Amnesia

12

Tuesday 16 March 1999, Wyvis

‘I’m so sorry.’ The old man’s voice was hoarse. Clémence looked up at him. Two tears, one after the other, were running crookedly down the wrinkles etched in his cheek. ‘I’m sorry, Clémence. Will you forgive me?’

As she had been reading the last pages of Death At Wyvis, Clémence had felt the anger rise within her. She had tried to keep it out of her voice, but she could hear her own repressed fury as the words came out. It was all she could do to finish the afterword at the end. Angus — Alastair — had slept with his best friend’s wife, had murdered her and had let that friend go to jail for it. He had lied to the police and to his companions. Not only had he ruined Clémence’s grandfather’s life, but the consequences had flowed down the generations to her father and herself.

And yet, looking at the crumpled eighty-three-year-old sitting in front of her, a lost man who had just discovered he was a murderer, she couldn’t help feeling a flash of sympathy.

She knew she couldn’t answer his question. But she could look him in the eye, and she did so. ‘Shouldn’t you be asking Aunt Madeleine that?’

The old man nodded. ‘Yes, of course,’ he said. He turned to Madeleine.

The old woman looked stricken by what she had just heard. Until then, her energetic great-aunt had never struck Clémence as frail, but Uncle Nathan’s death had taken its toll, sapping her resilience. And now this.

But Madeleine set her shoulders and raised head. ‘I don’t think I can ever forgive you, Alastair. Sophie was a wonderful girl — and a wonderful woman. Reading that book, you get a sense of the effect she had on you, but she had that effect on everyone she knew. She lit up a room; she lit up a family. She made life better for everyone who knew her, including me. I still miss her; I’ll always miss her. Her death was very wrong.’

Madeleine stared hard at the old man. ‘But it was a long time ago. I have learned to live with the knowledge, not just that you murdered my sister, but that you were never punished for it.’

‘Why wasn’t I?’ the old man asked. ‘Why didn’t I go to jail? Why aren’t I still in jail?’

‘You got a good lawyer,’ said Madeleine. ‘A top Scottish QC. He advised you to retract what you had written in the novel. He argued that you couldn’t remember what had happened, that you were only guessing. He said the book was called a novel for a reason.’

‘And I went along with that?’

‘No. You insisted on pleading guilty. A trial date was set, but the QC persuaded the prosecution that they had no case, so they dropped it. You were furious, but there was nothing you could do. Legally, you didn’t actually know for sure that you were guilty, so your plea was unreliable, and without that the prosecution had no other firm evidence implicating you. In the end, the lawyer persuaded you to accept it.’

‘So Stephen stayed in jail?’

‘Oh, no. They let him out. He had already served fifteen years.’

‘So no one has been found guilty of Sophie’s murder?’

‘No. But the police have closed the case. They think it was you. We all think it was you.’

‘I see,’ said the old man.

‘I wondered where you had found the money to pay the lawyers’ fees. It was only later that I discovered that Nathan had paid them. He said he owed you for getting him out of trouble in Deauville. I was furious with him.’

‘Did they reopen Alden’s death?’

‘The French police weren’t interested. It was too long ago; there was some kind of statute of limitations for murder under French law, and after everything that went on in my country during the war, the authorities were very reluctant to reopen any cases from before 1945. A British journalist wrote an article in a Sunday newspaper, but Nathan sued him successfully. Since then no one mentions it. And it does come across as an accident in the book.’

‘Which it was,’ said the old man.

Clémence stared at him.

‘I know it means nothing at this stage,’ he said. ‘But I am truly sorry. To both of you. For what I have done.’

They sat in silence. Clémence knew that he meant it, with all his heart. The confused, vulnerable old man she had met in the hospital a few days before had had no idea he was a murderer. But he was. She could feel sorry for him, but she couldn’t forgive him.

‘There’s something else,’ the old man said.

‘What?’ said Clémence. But she knew immediately what he was thinking. She wished he hadn’t realized it, that she hadn’t realized it, that she hadn’t told Madeleine, that she could just deny it to herself.

‘You are my granddaughter. Your father Rupert must be my son. Right after Capri, Sophie became pregnant. That was with Rupert, wasn’t it?’

Clémence dropped her eyes and nodded.

‘Did you know all along?’ The old man’s sad eyes held a hint of accusation.

‘I only worked it out this morning,’ said Clémence. ‘Look.’

She picked up the photograph album that she and Madeleine had been looking at when the old man returned from his walk, and opened it at the photographs of Oxford. ‘See this photo of you here? Where you are in profile? You look exactly like my dad. Same nose. Same forehead. Doesn’t he, Aunt Madeleine? And Dad has a cleft chin, like you.’

Madeleine nodded. ‘It’s true.’

‘Did you remember knowing that you were Dad’s father?’ Clémence asked.

‘No, I guessed it from the timing. And let’s just say I’m not surprised that we are related.’ The old man smiled at Clémence. ‘I am proud you are my granddaughter. Although...’ He swallowed. ‘Although I am ashamed too. Bitterly ashamed. That your grandfather is a murderer.’

‘I think I’ll stick with Stephen as my grandfather, if you don’t mind.’ said Clémence, letting the anger harden her voice. ‘He was innocent. You might have put him in jail, but you can’t take him away from me.’

‘Of course,’ said the old man. ‘I couldn’t do that.’

‘I knew nothing about any of this!’ Clémence protested. ‘I didn’t even know Grandpa had ever been in prison. I knew he’d been in films a long time ago, and I was vaguely aware there had been some sort of scandal, but I thought that had something to do with drink. And I believed my grandmother had drowned. No one told me anything!’ Her eyes were alight as she glared at the old man, and at her aunt. ‘At least now I know why my family is so fucked up. Why didn’t anyone tell me, Aunt Madeleine? Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘I am so sorry, darling,’ Madeleine said. ‘I did suggest that your father explain everything to you. But he had spent fifteen years hating his own father because he believed he had murdered his mother. That’s why he ran away to Morocco. He had a troubled time in his twenties, you probably knew that.’

Clémence nodded. She did. In her teens she had come to understand that in her family drugs were an issue for the parents and not the child.

‘And your mother just wanted to protect you from it all. I can understand why. I think the only reason she let me see you was that I paid for your education.’ Madeleine smiled. ‘I was worried about you. About your parents’ unconventional lives. But you turned out very well.’

A thought struck Clémence. ‘Once the book came out, did everyone else realize I was Alastair’s granddaughter?’

‘Nathan and I knew all along,’ said Madeleine. ‘But Stephen never suspected. I don’t think it was a question of being in denial, I think it never occurred to him. And from what I can tell, Rupert was the same.’

‘What about me?’ asked the old man. ‘Did I know?’

‘We never discussed it,’ said Madeleine. ‘But you were no fool. I bet you knew.’

‘So when you visited us in Morocco when I was little, you knew you were my grandfather?’ said Clémence.

‘Apparently,’ said the old man. ‘And presumably I thought that your father was my son.’

‘That must have been weird.’

‘Rupert was furious,’ Madeleine said. ‘He didn’t know you were his father, but he had read the book, so he did know you had killed his mother. He told me you showed up out of the blue. He only let you stay a few hours — the whole thing was terribly awkward.’

‘Do you remember any of that?’ Clémence asked.

The old man frowned, but shook his head. ‘Just the beach. And the camel.’ He allowed himself a quick smile. ‘And you.’ He turned to Madeleine. ‘What did I do afterwards? After 1959?’

‘You ran away to Australia. You ended up working as a doctor in a small town in the hills above Perth. You married a woman called Helen in 1968, I think. We came to your wedding in Perth.’

‘What was she like?’

‘Small. Blonde. At least ten years younger than you. Very pretty. A little bossy, Nathan and I thought.’

‘And we got divorced?’

‘After Death At Wyvis was published. I don’t think she liked being married to a murderer. I can’t blame her, really.’

‘No,’ said the old man.

‘Is Tony still alive?’ asked Clémence. ‘No one has ever mentioned his name to me.’

‘He died five years ago on Capri. A heart attack. He never did marry Luciana, but she was with him at the end. Nathan and I went to his funeral. It seemed like the whole island was there.’

‘He sounded like a nice guy,’ said Clémence.

‘He was,’ said Madeleine. ‘Elaine wasn’t, though. She drank herself to death some time in the seventies. She and her husband tried to make a fuss about Alden’s death in 1959 but Nathan’s lawyers shut them up. After the book came out, Elaine was quoted in that article in the British Sunday newspaper, but when Nathan sued successfully, she had to keep quiet. She died soon afterwards.’

‘How did the book sell?’ the old man asked.

‘It caused a little bit of a stir when it came out. It was published here but not in the States, nor in Australia, actually. But it’s been out of print for years. I don’t think the publisher even exists any more.’

‘I wonder why I came back to Britain last year,’ said the old man. ‘Do you know?’

Madeleine closed her eyes. ‘I’m sorry, Alastair, this has taken it out of me. I’m beat. Can we talk about something else until Davie gets back? I will tell you what I know, I promise. But maybe tomorrow?’

‘Actually, there is someone we need to see in Dingwall,’ said Clémence, thinking of Pauline Ferguson, the old stalker’s wife. ‘So maybe we can drop into your hotel tomorrow morning?’

‘Yes, why don’t you do that?’

‘I’ll make you a cup of tea,’ said the old man, but just as he was speaking, they heard the sound of a car drawing up outside.

‘That’ll be your taxi,’ said Clémence.

‘Good,’ said Madeleine, hauling herself out of the sofa with a grunt. ‘I’ll see you both tomorrow.’

As Clémence saw her great-aunt to the door, the old man escaped to the lavatory. He was dying for a pee, and he also wanted to be by himself, if only for a minute or two. He knew he deserved the contempt and disgust of Madeleine and Clémence, but it was good to get away from it for a minute. He lifted the lid, unzipped his fly, and let go. He raised his eyes to the small window.

Something moved.

It was something long and thin in a bush up the wooded slope about thirty yards from the cottage.

It was the barrel of a rifle.

The old man’s sight wasn’t too bad at distance. He squinted. The barrel moved again, and he could see a face. A bearded face. Jerry Ranger.

13

The American was staring at the front of the cottage, where the old man could hear Madeleine bidding goodbye to her niece. The old man flinched as Jerry glanced quickly at the cottage, and then back at the taxi outside the front door. The old man was pretty sure that Jerry hadn’t spotted him in the tiny window.

He zipped himself up and hurried out of the lavatory. Clémence was shutting the front door in the hallway.

