The First Novels: Pay Off, the Fireman (29 page)

       
I banged on the door hard and shouted, ‘It’s me, Sammy. It’s OK. I’m coming in.’ But I needn’t have bothered because when I knelt beside the two of them the gun was lying by her side and both her arms were around David.

       
Riker and I walked David through the mashing room and down the steps after Tony and Sammy, and together we eased him into the rear of the Sierra. There was an old tartan blanket in the back and Riker tucked it around David, for warmth and for comfort.

       
‘He’ll be OK,’ he said. ‘By the look of him he’s been drugged, Librium or Valium, something to keep him calm and sedated. I don’t think he’ll remember much of what’s happened.’ He sat next to him and closed the door.

       
‘They made him take some white tablets soon after we picked him up at Shankland Hall,’ Sammy said as she got into the front passenger seat.

       
‘What about you?’ I asked as I bent down to get level with her.

       
‘They didn’t give me anything, but it might have been better if they had. I’ve seen a lot of things tonight that I’d sooner forget.’

       
‘Did Laing hurt you?’

       
‘No, but I saw what he did to Carol and he took great delight in telling me what he planned to do.’ She started to cry, softly.

       
‘I’m sorry.’

       
‘Hey lover, it’s not your fault, I don’t blame you.’ She reached out and gently punched me under the chin. ‘The man had to do what the man had to do,’ she said, echoing Tony’s words. She smiled. My heart fell every time she gave me one of her forced smiles, and this was one of them.

       
‘Bullshit,’ I said.

       
She leant forward and kissed me on the lips, her long red hair brushing against my cheek. ‘I understand,’ she said. ‘That’s why I wanted to help.’ Then she smiled and this time my heart didn’t fall.

       
She reached for my right hand and played with my fingers. ‘I don’t think the girl’s dead, she was still moaning,’ she said. She shuddered and then slipped the Barbour off her shoulders. ‘Here, you’ll catch cold,’ and dropped it over my arm before closing the door.

       
I walked over to David’s side of the car as Tony switched on the engine and flooded the courtyard with light.

       
I wiped his tearstained moon face with my handkerchief through the open window until I realized I was smearing him with blood. He didn’t notice and tried to touch my cheek. He looked like a Red Indian covered with warpaint.

       
‘All for one?’ he said in a halting voice.

       
‘And one for all,’ I finished, and ruffled his untidy, greasy hair. ‘You’re going home with Sammy and Tony. They’re going to take you to see Shona. Be good.’ Tears started to brim in his eyes so I quickly added: ‘I won’t be long, I promise. I’ve just got a few things to do here. I’ll see you soon.’

       
Riker leant across and wound the window up and I stood back and waved them off. As the sound of the Sierra faded into the distance my eyes grew used to the darkness once more, and with the quarter moon reappearing from behind a cloud and the stars starting to twinkle in the sky again, I didn’t need the goggles to find my way back up the stairs to the first floor.

       
The girl had stopped moaning, but as I rolled her onto her back the eyes flickered open and her tongue gently moistened her lips through small white teeth.

       
Enough light came in through the open door to illuminate her torn apart chest and legs. Rivulets of blood were collecting in the folds of the tattered nylon anorak, she was bleeding from so many places that there was nothing I could do to stem the flow. Plop, plop, plop.

       
‘I’m cold,’ she whispered. I put the jacket around her and gently stroked her hair.

       
‘I’m so cold,’ she said in a voice that was scarcely more than a whimper. I knelt next to her and took her hand.

       
‘Can you hear me?’ I asked, and squeezed. It was the hand of a small, frightened child and it went with the voice. Her eyes opened again, halfway at first and then fully, a slight smile on her lips.

       
‘Of course I can hear you, boy,’ she said, and shivered as if someone had walked over her grave.

       
‘What’s your name, love?’ I asked.

       
‘Maggie.’ Her eyes closed again.

