Cold Fusion (4 page)

And the fact was that I knew him. Oh, he was a far cry from the gangly kid who’d passed an uncomfortable month at the Kerra comprehensive while his English public school was having its playing fields upholstered or whatever happened to shut such places down, but I knew him.

I’d left my change of underwear in my rucksack. Scrambling commando into my damp jeans put paid to any nice, warm stirrings in that department. My jumper smelled horrible too, chemical messages from yesterday’s fear and rage still caught in its fibres. It hardly mattered. I was going to add a new layer. I grabbed my T-shirt and filthy socks, shoved my bare feet into my boots and stalked out.

I met my host in the corridor. He was carrying a heap of folded clothes, and for one mad second I thought they might be for me. But the world was too bad for that—men were treacherous, cold-hearted and dumb, and that included me. He was just going for a shower of his own. I didn’t stop walking until I was right up in his face, then I came to a dead halt and blocked his path. “Calder the Younger, now Laird of Kerra, I presume.”

He studied me. He only had a couple of inches on me, but he made it look like more. His expression was mild, though, and being looked down on by him wasn’t the humiliating experience I might have imagined. I still didn’t feel like tugging my forelock to him. No wonder the snooty bastard hadn’t condescended to shake my hand. “Most people call me Vivian. I know you too. You’re Kier, David Mallory’s son.”

I fell back a step. That was too tough a return of serve for me at the moment. Anyone who knew my name would know what I had done. Well, the best defence was a good, strong offence, and I was mad enough to give one now. “Why didn’t you try to protect this place?” I demanded. “Even if your dad left it away from you, why didn’t you fight for it? There must have been something you could do, instead of going belly-up and handing it over to a bunch of bloodsucking English property developers!”

My voice echoed harshly off the concrete. When had I started shouting? I tried never to raise my voice. I sounded like my dad when I did, like a boat hull hitting shale. Vivian the Younger didn’t so much as bat an eyelid at me. He waited until I’d run out of breath, and then hefted the folded jeans and fleece jacket in his arms. “I was bringing you some clothes. You don’t have any right to question me like this. There’s tea if you want it, and some toast.”

It was impossible to tell what he minded and what he didn’t. Everything was delivered in the same even tone. He’d offered me breakfast and told me to mind my business without the smallest alteration of pitch. A savoury smell came drifting out of the cafeteria, weakening my knees, but I couldn’t stay here and break bread with a man I’d just insulted, and who was surely anyway about to chuck me out.
Kier Mallory, who killed sweet Alice Maguire
.

Something exploded in the café with a sharp, high-pitched pop. The lights in the corridor went out. An acrid tang of smoke reached us both, and at last the Laird of Kerra frowned. “Oh,” he said softly, handing me the pile of clothes. “
Damn
.”

* * * * *

The power had lasted long enough to boil the kettle, and the toaster had finished its job before shorting out the lights. I sat wrapped up in Vivian Calder’s clean clothes, a steaming mug of tea in front of me. There wasn’t any butter to go with the toast, but I didn’t mind—it was food, and my body was making up for last night’s death wish with a vengeance. Vivian had cleared a space for me at his workbench and was sitting opposite, elbows on the surface, chin resting on his knuckles while he watched me eat, or at any rate watched some far more interesting patch on the far wall behind me. The detached gaze was making me nervous.

I dabbed at my mouth with my sleeve. “Er, aren’t you having any?”

“I don’t eat while I’m trying to think.”

That was a hint if ever I’d heard one. He resettled his chin, pressing his lips to his knuckles. He had a lovely mouth. His eyes became distant and abstracted again, but the sugar in my tea was sending crazy updrafts to my brain and I couldn’t leave well alone. “How do you know who I am?”

Stupid bloody question. My face had been broadcast into every living room in Scotland from the sound of things. He let go the faintest sigh. “I remember you from your school in the village. I had to spend some time there, and a few of the boys took exception to me. You intervened.”

I cast back, trying to remember. My school years had been such a series of brawls—especially once I’d stopped hiding the fact that I fancied other lads—that I couldn’t pick out one in particular. I had made a policy of not letting the hardcore bullies inflict too much on the new kids. It hadn’t been courage, just that I was facing so much worse at home that the so-called tough gang seemed laughable to me. I’d already been sturdy from deck work, and I’d perfected a mean right hook.

