In the Mists of Time (16 page)

Mrs. Grieve discreetly wiped his nose. Thierry couldn't begin to imagine what this was like for her, or for her children. Although Louise bore the brunt of care, she did so through choice. He was under no illusions about the baggage that came with her, or the burden she carried, but the desire to share it with her, and the images in his mind of doing just that, were growing stronger.

Anything was possible if the love was there.

By the time they'd finished eating, the storm was in full swing, loud and angry, hurling everything in its arsenal, it seemed, at Ardknocken. Rain and hail battered the windows which the wind tried to blow in. Thunder and lightning crashed across the swirling sky.

“It's a night to stay in with a warm fire and a cup of hot chocolate,” Mrs. Grieve observed, though the rueful twist to her smile told Thierry she knew that wasn't going to happen for him.

“What's the plan?” Louise asked lightly.

“Patrols to watch the houses closest to the sea, get the people out where necessary…”

The doorbell rang, only just audible over the noise of the storm. Louise went to answer it, and, a moment later, he heard Dougie's voice, cheerfully yelling.

“That'll be your guests back,” he observed to Mrs. Grieve, and stood up to clear the table.

Dumping the first lot in the sink, he switched on the kettle and went back to the living room. From the doorway, it was like watching a tragedy unfold in slow motion, or in one of those dreams where whatever you do, you just can't move fast enough to prevent disaster.

Mr. Grieve, apparently still fascinated by the bread knife on the plate beside the half-eaten loaf, was staring at it when lightning flashed in the darkened window. Without warning, he made a feeble lunge for the knife and actually struck the handle, which sent the knife spinning off the table. But the movement had overset his balance, and he began to fall in the same direction as the knife. Mrs. Grieve, about to speak to Thierry, jerked her head round towards her husband, saw what was happening and made an instinctive lunge to save him.

Her chair overbalanced, knocking against Mr. Grieve's, finishing the old man's fall. By this time, Thierry had leapt across the room. Hastily, he picked up the fallen chair, and bent over Mrs. Grieve, who was nearest him.

“Are you all right?” he demanded.

She nodded. “Nothing broken. Robert…?”

Thierry put his arms under her and lifted her into her wheelchair for convenience before dropping down beside her husband and feeling for the bread knife, which was his main concern. Glenn's bizarre words,
“Don't touch the bread knife,”
kept echoing in his head.

Mr. Grieve had fallen facedown with the chair half on top of him. Moving the chair, Thierry could see the knife handle sticking out from under his shoulder. He didn't think the old man had fallen heavily enough to break any bones, even with the added force of his wife's toppling chair, so he turned him over very carefully, just as Louise came bursting back into the room.

“What happened?” she demanded.

Thierry propped the old man against the wall and picked up the knife, backing off to let Louise get closer to her father. Mr. Grieve was staring vacantly from wide-open, dull eyes.

“Oh no, oh Jesus,” Louise whispered, staring from her father to Thierry. The knife in his hands glimmered red.

Thierry said, “I'm so sorry, Louise. I didn't see—”

And then the lights went out.

Chapter Fourteen

Louise heard a moan of primeval fear issue from her own throat. There seemed to be nothing she could do about it. The image of her father's staring eyes and Thierry bending over him, holding the red knife, hung in her memory, a twist of impossible horror, incomprehension and in spite of everything, a nasty, corrosive twist of suspicion.

“Oh no, oh Jesus… Is he…?”

A switch snapped, and a flashlight beam weaved around the room until it found her father against the wall. Of course, her mother always carried a flashlight in case she couldn't reach a light switch.

Thierry hadn't moved. Neither had her father. There was an instant when Thierry's gaze met hers, and something in his eyes changed as he read hers. She had no time, no ability to process that, not when her father looked so dead.

She stumbled the rest of the way over, just as her father's chest wheezed. She'd never been more glad of that horrible noise.

“Oh thank God,” her mother whispered, covering her face.

Thierry stood. Louise's gaze flickered with him, and she could no longer see redness on the knife. Nor, when she actually looked back at him, was there blood on her father.

Of course not. It had never been blood. The knife had merely reflected the red of the carpet. Thierry laid the knife on the table and bent once more to pick the old man up.

“He's alive,” Thierry said, “but he's burning up. I think you should get the doctor.”

“I'll call her,” Mrs. Grieve said, wheeling herself towards the sideboard and the telephone.

“Where should I take him?” Thierry asked.

“Bed, I think,” Louise said hoarsely. “There's a stairlift in the hall.”

“It's all right. I can carry him if you bring the torch.” His voice sounded odd in the darkness, too carefully neutral. Perhaps he was just trying to calm her after her fright.

“There's another torch in the drawer,” Mrs. Grieve said shakily. “Take this one, Louise.”

Louise led the way up. On the first landing, four faces hung out of the bedrooms. “Power cut?” Caroline's voice asked.

“Afraid so. Must be the storm. I'll get you some candles in a few minutes if you could just hold on…”

“Sure. Can we help at all?”

