45
Sophie woke with a start, her hands clutching at the covers. She looked around the room, disorientated and lost. The hunting lodge, of course, she thought, focusing in the grey light. I’m in Scotland. I’m safe.
She had been dreaming, a vivid, disturbing dream where she’d been back in Miami, at Sergei’s house. But instead of watching Josh plunge into the pool, in her dream they had switched places and Sophie herself had been the victim, feeling the terror and impotence as her head was pushed into the frothing water again and again.
‘Only a dream, Sophie,’ she whispered to herself. ‘Only a dream.’
It was then that she noticed she was alone. When she had slipped in beside him, Josh had been sleeping against the wall, but now he was gone. She looked at the armchair in the corner of the room; his clothes were gone too. Panicking, Sophie grabbed her watch: 4.55 a.m.
She got out of bed and, pulling on a towelling robe she found hanging behind the door, tiptoed to the landing. The house was in silence and the purple light of the fading night seeped in through the windows.
Where the hell was he? As quietly as she could, she padded up the stairs to Lana’s room and peeped inside, where she could just make out the shape of Lana’s slumbering body in the bed. That was something at least.
Sophie crept back down to the ground floor – as empty and still as the rest of the house – her mind searching for explanations of where Josh could be.
He had given a copy of I Capture the Castle, complete with its front-page annotations, to the Russians. She had no idea if Sergei would ever work out that the scribbled numbers were map co-ordinates, but perhaps Josh had been worried they might get there first. Sophie pushed a curtain back and peered outside. The rain had stopped and there was a vague glow around the surrounding mountains: dawn was almost upon them. Perhaps Josh had decided to get a head start; or – and she could barely bring herself to admit this notion to herself – or he had decided to get the money for himself. She shook her head, ashamed to even entertain the idea. No, she thought fiercely, no, he wouldn’t do that. Not Josh.
Well, there was one way to find out. She moved towards the front door, her bare feet chilly against the stone floor. If he’d gone to find the loot, he’d have taken the car. The key was in the door and she turned it, stepping out into the cold.
And then she saw him. Sitting on the top of the porch steps, oblivious to the bitter wind blowing in from the mountains. Her shoulders sagged with relief.
‘Here you are,’ she hissed. ‘You scared the hell out of me.’
‘Did you think I’d gone to get the money?’ he asked without bothering to turn round.
‘No, of course not,’ she said, sitting down next to him, wrapping the robe around her knees.
‘You don’t trust me, do you?’ he said, glancing across at her. ‘Not really.’ He looked tired and disappointed.
‘I was just panicking,’ she said truthfully. ‘I thought maybe you’d decided Sergei could have worked out the co-ordinates and wanted to get ahead of him.’
Josh didn’t reply, just carried on staring out at the dark shapes of the mountains and the deep curve of the loch.
‘I’m cold,’ said Sophie, beginning to get up, but he put his hand on her knee.
‘Stay with me and watch the gloaming.’
‘What’s the gloaming?’ she said. It seemed like a suitable word for how she was feeling: uncertain and restless.
‘It’s an old Scottish word,’ said Josh. ‘It’s that little window of time before sunrise or after dusk when everything’s still. There’s no place more beautiful than the Highlands in the gloaming.’
She shuffled closer, pressed up against him, and watched as ribbons of silver light twisted up from the horizon. It was eerie and yet quite magical, like viewing the landscape through a dark blue filter, when everything felt suspended and full of possibility. And then the sky lightened just a touch and the moment was gone.
Sophie squeezed Josh’s hand, about to speak, when she heard a creak behind them.
‘Go and get ready,’ said Lana, standing in the doorway, fully dressed. ‘I want to leave in ten minutes.’
By the time Josh and Sophie came back downstairs, Lana was standing on the driveway, the Range Rover’s engine idling, the heaters on full blast. She threw the keys to Josh.
‘You drive,’ she said, handing the map to Sophie. ‘You can navigate.’