If only I was still that stalwart lad now. I took my mug and did my best to hide behind it. Meeting someone around here who remembered something good about me was almost too much. My hands shook, and I steadied them before I could spill onto anything vital. The space Vivian had set out for me was generous but clearly circumscribed.

“Right,” I said hoarsely. “Good.” Someone would tell him the bad stuff soon enough. I decided to get in there first. “Listen—I’ll be out of your hair shortly, but I want you to know something. I came here to hide out because…I’m not welcome in North Kerra anymore, and—”

“Really? Are they worse down there than I remember?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Well, how is it done these days? Torches and pitchforks, or do they ride you out of town on a rail?”

Slowly I caught up with him. Like a cat, he didn’t need to change his expression to convey a sharp shift of emotion. One dark eyebrow was raised, the far-off gaze suddenly focussed.

“No,” I told him quickly. “Not because I’m gay, for God’s sake. They got used to that a long time ago—for the most part, anyway. Alice Maguire was killed last week on a mission with Peace Warrior, the anti-whaling group I’m part of. It was my fault.”

“How?”

“We met a whaling vessel in the mouth of a Norwegian fjord. They were hunting, and I saw a chance to set them up to look even worse than they are. I took one of our RIB launches and got myself between the whale pod and the ship. It was great—it looked like they were chasing me with their bloody harpoon. Alice and another crewman were in the other launch, filming me.” I stopped to draw breath. I wouldn’t have believed I’d be able to speak to anyone with this much detail and dispassion. But Vivian’s brow had smoothed again, and it felt like confessing to a white marble angel in a graveyard, to some being divorced from earthly concerns, immune from pain and beyond passing judgement. “I misread the weather, though. I don’t know how. I’ve been sailing with my dad since before I could walk. There was a storm, and Alice’s RIB couldn’t handle it, and she and the other guy went down, and… Wait a minute. Are you even
listening
?”

“I am. I’m thinking about the problem with my wiring at the same time. I can do both.”

“For fuck’s sake.” I stood up. Bits of my last sober hours were coming back to me. What had Mackie told me in the bar—that there was something odd about the old laird’s son, something wrong? “Thanks for the toast. Enjoy the rest of your thinking—I’ll leave you to it.”

“They call you Mallory, don’t they?”

“What?”

“Down in the village. Not Kier—Mallory.”

“Yes. What about it?”

“Technically speaking, I’m not Calder the Younger. That’s a courtesy title to a laird’s heir apparent, and I’m not one, apparent or otherwise. And the lairdship isn’t an hereditary title, so now my father’s dead, I’m…nothing, really.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“I like accuracy. Speaking of which, you’re welcome to use as much of my shower gel as you want, but would you mind putting it back in the exact place where you found it?”

“Whatever. I mean no. I mean, I won’t be using any more of it, so… Why is that important?”

“I’d just prefer it if you did. Isn’t that a good enough reason?”

* * * * *

I set out down the track. The broken stalks of the silver flowers were strewn across it, and I picked my way through them clumsily, the two remaining blossoms dipping and glimmering over my head. They’d been designed so that the wind would blow through each of them with a different harmonic note. The couple still standing were built for the lower end of the scale and lent a satisfying drama to my retreat. The gate to the dune path was rusted shut, so I clambered over it, landing with a grunt on the far side.

I hadn’t brought my rucksack with me, and nor had Vivian thrown it after me. Perhaps I’d find it waiting on the doorstep when I got back, nicely positioned in the centre, but there was no point in kidding myself that I’d walked out for good. No matter how hard I stamped and kicked my way into the dunes, I couldn’t convince myself that I was really angry. In fact his nonresponse had been soothing. To meet someone who was more concerned with where I’d left his shower gel than the fact that I’d murdered two people…

Murdered? That had escalated fast in my inner courtroom. Even the Norwegian police had accused me of nothing worse than fecklessness. I missed my footing in the tangled marram grass and slipped off the edge of a dune. Righted myself enough to slide down it on my backside, and arrived at the foot in a flurry of limbs and sand. Once gravity was done with me, I didn’t move—remained sitting there in my untidy heap. I didn’t deserve to be soothed. I needed people who would throw up their hands at me, recoil in horror, dump me or chuck me out of the house, precisely the reactions I’d met with so far, until somehow the cosmic scales of justice got themselves balanced again.

