Kisses and Lies (15 page)

But it won’t. Because there’s nothing around here at all but forest and marshland and Castle Airlie, far behind me, and I would hear a car from miles away. There’s no car coming. I’m alone in this grove of trees. The sound of my breathing is the only noise besides the wind hushing the leaves overhead, and the occasional rustle of a bird landing on a branch.

And then I hear it: a twig, cracking as loudly as a pistol shot.

Followed almost immediately by the crack of what sounds like a shotgun firing.

I haven’t jumped this high since I was doing gymnastics. I take a huge leap and hide behind the biggest tree trunk I can see. Flattening my back against it, I try desperately to control my breathing and avoid making any sound whatsoever.

I’m hoping madly that I am just being completely paranoid. Because the alternative is much, much worse.

That would mean someone’s shooting at me.

LIKE A RAT IN A TRAP

My back is pressed so tightly to the tree that I can feel every scratchy sticking-out piece of bark digging into my spine. I don’t care. I flatten myself even tighter against the trunk and make myself breathe through my nose to keep as quiet as possible. Even in this damp climate, the leaves overhead are drying out for autumn, and they rustle in the wind, dead dry things tumbling slowly to the ground. My ears are straining so hard to hear any sound around me that it feels like they’re pointing out at the corners.

Birds land on branches, twittering softly to one another.

More leaves rustle above my head.

Nothing else.

And then, another shot. Closer now, and sounding, in this quiet forest, incredibly noisy. Its echoes reverberate through the trees, followed immediately by the equally loud noise of the birds that have settled on the branches above me taking off in a cloud of flapping feathers, squawking noisily.

This time, I’m so scared I don’t jump. I don’t think I manage to breathe for the longest time. I’m in a cold sweat—my palms are clammy, but I’m too frightened to move even to wipe them on the legs of my jeans. My heart is thumping like a kettledrum, so loud it’s hard for me to hear over it. So when I hear the rustle of leaves, I can’t tell where it’s coming from.

But I’m pretty sure it’s not overhead.

I can’t stay here. If someone’s coming closer, stalking me, I’ll be a sitting duck. I look down at what I’m wearing: trainers, skinny dark blue jeans, gray sweater. I pull up the neckline of the sweater and tuck it in over the top of my T-shirt to hide the latter’s bright blue color. Good: I’m all dark shades now, nothing that would make me easy to spot. And it’s lucky I’m dark-haired. A blonde would be much more visible.

Then I survey the ground. It’s thickly covered in leaves—leaves that are sheltered enough by the tree branches above not to be moist with rain and humidity, which means they’ll crackle when I walk on them. Anyone who might be stalking me with a shotgun (oh God, don’t panic, Scarlett, don’t panic) will hear exactly where I am.

I reach up instead and grab on to a branch, and pull myself up into a swing. I tuck my legs up into my chest and come up on the upswing in a tight ball, judging the moment till I’m at the right height to kick my legs out forward in a big jump, letting go of the branch as the jump takes me forward, my legs shooting out, my whole body flying through the air in a long line, back arching, arms back. And I land where I was aiming, by the roots of a nearby tree, close enough to the trunk so that there aren’t fallen leaves lying there, and I come down fairly silently. My feet land first. Then my knees bend, my back rounds, and I squat down, hands touching the ground, and breathe through my nose as quietly as I can.

I listen again. Nothing.

I huddle a bit forward till my nose and one eye are sticking out round the side of the tree. I see tree trunks, the black tar of the road, and the gold and red and brown of fallen leaves. Nothing else. No flash of color that doesn’t belong in a wood.

No shine of light on a shotgun barrel.

There’s a tree very close to this one. I take a deep breath and do a big frog jump, landing in a squat again and managing to clear the fallen leaves. I have to move, but at least I’m limiting my visibility. Only dark colors—I reach up to check that the blue of my T-shirt isn’t showing. And I’m making as little sound as possible. Someone hunting me would expect, after the first couple of shots, that I would run away in panic, scattering leaves noisily in my wake, or freeze with fear in my hiding place.

I’m doing neither, which may confuse them.

I really, really hope it confuses them.

