I sighed as I stared out across the glittering water, rolling, grey and brown hills surrounding the long, narrow loch. If the Loch Ness Monster really did exist, like my father had been obsessed with proving, there was no sign of it today. The only movement on the water were the gentle ripples raised by the constant wind and the occasional splash of a fish leaping into the air.
Sam turned to face the loch, holding the picture up in front of her so she could make sure she had all the landmarks lined up just right. Her brown hair was piled high on her head in a messy bun, and each puff of wind pulled another strand free and sent it floating about her face. Her nose was red from a cold she was still fighting off. Her green eyes matched mine, intense as she squinted at the photo.
“Do you see anything?” she asked.
“I see the loch,” I answered. I couldn’t figure out how I felt about all this. I’d humoured her crazy theory about how our father had disappeared because of the Loch Ness Monster for many years even as I simply believed he’d up and walked out on us, but then Martin found that reflection in the picture, and I no longer knew what to think. As blurry as the image was, it was still clear that someone had been ready to attack Alasdair, though the who and the why remained to be seen.
Sam glared at me. “Be serious. Do you see anything weird or suspicious or out of place?”
“Sam, Dad took this photo over a decade ago. Any clues as to what happened are going to be long gone.”
“Let’s try a reenactment,” Sam suggested, tucking the picture into the inside pocket of her coat for safekeeping. “I’ll pretend to hit you from behind, and we’ll see what would have happened.”
“Fine,” I agreed. “Just don’t actually hit me.” Sam dropped the stick she’d been picking up for that exact purpose.
She took her spot behind me and positioned her arms like she was holding a cricket bat, swinging it forward in slow motion, aimed at my back. We stood on a slight rise so it was an easy angle for her.
I pretended to stagger forward, trying to think of what I would actually do if I’d suddenly been hit from behind. I’d probably trip, drop to my knees, and roll. I didn’t actually go through with it, not wanting to get my trousers damp, but I walked towards the edge of the loch, groaning, “Oh no,” in a bored, drawn-out tone.
We weren’t far from the water. Alasdair probably would have wound up wet, staring up at his assailant in confusion. Was it someone he knew? Was there a spark of recognition, of betrayal in his eyes when he realized what had happened?
Alasdair MacBain was a data analyst and cryptid hunter, not a fighter. He wouldn’t have known what to do or how to react. He probably would have tried to run. But in which direction? I looked left and right, trying to get into my father’s head. It was hard, since it turned out I’d hardly known a thing about him. Far to the right was Urquhart Castle, a single tower and several tumbled walls that sat just above the water’s edge. Too far to run to. To the left, the grassy, tree-studded hills stretched their long arms out around the loch, and straight in front of me, up a long hill, was the road where his car had no doubt been parked, though he would have had to dodge around his assailant as they stalked towards him, just as Sam was doing now, her imaginary stick raised.
If it were me, I would rush Sam, trusting my reflexes and combat ability past her and her weapon, and then I would run for the car, but would Alasdair have been brave enough to do that or would he have wanted to get as far away as possible? I supposed he could have gone backwards as well, into the water, but I couldn’t think of what good that would do him.
“Bam, you’re unconscious,” Sam said and brought her invisible stick down on my head.
“Switch places with me,” I said, and she dutifully handed me her weapon and took my place beside the water. “What would you do if you’d just been attacked and were on the ground, dazed, with them coming towards you for another blow?” Our mother had taught Sam some self-defence, but she’d still have more of a civilian reaction to the situation than I would.
“How do we know Dad wasn’t knocked out with that first blow?” she asked.
I held out my hand for the picture, and she handed me the blown-up version. “The angle. It looks like it would have hit him in the back. And this fall wouldn’t be far enough or hard enough to do any real damage if he hit his head.”
Sam puzzled over it, looking around as I had.
“Don’t think, react,” I said. “Dad wouldn’t have had time to study the terrain.”
