Niamh stumbled to her Jeep, and holding the door open against the wind managed to climb up into the driver’s seat. She knew she shouldn’t drive. That it was madness in this state. But all she wanted was to get away. To escape these people, and this nightmare.
She fumbled in her bag for her key and turned it in the ignition, revving hard before backing out across the gravel and turning on to the road that would take her back in the direction of the old whaling station, and the A859 heading north. To Ness. And home.
The storm had begun to abate a little as she nursed the Jeep through the rain-filled potholes that pitted the track south across the moor to Taigh ’an Fiosaich. It was some time after two, the night as black as sin beyond the tunnel cut through it by her headlights. She felt physically and mentally drained, as if someone had pummelled her with boxing gloves. Her fatigue was very nearly palpable, the longing she felt to fall back on her bed and close her eyes only marginally more powerful than the desire to pull over here and now and let herself fall asleep behind the wheel.
She was not surprised when she navigated past the rise at Bilascleiter to see that there were no lights on in the house. But startled by the presence of a car there, its headlamps reflecting light back from its walls. She pulled up beside it on the gravel apron. The rain had stopped now as she slipped from the Jeep, but the wind still hit her with a force that nearly knocked her from her feet. Holding on to her vehicle, hair whipping into her face, she made her way around it to look at the other car. A saloon car. Not many people would have risked a vehicle like that on the road out here. Its engine was running. And she saw a rental sticker on the rear windscreen. Lewis Car Rentals. She frowned. One of Lee Blunt’s party? But how would any of them even know how to get out here? Where to come.
She felt a sudden foreboding. Someone had tried to kill her yesterday. And now there was someone in her house. In the dark. Someone unknown. For a long time she stood buffeted by the wind, trying to decide what to do. The safest option would be to climb back into her Jeep and drive away. But she had neither the strength nor the will. She was being overdramatic, she decided. If someone had come to kill her, they would hardly leave their car parked outside, engine running, lights on to signal their presence.
She approached the door and opened it slowly, carefully, into the house. The darkness inside was penetrated only by the lights of the car outside. She eased the door shut behind her and reached for the shelf above the coat hooks, fumbling for the torch they always kept there for emergencies. Clumsy fingers knocked it off the shelf and it went clattering to the floor, rolling away into the hall.
Niamh cursed under her breath, forced to drop to her hands and knees to find it, reaching out to feel for it ahead of her. Whoever was in the house would know by now that she was back. Her fingers closed with relief around the curvature of the torch’s long handle, and she stood up, feeling for the switch to turn it on.
Its light, cold and hard, was startling. And at almost the same time that she directed its beam along the hall and into the living room, she became aware of an alien odour in her house. Very background, but off-pitch and disquieting. Like rusted iron.
‘Hello?’ Her voice seemed tiny. She cleared her throat and called again. ‘Hello? Who’s there?’
The absence of any reply pushed her heart up into her throat, real fear quickly displacing disquiet. She swung the beam of her torch from left to right in the darkness ahead of her, seeing it reflected in the windows all along the far side of the living room. Now she moved forward very carefully, adrenalin heightening all her senses, but it wasn’t until she reached the end of the hall that a shadow on the floor ahead drew her eye.
She directed the beam downwards and released the most feral howl she had ever heard pass her lips. It felt almost as if it had come from someone else. But as she took a step back, the full realization of what she was seeing only now dawning on her, it came again. Quite involuntarily.
Lying hunched on her side, in an extended pool of thick, black blood, lay a woman whose hair fanned out across the tiles. Her cheek was pressed to the floor, and in profile Niamh could see that both her mouth and her eyes were open wide. She recognized her immediately as Lieutenant Braque. The woman who had been there in the Place de la République moments after Ruairidh’s car had been ripped apart in that explosion. Who had interviewed her afterwards in the company of the anti-terror officer. Who had come to her hotel to tell her she could take the remains of Ruairidh home. Polite, efficient, and lacking either warmth or empathy. And here she lay dead in Niamh’s home, more than a thousand miles away from where it had all begun.
Disbelief fought with confusion and panic for space among the turbulent emotions that replaced almost everything else in her head. Her lungs barely responding to the need for oxygen.
She swung the beam of her torch wildly around her, but there was no one there, nothing but furniture and the shadows it cast in the living room and kitchen.
The faintest sound from behind made her turn. In time to see the dark shadow of a figure launch itself at her. She saw light glint momentarily on the blade of a kitchen knife as it arced towards her and she threw out a protective hand. She felt it slice into fingers and the fleshy muscle of her palm, sending blood spraying into her face. But it was enough to deflect the blade from her body. She swung her torch into darkness and felt it connect with solid bone and flesh. Heard a gasp of pain. But the strength of the blow knocked the torch from her hand, and it went spinning off into the living room. She struck out again, blindly, this time with her fist, and felt the pain of connection. Enough to distract her attacker long enough to scramble away, out of the hall, into the living room, where she slipped on the pool of Braque’s blood and fell heavily on to the tiles, knocking all the air from her body.
Her head hit the floor with a sickening thud, and she rolled herself over in time to see the dark form of her attacker falling on top of her, soft and heavy, a strangely familiar scent carried in the warmth and weight of this unexpectedly slight body.
Niamh looked up, her eye drawn first by the blade caught in the reflected light of the torch. It was raised at arm’s length above her, and Niamh knew there was nothing she could do to stop it. Then her gaze jumped focus to the face of this person intent on killing her, and she gasped her astonishment and disbelief.
There was the oddest, twisted smile on Seonag’s ivory-pale face. Her silky red hair hung in flames on either side of it, and her eyes burned with a madness Niamh had never before seen in them.
‘Why?’ It was the only word she could bring to her lips.
Seonag’s voice was little more than a whisper as she gently shook her head. ‘It started as a game. A fantasy. How hard could it be to access the Dark Web? Were there really people out there who would kill for money?’ She almost laughed. ‘It was so easy. And suddenly fantasy became reality.’ The smile faded. ‘I thought with him gone you would want me. Finally.’ Her face crumpled as tears blurred her eyes. ‘But if I can’t have you, no one else will.’
Niamh braced herself for the certainty of death as Seonag’s knife plunged into her heart. But something dark and heavy swung through the light of the torch and crashed into the side of Seonag’s head, hitting her with such force that it knocked her sideways to slam into the wall and lie motionless on the floor. The sound of her knife skidding away across the tiles filled the room as Niamh looked up to see a man standing over her, a wheel brace dangling from his hand. Then, as he turned his head away from Seonag to look down at her, and she saw who it was, she thought that she must be dead after all. That Seonag’s knife had penetrated her heart and taken her life before the blow from the wheel brace. But she was still breathing, and the pain from the deep cut in her hand was still excruciating. This was neither dream nor afterlife. This was real, even though she had absolutely no way of processing what she was seeing.