Cold Fusion (27 page)

“No. I’ve come all this way.” She was crying. “I had this letter through from the police in Norway. Somebody—not an investigator, a private individual—hired a team of salvage divers to find and raise the launch from the
Sea Hawk
.”

I rested my elbows on my knees, then ran a hand over my head, which was spinning badly. “I don’t understand. Why couldn’t the police do that—raise the boat, I mean?”

“Because it costs a fortune, and there was no cause. They knew who was to blame.” She winced at the shove of my mother’s elbow. “They
thought
they knew. But it seems the boat had been tampered with before it hit the water. They found two holes in the hull, blown out from the inside. They found traces of explosive.”

My throat was numb. I had to organise my voice around my words. “Wait. She was scuppered?”

“So it seems. And fool as I think you, Kier Mallory, you’re no more capable of a wicked act than of flying. They’ve traced and discounted every member of the crew, apart from a man called—”

A trace of explosives. A trail that would lead from the fjord to the burned-out huts of Spindrift. “Alan Frost.”

“Aye, but that’s not his real name. They reckon he’s an agent working for the oil companies, setting up ways to discredit environmental campaigns. He’s disappeared.”

She put the envelope back in her bag. I wasn’t going to get to see this concrete piece of evidence. She’d done all she could to tell me its contents and deprive herself of a good local target for her blame. Her grief could hardly follow Alan Frost and pin itself to him in the lonely watches of the night. She’d never even met him.

“Thank you,” I said. “Thanks for telling me.”

“I don’t look on this as your absolution, Kier.”

She was miserable, but Viv had taught me that I still had a right to exist. I knew who the
private individual
had been. Impossibly private, an oyster guarding pearls beyond imagination. Hijacking an iPad in a service station, making me watch that damn tape—recorded and loaded for the world by Alan Frost—then sending me away. Asking to borrow my phone. I dug out a tissue from my jeans and held it out to Jill Maguire—took hold of and kept her hand when she reached for it.

“I’ll never feel absolved for Alice,” I said. “She did follow me to join Peace Warrior. But I didn’t send her out into seas that were too rough for that launch, and I didn’t…I didn’t bloody
murder
her.”

Jill tore her hand out of mine. She snapped her handbag shut, threw the strap over her shoulder and walked stiffly off down the corridor. My ma watched her—not unkindly, but as if she felt some kind of justice had been done. I wished I could have told her that it didn’t work that way. “Do you want to go after her?”

“No. She’ll be coming home with me. In the Calder Castle car,” she added after a second, and I could tell that the name and the privilege were a huge satisfaction to her. She fixed me with a meaningful glare. “Besides, there’s a grief that a mother can only face on her own.”

“I’m sorry, Ma. The same guy who scuppered that launch came after me and Vivian. We had to make a run for it, and it was easier if people thought we were dead.”

“Aye. Easier for
you
.” She let me steep for a few seconds, then checked to see that Jill was out of earshot. Her expression altered, and she leaned conspiratorially towards me. “Is it true, then? About you and Vivian Calder?”

I wondered what she’d heard. If she’d got the story from Alfred, it would have been short and sharp enough. And he must have given her some reason for my being here. I didn’t really care. It was still hard to articulate what I’d swept under rugs, shoved into holes and corners, all my life. “We’re…together. He’s my boyfriend, if that’s what you’re asking.”

She sat back. She really was looking spry today, wearing a touch of makeup for once, her hair nicely styled. “I can’t say I’ve ever been very happy, Kier, about your being…that way.”

“I didn’t do it to make you happy.” I rubbed my eyes. “Not to make you unhappy, either. I’ve tried not to shove it in your face.”

“No,” she agreed, to my surprise. “You haven’t. I’ll tell you something—Ailsa Stewart with her son-in-law the lawyer, and Fay MacGregor with her laddie who married that actress, and all the other gossips who come and tell me how well this one of their daughter and that one of their sons is doing—not one of them’s brought home a laird. Straight
or
gay.”

This was totally fucking surreal. I was sitting in Edinburgh sunlight, my whole life in the balance off down the corridor behind those still-closed doors, receiving parental approbation because I’d landed an aristocrat. Even if he
was
another bloke.

