CHAPTER 27
THE JOURNEY BACK
to the Range Rover was a nightmare. Although the hail had stopped, the mountainside was littered with white pellets of slowly melting ice, turning the slope into a frictionless slide. The light was fading and the wind that had tried to slow us on the way up now chased us back down, making the descent even harder.
Hindsight is the cruellest luxury. We’d been right, and yet hideously wrong. The intruder at the clinic, the wrecked yacht radio and attack on Grace, that had all been Strachan. He’d been stalking us from the first day we’d arrived on the island, watching our progress, even sabotaging us at times. Yet he’d been doing it to protect his sister, not himself. He wasn’t the killer.
She was.
I felt sick to think of how much time we’d wasted. The only faint source of hope was that Strachan had taken both sets of car keys with him, deliberately stranding Grace at the house after learning what she’d done to Maggie. If she wanted to go to the village, she would have to walk. Even so, she’d had time to get there by now. I tried to tell myself that she might not have gone to the hotel straight away, but I didn’t believe it. I’d seen how distraught she’d been when Brody and I had left her. It wouldn’t take long for that to transform to anger. All the unanswered questions would have to wait. Right now our priority was reaching Ellen and Anna before Grace did.
If we weren’t already too late.
We didn’t talk on the way down. We didn’t have the time, or the breath. Once we reached more level ground we broke into a stumbling jog, silent except for the laboured rasp of our breathing. Strachan was easily the fittest, but the way he ran with one arm clamped to his side made me think he might have cracked ribs to go with his other injuries.
Fraser had seen us coming. He was waiting in the Range Rover, engine running and the heater pumping out blessed hot air. He gave a savage smile when he saw Strachan’s bloodied face.
‘Somebody fell down the steps, did they?’
‘Get us back to the hotel. Fast,’ Brody gasped, hauling himself into the front passenger seat. ‘We need to find Ellen.’
‘Why, what—’
‘Just drive!’
Still breathless, Brody turned round to confront Strachan as Fraser banged the Range Rover into gear and roared off towards the village.
‘Talk.’
Strachan’s pulverised face looked almost unrecognisable. His broken nose was flattened, and the cheek under his nearly shut eye was dark and swollen. He must have been in considerable pain, yet he gave no sign.
‘Grace is ill. It’s my fault, not hers,’ he said, dully. ‘That’s why I wasn’t planning on coming back down from the mountain. With me dead, she wouldn’t be a threat any more.’
‘Why is she a threat anyway?’ Brody demanded. ‘You’re her brother, for Christ’s sake! Why’s she doing this?’
‘Her
brother
?’ Fraser exclaimed, throwing us against the side of the car as he swerved into a bend.
Neither of them answered him. Strachan looked like a man staring into an abyss of his own making.
‘Because she’s jealous.’
The barren landscape flashed by outside, but it was almost unnoticed now. I found my voice first.
‘She killed Maggie because she was
jealous
?’ I said, incredulously.
Strachan’s bloodied mouth twitched involuntarily. He swayed limply with the movement of the car, making no attempt to steady himself.
‘I didn’t know what she’d done until she came back, covered in blood. But Maggie had called to the house twice to see me. Grace might have overlooked the first time, but not the second. She pretended she’d seen a prowler to get me out of the way, and then slipped a note into Maggie’s coat arranging a meeting. She even took my car, so Maggie would think it was me.’
So the prowler had been a distraction after all, I thought. Except it had been Grace’s own, not Strachan’s.
‘You’ve got to understand how it was,’ Strachan said, and for the first time a hint of pleading had entered his voice. ‘When we were growing up, there were just the two of us. Our mother died when we were young, and our father was away most of the time on trips. We lived on an isolated estate, with security guards and private tutors. All we knew was each other.’
‘Get on with it,’ Brody told him.
Strachan lowered his head. The dankness of the
broch
still clung to him, mingling with the smell of stale sweat and blood.
‘When I was sixteen I got drunk one night, and went to Grace’s room. I’m not going to spell out what happened. It was wrong, and it was my fault. But neither of us wanted to stop it. It became…normal. As I got older I thought about ending it, but then…Grace got pregnant.’
‘The miscarriage,’ I said, remembering what he’d told me in his drawing room. It seemed an age ago now.
