Gaunt crossed the pool of light spilling from the workshop, reached the truck, wrenched the door open, and heaved his bulk inside. I heard him muttering as he fumbled in his pockets for the keys, then a low chuckle as he saw them dangling in the ignition.
I glanced over towards the workshop. Frank was still bent over the diesel. Casually, I began to wander across that way as the truck’s starter whirred and the engine coughed to life. I went into the workshop, grabbed the bass broom, and made a few half-hearted passes across the floor. Then something about the sound of that truck jerked my head around. Headlights swept across skeletal trees as Gaunt pulled out onto the road and turned, not left, but right towards Craignure.
He wasn’t heading home. He was going back to the village.
“Jesus!”
A spanner clanged on the stone floor as Frank stood up.
“Trouble?”
Shaking, I squinted at the palm of my hand, feigning a splinter. Frank stared across, frowning, then went outside, wiping his hands. I chewed my lip and clung to the broom, thinking about the new inside mirror and the outside one I’d doctored. If he was drunk enough, he wouldn’t notice either in the dark, and if he did it wouldn’t matter; outside my own devious mind, those two things added up to precisely nothing.
But he’d still be alive.
Frank came back in, his face wooden.
“He’s coming back again. He forgot his bottle, that’s all.” His bright blue eyes were puzzled. “Happy?”
I grunted as if I couldn’t care less. My legs were suddenly weak. As the Ford roared back up the hill, drew level, then rattled past, I dropped the broom with a clatter and reached down by the bench.
“Hey!” I held up the holdall, frowning across at Frank. “Did you take this out of the Ford?”
I ran awkwardly to the door, peering after the departing truck. Frank, back at the Lister, glanced up and grunted. “Forget it. Let him wait. He’ll pick it up next week.”
I winked broadly. “Better still, I’ll take it.” And as he shrugged and turned away, I knew he’d remember the lunchtime bus with its steamed up windows and guess I was using this as an excuse to see Chrissie. I limped outside and threw the holdall into the breakdown truck and climbed in after it.
The engine caught the first time, and I slammed it into gear and pulled round in a tight turn onto the road and hammered after the Ford.
The night sky was intensely black, the road strangely luminous. Deliberately, I left all lights off. I leaned forward, scrubbing condensation from the windscreen with my sleeve, watching the Ford’s headlights dancing across the heather amid the red glow as Gaunt braked for the bends. The gap closed rapidly. I throttled back and tucked in some fifty yards behind.
Suddenly I was calm, and in no hurry. I’d picked my spot last night with the Glenfiddich warm in my belly and cold hatred in my heart.
The road ran through Lochdonhead, brushed the eastern end of Loch Spelve, and began the long climb into the mountains. As it snaked down again through Glen More there was a section where it dropped steeply, and at the bottom of that stretch the camber was all wrong. Maybe it had been okay when they built the road, I don’t know, but with the surface sloping fiercely away to the right, drivers had to negotiate a tight left-hand turn leading into a steep, narrow climb.
It was a single lane road, with no room for vehicles to pass.
On the outside of the bend, and on the wrong side of that adverse camber, the ground fell away for about two hundred yards, a lumpy, boulder-strewn slope of heather and coarse grass that finished up in a dense clump of pines.
Dougail Gaunt knew that road. Drunk or sober, he had a built-in automatic pilot that could handle high winds and driving rain or nights when the temperature was through the floor and the Ford was taking most bends in a wicked, sideways slide. But even the best automatic pilot can blow a fuse. At the bottom of the dip I was going to hit Doug Gaunt with a shock situation. He’d have no time to think, and no room for error.
Ahead of me, the Ford began the long climb. The roar of the breakdown truck drowned all other sounds. I hung on, fifty yards back, seeing Gaunt’s hunched silhouette in the reflected glare from his headlights. He would hear nothing over the roar of his own engine. I was confident that with my own lights off there was no chance of his seeing me. If he was looking at all, it would be at that familiar outside mirror. He’d be wasting his time.
And then we were over the hump and dropping down and as the breakdown truck yawed on a patch of ice I saw, ahead of Gaunt, the road swinging left and up. Far down to the right the pines were dark against the glitter of water.
I closed up, one hand on the wheel, one fumbling for the dashboard switches. There was a sudden flash of blue flame from Gaunt’s exhaust, indicating a backfire, and I knew he’d dropped down a gear. As the bend approached I caught myself watching his taillights. I held my breath. Don’t slow too much, don’t brake, don’t...
Now!
I flicked the switch.
Headlights blazed.
Ahead, the whole scene was suddenly bathed in light; the sloping moorland, the tall pines, the Ford heeled over on the tight bend, the unmistakable figure crouched over the wheel.
And then, suddenly, I was screaming — “No! oh, Christ, no!” — and I scrambled for the switches, desperately trying to cut the lights. My flailing hand hit the right one, and they went out. I heard the Ford’s tires bite, saw the flash of brake lights, the sickening slide as the brakes locked. On that icy road with its wicked, wrong-way camber there was no second chance. The truck went spinning backwards over the right hand verge, headlights sweeping across my own wildly staring eyes.
And as I braked, fiercely, not caring, I saw those headlights swing almost lazily across the night sky. The Ford rolled once, slowly, bounced high. It landed on its wheels and careened down the slope, plowing into the pines with a distant tinkle of glass and the crackle of splintering timber.
Silence.
I sat, gripping the wheel, staring numbly into the blackness.
It had worked perfectly. Yet I felt physically sick, because I couldn’t blot out what I had seen before I slapped the switches the second time, finally extinguishing those deadly lights. And I knew I had to do something. Down there in the stillness, a life could be seeping away into the soft pine needles.
So I pulled the hand brake on and climbed out of the truck and the cold hit me and I shivered, tightening up, and for a moment my whole body locked and I couldn’t move at all. Then I unfastened the padlock and took a torch from the toolbox and slithered off the road and followed the scarred earth, down through the tussocks, across the grass towards the trees.
Streaks of white, splintered wood showed where the Ford had hit the smaller pines and gone through. I picked my way through broken, twisted branches to where the little truck had crumpled its front end against a monster tree trunk, reared high in the air, and dropped back, canted over to one side. There was the crackle of cooling metal. The air reeked of petrol.
I took a deep breath, and opened the door.
She flopped down like a rag doll and I held her dead weight with my shoulder. Her hair brushed my cheek as I stared across at the empty passenger seat. Glass was everywhere. The steering wheel was buckled and she’d gone into the windscreen and her blonde hair was dark and wet. I reached up and touched the soft white skin of her neck, but life had gone. Just once I pressed my face against her still-warm breast, eyes squeezed tight against the tears, breathing deeply of that oh so familiar perfume. Then I pushed her away, head lolling, and gently closed the door.