No Place Like Home

by Jane Renshaw

  ‘The wee princess is off to the Land of Nod. Sleeping like a baby.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Nice cup of cocoa and a digestive, and she was out like a light. That’s what Mum always gave us before we went to bed – cup of cocoa and a digestive. And yes, before you ask, she brushed her teeth afterwards.’

  Wow. It seemed Fraser had hidden depths.

  ‘Brilliant, fantastic. You’re obviously a natural.’

  ‘Aye, don’t be hanging up the frilly apron just yet, Bram! Hey, you enjoy yourselves, right, and don’t worry about us.’

  He wasn’t a bad guy, really.

  ‘Thanks, Fraser. We really appreciate it.’

  Back in the bar, Kirsty was lurching around with Mhairi and Isla, out on their own in the middle of the floor, trying to dance to ‘Loch Lomond’ by Runrig, a horrendous – in Bram’s opinion – rock treatment of a lovely traditional Scottish air. Her hair had come out of her braids and she looked like a wild woman, swaying about barefoot, the two barflies hardly believing their luck, eyes out on stalks. Willie the barman, in contrast, was regarding the spectacle with a jaundiced expression.

  She was just letting off steam.

  She needed to let off steam.

  Being back here, being home, would have been hard enough for Kirsty even without all the dramas of the last few days. It wasn’t like this was going to be a regular thing. It wasn’t like she was going to want to meet up with ‘the gang’ and get off-her-face drunk on a regular basis.

  Was it?

  7

  Bram was an early riser, so at least he was up and about when the doorbell rang at 7:10 the next morning. At first he didn’t recognise the diminutive man standing on the verandah dressed in a green knitted hat, red jacket and green trousers, a wicker basket tucked over his arm. He looked like a character in one of the fairy tales Bram used to read to Phoebe, and it took a moment before he recognised Willie the barman.

  Willie raised an eyebrow a millimetre. ‘Mushrooms.’

  ‘Uh–’

  ‘I thought you wanted some tips on foraging for mushrooms.’

  ‘Yes! Yes, I did! Come in, Willie, come in. Good of you to call by.’

  ‘I was coming this way anyway. I’ll not come in.’

  ‘Okay. Let me just leave a note for the slug-a-beds and get on my boots, and I’ll be right with you.’

  Bram wrote a note and left it on the kitchen table, adding ‘Pick-me-up in fridge.’ He didn’t use the words ‘hangover cure’ in case the kids read it.

  Kirsty was going to have one hell of a hangover when she eventually surfaced. Bram had zapped up his tried-and-tested cure and put it in the fridge to chill – apple juice, cranberry juice, prickly pear extract, ginger and Siberian ginseng. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had to make it.

  Willie strode out in front, leading Bram across the paddock to the wood. At the tree to which two of the notices were stapled, Willie stopped, staring at Phoebe’s.

  ‘My daughter has quite an imagination,’ Bram felt he should clarify.

  Willie just nodded, striding off into the wood.

  ‘Chanterelle,’ he said, a couple of minutes later, pointing to a cluster of trumpet-shaped mushrooms by the side of the path, the colour of rich egg yolks.

  ‘Wow, really?’ Bram stooped to peer at them. ‘I’ve only ever seen the dried variety. These look nothing like them.’

  ‘Taste nothing like them. Slightly sweet, bit like a savoury apricot.’ Willie cupped a hand gently under the largest one and twisted it out of the earth, brushing a couple of strands of moss off the ribs on its tapering sides. ‘Smells of apricots too.’ He held it to Bram’s nose.

  ‘Mm! It really does!’

  ‘Of course, the false chanterelle, Hygrophoropsis aurantiaca, also has a fruity smell. Easy to confuse the two, but the gills of the true chanterelle are false gills, and the gills of the false chanterelle are true gills.’

  Christ. ‘Okay.’

  ‘And the flesh of a true chanterelle is pale when you cut into it.’ He picked another one and plunged a dirty fingernail into it, ripping it apart to show Bram the dense white flesh inside. ‘But get them mixed up and…’ He sucked his teeth.

  ‘False chanterelle is poisonous?’