This tree is too far from the next one for me to jump, though. I look up instead and form a plan. Climbing up the trunk, with the aid of all its knots and crevices, isn’t too hard, though, as always, I wish I were barefoot. I’d take the pain of bare skin against scratchy bark and nasty little branches any day for the security of knowing that my rubber trainer toe isn’t going to pop out of a place I’ve wedged it into because I don’t have enough traction or control. At least my hands are bare. I reach the branch I want and scamper along it like a squirrel, on all fours, moving swiftly, and then I lift up, grab the branch of the next tree, and launch up, using my upper-body strength and my abs to tuck up my lower body and swing my legs over to the trunk, where they hang, scrabble, and miraculously find a foothold. I slide down the trunk, wincing as my sweater catches on a big knot, and land fairly silently at its base.

I look back. I’m quite a distance now from where I started.

Then I hear something that chills my blood. It’s a heavy metallic click, faint but distinct. I’ve never seen anyone reload a shotgun in real life, only in films. So maybe it’s just my lurid imagination that is causing me to think that what I just heard was someone snapping the shotgun barrel back into place, having loaded in two more cartridges.

Maybe I’m imagining that I’m the target. Maybe someone’s just out shooting birds or rabbits or whatever people shoot in Scotland in October, and I’m just working myself into a frenzy because after all, someone’s already killed one son of this family and got away with it, and now they might be trying to do the same with me—

Bang! Another shot. Birds squawk and scatter leaves. The shot was closer this time, I’m sure of it: the echoes last longer.

I look around me desperately. The woodland’s still thick, but even if I reached the end of it that would be worse: back to the castle is wide-open grassland, making it much easier for someone to aim right at me and then claim it was a terrible shooting accident. At least in the forest, I have a lot of shelter. As long as no one comes around the tree where I’m crouching and puts a barrelful of birdshot in my stomach.

Bang! The second barrel fires. Forget my hands being sweaty now—my entire body is clammy with terror. Panic sweat is horrible: it feels like the fear is melting you down, weakening you, till you’re paralyzed with it, your muscles too soggy to move.

I have to do something. I can’t be caught here like a rat in a trap. And I’m scared, too, that if I don’t move now, soon it’ll be too late.

So I start to climb. This time I go up and up, swarming up the tree as quietly as I can, higher and higher, till the branches are thinning out so much I don’t feel safe putting my weight on them. I wedge myself into a fork in the branches and wiggle around cautiously till I get as comfortable as I can. Which isn’t very comfortable at all.

It’s two in the afternoon now. By five, it’ll be dark. I can come down then and make my way back to the castle under cover of darkness. If I have to wait three hours in a tree, even shivering with cold and with twigs digging into my back, I’ll definitely choose that over Option B—possibly meeting a killer armed with a shotgun.

Castle Airlie is behind me and to the left. I can make out the gray expanse of the Irish Sea in front of me, and to my right the drive winds away out of the woodland, through an expanse of more marshy grassland and the occasional oak tree, round a rising hill where I lose sight of it. The canopy of leaves below me is so dense that I can’t really see anything below me in the wood, no matter how much I peer down. Occasionally I think I catch a glimpse of some movement, but nothing I can identify. Still, if I can’t see them, they can’t see me.

I break off a twig that’s trying to burrow into my leg, and settle in for a long wait.

I’m not exactly sleepy or tired, but there’s something about sitting still for a length of time that makes your head nod and your eyes want to close. So when the sun briefly breaks through the cloud cover, and I see a sparkle of rare sunlight hitting metal in the distance, I have to blink and rub my eyes and focus closely to make sure I’m seeing what I think I’m seeing.

Not someone running with a shotgun, the sun glinting off the barrel. No one could move that fast. It’s a car, coming down the drive. Toward Castle Airlie. Which means it’ll have to pass through this stand of trees.

I’m out of the fork I’m wedged in and swinging myself from one branch to another like Tarzan, only I bet his hands were a lot more callused than mine from doing this on a daily basis. I’m skinning my palms—I’ll have grazes later, I can tell. But right now, there’s so much adrenaline pouring through me that I don’t feel any pain, just a desperate hope.

I bound down to the forest floor, catch my breath, and start gingerly moving from one tree to another, ducking over so I don’t make an easy target, heading all the time in the direction of the drive. I pause behind a wide oak, waiting, listening, relying on my hearing because I can’t risk putting my head round the trunk in case the person with the shotgun sees me. For a while, I don’t hear anything, and I start to think that maybe the car’s going another way, one I couldn’t see from my perch in the tree, and I panic: if it does, then I could really be in trouble, because I’ve probably made enough noise for the shooter to work out where I am—

Oh, thank God! The roar of an engine reverberates through the wood. I dash out onto the drive and stand there waving my arms frantically, hoping there’s been enough time for the driver to see me.  .  .  .

