by Jeff Gulvin
As soon as she had let the hens out and spread enough corn to keep them going for a day or two, she loaded her gear into the Land-Rover and drove up to the field. Keira, perhaps sensing the urgency of their mountain rides now, trotted down from the top of the hill and stood waiting to be saddled. Imogen ran her hands over her head and kissed her where a lock of her mane hung between her eyes. Fifteen minutes later they were through the gap in the fence at the top of the field and riding north for the coire.
On the far side of the log bridge that spanned the River Leum she met William Morris the gamekeeper. He was a short, chubby man with red and roughened cheeks—skin persistently gnawed by Scottish weather. He was on his own, wearing a tweed jacket and tie, as was expected by the new Arabian laird. Morris spotted her as she approached the bridge through the pass, standing as he was on a hilltop, shotgun broken and crooked under his arm. He wore stiff-soled boots and gaiters and a flat cap pulled low to his eyebrows which sprouted stray hairs at various angles.
‘Ms Munro.’ He touched his cap with an index finger. Imogen felt clammy fingers of sweat at the nape of her neck.
‘Hello, Mr Morris.’ She eased Keira to a standstill and looked down at him. Keira champed on her bit, rattled the metal against her teeth and tossed her head.
‘You still like to ride, I see.’
‘Aye, I still like to ride.’ Imogen had never liked Morris. He was a grandfather three times over yet leched after just about any woman with a pulse. He shifted the gun from one arm to the other and rubbed his jaw with thick dirt-grained fingers.
‘What brings you this way?’
‘Nothing in particular.’ Imogen walked the horse around him. ‘I’ll see you, Mr Morris.’
‘Not if I see you first.’ He cackled at his joke and watched her till she rounded the bend in the trail.
One hundred yards south of the loch, Keira almost stepped on a peregrine falcon. She shied suddenly, nearly unseating Imogen, who gripped with her legs and steadied the horse beneath her. Keira regained her footing, shook her head and whinnied a lament that echoed across the valley. Imogen slipped out of the saddle and walked back to the bird. It was dead. She touched it with gloved fingers; it was stiff and cold. Carefully, she prised apart the feathers. There was no sign of any wound, no birdshot or animal marks, and anything hunting would have eaten it long before now. The area around where it lay seemed to reek of death; her imagination was fired by the fear Imogen suddenly felt. She looked back down the trail. Morris, although gamekeeper to the estate, was a long-time friend of Atholl McKenzie and kept vermin under control for him as a favour. It was no skin off Morris’s nose, as he had looked after this area when it was still part of the estate.
Quickly now, scouring the landscape for movement, Imogen stripped the saddle bags from Keira’s back and rummaged for the hessian bag she used to stow the horse’s carrots in. It was empty and just about big enough to house the dead peregrine; Imogen wrapped the bird carefully, then transferred everything else from the bag to the other one before refastening the straps. She stood and caught Keira’s reins, and the horse wheeled in a circle as she mounted, hopping for a moment on one foot. She hoisted herself up and, as she did so, she caught sight of Morris striding back along the trail. He was 100 yards behind her and had rounded the curve of the hill. When he saw her he stopped. Imogen, her heart beating fast, ignored him, and with a squeeze of her legs, eased Keira into a trot.
She knew now she would have to be careful not to arouse suspicion. Morris was heading back this way, albeit some distance behind her. She wanted to get to the coire as quickly as possible to check on the eagles. But at the same time, she didn’t want to be spotted doing so by him. It was a dilemma, and one that made her angry. She would bet her life that the bird in the saddlebag had been poisoned. As soon as she got home she would contact Daniel Johnson and get the society’s lab to check the carcass. It was illegal to poison falcons, especially peregrines, which were still few and far between. If McKenzie was killing peregrines he wouldn’t hesitate to poison eagles.
