Shot Through The Heart (Supernature Book 1) (10 page)

ZZ Top opened the door and came out, flanked by a couple of burly men, standing beside him with arms folded. "There's only one book that we're interested in here," he said.

"I bet it's not the Bible," said Adam.

Mark shot him a glare - he could see the nonsense streak coming through. "A faith centre in the Highlands must have a few stories to tell," he said.

ZZ Top laughed then looked at his colleagues. "You hear that, boys?" he asked. He looked back at Mark. "I think you should go."

"You don't want to give me a quote?" asked Mark.

"Go," said ZZ Top.

"Are you devil worshippers?" asked Adam, arms folded with an impish grin on his face.

"Satanists," said ZZ Top. "Now go."

Adam stood up to his full height and looked like he was going to start something.

Mark intercepted him, grabbing his arm and tugging him back. "Come on," he said. "It's not worth it."

"Listen to your pal," said ZZ Top, glaring at Adam.

They got back into Adam's car. Mark felt his heart pounding. All three of them were massive and could do serious damage. "No more nonsense," he said. "Let's get back to the hotel."

Adam looked back at the gate, ZZ Top and his mates pointed and laughed. Adam glanced up to the roof of the car and sighed. "Right, come on," he said.

That evening, Mark finally got video calls working. He spoke to his wife, face-to-face, for the first time in days, her face appearing via her tablet's camera. Beth sat perfectly still on her lap for once.

"Jesus, Mark," said Sarah, concern etched over her face. "You look terrible. Are you okay?"

"I'm fine," said Mark. "I just feel the weight of the world on my shoulders. I haven't been sleeping. It's really windy here, and the windows are rattling."

"You've been drinking, haven't you?" asked Sarah.

"Not too much," said Mark. "Just a beer with my dinner. I need something to calm me down - I'm working sixteen hour days just now, so that I can come home sooner."

"I wish you'd focus your time," said Sarah, "that way you might only be gone for a few days at the most."

"Yeah, you're probably right," said Mark. "There's just so much to get through and so many people that Kay should have interviewed. And I'm now so far behind with the writing. Every day, I get another five thousand words behind on my plan."

"You're pushing yourself too hard," said Sarah.

"Maybe," said Mark. "A photographer turned up today. Looks like he's staying for a few nights. That's another expense that I can't afford. Kay hired him."

"Have you found her?" asked Sarah.

Mark shook his head. "Not yet," he said. "The trail has grown cold. She just left the hotel and didn't turn up again. I don't see anything to suggest that she's been kidnapped or anything."

"Have you been to the police yet?" asked Sarah.

"No," he said, his voice small.

"Oh, Mark," said Sarah.

"Look," said Mark, trying to retrieve the situation, "I don't want to waste their time. Her car's gone - her mum reckoned that she's done if a few times before."

"You should speak to them at least," said Sarah. "They could have a body that's not been identified."

Mark nodded, conscious that she could see him. "Okay," he said. "I'll see what I can do. I'm not even sure where the nearest police station actually is." He smiled, desperate to change the subject. "How's Beth been?"

Sarah smiled. "She's been good today," she said. She held Beth up and made her wave her arm. "Wave to daddy!"

Beth gurgled, her eyes struggling to focus on Mark.

"Where did you take her today?" asked Mark.

"Just a walk around the Meadows," said Sarah, her expression suddenly getting darker. "I went to the fruit and veg shop on Argyle Place. The good one. Got some stir fry for dinner."

"Sounds fulfilling," said Mark.

Sarah smiled. "Sooner I can get her into a nursery, the better," she said. "I need to get back to my career. At least at work I can tell people what to do and they'll actually do it."

As he laughed, Mark realised that he couldn't remember the last time Sarah made a joke like that. It must have been weeks or months.

Sarah joined in the laughter. "What are you doing tonight?" she asked.

Mark sighed. "Bit more work," he said. "Then I'll maybe get something to eat in the restaurant downstairs."

"Not too much to drink, please," said Sarah.

"Relax," said Mark, "I'll be fine. I just need to chill- to relax." He thought of Adam using the phrase
chillax
earlier and how much he hated it.

