The Second Stranger, page 2
‘Your phone is dead,’ he said as I crossed back.
‘Lines are down,’ I told him. ‘You can sometimes get a mobile signal from the third floor. What’s going on exactly?’
The officer was scanning the expanse of the lobby, giving the space a narrow-eyed assessment of risk and safety, lines of sight, points of entry. ‘Can we shut these lights off?’
‘I guess,’ I said. ‘Why?’
‘How many guests are staying here?’
‘Just two. And me.’
‘And you are?’
I remembered I’d chosen tonight to leave my badge upstairs. ‘Remie Yorke.’
‘No other visitors tonight, Miss Yorke?’ I shook my head, perplexed by his brusque urgency. ‘Can you kill the lights please? Along the whole front of the building. You look like a Christmas market from out there.’
‘That’s the point,’ I said, aiming for levity. He furrowed his brow, wearing the kind of expression I knew from bitter experience police officers used when delivering bad news. ‘I can switch the lights off,’ I reassured him. ‘What’s happening?’
‘I have reason to believe we may have an escapee.’
I thought of the Porterfell siren’s wail and felt a tug of concern in my stomach. ‘A what?’
The police officer – Gaines, he’d called himself – straightened, hands on hips. I took him in anew; the stiff-collared grubby white shirt, polyester tie. Blond beard, grey along the jawline. A heavy leather belt across a paunch. His holster was empty and the pockets of his stab vest – I’d seen officers carry pepper spray, radio or torch in them – were empty too, except for a phone. ‘There was an RTA,’ he said. ‘Road traffic accident.’ What he said next drew the breath from me. ‘I was assisting in the transportation of a suspect. I lost control of my vehicle in the snow. If he’s out there, I don’t want him paying us a visit. For your safety, I’d like to lock the doors and switch off all lights.’
The procession of vehicles I’d seen leave the prison. I felt suddenly hot. ‘You came from Porterfell?’
‘Correct.’ He began hunting for switches, limping along the rear of the lobby towards the main corridor, the one that passed the lifts before reaching the garden room, the restaurant and bar where Jai was still sitting waiting for a top-up. ‘Any other points of entry?’ he said as he hobbled. ‘I passed an outbuilding.’
‘The garages,’ I said, helping him extinguish the lights. ‘They’re not connected with the rest of the hotel. We’re all locked up. Who’s missing?’
The wind thumped at the glass and upstairs a window shuddered in its frame. Gaines huffed hard, likely exhausted by the steep walk. The mountain road was a mile further up at the end of the drive, which climbed at a hard thirty degrees. He’d have had to thrash down through thigh-deep drifts; not easy territory for anybody. ‘What about these?’ Gaines tapped the LEDs that lined the base of the desk with the toe of his boot. They looked like small blue landing lights.
‘I don’t know. They’re always on.’ They were low and cold, enough light to render us insubstantial silhouettes to any outside viewer. I wished I hadn’t pulled a vest on; my hotel uniform felt sticky and uncomfortable.
The officer switched tack. ‘Who are your guests?’
‘We’ve someone in sixteen,’ I said, circling the desk and bringing up the details. ‘Alex Coben. With us until tomorrow. And Jaival Parik in thirteen.’ The mention of Jai’s name triggered another flush of anxiety. ‘He’s checking out tomorrow too. After that, we’re closed.’
He rolled his jaw as he thought. ‘I’d like to see them both. I’ll be encouraging them to stay in their rooms for a short while.’
‘OK, this sounds serious,’ I said. I’d visited Cameron regularly and he’d told me about his fellow prisoners. They weren’t in there for tax evasion. This escapee could be desperate, dangerous. I exhaled slowly and swallowed. When I spoke, my tongue felt thick. ‘Should I be worried?’
His eyes were on the dark windows. Beneath the petrol I could smell fast food and supermarket aftershave. ‘Let’s get this handled,’ he said, returning his gaze to me. ‘I’d like a good look at the place, just to be on the safe side. We can shut off the lights as we go. Do you have torches?’
‘In the office.’
