So Much Blood (20 page)

Then he had what seemed like a stroke of luck. Martin was keeping to the right of the road as if he intended to veer off down the Mound into Princes Street where he would soon be lost in the tourist crowds. But suddenly he stopped. Charles could see the reason. James Milne was standing in his path. Martin seemed frozen for a moment, then sprang sideways, crossed the road and ran on up the steps to the Lawnmarket, retracing Charles' footsteps.

In fact, going straight back to Anna's flat.

Realisation of the girl's danger gave Charles a burst of adrenalin, and he surged forward. As he passed the Laird on the steps he heard the older man gasp something about getting the police.

Martin was spread-eagled against the door in Lawnmarket when Charles emerged from Lady Stair's Close. The boy was hammering with his fists, but Anna had not opened the door yet. No doubt she was on her way down the five flights of steps. Charles screamed out Martin's name, turning the heads of a party of Japanese in tam o'shanters.

The youth turned round as if he had been shot and froze again like a rabbit in a car's headlights, unable to make up his mind. Charles moved purposefully forward. It had to be now; he had no energy left for a further chase.

He was almost close enough to touch Martin, he could see the confusion in the young eyes, when suddenly the youth did another sidestep and started running again. Charles lumbered off in pursuit, cursing. If Martin made it down to the Grassmarket, he could easily lose his exhausted hunter in the network of little streets of the Old Town.

But Martin did not do that. He did something much more worrying.

Instead of breaking for the freedom of the Grassmarket, he ran back across the road and up towards the Castle. In other words, he ran straight into a dead end. With a new cold feeling of fear, Charles hurried after him, up between the Tattoo stands on the Esplanade and into the Castle.

The fear proved justified. He found Martin standing on the ramparts at the first level, where great black guns point out over the New Town to the silver flash of the Firth of Forth. A gaping crowd of tourists watched the boy in silence as he pulled off the wig and smock and dropped them into the void.

Charles eased himself up on to the rampart and edged along it, trying not to see the tiny trees and beetle people in Princes Street Gardens below. ‘Martin.'

The look that was turned on him was strangely serene. So was the voice that echoed him. ‘Martin. Yes, Martin. Martin Warburton. That's who I am.' The youth wiped the lipstick from his mouth roughly with the back of his hand. ‘Martin Warburton I began and Martin Warburton I will end.'

‘Yes, but not yet. You've got a long time yet. A lot to enjoy. You need help, and there are people who will give you help.'

Martin's eyes narrowed. ‘The police are after me.'

‘I know, but they only want to help you too.' This was greeted by a snort of laughter. ‘They do. Really. We all want to help. Just talk. You can talk to me.'

Martin looked at him suspiciously. Charles felt conscious of the sun, the beautiful view of Edinburgh spread out below them. A peaceful Sunday afternoon in the middle of the Festival. And a young man with thoughts of suicide. ‘Don't do it, Martin. All the pressures you feel, they're not your fault. You can't help it.'

‘Original Sin,' said the boy, as if it were a great joke. ‘I am totally evil.'

‘No.'

For a moment there was hesitation in the eyes. Charles pressed his advantage. ‘Come down from there and talk. It'll all seem better if you talk about it.'

‘Talk? What about the police?' Martin was wavering.

‘Don't worry about the police.'

Martin took a step towards him. Their eyes were interlocked. The boy's were calm and dull; then suddenly they disengaged and looked at something over Charles' shoulder. Charles turned to see that two policemen had joined the edge of the growing crowd.

When he looked back, he saw Martin Warburton launch himself forward like a swimmer at the start of a race.

But there was no water and it was a long way down.

And Brian Cassells got another good publicity story.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHARLES WATCHED THE
sun-gold surface of the burn change in seconds to dull brown and then become pockmarked with heavy drops of rain. He heard a rustle of P.V.C. behind him as Frances tried to rearrange her position at the foot of the tree to keep the maximum amount of water off her book. The rain was no less cheering than the sun.