“I’d either try to get to my car, or, if I felt I couldn’t do that, run for the castle.” She pointed towards the faraway Urquhart Castle. “Because there’d probably be people there.”
There were at least a couple of kilometres of open, uneven ground between us and the castle. My dad had been in shape, but he’d also hated running.
“He would have gone for his car,” I said. “We have to assume he didn’t make it.”
“Why?”
“Because if he’d gotten away, we would have heard about him getting attacked.”
“Oh.” Sam’s face fell as she truly realized that we were not in the middle of a game here, that we were not putting on a play. Whatever was in that photograph had really happened to our father, though time and distance made it feel so very far away.
But the events of a decade ago weren’t going to reveal themselves to us, and disappointment curdled my stomach. Despite my staunch disbelief in my family’s various theories about Alasdair’s disappearance, there was a small part of me that still hoped we’d find something today, that younger self who was still struggling in university, desperate for my father to return and help.
“Let’s go,” I said with a sigh. “There’s nothing here.”
“No, come on, there has to be something,” Sam protested. “We just need to look harder.”
“There’s not!” I yelled, temper snapping. My words echoed across the loch to be swallowed by the waves and fed to whatever make-believe monster lived beneath them. Sam’s face crumbled as she flinched away, shoulders hunching. “It doesn’t matter if there was some grand conspiracy or not because either way, he left, and he’s not coming back.”
I crumpled up the blown-up image and flung it away, intending to cast it into the water and be done with it, but the wind caught the little ball and knocked it to the side, sending it tumbling through the grass until it bumped up against a pair of boots.
A man in a well-worn green coat and turtleneck jumper stooped and picked the paper up, leaning heavily on a silver-headed cane as he straightened. His grey beard was thick but neatly trimmed, a dark hat crammed on his head despite the slowly warming day. “Littering is generally frowned upon, laddie,” he said. His eyes were dark, hard to read, and something about him set off a warning light in my head. It seemed like he had simply appeared there. With how open the ground was, I should have seen him coming.
“Sorry. It got away from me,” I said and held out my hand for the picture as Sam stepped behind me.
But the man didn’t give it back. Instead, he smoothed it out and looked it over, studying the trapped image. “Are you Alasdair MacBain’s children?”
“Who’s asking?” I demanded. Sam poked her head out from behind me curiously but kept both hands wrapped around my elbow.
The man smiled. “I knew him, back in the day.”
“How?”
“You could call us hunting buddies.”
I narrowed my eyes at him, trying to figure out if I recognized him. He was a large man, tall and broad across the shoulders even at his advanced age which had to be well over sixty. There was confidence in his stance, an ease in which he held his cane, and I wondered if he actually needed it or if it was simply there for show.
“Are you also interested in the Loch Ness Monster?” Sam asked. She slipped out from behind me and stepped towards the man though I tried to push her back. Something felt off to me, and I didn’t want her getting too close.
“Yes. Alasdair and I often w
orked together trying to spot the thing. He never mentioned me?”
“No,” I said coldly. We’d all thought that Alasdair worked alone. He’d email other so-called experts, and he’d had a pen pal for about a year, but he never talked about meeting up with anyone in person. “Who are you?”
“You can call me Kane.” The man bowed, sweeping one arm out behind him.
“Kane what?” I asked. I was going to look up everything I could on this man as soon as I got back to the station.
But Kane simply smiled. “Just before he disappeared, your father told me he had a meeting with someone called the Kraken. That was the last I ever heard from him.”
I rolled my eyes and crossed my arms. “The Kraken? Really? Come off it. People don’t actually use code names.”
Kane shrugged. “Believe me, don’t believe me. It makes no difference to me. I just thought you might like to know what your father was up to in his last days.”
In his last days. That wasn’t ominous at all.
