by John Burke
Luke bumped the car at last on to a smoother, wider road and stopped in front of the central door. ‘Used to be the girnel — the Rent House, where the tenants came to pay their rents in kind.’
‘Before the rents were refused without reason,’ said Morwenna quietly, ‘and they were driven out anyway.’
‘Under adaptation’ — Ogilvie had been waiting to get his word in — ‘as a Museum and Interpretation Centre to supplement the restored croft.’ He opened his window and waved to a workman who had come round the corner of the building. ‘A word with you, my guid man.’
The man approached warily. ‘If it’s that you’re coming here to make more trouble —’
‘We represent the Ross Foundation. We are paying you for the work you’re supposed to be doing. And we’ve come to find out what the delays are. I have had reports of everything falling behind, and of some outside interference.’
‘Aye. If you’re really wanting to know, I’d say you’d have less trouble if you was to turn yon building into a distillery. Ye’d be doing a good trade with all the huntin’ and shootin’ folk.’
‘Your opinion’s not invited. We’re here to talk about this job and how it can be speeded up.’
‘Aye. Then you’d best be talking to Mr McAlister.’
The foreman was a well-set man with gingery whiskers and tobacco-stained teeth. His manner was courteous, but by no means deferential. You felt that while you might not like what he said, it would be well thought out and bluntly honest.
‘We’ve been having trouble, that’s the way it is. Things we’ve put up during the day get pulled down at night.’
‘By some local ghosts?’ Ogilvie sneered.
McAlister’s tone remained steady. He pointed to the collapsed scaffolding at the end of the building. ‘Something wi’ a lot more strength than bogles. They’d not be wanting the work finished. Not wanting any part of it here.’ Things got pulled down overnight, he explained. Sacks of rubble were strewn over the floors inside or tipped into the burn, clogging it so that it overflowed. Lorry tyres were slashed.
‘Damn it, man, don’t you have a watchman? With what we’re paying you, you could afford a man to keep his eyes open all night. And report any intrusions immediately to the local police. Do you just sleep through any sort of noise?’
McAlister, keeping his temper in the teeth of Ogilvie’s squeaky aggressiveness, explained that his workmen were accommodated in three caravans — ‘near the hotel over yonder.’ They all came from Glasgow. There were few local contractors of any size in this bleak region, and those craftsmen who did small local repairs and maintenance jobs wouldn’t touch this one. Local landowners had made it clear that they might no longer employ anyone who worked on this site.
‘I set a watchman over here to start with. Took it in turns. But one got badly hit, and there was no-one to pin it on. Told it was an accident, but we’re getting the message.’
‘Ridiculous, in this day and age. What are the police doing about it? You have bothered to get in touch with the police?’
McAlister’s patience showed signs of fraying. ‘Police? How many police d’you think they can let loose over this godforsaken wilderness?’
‘There were enough in the old days,’ said Morwenna quietly to Lesley. ‘Enough police to beat up old men and women and children when they tried to resist being thrown out of their homes. Enough to smash in women’s skulls and trample them into the ground.’
Ogilvie was blustering on. ‘When you take on a job of this kind, it’s your responsibility to install necessary safeguards. If you can’t contact the police, it’s up to you to adopt precautions of your own.’
McAlister took a long time to reply. At last he said, as if explaining to a confused child: ‘I’ll tell you how it is. We’ve needed protection once or twice on other jobs. Working on a ferry terminal last year, there was a wee bit of a dispute between two companies. Could gie ye the name of a security group in Ullapool, if it’d be of any help.’
Ogilvie harrumphed for a few seconds. ‘I don’t see we should allow ourselves to be terrorized into a position of having to commit further expenditure to the employment of mercenaries. Surely the responsibility lies with you and your —’
From the back of the car Morwenna said: ‘Take the address of those security people. Get in touch the moment we reach the hotel. We don’t have time to waste. Mr Ross is already getting very impatient with this whole thing.’
