Fortnight of Fear (6 page)

Gil screamed at David and stabbed at his face. But David seized Gil's wrist and twisted it around, skin tearing, so that Gil dropped the knife on to the pavement. Gil's high heel snapped. He lost his balance and they both fell. Their hands scrabbled for the knife. David touched it, missed it, then managed to take hold of it.

The long triangular blade rose and fell five times. There was a sound of muscle chopping. The two rolled away from each other, and lay side by side, flat on their backs, panting.

Gil could feel the blood soaking his cotton blouse. The inside of his stomach felt cold and very liquid, as if his stomach had poured its contents into his whole abdominal cavity. He knew that he couldn't move. He had felt the knife slice sharply against his spine.

David knelt up on one elbow. His hands and his face
were smeared in blood. “
Anna
…” he said, unsteadily. “
Anna
…”

Gil looked up at him. Already, he was finding it difficult to focus. “You've killed me,” he said. “You've killed me. Don't you understand what you've done?”

David looked desperate. “You
know
, don't you? You
know
.”

Gil attempted to smile. “I don't know, not for sure. But I can feel it. I can feel you – you and all the rest of them – right inside my head. I can hear your voices. I can feel your pain. I took your souls. I took your spirits. That's what you gave me, in exchange for your lust.”

He coughed blood, and then he said, “My God … I wish I'd understood this before. Because you know what's going to happen now, don't you? You know what's going to happen now?”

David stared at him in dread. “Anna, listen, you're not going to die. Anna, listen, you can't. Just hold on, I'll call for an ambulance. But hold on!”

But Gil could see nothing but darkness. Gil could hear nothing but the gray sea. Gil was gone; and Anna was gone, too.

David Chilton made it as far as the garden gate. He grasped the post, gripped at the privet-hedge. He cried out, “Moo! Help me! For Christ's sake help me!” He grasped at his throat as if he were choking. Then he collapsed into the freshly-dug flower-bed, and lay there shuddering, the way an insect shudders when it is mortally hurt. The way any creature shudders, when it has no soul.

All over the world that night, men quaked and died. Over seven hundred of them: in hotels, in houses, in restaurants, in the back of taxis. A one-time German officer collapsed during dinner, his face blue, his head lying in his salad-plate, as if it were about to be served
up with an apple in his mouth. An airline pilot flying over Nebraska clung to his collar and managed to gargle out the name
Anna!
before he pitched forward on to his controls.

A 60-year-old Member of Parliament, making his way down the aisle in the House of Commons for the resumption of a late-night sitting, abruptly tumbled forward and lay between the Government and the Opposition benches, shuddering helplessly at the gradual onset of death.

On 1–5 just south of San Clemente, California, a 55-year-old executive for a swimming-pool maintenance company died at the wheel of his Lincoln sedan. The car swerved from one side of the highway to the other before colliding into the side of a 7-Eleven truck, overturning, and fiercely catching fire.

Helplessly, four or five Mexicans who had been clearing the verges stood beside the highway and watched the man burn inside his car, not realizing that he was already dead.

The civic authorities buried Anna Huysmans at Zandvoort, not far from the sea. Her will had specified a polished black marble headstone, without decoration. It reflected the slowly-moving clouds as if it were a mirror. There were no relatives, no friends, no flowers. Only a single woman, dressed in black, watching from the cemetery boundary as if she had nothing to do with the funeral at all. She was very beautiful, this woman, even in black, with a veil over her face. A man who had come to lay flowers on the grave of his grandfather saw her standing alone, and watched her for a while.

She turned. He smiled.

She smiled back.

Inverness, Scotland

The charming Scottish county town of Inverness is situated on the River Ness, at the head of the Caledonian Canal. It is calm and clear and peaceful in the summer, with the spires of St Mary's Church and the High Church reflected in the river, although you always feel a bracing sense of dramatic history when you walk its streets. Not far away, to the east, a cairn marks the spot where the hopes of Bonnie Prince Charlie were finally crushed at the Battle of Culloden in 1746. Over 1,200 Highlanders were killed around Leanach Cottage, which still stands today. Most were brought down by the English army's opening cannonade, and then by the English tactic of ignoring the charging Scotsman in front of him, and bayoneting the exposed side of the Scotsman to the right.