  ‘Oh, aye. Wouldn’t kill you, mind. Just cramps, diarrhoea, vomiting. Aye. The chanterelle is a good one for the amateur because it can’t be confused with anything actually fatal.’ Willie picked another half dozen chanterelles, and then straightened, but when Bram bent to do likewise, he said, ‘Never take too many from the same clump. We want them to come back next year, don’t we?’

  So on they went, Bram’s basket still empty. ‘Maybe I could send you a photo of anything I forage, just until I get into the way of it, to confirm I haven’t made a potentially dangerous error?’

  Willie turned and looked at him. ‘Aye, if you must, email me a photo.’ He rummaged in his pocket for a pen and a scrap of paper on which to write his email address.

  ‘Thanks very much.’

  Bram imagined spooning unctuous chanterelle risotto onto Phoebe’s plate, and telling her about gnome-like Willie who’d helped him find the chanterelle mushrooms in their own wood. It was important she realised that the wood wasn’t a bad place – that good things could be found here.

  After an hour’s foraging, Willie announced that he was off, and when he’d gone, Bram started to relax into the whole thing. He was confident of being able to reliably identify the distinctive yellowy-orange trumpets, so he continued on into the wood, breathing in the earthy early-morning smells.

  Foraging for food from their own wood!

  Although of course he was more than happy for any of the locals, not just Willie, to do the same. Maybe he should put up notices to that effect next to the other ones, to soften the impact of what probably came across as rather aggressive territoriality.

  Because he was intent on looking for the splashes of yellow on the forest floor, he didn’t notice them until they were almost literally in his face: three crows, tied from the branches of a small birch tree by the legs, beaks swaying gently in the slight breeze.

  Bram stopped, and slowly looked about him.

  There were three more in another tree, this one further from the path. And another in a tree beyond that. The more he looked… It was like getting your eye in with the chanterelle. There was another. And two more, hanging from the gnarled branch of one of the old pine trees.

  Jesus Christ!

  He stood completely still, straining to listen, but all he could hear was the wind in the trees and a bird piping. Another answering. And then, suddenly, there were tiny birds all over the trees above his head, peeping and chirping and floating from one branch to the next. Tiny birds with long tails, moving in turn, it seemed, one past the other.

  There was something obscene about it, this flock of living birds so busy about their business while on the branches under them hung the crows, silent and still.

  As suddenly as they had appeared, the little birds were gone.

  Maybe he’d scared them.

  Or maybe something else had.

  The problem with being in this part of the wood, the birchwood, was that you could only see a very limited distance in any direction. Bram started walking back down the path. And then he was running, the basket jiggling in his hand, the chanterelles jiggling out of it, and then he had dropped the basket and was sprinting along the path, feet hardly seeming to touch down he was flying along so fast, and –

  ‘Vuuuuuw!’ The wordless sound shot from his throat as he flew round a kink in the path and right into a man who grabbed him, whose strong hands tightened on Bram’s upper arms, who –

  Who said, ‘Oofta, Bram!’

  Andrew Taylor, dressed head to toe in country gent wear, waxed jacket to the fore. He steadied Bram and released his arms.

  ‘Crows,’ Bram blurted, like a kid who’d run to an adult for help. ‘There are crows, strung up in the branches. Dead crow
s.’

  Andrew gave Bram’s arm a dad pat. ‘Ah.’

  ‘Back there. I’d better get something to cut them down with before the kids see them. There must be – I don’t know. At least a dozen.’ And it struck him, suddenly. ‘You don’t seem surprised.’

  ‘We can use this.’ Andrew took a shiny penknife from a pocket of his jacket. Yup, Andrew would carry a penknife.

  They started back along the path, and Bram retrieved his basket of chanterelles and the ones he’d dropped in his headlong flight, feeling a little sheepish that Andrew was obviously working out what had happened, that Bram had completely panicked.

  How could he be so calm about this?

  My God – could Andrew be responsible for the dead crows? But why would he want to shoot crows? Wild food for his restaurant? But surely not even Heston Blumenthal would serve up crow as a fine dining experience? And even if Andrew did have that in mind, he wouldn’t just leave them hanging from the trees.

  ‘There,’ Bram said, needlessly, when they came to the place.

