Darkest Hour (Age of Misrule, Book 2) (28 page)

“I think-” Veitch raised his glass “-I need another lager.”

Reynolds looked up and motioned to the barman. A minute later another round of drinks arrived at their table.

“How did you manage that?” Veitch asked. “They don’t do table service.”

“Oh, I’ve been a resident here for many years, my boy. They grant me my little indulgences out of respect for my great age and my deep wallet.”

Veitch laughed. “You’re all right, Gordon.”

“That’s very decent of you to say, my boy. But tell me, you’re troubled, aren’t you? I could see it written all over your face whenever I saw you around the hotel. Share your burden. I may, may, I stress, be able to help.”

Veitch sighed, looked away. “No, best not.” But when he caught Reynolds’ eye, the elderly man seemed so supportive he said, “Oh, bollocks, what’s the harm.”

He wasn’t sure it was completely wise of him, but over the next hour he proceeded to tell Reynolds everything that had happened since he had encountered Church in the old mine beneath Dartmoor. He was sure some of it made no sense-he could barely grasp the intricacies himself-but Reynolds kept smiling and nodding.

“So that’s the way it is, Gordon,” he said after he had related the latest impending crisis. “Sometimes I wonder, what’s the fucking point.” He caught himself and smiled sheepishly. “Sorry. Bad habit.”

Reynolds dismissed his apology with a flourish of his hand. “So, you feel it’s hopeless. Hopeless in that you feel there’s only five, or six, or whatever, ineffectual people facing down the hordes of hell. And hopeless because the girl you love is locked away in some dismal place with no chance of a rescue.”

“I never said I loved her!” Veitch said indignantly.

Reynolds waved him away again. “Of course you do! It’s obvious!”

Veitch coloured and shook his head. “And I’m not saying it’s hopeless. I mean, I’m going in there to get her, you know. I’m giving it my best bleedin’ shot.”

“But you don’t hold out much hope of getting out again.”

“Ah, who knows?”

Reynolds sat back in his chair and thought for a moment, sipped at his whisky, then thought again. Veitch watched him with growing impatience. Eventually, tweaking his moustache, Reynolds said, “Are you in the mood for a story, my boy?”

“A story?”

“Yes. A true-life story. Like they have in the women’s magazines. It’s about a young man of style and elegance, dashing and debonair, not really one for books, but a whizz with the girls-” He laughed richly. “Now I can’t fool you, can I? Yes, it’s my story. Still interested?”

Veitch nodded. He had warmed to Reynolds; his old prejudices had been forgotten for the moment.

“Let me tell you then. I was twenty-four, from a very good family with a little money in my pocket and a lot of confidence. A dangerous combination. My mother and father had always considered me for a career in the law. Edinburgh is the lawyers’ city, after all. But, you know, that thing with the books …” He shook his head. “No, not for me. I wanted something a little more colourful. Why should I consign myself to a prison of dusty old books when I could run off to sea or enlist in some war in an exotic clime? And that’s just what I did. I set off on foot for Leith with a head full of Robert Louis Stevenson and dreams of hiring aboard some tramp steamer to the Orient.”

“Nothing wrong with that,” Veitch mused. “Better than getting stuck in a rut at home.”

“Exactly! But then the strangest thing happened to me. As I walked towards Leith with the sun climbing in the sky, I came across a vision of such beauty it made me stop in my tracks. Now this wasn’t film star beauty, do you understand? But she was beautiful to me.” Veitch nodded. “Even to this day I don’t know why I did it. Perhaps it was because I was filled with the kind of joy you can only experience when you embark on something new, or perhaps it was the quality of light, or the fresh tang on the wind, or all those things aligned in an unrepeatable harmonious conjunction. But that moment was so special it felt like my skin was singing.”

He caressed the ornately styled head of his cane for a long moment, so deep in thought he appeared oblivious to the people around him. But when he spoke again, his voice was so infused with happiness Veitch felt warmed simply to hear it. “Her name was Maureen. She had red hair that fell in gorgeous ringlets and skin so pale it made her eyes seem uncommonly dark. She was walking into town on the other side of the street. What did I do? Why, I threw all my plans in the air and ran across the road to talk to her.”

“You’re an old romantic, Gordon.”