She rode on to Tana Coire, determining that if Morris or McKenzie or any of his men showed up, she would openly challenge them about the eagles. But nobody did, and she let Keira graze the banks of the loch while she sat in the afternoon sun, which bled weakly over the land, and watched the sky for movement. She sat for three hours and saw nothing, and was contemplating climbing the crags to check the nest itself when all at once a patch of darkness gained definition against the height of the mountain. Closer and closer it came, and the shape became a bird, and the bird an eagle; Imogen sat transfixed as it dived for trout. She was thrilled and terrified at the same time. All it needed now was for Morris to show up. But he didn’t. The white tail fished in peace and then soared, taking the final catch, impaled on its talons, back to the relative safety of its eyrie.
As soon as Imogen got home she dialled Johnson’s number. They agreed to meet halfway between Gaelloch and Inverness for Imogen to hand over the peregrine’s carcass. They met at a pub, had a brief drink together, then Imogen gave him the dead bird. Johnson took the hessian bag gingerly. ‘How close to the loch was it?’ he asked her.
‘About half a mile.’
He nodded and grimaced. ‘If this is poison, we’ll go and see Atholl McKenzie.’
Twelve
CONNLA CALLED HIS EX-WIFE from the payphone in the hotel lobby. Before he had left Washington the biology faculty had been on to him about teaching summer school again. He had considered it, needing the money badly, but there was no way now he would be back in time.
‘I just thought I’d let you know there’s no way I’m gonna be able to do it. Can you tell them for me? This is a great opportunity, Holly. I’ve got a chance of getting one of these cats on film.’
‘How much of a chance?’
‘Well, I’m not sure yet. But there was a sighting only the day before yesterday, and I ran into a fella I figure can help me out. It’s a chance I gotta take. Nobody’s ever got a definitive photograph before. The interest here is huge. I mean national-TV huge. If I can be the man with the camera, it’ll put me on the map.’
There was a short silence and then she said, ‘Why are you telling me, Connla? Why don’t you call the faculty direct.’ She paused then. ‘This isn’t your way of warning me you might not be back for the first semester, is it? It damn well better not be. I’ve put my neck on the block for you here.’
‘No, it’s not that, Holl. I just wanted to keep you informed.’
‘Why exactly?’
He had no answer for her. All at once he wondered at himself. Was this to do with the teaching, or just keeping a link with the past. ‘Are you telling me we talk too much?’
‘Yes. Don’t you think so?’
‘I don’t know. I guess. Yeah, if you wanna look at it like that.’
‘Look, I’m busy, Connla. I don’t mean to rush you off, but I’ve got meetings.’
‘OK. I’m sorry.’
‘Just don’t let me down. OK?’
‘OK. Bye.’ He hung up, pushed back his hat and scratched at the sweat in his hairline.
He took a walk into town, his thoughts shifting restlessly about in his head. Why did he call her so much? What was it about him and the past that he never quite wanted to let things go? It had never occurred to him until right at that moment, but that was how it was: a fear of letting things go. He recalled how gutted he had been when Holly had told him their lives were too separate to stay married any longer. He knew she was right, but that didn’t stop the sudden emptiness inside him. Maybe he ought to talk to somebody about it, because no doubt it had something to do with his parents and Ewan Munro’s death. But that would mean heavy discussion, and he couldn’t bear the thought of raking old coals. He shook his sudden depression away, walked up the high street and stopped at a little craft shop.
The trouble with Holly was that all the time they were married she had never got away from the idea of him making chair of the facul
ty in some Ivy League university. Yet it had been his very wildness of spirit, his dishevelled restlessness, that had attracted her in the first place. She had told him as much after they’d got together, while he was finishing his doctorate. Ironic, then, that she had spent the entire duration of their married life trying to ease the wilderness out of him.
He browsed among the knick-knacks, the little bits of Scotland for sale. Nothing appealed to him, it was either too twee or too crass, then he noticed a spiral display of greetings cards with various highland scenes depicted on them. One in particular caught his eye: a painting of a red deer stag, his head high, the last of the velvet fraying from his antlers. He glanced at some of the others; they looked like the same artist had painted them, though none of them were signed. A mountain scene where the rock was black and grey with a great fissure running through it. Hillsides, lochs—all beautifully painted.
