The Second Stranger, page 4
Gaines ran a gloved hand across his mouth. The sound of stubble against leather as he stared at the empty room. ‘Have you got a gunroom?’
I felt my strength evaporate.
The Mackinnon had originally been built as a private hunting lodge and our guests seemed to be split pretty evenly between those who wanted to watch the wildlife and those who wanted to kill it. We still had our fair share of shooting parties and we hired out firearms. In my eighteen months at the hotel, one particular space had become indelibly associated with misdemeanour. It was my fault the gunroom retained an uncomfortable power to disturb.
What I’d done there over a year ago still kept me awake at night.
‘We do,’ I confirmed, fingering the keys in my pocket. Housed above the garages in an outbuilding at the foot of the drive across the car park, the gunroom was only supposed to be visited by staff licensed to use the stock of rifles. I wasn’t one of those staff.
‘I need you to give me access.’
‘Look, Officer Gaines,’ I said, ‘do you mind telling me what exactly is going on?’
He gave a smile that struck me as over-rehearsed. ‘Just a precaution.’
‘I can’t allow access to shooting rifles,’ I said. ‘I’m not licensed to use them. And doesn’t prisoner-transport mean a firearm?’ Even as I said it, I remembered the officer’s holster was empty. Like the pockets on his stab vest. There was a silence. ‘What happened to your gun?’
‘I lost it in the accident.’ Gaines took a breath and squared his shoulders, reading my face. We left sixteen and hovered in the corridor. ‘OK, you want to know what’s going on.’ He sighed, assembling an appropriate response. ‘I was part of a three-vehicle convoy. We were transporting a prisoner to another facility after a prolonged stand-off at Porterfell.’
‘The trouble I saw earlier?’
Gaines nodded. ‘The weather was treacherous and the prisoner transport I was following slid off the road. I lost control of my vehicle. Once I came around, I established that the transport was open and the prisoner was gone. I knew of the hotel and I made my way straight here. It was hard to see clearly in the storm but I don’t recall any tracks. The recent snow is still fresh so unless he took a totally different route, it’s unlikely our runner is somewhere down here. Nevertheless, it is a possibility. My first concern is contacting colleagues and asking for a team to be dispatched before our escapee gets too far. In the meantime, we all have to stay safe so I need access to the gunroom. I take full responsibility.’
I tried moistening my lips, and asked the question I’d been thinking since Gaines first told his story. ‘So exactly how dangerous is this man?’
The officer rubbed an eye with the heel of a hand. ‘In these circumstances he poses a threat,’ he said. ‘But we’ve established he’s not inside the building. So my next priority is to ensure we’re well protected.’
Ezra reminded us of its presence with a petulant slam against the bay windows. ‘The gunroom is above the garages,’ I told him. A cold feeling thickened beneath my ribs, like I was sinking. ‘I’ll show you.’
I liked the idea of going to the gunroom even less than I did the prospect of meeting the prisoner.
6
The garages were at the first switchback of the steep drive towards the mountain road, only ten minutes’ walk in the snow. I felt a ridiculous need to justify the hotel’s security arrangements, as if I had any personal stake in them. ‘The garages are a converted stable building,’ I said, ‘locked on the ground floor.’ We took the lift back down to reception. ‘There’s CCTV. And the room itself is protected with an electronic keypad.’
‘Right.’ Gaines zipped his coat as he limped for the reception office. ‘Miss Yorke, I’ll need to look at the layout of the grounds again. Entrances and exits.’
In the office I reached for a staff coat, quilted with hotel livery, and pulled it on as Gaines studied the site plan once more.
‘It’s best we don’t go out by the revolving doors,’ he said. ‘We should use a service entrance. I saw one at the back of the kitchens.’
* * *
I hadn’t been out in a storm like this one. The dark air was a punishing slab, a mass of noise. In moments, blown snow was under my shirt, beading along the back of my neck, and I was hounded by its twists and turns as I re-locked the kitchens’ rear entrance. Keys pocketed, I indicated the direction and we worked our way through calf-deep snow towards the drive. The car park’s edges were nothing more than raised ridges now. My feet numbed fast. Around us, low ragged cloud blew in swift strips. Bellowing trees loomed under a sky the colour of pack ice.
