Ash (15 page)

Next to him in the Mercedes, the Scottish chauffeur became concerned. The medium he’d brought to Comraich some weeks back had reacted similarly. Moira Glennon had drawn in a long gasp and her body had gone rigid. It had been dusk then, and although there had been no mist, there had been a Delphic, somehow unearthly, gloom about the place.

When he’d collected her from her Glasgow home he’d found the plump little woman disappointingly normal, with a ruddy complexion and thread-veined cheeks that suggested she’d spent long periods on the moors and beside the lochs. All such ruddiness had drained from her face when she’d finally stared through the windscreen at the dimly lit building across the broad courtyard. But it was her poor bulging eyes that had really caught his attention, for their whites had gone pink and her pupils had become so enlarged their blackness had made thin bands of the irises around them. Even in the dull light he’d seen them, and it was this that had made him reach to steady her.

Then something completely weird had happened.

The woman’s body had begun to emit a coldness so intense that all the windows
frosted
inside. He’d jumped when the automatic air conditioning suddenly blasted warm air into the car. Warm air that had inexplicably turned to arctic chill.

Dalzell had quickly switched the system off so that its noise – and its added iciness – was one thing less to worry him. Then came the smell. He’d often heard of the smell of fear, but this was not the stench of loosened bowels: it was from the sweat that, despite the cold, poured from the medium’s armpits and her neck, from her wrists and her lap; the light cotton of the dress she wore under her open topcoat had darkened between her ample breasts and her thighs; fluids had erupted from her skin, her forehead first, then her upper lip, and yellow mucus drained from her nostrils, to be frozen there like crusted cheese. Her cheeks had become wet with the sweat oozing through her pores, trickling down onto her double chin. He’d called her name, his own face close to hers, but there was no reaction. The woman had lost all sensibility and had merely gaped at the castle with eyes that had seemed to have frosted over so that the pupils were just faint blurs behind the whiteness.

Dalzell shuddered, thinking that Ash was about to give a repeat performance, but he was relieved to find that the investigator’s reaction to Comraich was far less extreme than the medium’s. Certainly, his body was rigid, and the pallor of his skin was troubling, but while obviously disturbed, Ash had maintained his composure. Perhaps, the chauffeur mused to himself, the investigator had seen things like this before.

Ash watched perturbed as the mist around them began to thin so that the castle’s lower floors were slowly unveiled. The investigator sensed the queer malevolence that bled from Comraich, a corruptive leaking that, it seemed to him, sought sustenance from the observer’s soul, as it had used other poor souls through the centuries. At that moment he knew that his own spirit was in danger.

The fear weighed heavily on Ash. His clawed fingers clamped tightly on his thighs as he fought mentally against the almost overwhelming force emanating from that nightmare place across the courtyard. It felt like a losing battle, though: he could feel himself being drawn towards the abyss, into the sort of black mire from where a person seldom returned sane.

It was Dalzell who brought such intense thoughts to a halt.

‘Mr Ash?’

Again, with more emphasis: ‘
Mr Ash?
’

Ash blinked, suddenly aware that his eyes were completely dry.

‘Are y’all right, sir?’

The investigator drew in a sharp breath and slouched back in his seat. He forced his eyes away from the castle, the lower floors of which were emerging like a photographic print in developing liquid.

‘Yeah,’ he answered weakly. Then, ‘Yes . . .’ this time more affirmatively. ‘I’m okay.’ He flexed his neck and shoulders as if to relieve stiffness.

‘I thought for a moment there you’d gone . . .’ Dalzell paused, then said, ‘Y’know, like the other one.’

Still twisting his neck, eyes closed, Ash asked, ‘What other one?’

Beyond the windscreen, the low mist was stirred onwards in untidy straggles by a stiffer breeze from the sea.

‘The medium they sent for,’ Dalzell told Ash, all the while staring hard into the investigator’s pallid face. ‘Moira Glennon, a well-thought-of but very private psychic from Glasgow. Apparently her services were only for the chosen few. I had the job to bring her here when the weird occurrences started in the castle. They were fair getting out of control and naebody here knew what to do about—’

Ash raised a shaky hand to cut him off. ‘I guess, then, she didn’t succeed,’ he said. Usually dismissive of mediums, clairvoyants, or spiritualists in general, whatever they deigned to brand themselves, but even fake or self-deluded, experience had shown him that there
were
genuine psychics in the field of the paranormal. Yet cynicism was in his nature, and preternatural ability had to be proved to him beyond doubt (as it had in the past) before he would accept the anomalous.

