Shrike (Book 2): Rampant (21 page)

If there's anything I'm certain of as I change into my accountant clothes in the Grahamston station lavatory, it's that I can't go to Trevor with this. He'll only think I'm more suspicious and paranoid than he already does, and when I do find out what Britannia are up to, I need him to believe me. 

Part of my brain whispers that maybe I am crazy. Maybe Britannia are just planning to kill Edmund in a week's time. Maybe they needed more than four months to regroup after their failed attempt to blow up Scotland's capital. But I know what I feel, and I know what John Abbey said to me that night. Drugs or no drugs in the champagne, he was there. I text Taog from the train, letting him know I'm okay and that I'm going straight to work.

Even my work fails to distract me today. It's Friday, and I feel as though this week has stretched on forever. Was it really just last night I found the letters in Gina Galbraith's flat? So much happened between my supper with Magda and trudging into my office that I feel as though someone dropped me through a wormhole yesterday, allowed me to live a lifetime, and plunked me back in my own timeline having only lost a single night.

As much as I try to concentrate, my morning is full of interruptions. Staff questions, Francis Duck stops in, and between all of that, I can't stop checking the tracer's location on my mobile. Granger mostly stays in the house in Falkirk, but twice during the day my heart skips when I see she's left. Once my best guess is that she got a craving for McDonald's, the other time she seems to have simply gone for a stroll around Falkirk, weaving through back streets for half an hour before returning to the house. 

The office begins to clear out around five in the afternoon, and for once I leave with them, having barely managed to concentrate enough to finish my work for the day.

I go directly to Taog's flat, where I find him in the kitchen. His eye looks better where the capillaries burst, and he looks better in general. He smiles when he sees me, and as always lately, that smile is fuelled by relief. The box of letters from Gina's place is sitting out on Taog's table next to a crate of oil paints and brushes I haven't seen him touch since the referendum. The sight of them there saddens me. I'm not a creative person. I like numbers, and these days, I like physical activity. I'd rather learn a new kata than draw a picture, and the closest thing to a work of art that I've made of late is the smears of mud and bits of gravel stuck in the spandex of my costume.

But he is a creative person, and the stacked blank canvasses in the corner of his dining nook are just a reminder of the blankness we both feel. He's made a veritable vat of pasta for supper, and for once his appetite almost matches mine. I help him do the washing up, the box of letters pulling me magnetically from where it sits on the table.

It's his idea to work backward in the box, starting with the succinct final letter sent just days before the referendum. The letters paint a picture of Andrew Granger like a fine tapestry, detailed and nuanced at one end and fraying into tatters on the other. I pick up the letter second from the end, and hand Taog the one before it. I set my cup of tea on the kitchen worktop to avoid spilling it on these precious bits of evidence and begin to read.

Dear Gina,

It burns, this feeling of wrongness. I should be with you, far from where I am, and yet I'm here, trapped in an inferno I can't escape. Sometimes I feel my mind slipping, like the best parts of me have fled back to you, leaving only a husk to crinkle and crisp in this blaze. I belong in hell.

I never wanted you to see this, even secondhand or from afar. I dreamed a dream of a different life, and like Fantine, life has killed the dream I dreamed.

I'm tired of wearing a mask.

Andy

To a random onlooker, this note would seem simply despondent. But the date is the same as my kidnapping, the night I first saw Rosamund Granger when she burst into the lab beneath Hammerton, Inc., crowing about her capture of Glyn Burns. It can't be a coincidence that Andrew used that word in this missive. Suddenly the entire stack of letters makes me wonder if this is Andrew Granger's confessional and not simply love letters to a woman he thought he didn't deserve.

And the mention of a mask sends a shiver through me. Andrew saw me in mine, but not until later. He wrote this before he spotted me lurking outside of the flat where his mother forced him to torture Glyn Burns. He wrote this before he let me into the Hammerton building, raving about how I would never stop them. How helpless he must have felt. How trapped.

The next letter was written two weeks earlier, just before 

Dear Gina,

Today I walked down by the old church at Holyrood and thought I heard whispers. I can't shake it lately, this sense that I'll hear those whispers wherever I go for the rest of my life. The saints there in the square, they seem to accuse me with every step. Every day I think of walking with you hand in hand through Kelvingrove Park. How simple it was for us to meander those paths. How they gave me hope that one day, those paths would be our path together into a better future, far from the whispers that plague me.

The referendum is coming so quickly. I wish I could greet it with anything but trepidation, but I can't. Beyond trepidation is the knowledge that my family wants me to join them in whatever it is they have planned. It haunts me, and even as I feel the tendrils clutching at me, I want to break free. I just don't know if I can. You are the strong one between us, my love. Were our places switched, you would find something you could do to help.

All my love,

Andy

I look over at Taog, who is reading his own set of letters with a bemused expression. "What did you find?"

"The lad seems nutters. He went on about a cold snap and waking up to frost all around him in July." 

I stare at Taog, wide-eyed. "Taog," I say, about to tell him my suspicion when I see the realisation dawn on his face like water drops down a window.

"Frost. In July. His uncle." Taog rereads the other letter in his hand. "He's writing in code, or at the very least weaving in hints. Do you think he was feeding her the names of Britannia members?"

"I don't know. But I think he told her about Burns." I show Taog the letter in my hand. If Andrew was veiling information about Britannia throughout these love letters to Gina, I haven't the faintest idea how we're going to sift through all of it. 

