Val Mcdermid - Killing the Shadows

Fiona pulled the fleece over her head and tossed it to the ground. Then she remembered her knife and retrieved it, making sure the blade was retracted before she put it in her trouser pocket. She dropped to her knees, then spreadeagled herself against the rock. In an agonizingly slow commando crawl, feeling hideously exposed, she crossed the dozen yards to the stream, crabbing round as she reached the bank so she dropped in feet first. The water was so cold it took her breath away for an instant. She crouched in water that came up to the middle of her calves, her head barely above the bank. She scanned the hillside, looking for Blake’s vantage point.

“Gotcha,” she said softly. From this side, he was entirely unprotected. She could see the outline of his body against the hillside, the gun barrel protruding like an obscene prosthesis. He had a hand up to his eyes, as if he was looking through binoculars. Fiona made a rough calculation of where she needed to be so that she’d emerge above and behind him. The burn took a sharp left bend a few yards beyond where she wanted to be. Taking that as her marker, Fiona ducked down below the banks and started up the burn.

It was a treacherous ascent, the stones of the stream bed slippery with algae and too uneven to make her passage anything other than slow and awkward. More than once, Fiona lost her footing altogether and sprawled full length in the chilly waters. After the third or fourth ducking, she decided she couldn’t get any wetter and started using her hands and arms to move her along faster, scrabbling up the burn like a chimpanzee.

So fiercely was she concentrating on her progress that the bend in the burn was upon her before she realized how far she’d come. She squatted on her haunches, trying to get her breath back. No chance of a stealthy approach if she was panting like a dog on a summer’s day.

Slowly, cautiously, Fiona peered over the lip of the bank. She frowned. She was pretty sure she was looking in the right direction. But there was no sign of Blake. She sighted down the burn, to make certain she’d come far enough up. There was no doubt about it. She was exactly where she’d planned to be, which meant Blake should have been about a hundred yards away from her, maybe fifteen feet down the mountain. But he wasn’t.

The tight hand of panic gripped Fiona’s chest. She stood up, scanning the mountainside. There was no sign of her quarry. “Fuck,” she moaned, scrambling out of the water course and on to the rocky side of the bank. Even with this higher vantage point, there was no mistake. Blake had vanished from the landscape.

That could only mean one thing, she thought. He’d panicked when they disappeared and made his way down to the last place he’d seen them. Where Kit was lying, vulnerable and weak as the runt of the litter.

Fiona took off like a mountain hare. Heedless of her safety, she hurtled across the steep slope at an angle she hoped would bring her to the beginning of the channel in the rock where she’d left Kit. Her wet boots squelched, skidded and slipped as she ran, and only the sharpest of reflexes stopped her pitching headlong down the slope.

As she raced down the hillside, what had started as a dark line in the rock gradually defined itself as the gap. From this angle, it looked like a giant split in a massive slab of stone. The closer she approached, the more Fiona realized she had misjudged her line. She was actually going to hit the edge about halfway along. She adjusted her course slightly, but the going was too steep now for it to be possible to make much of a correction.

She slowed to a walk, stepping sideways until she was at the edge of the drop into the defile. She looked back towards the beginning, but the angle of the bend was too sharp for her to see all the way to where she’d left Kit. Without the concentration of the downhill run to protect her, fear coursed through her like electricity.

Fiona forced herself to breathe deeply and started the treacherous scramble back along the rock. Halfway to her destination, she came to an abrupt halt. She could hear a man’s voice raised in anger. She inched forward so she could see over the edge again.

What she saw made her stomach clench in pure terror. Down below, about fifteen feet away, Kit was sprawled on the ground, half sitting, propped against the rock wall. With his back to her, Francis Blake stood above him, hefting the shotgun in his hands. She couldn’t make out his words, but his intent was clear. He took a step back and started to raise the gun.

Without pause for thought, Fiona sprang into action. She took a short run up along the edge of the defile and launched herself through the air.

As the gun levelled out, Fiona crashed on top of Francis Blake, the momentum carrying them both in a heap on top of Kit.

The crack of a gunshot split the mountain air.

The city glittered below her in a tawdry galaxy, zirconium to the diamond sparkles of the stars blotted out by the light pollution. It was, Fiona thought, probably all she deserved. She’d come up to her favourite vantage point on the Heath in spite of the frosty night air because she wanted to be as alone as it was possible to be in the heart of the city.

She pulled the letter out of her pocket, fumbling it through her gloves. There was barely enough light to make out the letterhead, but she needed to check its reality. The Procurator Fiscal had decided she was not to be prosecuted for culpable homicide. There were to be no formal repercussions for that single minute of chaos when the gun had gone off, taking most of Francis Blake’s head with it. They had finally accepted that there had been nothing calculated in her actions; a few seconds either way and the outcome would have been quite different. Earlier, and Fiona might not have won a struggle for the gun. Later, and Blake would have fired and destroyed Kit utterly. Somehow, miraculously, she had landed at precisely the right moment. The gun had jerked back, Blake’s finger on the trigger, and suddenly it was all over.

Both Fiona and Kit had been injured too, which was probably what had made the police believe her story that she had had no intention of killing Blake when she jumped from the edge of the defile on to his back. It would, she thought, have been much less credible if they hadn’t taken some collateral damage.

She couldn’t really blame the police for their incredulous reaction. She must have presented a bizarre sight, staggering off the hill covered in mud and blood, soaked to the skin. Reeling from the shock of what had happened, she had been cold-hearted enough to strip Francis Blake’s body of his padded jacket and use it to make Kit as comfortable as she could. Then she’d torn herself away from him and covered the last few miles to the road in a blur of fear and pain, every stride sending a sickening wave of agony through the shoulder that had taken a blast of shot in the fatal moment.

Only adrenaline had kept her going all the way to the road. When she finally emerged from the last belt of trees, the phone box where she’d left Caroline had shimmered like a mirage through the miasma of her exhaustion. She’d staggered over to it and dialled the emergency services. Her relief when she was connected to a police officer almost made her buckle at the knees.

A squad car had been with her within minutes. Somehow, she’d managed to string her story together. And because Caroline had made the police talk to Steve, they took her seriously. But suspiciously.

And at least they’d mobilized an emergency helicopter to get Kit to hospital. She’d had no time to luxuriate in her relief; while paramedics extracted lead shot from her shoulder, the police had hovered, grim-faced and unsympathetic, waiting to pick holes in her story.