‘Call my cell as soon as you have anything; the number’s on the bottom of that note. Also, what’s Niddrie Mains like? High crime rate?’

‘Niddrie Mains? Not much out there, really. Good access to the coast. Stays pretty quiet.’

‘Of course it does,’ Connie muttered to herself as she grabbed her coat. ‘Quiet is exactly how he’d want it.’

She sprinted down the stairs, ran outside and hailed a cab to Niddrie Mains.

Chapter Thirty-Six

Xavier was stuck. Safe, for now, but he wasn’t going anywhere in a hurry. As Fergus had been tying up Elspeth and Meggy, he’d made a decision. He wasn’t going to sit on the lounge floor and wait for the maniac to come for him. The blockade in the hallway was going to last a while, but not forever. If he couldn’t fight, at least he could make it as difficult as possible to be killed.

It hadn’t been easy. The lack of light in the room below had helped to conceal his activity, but the success had been touch and go. Had his friends not pestered him every week to spend hours in the gym maintaining his upper body strength, and hounded him to play wheelchair basketball at every opportunity, he’d never have managed the feat.

Pulling himself to the opening above Elspeth and Meggy, Xavier had dragged his legs over the edge in the void. He’d moved as silently as possible while Fergus had come and gone, bringing in ropes and gags, talking to himself, cycling through a stream of different names. Trying to summon a strength he would never have thought possible and praying that his mental calculation was correct, Xavier had taken his whole weight on his arms and lowered himself by his hands into the void.

‘Xavier,’ Fergus had said suddenly, turning round as if expecting to see someone standing behind him.

Xavier was frozen, suspended, legs dangling through the hole in the ceiling.

‘Who was that? Did he leave me, too?’ He was talking to himself, clearly confused, going from one incoherent rant to the next.

Then Fergus had continued as before, checking the knots on the ropes before walking to the painted-in windows and pretending to close the painted-in curtains. Xavier had stared down at him, incredulous, through the tiny gap between his body and the edge of the hole.

Forcing himself to continue before his arms gave in, he’d looked inside the darkness of the cavity between the two floors for the most accessible rafter. His line of vision was too limited, and it mattered. He’d had to grab for the rafter in a single movement that could not be repeated. He had nothing to hold on to above the floorboards, and his body would have started to fall as soon as he’d shifted his body weight.