“Vivian’s not a laird,” I said, far from sure why on earth I was bothering. “It isn’t a hereditary title. And I haven’t brought him home yet.”

“Ah, but everyone around here knows who the Calders are. And if you did ever bring him, I’m sure he’d be very welcome.”

I tried to imagine. Vivian perched on the edge of our stained couch, trying not to twitch at the joyless, loveless, tawdry mess of the place. My father enthroned in his recliner, pointing a half-empty bottle of scotch while he gave his views on poofters, the propertied classes in general and land-grabbing bastard Calders in particular. “Yeah. My dad would love that.”

Her face gave an odd little jerk. There was something amiss here, I belatedly realised, something weird, over and above the high strangeness of the whole situation. I put my head on one side, drew a breath—let it go and started again. “All due respect, Ma, but why did Alfred Macready think it was so urgent to get you here that he sent a car?”

“I’m your mother. Isn’t that enough?”

No. Obviously not. The glance we exchanged in the silence after her question was awkward, sad, honest. She sighed and glanced out of the window at the bright Edinburgh sky. “Your father’s dead, Kier. He went fishing overnight with Baz Jones and his cronies. They all started drinking, and he must have just fallen overboard, because until they were well on their way home, they didn’t even notice he was gone.”

I stared at her. “He’s dead?”

“Yes. I’m not expecting you to break your heart, but remember that he was my husband. And your dad.”

We sat like a pair of ill-matched bookends on either side of the corridor, both of us trying to remember what he ought to have been. We really did have a good try. Her eyes glistened with tears for a moment. And I’d been taught not to speak ill of the dead. I even cast my mind back over the years, trying to find a bright patch, a time when we’d gone out on the trawler and stood shoulder to shoulder during a storm, or found a moment’s camaraderie down the pub. I tried on the mantle of the loving son who forgave his father in death.

No. There was no such thing. My ma had come up empty too, and because we were face-to-face here in the sunshine, neither of us could hide our abject failure. He’d died, and she’d gone out and spent a bit of the money he’d have pissed away otherwise on getting her hair done. On buying herself a new coat and a decent pair of shoes. Alfred hadn’t wanted to tell me himself, but he’d had her sent to me by special delivery because he’d known it would be such a bloody relief.

“Wait,” I said weakly. “He went overboard, and his mates didn’t even
notice
?”

She let loose a startled bray of laughter and clamped a hand over her mouth. Her eyes were wide above it. “Kier. Don’t.”

“He’s really gone?”

“Yes, thank God.” She got up, straightening her skirt. “I have to go and find Jill. The business and the boats are yours if you want them, Kier. It’d be a good living for a sober, decent man. I hope your young laird comes well through his illness. Bring him for tea once you’re home.”

She wasn’t used to walking in heels. Her progress off up the corridor was unsteady. Once she was out of sight, my own weird spasm of hilarity faded fast. The sensation of being caught in a half-waking dream intensified. Viv would have loved to hear that I now owned a three-boat trawler fleet as well as a croft in Glencathadh. All the good things of the earth, the assets Hugo Calder had wished to bestow on him, he now seemed to want for me. I wondered when I’d get the chance to tell him that he was my life’s one treasure, my only hope of prospering in this world.

Now. It was going to be now. The tight-shut doors into the ICU buzzed and swung inward, and I got to my feet and stood staring into the face of the doctor who’d come to find me.

* * * * *

“The trouble with Drescher’s is predicting the pace of its development. Some patients live for decades almost symptom-free, and others can experience a sudden crash. It’s particularly difficult in a young and otherwise healthy individual like Vivian. We hoped not to see him back here for many years to come.”

The Braidwood ICU was as nice a place as money could make it. The air was warm and hushed, the furniture in the visitors’ room comfortable. My doctor too was a match for her environment—small but plush, immaculately groomed. In her fifties, everything from her cap of grey hair to her spectacles calculated to reassure. She’d made several bids now to explain to me what was going on. I had to start taking them in, but my attention was like W.B. Yeats’s falcon, and didn’t want to hear the bloody falconer. I took a grip on the padded arms of my chair. “When you say a sudden crash…”

“A collapse of vital functions, requiring CPR and life support. Mr. Mallory, are you sure you wouldn’t like another cup of tea?”