The office lay immediately behind reception; part stud partition, part glass wall. Inside was the desk I shared with Mitchell on the day shift, a terrible coffee machine, two filing cabinets, a cork display board with a calendar plus schedule, handover notes and reminders.
Gaines assessed it quickly. ‘Whose desk is this?’
‘Mine,’ I said. ‘It’s just me on duty until seven tomorrow morning.’
‘And the rest of the hotel staff?’
‘Left this afternoon. Hunting season’s over. No more guests.’
‘What’s this?’
An old desktop screen and keyboard, tucked away in a corner. ‘CCTV,’ I said. ‘But it needs an upgrade. We rarely use it.’
‘I didn’t see any cameras coming down.’
‘There’s a couple along the perimeter fence where the deer sometimes get trapped. One at the top of the drive. One in the rear courtyard, one at the boathouse.’
‘Boathouse?’
‘We have a little cruiser moored up at the loch’s edge for guests,’ I told him.
‘Any interior cameras?’
‘Outside the lifts just beyond us here.’
‘Show me.’
I nodded, clicking the screen on, shuffling the mouse until the thing woke up. The screen had a six-way split of grainy footage, pictures struggling through the fuzz as if they’d been beamed back from another planet. The outside cameras were fogged with snow.
‘Jesus Christ,’ he snapped. ‘I can’t get any sense of the site from this.’ He ran a hand across his mouth and briefly closed his eyes. I realised he was trying to calm himself.
‘Sorry,’ I said, pointing him to the cork board. ‘There’s a map here.’
Gaines leaned in close and studied the fire assembly points. I found my eyes drawn to the reception’s revolving doors. My imagination populated the dark with sinuous shapes. I dragged my attention away, rifling the desk drawers and coming up with a couple of rubber-coated torches. I checked them both, then busied myself locating the first aid kit.
‘Sit down,’ I told him once I had it. ‘Let me look at that knee.’ I rooted through plasters and painkillers, and Gaines lowered himself, wincing, into a desk chair. ‘These swabs will sting, but we need to clean the wound.’ Something jagged had ripped through the flesh above the officer’s knee and the blood had stuck his trousers to his skin. He grimaced as I peeled the material back and dabbed at it with the alcohol. Once clean, I pressed cotton pads hard against the wound, trying to hide the tremble in my fingers.
It must have worked because the officer, on a sharp intake of breath, said, ‘You look like you’ve done this sort of thing before.’
I wiped the blood clear and prepared a bandage. ‘Used to have a delinquent brother,’ I told him. ‘He got into so many scrapes, convinced he was bulletproof. And he was scared of hospitals, so I ended up doing a lot of this work for him. Fights, falls, that sort of thing.’
I didn’t want to mention the two-inch knife wound I’d once had to deal with. I could still remember Cameron, fifteen years old, pointing out stars while I stitched him up, naming constellations for me. Swan and Vulture, Fox and Goose.
3
‘It’s just the soft tissue,’ Cam whispered, his pale skin sweat-streaked, a scarlet hand pressed against his right hip, his t-shirt a sticky black mess.
By fifteen Cam was a lean, muscular hawk-eyed boy with a shaved head. He had spiralled badly in the two years since the trouble at school had started everything. Where I’d breezed through high school, safe in the cosy, conscientious top sets, Cam had developed more slowly and wound up in the lower streams. The classes down there were wilder places; regularly disrupted and peopled with coarse kids from local gangs. One day a knife was discovered on campus and Cam was implicated. Though he said he wasn’t responsible, he received a temporary suspension. Seven years his senior, I was at university when this happened, but the way Mum told it that spell away from the classroom was a turning point. He fell in with a group from the local pupil referral unit and when he returned to class, his school-yard standing had changed. Teachers had given up on him. His reputation grew and, by fifteen, there was no way back. He stopped attending. Each evening he was out working.
The night he named the constellations he’d called me to pick him up. I had this dilapidated Volvo I’d bought from a friend on the hockey team, and I’d driven down from university in Edinburgh. Cam didn’t usually phone me. When I picked up, his desperate voice suggested our parents weren’t an option. And as he’d emerged from the scrub at a road’s edge, checking the night with quick glances and pressing his t-shirt against his side, I saw why.