“Because I can’t live with it,” I told the empty dawn aloud, wrapping my arms around my knees. “I know I should have the balls to stick around and deal with everything, but I can’t. I’m sorry. I just can’t fucking live with it.”

I’d landed on the beach. Much like a whale or a lost and rusted tank sixty years late for Normandy, I thought, and then I thought this—

The world keeps its tenderest colours

To light up the harshest of dawns.

I didn’t have an envelope to write on this time, not even my marching orders from PW, so I sprang up and dusted the sand off Vivian’s jeans, which were a bit long in the leg for me and tried to trip me up as I started a run down the shore. I reached the tideline, grabbed a driftwood stick and wrote the lines in the damp sand, and then I ran back and forward across them, kicking them to oblivion.

They were still true. The sun had risen in melting shades of rose gold, and the thing about this part of northern Scotland, the thing that brought the tourists here in droves and made some of them dream of staying on, was that the sand on these beaches wasn’t sand at all but a species of bleached-out coral, shattered by the waves and broken down. You could still find whole pieces, branching like little antlers, in the sheltered pools, but for the most part it had turned to sugar-fine grains, and it underlaid the waters close to shore and turned them to Mediterranean turquoise, jewel-like viridian and a purple like the flash of a starling’s wing. And they stayed that way all winter. Of course you found out how Mediterranean they were when you tried to dive in, but they were the answer to a dream, and old man Calder’s land would mushroom with holiday homes. The mushroom homes would sell, and lie empty from the end of September till May.

It didn’t matter. What was the land doing now, other than standing here vacant? I was doing that myself, and it wasn’t much cop. Better to have kids here, barking dogs, a bit of life—even the tennis courts and the go-kart track, I supposed. I still flinched and prickled up my hackles at the sound of footsteps in the sand behind me. The houses weren’t built yet, and with Spindrift closed down, I’d thought the beach would be safe enough for now.
Walk on by
, I told the wandering tourist, ducking my head, making myself invisible.
Walk on. Nothing to see here
.

“You forgot your coat.”

Warmth dropped round my shoulders. Not gently—more as if I’d been a coat hanger, and I stumbled at the sudden jostle, got my balance and turned round. “Oh. Right. Er, did you bring my rucksack too?”

Great. I was treating him like the porter of a no-star hotel. That was a nice return for his kindness. I tried to think of something more civil to say to him, but he’d put on a neat black watch cap and a Barbour, and he looked like the god of winter beachwear despite the coveralls underneath. Words failed me.

He looked me over once again, just as he had in the corridor. “No,” he said. “I’d like you to stay.” My throat tightened. Absurd ideas rattled through my mind. Maybe he saw them darting around like tadpoles under ice, because after a moment he clarified, “I really need help with my wiring. You could stay in one of the chalets if you like. They’ll be warm, if you’ll stay and help me. With my wiring.”

He was pretty keen on that wiring. Well, he’d saved my life, fed me and clothed me and come after me with my coat. The least I could do was spend a couple of days tinkering around with whatever useless project he had going here. Now I thought about it, I remembered people saying that the old laird had spoiled him, indulged his every whim with expensive toys. I couldn’t work out why he hadn’t left him the whole toyshop.

“I’m not much of an electrician,” I warned. “Changing plugs is about my limit.”

“You don’t have to be. Just do as I tell you. I just need some help with—”

“With your wiring. Yeah.” He was like a well mannered but insistent little kid who couldn’t quite rest until he had a definite answer. “I will stay. I will help, okay?”

My God, what a smile! I looked away. The charm and the flash of it came out of nowhere, and I didn’t want to watch it fade when he realised how little I’d done to deserve it. I went to sit down on a rock, one of the beautiful blocks of polished gneiss that cropped out of the sand along here. To my surprise he followed me and sat down too. There was barely enough room for both of us, but he still managed to keep a good three inches of space in between.