Chapter Nine

I woke, groggy and with a foul taste in my mouth, to the clunking sound of metal clashing on metal and grumbling voices. Sunlight poured through the drawing room windows, knifing into my skull. I groaned and unwound myself from the couch, wincing at the sight of the broken glass in the grate and the empty whiskey decanter on its side on the rug.

I rubbed my head and went to the window. I frowned at the workmen loading the scaffolding onto a truck.

I pushed my hair into some sort of order, retrieved a pair of sunglasses, pushed my feet into the walking boots I’d left at the door and shambled outside.

“McGregor,” I croaked, spotting the foreman glowering at his phone with a couple of his men, “what’s going on? Finished already?”

“You could say that,” McGregor said, his scowl deepening.

“What’s happened?”

“A fair bit, it looks like,” he said, pocketing his phone and waving at his men to hurry up.

“What are you talking about?”

“We’re terminating the contract.”

I blinked. “You’re what? Why?”

“Let’s just call it…irreconcilable differences?”

I glared while I tried to get my brain to cooperate. “I don’t understand.”

“Let’s not have a scene, sir.”

“I’ll take this up with Mr. Byrnes,” I said, my voice rising.

“Mr. Byrnes’ orders, my lord,” he replied with a sneer, then turned his back and walked away.

I watched the men remove scaffolding and load equipment, sending grim looks my way as they did so. I hurried to the workshop forecourt to find a mobile phone signal. There was a missed call and an unpunctuated text message from Clem.

 

have u seen the news

 

My guts filled with ice. I tried to load my browser, but the internet signal wasn’t strong enough. I returned to the house, hovered around the Wi-Fi router in the hall and loaded the BBC News website.

The Blood Winter Conspiracy—Cover-Ups, Manipulation and Deceit.

I blinked until the text became clear again. I read the article in a daze, my aching head spinning.

This groundbreaking report from Jason Singh, investigative journalist and haemophile-rights activist, details extraordinary revelations surrounding the true events of Blood Winter…

“…Ivor Novák has been woefully misguided in his decision to withhold the true aftermath of those terrible events. It is now imperative that haemophiles in the UK demand new representation…”

Singh goes on to comment about this unprecedented misrepresentation of facts…

…Haemophile Terje Kristiansen’s survival…

…Untold damage to the public trust…

…Lord Aviemore’s complicity…

…Legal counsel for Jon Ogdell, the man convicted of Terje Kristiansen’s murder, has issued a statement saying they will be launching an appeal…

…Concerns growing over the fugitive Evgeniya Morak, who is now believed to be tied up in Novák’s decision to withhold the truth…

…Support is growing for the Brassingtons and the ‘Humans First’ party after their announcement to run for parliament…

…Calls for those involved in the cover-up to be held to account and for Ivor Novák and Terje Kristiansen to be face charges at the Specialist Haemophile Criminal Court in Moscow…

I grabbed a table until the dizziness passed. Nausea rolled through me like salt water.

Novák’s office tried to call me. I didn’t answer. I tried to call Jay. He didn’t answer.

I sat in the kitchen, staring at an untouched cup of coffee, my head swirling, guts quaking, waiting for the noise to stop. Even when the rumble of the builders’ vehicles had died away, I didn’t move. I felt like if I took even a small step, the house would come crashing down around my ears.

It was only when the sound of someone hammering on the side door filtered through to me that I came back to reality. I drifted through the house, feeling like I was moving through a nightmare. The stone passage was cold on my bare feet. The side door looked strange, as though it was from another time, another place. I opened it. Clem stood outside, his fist raised to knock again, clad in his usual attire of stained coveralls and a grim expression.

“Jesus, lad,” he grumbled, “you look like you’ve seen the business end of a threshing machine.”

“Do you need something?”

His beard twitched and he craned his neck to peer down the hall behind me. “So…is it…that haemophile…” He coughed. “Is he here?”

I rubbed my aching head. “No.” He nodded, appearing to relax. “He wouldn’t hurt you,” I said, “even if he was.”

“I know that.” He looked uncomfortable, glancing at anything but me. “Just want this to stay between us. That’s all.”

“Want what to stay between us?” He shifted on his feet, glowering out over the hillside. When he still didn’t speak, words rattled out of me instead. “I’m sorry I lied…”

He looked confused. “About what?”

“About him.”

“Ain’t none of my business, son,” he said. “No reason for you to tell me who yer shackin’ up with.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Some people would consider it polite to let them know there’s a vampire living just up the road.”

“Ain’t no such thing.”

I smiled despite myself. “So have you come to hand in your notice or what?”

“You’re too clever by half and yet dumb as shit sometimes, boy,” he grumbled. “I came to see if you were all right.”