Lesley wondered how much bribery or back-scratching or hands in back pockets — call it what you like — there would be before this job was finished. She was growing fidgety about her own involvement in the project.
They drove on.
Luke smoothly resumed his self-appointed task of tourist guide as they came to the three caravans McAlister had mentioned and were approaching the Raven Hotel: a long two-storey white-harled building with a single-storey wing at the east end, sheltering a car park. ‘Used to be a hunting lodge, set up after the strath had been cleared,’ Luke explained. ‘Sheep runs over to the west, shooting and stalking up through the north-east. Then it was tarted up a bit for the sporting types and passing tourists, and a small bar for the locals. Not all that many of those, I’d imagine.’
‘And we bought it,’ said Ogilvie smugly. ‘Bought it a couple of years ago under the noses of the local squires and brought it up to modern standards. They still use it themselves — nowhere else to go — but they’ve hated every minute of being beholden to us.’
Four men in heavy tweeds emerged from the hotel and leaned on shooting sticks, sizing up the newcomers as if choosing the best angle from which to fire at them.
‘Waiting to break in and tear out all the bedroom fittings, and disconnect the water and electricity?’ said Morwenna.
‘Well … um … I’m not saying they’d go that far,’ said Ogilvie.
‘Who knows what they may have inherited from their accursed forebears? They thought nothing of tearing a building apart. Or tearing up the bodies of those inside.’
The man at the head of the group waited for them to get out of the car, and then said: ‘Come to see what a shambles this whole operation is? Got the sense to put a stop to it?’
‘Colonel Ferguson, I think,’ said Ogilvie stiffly. ‘I believe we’ve met before.’
The man’s face was a blotchy red: red with a permanent irritation, perhaps, plus a fair amount of drink taken in the hotel bar. His mouth produced a spluttering bark rather than a voice. ‘So we have. When you’ve been up here trespassing on my land.’
‘Using a right of way.’
‘Load of nonsense. We’re the people who keep this land fit for use, and we’re the ones who decide on rights of any damn thing.’ He sported a very English accent, with a little puff of breath sounding like ‘wha’ at the end of each heavily emphatic sentence. His thick lower lip had a permanent droop of contempt, as if it required a great effort of condescension for him to speak at all. For all the English assumptions of his voice, his clothing was demonstratively tweedy, with trews in a tartan which Lesley felt was trying to lay claim to some family relationship with the Campbells’. He was staring at her. ‘And who might this be?’
‘Lady Torrance,’ said Ogilvie, his voice and his body somehow standing to attention. ‘Colonel Sholto Ferguson.’
‘Och, aye.’ The man was suddenly overdoing a comic Scottish accent as if wanting in some way to caricature what was going on around them. ‘I believe I’ve met your husband at some Border function. The baronet by the back door — that’s him, hey?’
His bloodshot eyes took in Morwenna. Before he could speak, she said: ‘I’m Morwenna Ross.’
‘Ah, so the sad old goat’s found another wife. To make up for the one he lost to me?’
‘I’m Mr Ross’s daughter-in-law.’
‘Ah, yes. The one with the husband who couldn’t even sail a toy boat.’
One of the men behind him mumbled what might have been a protest.
Ogilvie m
ade a louder one. ‘Whatever your pretensions, Colonel Ferguson, I’ll not stand here and let you insult these ladies.’
‘Don’t worry, Mr Ogilvie.’ Morwenna was still quiet and steady. ‘We were well aware we could expect no courtesy from descendants of the rogues who took brutal pleasure out of the Clearances.’
‘Oh, God, not that old story again? Clearances? There never were any. People were given their fares to clear off overseas and settle in lands that suited them better. Clearances? Sentimental claptrap.’
‘Along this very strath, Patrick Sellars harassed families who for generations had —’
‘Patrick Sellars cleared the region of layabouts, and was himself cleared in open court of any wrongdoing.’
‘A court whose jury consisted of eight landed proprietors and a couple of livestock merchants.’
