“There!” shouted Sean so suddenly he made Paddy catch her breath. Red taillights glinted on a far hill, following the road around a corner.
The road was straightening out as they came into the dark village and Sean hung back, letting the slow BMW take Killearn Main Street alone, following it down through a dip in the road to Huntly Lodge.
They had passed the gate to Huntly Lodge before Paddy had realized where they were.
“Was that it?”
Sean was concentrating on the road. “Was what it?”
“Was that the gate we stopped at last night?”
“Aye, it was. He’s driven past it. Should I stop?”
“No.” She sat back in the seat, stunned at the enormity of her mistake. She had called the cavalry to the wrong place. “No, keep following.”
The taillights led them on and Sean followed at a cautious distance. Paddy hoped that they were following the wrong car, that Lafferty had stopped at Huntly Lodge and met the police there, that the car in front of them was an innocent midnight driver, someone pleasant going home after a long night out in the city, but they saw him as he hit the top of a hill and it was Lafferty; she could see him in the front seat, his round bald head and broad shoulders clear in the moonlight.
They were out of the green soft hills now, away from the relatively flat farming land, following the road down the side of Loch Lomond. Steep hillsides rose to their right; wind-gnarled trees clung dramatically to the sheer rock. To their left the flat land led down to the gleaming waterside. Sean had to let Lafferty get lost ahead of them and for a while they weren’t even sure they were on the same road.
They came to a turn in the road, passing a small cottage partially hidden behind a set of trees. They wouldn’t have noticed it if the BMW lights weren’t still on. The front door of the cottage swung wide into the dark inside. The car doors lay open. Lafferty was inside.
Paddy waited until they were around the corner. “Stop here.”
Sean brought the car slowly to the side of the road. He looked at her in the mirror. “The police aren’t coming here, are they?”
“No. They’re not coming.” She looked out at the flat silver expanse of the loch. “We’re on our own.”
THIRTY-THREE. TWO TWENTY AN HOUR
I
Paddy opened the door, stepping out into a soft muddy bank that swallowed the sole of her boots.
“Fuck.”
Sean leaned over from the driver’s seat and whispered loudly. “Should I come too?”
Paddy tutted. “Of course ye should bloody come. This guy’s an animal.” She found herself echoing Burns’s words.
Sean climbed out of the car and looked anxiously back down the road. “Sure ye don’t want me to wait with the car?”
“He’s going to kill her. He’s built like a brick shithouse. I could do with a wee hand.”
“But the police…” Sean shrugged nervously. “Can’t we drive until we find a phone and tell them to come here?”
“She could be dead by then.”
“We could be dead.” He felt immediately ashamed and slipped her eye. “I didn’t really sign up for this.”
“Okay.” She was furious. “You just keep watch then.”
“I’m not much of a fighter, Paddy-”
“Please your fucking self, Ogilvy.”
“Paddy-”
“I’m trying to save someone’s life, here, I haven’t got time to squabble.”
“Can’t I-”
But she’d moved off already, creeping down the lane heading back to the cottage, angry at Sean and sick with fright. Reluctantly Sean tripped after her.
It was a small Victorian cottage, a miniature mansion. A low slate roof hung over the whitewashed walls; picturesque windows had black wooden shutters open at either side. The front door was low, the heavy black lintel giving it a frown, flanked by cast-iron foot scrapers for horse riders to clean their boots on.
Across the road Paddy and Sean hung back behind the trees. Through the front windows they could see light seeping through doorways from the hall. Lafferty believed he was alone: he didn’t need to leave the lights off anymore.
Paddy looked back to the loch and saw the shape of a rickety wooden boathouse down by the water. She looked around the ground and picked up a thick branch. It was rotten and crumbled in her hand when she gripped it. There was nothing else by the roadside, no bits of metal or big round stones. She didn’t even have a plan.
Sean looked over at the house, fists firmly in his pockets, elbows locked tight. He saw her looking at his hands and smiled nervously. “Cold, isn’t it?”
“I’m going in,” she said angrily. “You do what ye like.” She crossed the road and headed around the side of the house alone.
Unlike at the Killearn house, the path here was overgrown with plants. She had to negotiate her way through the branches of an old tree that had snapped and fallen against one of the windows. A bush at her feet released the smell of spearmint as she brushed through it.
Around the back the lane opened up into a steep garden, shallow, with a sheer wall of black wet rock at the back. It was neatly set out but untended. The only part bare of vegetation was a big patch of turned earth at her feet.
The back wall of the house had two small windows on either side of a set of French doors leading from the kitchen. The far window was dark, a bathroom maybe. The window next to Paddy looked in over the sink.
She crept along the wall, the soft bare earth under her feet giving at every step. She stood flush to the wall and looked in. It was a pretty Edwardian kitchen, with beautifully crafted wooden shelves and pierced doors on the pantry, painted pale yellow and cornflower blue. An old-fashioned black cooking range sat in a large inglenook.
The kitchen had been beaten up: the wall cupboards lay open, doors had been yanked off hinges, the table overturned. Matching sets of plates and cups lay shattered on the black slate floor. Below the window the Belfast sink had loose tea and empty jars lying under a dripping tap, and a thick black crack snaked from one side to the other. A packet of flour had been emptied around the room, leaving a thin Christmas dusting on all the surfaces.
She didn’t see the legs at first. It was the drag mark from the doorway that led her eye to the filthy stocking feet near the window. Kate’s lower calf was horribly swollen, bent at an illogical angle, the pale sheer material of her tights holding the bloody mess together. Her feet were filthy, caked in mud, and a big toenail had come off, Paddy could see the coin-sized shape and the raw bloody mark underneath.
She tore her eyes from the figure on the floor and looked for a weapon. There were no knives visible in the kitchen; a couple of copper pots lay by the doorway but they didn’t look very heavy. She stepped back in the soft earth and looked around the garden. No tools. Big stones in the rockery but her hands were too small to pick them up.
Panicking, she stepped back to the window and peeped in. Something about the drag marks on the floor caught her eye. Paddy looked carefully at Lafferty’s footsteps next to the twin track marks from Kate’s feet. The footsteps were confused, as if Lafferty had turned around. Not around. He’d turned back. Lafferty’s footsteps doubled back, heading out of the kitchen.
He’d gone back out to the car, to the front of the house where Sean was waiting. Paddy froze in horror. Sean was alone with him. She listened hard, every sense heightened, listening for a cry or a call or a noise.
Wind rasped through the trees on the high hill behind her, dead leaves hissed around her ankles. So rigid with indecision that she could hardly blink, she stood there, a woman dying in front of her, her own breath frosting and clearing the small panel on the window, listening for Sean’s death.