Cold fusion, p.28
Cold Fusion, page 28
The rotors’ throb became a world-consuming beat, shaking the hills on their foundations, loud enough even for me to believe that rescue was at hand, a cure for the unbearable. Two green-clad figures were out and ducking beneath the blades almost before touchdown. They were clutching heavy-looking holdalls, and I knew from TV dramas that these would contain resuscitation gear.
“Viv,” I said, having to shout at him over the racket of the blades. “They’re here, okay? It’s gonna be all right.” He clutched my hand in response, or that was how I interpreted his convulsive grab. I dragged on a mask of calm for the first burly paramedic pulling open the truck’s rear door. “We’re in here. Quick, please. I’m not sure he’s breathing.”
After that it was out of my hands. The second medic ran round the back of the truck and hauled me out by my armpits. He was kind, and made sure I was on my feet before he let me go, but his whole focus was centring where it ought to be—on Viv, who had fallen back like a stem-cut rose onto the seat, who was neither fighting nor responding to the lights being shone into his eyes, the repeated shouts of his name. That was okay, though. It meant things would get done urgently and fast. If he’d been more responsive, maybe the paramedics wouldn’t have understood how serious things were. I managed to persuade myself it was a good thing when they tipped his head back and shoved a tube down his throat.
“Mallory!”
Alfred was holding me by the arm. I didn’t know why, until he let go and the air wash from the rotors almost knocked me down. We’d created our own microclimate here, a cyclone of light and noise and crisis. He held up a finger to me. “One!”
“One what?”
“They’ll let one of us go with the chopper.”
I was having to lip-read him. The pilot was keeping her hot, ready to go, and that was good too. I liked Alfred—would have grown, like Viv, to love him dearly in the course of years—and I wondered how I was going to tell him that I’d break his neck rather than let him take my place at Viv’s side. But he poked me hard in the chest with the same finger. “You.”
As soon as I got what I wanted, I felt inadequate. “But you know all about him.”
“I’ve told them. They’re going straight to Edinburgh. Stay with him.”
“I will, I swear. What about you?”
“You know where I’m going.”
I looked into his ferocious old face. Did he mean to storm the biological Vatican in person? I wondered how Constanza would feel, waking up to find him at the foot of her bed, shotgun in hand, as if she were a rare bird he’d finally bagged. Fear dropped away from me. Whatever was necessary, Alfred would do it. He’d find a way.
The paramedics were lifting Viv out of the back seat now, transferring him onto a stretcher. They made it look easy, and maybe it was. Maybe from now the wheel would turn. Alfred whisked me round and gave me a push towards the vortex. The pilot was gesturing that I should follow the medics and keep my head low. I could manage that. I took a deep breath and ran.
* * * * *
My serenity was pure shock. I sat strapped to a seat in the thundering machine, barely noticing that my mortal frame was being hoisted up, tipped and swayed through the forty-minute flight to Braidwood, that the scattered villages drew together, stretched filaments of streetlight between them and became a heaped-up treasure cave of jewels, Auld Reekie transformed by distance to the Arabian Nights. I wasn’t allowed to touch Viv, equally trapped and tied down in his place, and for now I didn’t mind—the medics had it all in hand, tending like deft-handed priests the machines at the head of the stretcher. When we got where we were going, they would let me have him back.
They didn’t. I’d been in a helicopter a couple of times before during Peace Warrior stunts, and I wasn’t alarmed by the swoop and the drop onto the helipad, though I sensed they were coming in at the far edge of full emergency speed. I didn’t return to my skin until I was out on the tarmac, trying to keep my feet in the battering dark. The rooftop doors were flying open, light and people spilling out. They weren’t about to give Viv back to me at all. They formed a cage around him, cutting me off, and then the stretcher was retreating. I began to stumble in its wake. They let me through the doors with them, and even into the huge lift that opened its jaws to receive us. The doctor who elbowed me in the face as she held a drip bag over Viv’s wired-up, motionless form found a smile for me, a wry apology.
