Coffin Road (28 page)

In focusing on the short term, in trying to save my daughter, I have not thought any further ahead than that. I have not projected possibilities into the future, played out the game in my head to visualise where it will end. And now I do. And see it clearly. Jon cannot afford for any of us to leave here alive. Not Billy, not me, not Karen. Not now. And I wonder if Sally realises it.

I glance at her pale, frightened face and find it hard to believe she is really capable of this.

Billy’s voice reverberates in the stairwell again. ‘He saw me kill Sam.’

‘That’s just your word against his. There’s no physical evidence to link you to this place. No other witnesses. And anyway, the police already think Tom did it. No point in making things worse.’

But Billy is not listening to Jon’s reason. ‘If he doesn’t want me to hurt Karen, he’d better come up. Right now.’ I can hear the hysteria creeping into his voice. His intelligence must surely be telling him that this cannot end any way but badly. But something else possesses him, something beyond intelligence, and he seems driven on a course to self-destruction. Which makes him unpredictable and dangerous.

I glance at Jon. In a low voice I tell him, ‘He’s going to kill me.’

Jon shakes his head in disagreement. ‘Not until he has his hands on the data.’

I close my eyes in desperation. No one, it seems, is thinking clearly or rationally. Except me. But I don’t know what else I can do. Billy has Karen and I have no choice but to do what he demands. With a final glance back at Sally, I start up the stairs, steadying myself with outstretched fingers on the curve of the walls.

From the stairwell, I enter through a yellow door into the circular wood-panelled room beneath the light room itself. The light is dazzling up here, as the slowly revolving beam thrown out by the lamp passes just above my head. I duck to avoid the underside of the lamp mechanism and climb the rungs of the ladder through the hatch in the grilled floor, pulling myself up and into the circle of glass whose prisms magnify the light and launch it out to sea. Briefly, irrationally, I wonder if it is reaching any ships out there in the dark, guiding them safely away from us.

Almost immediately, a revolution of the lamp blinds me, and I stagger back against the glass. It passes quickly, but leaves me nearly blind, and I blink to bring Billy and Karen into focus out of the flare of negative colour that fills my eyes. He is wearing a baseball cap pulled low over his eyes to protect them. Karen’s hands are bound behind her, and she has a pillow case over her head that concertinas on her shoulders. He has a hand spread across her forehead, pulling her head back, and a knife against the cloth where her throat must be. I feel a terrible empty ache inside me. I cannot imagine what I will do or how I will feel if any harm comes to her.

‘Where have you hidden the data?’

I see the lamp coming and close my eyes this time until it has passed. ‘What makes you think there’s not a copy?’

He just laughs. ‘Because you’re too fucking paranoid, Professor Fleming.’ A mocking parody of how he addressed me at the Geddes. ‘If there’s one copy, and you have it, there’s not the slightest danger of anyone else getting their hands on it. Unless, of course, you give it to them.’

I shut my eyes again, but even so, the light burns through my lids.

And still Billy wants to talk. ‘All the data that Sam and I collected so faithfully every week. Sent to you. Never shared. All the samples we sent to the lab, results returned only to you. So nobody else,
nobody
, could put it all together. Except you. And the statistician. Whoever he might be.’ A sneering little laugh. ‘Just one more thing you kept from us. Playing God. Forgetting that it was me –
me
– who discovered it all in the first place. Not you.
Me
. And who was going to get all the credit?’ He waves a finger of admonition at me. ‘Not right, Professor Fleming. Not right at all.’

I shut my eyes against the glare one more time, and feel someone at my side. I open my eyes, still in the blaze of light from the lamp, and even before I can shout, ‘No!’ I hear the shot. Deafening in the confines of the light room. I see Billy step back, the glass behind him red with his blood, the light fired from the lamp off into the night turning momentarily pink.

I am knocked roughly aside as Jon steps over Billy’s body, which has slumped into a sitting position against the wall, head tilted forwards, eyes closed. He whips away the cover from Karen’s head and I see her blinking frantically in the sudden, blinding blaze of light. Her mouth is taped over and, as her pupils contract, I see her terror.

I want to throw myself at Jon, but he holds her upper arm and pushes his gun against her temple.

‘This was never going to work.’ He has, it seems, lost all patience. ‘I want the data. Now!’ His voice reverberates around the light room almost as loudly as his gunshot of moments earlier.

I nod. ‘It’s downstairs.’

*

I am strangely calm as I kneel on the floor with the screwdriver that I have recovered from its hiding place in the kitchen. Above me, set into the wall, are the coat hooks where the men who tended this lighthouse once hung their waterproofs. Their boots would have stood where I now kneel. One of them, in contravention of all the rules, had left his coat hanging here on the night that Ducat, Marshall and McArthur disappeared in a storm just like this one.