‘Nitpicking,’ bellowed Ferguson. ‘The likes of you got nowhere then, and you’ll get nowhere now.’
He stomped away, leading his companions to a 4x4 parked at the far end of the hotel.
Where his eyes had been blearily quarrelsome, Morwenna’s had gone steely with a dark, cold hatred. Lesley experienced a sharp jolt as if some weapon had bruised her as it swung past — as if Morwenna really believed she might strike Ferguson down by the sheer force of that concentrated hatred.
‘It was the ancestors of those scum who brought in police and the military to humiliate and destroy. Or hired bullies at short notice. Clearly we need to hire our own mercenaries to defend those properties we’re reclaiming.’
Lesley was glad to be out of the car, easing her back and legs after the jolting along lumpy tracks and roads. She put her small travelling bag on the window seat of her single bedroom, looking out across a stark landscape made wildly beautiful under the glow of the setting sun. The sky seemed briefly to grow brighter rather than fade submissively into twilight, with the great leonine hulk of distant Ben Hope black against the glow.
As she went downstairs again, Ogilvie was obediently phoning the security firm, to be informed by a recorded message that they would be reopening at nine o’clock the following morning, but if it was an urgent message regarding one of their present commitments there was a sequence of individual emergency numbers.
They had agreed to meet for dinner in half an hour. Lesley went out into the long-lasting twilight.
The wind which had buffeted the car on the way here had dropped, leaving an uncanny stillness. She took a few steps away from the bright windows of the hotel, and watched the light along the far horizon gradually seeping away below stretches of dark strips of cloud, some humped as if following the contours of the braes below. A few yards ahead of her on a low knoll was the even darker silhouette of a heap of stones.
‘The cairn of the weeping stones.’ A croaky voice came out of the shadow of a tree.
She gasped at the sudden sound, and peered into the gloom. An old woman was sitting hunched on a branch twisted down to ground level. There was just enough light from the side door of the hotel to pick out her bowed shoulders and narrow face with its short, jutting nose.
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t notice there was anyone —’
‘’Twas built by the family from the brae yonder. A large stone for each of the parents, and a wee one for each bairn. It stands right where they had their last sight o’ hame. Disturb them now, and they’ll weep blood.’ The woman edged her way closer to Lesley and, her face still in shadow, peered at her closely. ‘No, you’re no’ the one.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘It has been said by the Braham Seer that a dark woman will come out o’ the west and settle the scores o’ the dispossessed.’ It was an incantation that could have sounded embarrassingly silly; but in this weird dusk its resonances sent a chill down Lesley’s arms.
She tried, clumsily, to keep it casual. ‘There are plenty of legends around these parts, I can tell.’
‘And if it’s that ye’re staying a while, ye’ll learn they mean no good to incomers. There were folk who took away handfuls o’ grass and soil from the graves of their kinfolk — and left behind them an undying curse on those as would meddle.’
Lesley was tempted to say this all sounded like a fine basis for a horror film; but at the same time she was conscious that it was no laughing matter.
Nick had made a joke of it at the weekend. ‘Hey, all this rough stuff out there. Can’t I come along to look after you — ride shotgun?’
She hadn’t been over-worried by the sullen men at the road junction, or by Ferguson and his companions. But now they had arrived safely, she felt absurdly unsafe, more than she had ever felt as a serving police officer in the thick of violence. All of them here needed defending against something less tangible.
‘You know what we’re here for?’ she asked.
‘Och aye,1 ken well what you’ll be trying to mend. But there’ll only be more deaths to add to those souls already destroyed.’
The woman struggled to her feet and walked past Lesley into the hotel. As Lesley followed, the manager came out of his office, said, ‘Goodnight, Mrs Aird’, and smiled at Lesley. ‘You’ve met the old crone, I see.’
‘Old crone? Not very complimentary.’
‘Mrs Aird plays up to it, bless her. We have to keep her on. Done the cleaning here since the hotel was set up. A real character. They say she has the second sight, but she’s not the only one round here. Our regular visitors love all that. Always call her the old crone, and she always has a fine retort for any of them.’ He raised a welcoming hand as Morwenna walked through. ‘You’ll all be going in to dinner now?’