Dalzell found it difficult to answer Ash’s direct question. ‘Succeed? Well, the poor woman didnae solve the problem, if that’s what y’d be meaning. Would that she’d had the chance.’

Ash frowned. ‘What does
that
mean?’ he asked, curiosity trumping professionalism.

‘I’m nae allowed to speak of it.’

Ash looked at him inquisitively. ‘So be it,’ he said finally, almost in a murmur.

He returned his attention to the castle and the sight caused him to shudder. The drifting mist almost gone, Comraich loomed forbiddingly. There wasn’t anything psychic about Ash’s appraisal: structurally, there appeared to be nothing sinister about the place, the fresh light now enhancing the warmth of its sandstone walls. And yet . . .

In the periphery of his vision, he could sense Dalzell’s intense gaze on him.

Ash could hold his questions back no longer. ‘Look, forget the rules. Forget what I said on the way here. No more runaround like the scenic route we’ve just taken. Whatever you say, it won’t scare me off – I’ve already come this far. Tell me what happened,’ he demanded.

Dalzell sighed and looked straight ahead, his troubled thoughts evident.

‘She died, Mr Ash.’

Ash blinked. ‘Died? How?’

‘She died when she saw Comraich. Sitting exactly where you’re sitting now.’

As he stared at the chauffeur, the sun finally broke through the thick blanket of cloud, but Ash felt no warmth from it whatsoever.

The sun had finally won its right to the day helped by high winds shifting and breaking up the thick cloud layers, scattering them towards the north, leaving the south-western coast of Scotland to enjoy the fine autumn burn.

It changed the face of Caisteal Comraich considerably.

Eddy Nelson had driven into the estate by another, even more secret access, two miles beyond the castle’s main entrance. It was a narrow, winding road that led to private garages some distance from the castle itself. He left his red Ford, slamming the door shut but not bothering to lock it. In fact, he left the keys in the ignition; car theft was unlikely at Comraich.

A sour expression on his face, he followed the barely visible track through the woods leading to Cedric Twigg’s tucked-away cottage somewhere near the woodland’s centre. He was annoyed because, unlike Twigg, for whom he’d acted as lookout at the rear of the huge BBC World Service offices near the Strand, Eddy had had to make his own way back to Scotland. So while Eddy had endured the hell of getting to Heathrow itself – then queuing for a ticket, being herded onto the always busy early-morning flight to Glasgow, bumping elbows in economy with business types opening their
Financial Times
to full extent – his mentor had journeyed from London City Airport in first-class luxury.

The novice assassin trudged through the woods, resenting even the stray leafy twig that had the temerity to block his way, stamping down on it with his high-priced shoes, cursing under his breath as his fashionable and very expensive footwear became covered in mud and dew. His general attire was not exactly suitable for countryside rambling, but he wanted his debrief with Twigg to be over before contemplating lunch, so he hadn’t bothered to change. On his visits here he usually wore strong desert boots, olive green chinos, and a thick crewneck pullover; today he was wearing a dark blue Hugo Boss suit and a white deep-collar William Hunt shirt with matching tie. Eddy enjoyed looking smart – what else would he spend his money on? – even though Twigg had chided him several times, pointing out that stylish young men would always be noticed, and not only by women, whereas shabby men were generally ignored.
Well, fuck you
, the mean little voice in Eddy’s head said.

If anyone was going to look distinctive in a crowd, it would be the sad, beady-eyed little bald man who looked like the guy from the
Halloween
movies.

Eddy sniggered to himself: what a joyless creep Cedric Twigg was. And what a pitifully hilarious name! But that reminded him of his own stupid name.

He mashed a funny-looking creature with two hundred or so legs into the muddy track just for its insolence in crossing his path.

