkle at the corners at the compliment. 

"It's just nice to feel as though I'm actually doing something at all. I went into the Gu Bràth office earlier today to chat to a few of the others."

"Oh?"

"Aye, they're still doing their work, most of it heaps less interesting than what we do." He smiles in earnest then, and I return it as best as I can. 

If we both live through this, I'll never complain about my boring life ever again. Not that my life is ever likely to be boring again. I don't reckon people will stop being people once I stop Britannia, and I'm still a lone super-powered individual in a country seeking to build its own identity post-referendum, whatever that may end up looking like. No, my life will not be boring. 

It cheers me somewhat to see Taog smiling and generally looking less like exhaustion on a stick and more like a human being. Purpose helps, I suppose. 

Taog's mobile buzzes, and his smile vanishes. "Turn on the telly," he says.

I obey. 

A reporter's face fills the screen, her hair haloed by flashing white and blue lights behind her. The caption on the bottom says, "Soldiers wounded in training exercise: two dead from friendly fire."

I can feel my face blanch. "Training exercise?"

"Tasha said it happened a couple hours ago."

The news recaps the incident as we watch. The Black Watch at Fort George undertook a training exercise just after 1800 hours. Due to misdirection in orders, two units fired upon one another and two infantrymen were killed by friendly fire before their commanders realised what had gone wrong. An internal investigation was opened, and as Taog and I watch the news, the reporter tells us that no comment has been made by Fort George or anyone in charge.

"Tragic," Taog says finally when I can't bear to watch anymore. Twelve wounded, two dead. Four of the wounded are in critical condition.

I leave the letters strewn about Taog's table and trudge up the stairs to his room. Too much for the present. I shut out the memories of David's face and the way his muscular body swayed as if he were made of rubber. I make myself forget Rosamund Granger, force myself not to check her whereabouts on my mobile. Instead, I climb into Taog's bed and pull the duvet up to my chin, curling around on my side. I can hear Taog downstairs doing the washing up, and the domestic sound is a small comfort.

I've had enough tragedy for one day. 

twenty-two

Saturday I need to get out of the house. When Taog goes into the Gu Bràth offices to help with campaign posters, I hop a train to Falkirk. The app on my mobile allows me to see retroactively where Granger's been since the tracer was implanted, and even though last night I vowed it didn't matter, I still feel a surge of relief when I see that she didn't budge from her hideout.

She's still there when my train pulls out of Waverley, but halfway to Grahamston, the pulsing white light begins to move.

It starts out on a circuitous route around the train station, but then veers east toward Victoria Park. I can't believe my luck. When my train pulls into the station, she's still moving east past the park, and by her pace I can tell she's on foot. I'm wearing street clothes again, and I'm beginning to get used to the sensation of spandex under my jeans and jumper. As it's broad daylight — albeit a sickly, midwinter sort of daylight — I don't want to draw attention by prancing around Falkirk in my Shrike outfit. I make my way down to Gowan Avenue from the train station, careful to keep an eye on the dot on my screen. Friday when she was moving around, she stayed out for about a half hour. I can only hope I've that much time before I see her start to circle back.