Gaines slogged uphill, head down, leaning into the wind. The driveway lights were off so the garages, out to the right of the drive in a pocket of pines, were nothing but a low dark shape, their margin uncertain. I thought about the desperate man who might be out here in the night, freezing to death, seeking the shelter of the hotel. Ahead a light blazed and I had to raise an arm to block my eyes. The hotel’s big garage doors had a movement-activated spotlight above them, next to the CCTV. We gathered in the lee beneath the camera, backs against the stone of the old building. Shelter made it possible to hear Gaines’s ragged breathing. Illuminated clouds of breath billowed. Looking back the way we’d come, the Mackinnon, usually a blazing beacon, wore a dark mask, its face an empty-eyed shell. Over by the reception doors the old larch shuddered, its stunted top dipping.
The officer jerked a thumb at the two big garage doors. ‘What’s in here?’
‘SUVs,’ I said. It was a relief not to have to shout. ‘They’re for the site team mostly. We collect guests from the station, run errands.’
‘Are they equipped to drive in these conditions?’
I felt sweat bead my hairline. I’d been trying not to fret about the chances of me driving away tomorrow morning, but with the storm the way it was, the route would soon become impassable. Council ploughs had swept up here the previous week, shunting the fall into tumbledown pillows that marked the edges of the road in chest-high walls, but, if Ezra persisted, the ploughs would struggle to get back, never mind my two-wheel-drive Nissan. The hotel’s SUVs were 4x4 at least, but I’d seen the site team having to attach snow chains to the tyres in bad weather. I could borrow one, I thought, anxiously improvising – leave my car here in the morning. Mitchell could sell it and forward me the money.
‘Miss Yorke?’ Gaines prompted.
I clenched my fists, trying to warm them. ‘Possible. But it’ll be hard going,’ I said, leaning into his shoulder to make myself heard. I could smell the sweat on him. We’d need to cut a steep path up the drive, turn right then follow the mountain road as it snaked its way along Farigaig. Plenty of tight turns to negotiate plus the added complication of treacherous edges; something my companion knew all about. He’d been lucky to escape with just a smashed knee. ‘There’s a chance, but the longer this goes on, the less I like it.’
‘You have the keys, though?’ I nodded. He turned to look at me. ‘I need to be sure we don’t lose our escapee; that he doesn’t become a greater threat than he already is. I’d like you to hand over the keys to the garage and the gunroom.’
I’d been used to helping the police before. It’s hard to avoid, growing up with a brother like Cameron. In my twenties I’d filled out written statements, brought biscuits out on Mum’s best china (Mum always insisted on best for authority figures, as if the plates would somehow make up for the behaviour of the boy) and I’d persuaded and cajoled when necessary, often from the back seat of a patrol car. I found myself swallowing back a strong sense of unease as I worked the keys from their loop. The hotel SUVs might be my only way off the site in the morning. ‘I’m going to need these back,’ I said. ‘I’m responsible for the safety of the site as well as the guests.’
He ungloved his hand, held out a weathered palm and I handed them over. ‘Any other way off the site?’
‘Not unless you fancy taking the boat.’ I pointed beyond the gardens – a grey blanket of snow under fog – to the line of thick ice that marked the loch’s edge. ‘The jetty’s almost a mile along the shoreline.’
Loch Alder was deep freshwater in gunmetal grey, filling the valley between our twin mountains. Out of midge season on sunny summer days, the two mountains provided shelter, stilling Alder’s waters until they mirrored high cotton clouds and whirling birds. Watercolour artists came for the views and guests took boat trips or bathed using the pocket-beaches for picnics. But during harsh winter weather, Alder froze into stillness, the ice creeping inwards from the inlets and thickening sufficiently to encourage hardy skaters. Over the last week, it had accreted into smoked glass at the shallows, two inches thick and snow-topped so that, to the untrained eye, the loch had shrunk. Towards its centre, a black sliver of liquid still shifted like a jagged wound.
