Miss Take - Chapter 14 (4459)

 

Chapter 14 (4459)

It was Monday morning and Kelly was taking her first-year class. Last week at school had been hell, but at least it had only been three days. The half term holidays were over now and it was noses back to the grind stone for her and her pupils. She had considered calling the agency before she’d gone back to work, to get someone in to replace her, but really, what was the point? She was as safe here as anywhere else and if something else awful happened to her then the school wondering where she was would be the least of her worries.

Everything that had happened at the weekend was buzzing around in her head and the lessons so far today had lacked focus, to say the least. One good thing had happened during the holidays though, Paul Bevy had switched school. Kelly wished that she could be so easily removed from her problems. The school was putting everything behind it, there seemed to be a general agreement among the staff not to discuss anything to do with Paul. It was done and it was time to move on, Paul leaving had draw a line under it.

 

After she’d finished with the first-years she had a free period and went to get a cup of coffee in the staff room. Things had moved on from the excitement of last term, but there was no shortage of other things to talk about and there were always members of the faculty in here swapping gossip and ill-founded opinions.

She did not mean to listen in, but the room was small and the others in the room could not be accused of being whisperers. The conversation had drifted onto the topic of the manhunt for Clarence Price. She’d noticed that among the teachers, and everyone else that she’d talked to in the last few days, that the people of Edinburgh seemed to be perversely proud of Price. Despite everything he had done, he was seen as a “local lad” who had fallen foul of sinister elements of the police or the Edinburgh underworld or both. Kelly had been astounded at first, hearing these theories discussed on the bus, or given forth by taxi drivers, but had now grown use to it, reasoning there was no depth to peoples’ stupidity.

‘He’s going after the gangs isn’t he?’ insisted Mr Ivy, the Geography and RE teacher and well known idiot. ‘He’s taking down those bloody Dundonian gypsies and now he’s after those Romanian people smugglers. If you ask me, Price is a hero. ‘Bout time something was done.’

‘What about that policewoman he killed?’ asked Miss Pringle, who was not much brighter.

‘Fake news,’ replied Ivy with a knowing smile. ‘I read in the paper that there had been shots fired two hours before the cops even showed up. The gangs had gone to take him out, don’t you see? Then the cops got caught in the crossfire.’

‘Why do they not say that then?’ pondered Miss Pringle.

‘They want to make out Price is a villain, it’s obvious!’ opined Ivy. ‘They don’t want the public on his side. He’s making them out to be fools and they hate that. He’s done more to clean up the streets in a week than they’ve done in years.’

Kelly rolled her eyes as she went over to re-fill her coffee cup. She had a momentary daydream where she told them the truth about everything, all the gory details of what had happened to her and what Price’s motivations actually were, but realised they would never believe her if she did. Price was very far away indeed from being Edinburgh’s answer to Batman. If he was anything, he was nothing more than a tool. A tool used by rich and unscrupulous men to carry out their dirty deeds, an easily manipulated psychopath.

Kelly walked down to the sandwich shop for lunch and had a cup of tea in it’s small seating area. By then she had moved her thoughts on to thinking about Corum, deciding that like it or not, she’d burned her bridges and was on her own.

How long she had, she didn’t know, but what she had to do now, it seemed to her, was find Price and turn him in. The reward was up to a quarter million. At first, she dismissed the entire notion as stupid and dangerous – better to cosy up to Lavius and let him and the rest of the dibble do their job. She half convinced herself to do exactly that by the time she’d finished her lunch, but on her walk back she felt her anger rising. She couldn’t just throw in the towel now. If she put herself in Lavius’s hands entirely, she would eventually end up in prison – and most likely five minutes after she was no longer of any use to him. Secondly, Price was dangerous, but he was also a fool. She could bring him in if she got the drop on him, she was sure of it. And if she did, it was far from certain she would get the reward money, but she’d definitely not get any of it if she didn’t at least try. And if she did - oh if she did! Thinking about it made her smile. With all that money she’d just get a false passport and jet off to somewhere without an extradition treaty with the UK. She’d fly her mum out and then it would be margaritas by the pool every day for life. She laughed at herself at that one, she didn’t even know what went into a margarita, she’d never had one before.