‘Yes, ma’am,’ said Josh, tugging at an imaginary cap and rolling his eyes at Sophie. They may have been hundreds of miles north of Knightsbridge, but Lana still clearly believed she was entitled to the luxury of staff.
They drove towards Ben Grear in silence. Perhaps the others were thinking of what they might expect at the other end of the single-track tarmac road, but Sophie was entranced by the landscape around them. She had never been to the Highlands before, and the storm had obscured everything the previous night, save for what was in their headlight beams. But the clouds had lifted this morning and the colours cast by the rising sun were quite astonishing: the mauve, deep orange and emerald of the heathered moorlands swept up to the distant crags, which seemed to tower over them, their naked rock slopes a hundred shades of purple.
‘Are you following the map, or are you looking at the flowers?’ said Lana irritably from the back seat.
‘It’s all under control,’ said Sophie, praying she was reading it correctly. ‘Around this next bend, then two or three miles and we should see Ben Grear.’
‘We don’t want to see the mountain,’ said Lana. ‘We want the building. We don’t even know what it is.’
‘It’s a castle,’ said Sophie.
‘How can you possibly say that?’ scoffed Lana. ‘I’ve studied the map, it isn’t even marked.’
‘No, it’s a castle,’ said Sophie, pointing straight ahead. Even from this distance, she could see it: a tiny castle built on an outcrop of land that jutted into a small loch, the glassy surface of the water reflecting it back like a mirror, the dawn sky casting a pink glow over it.
Josh tapped the GPS on the dashboard. ‘Yep, that’s it,’ he said. ‘Matches the co-ordinates exactly.’
He glanced over at Sophie, then pressed down on the accelerator.
‘It’s beautiful,’ said Sophie as they wound up the little access road cut into the side of the mountain. It wasn’t a castle, the kind you would visit on a school trip, with a moat and arrow slits and a drawbridge; it was more like someone’s idea of what a fairy-tale castle should look like. It was made out of pale weathered stone, with a darker slate roof, tiny windows and two Rapunzel turrets bookending the building. A folly, perhaps, or some long-dead landowner’s Highland fantasy; it didn’t matter: to Sophie it had all the romance and magic she had dared to hope for. She had known instantly that this was her castle, the ‘X’ on the pirate map, the place her father had so carefully led her to, because it was exactly as they had talked about. Even now, she could hear her father’s voice, daydreaming with his daughter about where they would one day live.
Our own little magical castle, he had promised. And he had kept his word. But at what cost? She closed her eyes and thought of her father: the kind, generous man who had been her hero and protector, the clever, smiling youth so full of promise that she had seen on Miriam Asner’s Super 8 footage. How could such a decent man, with so many wonderful qualities, have got mixed up in Asner’s plan? How could he have been involved in a theft of that magnitude? A theft that had stripped so many innocent people of their money. Was money such a destructive, corrupting force? Of course, she knew that it was. What she would never know were her father’s reasons, his justifications for getting involved.
‘Look for a key,’ said Lana, getting out and slamming the Range Rover’s door. ‘Whatever’s here, it’s going to be inside.’
Sophie tried the obvious first: she looked under the mat in front of the wide oak door, then along the top of the door frame and under flowerpots. Nothing.
Lana emerged from the back of the property, her hands empty.
‘Do you have the key?’ she said.
‘Of course I don’t have the bloody key,’ snapped Sophie. ‘Do you think I’d come all this way, then somehow forget—’
She stopped as they heard a grunt, then a crash. Running to the side of the house, they saw Josh’s legs disappearing through a window. Sophie swore under her breath. What if he was about to wake up a couple of honeymooners, or worse – an angry Scottish laird with a shotgun? It would be just typical to chase thousands of miles only to be arrested at the last moment for breaking a window.
‘No one’s home,’ said Josh two minutes later as he opened the creaky door from inside.