‘Frozen. Not a great option,’ Gaines said, grunting as he pushed away from the wall and made his way to the door. I nodded my agreement and watched the big officer fumbling at the gunroom key with clumsy fingers. He bundled it into the lock, twisting hard to break the ice gathering in the mechanism, then pushed the door open.
I was here again for the first time in a year. A ripple of shame passed through me.
Our breath clouded as we struggled in to the entrance hall, shutting the storm out behind us. Gaines re-locked the door against the storm. I didn’t like the implication. There was ice on the inside of the windows, I noticed, before the exterior light cut out and we hunted for our torches in the darkness. Gaines was first to his, playing a beam across the floor. In the half-light his eyes looked heavily bagged. His mouth was set in a permanent, tight wince. To our right was a door that gave access to the garages, but we made for the stairs.
As we mounted them, I felt my past actions shift inside me. Last time I’d climbed these stairs had been in the darkness of a late December shift over a year ago. Cameron was a fortnight dead and I’d been broken and scared. My night shifts back then had been long battles with despair and terror. I was his sister; what if I was targeted too? I’d thought. I needed protection.
The hotel’s Christmas lights had been glitter thrown across the wet tarmac that night. The bar had been closed, the guests all asleep, and I’d been working that foggy netherworld between midnight and dawn, a time when the black pines above the loch’s edge seemed to be in constant fricative communion, the wind buffeting branches together so they’d echoed beneath the voices of owls. I’d been alone but somehow it hadn’t felt like it, such was the fear of anticipation that had pulsed in me. I’d crossed the Mackinnon’s empty reception to the front doors and, leaving the guests safely in their beds, headed for the garages…
Now, Gaines and I creaked upwards to the electronic door of the gunroom, a heavy sheet-metal thing with a keypad. I prodded in the date of the hotel’s construction just as I had that night over a year ago, and we switched the lights on. The gunroom was a windowless space under a pitched roof with a burgundy carpet. In its centre, directly beneath the strip light, was a glass-topped display cabinet the size of a pool table.
A dozen hunting rifles lay end to end on a scarlet baize. Their walnut stocks were polished to a gleam.
7
There were drawers inset along the sides and Gaines unlocked them and pulled them open.
I knew their contents from that frantic December night; recalled hunting through them in the dark, my fingers trembling painfully. One was a set of black scopes. Some were telescopic and some were red-bead; one drawer Gaines dismissed as smaller air-rifles, one was filled with neatly packed, palm-sized cardboard boxes. The police officer grunted his approval and began flipping lids, carefully pulling out Styrofoam inserts patterned with plugs. In each hole, a neatly stored bullet pressed nose-down.
There was a manifest detailing the exact contents of the drawers. A year earlier I’d had to adjust it so that it didn’t look like anything was missing, burying the absence further back in the records so that the current stock looked accurate. I knew it would only take a cursory line-by-line search of the lists to detect my mathematical trickery and I’d been ready for the discovery, but it hadn’t happened. In the months that subsequently passed, I’d never quite felt the tension ease. Even so, I’d often thought of returning the stolen rifle, but the idea of a second secret foray into the darkness and a second tampering of the manifest was too much to take. Now my notice was handed in, my options had dwindled to nothing. I’d conceded over Christmas that the gun would remain safe where it was, hidden long after I’d gone. Only I knew the place. Maybe one day someone would come across it. Until then, it would stay, a permanent reminder of my fear in the days immediately after Cameron’s death.
‘Have you been hunting before?’ Gaines asked as he opened and raised the glass cabinet lid. I blinked, breathing hard, and shook my head. ‘I have a licence and training so I’m safe to use these,’ he said. ‘But you aren’t, so I want to be clear: on no account must you use these weapons. Just me. Understood?’
‘Understood,’ I said, my throat dry.
‘Remingtons,’ Gaines continued, half to himself, as if recalling moorland shooting parties of his childhood. He pulled at a handle on the right-hand side and revealed an empty slot. ‘Four rounds in the internal chamber,’ he said, carefully inserting cartridges, clicking them into place and closing the gun. He placed the stock up in the crook of his shoulder, felt the weight of it, then held it before him. ‘Safety catch here,’ he said, examining the gun before holding it vertically. ‘Good. Thank you, Miss Yorke. We can’t be too careful.’