Laird of Dunain
is dedicated to Ann Nicoll, of Dunain Park hotel and restaurant, on which the setting for this story is loosely based. If you haven't eaten Ann Nicoll's saddle of lamb in tawny port sauce; or her pigeon breast stuffed with pecan nuts and apples; then you don't deserve to be a carnivore, like the laird himself.

“The tailor fell thro' the bed, thimbles an' a'

“The blankets were thin and the sheets they were sma'

“The tailor fell thro' the bed, thimbles an' a'

Out onto the lawns in the first gilded mists of morning came the Laird of Dunain in kilt and sporran and thick oatmeal-colored sweater, his face pale and bony and aesthetic, his beard red as a burning flame, his hair as wild as a thistle-patch.

Archetypal Scotsman; the kind of Scotsman you saw on tins of shortbread or bottles of single malt whisky. Except that he looked so drawn and gaunt. Except that he looked so spiritually hungry.

It was the first time that Claire had seen him since her arrival, and she reached over and tapped Duncan's arm with the end of her paintbrush and said, “Look, there he is! Doesn't he look
fantastic
?”

All nine members of the painting class turned to stare at the Laird as he fastidiously patroled the shingle path that ran along the back of Dunain Castle. At first, however, he appeared not to notice them, keeping his hands behind his back and his head aloof, as if he were breathing in the fine summer air, and surveying his lands, and thinking the kind of things that Highland lairds were supposed to think, like how many stags to cull, and how to persuade the Highlands Development Board to provide him with mains electricity.

“I wonder if he'd sit for us?” asked Margot, a rotund frizzy-haired girl from Liverpool. Margot had confessed to Claire that she had taken up painting because the smocks hid her hips.

“We could try asking him,” Claire suggested – Claire with her straight dark bob and her serious well-structured face. Her husband, her
former
husband, had always said that she looked “like a sensual schoolmistress.” Her painting smock and her Alice-band and her moon-round spectacles only heightened the impression.

“He's so
romantic
,” said Margot. “Like Rob Roy. Or Bonnie Prince Charlie.”

Duncan sorted through his box of watercolours until he found the half-burned nip-end of a cigarette. He lit it with a plastic lighter with a scratched transfer of a topless girl on it. “The trouble with painting in Scotland,” he said, “is that
everything
looks so fucking romantic. You put your heart and your soul into painting Glenmoriston, and you end up with something that looks like a Woolworth's dinner-mat.”

“I'd still like him to sit for us,” said Margot.

The painting class had arranged their easels on the sloping south lawn of Dunain Castle, just above the stone-walled herb gardens. Beyond the herb gardens the grounds sloped grassy and gentle to the banks of the Caledonian Canal, where it cut its way between the north-eastern end of Loch Ness and the city of Inverness itself, and out to the Moray Firth. All through yesterday, the sailing-ships of the Tall Ships Race had been gliding through the canal, and they had appeared to be sailing surrealistically through fields and hedges, like ships in a dream, or a nightmare.

Mr Morrissey called out, “Pay particular attention to the light; because it's golden and very even just now; but it'll change.”

Mr Morrissey (bald, round-shouldered, speedy, fussy)
was their course-instructor; the man who had greeted them when they first arrived at Dunain Castle, and who had showed them their rooms (“You'll
adore
this, Mrs Bright … such a view of the garden …”) and who was now conducting their lessons in landscape-painting. In his way, he was very good. He knew how to sketch; he knew how to paint. He wouldn't tolerate sentimentality.

“You've not come to Scotland to paint The Monarch of the Glen,” he had told them, when he had collected them from the station at Inverness. “You're here to paint life, and landscape, in light of unparalleled clarity.”

Claire returned to her charcoal-sketching but she could see (our of the corner of her eye) that the Laird of Dunain was slowly making his way across the lawns. For some reason, she felt excited, and began to sketch more quickly and more erratically. Before she knew it, the Laird was standing only two or three feet away from her, his hands still clasped behind his back. His aura was prickly and electric, almost as if he were already running his thick ginger beard up her inner thighs.