Eddy Nelson! Christ, if people knew his proper moniker they’d laugh themselves sick. His unmarried mother’s surname was Eddy, and
her
mother, his granny, wanted him named after some old wrinkly crooner or bandleader or something who went by the name of Nelson Eddy. Fucking
Nelson
, for God’s sake! It wasn’t as if many people these days had ever heard of him; certainly no one of
his
generation had. He could still see the batty old woman chucking him under the chin, laughing like a loon as she repeated his name over and over again.
Nelson fucking Eddy!
No wonder he changed his name by deed poll to the slightly less ridiculous Eddy Nelson the day he turned sixteen.

Something moving in the undergrowth on one side of the track caught his attention. Something ginger.

‘Fuck off!’ he shouted towards it, and suddenly the animal was gone, with only twitching foliage to show it had ever been there. Eddy unplugged the iPod he’d been listening to by yanking the tiny earphone from his ear and pushing the wire down into his breast pocket. There had been talk in the castle about nasty creatures roaming the woods these days and, although the thought of confronting one didn’t bother him, it might be better to concentrate on the path ahead rather than Bono and U-fucking-2.

Distracted for only a short while, he returned to thoughts of his rotten upbringing. Old demented Granny Eddy had been shipped off to Nutterland when Nelson was five years old, and soon after it was deemed by concerned social workers that his semi-imbecilic single mother couldn’t be trusted to bring up her son properly. He was institutionalized from then on. All he remembered of his fat slut of a mother was her picking him up and handing him over to the woman who came to collect him with a sneery smile that said she was glad to be rid of him. She certainly wasn’t crying, and neither was he. He’d just been glad to be away from her and in a place where he was regularly fed and there were toys to play with.

Nevertheless, relieved as he was, the damage to his personality had already been done. Other kids didn’t like him, and he didn’t like anyone. Every few months he was in a different home for abused or orphaned children. Finally, he arrived in a place that was quite different from all the others: discipline and chastisement were the order of the day, but there was something else going on there; it was almost as if the people in charge were monitoring him to see how far he would go. Young Nelson was a stocky boy and very strong for his age, and he not only enjoyed cruelty for pleasure, but took an almost scientific interest in how much pain he could inflict on a creature before death intervened.

The thing of it was, Nelson liked to kill things: insects, small animals and birds, especially the sparrows and robins he managed to capture by enticing them with breadcrumbs. The smaller and the more fragile the bird the better: he would reach for the panicking prey and hold it aloft tightly in his fist. Then he’d slowly crush it to death, listening delightedly at its feeble cheeps of distress and the crack of tiny bones. Another treat for him was to catch a horsefly, pull off its wings and then detach one thread-like leg at a time until all that left was a minuscule and immobile but still living organism that could be placed near the centre of a spider’s web. He would wait patiently, a Sherlock Holmes magnifying glass stolen from the biology room in one hand, the other giving a little flick to a silky strand of the web, setting off a vibration that would awaken the spider for its afternoon tea. He enjoyed the kill because it always gave him a sexual thrill and a spattered milky release, the most glorious feeling he’d ever known, even though he was not much more than a child.

The boy’s instinct had been right; his progress was indeed being monitored. At sixteen years of age, the newly named Eddy Nelson was removed from this singularly idiosyncratic orphanage to a secret manor house hidden in the enormity of its own acreage, where an entirely different and harshly disciplined atmosphere reigned. He wasn’t a great asset as far as training was concerned, but as he grew yet bigger and stronger, he was finally chosen from a poor crop of others for special purposes, because he had the one ‘quality’ that the Inner Court valued above all else in the profession set out for this obsessively inhumane young man.

Eddy Nelson was psychotic.

Twigg’s cottage couldn’t be very far now. The trouble with these bloody thick woods – a forest, really – was that it was so easy to get lost in it. His so-called ‘mentor’ (how the thought of being an apprentice to someone who looked just about ready to draw his pension stuck in Eddy’s craw) had taught him many things about the assassin’s trade: the ploys and ruses, the stratagems that gave the mark a false sense of security, following without being noticed, surveillance techniques, signs that meant aborting the mission, and many other ways to carry out assignments and avoid the problems that invariably cropped up from time to time.