‘Clémence!’ the old man said in a loud whisper. ‘That American is outside with a rifle! I know this sounds silly, but he looks like he’s staking out the cottage.’

Clémence frowned. ‘That’s ridiculous. He must be stalking a deer or something.’

‘It really didn’t look like it,’ said the old man. Although maybe that was what he was doing when he was interrupted by the taxi arriving to pick up Madeleine. No. That didn’t seem right.

Uncertainty crossed Clémence’s face. ‘I had a weird conversation with him this morning. About you. And he had a copy of Death At Wyvis on his bookshelf with notes and underlinings in his own handwriting. Yet he said he’d never read it.’

The old man and Clémence exchanged glances. The uncertainty each felt fed off the other.

‘I know we are going to look foolish, but maybe we should sneak out the back. Just in case.’

Clémence hesitated. Then she nodded. ‘OK.’

‘Lock the front door. And get your coat. In case we are outside for a while.’

Clémence locked the door and then ran up the stairs to her room. The old man pulled on his boots and grabbed his own coat from the hook in the hallway. Clémence joined him and they moved towards the back door.

The doorbell rang.

‘Who is it?’ Clémence called.

‘It’s Jerry!’

Clémence hesitated and then shouted. ‘I’m in the bath. Wait two minutes and I’ll be down!’

Not bad, thought the old man, although Jerry would be able to figure out it was unlikely Clémence could have jumped into the bath that quickly after her aunt left. But it should give them a minute, maybe two. And from his position outside the front door Jerry couldn’t see the back of the house.

Quietly the old man opened the back door and they slipped out. They moved as rapidly as the old man could over the scruffy back lawn to the trees at the rear of the garden. They climbed up the slope, and paused at the crest of a small bank, on the other side of which a burn ran down through the woods towards the loch.

‘Let’s wait here and watch,’ said the old man. ‘If he goes away, we will know we just imagined it.’

‘All right,’ said Clémence. ‘He probably will.’

They crouched down and watched the cottage. ‘Do you think we’re being silly?’ Clémence said.

‘I won’t tell anyone if you don’t,’ said the old man with a grin.

‘Clémence!’ They heard Jerry’s voice ringing out. ‘Clémence, are you OK?’

‘Of course I’m OK,’ muttered Clémence to herself. ‘I’m getting out of the bath. Be patient!’

But Jerry wasn’t patient. Thirty seconds later he appeared around the side of the house, with the rifle slung over his shoulder. He peered into a couple of windows and then came to the back door. He studied it for a moment and then turned the handle. They had left it unlocked: it opened.

‘Let’s go!’ said the old man. He was damned sure that a man with a rifle entering a house uninvited through the back door was a problem.

They scrambled down the bank to the burn, and Clémence took the old man’s hand and led him down the hill towards the track running along the side of the loch.

‘No,’ said the old man. ‘He’ll be expecting that. And he’ll be faster than us. Let’s go uphill. That way we’ll lose him.’

‘Are you sure?’ said Clémence.

The old man nodded. ‘He’s bound to go down not up. We should have a few minutes before he has checked the house and realized we skipped out the back.’

So they clambered uphill, along the side of the stream. At one point they heard Jerry call Clémence’s name again.

After fifteen minutes they were coming to the edge of the wood, and the old man was getting tired.

‘What now?’ said Clémence.

‘Is he following us?’

They both sat still, although the old man’s panting made it difficult for him to hear much.

‘Can’t hear him,’ said Clémence. ‘We could hide here until dark.’

‘And then what?’ said the old man.

‘Go back to Culzie? Ring the police? Get my car?’

‘He’ll be expecting that,’ said the old man. ‘Where are the keys?’

‘I’ve got them,’ said Clémence.

‘Well he’ll disable the car. Let down the tyres or something. And he’ll probably cut the telephone wires.’

‘Livvie will be furious,’ said Clémence.

‘Livvie?’

‘Friend at uni. It’s her car. Wait a moment! Let me try my phone.’

‘Your phone?’

‘Mobile phone. I grabbed it when we left the cottage. There was no coverage there, but there might be up here.’

She rummaged in her coat pocket and pulled out a mobile phone. The old man realized he knew what it was. How? He didn’t think he had ever owned one, but friends had, people he knew. He saw an image of a middle-aged woman outside a shop in Mundaring talking on one. Who was she? How did he know it was Mundaring? When would his brain start working properly?

Clémence jabbed a few buttons and swore. ‘The stupid phone is out of battery.’ She looked around the desolate moorland above them. ‘Who am I kidding? There’s no chance of reception up here anyway.’

From somewhere down below they heard the sound of breaking glass.

‘What’s he doing?’ said Clémence.

‘Don’t know. But that probably comes from the cottage.’

‘Or Livvie’s car.’ Clémence stuffed the phone back in her pocket. ‘So what can we do?’ she said. ‘There’s only one way out of Wyvis. Along the track by the loch to the entrance of the estate at the lodge. He’ll be watching it.’

She was right. ‘It’s at least three miles from here to the lodge. It would take us over an hour.’

‘What do you think he will do next?’ Clémence asked. ‘I can’t see him.’

‘He could wait for us at the cottage. Or hide by the side of the track. Or he might go back to his own cottage to get his car.’

‘I’m scared,’ said Clémence.

The old man looked at the young woman who was his granddaughter. She looked scared. So she should be.

‘So what do we do, Alastair?’

He thought through the options. They could hide. If it was summer, that would have been the best bet; Jerry would never find them unless he was an expert tracker, which seemed unlikely. But in March, a cold night on the mountain might kill them. Or kill him. Clémence would probably be fine, with her youth, her health and that little layer of fat she carried. He was skin, bones and bad circulation. He remembered — how did he remember? — those news stories over the years about badly prepared walkers dying of hypothermia in the Scottish mountains. Or on Snowdon. And they were under eighty.

There was another possibility.

‘We could go that way.’ The old man pointed to the mountain above them. ‘Jerry would never expect that.’

‘Are you crazy?’ said Clémence.

‘Remember the walk described by Angus in the book? They went up to the top of Ben Wyvis and saw a road on the other side. Close by.’

‘Yes, but that took them all day. It’s going to be dark in an hour or two. And it’s a big mountain.’

‘We don’t go over it, we go around the side. Look.’

They both looked up at the rough moorland above them. To the right of the massive dome that was Ben Wyvis, a path snaked up a shallow valley, perhaps the ‘stalker’s path’ mentioned in the book, and disappeared around the corner of a crag. Although the summit of the mountain was still covered in snow, the path seemed clear.

‘That crag is about a mile and a half, two miles away,’ the old man continued. ‘We could get there in an hour; it will still be light. And once we are going downhill on the other side we will be OK if it gets dark. We just follow the path. Eventually we’ll get to that road — the Ullapool road. Then we flag down a car.’

‘Are you sure you can make it?’ Clémence said.

It would be tough. But the old man was determined. And he didn’t want to be shot by Jerry Ranger. More to the point, he didn’t want Clémence to be shot. He would do anything to avoid that, push himself to the absolute limit of his endurance if he had to.

‘I might be an old bastard, but I’m a fit old bastard.’

Clémence looked again at the mountain, and then at the old man. ‘OK,’ she said. ‘But if we are going to do it, we had better get a move on before it gets dark. Let’s go.’

14

Jerry scrambled down the gully, as fast as he could. He rounded a rocky outcrop and the loch opened up before him.

He paused and dug out his field glasses. He scanned the woods beneath him and what he could see of the track. No sign of them.

After searching the cottage he was sure that Alastair Cunningham and the young woman had sneaked out of the back door. The gully had seemed like the most logical route for them to follow. But now he wasn’t so certain. Maybe they had hidden before doubling back to get in Clémence’s car. If they had done that he had lost them for good.

Cursing to himself, he turned and climbed up the bank out of the gulley and back up the slope towards the cottage, slinging his rifle over his shoulder. In less than two minutes he broke out into the clearing. The car was still there, and the cottage seemed quiet.

He had to disable the car. He remembered from TV that there was something you could remove from a car engine to disable it. What was it? He knew nothing about car engines. The fan belt? Spark plugs? Alternator?

He stared at the hood of the Clio, and fumbled around. There didn’t seem to be a way of opening it outside the car. Where were the keys? In the house? Or did the girl have them with her?

He swung the rifle off his shoulder and smashed the window of the car on the driver’s side. He unlocked the door and groped for a lever to pop open the hood. He found it and stared at the engine. He yanked a few wires and then started pounding it with the butt of his rifle. Some things cracked, some things twisted. Then he crouched down and let the air out of all the tyres. He thought of shooting them, but a rifle shot would echo around the valley and might alert Trevor MacInnes. The last thing he wanted was the stalker to start driving around looking for poachers. He needed him tucked up inside his cosy lodge with a glass of whisky watching the TV.

So where the hell were they?

You couldn’t see anything very clearly from outside the cottage because of the trees. The view would be better from the upstairs windows. Jerry ran into the cottage and up the stairs. The front bedroom had a good view of the loch. He quickly scanned the track and couldn’t see anything. He pulled out his binoculars and started a more methodical sweep.

No, nothing.

But there were lots of blind spots, stretches of track which were out of the line of sight of the bedroom window.

Maybe they had gone the other way, up to the head of the loch and the big house. That was empty and there were plenty of places to hide and shelter in there. He would have to check for signs of a break-in and search the house and grounds, and the outhouses.

Wyvis Lodge itself was out of sight, but the approach to it was visible.

Nothing.

This was like a giant game of hide-and-seek. Jerry held most of the cards, but not all of them. His advantage was that there was only one way out of the estate. He had to make sure he had that under observation at all times.

He was in what seemed to be the old man’s bedroom. There was another window facing out towards the north side of Ben Wyvis. He moved over there and scanned the mountainside quickly.

There! Two figures bent against the slope following a footpath through the moorland along the north-west side of the mountain.

He fiddled with the focus wheel on the glasses. It was them! It was definitely them.

What the hell were they doing up there?

Jerry remembered climbing the mountain himself and seeing a wooded valley and a road on the other side. There wasn’t just one way out of the estate!

They were still in open moorland and there was some distance until they reached the crag. They were well out of range of his rifle, but they would be out in the open and in plain sight for a while yet. Jerry would just have to catch them up.

He ran down the stairs and out of the cottage. There was a footpath leading uphill through the woods, and Jerry followed it. In ten minutes he was out on open moorland.

Jerry wasn’t a sharpshooter or anything, but he had been taught how to fire a rifle. He bent low in the hope they wouldn’t spot him, and jogged up the path. He was breathing heavily and sweating, but he was catching up with them. They hadn’t spotted him yet.

