Deviant (23 page)

“The police wouldn’t just shoot at us like that,” Stick whispered, his voice shaking. “You have to believe me.”

Bren gaped at Abigail and nodded. He was thinking what she was. Somebody was trying to kill them, and it wasn’t the cops.

“I know a way out,” he gasped. “Keep quiet. Follow me.”

Abigail grabbed her backpack and crawled after Bren, with Stick right behind her, out of the kitchen and to a back door in the living room. “On the count of three follow me.” Bren stood up and gestured for them to do the same. “One … two … 
three!
” He flung the door open, sprinted across the small courtyard garden and jumped the fence that bordered the canal. A small speedboat was moored to a rotted wooden post. Abigail followed, crouching down as she ran. Bren had the engine running even before Abigail and Stick managed to jump in.

“Move it!” Bren commanded.

The front of the boat edged skyward with a sudden jolt. Abigail’s butt hit the seat hard, but she didn’t feel any pain. Stick teetered beside Bren at the far end of the boat, near the engine. In a haze of adrenaline, she turned back toward the house. The three men in black suits were now running across the garden and jumping the fence.

One of them aimed and fired a shot.

Stick winced. His eyes widened, as if in disbelief. Abigail could only watch, not quite fully processing. He clutched at the side of his belly and fell backward into the water.

Without thinking, she jumped in after him.

The dark, lukewarm water closed over her head, heavy with
the stink of gasoline from the boat’s engine. She thought she heard Stick gasp, but was suddenly fighting for her life in a panic.
I can’t swim. I can’t swim. Becky, where are you now?
Her legs and arms were moving in all the wrong ways. She sank, managed to surface once or twice, and then sank again. A strong pair of hands reached under her arms and lifted her back into the boat. She sputtered, choking on the polluted canal water she’d half-breathed, kicking in protest.

“No! No, put me down. We can’t leave him!”

Bren gunned the engine.

Her wet feet slipped out from under her. The last thing she remembered—before her head cracked against the side of the boat—were police sirens, wailing in the distance.

Big, bad, dangerous Glasgow. Bad, ugly social workers. Ugly Billy. Camelia. Get her away from there. Save her from No Life. Kelvingrove Park. Glasgow University. Holy Loch. The caravan. Strange man at strange funeral. Throwing stones into Loch Lomond. They’re all dead. Granoch. I’m an Unloved Nobody. Billy! Billy is here, now, somehow … “What you sayin’? What you talkin’ about, hey? Hey, honey?”

Abigail opened her eyes. Bren was gently brushing her fringe. “You hit your head in the boat. But you’re gonna be okay. Stop talking about big bad things. You’re safe now. I’m here.”

“Where am I?” Abigail sat up and pressed her hand against her throbbing skull. She was sitting on the lower shelf of a bunk bed, right next to Bren, in a very small space. A moving space. The hard mattress rumbled and bounced beneath her. The top of her head grazed the top bunk. A bus or train? There was a window behind her, a highway receding.

“You’re safe. Mom and Dad picked us up.”

Right.
Bren’s parents own a Winnebago and are enjoying
retirement
. The words clanged in her head, an advertising brochure based on some distant memory: scenes of the happy, drunken chat she and Bren had shared on the plane. Then all the rest of the memories came flooding back in terror. “Oh my God, Stick! He’s in the canal! We can’t—”

“He’s gone.” Bren interrupted. “It wasn’t your fault. There’s nothing we could do.”

“Is he dead?”

“I don’t know. He didn’t resurface.”

She nodded. Her throat was dry. There were other memories now. The photographs Stick had shown her while she’d held the ladder at the freeway sign; the party where she tried hard not to feel what she was feeling; his hand on hers as his yellow mini screeched through a narrow alleyway. Most of all: doubting him in Bren’s house when all he was trying to do was save her life. “Is he dead?” she whispered. The pain in her head seemed distant.

“Shh.” Bren said. “It’s not your fault.”

“You shouldn’t have left him.”

“I had to. They’d have killed you.” He had tears in his eyes. He touched her face. “You nearly died back there.” He kissed her forehead and moved his lips down so they were just millimeters from hers. “Oh Abigail … thank God—”

“Hiya … Can I come in?” The small plastic door opened without a knock.

Abigail turned to the woman standing before them. The Scottish voice, the shape of her figure, the flowing skirt and red hair and craggy freckled face: this was Nieve, reborn. She felt herself letting go, becoming wee Abi, just eight years old, wee
Abi who didn’t have to be a robot, who could cry when she was upset knowing that Nieve would listen to her and comfort her. She opened her arms to Nieve—but it couldn’t be Nieve—and sobbed into her shoulder.

I’m delirious. I’ve hit my head and I’m delirious
.

“I’m sorry,” Abigail said. “It’s just, you just remind me of someone.” She took a deep breath and wiped her eyes.

The woman patted her shoulder. “How’s that noggin?”

That’s right: Bren’s mum is from Scotland
.

“I’m fine but, please, we have to go back.” Abigail peered past her through the open door: a tiny kitchenette on one side, bench and table opposite—and at the front, a driver with a head of grey hair. The woman handed her a glass of water.

“Thanks Mrs …” Abigail couldn’t remember Bren’s last name. Did she even know it?

“Gracie, call me Gracie. Drink some water first,” she said. “That was some wallop you got, hen.”

“There’s no time …” Abigail slurred her words. She felt woozy.