He was about to pick up the one of the stag when he stopped. His mouth went dry and a shiver prickled his hair. Another card—a loch, with the surface ruffled into white horses and the hills rising beyond it. It was viewed through a four-paned window, and it was the window that caught his attention. There on the sill, half hidden by a yellow-and-blue curtain, was a little wooden figure. Connla stared at it and felt sweat break out on his palms. A native American Indian, arms to the heavens, head thrown back, an eagle feather and the broken stem of another clutched in his right hand.
He walked outside, the atmosphere in the shop suddenly stifling; it stopped up his throat like an infection. For a long moment he stood on the pavement, looking through the faces of the meandering tourists. The world pressed in on him, darkness at the edge of his mind, a darkness he hadn’t experienced in years. He could feel how quickly his heart was beating, and the confines of the small town seemed to press him against the earth. He started to walk, avoiding the pavements, moving up the road towards the bridge on the outside of the parked cars. He walked quickly. The sun seemed to have gone, yet he could see it still high in the sky.
A wind ruffled the waters of the River Tay, high with the spring rainfall, soaking the long grass at the edge of the banks. Connla picked his way down, moving past the children’s playground, where mothers pushed their infants on swings and watched nervously as the younger ones climbed the steps of the slide. He heard their laughter, and yet he did not hear them, only the stillness in his head and the loose slap of water. Crouching to his haunches, he sucked in breath and looked to the far bank. A fisherman drifted under the bridge in a boat, trolling for rainbow trout. The river seemed to roar and yet the sound was not from there; it was wedged deep in the past and Connla knew it.
Surrounded by Douglas Fir trees, their height accentuated by the tenderness of his years and the knowledge he suddenly carried. Knowledge that nobody else knew and, no matter how much he wanted them to, nobody could ever share. Running through the trees with the branches picking at him like the fingers of witches from story books. The path twisted this way and that; boulders, great hunks of rock, faces etched in the stone, watching him as he fled, accusing him with their silence. He paused and panted, and for one moment thought it couldn’t be, but then the stitch in his side, his parched and swollen tongue, the reddened sand that clung to the soles of his shoes. They would never believe what he told them. He knew they would never believe him. At that moment, barely ten years old, he knew he was blighted for ever. He had slowed to a walk, knowing that running was useless now, yet run he must, sweat he had to. He lingered for a moment to catch his breath and the face of the sun seemed to be missing from the sky; the trunks of the great trees crowded the path and forced it, dwindling into darkness.
He stood again, watching the current pluck at reeds beneath the surface of the Tay. Someone had walked on his grave. That’s what it felt like. Memory flooded back as if his finger had been snatched from the dyke and the whole thing had collapsed in seconds. He saw the face of his father soused with whisky, the broken veins in his cheeks red, blue and black in some places. The bulbous swelling of his nose and the watered yellow eyes that belonged to a man twice his age. He saw his mother, sitting nervously in the chair she always sat in, clicking her teeth and rubbing one hand over the other in a state of perpetual agitation. He saw the sheriff’s face, cropped hair, dark patches of sweat under his arms, thick red-knuckled fingers and white straw hat. He heard again the questions, hours and hours of questions, and smelled the stain of chewing tobacco on his breath. He saw his mother’s frightened red eyes from the other side of the table. He saw Ewan Munro’s face and felt again the terrible silence at school.
That first day back in Wyoming, before the funeral or the memorial or anything, when he had walked into school on his own and every eye had turned his way, as if they could see right through him. There was suspicion in his own mother’s eyes, she who had brought him into the world, so why not in those of his peers. Ewan had been his best friend, and when you were Ewan Munro’s friend there was something selfish about it. So Connla had walked into school that first morning on his own, and he would remain on his own for as long as he stayed there. Nobody spoke to him, nobody said a word, not pupil or teacher. They just looked on in that peculiar silent way, unease etched in their faces.