I still had the remains of the first one she’d asked someone to bring me. Not vending-machine tea but good stuff in a proper china cup. “No, thanks. You…you did have to revive him, then?”

“Not us. The helicopter crew, out in the field.” She frowned. “We’re aware of the DNR on Vivian’s records, but the paramedics didn’t have access to those. He wasn’t breathing, so they intubated him. You have to understand—DNR instructions are a vexed legal issue at the best of times, and—”

“Wait. I’m not arguing. I want you to keep him alive.”

“Well, that’s the general idea, but—”

“He wants that too. Things are different now. Did Alfred Macready tell you about his mother and sister?”

“Not only that, but there is apparently a cutting-edge specialist in stem cell transplantation on his way here from the States now. And not at our expense, I can tell you.”

Money for dive-and-salvage operations, money to fly the right brains and hands halfway around the world. As someone who’d never had more than fifty quid in one place at one time, all this felt like magic to me, sweeps from a powerful wand. “Good. So you just keep on doing whatever you have to for Viv. Can I see him?”

“He’s on full life support. It’s unlikely that he’d regain consciousness, but we’re maintaining him in a medically induced coma for now anyway, until we can work out our best options.”

“And how long will that last—the life support, I mean? How long will he need that?”

She gave me a peculiar look, a sharp mix of compassion and surprise that I could have got this close and still know so little. “I’m afraid he won’t ever come off it. The disease has progressed too far for him to be able to breathe on his own.”

I got up. I hadn’t had a chance to take in my surroundings yet. The hospital was perched on the edge of a place called the Meadows, a tree-lined park with playing fields. From the window I could see high-rise blocks, and these merged with the memory of Glencathadh mountain crests in the tired space behind my eyes.

“You mean if we can’t get any help for him,” I said dully. “But Alfred’s going to find his relatives, and this guy’s coming over from America.”

“I need to tell you something about Alfred Macready. I know him well because he came here with Vivian’s father time and again over the years. The one thing he wanted to do was save Hugo, and finally Hugo took that chance away from him.”

“He killed himself. I know.”

“So as long as Alfred sees a chance for Vivian, he’s going to turn the world upside down to make it happen.”

“Is that wrong? I’m gonna do the same thing.”

“This hospital will do the same. I will personally. I’ve known Vivian since he was a child, and now he’s a fine young man and a brilliant scientist. Nobody wants to lose him. But Alfred is carrying hopes and dreams from the past, and the chances of even a close relative being a viable tissue match are small.”

I hadn’t realised that. I’d thought all we had to do was line up people and doctors. “How small?”

“Don’t make me give you a figure.”

“Please.”

She sighed. “Around thirty percent.”

“Okay.” I had to think things through now. I couldn’t stay cushioned forever in a cloud of shock and grief. I’d let my lover, who’d been reconciled to his death, have a tube shoved down his throat on the strength of a thirty-percent chance. “The life support that he’s on—how good is it?”

“If you’re asking me how long we can keep him alive—”

“Yes.”

“Indefinitely, unless he has a sharp and unlikely deterioration. And that’s what it would take for us to implement the DNR, if we can’t get his mum and sister here, or we do and they’re incompatible—having his heart stop, and further intervention needed to keep him alive. That’s when we would consider letting him go.”

There were kids playing in the park, a West Highland terrier barking at a squirrel he’d chased up a tree. There was a whole world of urban detail to lose myself in if I wanted to. “I’m not sure what I’m asking anymore,” I said, letting go of the windowsill and turning around. “I just want to see him.”

She led me down a long stretch of corridor. It was carpeted on this side of the ICU doors, and I had a sense of moving further and further away from the rugged common day, where people breathed without intubation, people whose beating hearts could be taken for granted. Here, those fragile rhythms were celebrated by the faint beeping I heard as we passed the open doors of bright-lit cubicle rooms. It didn’t seem possible that the double-time thud I’d listened to, my head resting on Viv’s chest in the firelight, could ever be translated into such a sound. I was struggling to believe that he was in here at all.