Shrike (Book 2): Rampant (13 page)

I shut and lock the door behind me. 

"Oi, Taog?" I see one long foot stretched out on the coffee table, and I can't even get cheesed off that it's right next to a styrofoam container that most likely holds my supper. 

"I got you three suppers." 

His voice sounds like a hive of bees has taken up residence inside his throat. "Jesus, Taog. Are you okay?"

"I feel like hell. Guess all of the not sleeping caught up to me." His eyes are puffy and red, as is his nose. He leans his head back against the sofa. 

"Guess so. You're working from home this week, aren't you?" I watch him take a laborious breath, dismayed that this cold has taken over so quickly.

He nods and sniffs, switching to breathe through his mouth.

I sit across from him and eat. He flicks on the telly and puts it on a news station, which is the last thing I want to see right now, but I can't bring myself to tell him to change it. He looks like he's about to crumple into a ball of snot and stay that way.

I eat as the news goes on. After the referendum, there was a period of uncertainty. We all knew it would be a close vote, and no one could have predicted the attempted bombing of Edinburgh. How that influenced Scotland's people as they stepped inside the polling places to mark their X's in the boxes, we'll never really know. But now, knowing where we came from, it's hard to look ahead at where we're going. Uncertainty is still very much the watch word for Scots.

A reporter at Holyrood talks about the bickering at Parliament, and I try to tune it out. Political infighting is nowhere near my list of priorities just now. And yet, the way things have been going I wouldn't be horribly surprised to see John Abbey hiding away in the rafters of the parliament chamber, dangling strings above the heads of our MSPs. 

Still, I can do without the rampant chorus of "we told you so's" that colour the news every night lately.

A small snore reaches my ears, and I turn to look at Taog. His neck is bent at an impossible angle against he sofa, and his mouth hangs open. He looks so pitiful that I don't even know what to do with him. I finish wolfing down my three fish suppers and toss the rubbish in the bin, then gently wake Taog with a hand on his shoulder. He may be ill, but I don't have to worry about germs. 

He wakes enough for me to convince him to go to bed, and I help him get next door and up the stairs. 

"I'm supposed to train with David tomorrow," he says, almost slurring with exhaustion.

"I'll tell him. I reckon he'll be just fine." Poor Taog; I'm not surprised his body is shutting down. Weeks — months, really — of no sleep coupled with constant grief and stress. 

I wonder how long it will take mine to do the same. I tuck the duvet up around Taog's chin and make sure the heat in his flat is up to a suitable level. 

"Get some rest, love," I murmur. Again, I don't know why I called him love. But I don't rephrase myself, and he doesn't seem to notice or care what I'm saying. He's already asleep.

I hope he's able to stay that way without dreams.

I'd rang Trevor on my way home from meeting Macy and asked him to strengthen the detail on Sarah MacKay and Adair McCullough, and when I venture back over to my flat from Taog's, Trevor rings me back to let me know it's done.

"And I've a special request for you," he says.

"Which is?"

"I'd like you to go by each of their homes and see if the security folk are visible to you. They should be out of the way and unobtrusive. God knows I've done enough training with my staff members." Trevor sounds like death on a stick, but half as pretty.

"I'll do it. Who's first? Or does it matter?"

"Sarah MacKay. She's a bit farther away from your flat, but you can always come by Adair's on your way home." He points me to an address not far from where I met Macy today. 

I tell him I'll be there at dark, and we hang up. I talk more to Trevor than I speak to Magda lately. The thought hits me with a small pang. I've not seen her since the morning, and her mate Jarek was supposed to fetch her from the hospital this afternoon. Darkness falls in Edinburgh early in January, and by nine o'clock, I'm perched outside Sarah MacKay's flat. I spot Trevor's surveillance people, but only because I'm looking and know what I'm looking for. There's a woman at the end of the street pretending to check the headlamps on her car. Halfway down the street, a man chats on his mobile but keeps glancing toward Sarah MacKay's flat. There's a tall woman approaching the building, even, her hair tucked up into a hat. She reaches Sarah's doorstep and buzzes. A moment later, she's let in. I hear the click of the door, and the woman turns to look down the street in my direction.

It's Rosamund Granger.

She walked right by the surveillance people.

My heart hiccups, feeling like it's been stabbed with tiny needles. I leap from the rooftop and catch the branch of an oak tree, barely allowing my momentum to slow before dropping the remaining fifteen feet to the ground. I bolt for the door to Sarah's flat, hearing car doors open and slam behind me. They could be Britannia. Or they could be police. I don't know or care. All that matters is getting inside that building and up to Sarah MacKay's home before Granger puts a knife in the woman's chest. I don't waste time with the buzzer. 

I rip the door straight off its hinges and sprint through it.

Granger's made the stupid choice and taken the lift. I vault up the six flights of stairs to Sarah's flat and meet Granger coming out of the lift. 

"You're not going near her," I say, almost before I see recognition flit across Granger's face.

Here, in the well-lit corridor of a proper building, I can see her more clearly. Last time, her face was obscured by darkness and my fuzziness after she nearly electrocuted me. This time I can make out the anger in her face, the desperate frustration that tightens her eyes and sets her brain to calculating how close she can actually get to Sarah MacKay without me breaking her neck. I hear the banging of feet in the stairwell, and I know it's the people from outside. 

I'm not sure if they're friends or foes, but by the fear that freezes Rosamund Granger's face, she doesn't think they're friends of hers. Her blonde hair pokes out form underneath her hat, scraggly and unwashed looking.

"They not bathing you regularly, you nasty arsehole?" I ask. 

Granger snarls, shooting a glance behind me in the direction of Sarah's flat. 

