The Shadowy Horses

Forgetting the drama in progress, he turned. "Is he not with you?"

She shook her head. "I thought you had him down the harbor."

The thunder crashed directly overhead, and Kip cringed under my chair, whining. I'd forgotten him completely. I reached down to stroke his head, reassuring him softly.

"Right." Brian crushed the dead cigarette under his heel. "I'll go and have a look. Did you ring around his friends?"

"I couldn't," she said. "It's this wind, see. Our phone line's been out of order since breakfast."

"It can't be out," said Adrian. "Fortune's mother rang not long ago, from her cottage."

But Jeannie disputed the fact. "She couldn't have. I've been checking the line myself, every ten minutes, like."

"But Fabia said..."

"No one rang," Jeannie told him a second time, positive.

In the space of an instant my own mind sifted through a hundred things that Fabia had said, and fitted the statements together like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. I didn't like the picture that was forming.

Above all, I remembered her saying that the perfect revenge on one's enemy would be to take from him everything and everyone he loved, yet make him go on living. Everything Peter loved ... well, that would be his work, his reputation. She'd already tried to take that. And as for the "everyone" ... My mind balked, not wanting to follow that thought, but I forced it.

If Fabia knew what her father had known—if he had, as she said, told her everything—then she knew about Peter and Nancy. Was she trying to harm Nancy, somehow? And had she needed to get David out of the way, first, by inventing that telephone call; by sending David out alone on the road to St. Abbs?

The storm rose and wailed like a living thing, beating its fists on the shuddering walls, and I clenched my fist, convulsively. The road.

The road is dangerous.

"Oh, God," I breathed, as the shred of doubt grew and swelled to certainty.

My head jerked round, to stare at the tiny gold medallion sitting atop my disordered papers. The Fortuna pendant. It had been on David's desk, this morning—that's what Peter had told me. David's desk.

Oh, how could I have been so stupid? Stupid, stupid— thinking that the warning was for me. It was David that the Sentinel had tried to warn. David who had found the pendant in the first place, not by chance. What had Robbie said? It's for protection. You don't understand.

And now, too late, I understood.

I understood why Fabia had chosen the nasty, unlikeable Mick to be her latest boyfriend. As Brian had told Adrian, Fabia's interest only lasted so long as the men were useful. And Mick, at the moment, was terribly useful. She needed a violent, unprincipled man to help her destroy what her grandfather loved. She needed a man who could murder.

And now that same man, I felt sure, was somewhere near St. Abbs, where Nancy Fortune—an old woman with a weak heart—sat waiting out the storm in her cottage, alone and unprotected. And where David, unaware of the danger, would shortly walk into an ambush.

I was not aware of moving, but I heard my own voice saying "No" quite loudly, and somebody reached to take my arm, but I pushed them away and was through the great arched doorway before anyone could stop me. Kip howled after me, and I thought I heard Adrian shouting my name, but the sound of the wind swallowed both of them and I was running, running, the rain in my eyes and the bitter wind tearing the breath from my throat.

The Jaguar roared to life at the first twist of the dangling key. I hauled at the wheel, spinning gravel, and took the drive at twice the prudent speed.

The students had abandoned their tents in the downpour and were scurrying across the road toward the safety of Rosehill, holding their coats above their heads and screaming with laughter. I swerved to go around them and the bonnet kissed the big stone gatepost with an ugly grating sound, but I didn't slow the car at all and two of the students were forced to jump clear.

I barely noticed.

I was too busy praying. "Please," I whispered to the furies that were beating on the windscreen. "Please let me be wrong."

The rain was so thick I could scarcely see and the windows steamed, but I kept my foot to the floor through the village of Coldingham, taking the hills and the turnings blindly, letting the tires shriek their protest through a stunning arc of spray.

Biting my lip until I tasted blood, I tightened my grip on the steering wheel. "Please let me be wrong."

But as I came out onto the Coldingham Moor, the wiper blades swept cleanly through the pounding flood of water and I saw what I'd been fearing.

He had lost control of the Range Rover, and it had rolled, coming to rest on its battered roof. One metal door, bizarrely twisted, lay drowning in the river that had been the road. What remained of the windscreen was pure white with splinters, like smashed river ice. There was no sign of life.

The Jaguar spun out as I hit the brakes, and I covered my face with my hands. When I lowered them a minute later, they were wet. The car had come to rest against a rail fence at the far edge of the road, directly across from the battered Range Rover. I could see the empty seats. Fumbling with my door latch, I stumbled out, uncaring of the storm.

"David!" I screamed in panic, raising my hands in a futile defense against the lashing of the wind. He wasn't in the Range Rover. My hands scraped raw against the battered metal as I pulled the vehicle apart in search of him, but he wasn't there. Sobbing now, my body trembling with shock and pain, I turned away and staggered through the tangle of gorse and thorn at the side of the road. "David," I called again, but the storm stole my cry and I sank to the ground, defeated.