“No, that's okay. My father had a fall, and the doctor should be out soon…” If she could get here through the storm. She lived farther along the coast, not in the village.

She led Thierry up to her parents' room and directed him to her father's bed, while she rummaged for yet another flashlight in her mother's bedside cabinet.

Although Thierry laid her father down on the bed with utmost gentleness, his voice was oddly formal as he asked, “Shall I undress him?”

She nodded. “The carers won't be able to come in this. They warned us this morning.”

Between her and Thierry, it only took a few minutes to change her father and make him as comfortable as they could in the bed.

By the time, they'd finished, her mother clattered into the room in her wheelchair. The stairlift really was a blessing.

“The doctor's on her way,” she said. “She'd decided to stay in the village tonight, thank God.”

“I suspect she's going to be in demand,” Louise said grimly as she and her mother gazed down at her apparently sleeping father. His breathing was shallow and heartbreakingly rough, but at least he was still doing it.

Thierry was reading something on his phone.

“Go, if you're wanted,” Louise said. “We'll be fine now. There'll be others who aren't.”

Thierry glanced up from his phone. By the torchlight, his face was shadowed and unreadable as he scanned hers. “Call me if you need anything,” he said abruptly and strode towards the door.

Louise, leaving her mother with two flashlights, hurried after him with the third to light his way. He'd already climbed into his wellingtons and his raincoat, and was opening the front door by the time she reached him. The wind tried hard to wrench it from his hold. Outside it was pitch-black. The streetlights had gone out too. She tried to speak, to tell him to take care, but he was already hurrying away. He didn't look back.

Feeling suddenly, stupidly bereft, Louise closed the door on the storm. She wished he'd kissed her. She wished she'd kissed him. Since her father had fallen, there seemed to be a whole world of distance between them.

* * * * *

Through everything he did over the next two hours—sweeping determined sea water, carrying adults and children from their houses, heaving a fallen tree from a flooded front door, trying to wedge still a car floating dangerously across the harbour carpark—Thierry thought of Louise and the expression of horror she'd been unable to hide.

Not just horror at what might have happened to her father—that he could easily have understood. It was the horror of suspicion when she'd looked at him. As if he had been somehow responsible, as if he had hurt her father, stabbed him with the knife.

“Don't touch the bread knife…”

He almost wished he hadn't. But it had been necessary at the time to move it as far out of harm's way as possible. It had only been a momentary expression, and she'd let him carry her father upstairs, although she'd insisted on helping undress him when she should probably have been helping her mother instead…

It shouldn't bother him. Of course she was protective of her father, and she'd barely known Thierry a week. It shouldn't hurt; but it did. God, it did. That she could think something like that of him, even for the tiniest instant, proved surely the hopelessness of any kind of relationship. He would always, always be the ex-con, the fallen who could fall again at any time. The outsider in her world of good, law-abiding, decent people she'd never ever suspect of deliberately hurting her frail, sick, old father.

Grimly, Thierry sloshed through sea water that had flooded the church hall, though it had got no farther than the step of the church itself. At least the tide had turned and was receding again. There was still the storm to contend with, although it was showing no signs yet of blowing itself out.

Thierry waded on to the B&B road, where the sea had rushed through gardens and into some of the lower houses. By the light of bobbing torches, he could see people fighting against the wind to sweep water away from their doors. At the B&B, Louise's guests seemed to be doing that for her.

Thierry hesitated. He wanted to call in, make sure she was all right, that her father was, that there was nothing she needed.

“All right in there?” he called from the gate.

“All well!” called one of the guests.

So there was no need to go in, only…

His phone rang. It was Glenn. “Thierry, can you drive some flooded-out folk up to the big house? I'm there already. The minister's with them at the foot of the hill, but he needs to stay in the village. I said I thought you were still down there.”

“Sure,” Thierry responded, and sloshed his way forward.

The four-by-four was loaded up with three old people, a young woman and two kids.

“Thanks for this!” the minister yelled over the howling wind. “Don't know what we'd have done without you guys! Tell Glenn I'll be up when I can.”

Thierry poured himself into the driving seat. “Everyone okay?” He got a chorus of replies, and, satisfied, he fastened his seat belt, started the car and drove slowly up the hill, peering between the windscreen wipers, which fought a losing battle with the driving rain. The wind kept trying to whip the steering wheel from his control.

Ardknocken House was lit up like a beacon in the blackness. At least it still had power. Only as he pulled up right outside the front door and got out of the car to help his passengers did he notice the white swirls drifting down from the hill peaks.

He paused, staring. “You're kidding me,” he said aloud.

* * * * *

For the first time, Dr. Cameron actually looked concerned. She straightened, mechanically replacing her stethoscope and her thermometer back in her case.

“I'm afraid he's developed pneumonia,” she said, turning to face Louise and her mother. “In normal circumstances, we should get him to hospital tonight, but in this, I really don't advise moving him. To be honest, our chances of getting an ambulance tonight are slim.”