I clutched the doorframe. “Why?”

“Shit’s hit the fan,” he said. “It’s on the radio. Everywhere. Now, personally, I don’t consider this—whatever it is—anyone else’s business. But the hoo-hah? You’d think the world was ending. And you’re in the bloody middle of it all again.”

“I guess I must have been a prized wanker in a previous life.”

“And some of this one too. Got too much of your dad in you some days, though not so much recently, thank God.” I eyed him carefully. He twisted his fingers. “Just promise me one thing.”

“What’s that.”

“Promise me you’re not with this…this haemophile just for his…you know.”

“His what?”

“You know what I mean.”

I sighed, stared at the grass around his feet. “I’m not a Blood addict, Clem—though at this moment I’m not sure that wouldn’t be easier to deal with.”

“Don’t joke,” he said, examining my face. “And do us both a favor and stop the drinking. You hear?”

I sighed. “Clem, I appreciate your concern, but—”

“Concern my arse,” he snapped. “This is experience speaking, laddie. Years of it. Years of watching people destroy themselves over nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“Nothing is worth drinking yourself to death over, lad. Nothing. Understand?” I stared at the sky rather than meet his gaze. “You’ll get through this. The tide’ll turn again. It always does.”

“Thanks, Clem. I…” I stumbled and managed a tight smile. “Thanks.”

“Thank me by keeping it together,” he said, prodding me in the chest. “I’m too old to run this business on my own, you hear me?”

“I hear you.”

“Yer all I’ve got left of him. I won’t live through all that again.” He blinked, like he’d surprised himself by saying it out loud. He looked awkward but when I didn’t respond, his round frame appeared to relax. He craned his neck to examine the house. “Fixed this place up nice, they did.”

“They left this morning because of the news. They refuse to finish.”

“Ah, there’s not much left to do. Some new slates on the west wing is it. I could do that for ya, while it’s dry.”

“You could?”

“Aye,” he said gruffly, shoving his hands in his pockets. “Used to do all sorts of odd jobs around here. And they’ve left the slate.” He nodded to the pallets sitting by one of the outbuildings. “Still got my old ladders in one of these garages somewhere.”

“That would be great.”

“That’s sorted then,” he said with a nod, turning back down the track.

“You know the front door works now, right?” I called as he walked away.

“Too old to change habits now, lad.”

Then he was gone. My head still pounded and my mouth still tasted sour, but my thoughts began to calm, like a sea leveling after a storm.

Terje would be back. Maybe I could persuade him go away with me for a while, escape to somewhere even more remote—Scandinavia, maybe Norway. He could show me where he came from, show me the mountains he’d grown up in. Maybe then we could finally work it out. Both Hati Nenge’s and Jay’s words still echoed in my head, but now I believed that if we were away from it all, then we’d be able to work it all out.

I loved him. I wanted to make him understand that that was enough for me. Forever.

I shelved the thought that ‘forever’ held a very different meaning for him and went upstairs.

I showered and brushed the hangover taste from my mouth, dressed in a clean T-shirt and jeans, brushed my wet hair back and shaved the scruff from my jaw. I went to the kitchen, drank cold water from the tap and raided the fridge then grilled bacon and black pudding, fried mushrooms and potato cakes and heated up some leftover haggis. I made a pot of strong coffee, filled the toaster with doorstep slices of bread and consumed it all with relish.

Whatever else had happened, whatever people might now think, the truth was out. Novák couldn’t use us anymore. Neither could the Brassingtons. The world might be up in arms, but Clem was right. The next thing to be outraged about would soon fill social media and the news sites. People would eventually forget our faces, forget our names. The struggle for stability was far from over and was likely to get bloodier before it got better. But there really wasn’t anything more we could do about it.

Surely, now Terje would feel the same way.

After I’d loaded the plates and pans into the dishwasher, I checked how many hours were left until sunset then did a circuit of the house, tidying, putting away clothes and boots, books and dirty glasses and cups that had started to build up on every surface. I changed the sheets on the bed, cleared the broken glass from the fireplace, cleaned out the decanter and packed it and the spare glasses away in a cupboard.

I made more coffee and sat in the drawing room, not putting on the television or looking at my phone.

It was as I was draining the cup that I heard a ringing. I frowned. My mobile was in my pocket and didn’t receive calls in the house. It was the landline…the landline I’d had installed when I’d replaced the broadband and trusted the number to just one person…just one.

I hurried to the hall and picked up the handset.

“Meg?”

“Alec?” Her voice was shaking.

“Meg? What’s wrong?”

“Help me, Alec. Please.”

My veins filled with ice. “Where are you?”

