The Man Who Built the World (33 page)

‘I would have killed you for her. If she were here now I would gun you down for her if I thought for a moment she would love me . . .’ Tears streamed down Red’s face.

‘Red –’

‘SIT
DOWN
!’

Red swung the gun up, cocked it,
and pointed it at Ian. ‘Or I’ll swear you’ll not speak again!’

Ian lifted his hands and backed slowly away.
He lowered himself back on to the couch. Liana looked across at him, lips trembling with terror.

Red took his own seat again.
‘Jealousy. That’s it, isn’t it?’ he said, turning to Liana. ‘You and that sister of yours are just two pathetic old spinsters who can’t have a baby for themselves, so you thought you’d steal mine.’

Liana sighed.
‘That’s not true. You have to understand, we want to do what’s for the best. But we have duties beyond what you can understand. We have a duty to Gabrielle, and now to Bethany.’

‘Leave her out of this.’

Liana shook her head. ‘I can’t. Not now.’

‘Just shut up or I’ll blow your fucking face off!’

Liana fell silent, eyes lowering to the floor, too afraid of his gaze to watch him any longer. She reached out with her mind to check on Jack. He was still safe for now, but for how long? She couldn’t keep him hidden forever, she didn’t have the strength, and she couldn’t do anything else at the same time, it was too much for her.
Where was Elaina
?

#

They sat in silence for several minutes. Ian closed his eyes, meditated a little, tried to take himself away from here, back to a time when he had innocently roamed the forest as a young man, shooting at birds and rabbits with his air rifle, fishing in the river, picking berries, digging up roots, enjoying the earth and the woodland as though he and it were one, until the day he found a woman sleeping naked in a clearing, under a canopy of trees. Bathed in mottled sunlight, piles of fallen autumn leaves crisp and brown around her, a soft smile on her face. Her skin as white as pearls. Flawless. The curves and contours of her body smoother than the polished stones on a shingle beach.

Gabrielle.

I thought you’d fallen from the sky
.

His angel.

You did
.

His very own fallen angel.
An angel who changed the life of the young Ian Cassidy forever.

The sound of the wind rushing in through an open doorway broke Ian’s reverie, and he looked up, aware of another presence, and the infinite distance of seconds.
The fire flickered in the grate. Beside him Liana looked up, her mouth falling open but no words coming out, as though the entrance of the wind had left no space for any other sound.

A woman lurched into the room, hair slicked to her face, clothes soaked, a small dribble of blood on her forehead, with one foot held t
entatively up from the floor. He had seen deer and foxes, even the odd rabbit walk that way. A limp; her ankle was sprained or even broken.

Ian saw an injured woman.

Liana saw a stranger, a woman who was definitely
not
her sister.

All Red saw was her empty arms.

‘
Where’s my baby?
’ He roared, and the gun had come up before he had made it to his feet, long before Ian or Liana had time to register the situation, before the woman in the doorway had even had time to glance up from her saturated body to look in his direction.

‘
No
!’ Liana and Ian screamed in unison.

Recognition flashed into Ian’s mind at the same moment the gun went off.

Even with the howling of the wind the sound was impossibly loud. In the confines of the living room Ian felt sure his eardrums had burst, and so the sound made by the bullet as it struck Rachel in the chest just above her stomach and the subsequent sound of her body slamming back against the wall, were both lost. Ian didn’t even hear Rachel scream.

But as the sound faded, leaving his ears with a ringing sound like distant bells and the room filled with a smoky, cobalt smell, he heard Liana scream, horrified at the sight of the circle of blood that stained her beige wallpaper and the spots on her carpet and sofa, and of the stranger who had slumped face
-down across the floor. And somewhere, he heard another sound, not screaming exactly, but
similar
.

Crying.

It came from a room just off the hallway. Red heard it too.

Liana stared in dumb shock at the bloodied woman.
In the back of her mind she felt a dim awareness that the spell over the baby had been lost.

‘You fucking bitch.’

Red’s eyes blazed demonic. The butt of the gun swung around in an arc and struck her a vicious blow across the face. She made a grunting noise that sounded more like a cough, and collapsed backwards into Ian’s arms.

‘He was here all the time.
You devils.’

Red stalked out of the room.
Liana moaned, struggling to stay conscious. Blood ran from a fresh wound across her cheek.

Ian wanted to cry out in anger.
Not for any one person in particular, but for them all, for everyone in that room with the possible exception of himself. For Red, driven to madness, Liana, whom he knew had probably done what she had done for what she, at least, thought a good reason, whether it was right or not.

And of course
for the woman who lay on the floor between himself and the space that still stank of Red’s presence. He now recognised her, despite the rain, the blood.

Matthew had shown him a picture only yesterday, after all.

Of his wife and children. Of his beautiful family.

‘Hello Rachel,’ Ian whispered, feeling more useless than he had ever felt before.

Red came back into the room, holding a bundle in his arms. Tears flowed freely down his cheeks. Despite the burning hatred that had followed the moment Rachel’s blood had first splattered on the spotless wall of the lounge, Ian couldn’t help but feel a deep sorrow for his friend. A terrible, tragic, sorrow.

‘He was here all the time.
She – she – bewitched us.’ He lifted the gun in one hand, leveled it at Liana’s writhing body. ‘Die, you evil, evil woman –’

Ian moved quicker than he could ever have imagined at such a moment, pushing his own body across in front of Liana’s to shield her.
He lifted a hand, the effort so, so hard, his strength and resolve all but gone.

‘No, Red.’
He wanted to say more, to give his friend a reason, but nothing came. His simple humanity refused to let Liana Meredith be gunned down like a dog in the street.