It’s a big, beaten-up Land Rover, pale blue, with bars over the front to help herd sheep or something. All I know is that those bars look unbelievably scary coming at me fast down the drive. But I don’t have any choice. I stay where I am, terrified but determined, flailing in demented semaphore with my arms. The Land Rover screeches to a halt about two inches from my face, and Mr. McAndrew’s head pops out of the window as he yells:

“Scarlett! What the hell are you playing at, young lady?”

His brows are drawn down just like Callum’s; he’s frowning at me just as furiously. And I can honestly say I’ve never been so glad to see anyone in my life.

HOW IS THAT EVEN POSSIBLE?

“Who was firing a gun by the drive today?” Mr. McAndrew bellows as he storms over the drawbridge and into Castle Airlie. I follow on his heels, half skipping to keep up with him as he speeds furiously along the corridor and into the Great Hall. “Everyone! In the Hall! Now!” He claps his hands.

“Lachlan?” Mrs. McAndrew comes running down the main staircase, her voice anxious. “What’s wrong?”

“What’s wrong?” Mr. McAndrew shouts. “What’s wrong is that someone was firing a shotgun in the trees by the drive today, according to Scarlett. Which is strictly forbidden, because we all know how dangerous it is. Someone could be walking there. Or what if it hit a car?”

“Mr. Mac?” says Moira, coming through a door at the back of the Hall, wiping floury hands on an apron. “What’s all the fuss and bother now?”

Her hair is sticking up, and I’d guess she’s been pushing it back with floury hands, pre-wipe, because it’s got a white streak at the front which makes her look unintentionally comic.

Mr. McAndrew holds up his hand rather peremptorily, waiting for more people to arrive. I can hear someone in the gallery already, and sure enough, a few seconds later Catriona appears, a big terry-cloth dressing gown wrapped round her.

“Dad? What is it? I could hear you shouting from the shower,” she says, leaning over the balcony.

“Where’s your brother?” Mr. McAndrew asks, his jaw set.

Catriona shrugs. “Gone for a walk with Lucy, I think.”

“Did they take a gun out?”

“No idea, sorry.”

“Dad!” A door behind us bangs and Callum McAndrew strides into the Hall. I’m finding him more and more annoying. Why can’t he just walk like a normal person? He seems to be perpetually surrounded by a dark cloud. He’s wearing a greenish tweed jacket over a big cream Arran sweater and ancient jeans, pretty much exactly what his father’s got on, but somehow he manages to make it look dashing, which is annoying, too. “What the hell’s the row about?”

“Were you shooting by the drive just now?” his father says, beetling his brows at Callum.

Callum looks shocked. “Of course not. I was just out for a walk.”

“What about Lucy?”

Callum drops his gaze, suddenly looking a lot younger. “We had a fight,” he mutters. “She went home.”

“Lucy wouldn’t be shooting by the drive either, Lachlan,” Mrs. McAndrew says. “Everyone knows it’s not safe.”

“Well, someone gave Scarlett a nasty scare,” Mr. McAndrew says.

“She was walking in the wood?” Callum asks, casting a stern glance at me. “Dressed like that? In October? What an idiot!”

“Callum McAndrew!” Moira says, before his parents can get in first. “The lassie’s up from London, what does she know about game shooting? Did anyone bother to tell her? Did you?”

Callum’s eyes flash, but he doesn’t say anything. Moira turns to me.

“You should always wear something bright when you’re walking through the woods in the autumn, Scarlett,” she says, smiling at me. “Or you’re likely to get peppered with birdshot by someone out after a nice plump pheasant or two.”

When Moira says my name, I remember how Dan said it suited me. He was the first person ever to say that. I’d always been embarrassed by it, thinking it was a name for a heroine, a really beautiful one, and I could never live up to it. Even since then, I’ve been a lot keener on being called Scarlett. Even if Lucy’s right, and Dan just went after any girl who’d say yes to him, I still get warm inside thinking of him complimenting me like that.

“Though if she’s walking along the drive, she should be perfectly safe in any case,” Mr. McAndrew bellows. “I’m going to check the gun room now. And if I find anything missing, there’ll be hell to pay.”