Mrs Aird had stopped for a moment by the service door. She and Morwenna stared briefly at each other. Then Mrs Aird shook her head and went on through the door.
Ogilvie was fussing in the dining room. ‘You’ll be sitting by me, Mrs Ross? We do have a lot to talk about. And first thing in the morning I’ll check we’ve got that security matter settled, and then we can go to see the croft itself, right? That’s what it’s really all about, isn’t it?’
Lesley glanced over her shoulder. Mrs Aird’s shadow, uninvited, was somehow still with them, her voice still echoing. All part of the service — over-acting for the sake of visitors?
More deaths to add to those already destroyed …?
9
Ten minutes after she had settled at her desk in the morning, Beth’s phone rang. She assumed the call was most likely to be a chatty progress report from Luke or maybe a fussy demand for some piece of information from Ogilvie.
‘Beth.’ It was Shirley at the switchboard. ‘There’s a Mr Grant asking for you. A Randal Grant. Do you want to talk to him, or do I tell him you’re in conference?’
‘Conference, at this hour in the morning?’ There was an odd tingling in her toes, but she kept her voice steady. ‘No, I suppose I’d better talk to him.’
As he began speaking she conjured up an immediate picture of him sprawled languidly in that wicker chair in the corner of his studio. Yet his voice was actually crisp and businesslike.
‘I’ve got a nice set of prints to show you.’
‘What, already?’
‘We aim to please.’
‘Have you been up all night?’
‘Nothing else to do with my nights.’ This time laughter did creep into his voice. ‘No, really, it’s not that complicated a process.’
‘Can you bring them round?’
The pause seemed interminable. At last he said: ‘Naturally Mrs Ferguson will expect me to make a personal delivery. But for your batch … well, your place is always so full of hustle and bustle. I thought perhaps you’d like to come round here again, where we won’t be interrupted.’
Now she was the one to sustain a silence. But she knew all along what her answer would be. ‘I’ve got a few things to sort out here.’ Which was quite untrue. ‘I could be round with you in about half-an-hour.’
‘I’ll have the coffee pot on the go.’
She then had to find a few mean
ingless things to fill in the time she had committed herself to. When she did leave the building she was walking briskly as she always did, but more breathlessly than usual.
The smell of coffee did indeed greet her as Randal opened the door. He was dressed in a grey shirt and fawn chinos, and his feet were bare. He smelt as if he had just stepped out of the shower.
‘Hello. Nice morning.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Hello.’
A line of photographic prints had been pinned up on a wall board. One of the most striking grabbed her attention immediately. But her eyes strayed. Propped on an easel at an angle from the display was the portrait study of herself he had taken on her last visit.
‘Attractive, isn’t it?’ said Randal. ‘Beautiful, in fact.’
She did not remember having felt as wistful as that half-profile suggested. Nor had she deliberately parted her lips slightly in that amused, provocative way.
‘It’s … flattering,’ she said. ‘But then, I suppose it’s your job to make your sitters look more striking than they really are.’
‘False modesty …’ He waited for a long moment, then added: ‘Beth.’ It was the first time he had used her name. She would not have expected him to sound so shy. As if to make up for it, he rushed on: ‘It would be nice to have the rest of you in the frame.’
‘To add to your collection of conquests?’
‘To keep apart. Very special.’
‘I think we’d better concentrate on Mrs Ferguson’s possessions. That’s what I’m supposed to be here for.’
His prints made an impressive array. Somehow he had brought out a depth that, incongruously, hadn’t existed within the rooms of the house itself. The large painting of Sholto Ferguson would have made a superb recruiting poster. The way Randal had angled his view on the Indian room made it look almost three-dimensional. But the most striking subject was that of a wooden raven’s head, looking more like a Viking figurehead than what it really was — the head of a totem pole from the American Indian room.
