‘If you don’t get your rear over here right now, young man, I’m going inside and you can spend the rest of the night shivering in the dark. Is that what you want? Is it?’
He brought the torch round, sweeping across the skeleton branches and bone trunks.
A pair of eyes glittered back at him — too far away to make out anything but their reflected glow.
He stayed where he was. ‘Stalin? Stalin, that you?’
No answering bark. No response at all. Whatever it was just stayed there, staring at him from the darkness.
‘Hmph.’ Nicholas pulled his chin up. ‘Well, what are you then: a fox or a badger?’
And that’s when he feels it. A... presence. There’s someone behind him!
The smoky tang of whisky catches in his nostrils as they step in close, their breath warm against his cheek.
Oh God...
His mouth dries, pulse stabbing its way through his throat.
There’s a papery rustling sound. Then a cold metallic one as a ghost-white arm appears from behind Nicholas, painfully bright in the torch’s glow. The arm holds an axe, the blade chipped and brown with rust.
‘A fox or a badger?’ A small laugh. ‘Oh, I’m something much, much worse...’
— and then there was screaming —
2
‘Urgh... Look at this place: so bucolic it’s sickening.’
Una pulled her Fiat onto the gravel driveway and grimaced out through the windscreen.
A crumbling farmhouse with a small wood behind it, a bunch of hedges and bushes and flowers and trees and things. Nothing for miles and miles but hills and fields and sheep and trees and whatever the hell that was swooping about through the blue sky. Like bats, only in the daytime. Daybats.
Off to the side, a bunch of outbuildings and barns and the like were in various stages of being done up — one of them caught in a web of scaffolding, the slates stripped off the roof and replaced by blue papery stuff.
Urgh.
Joe’s voice boomed out of her car’s speakers, ‘So is he there?’
She killed the engine, grabbed her phone from its cradle, and climbed out into the... Oh dear Lord, it was like climbing into an oven. One filled with the contented sound of stupid bumblebees staggering their way through the baking air en route to extinction. Barely out of the car thirty seconds and already her nice floaty paisley shirt was clinging to her back.
‘Hello, Una? Helllllo?’
‘Hold on.’ She dipped back into the car for her Frappuccino and sunglasses, pinning the phone between her ear and shoulder so she could plip the locks. Stuck her shades on.
‘So, is the old bugger there or not?’
‘Well I don’t know, do I?’ The gravel scrunched beneath her feet as she marched for the front door. ‘With any luck he’ll be dead in a cupboard with a scarf around his neck, an orange in his mouth, and his cock in his hand.’
‘Oh thank you very much for that image. I’m eating a banana!’
Una mashed her thumb against the bell and deep inside the house something went off like a distant Big Ben. ‘Oh come on, he’s a stranglewank waiting to happen.’
No answer.
‘Going to have nightmares, now.’
Another go.
Una checked her watch. Nearly ten already. ‘For goodness’ sake.’ Because it wasn’t like she had a dozen faculty meetings to get through today, was it?
She tried the handle: locked.
Then Una turned and looked across the drive to a manky old Volvo estate painted a shade of used-nappy brown. ‘Professor Stranglewank’s car’s still here.’
So he couldn’t have gone far.
She thumped the palm of her hand against the front door, making it rattle. ‘NICHOLAS, ARE YOU IN THERE?’ Pause. ‘COME ON: IT’S TOO HOT OUT HERE FOR DICKING ABOUT!’ A bead of sweat tickled its way down her ribs.
‘If it is a stranglewank, fiver says he’s wearing women’s underwear.’
‘Hold on I’ll try round the back.’
She picked her way past the bins and through a patch of grass landmined with small grey jobbies. Around the corner the garden opened up. Well, if you could call it that. The whole thing was a sea of weeds. Oceans of them. Some high as your hip. A strange tiny shed looking about ready to collapse inside a chicken-wire prison. Place was a disgrace.
She took a sip of creamy cold coffee, then pinned the phone with her shoulder again and hammered her fist against the back door.
Boom! Boom! Boom!
Joe sighed in her ear. ‘Do you think they’ll let me have his parking space?’
‘In your dreams.’ Another three booming knocks.
Still no answer.
Well, can’t say she didn’t try.
‘God, can you imagine the press release?’
A grin. ‘Aberdeen University is delighted to announce the passing of its least favourite professor, due to sexual misadventure.’
‘He died as he lived, being a wanker.’
OK, one last try: Una turned the handle... and the door swung open.
She stepped over the threshold into a manky kitchen. Dirty dishes in the sink and stacked up on the work surfaces. Piles and piles of dusty books. A half-empty bottle of white wine sitting out on the filthy kitchen table, bathed in sunlight. The stale smell of hot pennies and mouldy food.
No doubt about it, the man lived like a pig.
‘Nicholas?’
She stood there, head cocked, listening.
A faint whining came from the other side of the door through to the rest of the house, accompanied by the scrabble of paws. Urgh... That revolting little dog of his, Satan, or whatever it was. The one responsible for all those landmines.
‘NICHOLAS? IT’S DOCTOR LONGMIRE! NICHOLAS?’
‘Speaking of eulogies, it’s Margaret’s retirement bash on Thursday. You want to give a speech?’
‘Do I jobbies, like.’
She walked towards the scrabbling door... Then stopped. Stared down at the kitchen table with its lonely bottle of Chardonnay, paired with a single, untouched glass. From the doorway, the table had looked filthy, maybe spattered with mud, but from here, closer, it definitely wasn’t mud. It was blood. Lots, and lots of blood.
On the other side of the door, Satan whined.
‘Well they better not ask me to give the old cow’s going away speech. You’ve heard her “opinions” on gay rights. Honestly, that woman can—’
‘Joe...’ Una swallowed and tried again, but her voice still sounded like she was sitting on a washing machine approaching the spin cycle. ‘Call the police, Joe. Call the police now!’
3
Bloody stairs.
Logan lumbered his way up them, peaked cap tucked under one arm, his cardboard-box-full-of-stuff in the other — a spider plant sticking its green fronds out of the open flaps.
They hadn’t updated the official Police Scotland motivational posters on the landing while he was away. Oh, they’d mixed things up a bit with a handful of new memos; regulations; guidelines; and ‘HAVE YOU SEEN THIS MAN?’ posters; but there was no getting away from ‘OUR VALUES’; ‘RESPECT’; and that beardy bloke in his high-viz and his hat, standing in front of the Forth Bridge, looking about as comfortable as a cucumber in a pervert’s sandwich shop: ‘INTEGRITY’.
Two doors led off the landing, one on either side.