‘Soft tissue? What the hell do you know about knife wounds, Cam?’ I hissed as I accelerated away.
‘Just calm down a minute.’ He managed a watery grin of reassurance. ‘I swear, get me out of here and I’m gonna quit all this.’
All this meant the dodgy courier work he’d got caught up in over the course of that year. He rode shotgun in an uninsured van while an older kid called Danny Franks drove. Packages got delivered, money changed hands, fights broke out. That’s all I knew.
My hands gripped the wheel, knuckles bone-white under streetlight. The place was all waste ground, litter-choked scrub. We passed a rusting shipping container converted into a truck-stop caff. Driving was difficult because I needed as much attention in my rear view as I had on the traffic ahead. There was a black Range Rover a street-length behind us, ominous. I climbed the hill up through Newburn and it followed. Pebble-dashed fifties houses, redbrick terraces backing onto bin-filled alleys. Soon, fields on the left and an estate of council houses.
‘There’s a car following,’ I told Cam. We were in open countryside now, the night sky coming alive with stars, the streetlights fading.
He craned his neck. ‘I don’t fucking believe this.’
His fear charged the air. This was before everyone had a decent satnav on their phone; I knew the city centre pretty well, but out here was another world. Terraces huddled against each other at crossroads, their windows dark. A shut-down petrol station, its forecourt backed by thick-canopied trees.
‘If they catch me we’re both dead,’ Cam hissed.
Back then, aged twenty-two, I wasn’t a sibling so much as an extra parent, driving home each weekend to make sure Cameron behaved, which, given Dad’s lack of interest, was lucky. Surrogate parents learn fear quickly. The feeling teemed through me for most of my twenties; fear of what he might do, or what someone might do to him, but that night was the first time I’d heard him actually admit he could die. My heart hammered so hard I saw stars. I blinked back tears. ‘Cam, I don’t know where I’m going.’
‘Turn right as soon as you can. We have to hit a main road soon.’ I scanned desperately but the road was cut deep into the fields. Still the headlights followed. ‘They’re big guys, Rem,’ Cameron whispered. ‘I wasn’t going to get out alive if I didn’t call someone. They’ve got a dog.’
I still remember that stomach-flooding feeling as I searched for a turning, the white heat of panic as I pressed the accelerator, climbing at speed into country darkness. ‘This is the last time,’ I told him, my voice rising. ‘If we get out of this, you stop. You stop whatever it is you’re doing and you get a job. They’ll make it hard for you, Cam. But you have to be strong because I’m never doing this again, you hear me?’
He watched the following lights, one hand pressed hard against the soft flesh of his side. I could see it glisten, smell it. There was a lot. ‘Just get us away.’
The dash beeped at me. Fuel warning. A wave of nausea, almost paralysing. ‘We’ve got maybe ten miles left. This right-hand turn better appear soon because if it doesn’t—’
‘There,’ Cam pointed.
‘Just a gate into a field.’ We passed it.
Cam swore weakly. ‘Another,’ he said, eyes ahead. ‘Is it a drive?’
‘I don’t know!’ I was going pretty quickly, and we’d opened up a gap between us and the car behind. I braked hard and we swung right. Just a track. Too late, we were committed. Rattling down it, I saw a gap in a hedge and swung the car through. We stalled in a field next to a silage truck. I switched the lights off and the two of us ducked low, unclipping our seatbelts and waiting hunched in the darkness, ready to run. Horse shit, fear and the coppery smell of blood in the air. Cam’s knife wound opening as he crouched forward. I could hear his shallow breathing. I reached out a hand and touched his shoulder. That night was the first in five years he hadn’t shrugged me off. We waited there for what felt like hours, in terrified silence, hyper-aware of every night noise, knowing that if we were discovered we were both dead.
But the car that was following us never came past. When I crept back to check, my body jagging with pent-up fear, the road was empty. I was certain they were waiting for us, hard guys with rabid dogs somewhere just beyond my sight, so back in the car we waited side by side with the lights out, Cameron wincing and pressing pale hands against his t-shirt.
‘Keep pressing it. How’s the bleeding?’
