By the Light of a Lie (Thane & Calder Book 1) Page 15

  ‘By causing, you mean the planets send down death rays, like?’

  ‘No, it’s just an easier, sloppier way of saying they accompany such happenings. Coincidence, synchronicity, whatever you like to call it. Historically, we know when these aspects come round; so do certain types of events. No one actually believes the planets have any direct physical effect.’

  ‘Fancy.’ He rubbed his chin. ‘Keep going.’

  ‘Personal charts are drawn up for the time and location of birth with the planetary positions for that moment. That tells you a huge amount about temperament and potential. And,’ she said forcefully, ‘don’t even ask the why question. We’ve no idea. The personal chart will also react to the present movements of planets, for even less explainable reasons.’

  His cupped hand gestured for more, his face intent.

  ‘Examples are easier even if there’s no birth time.’

  She pulled up Harman Stone’s chart from files, typed in Paul Stone’s details and printed both pages with a zodiac circle dotted with symbols and degree numbers and handed them to him.

  ‘It looks mystical, but in reality it’s all mathematical. It’s a shorthand way of encoding the huge amount of information. Think of a car mechanic reading off a computer engine diagnostic which looks like gobbledegook to most people, but means something to a specialist technician.’

  ‘I can understand that. Indeed,’ he smiled condescendingly, ‘I can even understand a diagnostic printout. Keep going.’

  She gave him a friendly finger and pointed to the screen. ‘You look at which planets are in which signs, where they stand in relation to the horizon at the moment of birth and the geometric angles between them. Each of the variables has an effect on how the energy of the planet operates. It’s a bit like baking a cake, seeing how the ingredients mix.’

  ‘Eh?’ He leant forward frowning and shaking his head.

  She smiled. ‘Take Paul Stone, for example, though frankly I think his son Harman is more in the frame. He’s got one sleazy chart.’

  ‘Can we take one at a time?’

  ‘OK, OK. Just to explain. Good god!’ She paused, staring at her computer screen. ‘Would you look at that.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Paul Stone. Ouch. He has Pluto close to a Cancer Sun so it merges the two energies. The Sun is his identity and Pluto is controlling, power-hungry, secretive. That is opposite –a hundred and eighty degrees across the zodiac – from Mars in Capricorn, so he’s not only ambitious for money, he’s ruthless, do-or-die determined. And worse, Sun Pluto Mars all square – ninety degrees – onto Saturn in Taurus. So he’s cruel, money-minded, mean, stubborn to the nth degree. No wonder his son is a train-wreck.’

  Herk sat back, looking puzzled. He scratched his head. ‘You lost me back there with the baking cake bit. Do you not mean like a chemistry experiment? Making crystal meth or explosives. Chuck it all together and you get something different.’

  She nodded. ‘Yup, that would be the more masculine analogy.’

  ‘Well, I don’t see you baking too many scones.’ He half-smiled and sat back staring doubtfully at the screen, his eyes intent. ‘So what can you tell from all this stuff then? It’d save the criminal courts a load of trouble and expense to just get a read-off and bung the bad guys straight inside.’

  She chuckled. ‘Not that simple. It tells you the potential of the chart, but not necessarily how the person is going to live it out. An underworld thug will have much the same chart as a criminal barrister. They both work in the same criminal environment, but approach it in different ways.’

  ‘So Paul Stone could be a sweetheart, then?’

  ‘Not a chance with that chart,’ she replied. ‘He had a really tough life early on that made him cold and hard, not afraid to cut corners to get what he wanted. Getting sentimental about lonely old-age pensioners isn’t what he’s about, I guarantee. He was born a day before Ayatollah Khamenei of Iran with virtually the same chart and temperament. So he’s a tough bastard. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, I suppose. Though not usually in a good way. Huh. I’ll have to think about this.’

  Herk moved his chair back. ‘Before we leave it, can you tell when Stone senior and junior are going to get their comeuppance?’

  ‘Die, you mean? No,’ she said, ‘it won’t tell you about death. It will pinpoint the timing of major difficulties and danger. But Paul Stone is pretty unbreakable. What would floor most people would slide off him.’