“Well, well,” he remarked, at last, in a strong Inverness accent. “You have all of the makings, I'd say. You're not one of Gordon's usual giglets.”

Claire blushed, and found that she couldn't carry on sketching. Margot giggled.

“Hech,” said the Laird, “I wasn't flethering. You're good.”

“Not really,” said Claire. “I've only been painting for seven months.”

The Laird stood closer. Claire could smell tweed and tobacco and heather and something else, something cloying and sweet, which she had never smelled before.

“You're good,” he repeated. “You can draw well; and I'll lay money that ye can paint well. Mr Morrissey!”

Mr Morrissey looked up and his face was very white.

“Mr Morrissey, do you have any objection if I fetch this unback'd filly away from the class?”

Mr Morrissey looked dubious. “It's supposed to be landscape, this morning.”

“Aye, but a wee bit of portraiture won't harm her now, will it? And I'm dying to have my portrait painted.”

Very reluctantly, Mr Morrissey said, “No, I suppose it won't.”

“That's settled, then,” the Laird declared; and immediately began to fold up Claire's easel and tidy up her box of watercolours.

“Just a minute –” said Claire, almost laughing at his impertinence.

The Laird of Dunain stared at her with eyes that were green like emeralds crushed with a pestle-and-mortar. “I'm sorry,” he said. “You don't
object
, do you?”

Claire couldn't stop herself from smiling. “No,” she said. “I don't object.”

“Well, then,” said the Laird of Dunain, and led the way back to the castle.

“Hmph,” said Margot, indignantly.

He posed in a dim upper room with dark oak paneling all around, and a high ceiling. The principal light came from a leaded clerestory window, falling almost like a spotlight. The Laird of Dunain sat on a large iron-bound trunk, his head held high, and managed to remain completely motionless while Claire began to sketch.

“You'll have come here looking for something else, apart from painting and drawing,” he said, after a while.

Claire's charcoal-twig was quickly outlining his left shoulder. “Oh, yes?” she said. She couldn't think what he meant.

“You'll have come here looking for peace of mind, won't you, and a way to sort everything out?”

She thought, briefly, of Alan, and of Susan, and of
doors slamming. She thought of walking for miles through Shepherd's Bush, in the pouring April rain.

“That's what art's all about it, isn't it?” she retorted. “Sorting things out.”

The Laird of Dunain smiled obliquely. “That's what my father used to say. In fact, my father believed it quite implicitly.”

There was something about his tone of voice that stopped Claire from sketching for a moment. Something very serious; something
suggestive
; as if he were trying to tell her that his words had more than one meaning.

“I shall have to carry on with this tomorrow,” she said.

The Laird of Dunain nodded. “That's all right. We have all the time in the world.”

The next day, while the rest of the class took a minibus to Fort Augustus to paint the downstepping locks of the Caledonian Canal, Claire sat with the Laird of Dunain in his high gloomy room and started to paint his portrait. She used designer's colours, in preference to oils, because they were quicker; and she sensed that there was something mercurial in the Laird of Dunain which she wouldn't be capable of catching with oils.

“You're a very good sitter,” she said, halfway through the morning. “Don't you want to take a break? Perhaps I could make some coffee.”

The Laird of Dunain didn't break his rigid pose, even by an inch. “I'd rather get it finished, if you don't mind.”

She carried on painting, squeezing out a half a tube of red. She was finding it difficult to give his face any colour. Normally, for faces, she used little more than a palette of yellow ochre, terra verte, alizarin crimson and cobalt blue. But no matter how much red she mixed into her colours, his face always seemed anaemic – almost deathly.

“I'm finding it hard to get your flesh-tones right,” she confessed, as the clock in the downstairs hallway struck two.

The Laird of Dunain nodded. “They always said of the Dunains of Dunain that they were a bloodless family. Mind you, I think we proved them wrong at Culloden. That was the day that the Laird of Dunain was caught and cornered by half-a-dozen of the Duke of Cumberland's soldiers, and cut about so bad that he stained a quarter of an acre with his own blood.”