Behind the two figures, to the south-west, the sky was a deeper shade of grey, verging on black. They were all about to get wet.

Jerry came to a boulder just off the path. The old man and the girl were getting very close to the crag, when they would be out of his sight. He didn’t want to leave it much longer. It was still quite a distance. The shot might alert the stalker, but he would have to take that risk. If he took the old man down that would be worth it.

He rested the rifle on the boulder, and looked through the scope. The image of the two figures jumped around with his heavy breathing. He waited, breathing slowly and steadily.

The images settled down.

He allowed the crosshairs to rest on the old man’s back, and squeezed the trigger.

The old man saw a small stone shatter just ahead of him, and a split second later he heard the shot.

He had been shot at before, nearly sixty years before.

‘Down!’ he shouted to Clémence, and threw himself face first into the heather.

Clémence turned to look at him, and then down the slope.

‘Get down, Clémence! He won’t be able to see you in the heather.’

There was another shot, and then Clémence dropped to the ground. For a moment the old man thought she had been hit.

‘Clémence! Are you OK?’

‘Yes. He missed. But I saw where he was. He’s not far down there.’

The old man could see the light blue of her coat through the heather.

‘What do we do now?’ said Clémence.

‘I don’t know.’ They were safe in the heather as long as Jerry stayed where he was. But of course he wouldn’t stay there. He would follow them up the hill and flush them out like game birds. Big fat pheasants that couldn’t even fly. They didn’t stand a chance, unless they somehow could get to the crag and out of sight.

The sky was darkening. Rain might help a bit. Snow a bit more.

‘All right,’ said the old man. ‘You crawl as fast as you can that way,’ he pointed to a direction a little to one side of the path. ‘I’ll distract him. If he hits me, crawl away from where I am and then just lie still. Go!’

He heard Clémence rustle through the heather.

He pulled himself to his feet and tried to run. It was scarcely more than a shuffle. Sixty years ago, even thirty years ago, he could have sprinted. Moving targets were much harder to hit, but he was barely moving. He tried a change of direction but tripped over some heather and fell, as another shot rang out.

He waited a few seconds, and then started off again. The crag really wasn’t very far away. There was another report, and then another. This chap wasn’t much of a shot. So the old man carried on running, or stumbling, at any moment expecting to feel the bullet tearing up his back.

Through his peripheral vision he was aware of something light blue moving beside him. Clémence was on her feet as well.

One more shot and they were behind the crag.

In front of them was a broad shallow saddle, between the summit of Ben Wyvis and a lesser top to its west. A small loch lay in the middle of it. No cover apart from heather, until a cliff face about a mile away. They would never get that far before Jerry reached the crag and a clear shot of them.

The light was draining from the sky, but that was mostly the moisture-heavy cloud in front of them rather than darkness. Somewhere beyond that, the sun was sinking behind the mountains.

The old man bent down to catch his breath. ‘You run on ahead, Clémence. I’ll catch you up.’

‘You mean you will distract him?’

The old man smiled weakly. ‘Maybe.’

‘No,’ said Clémence. ‘We stick together.’

‘Go!’

‘No!’

The old man concluded that his granddaughter was very stubborn indeed.

He looked at the sky. ‘That’s going to be snow, isn’t it?’

‘I think so,’ said Clémence.

He scanned the moorland. About thirty yards off the path a short distance ahead of them was a bump in the heather, no more than a ripple. Perhaps they could hide there. Until it started to snow.

‘All right,’ said the old man. ‘Follow me!’

He led Clémence at a shuffling run to the spot. It wasn’t much but, most importantly, it put them just out of sight of a man standing on the path by the crag. ‘Down here!’

They pressed themselves to the ground. Through the stem of a twisted heather bush, the old man could keep watch on the crag.

In less than a minute, Jerry appeared, holding his rifle ahead of him. He stopped and looked ahead towards the cliffs in the distance.

The old man followed Jerry’s eyes. The cliffs had disappeared. A thick white blanket was moving rapidly towards them; the black sky had turned white.

Jerry hesitated and then jogged slowly along the path for about twenty yards. He was close.

He stopped, and looked around.

He turned off the path and began walking slowly their way.

A snowflake landed on the old man’s nose. Then another on the heather an inch in front of his eyes.

Jerry was moving right towards them. He must have identified the ripple in the landscape as a likely hiding place. Damn.

More snowflakes, falling more steadily. But the old man could still see Jerry clearly. He tensed. If he was younger, he could have tried to jump Jerry, take him by surprise. That was still probably his best bet, but who was he kidding? What chance would an eighty-three-year-old man have against a fit fifty-year-old with a rifle?

Maybe he would give Clémence a chance to get away before he was shot.

He was about to whisper his instruction to Clémence to that effect, when Jerry stopped. Looked around him. Stared at the crag.

There was a fold in the rock there, barely big enough to hide a man, but it caught Jerry’s attention. He turned and jogged back towards it, his gun held in front of him, ready to fire. Clearly he had decided that’s where they were hiding.

The snowflakes fell faster, soft but persistent. The wind got up and the trajectory of the snow flattened below forty-five degrees. The brown heather was now spattered with white. The old man could still see Jerry and the crag, but he was becoming more indistinct by the minute.

When Jerry reached the crag, he was little more than a blurred dab of darkness in the white. And then he was gone.

‘What do we do now?’ hissed Clémence.

‘We move.’

15

Callum O’Neill hoisted his bike off the train onto the platform, and followed the dozen or so other passengers through the barrier. He paused outside the station to check his route from Dingwall to Loch Glass avoiding the busy A9, and set off. It was twelve miles to the foot of Loch Glass, but Callum was raring to go and looking forward to the ride.

When Clemmie had asked him to join her at the crazy old man’s place he had desperately wanted to say yes. But he had just started at The Feathers and he was nervous about requesting time off right away. Then one of the other barmen had asked Callum if he could switch Tuesday night for Friday, and Callum had spotted his opportunity. He had agreed, provided the other guy would do Wednesday as well, and so had bought himself two nights away. He would have to be back in Glasgow for Thursday lunchtime, but that was just possible if he got up early and caught the first train from Dingwall.

Callum’s immediate instinct was to phone Clemmie and tell her he was coming; she could pick him up from the station in Livvie’s Clio. But then he decided to take up her suggestion of bringing his bike and surprise her. Callum was a keen cyclist, and his dad had an excellent library of maps of the Highlands, so he had worked out that it would be a nice ride from the nearest station.

And it was. It was cool, and the sky was grey, but Callum worked up a sweat. He was soon out of Dingwall, and speeding north parallel to the A-road, with the Cromarty Firth and the Black Isle beyond it. He swooped down into the village of Evanton and turned left up a narrow lane signposted to Loch Glass.

This was harder work, but Callum was fit and his legs pumped, spurred on by the excitement of seeing Clemmie. He really liked her; she was attractive, she was funny and she seemed to like him. Their backgrounds were very different: she was part of the English public school contingent with their gap years and their instilled sense of superiority, and he was younger, Scottish and from a comprehensive. But he didn’t care about that and neither did she.

Besides, both of them were skint.

He was beginning to learn that her outward confidence and sophistication hid a screwed-up, lonely childhood. Callum liked his parents, he liked his younger sister and he still saw all his pals from school, all of which gave him a feeling of security that Clemmie envied.

That was fine with him. Frankly, he couldn’t believe his luck.

He attacked the hill that rose high above the River Glass, and then he was drifting down through the woods to the lodge marked on his map. There he came to a metal gate, with a sign: Wyvis Estate. Private.

He hesitated, wondering whether he should knock on the lodge’s door for permission to pass through. But then he decided he had been invited to the old man’s house by Clemmie, so he had a right to enter the estate. He opened the gate, crossed the river on the wooden bridge, and pedalled through the pine woods to the loch. No one inside the lodge seemed to have noticed him.

As he emerged from the woods, Loch Glass and Ben Wyvis opened up ahead. And an ugly black cloud loomed over both. He put on some speed as the cloud swallowed up the mountain. In a few more minutes snow started to fall.

He reached a turn-off to the left with a sign pointing up the hill into the trees to Culzie, and in another minute he was at a clearing in the woods. There was Livvie’s yellow Clio, with the snow already accumulating on its roof. The snow was falling thickly, as was the visibility. A couple of lights glowed in the cottage, so Callum rested his bike against the wall and, unable to suppress his smile, rang the doorbell.

There was no reply.

Rang again. Nothing.

Damn!

It was snowing hard and there was nowhere else to go, so Callum tried the door handle; it was unlocked and he let himself in.

‘Hello!’ he called. ‘Hello? Clemmie!’

No sign of her, nor of the old man. Livvie’s car was still there, and they had left some lights on in the house, so they might be out somewhere nearby on foot, in which case they would be back soon with the falling snow. Or, more likely, they had gone somewhere in the old man’s car, assuming he had one.

He went through to the kitchen, spotted the kettle and filled it from the tap. That’s what he needed: a cup of tea while he waited.

Jerry stood by the rocks and turned his face into the snow and wind. He couldn’t see more than ten feet ahead of him.

They couldn’t be far away from him. Before the snowstorm had hit, he had had a good view of at least a mile in all directions, and he had seen no sign of them. They had certainly not been on the footpath ahead of him. Which meant they had either disappeared or they were hiding. They weren’t in the rocks by the crag. Perhaps they were in that dip in the ground after all.

He set off into the white, stumbling through heather. After about a minute, he realized he had no idea where that hollow was. He stood still and looked all around him. White silence.

He could get lost in this.

He retraced his footsteps in the snow that was already lying on the heather, until he returned to the footpath. He remembered that there was a small loch ahead and that the path ran around the left edge of it, between the water and the steep slope up to the Ben Wyvis summit. If the old man and the girl were heading for the Ullapool road, then they would have to go along that path.

Head down, Jerry followed the path himself, at a jog. He had no idea how fit Clémence was, but he knew he must be travelling faster than the old man. If he kept up the pace, he should overtake them, probably quite soon.

It was hard work, running through the snow, and he had to keep his head down to avoid twisting an ankle. The flakes driven by the wind bit into his face, but he wasn’t cold, in fact he was building up a sweat. After ten minutes or so, he could just make out black water to his right. He stopped to catch his breath. Jerry was fifty-six himself: no youngster.

What now?

He was pretty sure that his quarry wasn’t just following the path, or he would have caught up with them by now. Which meant they could be anywhere out there in the whiteness. Or the greyness. The light was leaching out of the sky, behind all that snow. It would be dark soon. Jerry would never find them on the mountain.