One by one, I remove the screws that hold the wood panelling in place below the hooks, and start lifting away the panels. Jon stands over me with his gun, Sally just a few paces behind us in the corridor, holding Karen firmly by the shoulders.

Jon says, ‘How the hell did you ever get keys for this place?’

I chuckle, though there is really nothing to laugh about. It is the irony, I suppose. ‘The first summer I was here, I landed one day to find that the Lighthouse Board had sent in decorators to paint the place. Everything was opened up. The guys were okay with me taking a look around and we got chatting. The forecast was good, and they expected to be here for a few days. So I spun them the story about writing a book and said I would probably be back tomorrow. And I was. Only this time with a pack of Blu-tack. When they were having their lunch, I took the keys from the inner and outer doors and made impressions. Dead simple. Had keys cut, and access to the place whenever I wanted thereafter.’

The final panel falls away in my hands, and I reach in to retrieve a black plastic bag. I hand it up to Jon, and he peels back the plastic to look inside. As I stand up, I lift one of the wooden panels. I know that this is the one chance I will get, while he is distracted, and I swing the panel at his head as hard as I can.

The force with which it hits him sends a judder back up my arms to my shoulders, and I actually hear it snap. He falls to his knees, dropping the hard drive, and his gun skids away across the floor.

Sally is so startled, she barely has time to move before I punch her hard in the face. I feel teeth breaking beneath the force of my knuckles, behind lips I once kissed with tenderness and lust. Blood bubbles at her mouth.

I grab Karen by the arm and hustle her fast down the corridor, kicking open the door and dragging her out into the night. The storm hits us with a force that assails all the senses. The wind is deafening, driving stinging rain horizontally into our faces. The cold wraps icy fingers around us, instantly numbing.

Beyond the protection of the walls, it is worse, and I find it nearly impossible to keep my feet as I pull my daughter off into the dark. Only the relentless turning of the lamp in the light room above us provides any illumination.

We turn right, and I know that almost immediately the island drops away into a chasm that must be two or three hundred feet deep. I can hear the ocean rushing into it. Snarling, snapping at the rocks below and sending an amplified roar almost straight up into the air.

I guide Karen away from it, half-dragging her, until we reach a small cluster of rocks and I push her flat into the ground behind them. I tear away the tape that binds her wrists, then roll her on to her back to peel away the strip of it over her mouth. She gasps, almost choking, and I feel her body next to mine, racked by sobs, as she throws her arms around me and holds me as if she might never let go. Her lips press to my cheeks, and I feel the explosion of her breath on my face as she cries, ‘Daddy!’ One simple word that very nearly breaks my heart.

‘Baby. Baby, it’s okay. We’re going to be okay.’ I squeeze her so hard, I’m afraid I might break her.

We are, both of us, soaked through, the sodden ground beneath us stealing away the last of our body warmth. The rain is as relentless as the wind, and it feels as if it is flaying the skin from our faces.

I untangle myself from Karen and lift my head up over the rocks to look back towards the lighthouse. It is almost spectral in the strange reflected light of the beam that sweeps across the island and off out into the night. And I am just in time to see Jon and Sally run out from the protection of the outer wall. He has a torch, but its light is all but snuffed out by the blackness of the night and the ferocity of the storm. He turns it in an arc around them, searching, I imagine, for some sign of us. But he must know it is pointless. He grabs Sally’s hand and they run down the concrete path, in the tracks of trams long gone, and are swallowed by the dark. I am aware, then, of Karen’s face close to mine, watching, too.

‘You can’t just let them go,’ she says.

‘Why not?’

‘Because they’ve got the data.’

I turn, and for the first time in a long time find myself able to smile. ‘And I’ve got you. And that’s all that matters.’ I gaze off into the dark. ‘Anyway, there’s no way they will get off the island in this.’

Karen looks at me very directly, and I see myself so clearly in her blue eyes. ‘You can bet they’ll try, though.’

I struggle to my feet. ‘You wait here.’

But she grabs my hand and pulls herself up. ‘I’m not letting go of you again. Ever.’

I nod. And I don’t want to let go of her either. ‘Come on, then.’

We run, crouching into the wind, across the grass, and join the concrete path again just above Clapham Junction. We turn to our left, water flowing in spate across the concrete beneath our feet, and make our way down to the concrete platform, where the crane would have dropped its loads in days gone by. From there, a short flight of steps leads down to the concrete block where the crane itself was mounted, and we find ourselves looking on to the steps far below. I pull Karen to her knees, and we lie on the concrete, offering less resistance to the wind, easing ourselves closer to the edge of the platform, so that we are looking over it into the maelstrom beneath us.

The sea is like some wild animal, possessed, and thrashing itself in a fury against the rocks. Out in the bay it is just possible to see the two anchored boats being tossed around in waves that break across them in bursts of almost luminescent spume, threatening to engulf them completely. And I know that those anchors will not hold for long.