But then he was gone. There was a corridor, a neon-lit highway. The doors at the end of it opened—swallowed Viv and his retinue whole. I’d thought I was close enough to get engulfed too in the general rush, but the doors slammed in my face, a hissing, cushioned barricade. Automatic, no handle on the outside. Magnetic locks, probably, requiring a key card to degauss. No room for argument at all. I tried for a while anyway, tugging at the frames of the glass portholes, banging my palms off the wood.
A tired female face—way too nice to shout at, so I stopped—appeared behind the glass. The intercom rustled and opened. “Mr. Kier Mallory?”
“Yes. Let me through. Please.”
“You can’t come into ICU, not yet.”
“But…” My throat and eyes filled. “I have to stay with him. I promised Alfred.”
“Mr. Macready’s told us who you are. You’ll be given bedside access once Vivian’s stabilised. Until then, can you quit banging the doors down and try and be good?”
Too nice to shout at, too reasonable to fight. This was how people got their bloody way with me. Aggression I could match, punch my way through. I fell back, raising my hands. “Aye, all right. I’m sorry.”
“There’s comfortable chairs in the lounge down the corridor if you want to sleep. The cafe’s closed, but there’s a vending machine. Are you in need of some change?”
I had absolutely no idea. “I’d rather stay here.” I took up position on the hard plastic seat nearest the doors. “I’ll be here, okay? Right here.”
I didn’t sleep. I was fairly sure of that, and it didn’t seem likely that I would, bolt upright and shot through with terror as I was. Something must have happened, though, because my next impression of the corridor was sunlight, morning bustle, the smell of coffee. And, inexplicably, sitting opposite me in her own plastic chair, my mother, with Alice Maguire’s mother grim-faced and rigid at her side.
Perhaps I’d died. This was quite a welcoming committee, even by the standards of the Kerra hellfire minister. Doubtless Jill Maguire would say I deserved it, and whatever punishments came after. I wouldn’t argue. My throat was gritty, though, and I could barely see past the scraping dryness of my eyelids. I sat forward in my chair. “Sorry. Let me just go and have a quick wash.”
In the bathroom down the corridor, I splashed water into my face and scrubbed a lingering tang of gun oil off my hands. The events of the previous night whirled around the sink with the water, and I struggled not to go down with them. None of it seemed very likely, but nor did my waking reality. I dried off with paper towels, took a second to check my unshaven, fear-haunted face was halfway presentable and free from snot or tears, and stepped back out.
My mother ran into my arms. That was more unexpected than her being here in the first place. My reflexes were firing if not much else, and I caught her, propping up her stiff little hug. “What are you doing here, Ma?”
“That old man from the castle, the one who came and told me you were still alive…he phoned in the small hours and said you were here. He sent a car. I’m glad to see you, Kier.”
“He sent a car? Alfred Macready?” I shook my head, waking up a bit. “Ma, has a doctor been through? Have they said anything about Viv?”
“No. There’s been nobody through at all.” She looked good this morning, did Ma Mallory. The dreadful headscarf was gone, the slippers replaced with smart court shoes. Hospital visiting was a bit of a calling for the North Kerra elders, and she’d risen to the occasion, though I couldn’t work out who she was here to see. “Kier, there’s something I want to tell you—something Jill wants to tell you, anyway—before you go chasing off after that young man. Will you come and sit down?”
I didn’t think so. I wanted to chase off after my young man. Then I remembered how badly I’d wanted to see Jill Maguire when I’d first got home, the sense of duty that had consumed me. That feeling was still there, made sharper by my own sense of oncoming loss. “Yes. Okay.” I resumed my seat. My ma did too, and there I was facing them again. Jill Maguire had an envelope in her hand, holding it upright by its short end like a sword. I was reminded of a pair of stiff medieval angels in a stained-glass window. Well, I’d courted this hour of judgement. I decided to help her begin. “My ma says you want to talk to me, Mrs. Maguire.”
“Not exactly. When your mother happened to be getting a ride to the hospital here, she asked me to come too.”
So, you were dragged. Her hair was thinning, her mouth a bitter twist. Pity crawled through me—not empathy or compassion or any of the adult things we’re meant to feel for one another—just raw bloody sorrow, red as entrails in the snow. “What can I do for you? I know you hate the sight of me, but…I’ll do anything I can.”