He thought of continuing on down to the Ullapool road himself. But that was quite a distance. Also, there was a stretch of a mile or two where the old man and the girl might meet it, especially if they weren’t following the paths. Impossible to be sure of intercepting them before they flagged down a car.

No, he was better heading back and regrouping.

So he turned around and trudged down the mountain the way he had come.

The old man led Clémence in what he hoped was a straight line parallel to the mountain path. His plan was to continue until they hit the loch, and then try and work their way around it. The trouble was that in the whiteout it was impossible to be sure that they were, in fact, travelling in a straight line. They had no compass; there was no sun to check. The wind was blowing into his face from a direction just a little right of straight ahead. But the wind could change subtly without him noticing.

It was hard work. Not only was the heather rough, but it was interspersed with mud and peat bog. They both had good coats, with hoods, but neither of them had hats or gloves. The old man had had time to put on his boots, but Clémence was wearing trainers which were soaked through. Worse than that, it would be easy for her to twist an ankle on the uneven ground. They weren’t cold, the going was too tough for that, but the old man was aware he was running low on energy. Also, his stiff knee was beginning to hurt. There was water all around them to drink if they had to, but they had no food.

And somewhere very close to them was a man with a rifle, who was intending to use it on them.

They had a problem.

‘Where is this loch, then?’ Clémence said.

‘Ahead,’ grunted the old man.

‘Are you sure?’

The old man didn’t answer. Of course he wasn’t sure.

Suddenly the old man felt a tug on his sleeve. He turned to see Clémence holding a finger to her lips. She pointed.

Ahead of them, through the snow, they could make out the darkness of a hunched figure crossing in front of them. And a rifle.

The old man crouched low, and Clémence did the same. The figure disappeared to their left.

They waited a minute. ‘I think he must be heading back down the mountain,’ whispered the old man. ‘He’s probably on the path. Let’s take a look.’

They stumbled ahead twenty yards until they came to the footpath. Jerry’s footprints were already disappearing under newly fallen snow.

‘What now?’ said Clémence.

‘He went left, so we go right,’ said the old man.

‘What if he doubles back?’ said Clémence.

‘We’re in trouble,’ said the old man. ‘But the only way we are going to get down the other side of the mountain in this visibility is by following the path.’

‘All right,’ said Clémence. ‘Let’s go.’

The old man looked ahead at the snow. He was exhausted. He was finding it difficult to force one creaky leg in front of another, and his knee was giving him trouble. He had no idea how far it was to the road, or what the terrain would be like, but he knew it must be miles.

‘Are you OK?’ said Clémence. ‘Can you go on?’

‘Yes.’ The old man nodded. ‘Come on!’

He tried to hurry, but he couldn’t. The best he could manage was to force one foot in front of the other in a shuffling limp. The snow let up a bit, so that the visibility was more like thirty yards than five, but it was getting dark. The black waters of the small loch brooded to their right.

They battled on until the cliffs they had seen earlier emerged in front of them.

‘You need a rest,’ said Clémence.

‘No. Let’s keep going,’ said the old man.

‘Just ten minutes,’ said Clémence. ‘Here. It’s out of the wind.’

She found a boulder in the lee of the cliff, and brushed off some snow. The old man let himself down heavily on to it and Clémence sat next to him.

It felt so good to be still.

‘Who the hell is Jerry?’ said Clémence. ‘And why does he want to shoot us?’

‘No idea,’ said the old man. ‘He’s American, isn’t he? Do you think he is something to do with Nathan? His son, maybe?’

‘Uncle Nathan and Aunt Madeleine didn’t have any children,’ Clémence said. ‘I’m pretty sure about that.’

‘Well God knows who he is. But he seems determined to kill us.’

‘I’m sure Jerry Ranger isn’t his real name.’

‘I’m sorry I got you into this,’ said the old man. ‘If it wasn’t for me, you would be safely back at St Andrews, wouldn’t you? I am very bad news.’

‘You are.’ Clémence turned to him. She reached out her hand and squeezed his. ‘You’re freezing!’ she said.

‘Only my hands,’ said the old man. ‘Poor circulation.’ The truth was that sitting still, he was rapidly getting colder.

‘Come on then,’ said Clémence.

‘All right,’ said the old man. But it was all he could do to straighten his stiffened joints and stand up. He stumbled forward.

‘Can you do this?’ said Clémence. ‘I’m exhausted. You must be too.’

‘We can’t stay here,’ said the old man.

They followed the path, which, much to their relief, soon began to head downhill. And then it climbed again. At a couple of points it seemed to fade away under the snow, especially when the heather thinned out. After a few more minutes, they arrived at what seemed to be a fork.

‘Which way?’ said Clémence.

‘I don’t know,’ said the old man. The fork to the left seemed to head downhill. ‘Let’s go that way.’

The path descended gently, and then steeply, down towards a stream. It was flowing away from them, which meant that they were probably on the far side of the mountain from Loch Glass. The descent jarred his complaining knee. Then the path forked again: one way crossed the stream and the other ran along it. It was still snowing, and it was getting darker.

The old man leaned back against a rock. ‘I don’t know which way now.’

‘Can you go on?’

The old man shook his head. ‘Not much further.’

They looked at each other. ‘We’re going to spend the night on the mountain, aren’t we?’ said Clémence.

The old man nodded.

‘Well let’s get back to the cliff. At least there’s a little shelter there.’

The old man nodded again. He looked back up the steep slope they had descended.

There was no way he could get up that.

A night on the mountain would probably kill him. A night on the mountain with no shelter would definitely kill him. They couldn’t just collapse where they were. They had to get back to that cliff.

There was no choice.

The old man forced himself to put one foot ahead of the other as they climbed the slope. Don’t think about how far they had to go, just one foot after the other. And then again. And again. It was hard going, very hard going, for both of them, but eventually they made it back to the fork. Clémence gave the old man her shoulder and dragged him back to the cliff.

The snow had eased off a bit, but it was now completely dark, and the wind was biting. Clémence left the old man for a few minutes. When she returned she dragged him to a hollow in the rocks she had found, with a flat floor of almost dry dead bracken.

She sat on the bracken in the hollow. ‘Come here,’ she said, and the old man slumped down next to her.

It was going to be a very long night. He shivered. It might well be his last.

16

In the darkness and the snow, Jerry lost sight of the path down towards Culzie. He shouldered his rifle and stumbled downhill, his confidence that he would eventually reach Loch Glass waning. He peered through the snow-streaked gloom for signs of the twisted trees of the wood which surrounded the cottage, but he couldn’t see them.

In the end he stumbled into the ditch which ran along the lochside track. He climbed up on to the track and could just make out the boathouse, and the dark waters of the loch beyond. He turned right, and made much better progress along the road, until he came to the turn-off to Culzie. He decided to go back to the cottage, warm up, search it quickly and try to disable the phone connection. He didn’t have anything on him to cut the wires, but he could just smash the phones themselves to make them unusable.

Some lights glimmered through the gloom as he approached Culzie. Alastair and Clémence must have left them on. Snow was piled several inches high on the roof of the Renault. He was about to throw open the front door and flop into the cottage, when he caught sight of a bicycle leaning against the wall.

Strange. He was sure that the old man didn’t own a bicycle, and neither did Clémence.

He crept around the side of the house. The curtains to the living room were drawn and a line of light slipped out beneath them. Jerry tried to peer through a crack in the curtain, but he couldn’t see anyone in the thin strip of room that was revealed.

Someone had drawn those curtains! Someone had ridden to the cottage, had drawn the curtains in the living room, and was probably waiting for the old man and the girl to return.

Who could it be? Jerry had no idea, but he did know there was just one bike, and therefore probably just one person inside. Jerry had a rifle. He had surprise. He could easily overcome whoever it was: tie him up, or even shoot him. Or her.

But that would add complications, complications that were difficult to anticipate. Much better to sneak back to Corravachie, and figure out what to do next.

Jerry was exhausted by the time he got back to his own cottage, but he had a long night ahead of him. There was a chance that both Alastair and Clémence would die on the mountain, but it was not something he could count on. He had to assume that they would find help, and contact the police, who would then search for him. All that would take several hours: it might not be well into the morning before the police came looking. They would certainly come to Corravachie, so he couldn’t stay there. It would take them a while, but eventually they would work out which car-hire firm at Glasgow Airport had rented him the blue Peugeot, and what the licence number was.

So he had some time.

He packed. He shaved off his beard. He used his electric trimmer to shear his hair into a rough buzz cut. He ate.

Then he made a phone call and spoke for ten minutes.

He checked a map. He needed somewhere to lie low, somewhere where police or nosy locals wouldn’t find him, somewhere from where he could emerge to finish off the job he had started. At this point, he was committed. The police would most likely catch him eventually. The only thing that really mattered was whether he succeeded in killing the old man first.

That was the only thing that mattered.

He stuffed his bags into the trunk of the car, together with the rifle and ammunition, and drove slowly through the snow out of the estate. He barely made it sliding down the hill to Evanton, but once he was on the A9, the road was clear. He headed south for the A835 to Ullapool.

Clémence was cold and she was tired. Her feet were wet and freezing. One thing she was grateful for was her coat. Despite her protest, her mother had insisted that they get the warmest parka they could find in Hong Kong. She knew Scotland was cold and she didn’t want her student daughter to freeze.

The old man’s coat wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t as warm as hers. Clémence considered switching. The trouble was that a coat required a body generating heat to create warmth and, unlike Clémence, the old man didn’t seem to be generating much heat. He was pale and his bare skin was freezing to the touch.

Clémence had read somewhere that in cases of hypothermia, you were supposed to strip yourself and the victim naked, and huddle together in a sleeping bag. Clémence was willing to do that if it would keep the old man alive, but stripping down to their underwear in a snowstorm just seemed a stupid thing to do.

Yet she had to think of some way of transferring her body heat to him.

‘Alastair? Take your coat off.’

‘Why?’

‘We need to share body heat. I have an idea.’

They both took their coats off and Clémence laid the old man’s beneath them and hers on top. She hesitated; it seemed weird to cuddle up to this man who had been a total stranger to her only a few days before. Weird or not, it would be so much worse to be lying in a cave with a dead body. She pulled him to her and held him tight. Very soon the warmth built up, at least around their upper bodies.

‘Is that better?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ said the old man. But she could still feel the occasional involuntary shiver from him. She touched his cheek. It was still cold.

They lay there together in silence. For a while. A long while. Clémence could tell from the old man’s breathing that he was still awake.

He mumbled something.