“We can drive him there,” Louise said. “Friends will lend—”

“Not in the storm,” Dr. Cameron said firmly. “He'll be more comfortable here for tonight, and first thing in the morning, I'll send an ambulance.”

Since her mother acquiesced, Louise nodded too and followed the doctor from the room. “Is he going to die?” she asked in a small, harsh voice.

“Not yet,” Dr. Cameron said with a gentleness that was somehow more frightening than anything else. “These few hours will make little difference, you know. If he succumbs, it won't be for a day or so yet. And he may yet rally. I've seen worse cases do so. Keep your chin up, Louise.” She pulled her hood up over her wild hair and took a deep breath, ready to brave the storm once more.

“Thanks, Doctor,” Louise managed, and opened the door. Water was rushing through her sandbags at the gate. “Oh bugger.”

“Gives you something else to think about,” Dr. Cameron said bracingly. “If it makes you feel better, my own place is probably trashed by now.”

Louise was forced to a watery smile. “I hope not, and of course it doesn't! Fingers crossed for you, Doctor.”

“And for you,” said the doctor and sloshed her way up the path.

Louise forced the door shut, and went back to join her mother. On the way, she met Caroline and John.

“If you've got a couple of brushes,” John said, “we'll try and keep the water away from the house.”

“It's not normally part of the hospitality we offer,” Louise said ruefully. “But I can't deny I'd be grateful for the help.”

She detoured to the broom cupboard to fetch the outside brushes. “Thanks for this! I'll be out to spell you in a few minutes.”

“No rush,” John assured her. “We'll get the others out to help too.”

Louise smiled her gratitude, gave them another flashlight and took her own up to her parents' room.

“I just thought about Angus on his own down by the harbour,” her mother said by way of greeting. She was in her wheelchair by her husband's bedside, her eyes glued to his sleeping, wheezing face.

“He'll be flooded,” Louise said, getting out her phone and scrolling for the old man's number. She pressed Call. “The water's right into our garden. Our guests just offered to sweep it out for us, so I've taken them up on it. I'm sure Angus is being taken care of, but…he's not answering.” She put her phone back in her pocket. “I'll just run—or swim! —round there to make sure. If he is still there, I'll bring him back with me. He can have Aidan's room.”

“Aye, do that. But, Louise? Be careful down there, don't get swept in. I wish Aidan was here!”

“Well, he can help us clear up when he is,” Louise said as cheerfully as she could. She put the wireless handset on her father's bedside cabinet and added the emergency mobile beside it. “Call me if anything at all changes. The guests are good people, and I'll speak to Hugh next door before I go.”

Her mother smiled faintly and went back to gazing at her husband. It crossed Louise's mind that she was remembering him as he'd been before, perhaps when he was young, perhaps just before the vileness that was Alzheimer's began to rob him of who he was.

Louise swallowed the lump in her throat, refusing to allow tears when there was so much to do.

So far, Caroline and John were doing well at keeping the water from the house. Hopefully the tide would turn soon and it would come no farther. Hugh next door was sweeping too, but half-heartedly. Their house lay just slightly higher and their garden at a different angle, so they weren't so badly off as the B&B.

“You doing okay?” she shouted over the wind to Hugh.

“Aye, we're fine! Was that the doctor I saw earlier?”

“Yes, Dad's not too good—pneumonia. He'll go to the hospital in the morning.”

“I'm sorry, lass,” Hugh said kindly.

“Thanks. I'm going to check on Angus down at the harbour.”

“Mind yourself down there! I'd leave it to the men—”

“I'll be careful,” Louise promised.

Pausing only to explain to John where she was going, and asking him to keep an ear out for her mother, she left the garden and waded her way down to the harbour.

It was like an extension of the sea. Waves rolled over the carpark, carrying pieces of broken boat and seaweed. A car floated there too, held in place by ropes tied around lamp posts. So someone had been here.

The tide was turning, trying to draw her into the sea, which was oddly disorienting in the dark. She held on to gateposts, walls, window ledges, lampposts, whatever she could for balance, and hauled herself along to Angus's cottage. The sea had breached his hopeful wall of sandbags and got in under his door. By the beam of her torch, she could see it trickling out again.

She banged on the door, then opened the letterbox and yelled, “Angus! Are you in there? It's Louise. Are you all right?”

There was no answer. She shone the torch through the letterbox. Tellingly, his old oilskins weren't hanging in his tiny hall, so she was pretty sure he'd left. She tried one more time to phone him, but she couldn't even here it ringing inside. The flood must have cut off his phone.

Louise waded on, noticing that the off-licence and tea room were flooded too. At the lane that led up to the High Street, she saw someone striding past and called out. He paused, peering through the darkness until he caught her in the beam of his own flashlight. Alan from the pub.

“Louise? Are you okay?”

“Yes, I'm fine. I was looking for old Angus Black, who lives by the harbour—”