Michael Ridpath - Amnesia

Wyvis Lodge itself was out of sight, but the approach to it was visible.

Nothing.

This was like a giant game of hide-and-seek. Jerry held most of the cards, but not all of them. His advantage was that there was only one way out of the estate. He had to make sure he had that under observation at all times.

He was in what seemed to be the old man’s bedroom. There was another window facing out towards the north side of Ben Wyvis. He moved over there and scanned the mountainside quickly.

There! Two figures bent against the slope following a footpath through the moorland along the north-west side of the mountain.

He fiddled with the focus wheel on the glasses. It was them! It was definitely them.

What the hell were they doing up there?

Jerry remembered climbing the mountain himself and seeing a wooded valley and a road on the other side. There wasn’t just one way out of the estate!

They were still in open moorland and there was some distance until they reached the crag. They were well out of range of his rifle, but they would be out in the open and in plain sight for a while yet. Jerry would just have to catch them up.

He ran down the stairs and out of the cottage. There was a footpath leading uphill through the woods, and Jerry followed it. In ten minutes he was out on open moorland.

Jerry wasn’t a sharpshooter or anything, but he had been taught how to fire a rifle. He bent low in the hope they wouldn’t spot him, and jogged up the path. He was breathing heavily and sweating, but he was catching up with them. They hadn’t spotted him yet.

Behind the two figures, to the south-west, the sky was a deeper shade of grey, verging on black. They were all about to get wet.

Jerry came to a boulder just off the path. The old man and the girl were getting very close to the crag, when they would be out of his sight. He didn’t want to leave it much longer. It was still quite a distance. The shot might alert the stalker, but he would have to take that risk. If he took the old man down that would be worth it.

He rested the rifle on the boulder, and looked through the scope. The image of the two figures jumped around with his heavy breathing. He waited, breathing slowly and steadily.

The images settled down.

He allowed the crosshairs to rest on the old man’s back, and squeezed the trigger.

The old man saw a small stone shatter just ahead of him, and a split second later he heard the shot.

He had been shot at before, nearly sixty years before.

‘Down!’ he shouted to Clémence, and threw himself face first into the heather.

Clémence turned to look at him, and then down the slope.

‘Get down, Clémence! He won’t be able to see you in the heather.’

There was another shot, and then Clémence dropped to the ground. For a moment the old man thought she had been hit.

‘Clémence! Are you OK?’

‘Yes. He missed. But I saw where he was. He’s not far down there.’

The old man could see the light blue of her coat through the heather.

‘What do we do now?’ said Clémence.

‘I don’t know.’ They were safe in the heather as long as Jerry stayed where he was. But of course he wouldn’t stay there. He would follow them up the hill and flush them out like game birds. Big fat pheasants that couldn’t even fly. They didn’t stand a chance, unless they somehow could get to the crag and out of sight.

The sky was darkening. Rain might help a bit. Snow a bit more.

‘All right,’ said the old man. ‘You crawl as fast as you can that way,’ he pointed to a direction a little to one side of the path. ‘I’ll distract him. If he hits me, crawl away from where I am and then just lie still. Go!’

He heard Clémence rustle through the heather.

He pulled himself to his feet and tried to run. It was scarcely more than a shuffle. Sixty years ago, even thirty years ago, he could have sprinted. Moving targets were much harder to hit, but he was barely moving. He tried a change of direction but tripped over some heather and fell, as another shot rang out.

He waited a few seconds, and then started off again. The crag really wasn’t very far away. There was another report, and then another. This chap wasn’t much of a shot. So the old man carried on running, or stumbling, at any moment expecting to feel the bullet tearing up his back.

Through his peripheral vision he was aware of something light blue moving beside him. Clémence was on her feet as well.

One more shot and they were behind the crag.

In front of them was a broad shallow saddle, between the summit of Ben Wyvis and a lesser top to its west. A small loch lay in the middle of it. No cover apart from heather, until a cliff face about a mile away. They would never get that far before Jerry reached the crag and a clear shot of them.

The light was draining from the sky, but that was mostly the moisture-heavy cloud in front of them rather than darkness. Somewhere beyond that, the sun was sinking behind the mountains.

The old man bent down to catch his breath. ‘You run on ahead, Clémence. I’ll catch you up.’

‘You mean you will distract him?’

The old man smiled weakly. ‘Maybe.’

‘No,’ said Clémence. ‘We stick together.’

‘Go!’

‘No!’

The old man concluded that his granddaughter was very stubborn indeed.

He looked at the sky. ‘That’s going to be snow, isn’t it?’

‘I think so,’ said Clémence.

He scanned the moorland. About thirty yards off the path a short distance ahead of them was a bump in the heather, no more than a ripple. Perhaps they could hide there. Until it started to snow.

‘All right,’ said the old man. ‘Follow me!’

He led Clémence at a shuffling run to the spot. It wasn’t much but, most importantly, it put them just out of sight of a man standing on the path by the crag. ‘Down here!’

They pressed themselves to the ground. Through the stem of a twisted heather bush, the old man could keep watch on the crag.

In less than a minute, Jerry appeared, holding his rifle ahead of him. He stopped and looked ahead towards the cliffs in the distance.

The old man followed Jerry’s eyes. The cliffs had disappeared. A thick white blanket was moving rapidly towards them; the black sky had turned white.

Jerry hesitated and then jogged slowly along the path for about twenty yards. He was close.

He stopped, and looked around.

He turned off the path and began walking slowly their way.

A snowflake landed on the old man’s nose. Then another on the heather an inch in front of his eyes.

Jerry was moving right towards them. He must have identified the ripple in the landscape as a likely hiding place. Damn.

More snowflakes, falling more steadily. But the old man could still see Jerry clearly. He tensed. If he was younger, he could have tried to jump Jerry, take him by surprise. That was still probably his best bet, but who was he kidding? What chance would an eighty-three-year-old man have against a fit fifty-year-old with a rifle?

Maybe he would give Clémence a chance to get away before he was shot.

He was about to whisper his instruction to Clémence to that effect, when Jerry stopped. Looked around him. Stared at the crag.

There was a fold in the rock there, barely big enough to hide a man, but it caught Jerry’s attention. He turned and jogged back towards it, his gun held in front of him, ready to fire. Clearly he had decided that’s where they were hiding.

The snowflakes fell faster, soft but persistent. The wind got up and the trajectory of the snow flattened below forty-five degrees. The brown heather was now spattered with white. The old man could still see Jerry and the crag, but he was becoming more indistinct by the minute.