I gave Gaines a slow nod, trying to set aside my memories, and instead make sense of what had just happened. There was a lot implied in my companion’s short, unnecessary demonstration of the rifle and I didn’t like any of it.
‘When we get back to the hotel I’d like you to stay safe,’ he said as he looped the gun strap over his head, zipped his bag and re-shouldered it. ‘I’ll have another go at getting a phone signal. You’ll be staffing reception, checking the hotel stays secure. Understood?’
I tried to speak but no sound issued. I hadn’t spent a lot of time with police officers in more recent years, but Gaines was stirring troubling memories. Memories from much further back.
Having a brother like mine had meant setting aside many of one’s own aspirations. Other girls got boyfriends; I was handcuffed to a delinquent. Mates drifted away to their steady jobs and gap-year plans; I returned home each weekend, the exhausted carer of an adolescent criminal. While my best friend Jessie was celebrating her twenty-fourth birthday, I was borrowing her boyfriend’s car so I could look for my brother, driving the streets of Newcastle city centre, kerb-crawling in the rain like a sex pest. I still remember the tick of the heater, the rattle of the broken windscreen wipers, the shame and desperation of that long night.
Then, one day, the eight-year nightmare abruptly ended.
Like everyone else back then, I’d been following the Troy Foley story. It was hard to avoid coverage of the notorious gunrunner, at large for so long, finally trapped in an undercover sting by officers in Hackney. I scoured the news in ghoulish fascination as more of his gang-members were arrested. Every day brought new revelations; Troy Foley bought handguns and ammunition clips in Atlanta and arranged for them to be shipped to the UK packed inside the shells of air-conditioning units, it was discovered. Later it emerged that, once in the UK, the units were delivered to addresses associated with gangs in Bristol, Manchester and Glasgow. One by one, co-conspirators were flushed out as the investigation progressed.
Then came the announcement of the arrest of Cameron Yorke, 21, of Corbridge, Tyneside, in connection with the distribution of illegal firearms. My brother was described by an investigating officer as one of Troy Foley’s ‘key facilitators’ in establishing county lines gangs. Reading about my criminal brother in a national newspaper was a gut punch from which I never fully recovered.
With Cameron under arrest, years of high-alert tension should have ended but, immersed in dysfunction for so long, I no longer knew what normal was. I’d already studied troubled teenagers and mental health; written an MSc dissertation on conduct disorder and pathological defiance, volunteered at community mental health centres, even mastered the criminal justice system and youth detention. I was so focused on the troubles of others I hadn’t given a thought to myself for years. After my postgraduate study, I was lucky to have Edinburgh University take me on as an associate lecturer. My field became the psychology of faulty decision-making; Cameron’s invisible hand steering my choices even then. I had three years teaching – the happiest and most fulfilled of my life – but when they moved him to Porterfell, I gave up my university role and followed. Someone had to check in on him every week, make sure he was safe. I’d thought it was all about protecting him. I didn’t think I’d end up having to protect myself.
‘You need to be alert,’ Gaines was saying. ‘Stay smart. And don’t let anyone in. It could be a long shift at reception. Do you have some personal possessions that might make things easier? In your quarters?’
I croaked an answer, thinking of my travel guides and phrase book, and the officer nodded, re-locking the cabinet. We crossed to the door. ‘The storm’s due to ease around midnight,’ he said as we descended. ‘So that’s another, what, three hours? I’ll make contact with my colleagues, and if we’re patient and careful we’ll be able to resolve all of this.’
He locked up, pocketed his new keys and we hacked a return journey across the car park towards the back door of the kitchens. One way to try and re-centre, to master my thumping pulse, was to walk slowly, head lowered in a stoop, and count breaths. That’s how I got to noticing our tracks. The ones we’d made on the way up had been fresh and sharp-edged only ten minutes ago. Now they were vaguer disturbances; softening memories of footprints. Half an hour more and they might be nothing more than ridge-and-furrow undulations, soon gone entirely. As we approached the lee of the main building, they sharpened once more. Out of the wind they lasted longer.