“I want you to listen. Before I start, I warn you that I still hold you responsible for taking my child out on that fool’s mission.”
My mother bristled. I’d never seen that before, and I did a double take. She’d lived in fear of her neighbours, my father nipping her self-respect in the bud at every turn. “And I would point out to you, Jill Maguire, that although your daughter was a fine girl, and beloved of us all, she was no’ a child when she decided to take her chances on that ship.”
I couldn’t believe it. In a way I didn’t care, and it was years too late for her to start defending me. My mind stretched yearningly through the tight-sealed doors to wherever Viv lay, my man who knew all my sins and loved me anyway. “Don’t, Ma,” I said uncomfortably. “Let her talk.”
“I will, if she speaks rightly. Jill, if it’s too hard for you, I’ll tell him.”
“No. I’ve come all this way.” She was crying. “I had this letter through from the police in Norway. Somebody—not an investigator, a private individual—hired a team of salvage divers to find and raise the launch from the Sea Hawk.”
I rested my elbows on my knees, then ran a hand over my head, which was spinning badly. “I don’t understand. Why couldn’t the police do that—raise the boat, I mean?”
“Because it costs a fortune, and there was no cause. They knew who was to blame.” She winced at the shove of my mother’s elbow. “They thought they knew. But it seems the boat had been tampered with before it hit the water. They found two holes in the hull, blown out from the inside. They found traces of explosive.”
My throat was numb. I had to organise my voice around my words. “Wait. She was scuppered?”
“So it seems. And fool as I think you, Kier Mallory, you’re no more capable of a wicked act than of flying. They’ve traced and discounted every member of the crew, apart from a man called—”
A trace of explosives. A trail that would lead from the fjord to the burned-out huts of Spindrift. “Alan Frost.”
“Aye, but that’s not his real name. They reckon he’s an agent working for the oil companies, setting up ways to discredit environmental campaigns. He’s disappeared.”
She put the envelope back in her bag. I wasn’t going to get to see this concrete piece of evidence. She’d done all she could to tell me its contents and deprive herself of a good local target for her blame. Her grief could hardly follow Alan Frost and pin itself to him in the lonely watches of the night. She’d never even met him.
“Thank you,” I said. “Thanks for telling me.”
“I don’t look on this as your absolution, Kier.”
She was miserable, but Viv had taught me that I still had a right to exist. I knew who the private individual had been. Impossibly private, an oyster guarding pearls beyond imagination. Hijacking an iPad in a service station, making me watch that damn tape—recorded and loaded for the world by Alan Frost—then sending me away. Asking to borrow my phone. I dug out a tissue from my jeans and held it out to Jill Maguire—took hold of and kept her hand when she reached for it.
“I’ll never feel absolved for Alice,” I said. “She did follow me to join Peace Warrior. But I didn’t send her out into seas that were too rough for that launch, and I didn’t…I didn’t bloody murder her.”
Jill tore her hand out of mine. She snapped her handbag shut, threw the strap over her shoulder and walked stiffly off down the corridor. My ma watched her—not unkindly, but as if she felt some kind of justice had been done. I wished I could have told her that it didn’t work that way. “Do you want to go after her?”
“No. She’ll be coming home with me. In the Calder Castle car,” she added after a second, and I could tell that the name and the privilege were a huge satisfaction to her. She fixed me with a meaningful glare. “Besides, there’s a grief that a mother can only face on her own.”
“I’m sorry, Ma. The same guy who scuppered that launch came after me and Vivian. We had to make a run for it, and it was easier if people thought we were dead.”
“Aye. Easier for you.” She let me steep for a few seconds, then checked to see that Jill was out of earshot. Her expression altered, and she leaned conspiratorially towards me. “Is it true, then? About you and Vivian Calder?”
I wondered what she’d heard. If she’d got the story from Alfred, it would have been short and sharp enough. And he must have given her some reason for my being here. I didn’t really care. It was still hard to articulate what I’d swept under rugs, shoved into holes and corners, all my life. “We’re…together. He’s my boyfriend, if that’s what you’re asking.”