He leaned against the side of the bridge for a moment, listening to the excited shriek of the children playing behind him. He fumbled in his pocket for the pack of cigarettes he had bought but hardly smoked. He had to steady his hand as he lit one. He eased the smoke into his lungs, held it and exhaled, then felt giddy and a little sick in the same moment. He almost tossed the burning cigarette into the river, but he sucked again and the nicotine seemed to calm him. He took two more powerful drags and then flipped it away, exhaled through his nose and stuffed his hands into his pockets.
He saw Imogen’s face, as clear as if she still stood before him with that yellow blanket dragging over her shoulder. Her eyes were clear and cool and they looked into his soul in a way that no-one had ever done before. She looked at him while he sat on the log; she looked at him in the Sheriff’s office and every day at school. The other kids looked with suspicion and unease, but Imogen, Imogen looked with certainty.
And now this, like the hand of God all at once on his shoulder, stopping him in his tracks and wheeling him round to face a past he had denied. Slowly he walked back to the shop, and the assistant smiled at him from behind the counter. Connla did not smile. He stopped at the card display and looked again at the scene. Breath caught in his throat, and he hesitated a moment before picking up the card and laying it on the counter. ‘Would you know who painted this?’ he asked, suddenly unsure of his voice. The woman picked it up and inspected it for the signature he already knew was missing. ‘I really couldn’t tell you.’
Connla nodded. ‘You figure there’s any way of finding out?’ He gestured to the others. ‘I think the same artist painted them all. They must be reductions of larger paintings. This stag was done in oil, for sure.’ He paused to show her. ‘I’m only here for a while and I’d like to maybe buy a painting to take back to the States.’
The woman frowned for a second and shook her head. ‘I really don’t know,’ she said. ‘I suppose I could ask the wholesaler, get them to ask the card publisher maybe.’
‘Could you do that for me? I’m going to be away for a few days, but I can pop in when I get back.’
‘Fine,’ she said. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’
Connla thanked her, paid for the card and went back to the hotel.
Harry Cullen was waiting for him, sitting in the open doorwell of his battered VW truck. The pitbull poked its head out from under the camper top, saliva dripping in big gobs from its jaws. Cullen flipped away the butt of his cigarette and leered. It must have been intended as a smile but definitely came out as a leer, and Connla began to wonder at his choice of travelling companion. Cullen hefted a bag from the passenger seat and made his way round to the back.
‘We’ll take your wagon,’ he said. ‘I’ll have to driv
e if we go off road.’
Connla glanced at the battered VW. ‘No problem,’ he said. ‘Guess you’re bringing the dog, huh?’
‘Of course. I don’t go anywhere without him. He’s a good tracker, Mr McAdam. They use them to hunt wild boar in New Zealand.’ Cullen showed his grey-and-yellow teeth again and called to the dog. It jumped from the tailgate and sat down at his feet.
‘He certainly does as he’s told,’ Connla said.
Cullen smiled again. ‘He does what I tell him, right enough.’
Connla felt the shiver down his spine. ‘Right enough,’ he mimicked under his breath, and opened the back door of the Land-Rover. ‘Dump your stuff in here.’ He already had his overnight bag and camera equipment set out in the back. Cullen laid his travel bag next to it, then hefted a much longer rifle bag alongside. Connla stared at it, hands on his hips. ‘What’ve you got there?’
‘Magnum.’
‘A sniper’s rifle?’
‘Hunting rifle, Mr McAdam. We’re going after leopard, remember.’
Connla looked at him squarely then. ‘We’re not going to shoot one, though.’
Cullen turned back to him, a sour expression on his face. ‘Are you telling me you don’t take a gun along when you track your mountain lions?’
Connla thought about it then. It was true, he borrowed an old 30/30, just in case of trouble. If a mountain lion wanted to eat you, he could. But he looked again at the long leather rifle case and two things struck him: first it was incongruous; he didn’t associate guns with the UK, even if they were trying to track down a leopard. Second, his old 30/30 was a short-range self-defence weapon; the gun that Cullen had brought was the kind an FBI sniper might use.