He lifted a red palm to examine the cut. ‘Slower,’ he said. Some minutes later, he leaned forward and pointed. ‘Look. Vulpecula, the Fox.’
‘Which one?’
When Cameron was eight he’d got a huge box of glow-in-the-dark stars for his birthday and a map of the constellations. He worked hour after hour sticking them to the ceiling above his bed. He wanted them exact, so the project had been punctuated by tantrums and tears of frustration before it was finally done. I can still recall opening the door to his bedroom, seeing him lying in the dark on his solar system duvet, panning a torch across his private universe. At fifteen, his encyclopaedic knowledge remained.
‘The band of stars under Cygnus. Used to be called Fox and Goose,’ he said, his voice trembling as he pointed. ‘Now it’s just the Fox.’
‘I could do with the Fox and Goose right now,’ I joked. ‘The kind that served wine.’
He drew breath and I heard him whimper with pain. ‘At night in the Atacama Desert in Chile,’ he croaked, eyes on the sky, ‘you can’t see your hand in front of your face. Just the stars, billions of them. Best place in the world to stargaze. No radio interference, no light pollution, no cloud cover.’
‘Imagine.’
‘I’m going there one day, Rem,’ he said, wincing. ‘Got it all planned. Has to be in February, when night-time temperatures are good. You just need a tent and a few quid for food. San Pedro – biggest public telescope park in South America.’ His grimace became a sneer and he added, ‘Seven thousand miles away from this shithole.’
‘You could study Astronomy, you know,’ I said. That was me back then; worrying about the blood, trying to keep my brother’s spirits up, and somehow managing to be both dumb and insensitive.
‘Fuck that,’ Cam had said vehemently, both hands on his wound. ‘More years behind a desk in some crappy college? I’ve wasted enough of my life on that. I’m going to be there in person seeing it all for myself, not trapped in a classroom.’
I didn’t know what to say. It was the first time I’d heard this perspective on school life from Cam, or anyone. Over the next couple of years, though, that would change. I started volunteering with young offenders and found myself hearing this story over and over again, told in different voices using different images and analogies but at its heart the same.
I’d like to think if I’d been a little older and wiser I might have been a better sister to him. That in moments like that one, hiding in a starlit field together studying the Fox and Goose, I might have found some nugget of insight to share. Something that might have changed the course of his life.
* * *
‘Here,’ I said, passing Gaines some painkillers. ‘Take a couple of these. I’m nearly done.’
I unrolled a wad of bandage and pulled it as tight as I dared around the wound. ‘This will need stitches,’ I said as I threaded a safety pin through the frayed edge of the material. ‘You’ll need to get to Raigmore when the roads clear.’ Gaines moved his leg experimentally, tested his weight on it. Satisfied, he clicked the lamp off. For a second I was in a darkened office, just me and the uneasy shape of a stranger. Then his torch clicked on, washing the grey pallor of his skin, illuminating his uniform.
‘If you could show me around,’ he said.
‘Absolutely,’ I said. ‘Anything I can do to help, just ask.’
We locked the office behind us and set off, me thinking about this strange and unnerving start to my shift. I reassured myself. Santiago tomorrow.
4
I narrated as we made our way up the main corridor. ‘Lifts here,’ I said. ‘Basement access through here…’
‘What’s this about?’ He’d paused by the trolley of paint cans and brushes, and was lifting dust sheets.
‘We close for a fortnight tomorrow,’ I said. ‘Got decorators coming in. Some guys are going to hang new wallpaper. There’s a team sorting an unsafe bridge along the shoreline, roofers here to re-tile, gardeners, that sort of thing.’ He nodded and I resumed my tour. ‘Further up here we have the kitchens, the bar, and here on the right, the garden room.’
Gaines waited while I unlocked the door and flicked the lights on. The Garden Room was our conference space: tables dressed with white linen, carafes, bowls of boiled sweets, complimentary pens and notepads. French windows looked out over the terraced lawns, though tonight the view was nothing but a grandstand vista of Ezra’s interior. I listened to the storm’s hollow howl as Gaines checked the latches and assessed the fire door. Satisfied, he gave me a nod and we left the place in darkness.
