‘Ach,’ MacSawney spat. ‘If you sit there long enough, laddie, he’ll walk right over the top of yon mountain and be halfway to Glen Shiel. Ye’ve one shot. Make it count.’
George was all too aware that MacSawney didn’t like him. Apart from Lord Hellebore, MacSawney didn’t like anyone. He was a vicious, sharp-tongued drunk. The previous laird had been strict with him and had kept his nature in check, but Randolph gave him a free hand and more power than he had ever had before, so he had become an invaluable right-hand man. In fact, Lord Hellebore was slightly in awe of him. To Randolph, MacSawney was a village elder, a wise old man, full of country lore, who knew all there was to know about the land and the animals on it. But George knew that MacSawney had no love for animals. To him they were just his livelihood, no more deserving of kindness or respect than a rock or a tree.
When it came down to it, as far as George was concerned, MacSawney hated animals and needed no excuse to shoot, trap, poison or sometimes even club them to death.
‘Kill him,’ MacSawney hissed. ‘Do it. It’s your last chance.’
George centred his sights on the deer’s foreleg and took a deep breath.
He knew what to do, and muttered the advice to himself. ‘Bring it up the leg and when you see brown, fire… Bring it up the leg and when you see brown, fire…’
He nervously tried to steady the gun, gently squeezing the trigger, still holding his breath in. The deer moved. George exhaled and cursed silently. He knew how furious his father would be if he let the stag get away.
There was nothing for it. He quickly lined up his target again, closed his eyes and pulled.
He felt the gun hammer back into his shoulder, heard the deafening crack echo off down the valley, and when he opened his eyes there was no sign of the deer.
Had it fled? Had he missed completely or, worse still, only wounded it?
‘Well done, boy, well done.’ Randolph clapped him on the back.
George took the telescope and stared at the lifeless body of the stag.
‘A clean shot,’ MacSawney conceded, and the three of them trudged up the mountainside towards their prey.
When they arrived, Randolph knelt down and studied the wound in the animal’s chest.
‘Right through the heart. He won’t have felt a thing.’ He dipped his hand in the blood that was oozing out across the animal’s fur, then stood and wiped it across the boy’s face.
‘First blood. Good boy.’
George blinked. The blood felt sticky and hot.
MacSawney grinned at him. ‘Now you look like a proper Red Indian,’ he said.
MacSawney gralloched the deer – slitting open its belly and removing the innards – then they lugged it down the mountain and loaded it on to a waiting pony.
That had all taken place six months ago – last October – and now the stag’s head was mounted on the wall of the castle dining room. George Hellebore was looking at it, at its dead, glassy eyes, and remembering that day. Because it was then, trudging down the mountainside through the drizzle, the blood washing down his face into his mouth and eyes, that a terrible thought had first struck him. class="tx"> He missed his mother. class="tx">He was lost and lonely and confused, and he missed her terribly.
And once he realised it, he couldn’t put the thought out of his mind. So that now he missed her more than ever.
It was this castle that did it. He hated it. Its gloominess, its darkness, its tiny windows and huge, heavy walls. He had loved it at first, of course; for a young boy it had seemed an impossibly exciting and romantic place, with the turrets and the causeway and all its secret passages and hideaways. He had imagined knights there, and great battles, Highland warriors in kilts waving claymores. It was a fine place to play. But he had never had anyone to play with, to share it with, and he had slowly lost interest in his solitary games. Now playing knights no longer appealed to him, and the castle had come to seem more of a prison than a home. There was nothing comfortable here, nothing soft and warming. Everywhere you looked, there were guns on the walls, dead animals, stuffed fish and huge, heavy furniture that didn’t invite you to sit upon it. It was full of men and men’s things. Even the kitchen staff were all male.
George shivered, although it wasn’t particularly cold. The dining hall was the same temperature all year round owing to the thickness of the walls. They kept in the heat in winter and kept out the heat in summer, though there was always a log burning in the hearth, whatever the weather.
Two suits of armour stood, one on either side of the fireplace, and above it hung a huge oil painting, darkened with age. It was violent and upsetting and very Victorian, showing one of the classical subjects they loved so dearly – the Massacre of the Innocents, when Herod, warned that a future King of the Jews would be born in Bethlehem, ordered every male child under the age of two to be slaughtered. The painting showed a group of men, some dressed as Roman soldiers, some half naked in billowing robes, attacking a group of women and children with short swords and long knives. The women were screaming in terror and trying to protect their children. One man in the centre of the painting held a boy up in the air, and several babies were trampled underfoot.
George had often wondered whether this violent and disturbing picture was suitable decoration for a dining room, but he doubted whether his father had even so much as glanced at it. George often studied it, however – because of the woman.
She stood off to one side, her face just visible between two silver blades, and there was something in her expression…
He had no pictures of his mother, nothing to remember her by, and he hated the idea that this terrified woman might be all that he had to remind him of her.
When he and his father had left America and moved to England five years ago, they had left her behind, and Lord Hellebore had said to him bluntly: ‘You will never see your mother again.’