  And there they were, the poor bloody crows, hanging like sick Hallowe’en decorations. As Andrew reached up to the first one, he said, ‘They keep appearing in our wood too, which is why I carry the penknife. What I do is cut them down and put them in a pile, take the nylon string home, obviously, to be disposed of, and come back with a spade to bury them. I’ll do that, if you like.’ He dropped the first bird, thwack, to the ground, and turned to face Bram. ‘I’m sorry. I – We haven’t been entirely honest with you. Your father-in-law was right, we should have warned you that we’ve had… some trouble with local youths.’

  Youths now, not kids, Bram noted. ‘What kind of trouble?’ he got out.

  ‘Hanging around making a racket, bonfires, littering, graffiti – obscene graffiti. Cara was once followed through the woods by a couple of lads, which really shook her up, as you can imagine… But mainly it’s dead animals. Crows, rabbits, hares, even a goose, a couple of cats… Strung up in the trees.’

  ‘Oh my God.’

  ‘Yobs. Yobs with airguns, or possibly shotguns, and nothing better to do.’

  ‘But you told us you hadn’t had issues with guns! For God’s sake, Andrew! This is serious! Do the police know all this?’

  ‘Not all of it, no. We decided it was best not to – antagonise the yobs further.’

  ‘What do you mean, further?’

  A sudden snap behind him had Bram jumping round, scanning the trees, the undergrowth, but he couldn’t see anything. Anyone.

  ‘We put notices up. Private property – no right of way. Which admittedly was a bit of a stretch. You know there’s no law of trespass in Scotland? Only the area around one’s house is sacrosanct. People have a “right to roam” through these woods, but we were hoping to discourage it. Had the opposite effect, unfortunately.’

  ‘Great. So now the locals hate us.’

  Andrew grimaced, reaching up to another bird.

  ‘But this is extreme, surely? An extreme reaction to a few notices? It seems like the kind of thing seriously disturbed people do before – well, let’s face it, before moving on to human targets.’

  Andrew barked a laugh. ‘This isn’t the mean streets of London. You don’t get many murderers to the square mile up here. I think we’re safe enough.’ He looked down at the small pile of dead crows at his feet, then back at Bram. ‘Sorry. That was crass. I don’t imagine Kirsty sees things that way. How is she holding up, after Bertie being shot?’

  ‘Oh, she’s okay, thanks.’

  Of course, everyone up here would know about Kirsty’s past, even relatively new arrivals like the Taylors. It was the kind of thing, he imagined, that was still talked about, still mulled over in the Inverluie Hotel bar, people putting forward their own pet theories, arguing, speculating.

  ‘Dreadful thing, what happened – back in the nineties, wasn’t it?’ said Andrew, cutting down another bird and tossing it onto the pile.

  Bram wasn’t about to discuss this with Andrew. ‘Well, I’d better get back. I left–’

  It all happened in a heartbeat.

  A crashing and a whooping, and a figure moving, at pace, in the trees to Bram’s right.

  Crack!

  Thunk!

  Crack thunk crack!

  Something hit the tree right next to Bram.

  ‘Jesus, they’re shooting at us!’ Andrew dropped to the ground.

  Bram just stood, frozen.

  He could see him in glimpses through the trees, a figure in grey and black, running away. As Bram watched, he turned, just for a second, and Oh God! Some kind of monster? The contorted, hairy, grinning face of something not human –

  A mask.

  It was a mask.

  And David’s voice was in his head: Are you a man or a mouse, Bram?

  He fumbled for his phone, taking a few stumbling steps into the wood, his fingertips stabbing at the screen. By the time he’d brought up the camera function the bastard was almost gone.

  Almost, but not quite.

  He pointed and tapped, pointed and tapped.

  Andrew was lying on the ground with his arms over his head. Whimpering. Bram sank to the path next to him, his legs suddenly unequal to the task of holding him up. Had that really happened? Had someone really just tried to kill them?

  Police.

  He needed to call the police.

  He stabbed 999.

  ‘Police,’ he squawked at the operator. And then, when he was put through: ‘We’ve just been shot at. Someone in a mask with a gun. We’re in the woods, we don’t know if he’s going to come back or–’

  ‘Okay. What’s your location?’

