Scrap Metal (30 page)

“There, unfortunately. Busting for a piss.”

There’s my nice Larkhall lad again.
I couldn’t say it. His gentle rough-and-readiness of speech had been so much a part of what I loved in him. “Come on, then. Let’s complete your journey.”

He groaned as I hoisted him to his feet. “Oh, Nicky. I don’t remember much about yesterday, but…I’m so fucking sorry. I flipped out. I left you to deal with everything.”

“It’s okay. It got dealt with. And I’ve got plenty of help for the next couple of days, so you can come back to bed after you’ve had your piss and get properly better.”

“But…are you all right? Harry—”

“Not now, Cam.” Maybe I’d had a touch of the
teasach
after all. In my dreams, my granddad and Stu Duggan had morphed into one generic, lonely old man and met an endless parade of miserable deaths, by sickness, by water and foul play. I was fine, I told myself. But I didn’t want to hear Cam talk about Harry. I pushed open the bathroom door and guided him in. “There. I’ll stay if you like, give you a hand.”

He turned on me a look of loving admonition. “Och, Nurse Nichol. Where would you put it?”

“Fine. I’ll wait outside.”

I leaned on the banister. I had briefly considered nursing as a career, oddly enough. My grasp on science was too fragile to make it as a doctor, but I did like looking after people. The least difficult of my adjustments after my ma’s death had been turning my hand to laundry and bedlinen, to cooking up breakfasts for Harry and the farmhands. I’d never really minded the brainless slave labour of the sheep feeds, even at my most exhausted—watching the hungry creatures come bleating up to tug at their hay reminded me that something alive was better off for my existence. I’d taken, without realising it, the deepest satisfaction in every stage of Cam’s progress from starvation to strong, restored beauty. Alistair had thought me pretty funny, with my need to be always looking after something. He was right. I was. I was also stupid.

The door opened and Cam emerged, clutching the frame for support. Yesterday had undone more than half my good work, laid it to waste. I took his arm. “You look awful.”

“You too. Did you get any sleep at all?”

Don’t you remember?
I was still in my rumpled clothes from yesterday. I’d slept in them, in his arms, in the room where he’d imprisoned us. I didn’t answer, helping him back down the corridor. I shook out his pillows, pulled the sweat-damped quilt off the bed and substituted a fresh one. I turned it back and watched while he crawled in, shivering with exhaustion.

“Shona was here,” I said. “She made us tea on a tray, biscuits and everything. I’ll go fetch it.”

He drank his tea in silence, looking at me from time to time over the top of his mug. The biscuits were pink wafers, his favourites, but I couldn’t interest him. I knew it was important to keep the liquids going. He really seemed to be on the mend, though I would call Dr. Ferguson again later. I did all the things I would ordinarily have done—steadied the mug when the tremor in his fingers threatened a spill, took it from him when he was done, brushed a stray strand of his fringe out of his eyes.

After a moment he said softly, “Everything’s changed, hasn’t it?”

I didn’t want to know what he meant. “Yeah. Feels like a different planet with Harry gone.”

“I mean you and me. I wouldn’t blame you if you thought I could have saved him. I’d understand.”

“You’ve forgotten parts of last night. I tried to tell you. Harry’s doctor said he’d had a heart attack before he drove the tractor into the loch.”

“God. Yes, I…I think I remember that. There’s something else, though.” He was watching me fearfully, as if he’d heard the distant rumble of an avalanche and knew there was nowhere to shelter. “What else have I forgotten, Nichol?”

“You told me the real reason you’re on the run.”

I heard the air leave his lungs. I couldn’t look at him, any more than if I’d pitched a brick through a stained-glass window—couldn’t look at the fragments and shards. I got up, and carefully put his mug and mine back on the tray.

“Listen,” I said. “I don’t know much about justice, and…people paying for their crimes. You’re as sorry as any man ever was, and me telling the coppers or turning you in isn’t going to make you any sorrier. I don’t know what to do. All I can think is—stay with me here, and we’ll live with it. We’ll… I don’t know. We’ll just try and live with it.”

I carried the tray to the door. I
was
a compulsive feeder—even now, in this shell-shocked silence, it was bothering me that he hadn’t eaten in so long. “Could you face breakfast?”

“No.”

