“Coming from you, Will McGair, that’s priceless, you pushing grease into the truck and fixing all the broken bits on Fridays when he’s playing cards. The mirror’s your concern, not his.”
I sat gripping the phone and watching my knuckles whiten, because cards had been the beginning and before he’d taken my girl he’d taken my money. Yet as I listened to the breathless way she used words, and remembered the whiteness of her body in the warm darkness, I knew I had to have her.
“When are you coming back to me, Chrissie?”
“Give me one good reason, Will, I’ll come running.”
“I’m reason enough,” I said hoarsely. “You can’t be enjoying life at that fleabitten motel he runs. And besides,” I added desperately, “what good is a man who’s drunk most of the week and a hungover wreck the rest?”
She chuckled, a wicked gurgle that made my throat ache. “Look around you, Will. What’s so cosy about a poky room over a filthy garage? Doug Gaunt’s got an acre and a half down here at Pennyghael, and this time of the year, guests all gone, there’s a different bedroom for every night of the week. And he’s all man, Will, so if you want me, come and get me...”
I cut her off, putting the phone down with a gentle click to avoid smashing it in my rage.
Because that last, vicious taunt was a cruel reference to the twisted left leg I drag around, a legacy of one afternoon’s lobstering when frantic haste to haul in the pots had seen me caught astride the gunwale of the crazily rocking boat and dragged bloodily across the jagged rocks. Dougail Gaunt’s pots, I remembered. We’d been hauling them up, Jamie and I, because in his habitual alcoholic haze Gaunt had dropped them into deep water and they’d drifted across ours, tangling lines and dragging buoys — but all I’d got for my pains had been half a dozen of his derelict pots, three months in hospital, and a leg so shortened it needed a wooden block to depress the clutch pedal of a truck and could do precious little else.
My money, my girl, a crippled leg, and now a dead brother.
Were those four strikes reason enough for cold, calculated murder?
Outside again in the darkness I stood for a moment, shivering. The drone of an approaching car swelled above the moaning wind. Headlights flashed back from the workshop windows, blinding me so that in my grief and anger for a moment I was disoriented, not knowing from which direction it was coming.
And in that instant, as the car went past, it all clicked, came neatly together; that loose wing mirror that needed fixing, the flash of reflected headlights, big Dougail Gaunt and his liking for cards and drink. I grinned bleakly, tossed the workshop keys to Frank, and, ignoring his direct gaze, thumped up the narrow wooden staircase to that cramped room Chrissie Stewart had once been happy to share.
But that was before Dougail Gaunt had set lecherous eyes on her and stayed half sober for the seven days it took him to lure her away with smooth talk and a fat wallet. I brooded over that, and a bottle of Glenfiddich, while overhead the loose asbestos sheet slapped in the wind and every corner of that mean room was dark and empty.
By the time I crawled into my lonely bed I knew how I was going to kill him. I had it all worked out.
Next day was raw, the wind moaning in from the snowcapped peaks of Ben Nevis far away to the northeast. Roads everywhere were treacherous, and over on the Fionnphort road as it snaked down towards Pennyghael, the wind funnelling through the mountain passes of Glen More made safe driving ten percent skill and ninety percent luck. And that was for a sober man. For the man heading home with a dozen whiskies under his belt and his mind on the hot blonde keeping his supper warm, the skill went out the window and landed smack in the lap of the gods. It was midwinter, dark by four thirty. And if certain factors beyond the poor sucker’s control presented him with a situation that was utterly without precedent, his reactions were likely to be too slow altogether, or fast enough, but wrong. Either way, he was dead.
And this was Friday.
The old truck came clattering past as I was dipping the underground fuel tanks, backfiring as it lurched on down the hill into Craignure. Right then, knowing what I was about to do, the tenseness set in. I’d caught a glimpse of Chrissie’s blonde head on the passenger side. She’d spend the morning shopping and gossiping in the village, then catch the Fionnphort bus back at lunchtime. Dougail would stay behind for his afternoon of poker and hard drinking. Before that, though, he’d rattle back up the hill and leave the truck with us the way he did every Friday. Frank would hose it down and pump grease into the nipples, and tack-weld any bits that happened to have worked loose during the week.
I put the long brass dipsticks back on their hooks and went into the office, feeling a tightness in my chest. Frank was warming his hands over the paraffin heater. The coffee cups were steaming on the desk.