By the time her work day was ending a plan was forming in her head, and the more she thought about it, the more she liked it. How much Sir Horace was involved, she had no way of knowing, but one thing was for certain, Price had been calling Cunningham, they were connected by more than just their days in the army.

There was a possibility, she supposed, that Corum had made the whole thing up about his visit to Cunningham and her calling the number when he had signalled her too was all just part of some crazy plan to keep her focused on the wrong person. This seemed pretty far-fetched though, even to the most paranoid parts of her thinking.

There was one way to be sure if everything Lavius was telling her was true though and that was to go and check out Cunningham for herself. If she could get a hold of him and lay it on heavy, then she’d learn that either Lavius was lying about the whole thing, or Cunningham was her man. And if he was, then another bit of arm twisting would surely persuade him to contact Price and arrange a meeting. If she managed to get that far, she’d think about the best way to deal with Price at that point. Whatever happened, she wouldn’t involve Lavius in it. From now on, she was working alone.

 

After school, as she crossed the carpark to get to the bus-stop, Mrs Hunter bumped into her. Kelly nodded a greeting, but it looked like the old busybody had something on her mind.

‘Oh Miss Kane! Guess what? My Agnes saw you on a night out,’ she burbled. ‘On a Sunday night as well you rascal! She said you were with a young man no less.’

Mrs Hunter leaned in close, an old friend sharing a conspiratorial joke. She wasn’t much taller than Kelly.

‘Just a… friend,’ attempted Kelly, trying to pull free.

‘Oh, I don’t mean to pry!’ said Mrs Hunter as she pried. ‘But it wasn’t that young policeman was it? What was his name…? Laurence… Lambert? No, no, he had an unusual name didn’t he.’

Kelly knew that Mrs Hunter knew fine well what Corum’s name was and that she was fishing to see how quickly it tripped off of Kelly’s tongue.

‘I’m late for my bus,’ lied Kelly.

‘Of course, dear,’ said Hunter with a knowing smile. ‘I know I’m nosey, sorry dear. If you were stuck in a loveless marriage for twenty years you would be too…’

‘I’m sorry…’ began Kelly, at a total loss.

‘Never mind dear,’ sighed Mrs Hunter wistfully. ‘To be young again… Well off you go then, see you tomorrow Miss Kane!’

Kelly turned and headed off to the bus-stop as fast as her heals would carry her. This is too much, she thought as she lurked into the shadows of the bus shelter. Her phone made a notification sound and she checked her messages. It was Corum asking for a meet up. She put her phone back in her coat pocket and groaned. How much longer could this go on? It felt like each day she was being pushed closer and closer to a precipice.

***

By Tuesday night Kelly was climbing the walls. The news was still reporting the manhunt for Clarence Price, but other than a few obviously false sightings in places like Paris and Madrid there was nothing new.

After school and her dinner, she couldn’t face another restless night of inaction in her flat. She’d not slept a wink the night before. She’d even gotten her gear ready for a trip to Linlithgow, but in the end fear and paranoia had kept her indoors. She couldn’t face another night like that though, so after listening to the news for an hour, she went to her bedroom to get ready.

She would walk into town, then take the last commuter bus into Linlithgow. According to Google maps it was a three kilometre walk to the castle after that. There was no harm in it that she could think of, there was a footpath used by walkers that ran right past the castle. It would be late, but if she was dressed in a woolly hat and her camouflaged Parker jacket, she could pass herself off as someone out for an evening stroll or something.

It would just be a perimeter check, she told herself, just a scouting mission to take in the lay of the land. She’d already found out all she could about the place on the internet and was itching to take a closer look. Then, perhaps, she could think about what to do about Cunningham.