  ‘Aye well, best to know what you’re up against,’ Herk remarked cheerfully picking up both coffee mugs and heading for the kitchen. He added over his shoulder: ‘If we are up against him, which isn’t that clear yet. Remember, we leave sharpish tomorrow morning.’

  CHAPTER 28

  Elly sat in the window seat on the train down to Largs, entranced. Jimmy had insisted they take a minicab to Central Station since this was to be a treat. He seemed in a jovial mood, so despite her reservations about wasting money she said nothing. The train left promptly at 10 am and the grimy urban track soon gave way to the open Renfrewshire countryside, with rolling hills and small villages dotting the green on either side. Within half an hour, they were skirting the borders of Muirshiel Park.

  ‘Odd, isn’t it,’ Jimmy remarked, ‘the grass is greener here than it was around the Hall. Seemed almost grey there. As if the soil was bad or something.’ He breathed in deeply. ‘And you can smell the sea from here.’

  ‘Can you? I didn’t know the sea had a smell,’ Elly replied.

  He smiled softly. ‘Aye. Fresh, makes your head clearer. And it can be brilliant blue, really lovely.’

  Elly had never been to the coast in her life, having been moved from her village home as a teenager into the Hall and then to Glasgow, so could only nod expectantly. She puzzled for a moment about how Jimmy could be so certain since he had never mentioned any seaside trips to her, apart from their visits to Lachie’s grave on the river.

  When the shore finally came into view, she said in disappointment: ‘That’s no blue. It’s grey.’

  Jimmy, lost in thought, did not reply.

  They asked for directions at the station for the address on Waterside Road that Len had given them. Twenty minutes later they were knocking on the door of the ground-floor flat with Mary Duncannon’s name under the bell.

  A hunched, elderly figure shuffled slowly to open the frosted glass door. She greeted them warmly, apologising for her arthritis, and led them through to the small sitting room. Elly handed her a box of chocolates they had brought and insisted she go off to make tea for them.

  ‘I can’t believe you’re here,’ Mary whispered. ‘Come all this way just to see me.’ She looked overcome.

  ‘No get many visitors from the Hall, then?’ he asked.

  She laughed grimly. ‘Naw, they were all that pleased to be away they didn’t need reminding, especially of the early years.’

  ‘Ach, you were OK Mary, better than most, well all really. You left when? About the mid-1980s or thereabouts? It got much better after that.’

  The conversation over tea was stilted since Mary was embarrassed and Elly had no idea why they had come. Jimmy finally put his cup down and said: ‘Really, what I wanted to know was what you remembered about the early days and about Lachie. He came in about the same time I did. You knew he’d been killed in a mugging?’

  Mary blinked hard, kneading the swollen knuckles on her hands, her slippered feet twitching involuntarily. Her face contorted with frowns and grimaces as she tried to cast her mind back. After a few minutes silence she said: ‘I remember his face, I think. Kind of rough, dark hair, stocky. That right?’ She looked at Jimmy for confirmation and then continued: ‘We always used to think it was odd you being pals since you were so different. You were more refined, like, and had your reading and writing. He was kind of stupid.’

  She looked straight at Jimmy with tears in her eyes. ‘We always, well some of us, thought it was just awful what Dr Brand did to you. All those
electric shocks, wasn’t good. You were terrified of that man. He was much worse to you than the others, for no reason we could see.’

  Jimmy crumpled, hunching his shoulders to hold in a shudder. He shut his eyes in an attempt not to see that room, the contraption with the wires, the leer on the doctor’s face as he held him down. The hard voice that always said the same thing. ‘Little boys who make up stories need to learn to keep their mouths shut.’

  He was going to die. It was going to happen again. Fear started to mount, his shoulders shook and his teeth were clamped so tightly it sent spikes of pain up his jaw. He could hardly breathe. His mind seemed to be detached from his body, floating away into a fog. He heard Lachie’s voice in the distance. ‘Are you alright there, pal?’ Then a pat on his shoulder brought him a good feeling. Lachie would look after him, keep Dr Brand away from him.

  Elly shook him gently and sat on the edge of his chair with one arm round his shoulders, the other rubbing his forehead. ‘Come on now. You’re not there anymore. You’re safe here with us.’ His breathing returning to a calmer rhythm, although his heart continued to pound and he looked embarrassedly at the older woman sitting across from him. She waved a crippled hand at him.