  ‘Woodside. We’re in the wood at Woodside, it’s a new house, next to a house called Benlervie. Four miles outside Grantown-on-Spey. Postcode…’ His mind went blank. ‘Andrew, what’s the postcode?’

  He set a hand on Andrew’s back.

  Slowly, Andrew sat up. His hair was mussed and his expression fixed, confused, as if he’d just woken up. ‘They shot at us.’

  ‘What’s the postcode?’

  Andrew blinked. ‘PH27 3TY.’

  Bram repeated it into the phone.

  ‘And what’s your name?’

  ‘What the hell does that matter? Bram Hendriksen and Andrew Taylor. Please. Just get here. Someone’s trying to kill us!’

  ‘Can you get inside your property and lock the doors?’

  ‘No! We’re in the woods! To the west of the house? Andrew?’

  ‘North-west,’ Andrew muttered.

  ‘North-west of the house called Woodside!’

  ‘All right, Bram. Can you get under cover and stay there, until the armed response unit arrives? Leave the phone on but keep quiet.’

  Because the bastard might come back to finish the job. He might come back. Or –

  What he if was heading for the house?

  Bram was up and running before he had completed the thought process.

  Kirsty. Max. Phoebe.

  The armed response unit, from what Bram could see by peeking round the edge of the curtain in the TV room, consisted of four guys in bulky uniforms, presumably bulletproof vests. They trotted in single file across the grass to the wood and disappeared into it.

  ‘I don’t believe this,’ Andrew kept saying. ‘I don’t believe it. And right after I’d said I thought we were safe from whoever’s been shooting the animals. Do you think they heard me? Do you think they were listening to our conversation?’

  Bram grimaced. ‘Maybe.’

  Andrew had called home and told Sylvia and the kids to stay inside. Now he was sitting slumped on the sofa, the mug of tea Bram had made him ignored on the side table. When Bram had taken off, Andrew must have run after him. When he’d reached Woodside, the first thing Bram had done, of course, was lock the door behind him, and Andrew had nearly given him a heart attack by pounding on it as Bram was heading upstairs to check on everyone.

  They were all in the TV room now with the
curtains closed. Kirsty was curled in one of the armchairs in her pyjamas, Phoebe squashed in beside her. Kirsty had hardly said a word when Bram had told her what had happened. She had just pulled him to her as if she never wanted to let him go.

  They’d told Phoebe an edited version – that someone had been in the wood again, and some birds had been shot. But she was picking up on Kirsty’s distress, latching onto her mother like a little limpet.

  Max was pacing, staring at the screen of his phone.

  That reminded Bram. He pulled out his own phone. ‘I tried to get a photo, but… not much good for identification purposes.’ He frowned at the blurry image.

  ‘Can I see?’ asked Andrew.

  Bram held out the phone, which showed the trees and, if you looked very carefully, a blurry arm in some sort of grey garment and a leg in black. Useless. ‘And that’s the best one. I think he was wearing a mask.’

  Bram rubbed his face. His face was tingling, as if the nerve endings had been primed by the bullets zinging past and were now on high alert.

  The doorbell jangled, making them all jump.

  ‘It might be Grandad,’ said Max. ‘I texted him. I thought – it might be good if he was here.’

  ‘No, I’ll go,’ said Bram, pulling Max back. ‘You all stay here.’

  Thank God, thank God, it was more police officers. Two, three, four… Six in all. As they filed inside, a sturdy female officer, who introduced herself as DC Gemma something, rattled off a few quick questions about what had happened, finishing with, ‘Your dog was recently shot with an airgun pellet, yes? Could this just have been an airgun too?’

  ‘I don’t know what kind of gun it was – all I know is he was shooting at us. Deliberately. Even if it was “just” an airgun, they can kill, can’t they?’

  ‘It has been known,’ the DC conceded. She asked him to fetch Andrew so he could give his statement, and settled herself at the kitchen table with her notepad.

  When Bram had ushered Andrew out of the TV room, he muttered, ‘You’d better come clean about all the previous trouble you’ve had with youths in the woods.’