I am not sure why, but I am devastated by this. Sally is the one person I trust. The one person I have felt able to tell everything. Without her, I know I will be utterly, overwhelmingly alone. ‘Why, Sally? Why? You said it was as good as over between you and Jon.’
‘It is.’
‘Then why would we stop seeing each other?’
She takes a deep breath. ‘Because I have no idea who you are, Neal.’ She almost laughs. ‘Neal. I don’t even know if that’s your name.’
‘It’s not.’
A slight frown creases her eyes.
‘Neal Maclean is dead.’
And now they open wide. ‘Then who the hell are you?’
‘I don’t know.’ Hopelessly alone in my ignorance, as I knew I would be.
Her jaw seems to set, a hint of defiance in it. ‘And that man they found on the Flannan Isles... Did you kill him?’
I close my eyes and hold them shut for what seems like an inordinate length of time, before opening them again to see that she has not moved a muscle. ‘It is almost impossible for me to think that somehow I have it in me to take the life of another human being. But I think I probably did.’
The dark of the night outside seems profound. Tangible, enveloping, as if it had simply wrapped itself around me. In my bedroom, the only light comes from the luminous hands of the bedside clock. I have left the side window on the latch, and I can hear the wind and the ocean. And, in the room, the sound of Bran’s heavy breathing. He is happy to be back with me, oblivious of my misery, and has fallen easily into a deep sleep. I feel his legs kicking from time to time as he dreams, perhaps of chasing rabbits across the dunes.
It is hours since Sally left, and I can’t sleep. For fear that I share this body I inhabit with a killer.
Chapter twenty-six
It was almost two hours since Karen had boarded the train at Inverness. She was travel-weary after nearly three and a half hours on the train from Glasgow, and then hanging around at Inverness Station, waiting for her connection. The time had been passed with coffee and sandwiches in the Pumpkin Café, and an almost incessant stream of banter from a young Polish guard who seemed to have nothing better to do while waiting for his train than regale Karen with tales of his lazy Scottish girlfriend.
Since then, the West Highlands had slipped past the window of her seat on the train to Kyle of Lochalsh in a gloomy blur of lochs and mountains. Places like the Valley of Drizzle, and Raven Rock, seemed somehow reminiscent of Tolkien in this land torn and shaped by the great glaciers of some past ice-age. Tree-covered islands in vast, still lochs cast dark reflections on darker water, great jagged mountains rising above the treeline to vanish in brooding low cloud.
It was Karen’s first time in this part of the country. She felt dwarfed by it, lost and insignificant, and it cast a doubtful perspective on her foolish endeavour to track down Billy Carr in some distant, hidden valley. But his address, at least, had a postcode, so it couldn’t be impossible to find.
At last the train rumbled into the tiny station at Strathcarron, the village of Lochcarron strung out along the far shore of the loch itself, the jagged peaks of the Torridon mountains rising into an ominous sky. She was the sole passenger to leave the train here, stepping down on to a deserted platform, a blue and cream-painted rusty metal bridge straddling the track. As the train pulled away, she felt dumped and deserted in the middle of nowhere. She zipped up her hoodie and went out into a small car park. There wasn’t much here. A line of whitewashed cottages stretched away along a narrow lane. There was a Post Office in what might once have been the old station house, and beyond the car park, the Strathcarron Hotel.
Here, she asked a smiling young receptionist if she could call her a taxi. ‘Where are you going?’ the girl asked, and Karen showed her Billy Carr’s postcard. She frowned. ‘No idea where that is. The driver’ll probably know, though.’
The driver didn’t. It took fifteen minutes for him to come and pick her up from the car park behind the station, and when he looked at the address he shook his head. ‘Strathdarroch? Never heard of it, and I’ve lived here all my life.’ Then he grinned. ‘Thank the good Lord for GPS, eh?’
Programmed with Billy Carr’s postcode, the GPS took them off into the wilderness on a single-track road that rose up through wild, uncultivated country in the approximate direction of Loch Kishorn, or so the driver said. They passed through Forestry Commission plantation, and then what might have been the remains of ancient Caledonian forest, stands of ragged Scots pines and the deciduous oaks and birch and aspen of Scotland’s long-vanished temperate rainforest.
It took almost twenty-five minutes before the driver turned into a metalled cul-de-sac, where a wooden gate blocked their further progress and the road became a rutted track that cut up the hill through thick forest.
‘It’s up that track somewhere, love. But I’m afraid this is as far as I can take you. Rip the underside off my car if I try and drive her up there.’
Karen was reluctant to get out of the taxi. If she couldn’t find the Darroch Cottage of Billy Carr’s address, she would be stranded out here with nowhere to go, and no way back. They hadn’t seen a cottage, or a car, or any other sign of life for the last fifteen minutes. The light was already starting to fade from the east, and there could be no more than a couple of hours of daylight left. If she let the driver go, she was absolutely on her own. She checked her phone. There wasn’t even a signal here to call for help. ‘How much do I owe you?’ she said, in a voice that sounded a great deal more confident than she felt.
‘Forty-five quid, love.’ He paused. ‘Sure you know where you’re going?’
She nodded, almost afraid to speak in case the fear that was churning in her stomach would make her throw up.
After she had paid him, she stepped out into the dusk and watched as he turned the car and headed back the way they had come. She stood for a long time, listening to the sound of its motor fading into the early evening, until she could hear nothing except for the birdcall that filled the air all around her and, somewhere, the distant sound of running water.
Finally, with feet like lead, she unlatched the gate and slipped through it, fastening it again behind her, and started up through the trees, darkness closing in around her. She had never felt so entirely alone.
With her eyes turned down, watching each and every step on the ridges and ruts of the track so that she didn’t turn her ankle, she failed to notice how the trees around her were beginning to thin. And when finally she looked up, she saw that the track was leading her out of the forest and into a beaten clearing that sat in the lee of the hills.
Off to the right, on the very edge of the forest, stood a dilapidated stone cottage with a lean-to extension. To the left, a tiny loch lay still and dark in the gathering gloom, its waters lapping gently against the edge of the clearing. On the far side of it, a small waterfall tumbled through trees and rocks to send ripples arcing out towards its centre. A dusty, mud-spattered red Mitsubishi four-wheel-drive Outlander sat at an angle under the shade of a mountain ash growing among a cluster of rocks. Billy Carr, it seemed, liked red.
As she crossed the clearing, a couple of brown hens went skittering and clucking away into the trees, and she called out, ‘Hello, anybody there?’
She was rewarded with a silence broken only by the birds. The door to the cottage stood ajar, and she could see that the place lay in darkness beyond it. She reached out a hand and pushed the door open into the dark. The hinges creaked like a sound effect from a bad horror movie.
‘Hello?’
Still nothing. She stepped inside and allowed a few moments for her pupils to dilate. Most of the footprint was occupied by a single room, cluttered with old furniture standing at odd angles on an uneven stone floor. A sofa and a couple of armchairs, horsehair bursting through where the upholstery was worn thin or torn. An old rocking chair, with a red cushion, pulled up beside a wood-burning stove set in what must have been the original fireplace. To the left of the door, a dining table covered by an old, stained cloth was cluttered with all manner of bric-a-brac. A fishing rod and flies, boxes, and tornopen cartons of some kind of scientific supplies. There was a pair of large, padded white gloves, an SLR camera fitted into a bracket with a clamp on one end, a scattering of inch-long red plastic tubes with flip-over lids.