He stalks off across the Hall, his wife watching him, her white forehead corrugated with concern.

I’m a bit concerned too. Because I can’t help noticing that Mr. McAndrew’s going toward what looks like the same door that Callum just entered through  .  .  . which means that Callum, despite his denial, came from the direction of the gun room. I look at Callum, whose mother is putting her arm around him. Is he capable of shooting at me? Why would he do something like that—to scare me away from here? And why would he want me to go? He wasn’t at the party the night Dan died, by all accounts, but Lucy could have been acting for him.

And then something strikes me so hard that it’s almost like a blow. I must be the idiot Callum called me, not to have thought of it before.

Who was the older twin—Dan or Callum?

Which one of them would have inherited Castle Airlie if Dan hadn’t died?

“Och, that’d be Dan,” Moira says, kneading away in a big, rather chipped, china bowl, scraps of dough stuck to her knuckles. “But you know, he never cared about the land like Master Callum. It’s an awful thing to say, but it was always Callum should have been the older. Everyone knows it. They popped out in the wrong order, no doubt about it.”

Moira is paralyzingly blunt. I gape at her from my seat on a high wooden stool, which she gestured me to when I followed her into the kitchen. She sees my reaction and bursts out laughing.

“Och, there’s no beating around the bush with me!” she says. “You’ll get used to it soon enough. I tell you, Master Callum loves Castle Airlie. It’s in his blood.”

“I haven’t really seen that side of him at all,” I say, which I think is pretty tactful and diplomatic of me, considering that I’ve only seen a single aspect of Callum: the loud, shouty, angry one. I consider that maybe this is because Callum was up to his neck in the plan to murder Dan and is shouting at me out of guilt, and perhaps also to make the point that he’s a grieving brother, not a cold-blooded murderer. This is chilling, but it’s only speculation. I sigh. I need a lot more facts.

“Mmm, I can imagine,” Moira comments. “Well, you’ll have to take my word for it. If you took Master Callum from Castle Airlie, you’d break his heart right there and then. Master Callum and Miss Catriona, they both live for being McAndrews of Castle Airlie.”

“Catriona showed me round this morning,” I volunteer. “She was really nice about it.”

“Och, she’s got the manners in the family, no doubt about that!” Moira says, laughing. “And plenty of brains! She’s an architecture student, did you know? Such a bright girl. Keeps her cards close to her vest, too, that’s Miss Cat. Master Callum’s a terrible one for saying what’s on his mind without thinking about it first. Miss Cat, now, she thinks about everything before she says a word. She’ll go far, that girl.”

Moira drives her knuckles down into the dough, expertly working the air into it. Her hands are really strong. I can see the muscles in her forearms moving as she kneads the contents of the bowl.

“Just like Master Dan, now I think of it,” she continues. “He was a born politician. Very charming, Master Dan.” She smiles reminiscently. “And always ready to tell you what you wanted to hear. But he couldn’t hide that he was the only McAndrew who never liked it here—he couldn’t wait to get down to the bright lights of London. That’s why he was at school down there. Living with Mrs. Mac’s sister, going to all the parties there, getting his face in the magazines. Well, you’d know about that, wouldn’t you?” She looks up from her work and assesses me with a quick bright stare. “Drink up your tea, now.” She nods pointedly at my brimming mug, which she insisted on making for me. “You puir gurul, all the surprises you’ve had today. You must be fairly shattered!”

It takes me a little while to realize that “gurul” is Moira’s way of pronouncing “girl.” I pick up the tea and sip at it gingerly. Moira has spooned about half a cup of sugar into it.

“Ever since Dan died,” I say frankly, “it’s been one surprise after another. I suppose I’m getting used to them.”

Moira tuts her tongue.

“You’re too young. You’re all too young for this,” she says sadly. “Look at us here! We should be planning for the party of a lifetime right now, have the house full of people, not be moping around shouting at each other.  .  .  .”

“You mean for Dan and Callum’s eighteenth birthday?” I ask, drinking more tea. It’s horribly sweet, but it is actually making me feel better.

Moira nods.

“We had a wonderful party for Catriona’s eighteenth,” she sighs. “A huge ceilidh in the Great Hall, a band playing, I had four girls in from the village just to help me with the food—och, they danced till dawn! And of course, for the twins, it’d have been even bigger, what with there being two of them.”

She stops kneading the dough and turns away, wiping away what looks like tears with the sleeve of her sweater.