“Oh, indeed,” he chuckled. “I thought perhaps I’d pick up my plans later in the day, or the next day, or the next week. But as we walked and talked, and as she laughed, and as we recognised, in our looks and our gentle touches, that we were carved from the same clay, I realised I would never set sail from Leith. It takes someone very, very special for you to give up all your dreams in a single moment. But it was there, love at first sight, like all the poets say. Do you believe in that?”

Witch sat back in his chair and looked up into the dark sky through the window. “I’m not sure, Gordon. I think I’d like to, but it’s not the kind of thing you get to think about too much in Greenwich, know what I mean?”

“I think you’re not being very honest with yourself,” Reynolds said with a knowing smile. “Maureen and I quickly became inseparable. On the surface we had very little in common. She came from a good, upstanding family, but they had little money, little of any material possessions. She had been forced to leave school at thirteen to help earn the family’s keep. But those things don’t matter, do they?”

“S’pose not.”

He pressed his fist against his heart. “These are where the real bonds are made.” Then he touched his temple. “Not here. But there was one difference even we could not overcome.” He paused; the muscles around his mouth grew taut with an old anger. “I was a Protestant and Maureen was a Catholic, you see. That means nothing to you, I can see, and that’s good. You’re a modern manyou’re not burdened with centuries of stupidity. Everybody thinks of that kind of prejudice as the Irish problem, but it’s always been here in Scotland, even to this day. You told me you’d heard the stories in the city about Mary King’s Close, the street boarded up to let the Black Death sufferers die.”

Veitch flinched at the coincidence. He nodded.

“The people of Mary King’s Close were Catholics. Demonised, made less than human. Mothers of the time would frighten their children by saying the terrible people of Mary King’s Close would get them if they weren’t good. Would the horrors inflicted on them have happened if they were Protestants in this most Protestant of cities? I think not.”

“But Protestants might have got it in a Catholic city.”

“Of course, and I’ve damned them both to hell many times.”

Veitch tried to read his face. There was a seam of ancient emotion fossilised just beneath the surface. But he kept smiling, his eyes kept sparkling. “What happened to her?” Veitch asked.

“Ah, you see which way the story is going. We kept our romance a secret from my family and friends for as long as we could, but in a city as watchful and atrociously gossipy as Edinburgh it was bound to come out sooner or later. To say it was a scandal would be to overstate the case. In the wider sense, no one cared about a thing like that, and that is to the general population’s merit. The people of Edinburgh are good people. But in my own particular circle …” He sighed.

“You got a hard time from the folks,” Veitch said with understanding.

“My father was apoplectic. My mother took to her bed for days. The rest of my family treated me as if I’d developed some severe, debilitating mental illness. My close friends, who came from the same social circle, were acidic in their comments, but they directed most of their vitriol towards Maureen, who must, quite obviously, have led me astray.”

“And there was trouble.” Veitch took a long swig of his lager, trying to delay what he knew was coming.

Reynolds’s face crumpled, but only for an instant before he brought the smile back; in that tiny window Veitch saw something that made him flinch. “There was blood. They found her with her head stoved in on the edge of Holyrood Park. She’d been raped, several times, they said, not just murdered, but humiliated. Taught a lesson, in the good old-fashioned way.” His words were bitter, but his tone was as gentle and measured as ever.

“God Almighty!” Veitch went to take another drink, then had to put his glass down. He was overwhelmed by a terrible sense of injustice against a man he was sure, in the short time he had known him, was better than most. He felt a surge of anger, a desire to rush out and gain retribution in the most violent way possible, forgetting the crime had happened decades earlier. “Who did it? Who fucking did it?”

“Oh, no one was caught. Understandably. The rich and well-to-do are always protected by the law. There was an outcry in the city, but it blew over when the next scandal came along, as these things do. Who did it?” He raised his eyebrows thoughtfully. “One of my friends, several of my friends, all of them, my family. I would suppose they are the prime suspects. They were all guilty, whatever the detail.”

“Didn’t you try to find out who it was? Didn’t you try to get them?” Veitch felt the heat rising up his neck to his face.

Reynolds shook his head dismissively. “No, of course not. It didn’t matter, you see. Nothing mattered. Maureen was gone. My life was over.”

The baldness of the statement made Veitch bring himself up sharp.

