‘Good health.’
Murray thought his own toast sounded more like a curse. But Pete smiled and raised the glass to his lips.
‘So is your poet well-known in Scotland?’
‘No, he’s pretty obscure.’
‘This glen’s going to be proper cultured, what with you beavering away down here on your biography, and Mrs Graves up on the topside working on her novels.’
Before the blows the photographs had dealt, Murray might have quizzed Pete on the exact location of Christie’s cottage. Now he merely asked, ‘Do you see much of her?’
‘Not really, no. We phone to check on each other in the bad weather, and if the lines go down we drop round — you have to when you’re as remote as we are, and her mobility isn’t so good these days — but apart from that, we leave each other in peace.’
‘Have you read any of her books?’
‘Sheila’s the reader in our family. She used to be an English teacher before we settled here. She read the first one.’
‘Sacrifice?’
‘I think that was it.’ The crofter smiled apologetically. ‘It wasn’t a great hit, I’m afraid. Sheila usually likes books set on islands.’ He took another sip of his drink. ‘They remind her of here, I suppose, but she said this one was full of dead folk digging themselves from their graves.’
Murray felt a prickling on the back of his neck and resisted the urge to look towards the cottage’s small windows and the night beyond.
‘It’s about a group of hippies who move to the countryside and start dabbling in things they shouldn’t.’
‘Raising the dead?’
‘Amongst other things. It’s a bit silly.’
The wind had got up again. Somewhere a gate was banging, but the crofter didn’t seem to notice. He said, ‘Maybe I should give it a read.’
Pete met Murray’s eyes and his grin was wide enough for madness. Outside the banging became louder, then ceased. Murray wondered who or what had stopped it. He filled the silence with a question.
‘What did you do before you moved here?’
‘I taught too. Science. I decided to get out before I became the first teacher to do a Columbine and go on the rampage with a shotgun.’
The small man laughed. The lamplight caught the creases in his weathered face and twisted his smile into a grimace. Murray wondered if he had a gun up at the white cottage, and if he drank whisky there at night, alone in the middle of nowhere, with his wife and children asleep in the rooms above.
He rubbed his eyes and said, ‘Aye, I sometimes feel that about my students,’ though the thought had never occurred. ‘I still feel bad about almost bumping into Miss Graves’s car, even if she isn’t Booker Prize material. Maybe I should call round with a bunch of flowers or something.’
Pete shrugged.
‘You’ll meet her sooner or later.’ He closed one eye and held the half-bottle to his other, regarding the room through a golden whisky filter. ‘Mrs Graves is unpredictable. Some days she stops and chats, others it’s as if she doesn’t see you. Sheila says that a hundred years ago she would have been fuel for a bonfire.’ He laughed. ‘The way she says it, you’d think it wasn’t such a bad idea.’
‘Your wife doesn’t like her?’
‘She doesn’t like being snubbed. Me, I don’t care. After all, no one moves out here for the company. And it must be hard for Christie. She’s got MS. She had a bad episode a while back which more or less paralysed her. We thought that might be it, but she seems to have bounced back. Still, I’m not sure how much longer she’ll be able to be independent, let alone live in the back of beyond.’ Pete unscrewed the bottle’s cap and poured the remains into their glasses. ‘We may as well finish this, then I’ll leave you to get settled. I promised Sheila we wouldn’t go beyond the half-bottle. She doesn’t like me driving after I’ve had a couple, even when there’s only sheep to bump into.’
Murray nodded at the unmet Sheila’s wisdom, relieved he’d soon be rid of his new landlord. He thought of Alan Garrett and remembered Audrey saying that he wasn’t over the limit.
‘I heard there was a bad crash on the island a couple of years back.’
Pete’s expression grew serious.
‘Not long after we arrived. Sheila was really upset by it. Kept saying what if one of the kids had been walking by when it happened? What if he’d hit them instead of the tree? We’d met him too. Seemed like a nice guy, a family man. I heard he left a wife and kiddie.’
‘Was he under the influence?’
‘Apparently not.’ Pete gave him a half-suspicious look. ‘You didn’t know him, did you? I heard he was a university lecturer.’
‘No.’ Murray remembered the photograph of Alan Garrett that sat at his son’s bedside. ‘I heard about it, though. Bad news travels.’
‘That’s the truth.’ Pete clicked his torch on and off, pointing its beam at the edge of the room, as if the sudden shafts of light helped him think. ‘I shouldn’t do that, I’ll waste the battery.’ He set it back on the table and looked at Murray. ‘If I tell you something, will you promise it’ll go no further?’
‘Of course.’
The crofter looked Murray in the eye, as if assessing his sincerity. Either he decided to trust him, or the pull of what he wanted to say was strong enough to make Pete disregard any doubts, because he continued, ‘I never mentioned it to Sheila — she was upset enough as it was — but I’ve often wondered if he did it deliberately.’
Murray remembered the piles of journals devoted to suicides, the carefully logged statistics detailing artists’ age, gender, sexuality and the means they’d used to end their life. But the notion that Alan Garrett had committed suicide sat badly beside what he knew of his wife and child. He couldn’t imagine how the smiling man on the mountainside could have wanted to abandoned them.
‘Why?’
Pete shrugged his shoulders. There was something in the gesture that made Murray wonder if there had ever been a time when he’d contemplated smashing his tractor into a tree or convenient wall. He remembered the sickening feeling when his dad’s car had slewed towards Christie’s, the relief when he’d managed to bring it to a halt, and said, ‘I guess you’re sincere if you hit something as solid as that at full speed.’
‘That’s the thing.’ The small man’s voice was pensive. ‘You’ll have driven that road a few times yourself now. If you think on it, you’ll remember there’s not much along there that you could crash into that would have much of an impact. Sure, there are plenty dykes, but they’re low. I’ve dwelt on it more than’s healthy. That tree was about the only thing guaranteed to do the job. If he didn’t mean it, it was very bad luck.’
‘Bad luck anyway.’
Pete nodded and tipped back the last of the whisky in his glass.
‘Not a very cheerful subject for your first night.’
‘No.’ Murray forced a smile. ‘So tell me about the sheep.’
The crofter grinned.
‘Why? Is there one you’ve got your eye on?’
They talked farming, then university and education, until the whisky was gone. Murray offered a dram from his own bottle. Pete hesitated, and then turned him down.
‘I’d best get back. That’s one thing about this life, early to bed, early to rise. It doesn’t make you wealthy and wise, but it sure as hell makes you want to avoid hangovers.’ He leant into one of the boxes and pulled out an unset mouse trap. ‘You’ll maybe need one of these. The little buggers like to come in out of the cold at this time of year. Can’t blame them, I suppose. I’ll lend you one of the cats for a few days if they become a problem.’