‘What?’ She leaned towards him to hear better.

‘I said, atelier is definitely a French word. I was just letting you win.’

‘No it’s not! Well, it is, but it’s English as well. If we had a dictionary I could prove it to you.’

‘That’s easy for you to say up here.’

She watched the snowflakes dance and scurry in the wind.

‘I wonder where Sophie is buried?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I don’t know where she’s buried. I suppose it isn’t up here. They lived in California, didn’t they?’

‘Didn’t the book say that she was in the de Parzac graveyard in France?’

‘Oh, yes, I had forgotten.’

‘Have you ever been there? Sophie’s village in France?’

‘No. I’ve been to France a lot, of course. My mother’s family is from Rheims and we went there to see my grandparents and cousins on her side. But she wasn’t keen on having anything to do with Dad’s family. Apart from Madeleine.’

‘Because she paid the school fees?’

‘That’s right.’

Clémence looked out into the night.

‘You know I am angry that my biological grandfather murdered my grandmother,’ she said. ‘And I’m almost angrier that he let his innocent friend take the blame.’

‘I know.’

‘But somehow I think of that person as being Angus. Not you.’

‘But it was me.’

It was, it was true. Clémence just didn’t want to accept that. She was growing quite fond of the old man and she hated Angus; she wanted to find a way to square that circle. ‘Maybe you didn’t really kill Sophie?’

‘Of course I did.’

‘No, maybe you just thought you did.’

‘That note at the end of the book was crystal clear,’ said the old man. ‘I killed her and I knew it. That’s why I wrote the damn thing in the first place.’

He pulled himself up on to his elbows, tugging Clémence’s coat up to his chin. ‘I can’t hide from it, Clémence, neither can you. I knew when you were driving me back from the hospital that I wouldn’t want to learn who I really was, what I had really done. Well, it was worse than I could have imagined.’

‘Why did you call Death At Wyvis a novel?’

‘I don’t know. I suppose I had written The Trail of the Scorpion as a novel.’

‘Precisely!’

‘What do you mean “precisely”?’

‘We know why you called that memoir a novel. Because it wasn’t true. Because you skated over how and why you and that sergeant left the other guy to die.’

‘That’s right.’

‘So maybe this is a novel for similar reasons?’

‘You’re clutching at straws, Clémence.’

Clémence was, but she was determined to hold on to them. ‘In Death At Wyvis, you say that you had shown a first draft of Trail of the Scorpion to the sergeant, whatever his name was, in Leeds, and he had made you change it, right?’

‘Right.’

‘Maybe you did the same thing this time? Showed the handwritten manuscript to someone who insisted that you change it.’

‘But I thought you said the manuscript and the published book were identical?’

‘They were at the beginning, apart from changing your name to Angus. But who is to say they aren’t different later on? Like when Sophie gets killed?’

The old man grunted.

‘Admit it’s possible.’

‘It’s possible, I suppose. Barely. But it’s wishful thinking. There might be all kinds of other reasons why I changed my name to Angus. Why I called it a novel.’

‘If we were back at Culzie it would be easy to check,’ Clémence said. ‘I wish I had thought to do that!’

‘Maybe we will get the chance,’ said the old man. ‘If we ever get down the mountain alive. And if Jerry Ranger doesn’t find us first.’

Clémence sighed. The old man was right, of course. She was clutching at straws. ‘Oh, well. I may be deluding myself. But choosing to think it’s a possibility makes more sense to me than writing you off as a murderer.’

The old man found her hand and squeezed it. His own hand was cold.

‘It’s a shame you can’t remember anything about writing that book,’ she said.

‘I can remember parts of it. Writing the bit in Capri with Sophie at the Villa Fersen.’

‘But nothing more? Nothing about changing the manuscript? About dealing with publishers? Correcting proofs, isn’t that what writers do?’

There was silence from the old man. Clémence could almost hear him racking his brains. ‘No,’ he said eventually. ‘But I do remember writing something. Something else.’

‘What?’ said Clémence.

‘I don’t know. It was much more recent. It was in that study at Culzie, at the desk with a view of the loch.’

‘What were you writing?’

Clémence could feel the old man tense. ‘Damn!’ he said at last. ‘I can’t remember. It’s like I described before, I can see the pages, I can see my handwriting, but I can’t make out the words. I know it’s important, though. And it’s long.’

‘How long?’

The old man shook his head. ‘I don’t know. Lots of pages.’ He paused. ‘You can’t imagine how frustrating it is not to remember this stuff! And then when I do remember something, it invariably turns out to be something I wish I’d never known.’

Clémence didn’t answer. It must be dreadful. But then it was only so dreadful because the old man had so much to be ashamed about.

‘Do you think it’s stopping?’ said the old man, staring out into the night.

‘It’s slowing,’ said Clémence. ‘But now we are here, I think we should wait for daylight. Get some sleep.’

‘Good idea,’ said the old man, and he rolled over on to his side. Clémence pulled herself up to him, in a spoon.

‘I’m going to make this right,’ said the old man. ‘If we ever get down this mountain, I am going to make this right.

‘I don’t see how you can,’ said Clémence. ‘Sophie is dead. Grandpa has already spent fifteen years in prison.’

‘I know,’ said the old man. ‘But I’m going to find a way.’

A minute later, his breathing became more regular. Clémence felt the fatigue wash over her. Soon she would be asleep herself. She prayed, just before sleep came, that the old man would still be alive when she woke up.

17

Wednesday 17 March 1999, Ben Wyvis

Clémence opened her eyes. In front of her the snow-draped flank of Ben Wyvis glimmered blue in the early dawn. The sky above seemed clear, save for a smattering of pink-lined clouds.

Her shoulders were stiff. Her thigh hurt where a stone had dug into it. She was cold, especially her feet, which were still damp.

With a start she remembered the body next to her. She couldn’t hear or feel any breathing. Gingerly, she touched the old man’s cheek. It was cool but not cold.

He moved. Groaned.

He was alive!

She moved over and wrapped her arms around him, holding him tight.

‘Good morning,’ he muttered.

‘Are you OK?’

‘I’m cold. But that helps.’

‘Let’s stay here like this for a few minutes. Warm you up.’

Clémence felt the sharp edges of the old man’s bones against her chest. He was her grandfather and she didn’t want him to die.

‘Ow!’ said the old man. ‘You are crushing me.’

‘Sorry.’ She loosened her grip. ‘Actually, we had better get going.’

They disentangled, and Clémence pulled herself to her feet. The sky was clear, the mountain was white. It was cold, but the wind had died down.

She helped the old man to his feet, and eased him into his coat.

‘God, my muscles are stiff!’ he said. ‘And they ache.’

‘But you are alive.’

He grinned at her, his brown eyes warm in the frozen landscape. ‘I’m alive. Thanks to you.’

‘Let’s see where we are.’

Clémence strode out into the snow, looking around her for signs of Jerry. She didn’t see him, but she did see a stag, sniffing the air on a ridge barely fifty yards away. It turned and was off, scrambling along the ridge and over its crest.

Clémence followed it, trudging through the snow, until she reached a vantage point to the south side of the mountain.

It was a stunning morning. Snow-blanketed mountain tops stretched for perhaps fifty miles ahead of her. Much closer, to the south-west, was a wooded valley, in the midst of which a main road followed a half-hidden river. A smooth carpet of virgin snow led down the slope to the pine forest. If there were any paths, they were submerged. It looked easy, but she was quite sure it wouldn’t be.

She returned to the old man and told him what she had seen. ‘How are you feeling?’

‘Stiff,’ he said. ‘Tired. Cold. And my knee hurts. But I can make it. Let’s go.’

They set off at a slow pace. On this side of the mountain, heather gave way to grass, and there seemed to be fewer bogs. It was also downhill and, with the good visibility, they were able to take a route that avoided sharp descents or rocks.

Clémence threw worried glances at the old man as they trudged downhill. His skin was pale, and he looked so frail that a gust of wind would topple him, yet there was something determined in his step. She was exhausted; it amazed her that he could keep going.

Slowly, ever so slowly, the pine trees drew closer.

The morning light woke Jerry. He had shoved the small passenger seat of the Peugeot back as far as it would go, but it still didn’t leave enough room for his tall frame to rest comfortably. He had probably managed four hours sleep.

He had driven from Wyvis to the Ullapool road and then patrolled it up and down countless times until midnight. There had been no sign of the old man and the young woman, but he couldn’t be sure that they hadn’t been picked up by a car before he had seen them. He reasoned it was more likely that they had stopped at nightfall and decided to stay out on the mountain.

So he had taken a detour to a large twenty-four-hour supermarket near Inverness, where he had withdrawn as much cash as he could from an ATM and bought some essentials, including a pay-as-you-go phone with a charger that would work in a car. Once the police were on to him, he would avoid using his credit card for as long as possible. Then he drove back to an empty car park beside the Ullapool Road to get a few hours of sleep. Fortunately, the snow had stopped.

He was cutting things a little fine. It was just possible that they might have got down the mountain and alerted the police, but Jerry thought it unlikely that the cops would be able to track down Hertz at Glasgow Airport and get his registration number before at least the morning. They would guess he had rented a car, but they had no way of knowing where from. And having shaved his beard, he didn’t match a cursory physical description.

He started the Peugeot and drove up a track marked on his map on the south side of the road, which should give him a good view of the southern slope of Ben Wyvis. And indeed the mountain rose above him: a high ridge with a number of domed tops, the tallest of which was Ben Wyvis itself, stretching out like an enormous whale.

The blue and pink fingers of dawn caressed the snowfield beneath the summit, eventually leaving it a pristine glimmering white.

Jerry pulled out his binoculars and scanned the mountain. Nothing moved. He gave it a second pass, and this time spotted three dark dots high up to the right of the summit.

Deer. No people.

So the old man and Clémence were not up and moving yet. But Jerry was content. If they were going to descend the south side of the mountain, he would get a clear view of them.

Of course, if they decided to double back to Wyvis, he would miss them. On the whole, he thought that unlikely. It was just a chance he would have to take.

He was committed now.

Jerry scanned the mountain patiently every few minutes. After half an hour or so, he spotted two figures very clearly as they made a slow and indirect path down the mountain. He checked their progress against his Ordnance Survey map of the area. Footpaths were marked on the map, but the two people did not seem to be following them — they probably couldn’t make them out under the snow. Jerry waited until he could be sure where they would strike the pine forest and hence from which path they would eventually emerge into the main road.

