The Longest Shadow Read online

  The Longest Shadow

  R J Mitchell

  © RJ Mitchell 2013

  The author asserts the moral right to be identified

  as the author of the work in accordance with the

  Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of Fledgling Press Ltd,

  7 Lennox St., Edinburgh, EH4 1QB

  Published by Fledgling Press 2013

  www.fledglingpress.co.uk

  eBook ISBN: 9781905916627

  Print ISBN: 9781905916610

  1

  “WHAT’S YOUR poison, father?” asked the bartender, taking mischievous delight at the prospect of serving strong liquor to a man of the cloth at two o’clock on a Friday afternoon.

  The priest placed his bible on the bar and smiled: “Whisky, my son, malt whisky and the best, a drop of your 18-year-old Lagavulin, if you don’t mind.”

  “Sure,” replied the barman, turning round to the gantry to survey his extensive collection of malts, before reaching for the bottle of golden brown liquid. He placed it on top of the bar before asking the priest, an impish smile creeping across his features: “Will that be large or small, father?”

  From behind the circular rims of the gold-framed glasses, black eyes burned back at the bartender in a way that seemed strangely incompatible with the otherwise benign appearance presented by the clergyman’s collar and neat black suit.

  “You’d best make that a large one, my son, for I will need all the strength it gives me to be about the Lord’s work this day,” said the priest.

  Taking the glass, he cradled it and enjoyed the sight of the sunshine piercing through the liquid then took a sip, savouring the peatiness, before swallowing and letting out a slight sigh of approval.

  The raven-haired priest spoke, “This golden drop is produced at Lagavulin on the island of Islay. Mmm, powerful, with a peat-smoke aroma. Well-balanced and smooth, yet with a slight sweetness on the palate. Do you know, my son, what Lagavulin means in the Gaelic?”

  The bartender, a fresh-faced student by the looks of him, shook his head.

  The priest smiled, “Lagavulin is an anglicisation of the Gaelic ‘lag a’mhuilin’, meaning ‘hollow by the mill’. So you have learned something new today, my son, and for that may you thank the Lord.”

  He picked up his bible and left the bemused barman at a loss for words, walking out of the Sword Hotel and making his way onto the footpath that would lead him to his intended destination.

  As he made the ascent the wind picked up, causing the branches of the trees that lined either side of the small road to rustle with increasing vigour. Staring straight ahead he clutched his bible in his right hand and gave all his thought to the objective that lay before him and the completion of a vow that would bind him to the man he had made it to, for as long as he had breath in him.

  Loud blasts from a horn snapped him from his reverie and the priest turned sharply to see a mini-bus full of teenage schoolchildren pulling up just feet behind him. He smiled serenely and, moving to the side of the roadway, beckoned them forward. As he did so, the passenger in the front seat, a middle-aged man with a cigar hanging out the side of his mouth, leaned out his window.

  “Apologies, Father. Simon Duncan, Head of History at Wallace High School. I hope we didn’t give you a fright?” he said without removing the cigar from his mouth.

  “No, my son. On you go and have no concerns on my account.”

  “There’s still quite a climb ahead of you – and then you have 246 steps to make it all the way to the crown and the best damn view in all of Scotland,” the teacher cleared his throat as embarrassment at his curse overtook him. “Ah, please forgive me for a second time, Father. Can I give you a lift and make amends?”

  “Not at all,” said the priest, his Northern Irish accent becoming clear. “I am in need of both the fresh air and the exercise, to be sure. You go on ahead and I’ll see you at the crown as you call it. They tell me Wallace’s sword is a wonder.”

  The man laughed, “Indeed it is. Five foot four inches. Almost as big as a man. A windmill of death in the Wallace’s hands, Father. No doubt. But safely encased now.” The teacher smiled and nodded to the driver to press on before he turned to the priest once again, “Enjoy the climb, Father.”

  “I will indeed, my son,” said the priest, waving the school party off.