  ‘There, there I shouldn’t have brought that up, I’m sorry.’ She stared over his shoulder out of the window.

  ‘It’s OK. I came to ask. My memory is so mashed up about what happened back then. But I do remember Lachie was strong. He protected me, when he could.’

  ‘There was something else about... ’ She shook her head, as if trying to clear a jumble. A low, rasping hoot from a boat in the distance, repeated at intervals, filled the silence. She shifted uneasily, and obviously painfully, in her seat until Jimmy leant forward and said softly: ‘Don’t worry, Mary. Anything you can tell me will help.’

  ‘I feel stupid saying this,’ she whispered, ‘but I cannae get it out of my head that I want to be calling you Lachie, no him.’

  ‘What?’ Jimmy looked aghast.

  She apologised immediately, saying she was old and her memory got muddled, then tried to take it back.

  He sat back in the armchair, his eyes fixed on a gaudily painted print of a whitewashed cottage on the edge of a turquoise sea. Eventually he said, his voice trembling slightly: ‘Lachie doesn’t sit right with me somehow. But d’you know, Mary, I think you’re onto something. I think we did swap names. I can’t remember why. It didn’t make any difference since we were just numbers there. Maybe after Dr Brand died. And I’ve been Jimmy for so long I forgot all about it.’

  ‘Oh Jimmy,’ Elly leant forward anxiously, ‘and you put that name on his tombstone.’

  ‘Och, for god’s sake, what a muddle,’ he replied. ‘This’ll take some unpicking. I got given his birth certificate when we got out and he had mine.’ He chewed on a fingernail, then seeing Mary’s stricken expression leant across and patted her knee.

  ‘Don’t upset yourself,’ he said kindly. ‘I came because I wanted to know. I knew there was something ticking away at the back of my mind and that was it. Poor, poor Lachie.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘Now is there anything else you remember, Mary? This is very helpful. When we first came in to the Hall, that is.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ she said, ‘my head’s spinning now.’ She sat up straighter, wincing as her spine complained. ‘You came in and were different, better dressed as I remember, not the rags that the others had. Though they took your clothes away. You hid in corners, crying for your mother for a long time. I think she’d died. Lachie – Jimmy – the other one, he was more cocky like, except he acted dumb for the doctors since he didn’t want to go home. That’s all I can think of, I’m sorry, Jimmy.’

  Afterwards, Jimmy and Elly walked arm in arm along the promenade, the Atlantic wind whipping the glaucous blue sea into frothing breakers that occasionally lashed spray onto them. She knew better than to ask questions when he was sunk in himself. The cold, seeping through her coat, eventually made her say that lunch in a café might be nice.

  Over fish and chips served with a large pot of tea, he munched silently, staring out at the grey haar coming in from the sea. Eventually she put her hand across the table to hold his. ‘Are you going to tell Dr Birch, then? I think you should. She’s not as bad as you make out. And she’s trying to be helpful.’

  ‘Maybe,’ he said cautiously. ‘It’s just I can’t work out why she’s so interested in me, as if she thought I was someone special. I don’t like to be special.’

  Elly thought for a moment, wiping her mouth on a paper napkin. ‘Perhaps it doesn’t matter why she’s interested in you. What matters is she’s pushing you to find out what you want to know anyway.’

  ‘S’pose you’re right. I’d never have come down to see Mary if she hadn’t been prodding me. But it’s kind of scary finding out things I’ve forgotten. I just can’t get my head round Lachie being my name. Doesn’t feel right.’

  The train journey back was as sombre as Jimmy’s mood, with rain lashing against the windows obscuring the view.

  As they neared Central Station, he gripped Elly’s hand and said with a fearful look in his eye: ‘Maybe it was me they were trying to kill, not Lachie, when he got beaten up.’

  CHAPTER 29

  A bark of ‘Reveille!’ and a repeated loud knock on Tire’s door ended a broken night’s sleep. What the hell?

  ‘OK, OK,’ she shouted, trying to see the clock as the banging on the door continued. ‘What’s up?’

  ‘Nothing. Just making sure you’re awake. It’s 6.30. We leave at 9 prompt.’

