Authors: Marcus Sedgwick
Finally, feeling much stronger, I returned to Glasgow, taking the train down the coast on a bitter winter’s morning in order to check my post-office box for any communication from Hayes, the detective.
There was nothing.
I had been brooding over the way things had been with Hunter. I wrote him a short note, giving him the assumed name I was using, and the box number, and asking him to tell it to no one else, not even Susan. Since he had a key to my house, I asked if he’d forward any important post that came for me. I asked him if he’d mind checking once a week or so. And I told him I was sorry for our disagreement, and sorry that I’d been angry with him.
I was disappointed over Hayes’ lack of progress, and had nothing to go on, nothing at all. I wondered if I was wasting my time, hiding away in the wilds of Scotland like a frightened lamb, sending this flatfoot out to do my work for me, because I was too afraid.
Just as I was about to leave Glasgow, I paid one more call to the post office, and found a letter that had arrived that day.
He said he had reached the end of his investigations, that he had been unable to find out anything about the man called Verovkin or Lippe, and that he therefore resigned from the case. His wording was strange, the note unusually brief.
I wrote back immediately, doubling his fee for a third time, and sent it off to London.
I went back to Glasgow for the next two weeks, but there was nothing from Hayes. He had simply stopped replying to me.
There was nothing from Hunter either.
Chapter 4
On my final trip to Glasgow, a more sinister interpretation occurred to me. The idea was triggered as I stepped aboard my train back to Loch Nevis, because as I did so, I saw, two carriages along, a man climbing on, a man whom I was sure I’d seen at the post office.
That in itself proved little, but I was worried. I stumbled into an empty compartment and put myself by the outside window, glancing at the corridor. Supposing Hayes had strayed outside his brief? If he’d made contact, he might have been rumbled. If so, Verovkin might have extracted Hayes’ purpose from him. Of course he only knew my false name, but to a man used to using aliases of his own, it wouldn’t take long to work out that it was probably I who’d hired a detective.
I thought about Hayes’ last note, and wondered if he’d actually written it, and as I remembered that it had been typed, I felt the urge to be sick. All his other letters had been handwritten.
They’d got to him.
They’d got to him and most likely he was dead now, but not before he’d told them the little information he had on me. My false name, my post-office box number. They wouldn’t have known he’d written by hand before, and had typed his resignation letter to allay my suspicions.
I sat, breathing hard, still staring at the corridor, and was about to leave the train when it began to slide out of the station.
An elderly couple came into the compartment and smiled at me as they settled themselves in, carrying such a quantity of shopping baskets that it made me think they were going a long way. Just as they sat down, the man from the post office came past.
He didn’t stop, he didn’t even glance round, but I knew it was him. He looked hard, and strong, possibly Eastern European. He stole along the corridor, and there was something of an animal in the way he walked. I grew afraid.
‘Christmas shopping,’ said the lady across from me.
Startled, I looked over and saw her shaking her head at their baskets.
‘We’ve left it too late, as always.’
She laughed and I nodded, trying to smile. Her husband’s eyes twinkled as she patted his hand, and they settled down to some sandwiches that she produced from some wax paper.
The train began its long steady journey up the west coast, and with every stop I grew more and more alarmed. At each halt I leaned from the window cautiously to see if the man got off, but he did not.
It was dusk now, but the train was not busy and it was easy enough to see the few faces walking briskly along the little platforms, hurrying into the dark.
‘Are you not local?’ said the old lady.
I sat down, wondering what to say.
‘Are you afraid you’ll miss your stop? Where are you going, dear? We can tell you when to get off.’
‘Unless he’s voyaging beyond Arisaig,’ said her husband, holding a forefinger up theatrically. ‘That’s where we alight.’
He twinkled at me and I didn’t know if he was deliberately being quaint or if this was how he really spoke.
‘You’ll be for the island, mebbe?’ he added.
I was still too confused to answer, unsure what to say, as the man who I was now sure was following me passed the compartment again.
This time he walked slowly, and this time he did look at me. Deliberately, I could see. He half smiled as he saw the old couple, and walked on, and as he went out of sight, I grew more afraid.
‘Where do you need to get off, dear?’ said the old lady again.
‘Mallaig,’ I stumbled out.
‘So! He’s for the island.’
‘That’s two after us, dear,’ the lady said, addressing me again. ‘But it’s the end of the line, so you can’t miss it. Where’s your bags? You’ll be on Skye for the holidays? A schoolteacher, I’m guessing. Yes? Well, we have everyone coming this year. So much shopping . . .’
She spoke on, and on, and I was glad of it, because it meant I had to say very little. Her husband sat with his eyes twinkling, rocking gently as the train sped along into the night, the stops fewer and fewer.
Before I could think further, we had reached Arisaig, and the old couple gathered all their things together and made a great display of leaving the train.
As the door closed, the man nodded at me.
‘The compliments of the season to you!’ he announced, and they left.
I tried to calm myself, but as the train rolled on, I knew I had less and less time to make a decision. There were two stops left; Morar, and mine: Mallaig, the end of the line.
The man had not reappeared, and I wondered if he’d got out at Arisaig when I’d been occupied helping the old couple with their Christmas shopping.
I made a decision, and as the train pulled into Morar, I readied myself. I waited for a few seconds, and heard one or two doors slam further along the train. I opened my door and stepped out, looking first up and then down the platform. A second later, the man got off, just a carriage away.
He looked at me.
Still, there was the possibility that this was coincidence.