 

After alighting from the bus and with her new coat, hat and a light backpack, she set off into the late October gloom, following a well-kept path west towards the Castle. A signpost also told her that the Kelpies were in this direction, but she had no idea what they were. Her first port of call was a low hill that overlooked the castle, a good vantage point she had already identified from looking at Google maps. She took out her binoculars and surveyed the area. Scanning left from Almond Castle she was stunned to suddenly see two gigantic horses’ heads glowing blue on the dark horizon. She dropped the glasses and rubbed her eyes and looked again. It wasn’t a power station or anything like that, they were definitely horses.

She checked her phone, and learned that these were the Kelpies, a sculpture put up in 2014, by an artist called Andy Scott. How had she not known that? And her a teacher too.

She returned her attention the house, and sitting down to rest her elbows on her knees watched it for an hour or so through her binoculars. There was plenty to see, it was well lit up and positively bustling with activity.

There were guards, literally guards patrolling the grounds, like they were extras in an action movie, just waiting for James Bond to come and karate chop them from behind. They were wearing sunglasses in the dark and every so often speaking into earpieces or up their sleeves. Where these guys for real? Two reasons for whatever the heck was going on came to mind in quick succession, one was that these were some of Cunningham’s Nazi pals, basically cosplaying at being a security detail, or Cunningham was really spooked by everything that was going on with Price and had brought all these men in to keep himself safe.

She watched them come and go with a practiced eye. She knew a well-trained security guard when she saw one, and these goons were not that. They were not even competent enough to be called badly trained security guards. Her first thought had been correct – these were formless, weak chinned idiots. They were play acting, paying much more attention to how they looked in front of each other than they were on threat detection in the surrounding woods. A yappy dog would have done a better job of keeping the Castle secure.

One or two of them looked like tough ex-military guys, she identified them by their general sneering demeanour towards the others as they passed through the main doors on errands of their own. The bulk of them, though, looked like angry incels, wannabe tough guys that she knew she would go through like a fox in a henhouse if she had to.

Almond Castle was surrounded by forest on three sides, which made sneaking up to the main entrance easy. There were two guards, if you could call them that, at the door, but they had grown bored and were giggling over videos on a shared phone.

She lurked behind a tree and watched. Not much happened for a while, then another man came out and walked towards the stable block. She recognised him as Cunningham when one of the security lights illuminated him. He went into the building then exited five minutes later with another man. Cunningham went back to the main house while the other man drove a four door Austin Martin out of the block and up to the house. He then went back to where he had come from.

Cunningham appeared again and headed towards the car, now wearing a black leather jacket that was a size too small for his belly. As he walked to the car a well-dressed woman in her fifties followed after him.

‘Where are you going, you old bastard?’ she shouted at him.

He turned and shouted back at her.

The guards looked away in embarrassment and on a sudden impulse Kelly raced across the drive and hid behind the rear wheel of the car.

As the fight between Mr and Mrs Cunningham raged on, she opened the rear passenger door and crept in behind the driver’s seat. Two minutes later Reggie cursed at his wife one more time, jumped into the car and tore off down the drive and out onto the main road.

Five minutes into the drive he snarled ‘fucking bitch’ and thumped the steering wheel. After that he just muttered to himself for a few minutes, then put the radio on.

Kelly didn’t dare to look out the window or even switch on her phone to check where they were going, but she had the sensation that they were going back east. Street lighting lit up the backseat in flashes as the car sped on through the motorway junctions. After a long looping turn, she was pretty sure they had passed through Hermiston Gait and were onto the by-pass. This surely meant that Cunningham was heading for Gosford Hall. The rush hour traffic had gone, so it did not take long to drive east of Edinburgh, then up along the windswept coast towards Longniddry. Cunningham drove off the motorway, then onto the back roads, then finally onto a driveway. The car stopped, he sighed and went to get out of the car.

‘Fuck’s sake,’ he yelled as the door was blown back into his face by the fierce North Sea wind outside. He tried again and by the time he’d managed to get out, so had Kelly on the leeward side of the car.

Sir Horace was already at the door, an old grey dog at his side.

‘I told you not to come Reggie!’ shouted Sir Horace over the wind.

