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She lowered her eyes. “I didn’t know she’d marked the dress. I wanted to protect him,” she said very quietly.
Alastair looked at her with a ghastly smile filled with despair.
“But she didn’t know,” Monk said very softly, almost under his breath. The words fell in the room like stones. “She was afraid, because she saw Archie Frazer in the house, but you could have explained that. You killed her for nothing.”
Very slowly, as if in a nightmare, Alastair turned to Oonagh, his face like a dead man’s, aged and yet with the helplessness of a lost child. “You said she knew. You told me she knew. I didn’t have to kill her! Oonagh—what have you done to me?”
“Nothing, Alastair! Nothing!” she said quickly, putting out both her hands and gripping his arms. “She would have ruined us, believe me.” Her voice was desperate, urgent that he should understand.
“But she didn’t know!” His voice was rising, shrill with betrayal and despair.
“All right! She didn’t know that, or the forgery.” The gentleness vanished and her features were suddenly ugly. “But she knew about Uncle Hector and Father, and she’d have told Griselda. That is what she was on the way south to do. Griselda and her stupid obsession with health and her child. She’d have told Connal, and then it would have been all over the place.”
“Told him what? What are you talking about?” He was utterly lost. He seemed to have forgotten everyone in the room except Oonagh. “Father’s been dead for years. What did it have to do with her child? It doesn’t make any sense….”
Oonagh’s face was as white as his, but with fury and contempt. There was still no fear in it, and no weakness.
“Father died of syphilis, you fool! He was riddled with it! What did you think his blindness was, and his paralysis? We kept him in the house and said it was a stroke … what else were we to do?”
“B-but … syphilis takes years to get to …” He stopped. There was a funny little choking sound in his throat, as if he could not breathe. He was horrified beyond movement, except for his dry lips. It almost seemed as if she were holding him up. “That means … that means we are all … Griselda … her child, all our children … Oh sweet Jesus!”
“No it doesn’t,” she said between clenched jaws. “Mother knew it from the beginning. That is what she was going to tell Griselda. What she had just told me…. Hamish was not our father … not any of us.”
He looked at her as if she had spoken to him in an incomprehensible language.
She swallowed. Now the words seemed to choke her as much as him. Her face was white with pain.
“Hector is our father … every one of us … right from you to Griselda. You are a bastard, Alastair. We are all bastards … our mother was an adulteress, and that drunken sot is our father! Do you want the world to know that? Can you live with it … Procurator Fiscal!”
But Alastair was beyond speech. He was stricken as if dead.
The only sound in the whole place was Quinlan’s laugh, a wild, hysterical, bitter sound.
“I loved her,” Hector said, staring at Oonagh. “I loved her all my life. She loved Hamish to begin with, but after we met, it was me … it was always me. She knew what Hamish was … and she never let him touch her.”
Oonagh looked back at him with utter, indescribable loathing.
Tears were running down Hector’s face. “I always loved her,” he said again. “And you killed her, more surely than if you’d done it yourself.” His voice was rising, getting stronger. “You sold my beautiful Eilish to that creature … to get his services for forgery.” He did not even look at Quinlan. “You sold her like a horse or a dog. You used flattery and deceit on all of us … using our weaknesses against us … even me. I wanted to stay here, to be part of you. You are all the family I have, and you knew that, and I let you use it.” He gulped. “Dear God, but what you’ve done to Alastair …”
It was Quinlan who reacted at last. He picked up the heavy paper knife and lunged—not at Hector, but at Monk.
Monk reacted only just in time. The blade grazed his arm and he went backwards, knocking Hester off balance and lurching against the iron railing of the spiral stairs. He only just avoided going over them as they caught him in the small of his back and his foot slipped and went from under him, leaving him sprawled at Hester’s feet.
Alastair still stood mesmerized.
Oonagh waited only an instant, then realized he was going to be useless. For a terrible moment she stared at Hector, then she ran at him, bending to catch him in the solar plexus and knock him over the railing to fall the twenty feet to the floor below.
He understood from her eyes, but he moved too slowly. She caught him in the chest, to the left, not quite under the heart. He fell sideways against the railing and backed into Hester, sending her flying. She caught Quinlan just as he reached Monk to strike again. There was a shriek, a flailing of limbs, a moment’s blind panic, and then a sickening thud from the floor below.
Then total silence closed in, except for Alastair’s weeping.
Hester peered over the edge.
Quinlan lay on the floor below them, his blond hair like a silver halo. There was no blood, but his right arm, in which he had held the knife, was bent underneath him, and no one needed to be told he would not move again.
At last Alastair seemed to regain some semblance of control. He looked around for another weapon, his eyes glistening with almost manic hatred.
Oonagh could see there was no more room for words, no excuses anymore. She plunged past the choking Hector and still-sprawling Monk, ignoring Hester, and clattered down the iron stairs, making towards the back of the vast building until she disappeared between the bales of paper.