Then the guard’s whistle blew, and just as it did, I stepped back on to the train, and even in the dark of the poorly lit platform, I could see the eyes of the man as he climbed swiftly aboard.
It began to move, and now there was no doubt.
It was only a few minutes from Morar to Mallaig, and yet it was an agonising wait as I sat by the door to the outside, my eyes on the corridor in the direction he would come.
As the train rumbled on, I started to doubt that he was going to make his move, and as we pulled into Mallaig I could see he didn’t want to draw attention to himself, and I knew he was going to follow me out of the station.
It was around ten, a late December night. Mallaig was deserted.
The cottage I was renting was a good walk away, a couple of twisting miles along the southern shore of Loch Nevis, which usually took me at least forty minutes.
I was afraid. I had formed no plan, beyond calling at the police station and banging on the door and demanding to be let in until the murderer following me got bored and left. The idea was ludicrous, and I knew I was on my own. I’d thought about what I had in the cottage, and knew I could leave it all without returning. I had bought a few clothes, some books. I had some money there. I had much more elsewhere, and the few thousand pounds in cash in the cottage could be lost easily enough. There was nothing I could not leave behind, just as I had left more precious, more valuable things in my house in Hills Road without a second moment’s thought.
It was time to move on again, I could see, but first I had to get away from the man behind me.
It was a cold night, and as I leaped from the train and began to walk briskly out of the station a bitter wet wind welcomed me. I tried to glance behind me as I walked around the side of the station and was pleased to see I had a good head start on him.
Walking several miles a day had made me fit, and I used my speed to put more space between us. I turned from Station Road, not heading down the bay road as usual, but up on to Annie’s Brae.
Beyond the town it was always pitch-black at night and so I took a torch, but I didn’t use it this time. Instead, as I passed the last few houses, I saw a chance. I looked behind me. I couldn’t see him, but I knew that didn’t necessarily mean he couldn’t see me. There was nothing else to do, so I slipped around a small outcrop of rock that the road to the headland cut through, and waited.
Above the noise of the wind, I only heard his footsteps at the last moment. For a second I thought my plan had worked and he had walked on, but somehow he seemed to know what I’d done, and was turning to me in the darkness before I realised what was happening.
I saw his arm out in front of him as if he was holding a knife in his hand. He was right on top of me and I flung myself out of the dark crevice I was hiding in, and wrestled with him.
I wasn’t even thinking as I pushed him away, and he stumbled back over the short drop to the beach.
It wasn’t far, maybe just ten feet, but he landed on rocks. I heard the air come out of him as he fell and I heard something crack.
I began to run back to Mallaig, but I stopped. There was no sound from behind me. Cautiously I picked my way back up the short steep slope and peered over. I could see nothing. There was no sound but the wind, and the waves on the shore.
I stared long into the darkness and then saw the headlights of a car climbing out of Mallaig.
Scrambling down, I hid as the car passed, and then felt my way in the dark to where I thought the man had fallen.
I stepped on something soft and, recoiling, I crouched.
It was him. His neck was broken, and he had died instantly.
Something made me want to search him; I suppose I wanted to know my enemy. In the darkness I fumbled through his pockets and found a wallet, a bunch of keys, and nothing else.
I felt wetness on my hands.
The wetness was warm. I pulled the torch from my pocket and dared to flash it on briefly, and saw that his blood was all over me. My hands, my clothes. I saw the back of his head, and the hole in it, and with morbid horror, I knew where the blood had come from.
I stared at him for a moment more, but I cannot really say I was thinking what to do. I just did it.
I switched off the torch, then felt down and fumbled for his wrists, and began to haul him backwards across the rocks. I had to lift his body at times; at others I was able to let it roll a foot or two, when it would smash into more stones.
It took me for ever to get him to the sea, and then I pulled him as far out as I could wade, until I was so frozen and in danger of being swept away myself that I abandoned his body.
As I staggered from the sea I tried to wash the blood from my hands, but in the dark had no way of knowing if I was successful.
I was just climbing away from the site of the fall when I kicked something and heard the clink of metal on stone.
He’d had that knife in his hands.
I risked the torch once more and it didn’t take me long to find the thing, but it wasn’t a knife, it was a gun. A revolver.
I put it in my pocket, and then headed back to my cottage, half walking, half running through the town, only slowing when I reached the end of the bay road and climbed out past the last houses.
My place slowed, and I began to shiver. I was soaked through to the skin as high as my waist, the night was cold and then the rain came down, hard.
I think I was on the verge of hypothermia as I finally made it into my cottage around
11
o’clock.
I pulled off my wet clothes, and wrapped a blanket around me until I felt warmer. I struggled to light the fire I’d laid before I’d set out, using almost half a box of matches in my clumsiness. I drank a glass of whisky and then took another long swig from the bottle, which I clutched as I rocked backwards and forwards on a chair in front of the fire, waiting to get warm.
I stared into the flames for a long time as it slowly dawned on me that I’d just killed someone, something I’d never done as a soldier.
Then I remembered that I’d taken his wallet and, still wound up tight in the blanket, I reached for my coat and pulled the fat fold of leather from the pocket.
Along with twenty pounds in cash there were a few slips of paper, and a small bunch of business cards. In fact, five copies of the same business card.
His
business card.
The name on it read Douglas M. Hayes, and only then did I realise that I’d killed my private detective.
I dropped the cards on the floor, staring at them in horror, motionless for a minute.