‘It wasn’t a miscarriage. I made her have an abortion.’ Now there was no mistaking there was pain as well as shame in his voice. ‘It was a backstreet clinic. There were complications. Grace almost died. She never admitted who the father was, even when they told her she could never have any more children. But she was changed after that. Unstable. She’d always been possessive, but now…When our father died I tried to finish it between us. I told Grace it was over and started seeing another girl. I thought she’d accept it. But she didn’t. She went to the girl’s flat and stabbed her to death.’
‘Jesus,’ Fraser said. The tyres skidded on the wet surface as he threw the car into another bend. He was driving as fast as he dared on the winding road, but it didn’t seem nearly fast enough.
Strachan passed a hand over his face, oblivious to his injuries. ‘No one suspected Grace, but she didn’t even try to deny it to me. She told me she didn’t want me to see anyone else. Ever.’
‘If you knew she was dangerous, why didn’t you tell the police?’ I asked, holding the grab rail for support as the car bumped over a sudden dip.
‘And let everyone know what had been going on?’ Strachan shook his head. ‘The dead are dead. You can’t bring them back. And it was my fault Grace was like she was. I couldn’t just abandon her.’
We were all jolted as Fraser braked suddenly. The road ahead was full of sheep. The car fishtailed, throwing up sheets of spray as he hammered on the horn, scattering them in front of us. There were panicked bleats as woolly bodies jostled outside the car windows, close enough to touch. Then we were clear and accelerating away again.
Strachan barely seemed to notice. ‘We left South Africa, travelled around the world to places where nobody knew us. Where everyone would assume we were married. I tried to limit the…physical aspect between us. I’d still see other women. Prostitutes, mainly. I can’t afford to be choosy.’ The self-loathing was plain in his voice. ‘But Grace isn’t just jealous, she’s cunning. She always seemed to find out, and when she did…’
He didn’t need to finish. I willed Fraser to go faster. We hadn’t even reached Strachan’s house yet.
Too far. It’s still too far.
‘Each time it happened, we’d move on somewhere else,’ Strachan continued. ‘And each time she got that bit worse. That’s why we came here, to Runa. I liked this area, its wildness, and on an island like this Grace wouldn’t be able to just come and go. We started to feel we were really part of something here. I found myself really wanting to
make
something of the island!’
Brody regarded him with contempt. ‘So where did Janice Donaldson fit into your little paradise?’
A spasm of pain etched itself on to Strachan’s face. ‘She blackmailed me. I’d been seeing her for a while, but hadn’t told her my real name. Then one day Iain Kinross showed up at her flat while I was there. I’d no idea he was another of her clients. He didn’t see me, but my reaction tipped Janice off. She checked up, found out who I was. The next time I went she threatened to tell Grace. I paid her off—Christ, I even gave her more than she asked for. But it can’t have been enough.’
‘Did you know all along your sister had killed her?’ Brody asked, roughly.
‘Of course not! I’d no idea she’d come to Runa! Even when I heard a body had been found, I didn’t know it was anything to do with Grace. The whole burning thing, the fires, that was new. She just used a knife with the others. But when the constable was killed…I couldn’t kid myself any longer.’
I thought about his reaction when he’d seen Duncan’s body. It had been genuine after all. But it hadn’t been the shock of seeing a body, it had been the realization that his sister had started killing again.
‘Why did she kill him?’ Fraser demanded without turning round, his voice cracked. He was slewing the car round the bends almost recklessly, throwing us from side to side.
‘I don’t know. But in the past whenever Grace…had an episode, we’d always moved on. This time we couldn’t. And when she realized there was going to be a murder investigation she must have panicked and tried to get rid of anything that might incriminate her. Duncan must have just been in the way.’
‘In the fucking
way
?’ Fraser snarled, the car swerving as he started to turn round.
‘Easy,’ Brody warned him. His face was like stone as he turned back to Strachan. ‘How many people has she killed?’
Strachan shook his head. ‘I don’t know for sure. She doesn’t always tell me. Four or five before this, perhaps.’
I don’t know which was worse, the number or the fact that Strachan hadn’t even kept track of his sister’s victims.
‘Tell me about Ellen,’ Brody grated.
