The Petitioners (8 page)

This line of thought was interrupted by the sight of lights in the distance, coming closer at a rate that could have been rather dangerous and which seemed so ominous that I found myself heading out to meet the search party instead of just standing waiting for it, which would have been more sensible.

Inevitably, my foot slipped on a wet rock and I was only saved from falling by Declan’s reflexes as he reached out and held on to my arms. It was embarrassing to be helped up, but I quickly extricated myself from his grip and searched his face in the torchlight for a sign of what had happened.

‘You all right, mate?’ he said.

I knew it had all gone wrong just from his tone of voice as he said those few words.

‘What’s happened?’

‘Wait until we get down to base camp.’

It was only a few steps away, but it was an infinite, tortuous journey from hope to despair.

‘They’ve been taken,’ he said once we were outside the kitchen. Some members of Tanya’s team were still clearing up in there, so there was enough light to see his grim expression properly. In a way I wished there wasn’t.

‘Taken? Who on earth by? You seemed to think it would be perfectly safe going up there on a day like this. How do you know they haven’t fallen over some cliff that you had forgotten was there?’

‘Get a grip, Gav,’ he advised. ‘Losing it with me will not help.’

I realised I had been almost shouting in his face. I drew back a bit. Tanya came up to us.

‘How do you know?’ she said to him.

‘Signs of a scuffle,’ he said. He put his hand in a pocket and brought out a knitted Fair Isle hat. ‘It’s Fiona’s.’ His voice broke. I felt sorry I had shouted; in that moment of knowing Dan was lost, I had forgotten Declan too had lost somebody.

‘They must have come over the hills,’ said Tanya. ‘I’ll post extra guards tonight.’

‘Extra guards?’ I hadn’t known there were any guards in the first place. ‘Did you know this kind of thing was going to happen?’

‘I knew there were bands of looters about,’ she said gravely. ‘I didn’t know they were going to snatch two of our number.’

‘But why?’ I said helplessly. ‘What do they want with Fiona and Dan? He’s only a boy.’

‘Recruitment,’ suggested Declan, his face still set in grim lines. ‘Maybe they didn’t have enough of a group to be viable. Maybe they lost people.’

Tanya nodded. ‘That would make sense.’

‘What can we do?’ I said.

I half-expected her to round up a team and go after them there and then.

‘We can’t do anything tonight,’ said Tanya. ‘In the morning – we’ll see.’

‘In the morning?’ I cried. ‘They could be miles away by then – taking my son with them. I’d only just got him back from… well, never mind all that. Don’t your lot have night vision stuff or something with them? I’ll go too if that makes any difference. If you help me with this I’ll devote the rest of my life to helping with whatever you want me to do.’

‘Gavin,’ said Declan. He sounded almost as if he were warning me off. It wasn’t as though I was selling my soul to the devil, though. Even although a shiver ran up my spine when I re-played my own words back to myself.

‘Don’t make promises you can’t afford to keep,’ snapped Tanya. ‘I’ll get a team together to set out at first light. If you’re out of bed in time you can tag along.’

‘I’ll come with you,’ said Declan. ‘It’ll be quicker if I show you what we found tonight.’

The night went very slowly. Even when I was on the verge of dropping off to sleep, which happened once or twice, I would give a start and become fully awake again. I suppose I was listening for Dan to come in. In some ways I wished Emma were here to help, and in other ways I was glad she was hundreds of miles away, cocooned in her hospital bed, safe in her ignorance of all this.

I wasn’t sure whether Tanya had meant ‘first light’ absolutely literally, but just in case, I got out of bed as soon as the patch of sky I could see through the gap in our roof, such as it was, started to go through that almost imperceptible change from black to dark grey. I found them all having breakfast, so I was just in time.

We went up the hill in silence, passing the first reservoir quite quickly and then heading towards the place where the search party had looked the night before.

‘Is this really the sign of a struggle, or is it where the searchers milled around?’ I enquired as we all stared in the half-light at the patch of disturbed undergrowth between two small rocky outcrops.

Declan gave me a look. ‘It was like this when we came along. Then there was Fiona’s hat.’

‘The hat. Of course.’ Privately I thought the scuffs and marks on the ground could just as easily have been caused by animals fighting to the death, or a few stray sheep panicking, but I didn’t have any claim any expertise in interpreting tracks or any other kind of bush craft.

Fighting to the death…

‘Is there any blood?’ I added.

‘We couldn’t see anything that looked like that,’ said Declan, after a slight pause that made me wonder if they had in fact found bloodstains and he was trying to protect me. If he was, it would be the first time ever.

We stood and stared at the patch of ground for several more unnecessary minutes.

‘Which way did they go, then?’ I asked.

‘We think there’s a trace over here, sir,’ said one of Tanya’s team. I wished they would stop calling me ‘sir’. It was hopelessly old-fashioned and made me feel about a hundred. I tried to imagine Dan calling anybody ‘sir’, and failed. That was cheering in a way. I quite liked the idea that he wouldn’t easily give into anybody. Although of course there were times when that could be the sensible thing to do.

I hoped he was being sensible right now. Maybe Fiona could help him with that.

We all went to look at the trace. After peering very closely, I discerned a slightly bent clump of grass there. Maybe the others could see things I couldn’t. If only I had got my eyes tested when that was still an option. Let that be a lesson to me.

I followed the rest of the party as Declan and another expert followed the trail only they could see. We went up over the top of one hill and then down a bit and up another. There was always another hill to climb, much as there usually is in life.

We walked and climbed for most of the morning, and then it turned out that Tanya and her team had provided cheese sandwich capsules and some kind of condensed drink for everybody. I hoped that didn’t mean we were going to be out for the whole day. I was definitely beginning to flag, and I still wasn’t entirely convinced we were on the right track. Wouldn’t it be funny if we got back to our own camp and found Dan and Fiona there waiting for us?

