Sime wriggled back from the drop and got to his feet, training the light of his torch along the edge of the cliffs until he saw a way down. A gentle cutaway from the top, and a steep seam of rock running downwards at an angle that would lead him to Aitkens. He ran along to it, and carefully lowered himself over the edge, gingerly testing the rock underfoot in case it would give way.
It took him almost ten minutes to make the descent, battered by the explosive breath of the storm, soaked by the salt spray thrown up all along the cliffs.
Aitkens was breathing hard. Short, mechanical bursts of breath. His eyes wide and staring in fear. Sime perched precariously on the ledge beside him. ‘Can you move?’
Aitkens shook his head. ‘There’s no feeling in my legs. My whole lower body.’ His voice was feeble. He bit his lip and tears filled his eyes. ‘I think my back’s broken.’
‘Jesus,’ Sime said. ‘What the hell were you doing, Aitkens? Why would you want to kill Kirsty?’
Aitkens said, ‘I thought you already knew. When you came asking questions about our family history.’
‘Knew what?’
Aitkens closed his eyes, pained by irony and regret. ‘Obviously not.’ He opened them again and a tear ran back down the side of his head and into his hair. ‘Sir John Guthrie …’
‘Kirsty’s father?’
He nodded. ‘He was worth a damn fortune, Mackenzie. All that family wealth accumulated during the tobacco trade, and then sugar and cotton. He didn’t just own the Langadail Estate. He had property in Glasgow and London. Investments, money in the bank. And he left all of it to his daughter, since his son was dead.’ He closed his eyes again and let out a long, painful breath. He tried to swallow, then looked up at Sime once more. ‘Only they couldn’t find her. She’d run off to Canada in search of her crofter boy. His wife was dead and there was no other heir.’ He seemed to have trouble breathing and speaking at the same time. Sime waited until he found his voice again. ‘I did my research. In Scotland, in those days, when a beneficiary couldn’t be traced, it had to be reported to the Lord Treasurer’s Remembrancer.’ He shook his head. ‘Stupid name! It’s now the Crown Office.’ He swallowed to catch his breath. ‘In Guthrie’s case, the lawyers sold off all his assets and the money was put in the care of the Crown, until someone turned up to claim it. Only no one ever did.’
For the first time, Sime saw how greed had been the motive for everything.
Aitkens screwed up his face in what might have been either pain or regret. ‘The only people left alive with a claim on that money were me and Kirsty. Well, my father before me. But since I have power of attorney …’
‘And you didn’t want to share it.’
His eyes fired up with indignation. ‘Why the hell should I? She had a big house, a big divorce settlement in her future. More money than she could ever spend on her precious Entry Island. And what did I have? A subterranean life spent in the dark for a pathetic monthly wage. No life, no future. That money could have given me everything.’
And now, Sime thought, if he survived he faced a life of imprisonment, both in a wheelchair and behind bars. And that realisation was writ large all over Aitkens’s face, too.
Sime said, ‘It was you who attacked me that night.’
Aitkens found his voice again but it was just a whisper. ‘Yes.’
‘Why, for God’s sake?’
‘The ring,’ he said. ‘I’d seen Kirsty’s pendant. I knew it came from Kirsty Guthrie. I thought …’ He shook his head in despair. ‘I thought that somehow you might be family, too. Some distant damned relative that was going to come and stake his claim on the money. If you look inside the band of the ring you’ll probably find it’s engraved with the Guthrie family motto. Sto pro veritate.’ He closed his eyes, the despair in his sigh conveying all the irony of the words. ‘I stand for truth.’
Sime shook his head. ‘Jesus.’ The ring again. He took out his cellphone and punched in nine-one-one.
‘What the hell are you doing?’ Aitkens said.
‘Getting help.’
‘I don’t want help. For God’s sake, it’s over. Just let me die. I want to die.’ He struggled to try and shift his body. If he could move himself just a few centimetres nearer the edge, he could fall away to the oblivion that he saw now as his only escape. But he couldn’t do it.
When Sime hung up he found Aitkens staring at him with hate in his eyes. Sime said, ‘There should be a rescue team here within an hour.’
Aitkens said nothing and closed his eyes to contemplate the future hell that would be his life.