Shrike (Book 2): Rampant (28 page)

"Taog. Is Taog okay?" I'm moving toward the door without even thinking. "I have to go back to hospital."

"Gwen, they won't let you see him. He's stable for now."

I hate that word, stable. I hate it like the white fire that courses through my body as I hover in the foyer of my flat. I feel Magda's presence behind me, feel the worry rolling off her. 

I can't get sick, but I feel ill, my stomach roiling. When was the last time I ate? My body doesn't like it when I skip meals. 

Trevor says something about the rest of the list members who aren't ill being brought into the same safe house where I dropped Sarah MacKay, and I give him a dull acknowledgement, making a snap decision.

At this point, I don't care if Trevor thinks I'm mental. I change the subject on him. "Andrew Granger's letters implicate John Abbey."

"What?"

"Magda figured it out. There's too much here to ignore, and if you won't go after them, I will." I hang up on him. He doesn't try to ring me back. I order three large pizzas to try and appease my metabolism and go back to the table with Magda, telling her what Trevor told me.

"We have to do something," she says, and I love her even more for that. 

Rosamund Granger is the only real lead I have. I can either ignore her, or I can use her, and it's past time to use her. 

Magda watches me with her china blue eyes still blinking back tears. Tears for Taog or Andrew or just this whole cock up of a life, I don't know. Something breaks inside me. 

"I put a tracer on Rosamund Granger and let her go." I blurt it out, and the words seem to drip from my lips like the time I went to the dentist and tried to eat soup before the novocaine wore off. 

I tell Magda everything while we drink our third cup of tea for the day. If I expected judgement from her, I get none. Instead she greets me with that same ferocity I've seen from her before, when she clawed Mick Hamilton and kicked his knife away from him. When she told me I did the right thing killing him. She looks at me from over the top of her favourite mug — it has a kitten sniffing a daisy on it — and says, "When we get her, I want the chance to punch her."

Right then, the doorbell sounds, and I pick up my handbag to pay for my pizza, somehow heartened by Magda's sudden bloodthirsty words. 

Rage is sometimes a purifier.

I fling open the door.

There's no pizza.

Gina Galbraith is on my front stoop.

"Hello, Gwen Maule," she says. "May I please come in?"

She knew who I was all along. Her turning up here confirms it. I stare at her, wondering how much I ought to trust her. The answer is probably not much, but I haven't much of a variety when it comes to options right now. Just then, the pizza delivery car arrives behind her, and I motion Gina inside.

"Hello, Gina," I say. "Come in. Stay in the foyer." I don't want her alone with Magda when I'm not in sprinting distance.

"Who is that?" Magda asks from the kitchen.

"This is the woman those letters are addressed to," I say.

The pizza delivery man seems to sense that he's walked into some tension, and he eyeballs me when I won't let him come in to set the pizzas down. I pay for the food and send him on his way, the scent of the pizza making my stomach jump like an excited puppy.

I follow Gina Galbraith down the hall to the kitchen. "Glad to see you're not dead," I tell her.

"I had some things to do."

Magda watches the both of us with interest, and I see her gaze darting to the letters.

I push the papers aside and open a pizza box in the middle of the table, not bothering to get plates for anyone. I fold two slices together, suddenly ravenous. 

"Why are you here?" I ask Gina.

"Because I found what I needed." 

She sits down on the other side of me, across from Magda as if she knows sitting next to Magda would cause me some alarm. Her hair is darker than I remember it, and a light stain at her temple tells me that it's because she's dyed it. Her clothes are nondescript. No purple umbrella or oddly-patterned mac today, and I scrutinise her while she settles in, downing my two slices of pizza in the time it takes her to remove her jacket and drape it over the back of her chair.

I surmise — correctly, I think — that the purple umbrella was to give me an identifier. I retroactively reassess Gina Galbraith and her interactions with me. She planned to miss our last meeting; I'm sure of it. She knew it would make me look for her in the one place I would think to go — her flat. She left that box of letters out, made just enough of a show of a disturbance in her flat to get me to poke around. She led me through all of this. I need to know why.

