I'll Keep You Safe

Chapter Twenty-Four

It was the sound of the house door slamming shut, more than the roar of Seonag’s engine as she turned the key in the ignition, that woke Niamh.

She felt terrible. Long after Seonag had fled her room the previous night, Niamh had lain awake wrestling with past and present demons. To be confronted again by what she had taken for some distant and long-forgotten adolescent infatuation had further unbalanced her already fragile equilibrium. It seemed extraordinary to her that Seonag could have kept that torch burning all these years in some dark and hidden place, undiminished by time, or marriage, or children.

Sleep, too, had seemed a distant and evasive memory, until sometime after first light, when she had slipped away into the most shallow and dream-filled unconsciousness.

Now she sat up startled, the recollection of waking all those hours ago to find a naked Seonag in her bed flooding back with painful clarity. She slipped quickly from the bed and hurried to the window, parting the blinds with her fingers to see Seonag’s red SUV disappearing beyond the ruins of Bilascleiter. And be startled by the presence of another vehicle, two figures clearly visible beyond the reflections on the windscreen.

She let the blinds fall shut and grabbed her dressing gown to wrap and tie around her, pushing her feet into slippers and sweeping the hair from her face with both hands. She was in no way ready to receive visitors. But a firm knock on the door, and the knowledge that her Jeep parked outside betrayed her presence, meant that she had little choice.

In the hall she blinked away the sleep from her eyes and opened the door to let in a gust of cold, salty air. She was shocked to see Lieutenant Braque standing there, dark hair pulled back from a tired and lined face, ponytail flying out like a flag behind her. A portly middle-aged man with a widow’s peak stood beside her, and although Niamh didn’t know him, she recognized him as a police officer from Stornoway. Her first thought was that there had been some unexpected development.

‘What’s happened?’ she said.

‘Nothing more than any of us knew when you left Paris, Madame Macfarlane,’ Braque said.

Niamh shook her head in confusion and disappointment. ‘What are you doing here, then?’

Gunn held out his hand. ‘Mrs Macfarlane, my name is George Gunn. I’m a detective sergeant with the Stornoway police. Lieutenant Braque has been sent to monitor Ruairidh’s funeral, just in case whoever planted that bomb decides to show up there.’

Niamh frowned. ‘I thought Irina Vetrov’s husband, Georgy, was your prime suspect.’

Braque shrugged non-committally. ‘That is one line of enquiry. Unfortunately we have been unable to trace him, to rule him in or out. And if it was not him, then it may be that the killer is known to you.’

Gunn shuffled awkwardly and cleared his throat. ‘May we come in, Mrs Macfarlane?’

Braque and Gunn settled themselves on stools at the breakfast bar while Niamh popped pods into the coffee maker.

‘Is coffee alright?’

Braque glanced at Gunn. ‘I think Detective Sergeant Gunn may prefer tea.’ He looked as if he might protest, before meeting her eye and then nodding reluctant acquiescence.

‘No problem,’ Niamh said. She put the kettle on and noticed that it was stone cold. Seonag had made herself neither tea nor coffee. Nor had she eaten, and Niamh wondered how much, if at all, she had slept. Perhaps, like Niamh, she had been unable to sleep until late, then drifted off and slept longer than she meant to. She had certainly left in a hurry.

Braque said, ‘Don’t you feel very isolated away out here?’

‘Not at all,’ Niamh said. ‘We’re barely twenty minutes from Ness.’ She glanced at Braque. ‘I’ve heard people say you can feel lonely in a crowd.’

Braque avoided her gaze, almost as if the widow might see the loneliness of the spurned woman in her eyes. Mother of two children with whom she hardly ever spent time. Lonely and alone in a city of ten million people.

‘We built this place to be on our own. It’s where we felt most at home. Most ourselves. I never thought I would want to be anywhere else in the world. Until now.’

Gunn said, ‘You wouldn’t think of selling up, surely?’

‘I don’t know what I’m going to do, Mr... Gunn, is it?’

‘Aye.’

‘I hadn’t planned on being here on my own.’ She poured two coffees and a tea, and they sipped in silence for a few moments as Gunn and Braque took in the view from the windows. The sunlight playing on broken water was dazzling, and they could see the silhouettes of seabirds circling and diving, only to emerge moments later with writhing fish in their beaks.