"You're not going to get to her."

It's the wrong thing to say. Granger advances on me, pulling her taser out from a pocket. "I'll go through you if I need to, bitch."

That's the wrong thing to say to me. I throw myself at her feet, aiming to knock them out from under her.

A gunshot rings through the corridor. I hit the floor, derailed from my target. Who is fleeing down the hallway with no sign of any bullet impediment. If they're going to fire weapons indoors, can't they at least have half-decent aim?

"Get her!" A voice bellows behind me, and I hope to God they're not talking about me. 

"I will!" I shout it, and I'm already running. I'm faster than Granger, even though she's got the head start. 

Someone bulldozes me to the floor from the side. 

"Get off me!" I shove the bobby off my body and lurch away. I can't see Granger anymore. She didn't get on a lift to go back down — there must be another stairwell at the other end. I take off running, throwing on every inch of speed I can muster. I throw the door open to the stairwell, nearly taking it off its hinges just as I did the front door of the apartment. Launching myself down the stairs, I listen for the pounding footsteps that I should be hearing.

Nothing. I get to the building's foyer. No Granger to be found anyway.

"You stupid ass," I say, unsure if I mean me or the person who tackled me. I know I don't mean Granger. She's anything but stupid.

I hurry back upstairs, where a recovering team of three bobbies breathes heavily. One of them won't meet my eyes already. "I almost had her. I could have had her. You stopped me."

My words come out with deadly calm. 

"Anyone she kills after this is on you."

One of the bobbies looks as though he's about to swallow his tongue. It's a terrible thing to say, and I know it before the words leave my mouth. I know it's terrible because it's how I feel every day I remember that I had a chance to kill Granger. I had a chance to keep her from hurting anyone ever again. And instead I'm here, this day, with a murderous psychopath on the loose and possibly one survivor to go against the murders I can no longer count on both hands. Another bobby, a tall black man with a serious face who just now looks almost as angry as I feel, reaches for his radio. I stride past them to Sarah MacKay's door and knock.

It cracks open just a bit to show a brown face with wary eyes. "Sarah MacKay?" I ask.

She nods once, but she doesn't speak.

"Those constables in the corridor are here to protect you. Did you hear that gunshot?"

Her eyes search the corridor, and she answers. "Yes." 

Her eyes snap to mine, and I do my best to wipe all emotion from my face. "Someone was here for me?" Her voice sounds less nervous than I expect. Maybe she knew this day would come.

"Aye, someone was here." I shift my feet. "But those constables there, they'll keep you safe."

"Then what was the gunshot?" Sarah MacKay asks.

"Them doing their jobs."

thirteen

By now, Granger has to know we know about her targets. 

With both bobbies and me turning up at two of her hits, she's going to know we're on to her. My only hope is that she doesn't get creative and try killing Adair McCullough with a sniper rifle instead of a knife. Trevor's working on getting all the remaining list members to agree to something like house arrest for their safety, but none of that makes me feel better at all. If Granger wants them dead, dead they'll get.

Adair's neighbourhood is quiet and peaceful except for the roar of a landing plane from the airport nearby. I spot the surveillance officers, see that her flat is dark and undisturbed, and send Trevor a text to let him know all's well. I doubt Granger would be stupid enough to try again tonight, but I'm glad at least something's gone right.

A few streets from Adair's flat, I take off my mask, tuck up my tutu, and throw on the overcoat I stashed, dropping from the rooftops to street level. 

I stop at a 24-hour Tesco on my way home and pick up some instant meals. I don't care to cook, and the three fish suppers I already ate have already been burned through my body's furnace. 

Next to the frozen pizza, I see a familiar red head. "Shannon?"

She looks up, then smiles as she sees me. Shannon is a nurse at Edinburgh Sick Kids, and a few months back when everything was happening, all of us — me, Taog, Magda, the head of the Scottish National Party Glyn Burns, even my wanker of an ex-boyfriend Angus — ended up in her care. She's wearing black scrubs with light sabres on them and a black top that has a pale splotch on one side as if she's tried to wash off some sort of fluid and gave up when her shift ended. Her red hair is pulled back in what must have been a neat bun fourteen hours ago, but now a few hairs strain to be free.

"Gwen," she says in her soft English accent. Now that I know, I can hear the barely-there tinges of her native Welsh undulating beneath the surface. For a moment I see her face again, eyes limpid and full of tears as she tells me the meaning of my mother's final words.

I force a smile. "It's been a while, Shannon. How're you going?"

"Good, it's good. Back to normal at Sick Kids."

I take it by normal she means "no adults," and I nod. "Everything settling down, then?"

"Yeah, we're trying." She puts a couple pepperoni pizzas in her trolley and shuts the freezer door. "It looks like that's quite the opposite of how things are for you."

"Aye, you're not wrong."

"I heard about your mate Ross. I'm very sorry." 

She met him the night of the referendum, when he and David came to the hospital to watch the results. Magda and Taog were still bedridden, and we'd wheeled Magda into Taog's room and all sat there eating fried haggis and chips, joyful at the pure ecstasy of being alive after what we'd been through. 

And now Ross is in gaol, on remand because his fingerprints were on the bomb that almost killed us all. I can see the words behind her face. The
he seemed like a nice bloke
, and
it's just awful, isn't it
? The
I guess you never really know a person.
The things that everyone says because they don't know what else to say. One thing I've always liked about Shannon is that she keeps things simple and doesn't say those things at all, even if you know the impulse is there.

"I just…thought things would be different. After the referendum." I don't know what makes me say it; maybe I lack that filter that Shannon has. Maybe I'm just that tired.