Two hundred feet below us, Jon and Sally try to reach the inflatables. But the sea has beaten them to it. Both tenders, still tethered to the ring, are being thrown about and smashed against the rocks. The Harrisons retreat ten or fifteen feet back up the steps, and I hear a roar so human that it sends a chill through my very soul.

‘Jesus!’ I hear Karen say. ‘Look!’

I lift my head and see a huge wall of black water thundering between the islands to our right, gaining in strength and momentum. I have heard stories from old sailors of freak waves that carry all before them, but I have never seen one like this. It must be a hundred feet high or more.

The Harrisons hear and see it too, and I watch them turn and run in panic back up the steps. But they are too late. The luminous white that has been brimming on the brink of the wave finally spills over as it crashes into the island, completely engulfing the figures below us. I feel the force of the spray lash my face.

I blink to expel the water from my eyes, and when I can see again, the wave is receding with an enormous sigh, retreating into the bay in a whirlpool of green and black and white. And Jon and Sally, and both of the inflatables, are gone. Like the three lighthouse keepers on the west landing more than a hundred years before them.

Almost immediately I hear the sound of a motor rising above the storm and see a searching beam of light that sweeps across the island. Karen and I roll on to our backs and look up to see the coastguard helicopter as it swings dangerously in the wind, dropping on to the helipad just below the lighthouse and touching down with a bump on the concrete.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

They say that after a storm the sun always shines. Not necessarily true in the Hebrides, but it is this morning.

I have spent most of the night here in this interview room in Stornoway, giving my statement. They took Karen to hospital for a medical examination. She has a nasty head-wound where that bastard hit her, and they were concerned that she might be concussed, or have a fracture to her skull, so I have barely seen her since everything that passed on the island.

Neither have I slept, and as the morning sun floods this room with its light and warmth, I can feel my eyes grow heavy and begin to close. Only to be startled wide again by the door opening. Detective Sergeant Gunn comes in carrying a fat folder that he places on the table before sitting down to cast curious eyes over me. He sighs.

‘Hard as it is for me to believe, Professor, everything you have told me seems to check out.’ He pauses, and there is something like a smile playing about his lips. ‘To be honest with you, sir, I’ve never heard anything quite like it in all my years in the police.’

I am too tired even to think about it. Everything in my life these last two years has been hard to believe. He opens up his folder and scans the first few pages.

‘The Harrisons were brother and sister. They ran a private detective agency in Manchester. Whoever was employing them
—
’

‘Ergo,’ I tell him.

He demurs. ‘That may be, sir, but I doubt we’ll ever prove it. Whoever it was paid more than a million pounds into their business account in several instalments over the past year. Obviously, they felt it was more than enough to justify putting the rest of their business on hold for twelve months to come up here and keep an eye on you.’

I shake my head, still a sense of mourning in me for the woman I may even have thought once that I loved. ‘Hardly worth dying for, though.’

‘No, sir. No amount of money would be worth that.’ He turns his attention back to his folder. ‘Billy Carr is still in the ICU at the Western Isles Hospital, but the doctors seem confident that he’ll recover alright.’ He looks at me. ‘I apologise, Professor, for giving you such a hard time over the murder of Mr Waltman. But you must appreciate how it looked to us.’

‘I do, Mr Gunn. For a time, I even believed myself that I had killed him.’

‘Well, we finally got a report back from the lab. They have recovered DNA from the scrapings taken from beneath Mr Waltman’s fingernails.’

And all I can see is the two men locked together, falling to the ground, rolling over and over, punching and grabbing each other like schoolboys fighting in the playground. Until they broke apart and Billy laid his hand on that rock and struck poor Sam on the head, dropping him to his knees. Then hitting him again. Three, four times, in a bloody, fatal frenzy.

‘We’ve taken a swab from Mr Carr. I imagine there will be a match.’ He looks to me for confirmation, and I nod, grim still from the memory. Then he sits back in his chair, folds his arms across his ample stomach and shakes his head. ‘I think, sir, you might also find yourself in a bit of hot water for faking your own death.’

From somewhere, I find enough amusement in his words almost to laugh. ‘The least of my problems, Mr Gunn. Though I didn’t actually fake anything. You can read what you want into my suicide note.’ And I make inverted commas in the air with my fingers around ‘suicide’. ‘But it doesn’t say anywhere that I was going to kill myself. People drew their own conclusions when they found my empty boat out in the firth.’

I run a hand back through the salty tangle of my black curls. ‘What’s the word on Karen?’

Gunn closes his folder. ‘She’s fine, sir. No fracture. No sign of concussion. A very lucky girl. One of the constables has just gone to fetch her from the hospital. He’ll give you both a lift back down to Harris.’

