Scrap Metal (34 page)

I only had the truck’s solid weight to thank for making the curve. Shona had been right—normally I did drive like a pussy around here, mindful of stray sheep and tourists. I should stop and make her and Archie get out. The only life I was allowed to risk like this was my own. I should hand the wheel over. I was an aching mess of raw loss and need from my guts to my fingertips, but I had to calm the fuck down. I started to brake. Maybe if I didn’t tell them why, just veered over and pushed them both out…

No need. I crested the next hilltop, clear air under all tyres, and slewed to a grinding broadside halt. Twenty yards down the road, wheels still spinning, the Mondeo lay on its roof in a ditch.

Chapter Nineteen

Black rage threatened my vision. Shona grabbed my shoulder as if to hold me in one piece, but a moment later I saw Cam. He was blood-streaked and bruised, scrambling away from the overturned car. Baird was heaving himself out of the driver’s-side window. Cam gained a rise in the ground. He fell to his knees in the heather. He was clutching Baird’s pistol in one hand, and he took a shaky aim. “Stay where you are, you bastard!”

I half fell out of the Toyota. Archie struggled out on his side. “All right, Cameron,” he shouted. “That’s grand, okay? You did it. But leave it there. I’ll deal with him now.”

Cam thrust out his free hand towards us. “Stay back.” He jerked the gun at Baird, who was on his backside in the road now, dazedly shaking his head. “You were right. I never could kill a man. But I could shoot a cockroach like you, no bother at all.”

“Aye, if you…knew where the safety catch was.” Baird brushed shards of glass out of his hair. He looked at Cam, and the wreck of the Mondeo, in astonishment. “You mad wee fucker. You took us off the road!”

“Better that than go another inch with you. How do I work this gun?”

Baird broke into raucous laughter. Ignoring him, I slipped past Shona’s restraining hand and splashed through the ditch towards Cam. “Can’t expect him to answer that,” I said. “Not while you’ve got it pointed at him.”

“Don’t come near me.” Cam lurched upright. He almost fell over—desperately steadied himself. “I want to kill him. It isn’t bloody fair.”

“What isn’t, sweetheart?”

“I tried so hard to get out. I learned stuff, tried to get good at things. Every shitty council estate we lived in, I did my night schools, my classes.”

“You are good at things.”

“But wherever I turned—if I tried to get a decent job, a nine-to-five, there’d always be somebody like him in the way. Gang lords like McGarva, loan sharks threatening to call in their debts. Letting me work for them to pay some of it off, dig myself in deeper. I didn’t know how to get past them.”

Baird was still laughing. “It’s hardly Bren’s fault if your sorry face got passed all round Glasgow on wanted posters, is it?”

“No. It was my fault. Nicky, I just couldn’t see a way out.”

“You should be grateful for the job opportunities.” Baird chuckled. “Promotion, too—off the shop floor and into his bed. Not bad for a miserable wee nobody.”

I tried to gesture Baird to silence. “Shut up. Are you trying to kill yourself?”

“Well, like I say, I’d be really shit scared if he could get the safety off that gun.”

I was close enough to Cam now to touch him. I could see the trembling rigidity of every muscle, the tears beginning to carve white channels through the blood on his face. His thumb was probing blindly near the weapon’s catch. He’d find it any second. “Cam, ignore him. Put the gun down and come home with me.”

He turned to me in anguish. “That’s all I wanted. A home with you. I didn’t know until I saw it.”

“Well, it’s waiting there, just down the road. I’m waiting.”

“No. I was spoiled for you before I ever met you.” He swung back to face Baird. The gun clicked at last. “Spoiled by men like him.”

I hadn’t seen Archie make his quiet way uphill to stand beside us, and I jumped when he spoke. “Och, Cameron.” He took hold of Cam’s trembling wrist, drew it down. “You’re not
spoiled
,” he said gently. “And Nicky’s no saint, as you’ll find out the longer you live with him. Don’t you go and dirty your hands now.”

He took the gun from Cam, calmly as if it had been a cup of tea. Cam surrendered it—partly in astonishment, I thought, at the kindness in his eyes. Out in the road, Baird immediately showed signs of struggling to his feet. The kindness vanished. “Right, you trigger-happy mainlander thug, you! See if you come round my beat, shooting at my girlfriend.” He strode off in Baird’s direction, Shona running to meet him from the other side. I wasn’t sure which of the two of them was making Baird blanch in fear. “And I
do
know how to work the safety catch on this. Isn’t that right, Sho?”