Braque turned towards Niamh. ‘So... have you had any further thoughts about what happened in Paris?’

‘I’ve thought about almost nothing else,’ Niamh said, her voice flat, her face without expression, anxious to hide the emotion that too often had reduced her to unexpected tears.

‘Nothing fresh has occurred to you?’

Niamh shook her head. ‘No, nothing.’ Before the memory returned of her first moments back at the house. ‘Except...’

‘Except what?’ Gunn said.

And Niamh wondered how she could have forgotten. But Seonag had arrived just moments later, and life, or was it death, had taken over everything since.

‘The email,’ she said.

Ruairidh’s weaving shed was filled with reflected light from the Minch. Niamh had not been here again since her return on Sunday evening, and she found it just as painful now as it had been then. The essence of him lived on here. In the half-finished weave, the bolts of cloth, the skeins of wool, his guitar, his computer, all his handwritten scribbled notes on the workbench and the wall. His accumulated dreams and hopes. All of which had outlived him.

‘I’m amazed you get internet this far out,’ Braque said.

‘We get it by satellite.’ Niamh crossed towards Ruairidh’s computer.

‘Lots of folk in the islands opt for internet by satellite,’ Gunn said. ‘It’s faster and more reliable. But it’s expensive. And if the weather’s bad...’ He chuckled. ‘Which it usually is, then you lose the satellite signal.’

‘So you didn’t know about the email when you were in Paris?’ Braque said.

‘No.’ Niamh dismissed the screensaver and opened Ruairidh’s mailer. ‘Ruairidh didn’t tell me about it. It wasn’t until I looked at his computer when I got home on Sunday that I saw it.’ She pulled it up on screen and both Braque and Gunn shaded their eyes against the light from the window to read it.

‘From well wisher,’ Braque said.

Gunn read out loud, ‘See you in hell.’

‘And you say he received this while you were on the RER coming into Paris? About two hours before the car bomb went off?’

‘From the time on the email, and the time I remember him receiving one on the train, I would say yes.’

‘Why didn’t he tell you about it?’

Niamh shook her head. ‘You’re really asking me that?’

Braque shrugged and took out her mobile phone. ‘Can you forward it to me?’

‘Sure. Give me an address.’

Braque wrote it down and Niamh forwarded the email. Braque said, ‘I’ll also need the access code for your wifi. I have no phone signal here. I would like to pass this on to our computer expert in Paris.’

As Braque was tapping in the code, the telephone rang on Ruairidh’s work desk. Niamh answered it quickly. ‘Hello?’

It was her mother. ‘Oh. So you are there?’ Her voice laden with sarcasm. ‘Nice of you to come and see us. I hear you visited the Macfarlanes yesterday.’

Niamh glanced self-consciously at the two police officers and turned away towards the window, where she could see the reflection of someone who looked only vaguely like herself. ‘Ruairidh is their son, Mum. We had to make the funeral arrangements.’

‘And it never occurred to you to drop in?’

‘We went straight to the funeral director in Stornoway.’ She tried to lower her tone, but it still came out full of anger. ‘For God’s sake, do you have to be so selfish?’

There was a long silence at the other end when she could hear her mother draw a slow breath. ‘Your brother is on the ferry.’

‘Uilleam?’

‘Do you have another?’

Niamh closed her eyes, fighting to keep control.

Then her mother said, ‘Can you pick him up at Stornoway and bring him down to Balanish?’

Niamh clenched her jaw. ‘Yes. What time?’

‘The ferry gets in at one.’

‘I’ll be there.’

There was another long silence before her mother said, ‘He’s coming for you, you know. Not for Ruairidh.’

‘I never imagined for a minute he was.’ Niamh hung up and took a moment to collect herself before turning back to her guests. ‘Sorry,’ she said, barely in control. ‘I need to get showered and dressed. I have to go and pick my brother up off the ferry.’

‘Of course,’ Gunn said, and he took Braque’s elbow to steer her towards the door. ‘Don’t you worry, Mrs Macfarlane, we’ll see ourselves out, no bother.’