As he knew from previous experience, if you do not like rain, there's no point in going to the West Coast of Scotland. The whole area is wet. Wet underfoot like the surface of a great sponge. Everywhere the ground is intersected with tiny streams and it is never completely silent; there is always the subtle accompaniment of running water. The wetness is not the depressing damp of soggy socks and smelly raincoats; it is stimulating like the sharp kiss of mist on the cheek. And it is very relaxing.

Charles twitched his anorak hood over his head and thought how unrelaxed he still felt. Suffering from anoraksia nervosa, his mind suggested pertly, while he tried to tell it to calm down. But it kept throwing up irrelevant puns, thoughts and ideas. He knew the symptoms. It was always like this after the run of a show. A slow process of unwinding when the brain kept working overtime and took longer than the body to relax.

The body was doing well; it appreciated the holiday. Clachenmore was a beautiful place, though it hardly seemed worth putting on the map, it was so small. Apart from a tiny cottage given the unlikely title of ‘The Post Office', there was just the hotel, a solid whitewashed square with a pair of antlers over the door. Every window offered gratuitously beautiful views—up to the rich curve of the heathery hills, sideways to the woods that surrounded the burn (free fishing for residents), down over the vivid green fields to the misty gleam of Loch Fyne.

So the situation was relaxing. And being with Frances was relaxing. Arriving at a strange hotel with an ex-wife has got the naughty excitement of a dirty weekend with a non-wife, but with more security. And Frances was being very good, not talking about defining their position and not saying were they actually going to get a divorce because it wasn't easy for her being sort of half-married and half-unmarried and what chance did she have of meeting someone else well no one in particular but one did meet people, and all that. She seemed content to enjoy the current domestic idyll and not think about the future. A line from one of Hood's letters came into his mind. ‘My domestic habits are very domestic indeed; like Charity I begin at home, and end there; so Faith and Hope must call upon me, if they wish to meet.'

But he did not feel relaxed. He did not mind lines of Hood flashing into his head; that was natural; it always happened after a show; but there were other thoughts that came unbidden and were less welcome. He closed his eyes and all he could see were the writhing coils of the fat grey earthworms he had dug for bait that morning. That was not good; it made him think of worms and epitaphs. What would Martin Warburton's epitaph be? He opened his eyes.

The fish seemed to have stopped biting. Earlier in the day he had a good tug on his borrowed tackle and with excitement reeled in a brown trout all of five inches long. Since his most recent experience had been of coarse fishing, he had forgotten how vigorous even tiny trout were. But since then they had stopped biting. Perhaps it was the weather. Or he was fishing in the wrong place.

Even with the rain distorting its surface, the pool where he was did not look deep enough to contain anything very large. But there were supposed to be salmon there. So said Mr Pilch from Coventry who came up to Clachenmore every summer with the family and who liked to pontificate in the lounge after dinner. ‘Oh yes, you want to ask Tam the gamekeeper about that. Actually, he's not only the game-keeper, he's also the local poacher. Only been working on the estate for about five years, but he knows every pool of that burn. Good Lord, I've seen some monster salmon he's caught. They put them in the hotel deep-freeze. Mind you . . .' Here he had paused to attend to his pipe, an aluminium and plastic device that looked like an important but inexplicable electronic component. He had unscrewed something and squeezed a spongeful of nicotine into the coal-bucket. ‘Mind you, what you mustn't do is ask
how
Tam catches the fish. Oh no, I believe there are rules in fishing circles. But, you know, he goes through the water in these waders stalking them, and he can tell the pools they're in—don't know how he does it, mind—and he's got these snares and things, and his ripper. It's a sort of cord with a lot of treble hooks on. Well, he whips them out of the water on to the bank and then gets the Priest out—you know why it's called the Priest? It gives the fish their last rites. Vicious little device it is, short stick with a weighted end. Anyway, down this comes on the fish's head and that's another for the deep freeze. Highly illegal, but highly delicious, eh?'