“How is she back there, eh?” the male driver at the front yelled. “She okay?” His accent was Canadian, like Bren’s.

“She’s gonna be just fine!” Gracie yelled back, handing Abigail two white tablets. Her eye twinkled. “I know Bren is relieved. Though I’m not sure I approve yet.”

“Mom, please,” Bren growled. “Let’s not start.”

Abigail swallowed the pills. “What do you mean?”

“You’re still in high school. When Bren told us about you …”

“Wait. What are you talking about?”

Gracie glanced at Bren, who shook his head. “Oh, God.
It’s happening again, isn’t it? Please don’t tell me you think I’m gay.”

“You’re not?” Abigail cried.

His mother sighed, a wistful grin playing her lips.

“We need to go back and find Stick,” Abigail gasped, clinging to the one truth she thought she understood. But she could no longer keep her eyes open. She fell asleep almost immediately.

W
HEN SHE WOKE, THE
Winnebago was still. The small bedroom area was dark. She sat up carefully, her head still sore, but the pain had receded. She glanced out the window. They had stopped in an empty car park next to a beach. She could hear the waves crashing at the foot of the cliff. Hunger gnawed at her stomach. Her jaw tightened.

She shouldn’t have fallen asleep. She should have been trying to get an answer about Stick. Was he dead? How much time had she wasted? She had to get her head together, make a plan, and act. Fast. She threw open the door.

Bren and his mom sat across from each other at a tiny plastic kitchen table, Gracie at a laptop. Bren’s dad stood at the opposite wall, a marker in hand. They turned to her. Abigail opened her mouth, and closed it. Several large sheets of flip-chart paper had been pasted to every available space: arrows, maps, and photos. The grey Nike backpack, the letter from Nieve, the social work file, Becky’s iPhone, and the yogurt drink Abigail had stolen from her father’s warehouse … all were lined up on the table between Bren and his mum.

Bren’s father was the only one who moved. With his long
hair and AC/DC T-shirt, he looked more like an aging rock star than an ex-homicide detective. He capped his felt-tip pen and held out his hand to shake hers. “I’m Craig McDowell.”

She shook his hand. “Listen … thanks for everything, but these are my things.”

“We’re just trying to work out what’s going on,” he said.

“Have you called the police?” she asked.

“Not yet.”

Abigail felt herself slipping back into robot mode. She trusted Bren. And okay: his family had rescued her. And okay: so Gracie seemed to have something of the lovely Nieve about her. But she didn’t know them and they shouldn’t have been rifling through her things. “Right. Well if you don’t mind, I’ll just gather all this up and head off to the police station.”

“I’m sorry,” Gracie said. “We didn’t mean to upset you. But we think we should wait before doing that. You know, in case it’s not safe.”

“Why wouldn’t it be safe? Weren’t you cops?”

“That’s right,” Craig stated. His voice was far more authoritative and strident than his son’s. “I was a cop. And three men just attempted to kill our son. We want Bren, and you, to be safe. We want to help. We need your trust.”

“They are the good guys,” Bren said.

Abigail didn’t answer. Did she even believe in good guys anymore? Not really, except for Bren himself. But she needed all the help she could get. Yet again, she’d landed in an unfamiliar place with a new set of strangers to negotiate. She pulled her short fringe back with her hand, sighed, and studied the sheets
of flip-chart paper stuck on the walls. Gracie slid over and patted the bench beside her. Abigail remained standing.

“The best ammunition is information,” Craig said. “Whatever happened to Stick has already happened. Another half an hour won’t change that. Before we do anything, read over all of this carefully,” Craig instructed. “Maybe you’ll see something we haven’t.”

She first noticed the photo of the Granoch Group. Abigail examined the picture. That was Grahame Johnstone, right enough. Much younger, but just as uptight and stern. The only difference was that his hair was natural brown, rather than dyed. She then read the entire document on the Granoch Group, focusing, taking her time, remembering the key points:

Abigail picked up the bottle of Prebiotics she’d stolen from the warehouse and studied it. The four digit code on the front was … PA23. She must have buried this deep in her unconscious too. It was the Dunoon and Granoch postcode.

It wasn’t a Prebiotics drink. It was a drug.

“PA23. I lived with Nieve in that postcode,” Abigail heard herself say. “Holy Loch, in Argyll.” She opened the bottle and examined the liquid. There was a tiny capsule inside. They must have developed it to make it so small it would be undetectable. So small it could be ingested along with the innocuous liquid.

Next, Abigail looked at some information Bren’s family had collated onto a table about Granoch, using information from social networking sites like Friends Reunited and Facebook.

“But … is that bad?” Abigail said, after taking in the information on the table. “Who’d want to end up stabbed or in prison?” From what she’d seen so far, she couldn’t help think that some of it made sense.

“Of course it’s a bad thing!” Gracie snapped, outraged. “Abigail, you’d have been a prime candidate. The bright, passionate, angry girl next to me—gone! This is about poverty and nothing else. Should only the rich take risks, have fire in their bellies?”

Abigail stared down at her feet. “Becky wrote something about fire in bellies once,” she murmured. She could almost see her sister now: sitting at her desk the night before she died, intense and purposeful, tapping away at the keyboard. It was all too much. Abigail needed time alone to focus. “Can
you give me some time alone with all this, just ten minutes or so?”

“Of course,” Bren said. He led his parents out the narrow trailer door.