They headed up the path as far as Luke’s body and turned to stare at the inferno. Flames were already licking the roof, flicking through huge clouds of acrid smoke pummelling up into the moonlit sky. One of the walls looked close to collapsing, and parts of the wooden roof were beginning to crack and fall into the raging fire beneath.
As they watched, a noise rose above the whoosh and crackle of the flaming barn, the nasal whine of an engine. Suddenly a large speedboat with police insignia spurted round the headland in a spray of water.
‘Shit,’ Molly hissed, ‘help me with this.’
Adam took the opposite end of the barrel from Molly and they scurried behind the outcrop of rocks, Roddy slumping down next to Luke’s body. They sat there for a while before Adam crept up to peek over the top.
The speedboat had docked in the tiny bay below the headland, and half a dozen men in dark uniform were scrambling up towards the barn in a fluster. Adam instinctively lowered his head, but they were a long way from the barn in the dark. There was no way they’d see him, surely.
The men reached the barn and were instantly rebuffed by the flames and heat bursting out the entrance. One of them did a quick circuit of the building while another bustled over to the police car, peered through the window then checked the driver’s door, which was locked.
Adam saw a third man, arm held in front of his face as he stood looking at the collapsed entrance to the burning still. He lifted a police radio out of his belt and spoke into it. After a moment he looked at the radio as if it was malfunctioning. The other three men started a slow, methodical sweep around the immediate vicinity of the barn, searching with torches. One walked past the police car and began up the path towards them, making Adam duck back down next to Molly and Roddy.
‘Shit,’ he said. ‘They’re searching the area.’
They sat with their hearts thumping, not daring to move, Adam suddenly aware of the sound of his lungs pumping air. The cop was close enough now that they could hear the scrunch of his footsteps on the path and his laboured breathing as he headed up the slope. They were hidden from the lower part of the road, but they could tell from the noise that he’d stopped almost level with them. If he kept up the slope a few more yards and looked right, they’d be in plain view. They saw a torch beam sweep over the snow beyond them and held their breaths. In the torchlight, Adam was relieved to see the police car’s tracks had flattened the snow cover enough that they hadn’t left footprints. He felt a wash of relief that they’d carried Luke’s body, and that they’d lifted the barrel up the path and behind the rocks — Molly had made the right decision every time.
He looked at her now and she stared back at him, eyes wide. She moved her shoulders a fraction, a signal he couldn’t decode. Then his gaze fell on her hands, and he realised she was holding Joe’s pistol. He frowned at her and she frowned back, giving a kind of desperate shrug. They sat like that for what seemed an eternity as the beam from the torch played over the surrounding snowscape.
Eventually they heard footsteps again, this time moving back down the hill, getting quieter with every footfall until finally they were out of earshot.
Molly peered round the side of the rock. She didn’t move or speak for a long time. After a while she turned round.
‘He’s back down with the others,’ she said.
‘You were going to shoot him?’ said Adam.
‘I don’t know what the hell I was going to do, OK?’ Molly glared at him. ‘I’m just trying to stay alive here.’
‘Sorry.’
Adam closed his eyes and tried to get his pulse to slow down. He opened his eyes again and looked at Roddy, whose gaze seemed to be going in and out of focus.
‘You OK?’
Roddy blinked and smiled. ‘Fucking dandy. What’s the latest?’
Adam poked his head back up.
The men were standing arguing next to the burning building. There was a lot of gesticulating, towards the barn, then the police car, then the boat. Adam tried to second-guess what they might do, but didn’t know where to start. The conversation went on for several minutes, lots of shaking heads and hand gestures, then eventually they seemed to take a vote, four of the six men putting their hands up.
They headed towards the police car. The man in front pulled out his baton and nonchalantly smashed in the driver’s window, then opened the door and leaned in while the others started pushing. The car began to crawl down the gentle slope, gradually picking up speed as it passed the barn, the men jogging alongside or still shoving from behind. It was heading for the edge of a short drop, the tiny natural harbour of the bay below, the speedboat anchored safely off to one side.
As they approached the edge the man guiding the steering wheel let go and moved out of the way, the rest of them giving up on pushing as the car gently freewheeled over the edge and bounced boot over bonnet into the water with a resigned splash.
The men stood at the edge of the bay, gazing at the water as the car slipped under the surface. It must be deeper than it looked because soon all trace of the car was gone, just a spreading moonlit ripple on the inky surface of the sea.
The men turned back to look at the barn, which was shapeless now, a giant funeral pyre raging into the night sky. As they watched there was an almighty explosion from within it, making them and Adam jump as pieces of burning wreckage shot outwards and upwards from the inferno, flames stretching up with the force of the blast.
‘What the fuck was that?’ hissed Roddy from behind the rock.
Adam turned and shrugged. ‘Explosion.’
‘Probably the second still going,’ said Molly. ‘I turned all the dials on it full up before we left. Figured it wouldn’t hurt.’
Adam smiled and looked at the gang of coppers, who were now heading back to the speedboat, eager to get the hell out of there and away from the incriminating evidence.
Another small explosion made them all flinch, then stop and stare, before scurrying and clambering into the boat which lurched round and away from the bay in a flurry of white surf and revs.
Molly joined Adam to watch as the boat sped round the headland and out of sight. They stood looking at the burning still and the undulating water for a while.
Adam turned to her. ‘You know, I didn’t even know Scottish police had speedboats.’
Molly smiled. ‘Just like Miami Vice, huh?’
‘What now?’ he said.
Molly looked behind them at Luke’s body and the empty barrel. Roddy was sat next to it, eyes closed, his face set in a grimace, clutching at his bloody shoulder. She walked over to the barrel and stood it on its end.
‘Help me get him inside, then,’ she said, indicating Luke.
Adam sighed then joined her, taking Luke’s legs as she heaved under his armpits.
Roddy’s eyes flickered open. ‘What the fuck are you two doing?’
Adam lugged the legs up and over the rim of the cask and began sliding them in, moving his hands up Luke’s body to help Molly lift the other end high enough. ‘Isn’t it bloody obvious?’
‘OK, but why?’
Molly gave a grunt of exertion as she got her body weight under Luke’s back. ‘He’s too heavy to carry, and we have to take him with us.’
She and Adam were slowly shuffling the corpse into the barrel in fits and starts.
‘In a fucking barrel?’ said Roddy.
‘Yes,’ said Molly. ‘In a barrel.’
The body slumped over the edge and fell into the cask. They tucked his arms in and Molly gently eased his shoulders and neck until his head was completely inside.
‘It’s a snug fit,’ said Adam, getting his breath back.
‘Probably just as well, don’t want him rattling around in there, or falling out.’
Roddy looked at them breathing heavily next to the barrel. ‘You two are priceless.’
Adam just stared at him as his breath returned to normal.
‘Right,’ said Molly, rubbing her hands together to warm them up. ‘Time to head back to the car and get ourselves saved.’