“What are you doing out here today?” Sam asked. Her eyes were bright with this new crumb of information, and I wanted to hold her back, keep her from getting her hopes up too high. No doubt this old man was just pulling our legs, looking for some twisted way to amuse himself as his days began to wane.
“I come out here once a month or so to walk around the loch. Maybe one of these days I’ll see old Nessie, huh?” Kane winked, but I thought the expression seemed rather contrived.
“It’s quite a coincidence that you’re here the same day we are,” I said.
“Well, that’s what a coincidence is,” Kane pointed out and then grinned at Sam. “He’s a suspicious one, isn’t he?”
“It comes with the job,” Sam explained.
“Let’s say I believe you,” I interrupted before the two of them could get too chummy. “How do we find this Kraken person?”
“I’m afraid I can’t help you with that.” Kane sounded apologetic as he spread his hands and shrugged. “Alasdair never said.”
Very convenient.
I clapped my hands together. “Thank you so much for your incredibly cryptic and not at all helpful message. If you don’t mind, my sister and I will be on our way.” I gave Kane a flat smile and grabbed Sam’s wrist, hoping to steer her towards our parked cars. She resisted, curiosity burning across her face, but Kane nodded in farewell and handed me the still wrinkled picture before he walked off, leaving Sam with slumped shoulders and unanswered questions.
We watched him go. He walked with a slight limp, leaning on his cane. “Why are you letting him go?” Sam hissed, yanking her arm from my grasp. “He knows dad.”
“Knew,” I corrected. “There’s something about him I don’t trust.”
Kane didn’t spare us a backwards glance, though he had to know we were still staring at him.
“Promise me we’ll look into the Kraken, okay?” Sam said seriously, holding up her outstretched pinky.
I wrapped my own pinky around hers. “We will. I doubt we’ll find anything, but I promise we’ll at least try.”
“You’re such a pessimist,” Sam said, but she laughed and released my finger.
Side by side, we trekked back up the hill to the road where we’d parked our cars. At the top, I paused and looked down at the loch. Kane was still making his inexorable way towards Urquhart Castle, and something about his dark form against the glittering blue of the water and the soft green grass sent a shiver down my spine.
Three
After our encounter at Loch Ness, I left Sam and drove thirty minutes back to Inverness and was late meeting Fletcher at the police station’s gym. I changed as fast as I could and rushed out of the changing room, struggling to banish thoughts of my father, Kane, and the mysterious Kraken so I could focus on the workout.
Fletcher was stretching as I arrived, bent double as she reached for her toes. She craned her neck to the side to look up at me as I approached, raising an eyebrow as she grinned. “You’re late,” she informed me. Her dark hair was gathered in a plait that tumbled over one shoulder, revealing the short undercut on the other side, and she’d taken out her many ear piercings so they wouldn’t get caught on anything whilst we sparred.
“Sorry, I was with Sam.”
Fletcher swapped legs in the hurdler’s stretch and grimaced as her hamstring protested. “Did you find anything?”
“Later.”
That piqued Fletcher’s interest. “So you did find something?”
I sighed as I finished lacing up my trainers. “Maybe. I’ll tell you about it later. I promise.”
“I’ll hold you to that.”
We hopped on two open treadmills to start our warm-up, and though my knees creaked in protest for the first couple of minutes, it wasn’t long before I sank into the rhythm of it, allowing the drumming of my feet to smooth out the frayed thoughts in my head. Twenty minutes later, we switched to pad work. We wrapped our hands, and then Fletcher grabbed the target pads while I stuffed my hands into boxing gloves. Bouncing lightly on my feet, I began to punch Fletcher’s pads, the soft thump of foam hitting foam satisfying.
“So have you heard from Lena?” she asked.
I missed a beat, and she took a swipe at my head, forcing me to duck. “No,” I said.
“Wasn’t she supposed to get back from her tour a month ago? Kick.” She dropped both pads to her right hip so I could pivot and snap up a sidekick.
“That’s what she said.”