  After ten minutes walk up a steadily increasing gradient, he finally arrived at the foot of the towering monument to Scotland’s greatest freedom fighter. Gazing at the massive sandstone walls he turned to survey the view around him: the meandering River Forth and the slowly rising urban sprawl of the city of Stirling, which once, hundreds of years ago, had dominated the waist of Scotland from behind the stout medieval walls of its intimidating castle.

  “Hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done. I will complete my vow to you now at last, Declan,” he said under his breath as he turned towards his task.

  2

  THE VIEW was stunning by any standards and well worth every one of the 246 steps Thoroughgood had had to climb to appreciate it. The Wallace Monument had always held a special place in his heart. The great Scottish hero had, after all, been one of the main figures in the specialist paper he had written at Glasgow University all those years ago. Its title had been “Robert the Bruce and the Wars of Independence”, but William Wallace, freedom fighter and Guardian of Scotland, had received almost equal billing in it.

  Thoroughgood had in fact been raised in Stirling. Many of his Sunday afternoons had been spent climbing the impressive building with assorted relatives who never ceased to be amazed by this awesome memorial to Victorian architecture.

  Gazing around towards Ben Lomond and the Trossachs in the west and on, over the Forth Valley, Stirling and the Ochil Hills to the Pentland Hills in the east, he felt the kind of inward peace that always returned when he visited the sites of his childhood and early teenage years. He smiled as he remembered the time when, aged just ten, he had been ridiculed by some local girls. One of those Sunday afternoon ascents had been made in a kilt at the insistence of his mother and in the company of two young cousins, who had found it hilarious when he had been subjected to a chorus of “kilty, kilty, cold bum!” by the girls.

  Down below, in the village of Causewayhead, was the Birds and the Bees Pub where he had enjoyed his first underage pint as a pale, 15-year-old. He would never forget the wicked pleasure it had given him as, dressed in the trademark biker’s jacket of his teens, he became the first in his year to be served in a pub at 6.30pm on a Tuesday night. “Pint of IPA please, miss.” And a smile crept across his drawn features as he said the words out loud.

  So why was he here? The events of the last two years were hard to comprehend when he tried to take stock, but it was at moments like these, with the wind blasting through his black hair, increasingly marbled with grey, that he was able to focus his thoughts with clarity.

  It still seemed like a surreal dream to him; Meechan, the crime lord, ripping off the Mossad – hawking their enriched uranium to the mad Imam, Tariq – and paying for his treachery when his life was terminated by a Kidon death squad. Yet he still cringed at the thought of the carnage that would have ensued, had the mad cleric produced and blown a dirty bomb at that Old Firm game.

  Meechan’s demise had robbed Thoroughgood of the revenge he had craved above all else against the man who had sanctioned the death of Celine, the woman he supposed he would always love.

  Thoroughgood knew he had to start looking forward in order to
avoid being devoured by torment. Yet, as he drank in the shining vista on that brilliant spring afternoon, his thoughts once again retreated into the past. The opening lines of “The Go Between” by LP Hartley sprang to his mind readily, “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” It was God knows how many years since he had first read these words and yet they had seemed to find their way back into his consciousness with a strange regularity ever since.

  Thoroughgood’s mind seemed to be on a constant loop of childhood memories, interrupted by an occasional fast forward to Celine’s face in her final moments – and finally, a vision of Meechan himself quoting from Thoroughgood’s grandfather’s bible, so sure that he was about to apply the full stop on the DS’ own haunted existence.

  The wind stung his cheeks, but it was the short sharp blow on his back which felt alarmingly familiar, that snapped his mind back to the here and now. The voice coming from behind him grated in the harsh Northern Irish accent of his nemesis.

  “Turn around slowly, copper, and keep both hands at yer side.”

  But Meechan was dead . . .

  3

  THOROUGHGOOD TURNED slowly, as he was bid, and for the first time set eyes on the man who had killed Celine.

  “O’Driscoll, you fuckin’ murderer,” he snapped.

  The priest took a step back. His bible, Thoroughgood realised with a sinking heart, housed the barrel of a handgun, which remained trained on him.