No, it wouldn’t be funny, exactly. It would be a miracle, and one that I wished I could believe in.

Sure enough, when we finally turned and trudged back home again as darkness fell, only the four or five guards we had left behind were waiting for us. We hadn’t seen any sign of a marauding band that might have seized Dan and Fiona.

‘At least we know they’ve had practice in looking after themselves,’ said Declan, trying to cheer me up as we sat in the kitchen together after supper. He gave me a chocolate capsule. ‘Pity they don’t make whisky in capsule form – you look as though you could do with it.’

‘You should have brought back a few bottles of the real thing when you were on one of those damn raiding parties,’ I grumbled at him. ‘We were bound to have an emergency sooner or later.’

‘Maybe we should have gone further afield today,’ Declan mused. ‘They might have been camped over the next hill.’

‘Are we planning to do the same again tomorrow?’ I asked him. I had run out of ideas and energy. The only thing keeping me going at all was the overwhelming wish to find Dan – to be able to bicker with him once again in our temporary home, and to dream of the family being reunited in the foreseeable future. I didn’t know if he would come to any harm with the other group, if indeed another group had taken him as everybody seemed to have concluded. It still seemed strange to me that they would take him at all unless they wanted him to work for them in some way. If they had been planning to kill him and Fiona, surely they would have done it right away on that hillside – or would they? I said as much to Declan.

‘Surely they would,’ he said with a nod. ‘And there aren’t so many able-bodied young people left that anybody can afford to waste them, now, are there?’

That explained why he wasn’t as distraught as I might have expected.

Or there could have been another explanation.

Tanya woke me up at first light again. This time I really had been asleep.

‘Declan’s gone,’ she said.

The words didn’t make any sense until I had heaved my mind out of the chasm between sleep and wakefulness. Once that had happened, I sat up in bed and said, ‘Where?’

‘We don’t know yet. He disappeared in the middle of the night, apparently, but neither of the men on watch saw him leave. If we were a military team I’d have had them both court-martialled. Do you have any idea where he might have got to?’

‘Me?’

‘Gavin, you’re the only one who knows him at all well. If you had no idea of what he was planning…’

‘What he was planning? You think he’s gone off under his own steam?’

She glared at me. ‘Can you imagine anyone in their senses trying to abduct Declan? They’d be mad to try. No, he’s been up to something all along. I had a feeling he might be. Come along, let’s get going.’

‘Going?’

‘We’ve got to get after him.’

‘Why?’

I suppose my mind wasn’t quite as fully in the realms of wakefulness as I had imagined. I resolved to try not to ask any more stupid questions. Or at least, not in every sentence.

Tanya made a sort of hissing sound like an angry cat, and stalked out of my presence. Maybe she’d feel better once she’d caught a few voles.

I got up and got dressed anyway. I had no real intention of going to look for Declan. Of all the people I knew, he was the one who was most able to take care of himself. I even wondered for a moment if he had faked the whole thing with Dan’s and Fiona’s disappearance. Maybe they were waiting for him just out of reach, ready to gang up with him again and escape to their friends in the Highlands. The rebel base there must surely be still active. On the other hand, I mused, moving slowly in the direction of the camp kitchen, did they really have anything to rebel against now? From all we had seen in recent weeks, the government seemed to have fallen apart, and instead there were various conflicting authorities vying for control over their little fiefdoms. Perhaps there were other private enterprises like Fairfax Consulting operating in other parts of Scotland.

I had really hoped to spend my time on things I thought were important, instead of wasting it thinking about politics again.

‘You took your time,’ said Tanya when I finally arrived in the kitchen and claimed my morning drink of coffee-substitute made of God knows what.

‘I was thinking,’ I said reluctantly.

‘Thank goodness for that,’ she said. ‘Now maybe we’ll get somewhere. Have you had any ideas?’

‘Ideas? Oh, you mean about Declan? No, not really.’

I wasn’t going to confide in her about the rebel stronghold and my suspicion that they were all heading in the same direction. Let her work it out for herself.

‘Sit down,’ she said.

I sat gingerly on the edge of one of the long benches. She put her hands on the table and leaned forward.

‘Is there any chance he’s gone to join another group somewhere? Say in the Highlands?’

Had she been reading my mind using a modern gadget I had never heard of before? Or, more likely, she had glimpsed Declan’s files in security HQ or whatever it was called. They probably had a whole virtual filing cabinet dedicated to him.

‘He didn’t say anything,’ I offered cautiously.

‘But you were thinking it, weren’t you?’

‘Isn’t it against the law to read somebody’s thoughts?’

She laughed. ‘Not only against the law of the land, but against nature, I’m afraid. I just put myself in your shoes – abandoned by your son and now by your friend – and worked out what you might be thinking.’

‘Dan hasn’t abandoned me,’ I said.

She raised an eyebrow. ‘Don’t tell me you haven’t considered that possibility.’

‘Why should I? Everybody went to great lengths to prove he’d been taken by marauding raiders, or raiding marauders for that matter.’

‘I don’t know why you’re being so defensive about it, Gavin. It certainly isn’t against the law to think things about your friends.’

‘Maybe I don’t want Declan to get arrested, that’s all.’

‘Hmph! He won’t be arrested. There aren’t enough law enforcement people left in the Central Belt to waste time going after some middle-aged Irish rebel who doesn’t want to be found. In any case, nobody knows whether the rebels will end up in charge at the end of the day.’

‘I don’t want to have to worry about that,’ I said in a tone that sounded childish even to my own ears. ‘I just want to be able to get on with my work.’