“Aye, that’s right. He went on a course, Mr. Baird. In Glasgow. I am no’ his girlfriend, though.”

Cam laughed. It was brief and soft, a sound I hadn’t thought to hear again. He turned to me, his face lit by its old smile, the one that had ended an endless island winter for me. “You came after me.”

“Yes. Always. My God, what did you do to the car?”

“Grabbed the wheel.”

“You could have died, you nutcase.”

“Better that than let him take me away.”

There was glass in his hair too. Carefully, shielding his eyes, I brushed it clear. I lifted his chin and tried to see where the blood was coming from. I was being calm and sensible. It wasn’t the time to grab him, crush his ribs to dust with the relief of finding him. “You’re hurt. Is it just these cuts, or…”

“Nicky.” He ran a hand down the side of my face. He pushed back my fringe, stared at me as if seeing me for the first time, or seeing a new world. His eyes were alight with wonder. “Even when you thought I’d murdered Stu Duggan…”

“Hush.” I forced down a sob so hard I almost choked on it. “All over now. I love you.”

He folded into my arms. I buried my face in his hair, and I listened to the sounds of midsummer on my island. Gorse pods were crackling in the sun. When the wind shifted, I could hear the voice of the sea, woven through always with birdsong and mermaids. Cam’s fractured breathing, his soft repeats of my name, the one thread that gave meaning to the rest, turned it all to music. I held him, careful of his ribs but tight, tight, and I closed my eyes.

Other sounds—a weird percussion, felt at first rather than heard, high in the air to the east. Then, more homely, the crunch of big feet through heather, a cautious approach. I didn’t want anyone near us, not yet, and I raised my head and glared at Archie over Cam’s shoulder. “Give us a few minutes.”

“Er… Yeah.” He shifted awkwardly, adjusting the bundled cloth beneath his jacket sleeve. “Thing is, that’s the police chopper on its way out from Ardrossan. They’ll be landing in a minute, and…”

Cameron stirred in my arms. I felt the beginning of his attempt to move away from me, and I restrained him, pulling him back close. “Okay. What about it?”

“I’ve arrested Baird on suspicion of the murder of Stu Duggan. He’s handcuffed to the door of your Toyota, the one that isn’t rusted through. But I also have to…”

“What?”

Cam took hold of my shoulders and eased me back. “He’s trying to say he has to arrest me too.”

“He’s saying no such thing.”

“I didn’t kill Duggan, but I stood and watched it happen. Then I didn’t tell anybody. I’ve got to pay.”

“You couldn’t have done anything. Couldn’t have stopped them.”

“Still.” He didn’t let go of me. His grip became bruising, and he leaned his brow against mine, closing his eyes. “It makes me an accessory. Doesn’t it, Archie?”

“That’s for the courts to decide. All I know is…I’m so bloody sorry.”

He released my arms. I tried to grab him back then to interpose myself between him and Archie. “Don’t you dare. Not either of you. Christ, I just got you back!”

“Nicky, love. You’d make Satan feel better about himself. But this has been burning into me all the time, eating me alive. I
want
to pay.”

Chapter Twenty

The last day of July, and all the doors and windows were open to the vast late-evening heat. It lay lazy in the corridors of Seacliff Farm, penetrating to the coldest and most ancient of its bones. I sat on the bed in my ma’s room, watching the white curtains drift. I’d opened it up just half an hour before. She didn’t sing or show herself to me anymore, so it was up to me to trust the impulses that came from the essence of her living inside me, in my heart and the spirals of my DNA. I’d expected cobwebs, the inevitable smell of disuse. I’d expected a locked door. Harry had sealed the place up like a tomb, or he’d told me he had, but the lustrous bronze handle had turned as soon as I touched it, as if someone inside had been waiting.

The room was fresh, cool as water. The surfaces of her walnut dressing table and desk gave back the light just as they always had. She’d tolerated every kind of dirt in the farmhouse below, but this had been her sanctuary. There in their niches or on shelves at the cardinal points of the room were her creatures, little things she’d let me play with when I was a kid but took gently back from me and replaced afterwards, time-blackened carvings in oak. Clockwise from the north—a bull, a small stout man with wings she’d told me was an angel but looked way too happy and mischievous for that, a lion, a coiled dragon she’d called Griffin. I was grown up now so I hadn’t touched them. I’d sat on the bed, looked out through the window I hadn’t opened, and watched the curtains drift. Maybe Harry had come in here and tidied up until he died. It didn’t seem the kind of thing he would do.

