Now she scrambled across the upturned cabin, but he held out a hand to stop her. Beyond him, through the glass, she could see people running towards them from the farmhouse. He said, ‘You’re going to have to do this on your own now.’
‘Don’t be silly.’
She tried to sit him up, but he pushed her away. There was blood everywhere. ‘Addie!’ His voice was insistent. ‘They’re going to try everything in their power to stop you.’ He fought to get more air in his lungs. ‘So you’re going to need help.’
Chapter Thirty-One
Tiny sat slouched in his armchair, balancing a half-drunk beer on the arm of it. The television was on. News coverage of a political rally held by the Eco Party. The venue they had chosen was far too big for the number of its supporters crowding around the stage waving banners and saltires. The close-up shots made it appear full. But the TV director was showing his political bias by intercutting with wide shots revealing the emptiness of the hall beyond. It was an anticlimax to a bitterly fought campaign in which the Ecologists had gained almost no ground on the ruling Democrats, who were scheduled to hold a triumphant rally the following night on the eve of an election they were certain to win.
Tiny was paying it no attention. It was a distraction in the corner of the room, like the flickering flames of the living-room fires he remembered from his childhood. Sheila was sitting on the settee opposite, playing some word game on her tablet. They didn’t talk much these days, drifting apart as they grew older, and without the glue of children to keep them together. But they were still comfortable with each other.
Tonight she had commented on how distant he seemed, coming home at the end of his shift to eat a carry-out pizza from a box on his knees. He had told her there was a lot on his mind. Just work stuff. She had never cared for Brodie, so he didn’t really feel like telling her that his best pal had been killed in an air crash. It had been rumoured for a couple of days that his eVTOL air taxi had ditched in the sea somewhere off Mull. He had been shocked to the core to hear it. But no one had been able to provide confirmation. Not even the DCI. Until today. But the air taxi had not, it turned out, ditched in the Atlantic as first reported. It had crashed on the Isle of Coll, and they had pulled Brodie’s body from it, killed by a bullet from a rifle. No one could quite believe it.
Tiny had spent most of the evening thinking about Cammie, remembering all their scrapes and adventures, and hoping against hope that somehow reports of his death had been greatly exaggerated. He knew, of course, it was a forlorn hope. When he’d first heard rumours about the eVTOL going missing, he had tried calling Brodie on his iCom, but the call had gone straight to messages. Which had not augured well.
Now on his third beer, he was subsiding into distant mawkish memories, and getting quietly emotional.
When the doorbell rang, it did not immediately penetrate his thoughts. It was Sheila’s voice that woke him from his reverie. ‘Who could that be at this time of night?’
Tiny looked up. ‘What?’
‘The doorbell.’
And right on cue, it rang again. Sheila clearly had no intention of answering it, so Tiny heaved himself out of his armchair to lay his beer on the coffee table before heading out to the hall to see who was there.
He turned on the outside lamp before opening the door. The rain that had been falling all day cut through the light it cast upon the steps and the path beyond.
A young woman stood on the top step, long auburn hair escaping from the hood of her parka, wet and smeared across her face. She was holding a child in her arms. A young boy who was fast asleep, his head resting on her shoulder. Tiny frowned. There was something oddly familiar about them both, but he was sure he didn’t know them. ‘Yes?’
She said simply, ‘My dad told me you would help.’
Chapter Thirty-Two
Addie walked up Renfield Street in the rain. There was not a breath of wind beneath a bruised and ominous sky, and the large teeming drops raised a mist on the pavements and filled the gutters as they ran in spate downhill towards the river.
The city was busy, in spite of the weather. Black and red, and blue and yellow umbrellas formed a canopy over the heads of shoppers as they flowed like rainwater from Bath Street and Renfield Street into the town’s most famous shopping boulevard. Sauchiehall Street, deriving its name from the old Scots word sauchiehaugh, which roughly translated as willow grove. A meadow once filled with trees. A far cry from the tall steel and brick buildings, and the few remaining red sandstone tenements that lined it now.
Addie passed the 3D cinema complex on the corner and glanced up for the first time towards the top of the hill, and the glass tower at the far side of the square formed by the buildings of the Scottish International Media Consortium. The home of Charles Younger’s newspaper, the Scottish Herald. Although most of its publishing these days was conducted online, the Herald still produced a daily newspaper. Its circulation amounted to only a few thousand, but it was read by the country’s top business people, its politicians and regulators, and by most in the legal profession.
She felt fear form a fist in her belly.
Robbie’s old weekend pack, which her father had been wearing when he was shot, weighed heavily on her shoulders, chafing at them even through the layers of her parka. His blood stained the inside face of it, but was not visible to the casual eye.
She could feel the temperature falling, even as she crossed the street. It was forecast to dip below freezing, with wet roads and pavements turning to ice in the coming hours.
The previous evening she had spoken to the newspaper’s editor, Richard Macallan, for less than ten minutes, from one of the few remaining public telephone booths on the south side. The incoming call to the Herald, Tiny told her, would be monitored. It wouldn’t take them long to trace the source of it. But unless Macallan knew she was coming, she would never get past security. So the phone call was necessary to alert him. But the authorities would have been alerted, too. And she could only stay on the line for a few minutes before they would come looking for her.
Now, she knew, they would be waiting for her at the top of the hill.
She skirted the traffic barrier and walked up into the tiny square, which was more of a turning circle, built around a unicorn raised on a tall pillar above an old stone fountain. The unicorn: Scotland’s national, mythical, animal. A symbol of purity and innocence. A sad irony, given Addie’s reason for being there today.
Cars stood parked in a row along the left side, and two men in dark suits and long raincoats emerged from a black Merc. They strode quickly across the cobbles to intercept her. And were exactly as Addie had imagined, living out some comic book fantasy of their own importance.
Both men were startled by the sound of tyres skidding on wet cobblestones, and they turned to see four marked police vehicles speeding through the raised barrier. The cars divided to flank the tiny group in the circle, and flak-jacketed police officers poured out, Heckler & Koch MP5 sub-machine guns levelled at the men in raincoats.
Almost by instinct, the two men reached for concealed weapons beneath their coats, but stopped as a tall, plain-clothes officer emerging from the lead car barked at them, ‘Remain perfectly still, or you will be shot where you stand.’