Кит Мори - Deathly Wind

Once he was alone Torquil went through to the kitchen and put the kettle on for a cup of tea.

Then with his cup in his hand he went through to the Incident Room and stared at the whiteboard.

Jock McArdle! And now he wanted police protection! He grinned. There was only him available to give that protection now. But protection against whom?

The answer came when the station telephone rang.

‘Emergency!’ The rasping whispered voice had an unmistakable Glaswegian twang. ‘This is Jock McArdle at Dunshiffin Castle. I need help now! There’s a nutter here – with a gun!’

There was the deafening noise of a gun being discharged, then a strangled cry, then silence.

‘Bugger!’ cursed Torquil. He dashed out, stopping only to pick up his helmet and his gauntlets. Moments later he was hurtling along the mist-filled Harbour Street on the Bullet.

Like many native West Uist women Katrina had been used to handling boats since she was a youngster. She knew exactly where she was going and what she was doing. Her heart was racing and she felt more anxious than she thought possible.

She was unaware that she was being pursued.

It seemed to take an interminable time as she raced through the mist as fast as she dared go. And she was always conscious of getting too close to the coastline, with its innumerable stacks, skerries and hidden rocks. But at last she saw the Wee Kingdom loom out of the mists, and she steered a course parallel with it until she rounded the western tip, where three successive basalt stacks jutted out of the sea. On the top of the most westerly one, was the ruins of the old West Uist lighthouse and the derelict shell of the keeper’s cottage. She headed straight for it, slowed the boat and manoeuvred to a stop by the aged jetty. Quickly tying up, she unsheathed her rifle from its bag and gathered her medical bag and water bottle. As she turned to look at the bleak ruins of the lighthouse, she felt a shiver of fear run up and down her spine.

She mounted the steps to the ruin, which was nowadays no more than the bare husk of a tower. The door had long since gone and the inside was full of collapsed masonry and years of guano from the gulls that even now were circling it, protesting noisily at a human presence. Then she turned her attention to the derelict lighthouse-keeper’s cottage. She went along its frontage, trying to see through the wooden shutters that had been nailed in place years before. And then she was at the door, staring at the new looking padlock.

Another shiver ran up her spine as she tested her weight against the unyielding door. She listened with her ear at the door, but heard nothing.

Except the noise of an engine approaching through the mist.

Who the hell was this?

She had no time or inclination to find out. She dropped her bag and water bottle and taking careful aim with the Steyr-Mannlicher rifle, she fired point blank at the lock.

Morag and Lachlan heard a popping noise as they approached.

‘What was that?’ Lachlan asked.

‘It sounded like a muffled gunshot,’ said Morag.

‘You mean a shot from a gun with a silencer?’ Lachlan queried. ‘We’d best be careful here, Morag.’

And minutes later, having tied up beside the motorboat on the jetty they made their way warily to the open door of the old lighthouse-keeper’s cottage. Just inside the door a rifle was propped up against the wall, while inside they saw Katrina Tulloch sobbing her heart out and leaning over a body lying face down on the floor.

The turrets and battlements of Dunshiffin Castle, the thirteenth-century stronghold of the MacLeod family, were lost in the mist as Torquil approached on his Royal Enfield Bullet. He stopped a hundred yards away and parked his machine by the side of the road and then advanced on foot. He had no intention of announcing his arrival, so he took to the grass verge and jogged along towards the bridge that crossed the moat. Unfortunately, there was no way of entering the castle by any other route, so he kept close to the walls of the gateway tower and thanked the mist for giving him some cover. Once in the gravel courtyard he stepped carefully in his stout Ashman boots so as to avoid announcing his presence.

On the way there he had stopped to call for back-up, but cursed when his phone failed to connect with any of his staff. He had thought of taking a detour to the phone box on the Arderlour road, but the sound of the gunshot when McArdle had called him had indicated the urgency of the matter. He knew that he would just have to use his wits and trust to the message he left in the voice box and his ingenuity.

There were no lights on, but one side of the large double front door was standing ajar. Torquil made his way towards it by following the courtyard wall and then climbing up the side of the steps to come at it from the side. He wrapped his goggles around the end of his baton and edged it into the doorway, using it like an angle mirror. Seeing nothing suspicious he crept through the door to stand in the hall as swirls of mist wisped through the door.

On the oak-panelled walls hung numerous stag heads, antlers, shields, with criss-crossed claymores and pikestaffs. On either side of the stairway leading up from the great hall stood empty suits of armour. Having been in the castle on numerous occasions over the years, as both guest and as a piper for formal occasions he knew his way about the place. But the thing that led him at the moment in the chilly atmosphere was the unmistakable smell of a gun having been discharged. As he stealthily crept up the staircase, passed the larger than life size portrait of the Jacobite laird, Donal MacLeod the odour became stronger. He reached the top of the stairs where twin galleries ran east and west with doors dotted along them and corridors at either end leading off into the interior of the castle. And there the smell was very strong. Grasping his baton he headed for the west wing.

All of the curtains were closed and the long corridor was almost in pitch blackness, except for a line of light coming from a door at the end of the corridor. Torquil knew that this used to be the billiard-room in the previous laird’s day. He stopped for a moment to take off his boots and then crept softly along the corridor in his stockinged feet. As he did so he heard a click then a muffled thud, like the sound of a billiard cue striking a ball followed by it thumping into a pocket of a billiard table. It was then, as his eyes accustomed to the extra darkness of the long corridor that he was aware of a figure ahead of him, creeping along the wall towards the door.

He stopped to watch as the figure reached the door, seemed to peer through the crack, then gingerly push the door open. As he did so the smell of a gunshot mixed with cigar smoke seemed to grow even stronger.

Then a voice cried out from the room, ‘Don’t move a muscle, Cardini!’

Torquil moved swiftly on his tiptoes towards the door. Inside he saw the back of a man dressed in a smoking jacket bent over the billiard-table, as if frozen in time having just played a shot. Just behind him, a man was standing with his feet wide apart, arms outstretched, both hands holding an automatic weapon, pointed directly at the back of the other’s head.

There was no time for thought. Torquil was in the room in a couple of strides. With a swift upward strike of his baton he knocked the man’s gun upwards, where it discharged with a deafening explosion, shattering a window. Then, moving swiftly before the man gained control of the gun, he brought the baton down sharply on the back of his head.

As the assailant fell face down, Torquil kicked the gun under the table, and then leaned down to turn him over.

He was surprised to see himself looking down at the unconscious figure of Vincent Gilfillan.