“Please…” Her breathing was labored. “It’s all gone wrong…”

“Meg?”

The call cut. I swore, checked the call history, but she’d rung from a withheld number. Panic spiked up my back. I tried to decide whether to ring the police, realized I didn’t know what I’d say and wondered if they’d even help me if I did. For all I knew, they were on their way to arrest me already.

I took a steadying breath, looked up another number in my mobile contacts list and dialed, using the landline.

“Hello?”

“David?”

A pause. “Who is this?”

I braced myself. “It’s Alec.”

A heavy silence.

“Look… I know you don’t want to speak to me.”

“You’ve got that right.”

“Just listen…”

“Listen? After all this? Never. Never again, Alec MacCarthy.”

“David, it’s Meg.”

“You stay away from her, you hear me?” he snarled. “You’ve done enough.”

“What do you mean?”

“Like you don’t know.”

“David, what’s happened? Do you know where she is?”

“Like I’d tell you.”

I fought impatience. “Look, arsehole… She’s in trouble.”

“Bloody right she’s in trouble. Been MIA for over a week. Gone right off the bloody rails. Quit her job and left her husband, all because of you.”

“What?”

“She’s still in love with you, you moron.” David’s voice was tight with pain. “Loves you more than I ever did.”

“That’s not true.”

“Goodbye, Alec. Don’t call me again.”

“David, wait. Meg’s just this second called me. She sounded scared.”

A pause. “What did she say?”

“Nothing. She just asked me to help her, then the call cut off. Do you know what’s going on?”

“I told you—”

“She’s not in love with me,” I snapped. “She wouldn’t throw everything away over me.”

“That just shows how little you know about your ability to screw with people.”

“I didn’t—” I cut off the protest. “Just think a moment, David. This is not Meg. She doesn’t do stuff like this. Something else is happening here, something bad.”

“Like what?” he asked, sounding nervous now.

“You tell me. What’s she been doing lately? Talking about?”

“Just her marriage falling apart.”

“There must be something else, something out of the ordinary.”

A noisy sigh. “She’d been going up to Glasgow…a lot.”

“Glasgow?” Something twisted in my belly. “Why?”

“She was seeing someone. Brian found out.”

I shook my head. It just didn’t square with the Meg I remembered. “Did she actually admit to seeing someone?”

Another pause. “No.”

“What did she say she was doing?”

“She wouldn’t tell me or Brian… Just that it was important.”

“Jesus Christ, David,” I swore, hurrying to my laptop and booting it up. “And now she’s disappeared? And you didn’t try to find her?”

“Fuck you, Alec. You haven’t seen her lately. She’s been secretive, moody, frightened—textbook adultery behavior.”

“Bollocks,” I said, loading an old phone-tracing website and logging in. I sent up a quick prayer of thanks when I saw that Meg hadn’t disconnected from the shared account we’d set up after uni. Neither had David. His phone location pulsed over London, but Meg’s wasn’t pinging. “Shit.”

“What is it?” Urgency now sharpened David’s words.

“Her phone isn’t registering on GPS. Hasn’t for days. When she texted me the other day, it was from a different number.”

“Shit.”

“You didn’t look for her yourself?”

“I thought she was crashing and burning,” David argued. “No one can help you during that. You gotta hit rock bottom first. I learned that the hard way.”

“You didn’t even check to make sure she was safe?”

“Don’t you dare judge me. You who lied to the entire world—”

“Not me. Novák.”

“But you didn’t think to set the record straight, did you? Not even with us? After everything that happened, you wouldn’t even return our calls? Maybe if Meg had known you were holed up with your immortal fuck buddy instead of drinking yourself to death like your dad, she wouldn’t—”

“Her phone last pinged a week ago,” I cut him off.

“Where?” I swore. “Where, Alec?”

“The old distillery.”

Silence. “Why the fuck would she go there?”

“I don’t know.”

“You have to get to Glasgow, Alec. The drive’ll take me more than six hours.”

“Don’t come up,” I said, shrugging into my jacket and searching for my car keys.

“Like hell…”

“You’re angry,” I said, as levelly as I could. “And she must have called me for a reason.”

“She’s my bloody sister.”

“David, please,” I begged. “If this is my fault, let me fix it.”

“I can’t just sit here.”

“If you want to do something, call the police. Tell them your sister has been acting erratically and has now been missing for over a week.”

“I already called them,” he grated, “two days ago. They didn’t take it seriously after Brian told them she’d left him for someone else. They’ll take it even less seriously now that she’s called you.”

I swore again.

“Just get there, MacCarthy,” he said. “And, I swear, if anything’s happened to her—”

I cut the call.