"You trusted me with a lot of information," I say slowly. "I'm trusting you to sit in the same room as my best friend, and you can even have some pizza. But I need to know what you know."

"I'll tell you as much as I can," Gina says. And she begins.

"I met Andrew three years ago, when he was studying at St Andrews and I was visiting my auntie in the town. We fell in love, which sounds silly, but it's the only way I know how to describe it. Andrew was kind and empathetic. I met him on the beach one day when he was walking, and a paper he was writing on flew away. He loved to write." Gina's words may be somewhat sentimental, but her tone is anything but. I think of Taog and bite my tongue, taking another two slices of pizza. 

"I fell hard that summer," Gina says quietly. She picks up a slice of pizza but doesn't make a move to eat it, only holding it in one hand and letting it drip a spot of grease onto her jeans. "I always liked the lads who had some sort of melancholy to them. Maybe I read too many vampire books when I was at school, I don't know. I liked the broody lads, and Andrew was that. I grew up with a lot of hurt and anger, even if I never let it show. I wrote angsty poems in my diaries and listened to Mogwai's angriest music when I was home, but I got good marks and charmed my teachers at school. My da was an alcoholic and my mum worked two jobs to support us, and I felt like I had this darkness inside of me for a long time."

She looks at me as if to tell me that this is relevant and that she'll get to the why of it. Magda is enraptured by Gina's tale, one finger smoothing a crease in one of the letters on the table. Gina takes a bite of her pizza, chews, swallows, and sets the rest of the piece down on the lid of the box.

"I always thought, secretly, that when we look for a lover, we desperately want to find someone whose darkness matches our own. When I met Andrew, I found that. I found that he had a darkness, and at first I thought it just matched. I found out too soon that it would eclipse mine." For the first time, I detect a thickness in her voice, and I don't think it's the mouthful of pizza she just swallowed. "The first year we were together was beautiful. He was at uni in St Andrews and I was at uni in Glasgow, and he would write me these lovely letters. I've hundreds and hundreds of letters from him, most of them hidden far away from that box I left out for you. I remember the first day I really saw his darkness. It was the day they announced the date of the referendum, and I was in town to visit him. I mentioned the referendum date, and he snapped at me. He'd never once raised his voice in all the time I'd known him, and it frightened me. He instantly apologised, then excused himself and said he fancied a walk alone."

She pauses in her story, and I can now see the pain lurking behind her eyes. Her gaze falls on the letter under Magda's fingertip, and for a moment I think Gina is going to snatch it away, but she tears her eyes away and meets mine instead.

"I won't bore you with more of that. It came out in bits and pieces over the coming months. It started with him telling me that his family were staunch opponents of independence, that they were very conservative and regressive in their views of politics, that they were generally nutters. I didn't think much of it at first; my family was made of some daft folk as well, and it didn't occur to me that his words had more than surface value. One day a few months later during another visit, though, he got drunk and said he thought his mum was a terrorist. I laughed it off, and his eyes went black, and he looked away. I remember my laughter dying in my throat when I saw that look on his face. That night he cried in my arms, and that night I knew there was much more to his family than simply mad politics." Gina sighs then and scoots back in her chair. "He pretended that night hadn't happened for a while. I don't know what eventually triggered him confiding in me. Now that he's dead, I never will. But last year, he started to talk. I think he needed someone to talk to, and I was the only person on this earth he felt really loved him. So he talked to me. We went on a mini break to Orkney, and I remember sitting in the Ring of Brodgar, our backs up against those five thousand year old standing stones, and him telling me that his family were dangerous people. That they wanted to hurt people. To kill people. That they thought they could restore Britain to some sort of eighteenth century maniacal, imperial glory and that this referendum was their chance to start. He wouldn't name them though. He knew every member of Britannia and had since he was a bairn. He said they were a small and close-knit bunch, that they had to be because keeping secrets as big as they do is impossible if you aren't tight like fingers in a glove with your co-conspirators. He said they'd been working at this since the late seventies, infiltrating government agencies and positioning themselves as highly as they could in places of power that had enough influence to matter but not enough to draw attention. They were focused, ambitious, driven. Like a cult."