"You ought to take it to Trevor."

"He won't believe me."

"How can you be sure unless you find out? Either way, letters from the late Andrew Granger to his girlfriend — who is on the list of targeted people —"

"She
wrote
that list, Taog. Trevor'll say she put herself there out of paranoia."

"Some paranoia is justified." He sets the letter down on the table.

The air feels thick and heavy. He's right. I know he's right. I think even Trevor knows he's right. The problem is, Trevor wants to reserve the prerogative to decide which paranoia is justified and which is nutters. 

A snide little part of my mind points out that I'm essentially doing the same thing, but I ignore it. I'm party to more information than Trevor is.

Maybe Taog is right. Maybe I need to share.

I regret my decision immediately. Sitting in Trevor's office, surrounded by case files and looking at a framed picture of Eilean Donan on the wall that sits askew like a dog cocking its head, I wish I'd never come here.

Trevor took my sack of scones and the large cuppa I brought him, paged through the photocopies of Andrew's letters, and then left the room.

I feel naked sitting here, dressed in jeans and a Doctor Who t-shirt, my face exposed. The bobbies in St. Leonard's know me only as a woman Trevor befriended after a home invasion, and even the ones who have met me as my alter ego can't seem to reconcile my masked identity with the woman who brings scones and tea for their sergeant. Maybe all Kansas-boy really needed was glasses after all. People, even people trained to be observant, seem to struggle to recognise others when they're found out of expected context.

Wishing I could climb into the TARDIS on my shirt and zoom away to another planet — at this point any other planet would do — I wait for Trevor to come back. I don't know why he's gone, but the ticking of his desk clock holds about as much comfort as a clock in a crocodile's belly.

When the door clicks behind me, I turn. Trevor stumps into the room, still holding the letters I gave him. He sits next to me instead of behind his desk, screeching his chair on the floor to face me.

"I appreciate you bringing these to me," he says. He reaches out a hand, and for a second I think he's about to take mine.

He seems to think better of it and retracts his arm, folding his hands in his lap instead. I expected disdain, maybe a bit of anger, annoyance — anything but an attempt at tenderness. The gentle almost-gesture makes me more nervous than the possibility of dismissal.

"I obviously haven't had time to read through all of these." Trevor nods at the stack of copies in his lap. His left leg begins a little tap on the floor. I can feel the reverberations, and it only adds to my uneasiness. "I'll go through them more later, but from what I can see, they're the letters of a madman."

There it is. The dismissal. "I don't disagree that Andrew's mind was damaged by his family and what they made him do, but even people who are cracking might have something useful to say."

"And we'll look for it, but Gwen, you have to understand how this looks."

"How what looks?"

"You're starting to sound like one of the people on that list." When the words leave his mouth, he looks like his tongue has betrayed him. He swallows as if he thinks he can gulp the words back down.

Is it really paranoia when you can predict someone's behaviour? "If you expect me to start prattling about how the moon landing was faked and that 9/11 was an inside job, don't hold your breath. But you know as well as I do that Britannia are real. They are real, and they tried to wipe out our city."

"I know, Gwen. But we got them."

"Are you sure you're not the mad one here?" Anger bubbles up in me, and I push my chair back and stand, looking down at him. "Granger is not all of Britannia. She and Frost were not its only members any more than you're the only sergeant in Scotland. They're still out there, and they're the ones pulling Granger's strings."

"We've not seen any evidence to support that. Her movements and behaviour are that of someone working on her own. She doesn't seem to be getting orders from anyone."

I've heard her get orders. I want to scream it in his face, because I'm right, and he's wrong, and everything that comes out of his mouth makes me wish I could just tell him about the tracer on Granger and what I heard. But at this point I'm thinking he flat wouldn't believe me at all. The way he almost reached out and took my hand, that was a patronising gesture, a pat on the head of an abused dog.

He shifts in his chair, and that's when I see it. In his sleeve. A bulge. I take three big steps backward. "Trevor, what is in your sleeve?"

He goes still, a reflex that shows he's hiding something and trying not to betray it, even though he doesn't look at his arm or twitch a finger toward it. "Nothing."

"I can see the bloody lump, McLean. What in sodding hell is up your sleeve?"

"Just a precaution, Gwen." His face has drained of colour, and he darts a glance toward the door.

And I know. I don't have to see it to realise that he's got a taser in his sleeve. Likely got the idea from Granger succeeding in subduing me with one. The way he's looking at me — with fear. He thinks I'm unhinged. 

It takes every ounce of self-control I have not to prove him right.

I look him in the eye with as much disdain as I can muster. "I'm still on your side."

With that, I pluck a scone from the sack on his desk and walk out of the room eating it, hearing his breathing behind me like the flutter of a baby bird.

It's not till I exit St. Leonard's that I realise my sentence could be interpreted as a threat.

twenty-one

Halfway through my training session with David, I start to feel tired. Really tired, in a way I've not felt in months. I haven't slept in days. Not for more than an hour at a time. Maybe I'm finally reaching the limits of this body.

The gym is silent except for the sound of my fists and feet hitting the bag or the rush of air past my limbs as I go through my katas. David watches in silent approbation, which is mostly normal except for the silent bit. He's usually ready to correct my form or show me how to execute a move more efficiently. Today he only watches, a hulking form in the tight black t-shirt he always wears. 

When I've finished, he hands me a towel. "We need to talk."