"Okay," said Sarah. "Well, I'm going to go. Give me a call tomorrow."

"Will do," said Mark. "Love you, bye."

He ended the call on his phone and reclined in the chair. He checked his watch - he was supposed to be meeting Elizabeth in just over an hour.

Mark thought that the dining room in Ruthven Castle had seen better days.

It was at the opposite end of the second floor from the drawing room where they'd previously met. The walls had large settlement cracks - Mark didn't want to mention them, in case they might be a sore point with Elizabeth. The walls were plastered only on two sides, with the remaining two exposed stone. Elizabeth sat at the head of a long table, with Mark at the first setting to her left. The room must have seen grander occasions than a writer visiting for a meal.

Elizabeth wore a short black dress. It hugged her lithe, muscular figure - Mark wondered if a room in the castle was devoted to a gym. Her arms were thin but toned, her legs slender and below her bosom he could see her ribs through the dress. Mark had a thing for flat stomachs in his teens, and he could see that hers was equivalent to the Cindy Crawford poster on Buffy's bedroom wall in their student flat.

Ivor served the main course, lamb cutlets with potatoes and peas. A generous dish of mint sauce was placed between them - Mark piled three spoonfuls on his plate. The first course had been delicious - a fish salad that was heavy on the mayonnaise and light on the vegetables, but with copious quantities of salmon. Mark assumed it had been caught from the loch.

"I assure you that the lamb is delicious," said Elizabeth. "A solid hunk of meat."

Mark nodded. "It certainly smells it," he said. "And I just love mint sauce." He cut off a slice of the lamb, dipped it in the sauce and ate it. It practically melted in his mouth. "This is fantastic."

Elizabeth took a drink of wine from her large goblet. "Ivor is an excellent cook," she said. "Ably assisted by Clarissa's husband, Paul. He is a trained butcher and still tends to the cuts."

Mark recalled the story that John had told him about dropping a sheep off every fortnight. "What do your daughters do, then?" he asked.

"For a living?" asked Elizabeth, holding a small forkful of the meat in front of her mouth.

Mark nodded.

"Nothing, really," said Elizabeth, before chewing. "We keep ourselves to ourselves. We decided a long time ago to use the family assets to fund our lifestyles rather than go out and seek alternative employment."

"And there's seven of you here?" asked Mark. It did seem like a strange way to live - three sets of daughters and their husbands living in a gloomy, old castle.

"Eight, including Ivor," said Elizabeth.

"Right," said Mark. "So, eight, then?"

Elizabeth nodded, then chewed another sliver of lamb, refusing to continue the discussion any further.

"What happened to their father?" asked Mark.

Elizabeth arched an eyebrow. "My girls are all adopted," she said.

Mark didn't know how she'd managed to get that one past the authorities - one of Sarah's friends had gone to hell and back trying to persuade them of her and her husband's suitability to be adoptive parents.
 

Elizabeth shrugged. "I never married," she said, "and I like to make sure that those less blessed than I manage to have a decent lifestyle."

Mark felt butterflies in his stomach - she'd never married. He seriously started to think that she was trying something on with him, regardless of how ginger and speccy he was. He tried to blot it out of his mind. "That's very generous of you," he said, before eating another potato.

Elizabeth put her knife and fork down on the plate together, to signify to the waiting Ivor that she was finished. Mark had barely made any inroads but she had devoured the entire plate.
 

She leaned forward, the deep cleavage showing through her tight dress. Mark looked away, aware that his eyes betrayed him. He wanted to look.
 

"So, tell me, how is your book going?" asked Elizabeth, her eyes following Mark's gaze.

Mark finished chewing an unusually tough mouthful of lamb, already aware that fragments of it were going to be stuck between his teeth for days. "It's getting there," he said. "That's the best way that I can put it." He scooped up some peas, covered in mint sauce to disguise the flavour. "I met up with William Sellar today."

Elizabeth smiled. "William," she said, and shook her head slightly. "What was he saying?"

Mark gave her a summary of his statements about the first phase.

Elizabeth frowned. "Interesting," she said. "He didn't say what he was proud of?"