She sat back. She really was looking spry today, wearing a touch of makeup for once, her hair nicely styled. “I can’t say I’ve ever been very happy, Kier, about your being…that way.”
“I didn’t do it to make you happy.” I rubbed my eyes. “Not to make you unhappy, either. I’ve tried not to shove it in your face.”
“No,” she agreed, to my surprise. “You haven’t. I’ll tell you something—Ailsa Stewart with her son-in-law the lawyer, and Fay MacGregor with her laddie who married that actress, and all the other gossips who come and tell me how well this one of their daughter and that one of their sons is doing—not one of them’s brought home a laird. Straight or gay.”
This was totally fucking surreal. I was sitting in Edinburgh sunlight, my whole life in the balance off down the corridor behind those still-closed doors, receiving parental approbation because I’d landed an aristocrat. Even if he was another bloke.
“Vivian’s not a laird,” I said, far from sure why on earth I was bothering. “It isn’t a hereditary title. And I haven’t brought him home yet.”
“Ah, but everyone around here knows who the Calders are. And if you did ever bring him, I’m sure he’d be very welcome.”
I tried to imagine. Vivian perched on the edge of our stained couch, trying not to twitch at the joyless, loveless, tawdry mess of the place. My father enthroned in his recliner, pointing a half-empty bottle of scotch while he gave his views on poofters, the propertied classes in general and land-grabbing bastard Calders in particular. “Yeah. My dad would love that.”
Her face gave an odd little jerk. There was something amiss here, I belatedly realised, something weird, over and above the high strangeness of the whole situation. I put my head on one side, drew a breath—let it go and started again. “All due respect, Ma, but why did Alfred Macready think it was so urgent to get you here that he sent a car?”
“I’m your mother. Isn’t that enough?”
No. Obviously not. The glance we exchanged in the silence after her question was awkward, sad, honest. She sighed and glanced out of the window at the bright Edinburgh sky. “Your father’s dead, Kier. He went fishing overnight with Baz Jones and his cronies. They all started drinking, and he must have just fallen overboard, because until they were well on their way home, they didn’t even notice he was gone.”
I stared at her. “He’s dead?”
“Yes. I’m not expecting you to break your heart, but remember that he was my husband. And your dad.”
We sat like a pair of ill-matched bookends on either side of the corridor, both of us trying to remember what he ought to have been. We really did have a good try. Her eyes glistened with tears for a moment. And I’d been taught not to speak ill of the dead. I even cast my mind back over the years, trying to find a bright patch, a time when we’d gone out on the trawler and stood shoulder to shoulder during a storm, or found a moment’s camaraderie down the pub. I tried on the mantle of the loving son who forgave his father in death.
No. There was no such thing. My ma had come up empty too, and because we were face-to-face here in the sunshine, neither of us could hide our abject failure. He’d died, and she’d gone out and spent a bit of the money he’d have pissed away otherwise on getting her hair done. On buying herself a new coat and a decent pair of shoes. Alfred hadn’t wanted to tell me himself, but he’d had her sent to me by special delivery because he’d known it would be such a bloody relief.
“Wait,” I said weakly. “He went overboard, and his mates didn’t even notice?”
She let loose a startled bray of laughter and clamped a hand over her mouth. Her eyes were wide above it. “Kier. Don’t.”
“He’s really gone?”
“Yes, thank God.” She got up, straightening her skirt. “I have to go and find Jill. The business and the boats are yours if you want them, Kier. It’d be a good living for a sober, decent man. I hope your young laird comes well through his illness. Bring him for tea once you’re home.”
She wasn’t used to walking in heels. Her progress off up the corridor was unsteady. Once she was out of sight, my own weird spasm of hilarity faded fast. The sensation of being caught in a half-waking dream intensified. Viv would have loved to hear that I now owned a three-boat trawler fleet as well as a croft in Glencathadh. All the good things of the earth, the assets Hugo Calder had wished to bestow on him, he now seemed to want for me. I wondered when I’d get the chance to tell him that he was my life’s one treasure, my only hope of prospering in this world.
