“Excuse me, doll, but who are you to chastise me?” Sam returned the favor. “From what I observe here with your little bag, is that you are a home care giver, a nurse at best, and certainly not one of Purdue’s long standing associations.” He opened the driver side door. “Now why don’t you skip along and do what you are paid to do, hey? Or do you wear a nurse’s outfit for those special call-outs?”
“How dare you?” she hissed, but Sam could not hear the rest. The lavish comforts of the 4x4’s cab was especially good at soundproofing and it reduced her rant to a muffled babbling. He started the vehicle’s engine and relished the luxury before reversing dangerously close to the upset stranger with the medical bag.
Laughing like a naughty child, Sam waved at the security guards at the gate as he left Wrichtishousis in his wake. On his way down the snaking road toward Edinburgh, his phone rang. It was Janice Noble, editor of the Edinburgh Post, notifying him of the rendezvous point in Belgium, where he was to meet her local correspondent. From there, they would sneak him into one of the private boxes in the gallery of the La Monnaie, to enable him to gather as much intelligence as possible.
“Please be careful, Mr. Cleave,” she said finally. “Your airline ticket has been e-mailed to you.”
“Thank you, Ms. Noble,” Sam replied. “I will be there within the next day. We will get to the bottom of this.”
As soon as Sam hanged up, he got a call from Nina. For the first time in a few days he was happy to hear from someone. “Hello, Gorgeous!” he cheered.
“Sam, are you still drunk?” was her first response.
“Um, no,” he answered with dampened enthusiasm. “Just happy to hear from you. That is all.”
“Oh, okay,” she said. “Listen, I have to talk to you. Can you maybe meet me somewhere?”
“In Oban? I am actually on my way out of the country,” Sam explained.
“No, I left Oban last night. That is what I want to talk to you about, actually. I am at the Radisson Blu on the Royal Mile,” she said, sounding a little frazzled. By Nina Gould’s standards, frazzled meant something huge went down. She was not easy to rattle.
“Alright, check out. I am coming to pick you up and then we can talk at my place while I pack. How does that sound?” he suggested.
“ETA?” she asked. Sam knew something had to have hounded Nina, when she did not even bother to interrogate him on the finer details. If she came right out and asked for his estimated time of arrival, she had already made up her mind to accept his offer.
“I will be there in thirty minutes, give or take, for traffic,” he confirmed, checking the digital clock on the dashboard.
“Thanks Sam,” she said in a waning tone that alarmed him. Then, she was gone. All the way to her hotel, Sam felt as if a colossal yoke was put on him. Poor Aidan’s horrible fate, along with his theories about McFadden, Purdue’s moody altering and George Masters’ disturbing way of apprehending Sam only added to the worry he now had for Nina as well. He was so preoccupied with her well-being that he hardly noticed that he had traversed the busy roadways of Edinburgh. A few minutes later, he arrived at Nina’s hotel.
He recognized her immediately. Her boots and jeans made her look more like a rock star than a historian, but her tapered suede blazer and pashmina scarf tamed the look somewhat — enough to make her look as sophisticated as she was. Stylish as she was dressed, it did not redeem her fatigued face. Usually beautiful even by natural standards, the historian’s big dark eyes had lost their luster.
She had a lot to tell Sam and very little time to do it in. She wasted no time in getting into the truck, and cut right to the chase. “Hey Sam. Can I crash at your house while you are God knows where?”
“Sure,” he replied. “Good to see you too.”
It was uncanny how, in one day, Sam had been reunited with both his best friends and they both greeted him with indifference and world-weary misery.
18
Beacon in the Fearsome Night
Uncharacteristic of her, Nina said next to nothing on the way to Sam’s apartment. She just sat staring out the car window at nothing in particular. For atmosphere, Sam had turned on the local radio station to combat the awkward silence. He was aching to ask Nina why she had fled Oban, even for a few days, because he knew she had a lecture contract with the local college there for at least six more months. However, by the way she acted he knew best not to pry — yet.
When they arrived at Sam’s apartment, Nina trudged in and sank down on her favorite couch of Sam’s, usually occupied by Bruich. He was not rushing, as such, but Sam started collecting everything he would need for intelligence gathering so long. In hopes of Nina explaining her plight, he did not press her. He knew she was aware that he would soon leave on assignment and thus, if she had something to say, she would have to come out with it.
“I am off to the shower,” he mentioned as he walked by her. “If you need to talk, just come in.”
He had barely dropped his trousers to get under the warm water when he noticed Nina’s shadow glide past his mirror. She sat down on the toilet lid, leaving him to go about his washing business without a single word in jest or mockery, as was her habit.
“They killed old Mr. Hemming, Sam,” she just stated. He could see her slouching on the toilet, her folded hands between her knees, her head hung in despair. Sam assumed this Hemming character was someone from Nina’s childhood.
“Friend of yours?” he asked in an elevated tone to challenged the rushing shower.
“Aye, so to speak. Prominent citizen of Oban since 400BC, you know?” she answered plainly.
“I’m sorry, love,” Sam said. “You must have loved him very much for you to take it this hard.” Then it hit Sam that she mentioned someone killing the old man.
“Nope, he was just an acquaintance, but we spoke a few times,” she explained.
“Wait, who killed him? And how do you know that he was murdered?” Sam asked eagerly. It sounded ominously like Aidan’s fate. Coincidence?
“McFadden’s fucking Rottweiler killed him, Sam. He killed an infirm senior citizen right in front of me,” she stammered. Sam felt his chest take an invisible blow. Shock jolted through him.
“In front of you? Does that mean…?” he started, when Nina stepped into the shower with him. It was a wonderful surprise and a devastating clout altogether, when he saw her naked body. It had been a long time since he saw her like this, but this time it was not sexy at all. In fact, it was heart wrenching for Sam to see the bruises on her thighs and ribs. Then he noticed the welts on her breasts and back and the roughly stitched knife wounds on the inside of her left clavicle and under her left arm, done by a retired nurse who promised not to tell.
“Jesus Christ!” he shrieked. His heart pounded wildly and all he could think of was to grab her and hold her tightly. She did not cry, and that terrified him. “Was this the work of his Rottweiler?” he asked into her wet hair where he kept kissing her head.
“His name, aptly, is Wolf, as in Wolfgang,” she muttered through the streams of warm water that meandered over his muscular chest. “They just walked in and assaulted Mr. Hemming, but I heard the commotion from upstairs where I was getting him another blanket. By the time I got downstairs,” she choked, “they had pulled him out of the chair and threw him head first into the fire in the hearth. Christ! He had no chance!”
“Then they attacked you?” he asked.
“Aye, they tried to make it look like an accident. Wolf threw me down the stairs, but when I got up, he just used my towel pipe on me while I tried to run,” she recounted in gasps. “Eventually he just stabbed me and left me to bleed out.”