According to the map, the woods stretched for two to three miles, and there were three main paths through them down to the road. The figures moved along a ridge and then descended in a straight line for the woods on what looked like a smooth slope. Checking his map, Jerry was pretty sure that Clémence and the old man were heading directly for one of those footpaths through the woods, just by a kink at the edge of the splash of green.

Jerry jumped into his car and drove down to the point where that path hit the road. There was a lay-by there, and he pulled over. His blue Peugeot was in plain view of the road, but since he now knew his quarry was still on the mountain, he could be sure they hadn’t alerted the police.

Pausing to make certain that he couldn’t hear any other cars coming, he popped the trunk and eased his rifle out, before jogging into the woods.

It was a good, well-maintained path that was clearly visible even after the snowfall. He was glad to see that there were no footprints; no random early-morning hikers to get in the way. He hurried up the hill, until he was out of sight of the road, and then began to search for a good place for an ambush.

He came upon a small stretch of open ground along the bank of a stream. He ducked off the path, and soon found the ideal spot, in a dense clump of trees, with an unimpeded view of the footpath. He settled down to wait, ears sharpened for the sound of descending footsteps.

The range was only about twenty yards. No chance he would miss.

No chance at all.

18

It took Clémence and the old man over an hour to reach the pine forest. As they approached it, Clémence was disappointed to see that it was protected by a high deer fence. No way through.

‘Left or right?’ Clémence said.

‘Left,’ said the old man.

And so they set off, walking quite a way along the perimeter, until they reached a stile and a prepared footpath heading downhill.

The wood was quite beautiful, the fresh snow glistened, flakes on the branches of the pine trees sparkled, and some energetic blackbirds proclaimed the glory of the morning. Clémence was exhausted, but it lifted her and gave her the strength to manage the last mile.

But she wasn’t sure whether her companion had it in him. He stopped and leaned against a tree.

‘Are you going to make it?’ said Clémence. He could barely stand. ‘I don’t think it’s too far.’

‘Yes, I’ll make it,’ said the old man. ‘Just give me a moment.’

They waited in silence for a couple of minutes as the old man recovered his breath.

‘Clémence?’ he said.

‘Yes?’

‘You remember I said last night I was determined to make this right?’

‘Yes.’ She did remember. She also remembered how she had pointed out that it was too late now, but she didn’t mention that.

‘When we get down there, I don’t want to go to the police.’

‘What?’

‘We shouldn’t go to the police about Jerry. At least not right away. There are things that I need to find out first.’

‘There is a nut-job carrying a rifle trying to kill us!’ said Clémence. ‘Of course we should go to the police.’

‘I’ve been thinking about that,’ said the old man. ‘I’m sure he’s trying to kill me, not you. And I don’t want to put you in any danger. So you should leave. Head off somewhere, anywhere. Not St Andrews, but somewhere where Jerry can’t find you. Only for a few days until I have discovered whatever I can.’

‘You’re crazy,’ said Clémence. ‘We must go to the police. Then they can go looking for him before he kills you or me or anyone else. And when they catch him, they can ask him who he is and why he is after us.’

The old man sighed. ‘Once we tell the police, they will take over. And who knows what they will find, what secrets they will uncover? I want to uncover them for myself. I want to speak to Pauline Ferguson. You are right, we should compare the manuscript of Death At Wyvis to the final novel. And whatever it was I wrote in the study at Culzie, I need to find it.’

‘And you expect to do all that by yourself, with Jerry Ranger after you?’

‘Yes,’ said the old man. ‘I said I wanted to make this right. I will.’

‘No,’ said Clémence. ‘When we get down this mountain I am going straight to the local police station and I am telling them everything.’

‘Please, Clémence.’

‘No. Now let’s get going.’

After another three-quarters of an hour they reached an empty car park and the main road. It was still only eight o’clock.

There was a bench in the car park, and the old man slumped on to it. He winced and rubbed his right knee.

Clémence stood on the roadside and stuck out her thumb. She didn’t have long to wait. The fourth car, a dirty black Volvo, pulled over and the driver wound down his window. He was a thin red-haired man in his thirties with loose pouches under his eyes.

‘Are you all right?’ he said with a concerned smile.

‘Not really,’ said Clémence. ‘We’ve spent the night on the mountain. I’m with my grandfather. Could you give us a lift to the nearest town?’

‘Aye. Go fetch him and hop in.’

Clémence beckoned to the old man and eased him into the back seat as she joined the driver in the front.

Jerry’s excitement turned to frustration as the minutes ticked by. He had been worried that he wouldn’t be able to find a good ambush spot before they stumbled upon him, and now they hadn’t showed. Where the hell were they?

Jerry pulled out the map again and examined the kink in the perimeter of the forest, where the old man and Clémence had been heading. All right, they wouldn’t be on the path marked on the map, but they should be able to see the footpath through the woods. It would almost certainly be signposted.

Wouldn’t they see it?

He peered at the map closely.

Maybe not. Maybe if they hit the woods just to the east of the path, on the other side of the kink, they wouldn’t see anything. Then they would either plunge straight into the woods, which would be hard work in the snow, or walk around the edge until they found a path. Now, if they turned right, they would very soon find the path Jerry was staking out. But if they turned left?

Damn. Goddamn it to hell!

The other path ran through the woods parallel to Jerry’s, but to the east. It was only about a quarter of a mile away.

Jerry grabbed his rifle and ran across the path and down into the stream. He clambered up the bank on the other side and plunged into the trees.

It was hard work, but in a few minutes he came across a well-made footpath.

There were two pairs of footprints heading downhill.

Damn!

Jerry ran, jumped and skipped down the slippery path. He fell twice. They couldn’t be that far ahead!

He turned a corner and the trees opened out with a view of the road. A black station wagon was pulled over, and a dark-haired woman in a light-blue jacket was helping an old man into the back seat.

Jerry swung the rifle off his shoulder, and aimed.

He was breathing too heavily to keep the sights still.

In the couple of seconds it took to settle the sights, the car was already pulling out into the road.

Jerry had a blind shot at the car’s rear window. He almost pulled the trigger anyway, but decided not to.

He would get another chance.

He would make damn sure that somehow he would give himself another chance.

The car was deliciously warm.

It turned out that the red-haired man was a vet named Matt, who had been up half the night delivering a calf. He lived just outside Dingwall and his wife did bed and breakfast. He offered them breakfast and the use of a bed to recover. Clémence explained that they had been walking from Loch Glass, got lost in the snow and their car was abandoned on the Wyvis Estate on the other side of the mountain.

The vet pulled out a phone and called his wife to have breakfast ready for them when they arrived. After twenty minutes or so, they turned off the main road into Dingwall along a short track to a small farm wedged between the road and a railway line. As they walked into the farmhouse, they could smell bacon, and the vet’s wife Agnes, a small, thin woman with spiky hair and a quick, friendly smile, greeted them with a massive breakfast and hot coffee.

‘Where are you staying?’ she asked.

Clémence thought quickly. ‘Nowhere. We were planning to find a hotel in Dingwall after our walk, but then we got lost. Matt said you had a room here? I wonder if we could stay here tonight?’

‘Aye, of course you can. You’ll have to share a room, mind you. What about your car?’

‘We can get a taxi back to Loch Glass to pick it up later on,’ said Clémence. She wasn’t at all sure whether they would actually do that, but she needed to sound credible.

After breakfast, the vet went off to his practice in town and Agnes showed them a small cosy bedroom, with two single beds and an en suite bathroom.

‘You don’t happen to have a charger I can borrow?’ said Clémence, showing Agnes her phone.

Agnes did, and it fitted. Clémence plugged her phone in. ‘I’ll leave you to it,’ Agnes said.

‘Are you going to call the police now?’ said the old man, when she had left the bedroom. ‘We are not in danger. Jerry has no way of knowing where we are.’

It was true. Clémence felt safe and warm. Yet she also knew they should ring the police.

‘I will, but not yet. You have a bath. I’ll try and dry my socks. And you might need a nap.’

The old man bathed first, and then it was Clémence’s turn. It felt glorious, and she wallowed for twenty minutes. As she was getting dressed, she heard her mobile phone go off in the bedroom. She pulled up her jeans and rushed to answer it.

She recognized the number.

‘Hi, Callum!’ she said, so happy to speak to him.

‘Clemmie, are you all right?’ He sounded worried.

‘Yes,’ said Clémence, uncertainly.

‘Where are you? I’m with Terry the gamekeeper in his Land Rover looking for you.’

‘Are you?’ said Clémence, confused. ‘What are you doing with him?’

‘I got the train to Dingwall yesterday and cycled up to Loch Glass. I wanted to surprise you, but you were out when I got to Culzie. It was snowing and I waited for you, but you never showed up. I thought perhaps you had gone out somewhere for dinner. Then when you didn’t come back I thought maybe you couldn’t make it back to Wyvis, because of the snow or something. I fell asleep in the lounge. This morning, when you still weren’t here, I went to the Stalker’s Lodge and spoke to Terry, and he said the old man’s car is at his place, so you must have gone out on foot somewhere. We’ve been looking for you. Terry was just about to call the police and Mountain Rescue.’

Clémence thought quickly. She wasn’t sure that she wanted Terry to know what had happened, at least not quite yet.

‘Is Terry there with you now?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, tell him Alastair and I are fine. We got stuck up Ben Wyvis last night and came down the other side. We are at a hotel now. We’re OK.’

‘You spent the night on the mountain? Why on earth did you decide to climb it when there was a storm coming?’

‘I know, I know, it was stupid,’ said Clémence. ‘Look, the important thing is that you and Terry know we’re OK. But I’d really like to talk to you properly. So as soon as you are alone, give me a call, right?’

Clémence heard Callum talking to Terry, and Terry’s Highland rumble in the background.

‘Terry says someone tried to break into your car last night. Do you want him to report it to the police?’

‘Oh, no. Tell him not to worry. I’ll do that myself when I get back there.’

‘Are you sure you’re OK, Clemmie?’

‘Quite sure. I’ll tell you all about it when you call me back.’

The old man was sitting on his bed, watching her intently. ‘Is that your boyfriend?’

‘Yes. He spent the night at Culzie; he wanted to surprise me. He’s with Terry now. He’s going to ring me back in a minute.’

‘You didn’t tell him what really happened?’

‘No,’ said Clémence. ‘But I will. When he’s alone.’

‘I see,’ said the old man. ‘You know, you could ask him to bring the handwritten manuscript to us. And the published novel. Then we could compare them.’

Clémence knew what the old man was up to. He was playing for time before she called the police. But she did want to know whether her theory was correct: that there was a difference between the two versions of the story. She really wanted to know. And she felt safe at the farm; there was no way that Jerry could know where they were.