They had been walking on the deck of the great steamship SS Holden, crossing the cold, grey Atlantic in midwinter. It had been stormy that morning and the deck was lashed by stinging rain and the spray from the huge waves that heaved all around them and smashed into the ship’s hull with a noise like cannon fire. There was nobody else on deck – nobody else would be crazy enough – but Lord Hellebore insisted that every morning at nine they walk five times round the ship for exercise, whatever the conditions. George was horribly seasick and had to keep breaking away in order to vomit over the railings, but his father was untouched by either the weather or his son’s condition. He might have been strolling through Central Park in New York on a sunny afternoon, discussing baseball, for all it affected him.
But he wasn’t discussing baseball. He was discussing George’s mother.
‘She was a weak woman,’ he shouted into the wind.
‘You talk about her as if she were dead,’ said George miserably.
‘As far as you are concerned, she is,’ said Randolph bluntly. ‘We have no need of women in our lives.’
George hadn’t really understood. He had been kept out of things and had only picked up scraps of information from what his nanny had hinted at and what he could understand from the forbidden newspaper reports he sneakily rescued from the garbage and read when his father was at work.
He knew that there had been a court case that involved another man, his mother’s lover, and that his father, using the most expensive lawyers, had kept ‘custody’ of George.
George hadn’t known what custody meant at first, but he soon learnt. He learnt that it meant that he was to live with his father and never see his mother again.
George had been younger then, too young to care. He had worshipped Randolph and was happy to be with him, and for years he hadn’t thought twice about the woman they had left behind in America, but suddenly, wiping the dead stag’s blood from his face, watching MacSawney and his father dragging the animal through the grass, he had grown aware of an emptiness within him, as if a part of him were no longer there.
He couldn’t sa
y any of this to his father, he couldn’t say it to anyone, they would think him a sissy – the worst insult of all. He had once woken, crying, from a dream about his mother and had lain awake all night, too sad and frightened to go back to sleep; when he’d told his father about it at breakfast, Randolph had beaten him with a cane and told him not to be so weak and to put such childish thoughts out of his mind.
Sitting in the great hall, eating his supper, he remembered that beating, he remembered the unjustness of it, as if any person could have control over his own dreams!
There were three of them at the table: himself, his father, way down at the other end, and his father’s chief scientist, Dr Perseus Friend, a thin, pale man of thirty who was already losing his wispy blond hair and was forever polishing his wire-framed spectacles. Perseus was the only other person who ever ate with them. Randolph worked all hours of the day and night, and he liked to discuss his progress with Perseus over supper.
Perseus Friend had been born in Germany of an Irish father and a Russian mother. His father had worked for the German army and, during the war, had developed poison gas for use in the trenches, working with chlorine, phosgene and mustard gas.
After the war, the defeated Germans had been banned from maintaining any real army, and work such as Professor Friend’s was strictly forbidden. So Perseus’s father had travelled the world, selling his services to the highest bidder, and everywhere he went, Perseus went too, learning all he could along the way.
They had gone first to Japan, then to Argentina and finally Russia. The Russians had suffered twice as many losses from the Germans’ gas attacks in the war as any other army and were keen to develop weapons of their own.
Perseus had been a fiercely clever child and had followed his father into science; but, whereas his father had been a chemist, his own interest lay in biology. He had become intrigued by the use of germs and germ warfare, using diseases to fight the enemy. The two of them made a formidable combination, and eventually Lord Hellebore heard of the brilliant father-and-son team working in the Soviet government laboratories at Saratov.
Once Randolph had built his new operation here in Scotland, he had hired their services, but an accident at the Russian laboratory, shortly before they were to leave Moscow, had left seven scientists dead, poisoned by their own gas, including Professor Friend. Perseus had always suspected that it was no accident at all; that the Russians had wanted to silence Friend and keep his secrets, and it was only by sheer luck that he himself hadn’t been in the laboratory at the time. So he had left silently and furtively and come to Scotland as fast as he could.
Perseus’s only interest was his work; it was all he talked about; it was all he thought about. He had no curiosity about any other human activity and was utterly unfeeling towards other people. He never experienced love, or hate, or sadness, or happiness, or even anger – unless an experiment went wrong, or his work was interrupted by some inconvenience. Women held no interest for him, so this isolated castle was the ideal place for him to live and work.
George looked at him now, cutting up his meat as if he were dissecting some hapless creature on one of his slabs. There was something horrible about the way he ate, talking incessantly, oblivious to what exactly he had just pulled off the end of his fork with his neat little teeth, chewing with his mouth open, with no apparent enjoyment. It reminded George of a lizard eating, its eyes looking around, surely not relishing the taste of a spider or a beetle.
Tonight, it was roast beef. The centrepiece of every meal was some boiled or roasted meat. George remembered the days when his mother had had some influence over their food and his diet had been more varied and less heavy.
No. He must stop thinking about his mother, it only made him unhappy, but the alternative was to listen to Dr Friend droning on about Germany. His voice was very irritating, slightly high-pitched, dull and unmodulated; it droned on like a train along a track, with no light and shade and certainly no regard as to whether anyone was actually listening to him.