As if the thought had been enough to summon him, I smelled bitter smoke. I sighed, closing my eyes. It wasn’t Reynolds, not his favourite, the one Cam had kept him supplied with once he knew the old sod’s preference. It was his rancid Black Ox. The kitchen still stank of it at a certain hour each night. For every ten times I switched the immersion heater on, five times I’d come back and find it switched off. The radio and the kettle too. I heard stamping footsteps upstairs. Doors banged when there was no one but me in the house.

It was becoming a nuisance, quite apart from the whole effect of making me think I was insane. I sat up straight on the bed. I didn’t open my eyes. “Harry,” I said. “Harry Nichol Seacliff.”

The silence in the corridor became attentive. I took a deep breath and let it go. “Right. Listen to me. I loved you with my whole heart, old man, and it’s your own fault I couldn’t tell you that while you were still alive. I love your farm too, and when I have a son—or a daughter—I’ll pass it on to them, with your name and all Caitlin’s stories. I want to stay. But if you haunt this place, I’ll pack my bags and go, and I’ll leave it to you and the wind.”

I sat still for a long time. Then, when the strange heavy quiet had dispersed, and summer air and jackdaws’ roosting calls were filling the room once more, I got up, still with the prickling sense that I was being watched. I looked once more round Caitlin’s room, then I gently closed the door.

Harry wasn’t in the corridor, but there were his dogs, sitting in a triangle without a centre point. I’d done my best to care for them, but they were thin and lonely. Vixen, as was customary, curled her lip at me and snarled. There was no point in talking to them.

Well, not in English, anyway. “
Coin mhath
,” I said. “
Ag éisteachd
.”
Good dogs. Listen to me.
“Your master’s gone, and I’m sorry. But you know what time of year it is. I’ve got shearing coming up, and then the beasts to put in folds as nights draw longer. I need dogs, good dogs that can herd sheep for me.”

I shut up.
The beasts to put in folds as nights draw longer?
Clearly the last two centuries had never happened for the Gaelic-speaking parts of my brain. Anyway, the dogs were gazing up at me in total incomprehension. “
Tha mi duilich. Na biodh cùram ort
.”
Sorry. Never mind. It doesn’t matter.

I set off down the stairs. When I heard the padding feet behind me, I knew a moment’s atavistic fear. Then Floss shoved her wet nose into my palm, and Gyp jostled his way to my side. Vixen, who would always be the tougher nut to crack, took a wild leap over him and shot ahead, but stopped and sat down waiting by the door.

I ruffled her ears as I went past. The yard was hot and very quiet. It had been such a long afternoon, and I’d waited as patiently as I could. I’d walked by Cam’s side every step of the long, long month just gone, but there were places I couldn’t go, and one of those was the arena where he stood and faced himself. A price had been asked of him, but it hadn’t been the one he’d expected. I’d often wondered if a medieval flogging or the sacrifice of a limb would have better scoured out the guilt from his heart. As it was, he’d been given bail and a suspended twelve-month sentence on condition that he testified against Bren McGarva, Baird and the rest of his gang.

Even desperate to set things right and do justice by Stu Duggan, a grass up on that scale had run against Cam’s good west-Glasgow grain. He’d told me last night—the night before the trial, in our grim Travelodge room near the district courthouse—that he’d rather have done the time, if he could have borne to be parted from me. But he’d stood in the witness box for just over an hour this morning and told the truth—so help him God, though he’d looked at me the whole time, not at the Bible on the stand, and not at Bren McGarva, whose stony-faced leer had never altered from the start to the finish of his ordeal. After that—it had seemed so strange, the drop into the ordinary, like common daylight after the opera—I’d been allowed to hail us a taxi, take him with me back to the hotel, pack our bags and catch the ferry home.

The crossing had been smooth, but neither of us had felt like tackling the overpriced sandwiches. We’d sat in what Calmac called the viewing lounge, which suggested 1920s grandeur and consisted, rather worryingly on a huge, tourist-packed ship, of cracked benches and broken curtain rails, and when at last I’d picked up the Toyota and driven us back to Seacliff, he’d asked for the first time to be alone.