  Oh god, marching orders. For a moment she considered going back to sleep then decided it wasn’t worth raising more arguments this early, when her head felt fragile. She stumbled out of bed into the shower, blow-dried her hair, put on minimal make-up, threw on tight jeans with short cowboy boots and a light wool sweater. Thirty minutes later she walked into the kitchen, dropping her travel bag – packed the night before – at the door with a thud.

  ‘Right,’ she said briskly, heading for the coffee machine. ‘Reporting for duty, sir. What’s the schedule for the next two hours before ETD?’

  Herk leant against the long kitchen counter, both hands wrapped round a tea mug. He was dressed in desert combat trousers with deep pockets, squad boots and a green T-shirt with an eagle printed on it. With a satisfied grin he said: ‘Pre-op briefing.’

  Lighting a cigarette, she said: ‘And that couldn’t have fitted into the fourteen-hour drive?’

  He chuckled. ‘To be honest, I thought you’d take longer to get ready. I’d forgot you weren’t like other women.’

  ‘So,’ she continued crisply. ‘Leave at 9, Sandhurst at 11. I meet St Clair and you skive off for a buddy’s tea party, then Channel, France, then the Costa Brava. Anything else I should know?’

  The hand holding her coffee mug, she noticed, was trembling slightly so she put it down.

  ‘Have ye thought about what you’re going to ask St Clair, then?’ Herk looked directly at her.

  She flinched and shook her head, her chest caving in as her shoulders drooped. Eventually, she said: ‘I don’t know that this is such a great idea. St Clair, I mean. You think it’ll clear my head. I’m scared it’ll muddy it more. Not that it terribly matters, I suppose. Spain’s probably going to be a waste of time.’

  Herk fidgeted with his feet and ran his stubby fingers along the counter, then he cleared his throat and said: ‘Look, you’ve gotta sort out your family stuff. I’m not going to be around forever and you won’t do it unless I push. So you might as well get it over and done with.’ He hesitated and continued slowly: ‘And I’m not so sure Spain’s going to be a walkover. I don’t have a great feeling about it, to be honest. So we need to be on our toes down there. Which is why I’ve arranged to swap the car in Barcelona for a decent cross-country four-wheel.’

  ‘God almighty, do you think so?’ Tire looked incredulously at him, then blew out a long puff of smoke. ‘It would fit the astrology. Christ. I do need t
o get my shit together.’ She straightened her spine and took a deep breath.

  Over a breakfast of scrambled eggs and smoked salmon, which Herk regarded with suspicion and Tire insisted was good protein and lighter than a fry-up for a long journey, they discussed strategy for St Clair and the holiday resort.

  The wind was blustery as they slipped out of the apartment backdoor. Herk was carrying a canvas holdall and didn’t offer, she was pleased to notice, to take her bag. The streets were quiet with only a few passers-by out for the Sunday papers and little traffic as they walked along Beak Street, with Herk constantly glancing around.

  ‘Crying shame, that,’ he remarked, as they passed a contemporary art gallery with ‘Riflemaker’ above the window. ‘Used to be a good gunsmith long ago and now it’s full of all that crap’. He glared at three abstract paintings with blotches of colour spread unevenly across the canvas. ‘I can’t understand why anyone would buy that stuff.’

  ‘It’s known as culture,’ she replied sweetly. He walked on ahead.

  Two streets further on, he nodded to a black BMW parked by a meter and bleeped the boot open. Bags stowed, they climbed in, Tire after an argument settling into the back seat. Regent Street sped by into Haymarket and then onto the tree-lined open space of Pall Mall. Tire found she was gripping the door handle as they drew nearer the flyover onto the M4. Why do all roads lead this way? She registered little of the hour’s drive thereafter, along the M25 motorway then south on the M3 towards Sandhurst, feeling morose and not a little jittery.

  What was she going to ask St Clair? Herk had tried to make her think about what she really wanted to know over breakfast. The answer was not much. Did she really want it confirmed that her father was the sod she had always thought? Maybe St Clair had known her mother, was related? She drew a shuddering breath, irritated at her nervousness. Interviewing some evil thug of a murderous warlord, which she had done on several occasions, was easier than this. Maybe she could treat it as if it wasn’t about her at all. This was just another research interview.