“It’s hard to believe Dan’s gone, you know?” she says through the wool. “I tell myself I’ll never see him walking through that door again with his cheeky smile, coming over to give me a hug and then help himself to some biscuits when he thinks I’m not looking. But it’s not easy. It’s not easy.”

I look around the kitchen to give Moira some sort of privacy. It’s a huge, drafty room, with a gigantic black iron range set into the wall on one side, an equally gigantic iron hood above it. Various saucepans and pots are set on top, bubbling away, and Moira’s warned me in dire terms to be careful going near it, as it’s all too easy to burn yourself on it. The walls are painted pale blue, which must have been a long time ago, as they’re very faded and stained now, and overhead, in the rafters high above the big battered wooden table, is a system of pulleys and wooden rods draped with drying clothes and tea towels. It’s toasty warm, smells of baking, and is by far the coziest room I’ve seen so far in Castle Airlie—even if it is the size of an airplane hangar.

Buzz! I jump. I’m so wound up with everything that’s been happening today that for a moment I don’t realize the weird fizzing vibrations I’m feeling in my side are actually coming from my phone. A text just came in. Jase! I think instinctively, and have to stop myself reaching for it straightaway. God, I so hope it’s him. These people, fighting all the time, this huge echoing castle, not to mention playing hide-and-seek with a shotgun this afternoon—I could really do with hugging Jase, feeling his warmth, being briefly enfolded in his strong arms and pretending, like some feeble heroine from a fairy tale, that having a boy close will make everything all right.

I know it doesn’t work like that. I know you have to fight your own battles. But just for a few minutes, there’s nothing I’d love more than to pretend that hugging Jase would solve all my problems.

Moira hasn’t noticed my start. Reaching for a tissue, she blows her nose with a loud trumpet, shoves the tissue up her sweater sleeve, and returns to her kneading. I finish my tea in one big slurp, and, high on the sugar rush, climb down off the stool and put my mug in the deep sink that runs half the length of the kitchen.

“I think I might go lie down in my room for a bit,” I say.

Moira nods vigorously.

“Now that’s a guid idea,” she says. “Dinner’s at eight, as always. You get a bit of a rest.” She indicates a door at the end of the kitchen. “Go up the servants’ staircase. Pop through that, go up the stairs in front of you to the second floor, through the baize-covered door, turn left and your room’s third on the right. Easier than going through the Great Hall, and you probably won’t bump into anyone. Which is probably the last thing you want to do right now, eh, hen?”

I blush. “Well, um  .  .  . ,” I mumble.

Moira shakes her head. “Master Callum’s still breathing fire,” she says sadly. “I’m not saying it was the right thing for Mrs. Mac to ask you here, especially not now. But once you entered Castle Airlie as a guest, that’s how you should be treated.”

I tense up, wondering where she’s going with this. Is she going to say I should leave? Because suddenly I realize that, despite all the drama and upset here in Castle Airlie, not to mention being stalked this afternoon, I definitely don’t want to go: I sense that the key to the mystery of Dan’s death is right here, among these people. And I have to stay until I find it.

“Off with you now,” she says. “Get some rest. At least you’ve worked up an appetite with all that walking! It’s cock-a-leekie soup and brown trout for dinner, with oatmeal potatoes, so you’ll have plenty to eat.”

I mumble a thank-you and head for the door she pointed out. Halfway up the stairs, though, I reach for my phone, and my heart leaps just at the sight of the little yellow envelope at the top of the screen that says I have a message. I unlock it and click on the icon in one fast move, and it must say something really awful about me that I have incredibly mixed emotions when I see the message.

I should be over the moon that I haven’t lost another friend. But I’m torn—although I’m incredibly curious about its significance, I’m gutted that Jase still hasn’t got in touch with me.

On my screen are the words:

MEET ME WHERE CARS PARKED ASAP. LOTS 2 TELL U. HOPE UR OK! T

Taylor’s here? At Castle Airlie? How is that even possible? I dash down the steps again and look around me. There’s a door at the end of the corridor that looks as if it might lead outside. I know where the cars are parked, because that’s where Mr. McAndrew left the Land Rover this afternoon. And I know, too, that there’s another bridge over the moat at the back of the castle, for kitchen deliveries, because I saw it when Catriona and I were on our walk this morning. I nip down the corridor, grateful yet again for my trainers which allow me to move near-silently, and lift the latch of the door.