Michael Ridpath - Amnesia

But that would add complications, complications that were difficult to anticipate. Much better to sneak back to Corravachie, and figure out what to do next.

Jerry was exhausted by the time he got back to his own cottage, but he had a long night ahead of him. There was a chance that both Alastair and Clémence would die on the mountain, but it was not something he could count on. He had to assume that they would find help, and contact the police, who would then search for him. All that would take several hours: it might not be well into the morning before the police came looking. They would certainly come to Corravachie, so he couldn’t stay there. It would take them a while, but eventually they would work out which car-hire firm at Glasgow Airport had rented him the blue Peugeot, and what the licence number was.

So he had some time.

He packed. He shaved off his beard. He used his electric trimmer to shear his hair into a rough buzz cut. He ate.

Then he made a phone call and spoke for ten minutes.

He checked a map. He needed somewhere to lie low, somewhere where police or nosy locals wouldn’t find him, somewhere from where he could emerge to finish off the job he had started. At this point, he was committed. The police would most likely catch him eventually. The only thing that really mattered was whether he succeeded in killing the old man first.

That was the only thing that mattered.

He stuffed his bags into the trunk of the car, together with the rifle and ammunition, and drove slowly through the snow out of the estate. He barely made it sliding down the hill to Evanton, but once he was on the A9, the road was clear. He headed south for the A835 to Ullapool.

Clémence was cold and she was tired. Her feet were wet and freezing. One thing she was grateful for was her coat. Despite her protest, her mother had insisted that they get the warmest parka they could find in Hong Kong. She knew Scotland was cold and she didn’t want her student daughter to freeze.

The old man’s coat wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t as warm as hers. Clémence considered switching. The trouble was that a coat required a body generating heat to create warmth and, unlike Clémence, the old man didn’t seem to be generating much heat. He was pale and his bare skin was freezing to the touch.

Clémence had read somewhere that in cases of hypothermia, you were supposed to strip yourself and the victim naked, and huddle together in a sleeping bag. Clémence was willing to do that if it would keep the old man alive, but stripping down to their underwear in a snowstorm just seemed a stupid thing to do.

Yet she had to think of some way of transferring her body heat to him.

‘Alastair? Take your coat off.’

‘Why?’

‘We need to share body heat. I have an idea.’

They both took their coats off and Clémence laid the old man’s beneath them and hers on top. She hesitated; it seemed weird to cuddle up to this man who had been a total stranger to her only a few days before. Weird or not, it would be so much worse to be lying in a cave with a dead body. She pulled him to her and held him tight. Very soon the warmth built up, at least around their upper bodies.

‘Is that better?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ said the old man. But she could still feel the occasional involuntary shiver from him. She touched his cheek. It was still cold.

They lay there together in silence. For a while. A long while. Clémence could tell from the old man’s breathing that he was still awake.

He mumbled something.

‘What?’ She leaned towards him to hear better.

‘I said, atelier is definitely a French word. I was just letting you win.’

‘No it’s not! Well, it is, but it’s English as well. If we had a dictionary I could prove it to you.’

‘That’s easy for you to say up here.’

She watched the snowflakes dance and scurry in the wind.

‘I wonder where Sophie is buried?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I don’t know where she’s buried. I suppose it isn’t up here. They lived in California, didn’t they?’

‘Didn’t the book say that she was in the de Parzac graveyard in France?’

‘Oh, yes, I had forgotten.’

‘Have you ever been there? Sophie’s village in France?’

‘No. I’ve been to France a lot, of course. My mother’s family is from Rheims and we went there to see my grandparents and cousins on her side. But she wasn’t keen on having anything to do with Dad’s family. Apart from Madeleine.’

‘Because she paid the school fees?’

‘That’s right.’

Clémence looked out into the night.

‘You know I am angry that my biological grandfather murdered my grandmother,’ she said. ‘And I’m almost angrier that he let his innocent friend take the blame.’

‘I know.’

‘But somehow I think of that person as being Angus. Not you.’

‘But it was me.’

It was, it was true. Clémence just didn’t want to accept that. She was growing quite fond of the old man and she hated Angus; she wanted to find a way to square that circle. ‘Maybe you didn’t really kill Sophie?’

‘Of course I did.’

‘No, maybe you just thought you did.’

‘That note at the end of the book was crystal clear,’ said the old man. ‘I killed her and I knew it. That’s why I wrote the damn thing in the first place.’

He pulled himself up on to his elbows, tugging Clémence’s coat up to his chin. ‘I can’t hide from it, Clémence, neither can you. I knew when you were driving me back from the hospital that I wouldn’t want to learn who I really was, what I had really done. Well, it was worse than I could have imagined.’

‘Why did you call Death At Wyvis a novel?’

‘I don’t know. I suppose I had written The Trail of the Scorpion as a novel.’

‘Precisely!’

‘What do you mean “precisely”?’

‘We know why you called that memoir a novel. Because it wasn’t true. Because you skated over how and why you and that sergeant left the other guy to die.’

‘That’s right.’

‘So maybe this is a novel for similar reasons?’

‘You’re clutching at straws, Clémence.’

Clémence was, but she was determined to hold on to them. ‘In Death At Wyvis , you say that you had shown a first draft of Trail of the Scorpion to the sergeant, whatever his name was, in Leeds, and he had made you change it, right?’

‘Right.’

‘Maybe you did the same thing this time? Showed the handwritten manuscript to someone who insisted that you change it.’

‘But I thought you said the manuscript and the published book were identical?’

‘They were at the beginning, apart from changing your name to Angus. But who is to say they aren’t different later on? Like when Sophie gets killed?’

The old man grunted.

‘Admit it’s possible.’

‘It’s possible, I suppose. Barely. But it’s wishful thinking. There might be all kinds of other reasons why I changed my name to Angus. Why I called it a novel.’

‘If we were back at Culzie it would be easy to check,’ Clémence said. ‘I wish I had thought to do that!’

‘Maybe we will get the chance,’ said the old man. ‘If we ever get down the mountain alive. And if Jerry Ranger doesn’t find us first.’

Clémence sighed. The old man was right, of course. She was clutching at straws. ‘Oh, well. I may be deluding myself. But choosing to think it’s a possibility makes more sense to me than writing you off as a murderer.’

The old man found her hand and squeezed it. His own hand was cold.

‘It’s a shame you can’t remember anything about writing that book,’ she said.

‘I can remember parts of it. Writing the bit in Capri with Sophie at the Villa Fersen.’