However the salmon were playing hard to get. So were the trout. So, come to that, were any fresh water shrimps that might be around. Obviously the recommended bunch of worms on a large hook ledgered to the bottom was an insufficient inducement. Charles turned to Frances, and put on his schoolboy party-piece voice. ‘A recitation—
The Angler's Farewell
by Thomas Hood.

Frances clapped and he bowed smugly. ‘Ithangyoulthangyou, and for my next trick, I was thinking of going for a walk to work off some of Mrs Parker's enormous breakfast in anticipation of her no doubt enormous lunch. Do you want to come?'

‘I'm nearly at the end of this book actually and I'm quite cosy.' She looked cosy, tarpaulined in P.V.C. mac and sou'wester, crouched like a garden gnome at the foot of the tree.

‘O.K. What are you reading?'

‘Your
Mary, Queen of Scots
.'

‘Oh Lord. That's not my book. I should have given it back. Borrowed it from someone in Edinburgh. Ha, that reminds me of Anatole France.'

‘Hm?'

‘“Never lend books, for no one ever returns them; the only books I have in my library are those that other people have lent me.” A quote.'

‘I didn't know you were given to gratuitous quotation.'

‘The bloke who lent me the book would have appreciated it.'

Some Victorian spirit of Nile-source-searching prompted him to go upstream towards the spring that fed the little burn. Any hopes of finding the source before lunch were soon dashed by the stream's unwillingness to get any narrower and the steepness of the gradient down which it came. Centuries of roaring water had driven a deep cleft into the rock. Tumbled boulders enclosed dark brown pools, fed from above by broad creamy torrents or silver threads of water.

The banks were muddy and the rocks he had to climb over shone treacherously. More than once he had to reach out and grasp at tussocks of grass to stop himself from slipping.

At last he came to a part of the burn that seemed quieter than the rest. There was still the rush of water, but it was muffled by trees arching and joining overhead, which spread a green light on the scene. Here were three symmetrical round pools, neatly stepped like soup plates up a waiter's arm.

He identified the place from Mr Pilch's descriptions in the lounge after dinner. ‘Some of the pools up there are incredibly deep, just worn down into the solid rock by constant water pressure. Makes you wonder whether we take sufficient notice of the potential of hydro-jet drilling, eh? Mind you, it takes a few centuries. Still, some of those pools are supposed to be twenty feet deep. Tam claims to have caught salmon up there, though I can't for the life of me imagine how they get that high. Maybe by doing those remarkable leaps you see on the tourist posters, eh?'

But Charles did not want to think about Pilch. The enclosing trees and the muffled rush of water made the place like a fairy cave. It was magical and, in a strange way, calming. Puffed by the climb, he squatted on his heels at the foot of a tree, and started to face the thoughts which regrettably showed no signs of going away.

He knew why he was restless. It was because the explanations he had formed for recent events in Edinburgh were incomplete. Now Martin Warburton was dead, that situation looked permanent. The frustration was like getting within four answers of a completed crossword and knowing from the clues that he had no hope of filling the gaps. He could put down any combination of letters that sounded reasonable, but he would not have the satisfaction of knowing he was right. And with this particular crossword, there would not be a correct solution published in the following morning's paper.

It was partly his own fault for wanting a clear-cut answer rather than the frayed ends of reality. A basic misconception, like his idea that the police were way behind on the case.

But he could not get away from the fact that the tie-up of Martin's motivations which he and the Laird had worked out was unsatisfactory. There were too many loose ends, stray facts that he had found out and still required explanations. Though the main outline was right, there were details of Martin's obsessive behaviour that were not clear.

He worked backwards. Martin's suicide demonstrated that, at least in his own mind, the boy was guilty of something. The discovery of the Nicholson Street bomb factory made it reasonable to suppose that one of the causes of his guilt was the device planted in Charles' holdall.