‘I could,’ she said carefully.

The old man smiled.

‘All right,’ Clémence said. ‘But after we’ve done that, then we call the police.’

The old man didn’t answer, but for the first time in a while, he looked happy.

Clémence’s phone rang again.

It was Callum, and he was back in Culzie, alone. Clémence told him what had happened. He was shocked and concerned for Clémence’s safety. But when she asked him to bring the manuscript and the novel he was happy to comply. She told him to watch out for Jerry and to ride past the vet’s farm a couple of times to make sure he wasn’t being followed. He reckoned it might take him two hours to get there. Although it was downhill, there was still snow on the road around the loch and the road from Loch Glass down to Evanton would be tricky.

You could rely on Callum. You could always rely on Callum.

‘What do we do about Aunt Madeleine?’ said Clémence.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, Jerry doesn’t know where we are. But he might know where Aunt Madeleine is staying. Or he might find out. She’s eighty-five. We can’t put her in danger.’

‘Oh, I see,’ said the old man. ‘It would be nice to speak to her, though. She might be able to tell us a lot.’

‘We should make her leave,’ Clémence said. ‘It’s too dangerous while Jerry is on the loose. Even if we call the police.’

‘OK. How about we tell her to pack and come and meet us here? We can talk to her and then she can go straight to the station or even the airport at Inverness and go to London, or back to America? That should be safe.’

Clémence thought it through. That seemed reasonable.

‘Ask her to come in a couple of hours. Maybe three.’

‘Why?’

‘To give us a bit of time to look at whatever Callum brings. We may want to ask Madeleine about it. And perhaps we should find a quiet café or pub to meet in, rather than here.’

Clémence was doubtful. She thought about just telling Madeleine to leave her hotel immediately and take a taxi to Inverness Airport, but a couple of hours probably wouldn’t make any difference. She had no real reason to think that Jerry was after Madeleine as well, nor that he would be able to find out where she was staying.

‘All right,’ she said. ‘But which café?’

‘Ask Agnes. She seems helpful.’

Clémence went downstairs, and found the vet’s wife in the kitchen. She suggested a small place in Maryburgh, a village a short distance from the farm, in the opposite direction to Dingwall. Clémence went back to their room and phoned Madeleine at her hotel from her mobile. She only just managed to persuade the surprised and sceptical old lady to pack and meet them, promising that all would be revealed when she got to the pub.

‘So now what do we do?’ said Clémence when she had hung up with her great-aunt. ‘Do you want a nap until Callum gets here?’

‘I have a little idea,’ said the old man, with a grin.

19

Agnes gave them a lift into Dingwall, which was lucky because although it was only a mile or so, Clémence wasn’t sure the old man could walk much further. Agnes herself would be out for the rest of the day, but she said that her guests could use her lounge if they wanted, and suggested that if they needed a taxi to pick up their car at Loch Glass, they could find one at the station.

Dingwall was the old county town of Ross and Cromarty, and lay adjacent to the Cromarty Firth. The snow had been much lighter at sea level, and was already melting to a thin slush. Agnes drove around the outskirts of the town and dropped them at the front door of the Ashwood House Nursing Home. Clémence had told her they had promised to visit a friend of a friend while they were in Dingwall.

She was nervous about Jerry Ranger, but willing to play along with the old man for three hours or so. If they got a taxi directly from the nursing home back to the farm, then it was hard to see how Jerry could possibly find them. And once Madeleine was packed off to Inverness, Clémence would speak to the police.

The nursing home was an imposing Victorian house with half a view of the firth, but inside it was tatty and unloved. The staff were friendly and good-humoured, however, and one of them led them up to Pauline Ferguson’s room.

She was a sturdy old lady, with bright-blue eyes and curly hair of steel grey. She was in bed, and a wheelchair and walker suggested mobility problems.

‘Ah, Dr Cunningham! Sheila said you would be in to see me! How are you after your fall?’

The old man smiled politely. ‘Good morning, Mrs Ferguson. As perhaps Mrs MacInnes explained, I seem to have lost almost all my memory, so I have no recollection of you at all. I do hope you will forgive me.’

‘Och, of course I will! And who is this lovely wee lassie?’

The old man smiled with what Clémence suspected was pride. ‘This is my...’ he hesitated. With a surge of pleasure, Clémence realized that the old man was about to say ‘granddaughter’, but had stopped himself. Mrs Ferguson seemed to assume it was a touch of senility — a trait she was no doubt used to.

‘My friend,’ the old man said. ‘Clémence Smith. She’s a student at St Andrews University and has kindly agreed to look after me.’

Mrs Ferguson gave Clémence a cheery smile. ‘You seem to be doing a good job with that.’

Clémence couldn’t help laughing. ‘Not that good a job, Mrs Ferguson,’ she said.

‘Well, I’m glad you came to see me. After Sheila told me about your wee accident, Dr Cunningham, I thought you’d mebbe not be able to mind what we said, and it seemed gey important to you at the time. So I thought mebbe I’d repeat it.’

Excitement shone in the old woman’s eyes. This was clearly gossip of a high order, and she was going to enjoy it. Clémence had read to old people at a nursing home herself, and was familiar with residents like Mrs Ferguson: a sharp brain craving stimulation, desperate to break free of a worn-out body.

‘Please do, Mrs Ferguson,’ said the old man. ‘One of the things Clémence has been doing with me is trying to piece together my past.’

‘The idea is to jog his memory, and help him recall things himself,’ added Clémence. ‘The doctors insisted on it.’

‘Aye, they’re not daft,’ said the old lady. She hesitated. ‘Now. Tell me what you’ve jaloused?’

There was a brief silence. ‘What’s “jaloused”?’ asked Clémence. She thought she was used to Scots by now, but this woman was something else.

‘Oh, I’m sorry, lassie. What you’ve suspected, I mean.’

‘Well, we know about Sophie Trickett-Smith’s murder,’ said Clémence. ‘We’ve read Death At Wyvis.’

‘So we know I killed her,’ the old man said. ‘And we know you were cooking at Wyvis Lodge that night.’

‘We think we know he killed her,’ Clémence corrected quickly. The moment she said the words she was surprised at them. She was losing objectivity; she realized she was desperate to believe that the old man wasn’t a murderer.

Mrs Ferguson’s eyes caught Clémence’s. She had noted the doubt in her voice.

‘It was that night you were asking me about, Dr Cunningham. You were wanting to ken any wee thing I could mind about it. It was a long time ago, but my certes, it was certainly a night to remember!’

‘And what did you tell me?’

‘Not much you didn’t ken already,’ said Mrs Ferguson. ‘Or that wasn’t in Death At Wyvis.’

‘Oh.’ The old man was disappointed, and so was Clémence.

‘But then, just as you were leaving, you were speiring me about my son Iain. He was there that night too, helping out in the kitchen, and you wanted to ask him a few questions.’

‘And did I?’

‘No. Well, at least not then. You see, Iain bides in America now. In New York. He’s in property, or “real estate” as he calls it. He has done well for himself, with him leaving the school at fifteen.’

‘That’s impressive. You must be very proud of him.’

‘Och, away you go! You see, I’m not sure our Iain is just the clean potato, if you see what I mean.’

‘Oh,’ said the old man. ‘Do you mean in business, or in other matters too?’

Clémence knew the old man was referring to the night of Sophie’s death. And so did Mrs Ferguson.

‘You see, Iain was set up in business in New York by an old friend of yours. Nathan Giannelli.’

‘Uncle Nathan?’ said Clémence.

‘Aye. First he got him a junior office job with a real estate developer friend. Then, a few years later, he lent Iain some money to get started. Iain did the rest himself.’

‘Why would Nathan do all that?’ the old man asked.

‘You asked me that question before, and I couldn’t answer it. But I could see what you thought. You thought that it was to get Iain not to tell the truth about whatever he had seen that night.’

The old man and Clémence sat in silence as they digested this information.

‘Did you speak to your son about this?’

‘No,’ said Mrs Ferguson. ‘At least not at first. I think you must have visited me about September last year. I got a call from Iain a month later saying that you had been to see him in New York. Iain was angry at me for telling you about Mr Giannelli helping him. It was the first time he had called me since Christmas.’

Mrs Ferguson’s cheer had left her voice. She seemed upset by her son’s reaction, but more sad than angry.

‘Did he tell you what I had asked him?’

‘No. He wouldn’t. But, as I said, he sounded upset. And worried. Can you remember talking to him? Surely you would remember flying to America?’

‘You would think so,’ said the old man. ‘But no, I don’t remember anything about that at all. So that would be October last year?’

‘That’s right.’

‘And I didn’t visit you again?’

‘No,’ said the old woman. ‘I wish you had; I was fairly wanting to know what you had discovered.’

‘Sorry,’ said the old man with one of his comforting smiles. ‘I will when I find out what’s going on this time. I promise.’

‘You do that,’ said Mrs Ferguson.

‘It was a big move from Wyvis to New York,’ said Clémence.

‘Aye, it was. But it was good for Iain. He was a bright wee laddie at school. I wanted him to stay on, but he was desperate to leave and become a stalker like his dad. At least that’s what he thought when he was fifteen. But as he got older I think he wanted to leave the Highlands and go to the big city: Edinburgh or even London. He was wanting to get on in the world, ken? I was pleased about that, but my husband thought he should stay working on the estate as a ghillie. I’m not surprised that he jumped at the chance to go to New York. Nor that he did well once he was there.’

A note of pride had crept into the old lady’s voice, but she banished it. ‘Mind you, once he got there, it was as if he was wanting to rub out his past life here. We saw him mebbe six times in the last thirty years. I have grandchildren and I’ve only seen the wee bairns twice! I think he’s ashamed.’

‘Ashamed?’ said the old man. ‘Ashamed of what?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Mrs Ferguson. ‘And I’m feart to find out. But if you do discover what, you will tell me, won’t you?’

‘We will, Mrs Ferguson, don’t you worry about that,’ said the old man, reassuringly. And as he did so, Clémence glimpsed the bedside manner of an experienced GP.

‘Do you know what, Dr Cunningham?’

‘What?’

‘I mind fine that week when poor Mrs Trickett-Smith was murdered. I never really believed Mr Trickett-Smith killed her. But when I read that book, I definitely didn’t think you did it. You were aye the gentleman. And you loved her far ower much.’

‘Gentlemen can kill people just as easily as anyone else,’ said the old man. ‘And the world’s jails are full of people who killed people they loved.’