The gun stayed leveled.
Ian could see down the dark tubes of its twin barrels. He waited.

The gun dropped.
‘For the past, Ian. For the past. Otherwise you’d already be dead.’ He glanced down at the bundle in his arms. Ian heard a faint cooing sound. The boy was his grandson. His heart wanted to burst.

‘I’ll be going now,’ Red told him.
‘And I’m taking my son.’

Ian opened his mouth to speak, but Red had already fled out into the rain.
The front door slammed shut. Liana moaned beside him, and he propped her up on the sofa, glancing at the growing swelling beneath her eye, and the blood that ran down her face. Her injuries were bad, but she would have to wait.

He crawled across the floor to Rachel.
Trying so hard to be delicate, but in the same moment desperate to discover the extent of her injuries, he rolled her on to her back. She flopped over as though dead, and he glanced down at her front, the clothes there dark with blood. He looked up at her face, expecting to see the vacancy of death in her eyes.

‘Help me,’ she whispered.

Alive. God only knew how, but somehow the bullet must have missed her main arteries, the major organs. Without doubt she was hurt badly, but even a serious wound was better than the killing blow he had expected. His shotgun (
his shotgun
) was high caliber and could rip a rabbit open from eighty yards. At close range, any torso shot should have left an exit wound the size of a saucer. It should have been fatal.

She
had lost a lot of blood, and he ripped open her shirt to assess the severity of her wound. Blood oozed rather than pumped from the ragged opening just below her right breast, confirming the shot had missed an artery. She had been about as lucky as anyone could have hoped. Ian turned back to Liana.

‘Get an ambulance.
Quick!’

She stared back at him groggily for a moment.

‘Hurry up, or
she
will
die
!’

Liana finally seemed to register the words.
Her left eye had almost closed, her cheek was turning black and puffy, the bruising mottled like the last dregs of black paint on a dry roller. She had probably fractured a cheekbone, or even her eye socket.

She struggled to her feet, swayed long enough for Ian to think she would topple over, then managed to get her balance and disappeared out into the hall.
A moment later he heard her speaking to someone, calling help, but the words themselves eluded him. All Ian could focus on was the blood oozing from his daughter–in–law’s chest.

‘One hell of a way to meet each other for the first time,’ he muttered to her, then wryly added, ‘I’m Ian Cassidy.
Matthew’s father.’

Neither understanding nor recognition registered in her eyes, only that same desperate pleading.
He doubted she could sense anything but the pain, and knew that it would soon leave her, replaced by shock caused by blood loss, then unconsciousness and possible coma. Unless the ambulance arrived within a matter of minutes, she would die.

The nearest hospitals were in Plymouth, and with
the weather conditions outside their only hope was that there was an ambulance stationed somewhere nearby, out on the moor.

‘W
e have got to stop the bleeding.’

Liana came back into the room
, carrying a bundle of rags and a white plastic container with a red cross on the front. ‘I’m not sure what we’ve got in here, but something might help.’

‘Thanks.’
He took a piece of cloth from her and pressed it over the wound, noticing how Liana’s eyes, or at least the one he could see, still wavered.

‘He hit you hard, eh?’

She looked at him, her eyes dazed. ‘Huh?
Oh
. Yeah. I can’t feel half my face. I guess it’s nothing though, is it? Not with this.’ She flapped a hand in Rachel’s general direction.

‘No.
She will probably die. She’s lost a lot of blood.’

Liana sniffed.
‘That’s sad.’ She shook her head. ‘It’s all my fault. All of this.’

Ian shook his head, resisting the urge to agree with her.
‘I think blame for anything runs a lot deeper than any of us knows. Sometimes things just . . .
happen
.’

Liana shook her head.
‘You don’t need to try and be understanding. Everything’s a mess, all because of my sister and me.’

‘No.
Whatever you did, you only did because you thought it was right. We all do things we think are for the best sometimes, even when they turn out not to be.’ He pressed his hand harder against the wound. He could feel Rachel’s heartbeat. Weak, but better than nothing. Thinking of Gabrielle, he said, ‘Believe me, I know.’

Liana knelt down beside him.
‘You should go after him,’ she said. ‘Who knows what he might do to that child?’

‘He loves the baby.
He won’t hurt it.’

Liana reached out, touched Ian’s cheek with her fingertips.
‘Did you think yesterday that he could shoot a woman like this? Like he’s just done? You can’t let him take the baby.’ She turned his face towards her own. ‘Please. Don’t give Red the chance to hurt him!’

‘That’s his baby.
He loves it.’

‘Maybe, but there are things about Red that you don’t know.
Please!’

Ian looked away, down at Rachel, her eyes now closed, her breathing shallow and laboured, coming in gasps as though air leaked in through a hole somewhere in her chest.
Ian frowned; the bullet might have grazed a lung. He hoped it hadn’t been punctured, that made a bad situation worse.

‘Do you know who this is?’ he asked Liana.

She shook her head.

‘This is Rachel Cassidy.
My daughter–in–law.’ Then, as though to clarify: ‘Matthew’s wife. I’ve never met her before tonight, though you could hardly call this an ideal first meeting. He showed me a photograph of her last night.’

Liana nodded.

‘She must have come here to find Matthew.’ He shook his head and sighed. ‘It’s all falling apart, you know? My wife and daughter are dead, my wife by my own hand, my daughter by suicide. My son is somewhere up in my house or nearby on the verge of breakdown. Who knows where? We couldn’t find him. Perhaps I’ll find his body tomorrow morning, who can tell?’