I didn’t really want to talk about this, and Fletcher knew it, which is why she’d waited until she had me trapped on the mat with her.
“No texts, phone calls, emails? Nothing?”
“Nothing,” I confirmed.
She reached the pads into the air so I had to stretch to hit them and then popped a blow at my head. I swayed to the side and jabbed once her hand was back in place. We’d only punched each other in the face twice since we’d started training together, and I considered that to be a win.
“Have you tried to reach out?” Fletcher asked.
“No, I’m waiting for her to.”
“What if she’s waiting for you?”
The pads went back down to her hip so I could kick with my left leg and then returned to guarding her face.
“She needed space after what happened. It’s up to her to decide if and when she’s had enough room.”
I was starting to breathe a little heavier now, the combination of blows growing faster and faster as we fell into the groove. Fletcher went quiet and let me focus on my form and the way each hit sent reverberations through my arms, banishing thought.
When my time was up, we switched, pausing to catch our breath and take a drink of water before we swapped equipment. Fletcher attacked like she was actually trying to take my head off, and it was as much work keeping up with her as it had been throwing my own punches.
“What about you and Denise?” I asked, hoping to throw her off her rhythm.
“I broke up with her,” Fletcher answered, panting. She bounced around me, and I spun in a slow circle to stay with.
“What happened?”
Fletcher shrugged, but there was a furrow in her brow as she threw a right cross that might have been more than just the strain of the workout. “Nothing really. I wasn’t feeling it as much as she clearly was, and I didn’t want to lead her on.”
“Are you okay?”
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
Her next cross sent shudders up and down my arm. “Because you’re currently trying to beat me to a pulp.”
“I always do that,” Fletcher said, and I bobbed my head back and forth. That was true. “It’s for the best,” she continued. “Who needs a love life anyway?”
Another good point. They generally turned out to be more hassle than they were worth.
We turned our attention back to the workout. We lifted weights once we were finished with the pads, and then it was back to the treadmill for a light, cooldown jog. Fletcher was very intense when i
t came to exercising which helped me push to work harder when we went to the gym together. It also left my legs rather jellied, but it was a good feeling, like I’d accomplished something.
My phone rang as we headed for the changing rooms, and I held up a finger for Fletcher to wait since it was Dunnel’s name on the caller ID. “Hello?” I said as I answered.
“You two are in the building, yes?” Dunnel asked without any preamble. “I have a case for you. It just came in.”
I’d been hoping to slide out of the station unnoticed and relax for the rest of the day, but I couldn’t resist the call of a new case. “Give us twenty minutes,” I said. I’d have to shower in the changing room rather than at home which I was loath to do since the showers here had terrible water pressure and never got hot enough, but I was also coated with sweat that was already beginning to dry and itch.
I got ready as quickly as I could and then met Fletcher at the lift, my hair damp and unstyled while she’d somehow found time to replait her hair into the flower crown style she’d stolen off one of the people we’d arrested in the Finn Wair case.
We climbed the stairs up to the ground floor and wound our way back to Dunnel’s office. It was a Thursday afternoon, and the whole station was humming as people tried to get their work wrapped up before the weekend. With a fresh case just dropped in our lap, we would no doubt be working a lot of overtime, but I found myself almost relieved by that. There would be no time to fret about my father’s disappearance or the way Lena had ghosted me.
“We’ve got a body,” Dunnel said the instant Fletcher and I stepped through his door.
“Hello to you, too,” I replied.
Dunnel glared at me. “It was called in about half an hour ago, so I don’t have much to tell you right now. A forensics team is on its way, though. You’re to meet them there.” He had the address written on a sticky note which he handed to me before he continued. “Do you think you can handle it?”
I plucked the paper from his fingers. “I’m sure we can manage.”
Dunnel’s question had been a set up as he smirked and gave me a sly look. “Oh, we can, can we?”
The Hidden Eye Page 2