Mark shook his head. "Nope," he said. "Any ideas?"

"William's a strange one," said Elizabeth.

"Do you know him, then?" he asked.

"Reasonably well," said Elizabeth, with a tight grimace on her face. "He's not the most reliable of people. He has some fairly fanciful ideas, I should say."

"I'll bear that in mind," said Mark. "It's always good to get a second opinion on the veracity of the statements that I'm collecting."

"Was my input useful yesterday?" she asked.

Mark nodded. "Definitely," he said. "I've transcribed our discussion but I need to do some more thinking on it. I might have some more questions, I don't know. My head is all over the place just now."

"I can understand that," said Elizabeth. "It must be very disconcerting to have lost your assistant."

"She'll turn up," said Mark. "I'm sure she will. It's more the hassle of the missing work that's annoying me."

"That sounds a bit callous," said Elizabeth.

"You don't know the pressures that I'm under," said Mark. "I've got so many books that I want to write, and yet I'm so far behind on this one." He took a big drink of the wine - he'd had better, but not often. "I'm sure that Kay will return at some point, when she fancies it."

"Have you been to the constabulary about it?" asked Elizabeth.

"You're the second person to ask that today," said Mark. "My-" He stopped, not wanting to mention to her that he had a wife. "My partner asked me earlier."

"So,
have
you been to the police?" asked Elizabeth, ignoring the mention of Mark's other half. He realised he'd pretty much tried to hide his left hand from her every time they'd met, in case she lingered over his wedding ring.

"I haven't yet," said Mark. "I would think if something's happened, they'll contact her parents first and they've heard nothing."

Elizabeth nodded. "That would certainly be the best course of action to take," she said.

Mark frowned, conscious that he was avoiding the issue. The longer Kay was missing, the more he needed to speak to the police.

Mark put his cutlery down - he had eaten just over a half of the plate, and didn't know how Elizabeth had managed to polish it all off.

Elizabeth waved her hand at Ivor. "Mark and I will retire to the drawing room," she said.

Elizabeth refilled her glass and topped Mark's up - he was starting to lose count and control.

They were in another drawing room, sitting next to each other on a sofa, much wider than the one before. It faced the large picture windows overlooking the garden, where the shadows from the castle were lengthening. A fire crackled in its grate beside them, flooding Mark with more heat than he was already suffering from the embarrassment of Elizabeth's continual innuendo.

They'd spent an hour, and another two bottles of wine, going through their life stories.

Mark had told her about his schooling in Edinburgh, going to university in the city, meeting Sarah, and had perhaps been a bit too honest about the difficulties that they were now going through.

Elizabeth had told him about her life. She'd been born in the castle, her father and mother both dying in the late 70s. While her mother had been Lady Ruthven, it seemed like her father had not taken the title, much like Prince Philip not being the British king. She'd lived in the area for pretty much her entire life, save for a brief period in Edinburgh where she'd spent six months living in Stockbridge, an area Mark knew reasonably well from the occasional pub crawl in his early twenties - a distant memory now.

"Did you say that you had a daughter?" she asked.

"Beth," said Mark, nodding.

"Tell me about her," said Elizabeth.

"She's a little rascal," said Mark, smiling with genuine warmth. "I love her to little bits, I really do."

Inside, while he did truly love her, he was beginning to resent the bond between her and Sarah. Before Beth had arrived, they'd been one of the closest couples he'd known. Aside from the public hand-holding - borne of genuine affection - they had a private world occupied only by the two of them, and a private language of baby talk and silly nicknames.

And Beth had taken that away from him.

In time, he knew that things might revert back to something like normality, but he really needed their love life to be rekindled - Sarah hadn't been affectionate since six months into the pregnancy, at which point she took a sudden revulsion to him.

Elizabeth coughed. "Looks like I lost you there," she said.

Mark smiled politely. "It's just that nothing's ever perfect, is it?" he said.

Elizabeth raised her eyebrows. "That's honest at least," she said.

"I try to be honest," said Mark.

While his mouth spoke those words, he thought of the duplicity that he'd employed with his wife earlier - why did he feel so much guilt about seeing Elizabeth? They hadn't done anything.