‘Jesus, just let me in out of this gale at least, Lavius,’ yelled Cunningham as he barged past Sir Horace and into the hall.

Once they were out of sight Kelly snuck in past them. The dog was still in the hall when she passed through, so she gave it a strip of bacon from her pocket and received a lick on the nose in return.

She could hear their voices in the library and snuck into her familiar position behind the table piled with books. The dog laid its head on her lap and looked up at her and she fondled its ears as she eavesdropped on the conversation. For a moment, she felt strangely calm. The wind outside raged, but in here it was warm and quiet. What a place this would have been to have been raised in, she wondered, and could she even begin to imagine what Corum’s childhood had been like? While she was living in a one bedroom flat with her grandmother, huddled round a one bar heater together in the winter and sometimes only eating one meal a day, here was the Lavius clan, in their stately home, waited on hand and foot, wanting for nothing. How the other half lived. She snapped herself out of her unhappy nostalgia and listened in to the conversation.

‘You can’t keep using me house for your nefarious deals,’ Sir Horace was saying with no real conviction.

‘Well, I can hardly do it at my house can I?’ replied Cunningham. ‘One of your fucking kids was around there the other day harassing me. Can you believe it? As far as I’m concerned until you call him off, I’m here to stay.’

‘This really is the limit.’

‘Fine, fine,’ said Reggie. ‘Just this one last meeting then. Once this is done, it’s all done and one way or the other I won’t be back again. Get me a drink will you old man, he’ll be here soon.’

‘Who?’ asked Sir Horace as he went over to the drinks’ cabinet. ‘It better not be a Nazi.’

‘Not a Nazi, don’t worry.’

‘Hmm, well,’ fussed Lavius. ‘Well, you can meet whoever it is in Red Room. You’ll not kick me out of my own library at least, not on a night like this.’

‘Fine, fine,’ repeated Reggie.

When his drink was handed to him, he took a swig and sighed. After a while he took a deep breath and said, ‘it’s nice to get a bit of peace. Bella is having a massive Halloween party and it doesn’t matter where I am in the house, I can hear her banging about and shouting at the staff. You can come if you want, by the way, she’s invited absolutely everyone so you’ll see some of the old faces.’

Sir Horace murmured something non-committal.

After that they sat in a sort of comfortable silence for ten minutes or so until another car did indeed roll up on the drive and pulled up beside the Aston.

‘The Red Room?’ asked Cunningham, then got up and went to meet his guest at the door.

Kelly stuck her head out of her hiding place a little and tried to see who it was. As the tall figure stepped out of the shadows, she saw a thin-lipped face with busy eyebrows and curly tonsured hair. She stifled a gasp as she realised it was Trajan, chief of the Vampires.

She’d taken her eyes off Sir Horace and had not noticed him approach the door and slam it shut, cutting off her view. He turned towards her hiding place.

‘What are you doing down there?’ he asked.

She froze and could think of nothing to say.

‘Come on Max, you daft dog,’ said Sir Horace with a resigned sigh. ‘Come on boy, we’ll just sit by the fire and let those bad men do whatever it is they are doing.’

The dog whined and left its place in the dark beside Kelly and followed its master to the back of the library. Kelly let out the breath she had been holding.

What was Trajan doing here? was her first thought once she had regained the capacity to think. Cunningham was apparently a lowlife, and it sure looked like he knew how to get hold of other lowlifes if he needed to. She dearly wanted to go and listen in on their conversation, find out what plot was being hatched in the Red Room, but Sir Horace had shut the door and she’d give herself away by leaving in that direction.

After a minute she was seriously considering it though, hoping that Lavius would put it down to the wind or ghosts or something, but her plans were cut short when Sir Horace sighed, stood up and went over to the phone on his desk.

‘Hello, it’s your dad again,’ he said once it was answered. ‘Guess who’s here.’

‘I know,’ he went on after the person at the other end had spoken at length. ‘Some sort of Nazi I expect. Bella probably didn’t let him in the house. This is the last time though, it’s the absolute limit.’

The other end spoke briefly.