I did look then. He’d spoken quietly, his tone dead flat. His face was expressionless, but at the same time I could read the feelings of a man who might never voluntarily eat again.

“Get some more sleep,” I said. “I’ll come back and check on you soon. This is still your home, Cam. And…time might make a difference. We’ll live with it. I had to know.”

I understood now why Harry had wanted to finish the barn roof. I’d had all summer to do it, but for him summer days had been running through his fingers like sand. When I had slogged with grim energy through all my chores—when I’d dismissed Jen and Kenzie home, and checked on Cam for the fourth time and found him asleep, or pretending to be, curled up with his face to the wall—this unfinished business gave me my next handhold, and I seized it angrily. The ladder was there where the old man had left it.

I didn’t really know how to patch a roof, not the way Harry did, but I’d watched him often enough, and it couldn’t be rocket science. At any rate, banging nails into rafters was a savage kind of relief, and I stayed up there, not breaking rhythm when the skies began to grow dark.

It must have been later than I’d thought. At last I sat back and knelt, trembling, my efforts vibrating through muscles of my arms and shoulders. My left hand was bruised from half a dozen badly aimed strokes, my right beginning to blister. I couldn’t feel either. I could smell sulphur, though. Maybe it was the devil, coming to claim my temper for his own. More likely it was Harry, paying me a visit from the place I had no doubt he’d gone, if my ma hadn’t managed to catch him en route and bear him off with her to the Summerlands…

No, not sulphur. More like copper or blood. I shifted round and saw the darkness, the premature nightfall, wasn’t coming from the west. I was smelling ozone. The blackest summer storm I’d ever seen was piling itself up over Kilbrannan Sound. In a narrow strip beneath the thunderheads, the sky had turned a jaundiced, malevolent gold.

First drops of rain began to hit the slates around me. They were fat as tears, which saved me the bother. I didn’t move. I sat, my knees drawn up to my chest, and let the thunder’s warning boom roll through my bones.

The thing was that when I’d talked to him—when I’d stood by my bed and told Cam I knew his secret—I’d expected anything but the reaction I’d got. Stupid, because he’d poured it out at the lava-hot pitch of his fever, but my mind since then had erected some rickety defences. If he’d blushed bright red—stammered, denied, crossed his fingers in plain sight and lied to my face, I’d had have taken it. I’d have believed him. He was my Cameron and he was good. Any excuse, any reasons, I’d have granted without question. But all he’d done was sit there, as if a long-expected blow had finally come down. He’d acquiesced.

Christ, couldn’t he at least have tried for a redeeming lie? It would have been so easy.
I was off my head, Nichol. I’d had a bad dream
.

I was so fucking furious with him for not making the effort, for hanging himself like this. The thunder roared, and I wanted to scream back at it, but my throat was too dry. When the lightning came, great flashing sheets, I didn’t shield my eyes.
Come on, then,
I thought.
Blind me. Strike me bloody dead, up here on this rooftop, the highest point for two hundred yards around. I’m harbouring a killer. I love him more than anything else on God’s earth, and at the same time I feel like he reached into my chest and turned my heart to stone.

A cold wind sprang up, a breath from the storm’s dark core. We’d had such a fine spring—too damn fine, with its showers and sweet breezes—and Harry had only secured the roof tarpaulins with stones. The first of them flew aside as the wind snatched the sheet out from under it. I didn’t care, but Harry would be so pissed off with me if I let the new rafters get soaked. I grabbed some nails and a handful of rope. Hailstones the size of marbles battered me as I scrambled up to reach the top beam. We were in for it—a proper Arran summer tempest, and God help those at sea. The wind began to scream.

There was something moving on the track that led up to the road. I finished lashing the first tarp down and shielded my eyes against the hail. A human shape, though it was hard to tell in the weird light. The elder trees that lined the track were whipping back and forth, their luminescent blossoms tearing to shreds. Between them, caught briefly in a monstrous lightning flash—yes, a running man, head down, struggling against the storm. My skin crawled. None of Seacliff’s ghosts had ever scared me, but this thin figure, caught in desperate flight…

I dropped the hammer I’d been holding. The rope slithered after it and disappeared. The hail was turning to salt-hot lightning rain, slicking the roof in an instant. I fought for grip then gave it up, making my descent in a half-controlled fall, catching at the gutter at the last second for purchase. There was the ladder—too old, too unsteady and slow. I braced myself, aimed for a soft patch of turf, and I jumped.

