Питер Мэй - I'll Keep You Safe

She directed the beam downwards and released the most feral howl she had ever heard pass her lips. It felt almost as if it had come from someone else. But as she took a step back, the full realization of what she was seeing only now dawning on her, it came again. Quite involuntarily.

Lying hunched on her side, in an extended pool of thick, black blood, lay a woman whose hair fanned out across the tiles. Her cheek was pressed to the floor, and in profile Niamh could see that both her mouth and her eyes were open wide. She recognized her immediately as Lieutenant Braque. The woman who had been there in the Place de la République moments after Ruairidh’s car had been ripped apart in that explosion. Who had interviewed her afterwards in the company of the anti-terror officer. Who had come to her hotel to tell her she could take the remains of Ruairidh home. Polite, efficient, and lacking either warmth or empathy. And here she lay dead in Niamh’s home, more than a thousand miles away from where it had all begun.

Disbelief fought with confusion and panic for space among the turbulent emotions that replaced almost everything else in her head. Her lungs barely responding to the need for oxygen.

She swung the beam of her torch wildly around her, but there was no one there, nothing but furniture and the shadows it cast in the living room and kitchen.

The faintest sound from behind made her turn. In time to see the dark shadow of a figure launch itself at her. She saw light glint momentarily on the blade of a kitchen knife as it arced towards her and she threw out a protective hand. She felt it slice into fingers and the fleshy muscle of her palm, sending blood spraying into her face. But it was enough to deflect the blade from her body. She swung her torch into darkness and felt it connect with solid bone and flesh. Heard a gasp of pain. But the strength of the blow knocked the torch from her hand, and it went spinning off into the living room. She struck out again, blindly, this time with her fist, and felt the pain of connection. Enough to distract her attacker long enough to scramble away, out of the hall, into the living room, where she slipped on the pool of Braque’s blood and fell heavily on to the tiles, knocking all the air from her body.

Her head hit the floor with a sickening thud, and she rolled herself over in time to see the dark form of her attacker falling on top of her, soft and heavy, a strangely familiar scent carried in the warmth and weight of this unexpectedly slight body.

Niamh looked up, her eye drawn first by the blade caught in the reflected light of the torch. It was raised at arm’s length above her, and Niamh knew there was nothing she could do to stop it. Then her gaze jumped focus to the face of this person intent on killing her, and she gasped her astonishment and disbelief.

There was the oddest, twisted smile on Seonag’s ivory-pale face. Her silky red hair hung in flames on either side of it, and her eyes burned with a madness Niamh had never before seen in them.

‘Why?’ It was the only word she could bring to her lips.

Seonag’s voice was little more than a whisper as she gently shook her head. ‘It started as a game. A fantasy. How hard could it be to access the Dark Web? Were there really people out there who would kill for money?’ She almost laughed. ‘It was so easy. And suddenly fantasy became reality.’ The smile faded. ‘I thought with him gone you would want me. Finally.’ Her face crumpled as tears blurred her eyes. ‘But if I can’t have you, no one else will.’

Niamh braced herself for the certainty of death as Seonag’s knife plunged into her heart. But something dark and heavy swung through the light of the torch and crashed into the side of Seonag’s head, hitting her with such force that it knocked her sideways to slam into the wall and lie motionless on the floor. The sound of her knife skidding away across the tiles filled the room as Niamh looked up to see a man standing over her, a wheel brace dangling from his hand. Then, as he turned his head away from Seonag to look down at her, and she saw who it was, she thought that she must be dead after all. That Seonag’s knife had penetrated her heart and taken her life before the blow from the wheel brace. But she was still breathing, and the pain from the deep cut in her hand was still excruciating. This was neither dream nor afterlife. This was real, even though she had absolutely no way of processing what she was seeing.

The man who had just saved her life, yet again, was Ruairidh Macfarlane.

Niamh sat on the floor, her back to the settee. Ruairidh had effected a makeshift bandage for her hand which had, at least, stopped the bleeding.

He sat beside her now in the slowly fading light of the torch. There was a good chance that the batteries would give out before power was restored.

Braque’s blood had turned rust-brown, coagulating on the tiles, but still red where Niamh had lost her footing in it, smearing it all across the floor as she fell.

Seonag had not moved from where she lay heaped up against the wall. There was a small pool of blood around her head. Niamh found her eyes wandering across the floor towards her, feelings for the girl who had been her best friend all through childhood frozen now. Paralysed. Her way, perhaps, of coping with the unthinkable. ‘Is she dead?’ she asked Ruairidh.

He shook his head, indifferent to her fate. ‘I don’t know. I don’t care.’

Niamh turned to look at him, still in shock, still struggling to come to terms with the impossible. ‘Are you going to tell me now?’

He hung his head and shook it slowly from side to side. ‘I was never having an affair with Irina, Niamh. I’d commissioned her to make a dress for you. For our tenth anniversary. Something special. Something unique. It was Seonag who got me your measurements. She was the only one who knew. It could only have been her that sent those emails.’

Niamh’s face creased in confusion. ‘What about the explosion? If it wasn’t you in the car... Who?’

Ruairidh closed his eyes as he remembered. ‘Georgy Vetrov. I’m assuming he got the same email you did. Thought me and Irina were lovers. We were sitting at the lights, and the door flew open and Georgy was pushing a gun into my face. Ordered me to get out of the car. When I did, he hit me with it. Hard. I went spinning off into the dark between those workmen’s skips at the side of the road. I was just getting to my feet when the car pulled away from the lights and blew up. I was protected from the worst of the blast, but still knocked off my feet.’ He turned with eyes appealing for forgiveness. ‘All I could think was that I should have been in that car when it exploded. Me. That someone had just tried to kill me. And that but for Georgy I would be dead.’

He paused and drew his knees up to his chest, arms around his shins, lost in the moment.

‘I did a stupid thing, Niamh. I suppose I just wasn’t thinking straight. But I thought if someone wanted to kill me and they knew they’d failed, they were probably going to try again.’ He screwed his eyes up tight. ‘I should have turned myself over to the police straight away. But I didn’t. I ran. Up a back street, then along behind the hotel to the far end of the square.’

In the quietest voice she said, ‘Have you any idea what you put me through?’

He dropped his head in shame. ‘I think I do. I’ve watched you almost every minute of every day since. I saw them taking you away from the square that night. And I suppose even then I could have owned up to the truth. But I didn’t. And from that point on, it seemed there was just no way back.’

She gazed at the bandage on her hand. ‘I’m trying to decide whether I still love you or hate you more than I’ve ever hated anyone in my life. Even Seonag.’