  O’Driscoll smiled. “You are surprised that with a Kidon despatched after him, Declan Aloysius Meechan would not prepare for every eventuality? That he would not make sure he had a gold-plated insurance policy in place that would mean even if he had departed this mortal coil, you would not be far behind, copper?”

  Thoroughgood felt all hope of survival draining away from him. He shot a quick glance towards the uppermost level of the monument but there was nothing there to help him. In any case, he knew that even if there had been, there was little he could have done to neutralise the metal barrel trained on him and ready to pump certain death into his body.

  Faced with the inevitable, Thoroughgood said, “So, even from the grave I can’t escape your friend, or was he your master? Tell me one thing before you pull the trigger? How did she die, O’Driscoll?”

  There was a short pause and for the first time in the moments since they had locked eyes, Thoroughgood detected a tinge of emotion. Something akin to a grimace slipped over the assassin’s face.

  O’Driscoll replied, “You know, right until I clapped eyes on her, in the last few minutes before I brought her life to an end, I couldn’t understand why any woman could make a man like Declan Meechan do the things that ‘my master’, as you so eloquently described him, did. But – I’ll give you this – she was a beauty. In the seconds before I pulled the trigger, there was a serenity in her that I have never come across in a woman in this life, nor probably will in the next, whatever awaits me.”

  “Serenity? That didn’t stop you killing her, did it, you cold-blooded bastard,” raged Thoroughgood as his self-control slipped. In desperation, before he met his own death, he had to ask the question that had tormented him ever since Celine’s murder, “Tell me, O’Driscoll, if you have one piece of humanity in you, what were her last words?”

  O’Driscoll’s face remained expressionless while his soulless eyes remained locked on Thoroughgood. “For the record, she said nothing, Thoroughgood. Because I did not give her the chance, but I will say this, I did not agree with Meechan’s decision to have the woman you both so obviously loved, killed. I do, however, agree completely with his decision to have you terminated.”

  O’Driscoll pulled the handgun from the bible and raised it level with Thoroughgood’s head, “Back up against the wall, your final resting place awaits you.” He gestured with the gun and Thoroughgood shuffled back, until he was pressed against the cold sandstone and prepared to meet his maker.

  An evil smile crept across O’Driscoll’s face, “What are your last words in this life, Thoroughgood?”

  Words would not come to Thoroughgood and in any case he knew they would have been wasted. This was it then, a bullet in the brain from the man who had killed Celine. Meechan laughing at him from beyond the grave.

  He locked his eyes on O’Driscoll with all the defiance he could muster, “Get it over with,” said Thoroughgood and braced himself for certain death as the cold wind blowing across the crown of the Wallace Monument stung his face.

  But now that was not the only noise filling the air 220 feet up, as the chatter of adolescent voices perforated the deadly silence. The school party that had passed O’Driscoll en route to the monument began to spill out onto the building’s top floor. Unaware of the drama playing itself out 20 yards away, the first two boys out were only interested in an impromptu kick-about with the ball they had smuggled up the spiral staircase.

  Thoroughgood noticed them first and as the sound of their chatter reached his ears O’Driscoll’s attention wavered from Thoroughgood as he glanced to his right.

  The taller of the two teenagers, a brown-haired lad, grabbed the ball from his ginger-mopped mate and dropping it, aimed a volley at it. The ball headed straight for O’Driscoll as, belatedly, the teenagers spotted the gun in his right hand. Thoroughgood knew his only chance had been conjured up by divine intervention and he threw himself at the priest as the taller teenager shouted, “He’s got a gun!”

  O’Driscoll cannoned downwards at the impact of Thoroughgood’s attack as the DS wrapped both his hands around the killer’s wrist and smashed his hand and the gun it held, off the cement floor.

  The gun went off, the bullet ricocheting off the sandstone wall behind Thoroughgood. As it did so, the air filled with the shrill of teenage screams and an adult voice shouting, “Get back down the stairs, back everyone!”