I wrenched my knee, but it was nothing I couldn’t live with. Nothing I couldn’t scramble up onto and run, slipping on the hailstones that still lay in the yard. Why the hell did we have so many fences, so many tumbledown alleyways and gates in this labyrinth of a farm? Whatever insane strength had sent me vaulting over obstacles the day before had deserted me now—I just had to climb, gasping for breath, or where it was quicker stop long enough to unhook chains and ropes. The rain drove into my eyes. I clambered over the last five-bar and stumbled out onto the track.

Empty. The next long glare of sheet lightning showed me. The storm was right above me now, the thunder hard on the heels of the flash. Seacliff processed its ghosts quickly, I knew. Al had never been back, but I’d heard my ma singing on the day after her funeral. Upstairs in the gloomy old house where I’d left him, Cam could have found knives, ropes, half a dozen unfinished painkiller prescriptions. He could have found Al’s shotgun. His trapped spirit would run forever up this lane, pursued by his sins, manifest as lean black dogs, their coats slicked down by rain, their eyes catching yellow in the storm…

One of them cannoned hard against my legs, knocking me out of the way. I grabbed at the gate for balance. I’d been reading too much Conan Doyle. These Baskerville hounds were nothing more than Gyp, Floss and Vixen. Harry never locked them in at night, and I too had left the top half of their kennel door open, an easy leap if they chose to make it. I shook off my horrified paralysis and ran after them.

Cam had got as far as the roadway gate. The latch on that one required a powerful heft, and he’d run out of strength while he struggled with it. He was on his knees, half hidden by buckler ferns and rushes. This time when the collies found him they didn’t crouch or try to herd him. As if pointing him out to me had been their purpose, and beyond that he was up to me, they braided themselves back into their orderly triad and loped away down the track.

Cam hadn’t heard them over the roar of the storm. He hadn’t heard me. He dragged himself upright as I approached and started to climb the gate. I didn’t want to scare him but the wind tore my voice away. “Cameron. Cam!” His useless little Topshop rucksack was over his shoulder, looking as if it contained less than when he’d arrived. I took hold of its strap to restrain him, and he twisted round in fright, losing his hold on the gate, clattering back down. I caught him as best I could. “You stupid sod. What are you doing out here?”

“Let me go.”

He began to fight me off. I remembered how he’d dealt with Joe McKenzie and supposed I had his fever to thank for the diminution of his strength now. Still he was fierce and electric in my grasp, the lightning showing me a blank tiger’s mask, his eyes wide and filled with anguished darkness.

“How can you want me to stay?” he yelled at me at last, when he’d struggled to a standstill. “You know what I am now. How can you want me?”

I’d had enough. “How can you fucking leave me?” I yelled back. “The old man’s barely cold on his slab, and you—you’re pissing off back into the night. Are you going to abandon me as well?”

The gale dropped. The change was quite sudden. I’d known it before at the end of a wild island storm, as if some quota of havoc had been reached and there was no call for more. The rain, no longer driven, turned to a drenching vertical torrent. Cam and I stood in the downpour. He was staring at me, water streaming down his face from his sodden hair. He could hear me now without me bellowing at him.

“You’ll be ill again,” I said more quietly, “if you stay out here. Come back to the house with me.”

“Nichol…”

“If you still want to go in the morning, I won’t stop you.”

“I have to turn myself in.”

“I won’t stop you. But come home now. Come on.” I put an arm around him. After a moment’s resistance he gave it up and leaned into me. He could barely walk. I steadied him, drew him close and tight against my strength, and together we set out through the rain.

Chapter Seventeen

The next few days went by me in a grey dream. I was numb, gliding on ice. I welcomed this state of affairs, though it made me stupid, unable to believe in Harry’s death even as I spoke to the Lamlash Cooperative about arranging the funeral. He, with his typical dislike of fuss, had left the plainest possible instructions in the most obvious place for me to find them, a brown envelope marked Harold Nichol Seacliff in his dresser drawer, and although it didn’t jolt me back to life, I stood for almost half an hour, staring out of his bedroom window. I hadn’t known he had a middle name.