Roberta hurried over, felt for a pulse.
Nothing.
Damn it!
She hauled him over onto his back. Was he breathing?
How could he be breathing if he didn’t have a pulse.
Yeah, but finding a pulse was notoriously difficult, wasn’t it?
Only one way to check for sure.
She hauled back a hand and gave him a good hard slap.
‘Aaargh!’ McKinnon sat up, hands windmilling, like a small child trapped in a tumble drier. Eyes wide and darting around. Slapped cheek already going red in the torchlight. ‘Where...?’
Roberta pulled her hand back for a second go. ‘If you’ve just been having a kip, God help you.’
‘Whhh...’ One side of his face scrunched up. ‘Ow!’ Then he reached for the back of his head, fingertips probing at the ginger hair.
She hauled him forward and shone her torch there – blood. Not a heap of it, but enough. It dotted the crown of a properegg-shaped lump that hadn’t been there before. ‘What the hell happened?’
‘Someone thumped me.’ God, with a razor-sharp mind like that, it was a wonder McKinnon hadn’t been promoted to DI yet.
She helped him struggle to his feet. ‘It’s OK, you’re...’
A noise out in the corridor made her spin around.
Someone was lurking in the darkened lobby, but before her torch beam found them, they were off, running.
Nairn!
She let go of McKinnon and he promptly collapsed on the floor again as she leapt for the library doors. ‘COME BACK HERE!’
Out into the lobby, making for the main entrance.
Moonbeams spilled in through the windows, painting cold white bars across the echoing space, making the dark darker.
A flash of grey and the bugger she was chasing leapt across a patch of light – definitely Nairn. Couldn’t see his face, but he was still wearing that spooky pelt-cloak thing, with horns on the hood.
‘YOU CAN’T GET AWAY, NAIRN!’
He skidded to a halt at the front doors and rattled them.
Locked.
Ya wee beauty!
Then he turned the key and shouldered them open, bursting out into the night.
Sod.
16
Roberta sprinted past that stupid metal stag and barrelled through the open doors.
Outside, the moon’s glow cast everything in black and white, carpeting the wet grass with a billion tiny stars, turning the woods on the other side of the hotel gardens into a wall of silhouettes.