  As Thoroughgood rammed O’Driscoll’s hand and the revolver off the ground, the handgun slid across the cement. O’Driscoll smashed his forehead into Thoroughgood’s nose and was showered in crimson for his trouble. The blow stunned Thoroughgood and the assassin threw him back against the sandstone wall, flashing a vicious smile, as he saw that he was now considerably nearer the stray firearm than Thoroughgood. But Thoroughgood was already on his feet and sprinting across the parapet in a desperate attempt to beat O’Driscoll to the firearm.

  Just as the assassin wrapped his fingers around its grooved handle, Thoroughgood smashed into him with all the power he could muster, his weight sending both men into the east wall. Thoroughgood rasped, “At last you’re mine O’Driscoll, you murderin’ scum,” as he attempted to force O’Driscoll’s hands and the firearm into the air. But before he could move the handgun clear of his body O’Driscoll pulled the trigger and Thoroughgood felt a rasp of cold air as the bullet shot past his right shoulder.

  O’Driscoll stared at Thoroughgood’s face, expecting the detective to show signs that he had been penetrated by the lead missile. There were none. This time, Thoroughgood slammed his forehead at the assassin’s right eye and the impact threw O’Driscoll half over the rampart. Thoroughgood finally broke his adversary’s hold on the gun and it fell from his grip.

  The sound of the firearm smashing off the sandstone walls of the monument provided a chilling backdrop to their dance with death, underlining just how far the drop from the building’s crown was.

  His desperation giving him renewed strength, O’Driscoll slammed his left fist into Thoroughgood’s jaw, winning just enough breathing space for him to roll along the wall and pull back from the detective. Backing off another couple of yards O’Driscoll tried to recover his breath and as he did so, a feral grin spread across his venomous features.

  “Fancy your chances now, copper, eh? Problem is, I always carry a little something for emergencies.” O’Driscoll removed a glinting blade from inside his suit. “You have made this messy, Thoroughgood, but it will be all the more enjoyable for that.”

  O’Driscoll advanced on him, knife in his right hand.
Thoroughgood rolled over to his left, simultaneously ripping his jacket off and springing to his feet.

  “You’ve one chance, Thoroughgood, and that is no chance,” smiled O’Driscoll. “Declan told me he would have spit you that time up at Tara, but for her intervention. It was then that he knew he had been cuckolded by you and your beautiful whore. That was the moment the die was cast for you and her. Now I am going to finish what Declan started that night, and gut you once and for all, copper.”

  As the blade sliced towards Thoroughgood’s left shoulder, he ducked low to his right, smashed his right hand into O’Driscoll’s ribcage while, with his jacket wrapped around his left hand, he grabbed at the blade and tried to wrestle it from the winded O’Driscoll. The knife was forced up into the air – both men grappling for control of it.

  Thoroughgood rammed his knee into O’Driscoll’s midriff and the killer let out a gasp, but he retained his grip on the blade and backed away. Thoroughgood was now back where he had started, against the sandstone wall.

  O’Driscoll advanced for the final time. “I hope you can fly,” he taunted and slashed the blade down, filling the air with the hiss of impending death. But as he moved the knife Thoroughgood pounced. With both hands on O’Driscoll’s right arm he pulled himself down, clawing the killer with him and pushing both his feet into O’Driscoll’s guts. With all his power, Thoroughgood somersaulted the assassin over his head and rolled free.

  Readying himself for his assailant’s next attack, Thoroughgood’s eyes opened wide as the assassin hit the wall and, caught off-balance, toppled over its edge and into the blue horizon, his death scream filling the air. Shaking, the DS made his way to the wall and looked over. There, at the bottom of the monument, lay the inert form of O’Driscoll, the ruby pool beside his smashed skull growing bigger by the second.

  Tears welling up in his eyes Thoroughgood whispered into the wind: “At last, Celine, you are avenged.” He grabbed the abandoned football and booted it off the roof of the Wallace Monument, into the sky.