“I loved her, you see. I loved her in all the cliched ways-more than life itself, more than myself. We’d devoted ourselves to each other in a way that, I think, people find hard to understand these days. The night before her death we’d spent six hours talking about our life, about what we meant to each other, about the here and now and the sweet hereafter. In all the world she was the only person that mattered. And a few hours later I was more alone than anyone could be.”

There was a long silence which Veitch couldn’t bear to fill. After a while the emotions between them became unbearable too, so he said in a quiet voice, “How did you carry on, mate? I don’t know what I’d have done … Blimey … His words failed him.

“Why, I carried on. As Maureen would have wanted me to do. But I carried on a different person, as you would have expected. I went into the law, which made my family very happy. And I never married, which was better than they feared, but not what they hoped. I never kissed another woman. I never smelled another woman’s perfumed hair. I never touched a woman’s skin.”

Veitch felt a lump rise in his throat. He thought he might have to go to the toilet before he made a fool of himself.

But then Reynolds said, “Come up to my room for one last drink. I have a bottle of malt that is quite heavenly. I retire early these days. It gets lonely when the night falls.”

They moved slowly through the quiet, deserted hotel, their thoughts heavy around them. “You’re a better man than me,” Veitch said as they reached the lifts.

“No,” Reynolds said assuredly. “I lived a life without hope and thus wasted it. In what you told me I can tell you have hope, or at least the potential for hope. And perhaps I can help you.” They entered the lift and he punched the floor number. “I lived a life with nothing to believe in,” he continued. “How could I believe in anything? Family? Friends? Religion? What kind of God would let a thing like that happen? What kind of God was worshipped by the people closest to me?”

The thick carpet muffled their footsteps. It was comfortingly bright in the corridor.

“There is a gun in the drawer of my bedside table.” It seemed like a non sequitur, but Witch was suddenly alert, Reynolds was going somewhere. “An old service revolver. A family heirloom.” He laughed. “Fitting, really.”

Veitch looked at him, but he kept his pleasant gaze fixed firmly ahead. “I’d made my plans, composed my mind and a few nights ago I was ready to kill myself.” His smile made it sound as if he was discussing attending a picnic. “I’d had enough of the drudgery of days. The emptiness of thoughts. The coldness of life. It seemed time for a Full Stop. Wrap things up neatly. The end of my story.”

“So why didn’t you do it?”

Reynolds looked at him in surprise. “My, you are a blunt man. I like that. You wouldn’t get that in my family. They’d just pass the brandy and someone would see fit to mention it a few days down the line. Why didn’t I kill myself? Why didn’t I?” he mused, as if he had no idea himself. “Because of my very last conversation with Maureen, that’s why.”

Reynolds unlocked the door and they stepped into his suite. It was spacious and well turned-out, but still a hotel room; there were no personal touches to show it had been his home for so long. It spoke of an empty life lived for the sake of it.

“Nice place,” Veitch said uncomfortably.

Reynolds poured two large glasses of twenty-year-old malt and handed one to Veitch. “It’s a place to rest my head.”

Veitch perched on the edge of a desk. “So, are you going to tell me, or punish me for a bit longer?”

Reynolds laughed heartily. “I wanted you to hear my story before I got to the crux of the matter. Stories are important. They provide a framework so we can’t easily dismiss the vital messages buried at the heart of them.” He pulled open a bedside drawer and took out the service revolver, which he tossed to Veitch so he could examine the archaic weapon.

“Blimey, that’s a museum piece. You’re just as likely to have blown your bleedin’ hand off as your head.”

Reynolds gave a gentle laugh. “The last conversation with Maureen has never left me.” He lowered himself into a chair on the other side of the desk, put his head back and closed his eyes. “All those years and I can still smell her hair, feel exactly how her hand used to lie in mine. And I can remember every word we said. Most of it, I’m sure, would seem nauseatingly cloying out of the context of our lives, but it held meaning for us. But there was one point …” He drifted for a moment, so that Veitch thought he had fallen asleep, but then his voice came back with renewed force. “The only thing left to discuss was what would happen should one of us die. We knew our situation, that anything could happen. And we made a pact that whoever went first would send a sign back to the other that love survived, that there was hope beyond hope, a chance, at the end of the long haul, of being reunited. Love crosses boundaries, that’s what we felt. Our feelings were so strong, you see. So strong. How stupid you must think we were.”