‘If I had to guess, I’d say it was a Russian,’ replied Sir Horace. ‘Face like Bella Lagosi on a Toby Jug. What are you not telling me son? Right... Right... I suppose you’re right. What should I do?’

Sir Horace listened for a minute or so then hung up. He waited for Trajan to leave. Cunningham entered the library, said thank you and farewell, then left, leaving Sir Horace and Max alone with their thoughts.

It wasn’t long before the old man and his dog were asleep by the fire, and quietly closing the door behind her, Kelly left the Hall. As she walked through the wind and rain towards Longniddry to get a taxi, she turned everything she’d just witnessed over in her head. If Sir Horace wasn’t just a bumbling patsy in all of this then he certainly did a very good impression of one. If Cunningham was the sort of person that kept company with eastern European gangsters then he was definitely capable of having prostitutes and drug dealers murdered.

She couldn’t deny that Corum’s version of what was going was checking out and by the time she was sat in a warm taxi on her way back to Edinburgh in the dark rain-lashed night, she was convinced enough to call him up to arrange a meeting.

He started to suggest a pub in town, but she stopped him.

‘No more pubs, I can’t be bothered dressing up again. And someone saw us last time, you know? The daughter of some busybody at school saw us at the Grassmarket.’

‘Where then?’ he asked.

‘Not my place,’ said Kelly, realising that not wanting your suspicious business carried out at your own home was something that her and Cunningham had in common.

She checked the time.

‘It’s past ten now. Connor will be in bed. Meet me at Nile’s house.’

 

The taxi dropped her off two streets away from Craigs Park and she walked the rest of the way. She pulled her hoodie up and kept her head down as she went up to the door.

‘Corum not here yet?’ she asked when Niles opened the door.

‘Is he meant to be?’ he replied as he ushered her into the kitchen and put the kettle on.

Five minutes later there was a loud knock at the front door. Kelly sat up straight – no one but the cops knocked like that. Anyone else would have used the doorbell.

The knocking went on, getting louder, as Niles got up. Kelly was already heading for the back door. In two heartbeats she was out and into the close. She could see blue flashing lights at either end so she jumped into the opposite garden and hid in a bush.

She’d been spotted though, and she heard voices and footsteps coming up the close. Torches were shone into the garden where she was hiding and two uniformed officers rushed through the gate towards her. She bolted and went straight for the wall of the house and was up onto the roof in a few bounds, the police down below shouting up at her impotently.

Down the other side and onto the more open Buglin Park Road. There were no cops here, but she could hear them, multiple cars screeching around from the other street. Where to now? She’d not had to escape from Nile’s house since she had been a teenager and she’d usually either gone to the big Co-op nearby or the school. The amount of cops that she suspected were behind her would have no problem flushing her out of a supermarket, but a dark closed up school might puzzle them for a while.

She could hear sirens everywhere, but so far she was giving them the slip. She pelted through an underpass and past a couple of office buildings and into the school carpark. The sirens were more distant, but to her dismay she could hear the sound of a helicopter and saw searchlights hunting along the streets she had just run down. There was an old grate behind the janitor’s shed that she used to break into the school through and she headed for that. Again, her luck failed her, as to her horror, as she rounded the corner to the playing fields, she saw that everything had changed. Not only was the grate not there, but the shed had gone too. Everything was different. She turned, looking desperately for another escape route, just as the helicopter’s search light found her. The grass around her was suddenly brightly lit up. She could hear the cars racing around from the carpark, shouts and footsteps. She spent her last few seconds of freedom looking desperately for a stone or brick to break a window with. If she could just get inside, then maybe, just maybe she would be able to find a hiding spot.

Spotting a stone, she stooped to pick it up and three uniformed police officers slammed into the back of her.

‘Gavin Newgate!’ yelled one of them in her ear as he wrestled her arms behind her back. ‘You are under arrest, ya wee bawbag. You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence…’

‘All right, all right!’ Kelly yelled back. ‘I ain’t resisting.’

Kelly was fuming as the handcuffs went on. After everything, Lavius had sold her out after all.