The late seventies. I interject there. "Britannia got its start during the '79 referendum on Scottish devolution, didn't they?"

Gina doesn't miss a beat, only gives me a shrewd look. "Aye. They saw the possibility of the breakup of the United Kingdom as a sign of the empire rotting. When it didn't meet the requirements, the Frost family joined up with their friends and started Britannia."

"So why did you leave?" I ask her. "I understand all this, Andrew confiding in you. But how did you get involved? And how were you so sure you were one of Granger's targets?"

"I was getting to that," Gina says. "Once I started realising how deeply mired Andrew was in Britannia — he thought he could never escape, and I was determined to help him get out — I turned myself to finding out as much about them as I could, both from Andrew and from anywhere I could find the information. Andrew and I had been together for two years at that point, and I'd never met his family, nor had he met mine. We lived in our own world where we each were the only loves of our lives. But I could see that he was being eroded by his family, even in the snippets he told me. I started looking into what I could, and I got careless."

Magda, who hasn't said a word through all of this, is watching Gina with complete fascination. In some ways, I can see her own parallel here, getting pulled into this tangled web because of love. In Magda's case, for me and later Taog. I wonder how neither Magda nor Gina simply threw up their hands and told us to fuck right off.

Gina's going on. "There's a man called Craig MacLeod who was one of Britannia's founding members. I approached him, not knowing he was actually in Britannia. I think I'm only alive today because I was silly and still at uni and had adopted a strategy of playing daft when it came to questioning people about Britannia, even peripherally, because I didn't want anyone to think I was actually serious. The last thing I needed was my university professors booting me from my programme because they got wind I was entertaining conspiracy theories when I was supposed to be studying political science. I met MacLeod at a function in Glasgow, and I'd heard he was somehow connected to the Grangers. He's a very guarded man, and I never was able to find him again after that night. But after our brief encounter, I came home to find that my flat had been broken into, my computer stolen, my car tyres slashed, and my mattress gutted. When I told Andrew about it, he about had apoplexy. He knew MacLeod, and he told me never to go near the man again. That's what put me on Britannia's radar, and I've been on it ever since. Somehow Andrew kept them from discovering our connection, at least I think. You'd think that coming home to what I did would have frightened me off. It almost did. But you know what else? It was Andrew's fear that kept me in it. I couldn't bear that fear. I could almost taste it over the phone lines whenever we'd speak, feel it in his touch the next time I saw him and he crushed me against his body and begged me to never go near MacLeod again. I hate bullies, and Britannia are nothing but bullies."

"Aye, well, that's the gospel truth." I think of Taog in hospital and all the members of Gu Bràth who are suffering because of Britannia, and the thread of white fire begins to pulse in my blood again. "Get to the point, Gina. I'm sorry to be rude, but we need to do something, and we need to do something now. Do you have real information for me or not?"

"Britannia is planning something for Friday. Something big. I couldn't get a handle on what, but I had to come back to warn you."

Frustration fills me. "I already know that."

Gina starts. "You know?"

I show her my mobile and the countdown I've set. Watching the seconds bleed away like grains of sand in an hourglass fills me with impotent irritation. "I stole your tracers and stabbed one into Granger after one of your list members shot her with a crossbow."

"You got a tracer on Granger?" Gina scoots forward to the edge of her chair. "Do you know what that means?"

"Aye, it means I can follow her, but she hasn't gone anywhere useful." Except to and from Edinburgh to murder people. "She's hiding out in Falkirk right by where she murdered Kinnon O'Dair."

"What are you sitting here for? I've got surveillance equipment in my car. We can bug the house."

Surveillance equipment. Of course she does. I feel a smile spread across my face, and I can tell the light in my eyes is matching what I see in Gina's.

"Let's go catch Granger by the toe," I say.