       
‘Listen to me, Maggie. Listen carefully. You’re dying, Maggie, and there’s not a thing I can do about it. You’ve lost a lot of blood and there’s no way I can get an ambulance out here, we’re hours from anywhere even if I could get to a phone. I can’t move you. Do you understand? There’s nothing I can do.’

       
Her grip tightened, and then relaxed. ‘And what’s the good news, doctor?’ she whispered.

       
Her chest had stopped rising and falling but she wasn’t dead, not yet.

       
‘Can you hear me still?’ I said, lips close to her ear, and she squeezed again. ‘There’s something I have to know, Maggie. Does anyone else know about me? Did the two of you report back to Ireland or were you working alone? I have to know.’

       
Her eyes opened again, the pupils wide and black in a circle of pale green. ‘James,’ she said. ‘Where’s James? Where’s James?’

       
‘He’s dead, Maggie. I’m sorry. Listen to me, Maggie, please. Does anyone else know about me? Is anyone else going to be coming after me?’

       
She began shivering again, tremors running right along her body. I put my free hand on her forehead and she was cool to the touch.

       
‘Maggie, I must know. Not just for me but for my family, too. And my friends. Are we safe?’

       
‘You’re safe,’ she whispered at last. ‘You’re safe, boy. We were to get in touch only when the job was finished.’ She coughed and blood trickled down one side of her pretty mouth, bright red against the whiteness of her skin.

       
‘Oh, James,’ she moaned softly. ‘James.’ Then her grip tightened, so hard that her nails bit into my flesh. ‘Don’t leave me, not yet,’ she said urgently. ‘Stay with me. Please stay with me.’ I was back at Shankland Hall saying goodbye to David, frightened of being left on his own, needing to be with someone who loved him.

       
‘It’s OK, Maggie. I’m not going anywhere,’ I said gently. She lay quietly until another spasm of coughing wracked her body and she sighed, a long moan that came from somewhere deep within her.

       
She lay still with her eyes closed and I thought she was dead. When she spoke again, even though it was just a faint purr, she startled me. ‘You’ll be hearing my confession?’ she asked, and I held her in my arms, listening and forgiving until she died.

       
I lifted her easily and carried her down to the Cavalier, laying her down on the tarmac as I opened the boot and wrapped her in two of the black plastic bags, sealing them with tape, winding it around and around like a child doing up a Christmas present.

       
She was easier to handle when completely covered. I didn’t have to look at the tousled red hair, the pert nose or the blood on her lips, she became just a parcel to be disposed of, not a pretty young girl that I’d killed with a shotgun. Out of sight, out of mind.

       
Laing was surprisingly light and I tossed him into the boot with Maggie, sheathed in plastic. James was heavier but I was still able to carry him draped over one shoulder after I’d put the bags round him. I lowered him onto the front seat, clipped the belt across him and closed the passenger door before going back for the shotgun, lying where I’d left it, next to a pool of his blood.

       
The water would have been cut off as well as the electricity, so I just left the blood to soak into the concrete. Besides, there was no way I could repair the damaged door or collect all the spent cartridges and bullets from around the distillery so I’d have to leave it, another mystery to lie unsolved on the files of the Highland police. That and the Loch Ness monster.

       
I put the goggles on and thoroughly checked all the rooms, looking for anything I might have left that could point to my having been there. Not that I thought I had dropped something incriminating because I’d left all identification back at the house. It was my conscience getting to work already, niggling and probing like a tongue worrying a loose filling. You won’t get away with it, you’ve done wrong and you’ll get caught, you’ll pay for this. My father telling me that it didn’t matter what I’d done so long as I told the truth.

       
I gave the area around the car a going over, too. It was all clear but it didn’t make me worry any less. I was about to slip on the Barbour jacket I’d taken from Maggie’s body until I noticed the blood on the lining, so I threw it into the boot with the shotgun on top of the two bodies. God help me if I was stopped by the police tonight, three bodies, a sawn-off shotgun and a bloodstained jacket. Calling that circumstantial would be on a par with claiming that Hitler had a bit of a temper.