Sophie pursed her lips, but thought better of telling him off; things were tense enough without adding petty squabbles to their problems. She followed Lana inside. It was basic, almost spartan, with a thin layer of dust on most surfaces and a cold, damp smell coming from the bones of the house. There were a few personal effects – books, old maps and dark oil paintings on the walls – but it didn’t look as if anyone had been there for a while.
‘Now where?’ said Lana. She looked wound up, on edge. Had her jibe about Nick betraying Lana to the Russians got to the woman? wondered Sophie.
‘There’s not much here, so check everything,’ said Josh, coming back from a quick look around. ‘Lana, you take the kitchen and living room. Sophie, you take the bedrooms upstairs. I’ll do everywhere else.’
There were three bedrooms on the first floor. Sophie took the largest one first, which at least looked as if someone had been in it within the last thirty years. There was a fishing rod in one corner, some leather-bound Dickens novels on the shelves, but not much else. So what exactly am I looking for? she wondered. If there was money hidden here, it would take up a lot of room, and even if Asner’s loot had been converted into diamonds or something else valuable, she was pretty certain it would be something of size. A suitcase, perhaps? she thought, looking under the bed. No. Not even a shoebox. In the corner of the room was a small built-in wardrobe, but there was nothing inside apart from a rather mildewed overcoat and a pile of equally mouldy linen. In the movies, the safe is always hidden behind a painting, she thought to herself, walking over to a picture above the washstand – and found herself looking at a photograph of a boat.
‘Iona,’ she gasped, recognising her father’s beloved boat. ‘So you were here.’
She stood there in shock for a moment. She had guessed that this had been her father’s place, had expected to find something of his here, in fact. But even so, she found her heart beating hard in her chest, knowing he had stood where she was, that he had slept in this bed and, after all the running and dead ends, that this was exactly where he had wanted her to come.
‘Where would you hide something, Daddy?’ she asked.
And then it came to her. At Wade House, her father had installed a wall safe in the back of a wardrobe; she could remember him on his knees with the drill. She stepped back over to the closet and pushed the overcoat and the mottled sheets out of the way. There it was, the same colour and shape as the safe they had at home, with a four-digit electronic PIN lock.
‘Josh! Lana!’ she shouted.
She heard Josh’s heavy footsteps coming up the stairs two at a time.
‘Good girl,’ he said when he saw the safe. ‘Have you tried to open it?’
‘Not yet,’ she said. She bent to tap in the combination of the safe they had at home. It beeped twice: wrong number.
Lana burst through the door.
‘Have you found it?’ she gasped.
Josh nodded to the safe. ‘Yes and no. We don’t have the code.’
‘Try the number from the book,’ said Lana.
Warily, Sophie pulled the paperback from the pocket of the waxed hunting jacket she had borrowed from the lodge that morning. She wanted to get inside, of course, but she didn’t like the feeling of having Lana hovering behind her.
She tried various combinations of the map co-ordinates, but still the safe door refused to budge.
‘This is ridiculous!’ said Lana. ‘Josh, do something.’
‘What do you expect me to do?’ he said. ‘Blow a hole in it? All I know about safe-cracking I got from The Italian Job.’
Tuning out their bickering, Sophie turned back to the first page of I Capture the Castle. Was there anything else on it except the name and co-ordinates?
Of course there was.
To my dearest S, read this and think of our castle. Happy birthday. All my love always, Daddy.
Her birthday. The fourth of September – it had to be. She bent over the panel and tapped in ‘0409’. There was a second’s pause, then the safe whined open. She could hear Lana gasp behind her. Sophie looked inside: it was empty. No, not quite: there was a plain Manila envelope sitting on the bottom. She opened it and pulled out a sheet of paper.
‘A certificate?’ she said, looking up at Josh.
She had been expecting bricks of bank notes or gold bars; at the very least a black velvet bag full of diamonds. This looked like a fancy version of the guarantee which came with a washing machine.
‘It’s a bearer share certificate,’ said Josh, taking it from her.