The Edinburgh Dead - Brian Ruckley [76]
He heard wood cracking, splintering in the darkness behind him. His heart hammered. He looked back, blindly, into the depths of the cowshed. The frenzied thrashing grew louder still.
He slipped out of the shed and settled the bar down across its pegs on the door. He reached for the chain, at his feet, and found it tangled. He spent a precious moment or two trying to get it back in its place, but heard something overturned, a terrible crashing, from within; no longer in that far corner of the shed, he thought, but closer to the door. Time, he judged, was against him.
He let the chain fall and went on his toes—quickly, but quiet—to the corner of the shed and around into the deeper moon shadows. There was a crude outhouse of some sort leaning against the stone wall, with a sloping roof like a chicken coop. Quire brushed against it as he passed, and there was an eruption of excitement within. He recoiled from it, stifling a cry of alarm in his throat. This noise he could decipher more easily than the chaotic racket that still emanated from the main shed; this time, he could hear blunt claws scrabbling against the wooden planks. His nostrils caught the sharp, rotten stink of dog. Fear took hold of him. Simple, deep fear.
He ran, no longer caring about concealment. He pounded across the yard, the tail of his long coat flapping behind him, pistol still clutched in one hand. The light falling from the open farmhouse door bathed him, then he was beyond it and into the moon-softened darkness again.
Behind him he heard the doors of the cowshed shaking and groaning beneath sudden assault. He did not look back, not even when he heard the beam that held them shut fracture, the deep, booming breaking of its back unmistakable.
He ran straight down the curving rough track. No time now for retracing the steps of his more cautious approach across the fields. The surface was a hopeless mess of humps and hollows, ruts and stones, that set him stumbling and made his flight ever wilder. The path fell in amongst trees, and the lantern of the moon’s face was taken from him. His eyes failed him. He almost fell, but staggered instead to lean against the trunk of a birch. He was panting, as much out of the anxious urgency of the moment as his exertions.
He looked back the way he had come. The steading was a black and menacing outline against the moon now, the line of smoke from the chimney laying a crack across that pale orb. More troubling was the heavy sound of footsteps. They were drawing near. Quire peered into the gloom.
It was a lone man, and not a large one at that, coming steadily down the track. He ran with his arms hanging loosely down at his sides. Trailing from one of them was a cord or rope of some sort, and still bouncing along at its end the iron ring by which it must have been secured to the wall. Quire could not see his face.
“Hold up, there,” he shouted, stepping into the centre of the track. “Are you a prisoner? I’m with the police.”
The approaching figure made no reply, just came jogging on, into the darkness cast by the trees crowding in on either side.
“Can you not talk?” Quire demanded uneasily, lifting his pistol.
Without breaking stride, the lean, rangy man swept up one arm and brought the iron ring roped to it lashing round in a wide curve towards Quire’s head.
“Jesus Christ,” Quire exclaimed.
He ducked, and the ring went hissing over his head. He leaped to one side as his assailant rushed at him, but his ankle turned on the lip of a rut in the track, and he fell to one knee. Before he could rise, there was a hand on the lapel of his coat, and another scrabbling at his belt.
Quire discharged the pistol into the man’s stomach. The flame and noise and smoke erupted between them, blinding him, burning up into