       
I pulled away from the distillery, lights raking the terraced cottages as I headed for the tunnel of trees. The cat was back on its perch, head turning to watch me drive away, as the plastic wrapped body strapped into the passenger seat bobbed back and forth each time the car hit a pothole.

       
I thought of driving with the lights off and using the image intensifiers but decided against it. With the headlights switched on any oncoming traffic would be dazzled and unable to see inside the Cavalier, but at this time of night the roads would almost certainly be deserted anyway.

       
The car felt leaden, weighed down as it was by four occupants and the inflatable dingy, and I kept it at a steady forty-five mph as I followed the A9 over the River Spey and back towards Pitlochry. I left the main road after passing the village of Etteridge and drove along a little-used track to Dalwhinnie, close to the northern tip of Loch Ericht, sticking to the route I’d planned earlier in the evening in my father’s study after Maggie’s phone call.

       
Shown on the map as a thin line linking the A9 with the A889, it was a short cut across the bleak Glen Truim, barely wide enough for two vehicles in places, wires strung between EEC-funded fence posts to keep sheep from wandering in front of what little traffic there was.

       
When I reached the sleepy granite village of Dalwhinnie I turned the Cavalier right onto an even narrower track which wound along the northern shore of the loch through the thickly-wooded Loch Ericht forest. On the map it appeared as a dotted line which petered out after Benalder Lodge, but I’d no intention of going that far.

       
Two miles down the track I stopped the car and switched off the engine, listening to it crackle and clunk as it cooled in the frosty night air. The tree tops whipped to and fro as the wind tried to pluck them from the black, gritty soil, and I shivered as I opened the car door but I still couldn’t bring myself to wear the jacket.

       
There was no convenient gate as there had been at Loch Feochan when McKinley and I had driven down to the shore with Read, but the track was less than fifty feet from the water’s edge so I reckoned I’d be able to carry everything without too much trouble.

       
I took Laing first. He seemed to have got heavier and I had to manhandle him out of the boot and drag him through the fence and half roll, half pull him over the rough grass and heather. James was next and I dragged him, too. Maggie I carried, carefully, tenderly, head against my chest as if I were taking her over the threshold, and I put her down gently where the water lapped on the ribbon of stony beach.

       
The chains and inflatable boat I dropped over the wire fence and then I drove the car half a mile back down the track towards Dalwhinnie, just to be on the safe side, in case a passing poacher got curious or a courting couple decided to drive along for a lovemaking session in the woods. Both were unlikely in the extreme, logically I knew that, but the maggots of unease and guilt were already gnawing away at my mind and the inner voice that was my conscience was telling me that I wouldn’t get away with it, that somebody would catch me, somehow, somewhere.

       
I walked back in the darkness, jacket in one hand and shotgun in the other. My heart missed a couple of beats when I thought I’d gone too far but then I saw a hump in the grass by the fence. It was the boat in its bag, and I stepped through the wires and pulled it, and the chains, down to the lochside.

       
Clouds passed over the moon but they were thin and wispy, no heavier than a veil across a bride’s face, so I didn’t need the goggles as I unpacked the canvas bag, tipped out the deflated boat and unwrapped it on the beach. I connected up the plastic foot pump and it took four or five minutes to inflate the boat, my legs ached and I was breathing heavily by the time it lay on the stones, rocking in the wind. The plastic oars were each in two halves and I screwed them together and pushed them through the rowlocks.

       
I pulled the boat half into the water and weighed it down with one of the lengths of chain while I hauled the parcel that was Laing along the beach and heaved it in, knocking one of the oars out as the inflatable distorted and bent with the added weight. I pushed it into deeper water and climbed in, my legs soaking from the struggle.

       
I rowed slowly but powerfully through the choppy water until I was about a hundred yards from the shore. Making certain the oars were secure, I tied the chain around the body and rolled it over the side. It cut cleanly through the water and disappeared without a sound leaving the inflatable bouncing up and down, freed of its heavy load. A few seconds later a small stream of bubbles trickled to the surface and then they too were gone.