Strachan closed his eyes. ‘Ellen was a mistake. There always was that…
tension
between us. I tried to avoid her, I daren’t make Grace suspicious. But a few months after we’d arrived here, I found out Ellen was going to visit college friends in Dundee. So I made an excuse to be there as well. It only happened that once, Ellen insisted on that. When I found out she was pregnant, I tried to pay her to go away somewhere. Somewhere safe. But she refused. She said she wouldn’t take a penny off me, because I was married. Quite an irony, eh?’
His bitterness quickly faded.
‘I’ve lain awake at night, terrified what would happen if Grace ever found out…’
He tailed off. Now his house was visible up ahead. Both cars were still outside, and the lights still burned in the window. Seeing them I felt a faint hope.
‘Should we see if she’s still there?’ Fraser asked.
‘She won’t be,’ Strachan said with certainty.
Brody looked at the approaching house, torn. If Grace was still here we could end this now. But if she wasn’t we’d have lost even more time.
‘What’s that on the drive?’ I asked. A pale yellow shape was lying motionless in the driveway. I felt cold as I realized what it was.
The body of Oscar, Strachan’s retriever.
‘She killed his
dog
?’ Fraser exclaimed. ‘Why the hell would she do that?’
No one answered, but Strachan’s face was bleak as we left the house behind.
‘Drive faster,’ Brody told Fraser.
Within minutes, the first houses had appeared ahead of us. The light had almost gone as we entered the village. Its streets were ominously empty. Fraser barely slowed as he flung the Range Rover into the side road leading up to the hotel.
The front door stood open.
Strachan leaped out of the car even before it had stopped moving. He ran up the hotel’s steps to the entrance, but then stopped dead, his battered face suddenly leached of colour.
‘Oh, Christ,’ Brody breathed, staring inside.
The hotel had been wrecked. Broken furniture littered the hall. The grandfather clock lay face down and smashed, the mirror torn from the wall and smashed into crazed shards of glass. It was frenzied, wanton destruction, but that wasn’t what had stopped Strachan.
The hallway was covered with blood.
The metallic stink of it thickened the air with a slaughterhouse taint. It was pooled on the wooden floorboards, spattered in abstract splashes across the panelled walls. It had sprayed highest just inside the doorway, jetting up the walls almost as far as the ceiling. This would have been where the attack first took place, but its progress afterwards was easy enough to follow. The blood formed a trail, big round splashes at first, then smeared tracks as its source had stumbled down the hallway.
The trail disappeared into the bar.
‘Oh, no…’ Strachan whispered. ‘Oh, please no…’
There was hardly any coagulation, which meant the blood was still fresh. Not very long ago it had been pumping round a living body. Both Strachan and Brody seemed paralysed by the sight of it. I forced myself to go past them and hurried down the hall, trying to avoid treading in the splashes on the floor. A bloody handmark stood out on the white doorframe, where someone had clutched it for support. It was too smudged to say how big or small the hand had been, but it was low down on the frame, as though whoever had made it had been crawling.
Or a child.
I didn’t want to see what was inside. But I’d no choice. I took a breath, trying to prepare myself, and stepped into the bar.
Nothing in it had been left intact. Chairs and tables had been tipped over and smashed, curtains slashed, bottles and glasses shattered in a frenzy. In the middle of it all was Cameron. Limbs splayed out in the relaxation of death, the schoolteacher lay slumped against the bar. His clothes were soaked through with blood that had only just begun to dry. A wide gash had opened a second mouth in his throat, slicing across his trachea as though trying to free the bulging Adam’s apple.
The teacher’s eyes were wide with shock, as though unable to believe what Grace had done to him.
Fraser appeared behind us. ‘Oh, Christ,’ he mumbled.
The air was a nauseous cocktail of alcohol and blood. There was another odour as well, but even as my stunned senses began to recognise it, a sudden sound tore through the silence.
A child’s scream.
It came from the kitchen. Strachan was running even before it had died. Brody and I were just behind him as he burst through the kitchen’s swing door, but the scene inside halted us all in our tracks.
The devastation we’d found before was nothing compared to this. Broken crockery crunched underfoot, while spilt food littered the floor in dirty snowdrifts. The kitchen table had been upended and its chairs smashed, the tall pine dresser pushed over on to the floor. Even the ancient cooker had been wrenched away from the wall, as though someone had tried to tip that over as well.