‘This Adolf Hitler, the new chancellor of Germany, is an interesting man,’ he was saying. ‘I have been reading his book, Mein Kampf, and various articles and pamphlets that I arranged to have sent over. Herr Hitler has some very modern ideas about biological purity and the selective breeding of humans to create a master race. You should meet him, Randolph. His National Socialist Party will make some big changes. I can assure you that he would be most interested in our work here, and a friendly and cooperative government who understood our aims would make it much easier to obtain live subjects for our experiments…’
George put down his knife and fork with a clatter and interrupted him, as much to shut him up as anything else. ‘I thought the Germans weren’t allowed to develop their army,’ he said.
‘Hitler will change all that,’ said Dr Friend without looking up from his plate. ‘Hitler will make the country great again, and we will be there beside him to reap the benefits. I was reading the Hamburg Scientific Journal just last night, and there was a fascinating article about twins. Apparently…’
‘Are you not eating, George?’ boomed Randolph, half a mile away at the other end of the black oak table, while Dr Friend carried on talking over their conversation, oblivious to the fact that somebody else was speaking.
‘I’m not very hungry this evening, Father.’
‘You must eat. Meat is good for you, gives you iron, builds your muscles and bones.’
Before George could say anything in reply, there was a knock at the door and Cleek MacSawney came in. He looked distastefully at George and Dr Friend, before lurching over to Randolph.
Halfway across the room, one of the laird’s dogs jumped up and padded over to sniff the newcomer, but MacSawney lashed out with a foot and caught it in the belly. It whimpered and scurried under the table, its tail between its legs.
MacSawney murmured something in his boss’s ear and Randolph’s face darkened, his brow creasing into a heavy frown. He wiped his mouth on his napkin, pushed his plate to one side and stood up.
‘Finish your supper,’ he said tersely, and left with MacSawney.
Through all of this, Perseus had not stopped talking and eating, and he didn’t even look up from his food as Randolph went out.
‘… genetics is the answer, but it is still too poorly understood, we have progressed hardly at all since Mendel. Of course, we cannot get the eels to breed, the simple fact is – we need people…’
After dinner, there was no sign of Lord Hellebore, so George sneaked into his office. He knew that if he was caught his father would thrash him, but he didn’t care any more. At one time, all he had thought of was trying to please him, but since the sports day at Eton he knew that, no matter what he did, he would never please him, never come up to his standards. So he had stopped trying.
George started searching through Randolph’s desk. It wasn’t locked. Nothing was locked in here. It was forbidden for anyone to enter, and the servants were too terrified of the lord to disobey his orders. However, George didn’t find what he was looking for in the desk, so he went over to the filing cabinet that sat near the tall, barred window.
He looked down the labels on the drawers.
Estate Business.
That was no use.
SilverFin.
His father had borrowed the name of the loch for his latest research project. The SilverFin team was headed by Perseus and worked in secret behind the locked steel door of the laboratory under the castle.
George wasn’t interested in that.
The third drawer down was markedPersonal’ and he yanked it open.
He rifled through the contents and eventually found what he was looking for: a folder of legal documents and letters. He pulled the folder out and searched quickly through the papers. Nothing – nothing – nothing – then there it was!
The address of his mother’s house in Boston.
He read it several times to memorise it, then carefully placed everything back how he h
ad found it and, after checking that the coast was clear, he hurried out and up to his room.
Once there, he sat at his desk, filled his pen with ink and wrote the address down while he still remembered it. Then, keeping an ear cocked for any sounds outside, he took out a sheaf of writing paper and began to write.
Dearest Mother
I know I have never written to you before, but lately I have been thinking about you a great deal…
There was a crash from down below and he stopped, his hands hovering over the letter, ready to hide it away in an instant. The huge front doors had slammed shut and he heard shouts and commotion. He waited for the noise to die down then carried on, his heart thumping.
It was a risky business. He would have to write this letter in total secrecy, then go to the post office at Keithly and post it himself; but just writing those few simple words had cheered him up. Not for the first time, he wished that he had someone to talk to, someone to share all his fears with, to dispel his loneliness. With a pang of guilt he recalled spotting James Bond at the circus. For a moment, when he’d seen him, his heart had jumped. He had smiled – here was someone he knew, a familiar face – and then he’d remembered that Bond was supposed to be his enemy, that he’d beaten him in the race, and all the bitterness and regret had bubbled up inside him like poison, until a red veil of anger had fallen over him. How different things might have been if he had gone across and shaken his hand and called a truce. But no, the habits of his short lifetime were too powerful and he had paid those two thugs to go and beat up the younger boy.
His thoughts were interrupted by a further commotion coming from below, more angry shouts and another voice, crying out as if in pain. Maybe it was one of the workers being disciplined. His father was very strict, and anybody who stepped out of line was dealt with very harshly by the brutal MacSawney.
George tried to block the sounds out. At least if someone else was getting it in the neck, he was safe for a while. As the noises died away he carried on writing. For a long while there was silence and he lost himself in the letter, trying to say everything he had wanted to say to his mother since he had last seen her, but then he heard something snuffling at his door.