Clémence and the old man left Mrs Ferguson, and rang a taxi from the nursing home manager’s office. They crammed together into a small plastic sofa in the hallway waiting the promised ten minutes. They faced a prominent framed notice on the rules visitors should follow to sign in and sign out, rules they had complied with in full.

‘At least I can leave this place,’ said the old man. ‘Imagine being imprisoned in here for the rest of your life.’ He turned to Clémence. ‘Promise me you will never let them put me away in a place like this.’

Clémence felt a flash of irritation. It wasn’t up to her where the old man spent the rest of his days. He wasn’t her responsibility. And, thanks to him, her grandfather, one of her grandfathers, had spent fifteen years in a real prison.

She didn’t answer him directly, but asked a question of her own. ‘What do you think Iain saw?’

‘I don’t know,’ said the old man. ‘Probably me killing Sophie. Or coming out of the boathouse, or something that would incriminate me.’

‘But would Uncle Nathan help him like that if that’s what it was?’

‘Possibly. After all, I had helped Nathan in Deauville, and we know he felt in my debt for that. He’s supposed to be one of my oldest friends, but I can’t remember him since my fall, so you know him better. What do you think?’

Clémence sighed. ‘Uncle Nathan could fix anything. And he was always helpful and generous. It’s not as though he was a soft touch; he would always get what he wanted. But if he wanted to help you, you would be helped.’

‘Well, that’s what he did then.’

They sat in silence for a moment. But it didn’t quite make sense to Clémence. ‘If that’s what it was, why do you think you went all the way to America to track Iain down? If he was just covering for you, why bother?’

‘I don’t know, Clémence. I really don’t know.’

‘Can’t you remember?’

‘You know I can’t remember anything!’ The old man couldn’t contain his frustration.

‘Yes you can,’ said Clémence. ‘Sometimes. Sometimes things like this jog your memory. Did this have something to do with whatever you were writing at your desk at Culzie? Perhaps you were writing a letter to Iain? Or Nathan?’

‘It wasn’t a letter,’ said the old man, furrowing his brow. ‘It was longer than a letter.’

‘A long letter?’

‘No. But you’re right, it did have something to do with Iain.’

Clémence saw the old man struggling and kept quiet. He nodded his head slowly. ‘Yes. It had to do with Iain. And Nathan. Going to see Nathan in America.’

‘Anything else?’

The old man smiled to himself. ‘Yes. It was for the book. For Death At Wyvis. It was an appendix for a second edition.’

‘Are you sure?’

The old man’s face was screwed-up in concentration. ‘Not absolutely sure, no. But I think so.’

Clémence felt a surge of excitement. ‘Where is it? Whatever you were writing. Did you give it to someone? A publisher, perhaps? Uncle Nathan? Is it still at Culzie?’

‘I don’t know. But...’

‘But what?’

‘I know what I wrote it in. An exercise book. A black hard-backed exercise book.’

Clémence’s pulse quickened. ‘Big? A4? With red binding?’

‘Yes. Yes, that’s right.’

‘I know exactly where it is,’ she said.

‘Where?’ The old man looked at him, his eyes alight.

‘It’s at Culzie. Your desk, middle drawer. I saw it when I was looking for photographs.’

‘Well done!’ said the old man, grinning. ‘We’re getting somewhere after all.’

‘I wish I had asked Callum to look for it.’

‘I’ll go back and get it,’ said the old man.

‘No you won’t. The police will. I’ll tell them about it.’

The old man looked disappointed, but he didn’t argue. Yet Clémence was pretty sure that he hadn’t given up on trying to uncover the truth without the police.

And what was in that black exercise book?

20

Stephen gazed out of the window at the Firth of Forth shimmering in the weak March sunlight. He had forgotten how beautiful this stretch of the line to Edinburgh could be, at least in good weather.

Which wasn’t surprising. Now he came to think about it, he hadn’t taken this train for forty years. Not since 1959.

He wasn’t looking forward to any of this. Seeing Alastair again. Revisiting Wyvis. Thinking about Sophie and her murder and the horrible things that had happened afterwards.

Of course Stephen had known that he hadn’t murdered Sophie himself, but he had felt so guilty that he wasn’t surprised that the police believed he had. The guilt was an overwhelming burden that crushed him.

He had tried hard when they had first got married to treat her well, and by and large he had succeeded. Even when he had taken on bit roles in films, he had managed to treat them as a nine-to-five job from which he returned to dinner with his wife.

But the movies were beguiling. Even in wartime there was glamour. Sophie was always beautiful, but then so were the actresses. And they were out of bounds and therefore tempting. There were long stretches with nothing to do, and there was alcohol. As he became more famous, there were the fans: the young women who thought he was handsome and dreamed of sleeping with him.

He dreamed of sleeping with them. And then he did.

In Hollywood it all got worse, as Sophie had known it would. He drank. He took drugs. He slept with lots of women. He treated her badly, very badly.

He treated her much worse than Alastair ever would have done.

And somehow he didn’t notice any of this until he was sitting in a Scottish jail, waiting for his trial for Sophie’s murder.

The truth was he broke down; he couldn’t mount a credible defence for Sophie’s killing, since he knew he was responsible for it. When he was found guilty of murdering her, it seemed to him that justice had been done. He wasn’t innocent.

It was lucky that he didn’t have access to alcohol in prison, but even without it, he reached despair that was so deep he couldn’t remember it.

It was Maitland who had pulled him out of it. Maitland was a manager in an insurance company who had murdered his wife in a fit of jealousy when he had discovered her with another man. Unlike Stephen he had always treated his wife well, at least according to him, and Stephen believed him. Unlike Stephen he had actually killed her. Like Stephen he regretted her death.

But he had learned to live with the fact. He was different from other people: he was a murderer, and he was in prison, where he should be. His life was going to be shitty, which was as it should be. But since he was still a living organism on this planet, and likely to remain so for many years yet, he would get as much out of those years as he could. The small things. Like the Telegraph crossword.

What was the point of Maitland’s life? It was a big question, with no big answers, so he had provided a small one. Doing the Telegraph crossword.

Stephen was Maitland’s disciple. Life was shitty, but it was no longer unbearable. That was despite bloody Alastair Cunningham’s repeated attempts to make it so.

First there was the publication of Death At Wyvis. It was true the book had got Stephen released a few years early for a crime that he didn’t commit. But it had stirred everything up: Sophie’s death, the trial, Stephen’s responsibility for the whole thing. Oddly, Stephen blamed Alastair for that, more than the fact that it was he who had actually killed Sophie.

The fuss died down eventually, and Maitland was let out on parole and came to live in Shepherd’s Bush. He and Stephen began to meet daily at the Windsor Castle for a pint and the crossword. Stephen’s days achieved some focus.

Then, for reasons only known to himself, Alastair had returned from Australia to cause trouble, big time. They were both over eighty, for God’s sake! Why couldn’t Alastair just stay in Australia and rot?

So Alastair felt guilty? He deserved to! Why mess things up for everyone else? Because there was no doubt that Alastair had messed things up for everyone.

And then the stupid bastard had fallen, hit his head and forgotten everything. Excellent! It should all have just stayed forgotten. And it would have done if Madeleine hadn’t interfered again and got Clémence involved.

It was really for Clémence’s sake that Stephen was on the train going north. It wasn’t just that Clémence was an innocent bystander who didn’t deserve to be caught up in the mess. Clémence was Stephen’s granddaughter, and even though he rarely saw her, every time he did she reminded him of Sophie.

Alastair could get what was coming to him. But Clémence? Clémence he had to protect.

Clémence heard wheels crunch gravel outside the nursing home. Their taxi had arrived.

It took them less than ten minutes to get back to the vet’s farm. Clémence didn’t see either Jerry or his blue car lurking, although she couldn’t remember exactly what make his car was, so it was difficult to identify it in the traffic.

Her heart leaped when she saw Callum waiting by the front door of the farmhouse, next to his bike.

She rushed out of the taxi to give him a hug. ‘I’m so glad to see you!’

He squeezed her. He was reasonably tall, very thin, with dark curly hair and gorgeous blue eyes. There was something very reassuring, very normal about his presence. As though the boy sitting next to her in her French grammar class would banish all the weird stuff that had been happening to her over the previous few days.

She paid the taxi driver and introduced Callum to the old man, who greeted him warmly. They went inside, and Clémence made them all tea while she explained to Callum the gist of what had been happening.

Callum took it all in, asking some questions for clarification. Despite the extraordinary situation Clémence and the old man were in, Callum seemed to take it in his stride.

‘So what do we do now?’ he said, as Clémence brought the three of them mugs of tea, and they sat around the kitchen table.

‘Did you bring the manuscript of Death At Wyvis?’ asked the old man.

‘Yes,’ said Callum, opening the bag he had brought in with him. ‘And the published book, like you asked.’

‘We’ll have a look at this,’ said Clémence. ‘We are meeting my aunt Madeleine for lunch; she knows as much about all this as anyone. And then we are going to the police.’

Callum handed the manuscript to Clémence.

‘I’ll just check the chapter where Sophie gets killed,’ said Clémence.

The old man nodded.

He and Callum sipped their tea, as they watched Clémence scan the relevant chapter, ‘Chapter X — The Boathouse’. The chapter — the conversation with Sophie on Ben Wyvis, the dinner back at Wyvis Lodge, putting Stephen to bed, having sex with Sophie in the boathouse, the row, stumbling angrily around in the woods — seemed to be identical, with the exception that the narrator’s name had been changed from ‘Alastair’ in the manuscript to ‘Angus’ in the printed novel.

But Chapter XI was different. Clémence skimmed the first page quickly.

‘Here, let me read this,’ she said to the other two. ‘In the published novel, Chapter XI starts with Angus waking up at dawn and throwing up in the loo. But there are a couple of extra paragraphs right at the beginning.’

She cleared her throat and began to read.

Chapter XI Justice Undone

Author’s note

There is a Wyvis Estate on the shores of Loch Glass in Easter Ross, although I have rearranged some of the dwellings there. The various owners of the estate over the years and their families are entirely fictional, with the exception of the nineteenth-century proprietor. The bed and breakfast outside Dingwall run by a vet and his wife is entirely real. The name is Kildun Cottage, and I warmly recommend it.

I should like to thank a number of people who have helped me with this book: Andrew Botterill, Kevin Anderson, Alasdair and Gill Macnab, Aline Templeton, Kate Penrose, Julia Ridpath and Richenda Todd. Also Louise Cullen and Sara O’Keeffe at Atlantic Books, Nicky Lovick, Liz Hatherell, my agent Oli Munson and, as always, Barbara.