My sense of relief is enormous, and I feel now that an end to this nightmare that my life has been since my sacking from the Geddes is just in sight. ‘My car must still be at Rodel.’

‘Sergeant Morrison went to get it this morning. It’s waiting for you at the cottage.’

‘I’m allowed to drive it now, then, am I?’

‘Provided you have a valid licence, sir.’

I smile. ‘I can assure you, Mr Gunn, I do.’

*

I see her in the street outside, for the first time in daylight. She is so pale it is almost painful. In the photographs I saw of her, she had rings and studs in her face. Not now, though. Just the holes they have left, and I wonder if they will ever close up.

She seems so tiny. Frail. And yet, a million miles from the little girl in the blue dress and straw hat. The photograph that sat on my desk for all those years. The features are the same, though the hair is different, and I realise what has changed. She has grown from child to adult. And in the process lost her innocence. Not lost it, perhaps. Had it taken from her. By me. What damage have I done to my own wee girl by trying to save the world?

We stand there on the pavement in Church Street, with the sun slanting down between tall buildings and the sound of gulls rising with the breeze from the harbour at the foot of the road. People pass us without a second glance. A father and daughter. Nothing remarkable about that. Not even when we hug, and hold each other with silent tears on our cheeks. Because I was dead, and am alive again. We were lost, and now we are found.

When, finally, we part, and I blink away my tears to see her more clearly, my eyes light on the tattoos that deface her arms and neck. Blue and black outlines, blocks of colour. Weird and wonderful designs. I say, ‘When did you get these?’

She closes her eyes and sighs. Then opens them again and says, ‘Dad . . .’

‘What?’

‘Don’t start!’

*

The light at Luskentyre is stunning. The wind is brisk but soft. The land has soaked up everything thrown at it last night by the storm. It has, it seems, an endless capacity to do so. The sky presents itself in torn strips of blue interspersed by teased-out cotton wool, and the sun reflects in countless shades of turquoise across an outgoing tide that leaves silver sands shining.

Karen is seeing it for the first time. ‘Jees, Dad! Is this really where you spent the last two years?’

I nod, and see our driver smiling.

‘And you expect me to have sympathy for you?’

We are barely through the door of Dune Cottage when a frozen-faced Mrs Macdonald arrives with Bran. ‘Overnight is hardly a few hours,’ she says coldly and marches back across the road without another word.

Karen raises an eyebrow in query. ‘Long story,’ I say, then turn to ruffle Bran’s ears as he leaps about my legs. ‘Karen, meet Bran. Bran, meet Karen. I have a feeling you two are going to get on like a house on fire.’

Karen crouches and Bran turns to her, sniffing excitedly. Maybe he can tell from her scent that she is a part of me, and that she deserves his love as much as, if not more than I do. She spreads her hands on his head and he licks her face, and when she puts her arms around him, he leans in to her, making funny little noises, looking up at me with big soulful eyes as if seeking my approval.

When she stands up, she says, ‘I phoned Mum.’

‘How was she?’

‘I think, incandescent would probably describe her best. Of course, she was pleased to hear I was safe. But the bit she liked most was when I told her you were definitely still alive.’

I grin. ‘That must have been disappointing for her.’ But Karen doesn’t smile, and I see only pain in the face she turns up towards mine.

‘You have no idea what you put me through.’

I put my arms around her and pull her to me. ‘I think I do.’ And I make her look at me. ‘And I’m so, so sorry. I would never have done it this way if I’d had a choice.’

She nods. ‘I know. Billy told me. They threatened me.’

‘You were my one weak spot. My Achilles heel. And they knew it.’

‘In spite of how horrible I was to you?’

My smile is rueful. ‘We are all teenagers once, Karen. Your mum and I had already burned ourselves out. But leaving you behind was the hardest thing I ever had to do in my life.’ I turn towards the laptop on the kitchen table. ‘That Facebook page of your Uncle Michael’s . . . That was me. So I could watch you, even from here. See you growing up. From your posts and your photos. It was just about the only thing that kept me sane.’

She nods. ‘I think I figured that out by now.’

A shadow falls across her face, just as if the sun had slipped behind a cloud. ‘And I fucked it all up for you.’

I am shocked to hear her swear. But more disturbed by what she says. ‘How?’

‘All that data. Lost. Because of me. Two years of research. You’ll never be able to set that up again, will you? You could never finance a repeat of it all.’

I take her into my arms again and rest my chin on the top of her head, closing my eyes. ‘I don’t have to.’

She draws back and looks at me. ‘Why not?’

‘Karen, I may be all the things that Billy accused me of. Manic, selfish, paranoid.’ I pause. ‘But I’m not stupid.’ I take her hand. ‘Come on, there’s someone I want you to meet.’