Where The Shadow Falls

by Gillian Galbraith

  A pair of spectacles was extracted from the grease-stained blue husky jacket, and Prue MacGregor peered at the proffered sheet, putting her face close to it as if nearness to the paper might force it to reveal its secrets. Whilst she was still engaged in her minute examination of it, mouth forming silent words, her mobile went off and she picked it up immediately.

  ‘No! No! We arranged it. I’m going to go to the Parliament. You deal with the newsletter this time. It’s too late to change everything around. Incidentally, I noticed that some bastard has been tampering with our signs, so that they now read “More Turbines on the Lammermuirs”. The initial No’s been painted over. Get Neil to sort that one out tomorrow.’

  Having despatched her caller, she handed Alice’s sheet back to her.

  ‘Nope. Can’t help you… Ah, Joanna.’ Her attention shifted to the tall, elegant figure who was collecting a cup of coffee from a nearby table. The speaker joined them, and Alice saw that she was holding in her left hand the handwritten notes for her speech. They were heavily annotated and revised, all in a distinctive copper-plate hand. Quickly becoming aware that the two women wanted to talk exclusively to each other, she drifted back to the Ochil stall. Ten of the photos had captions below them, but each one had been printed using Arial font.

  An electronic alarm bell rang informing the audience that the Question and Answer session was about to begin. Alice resumed her original seat, noting that her neighbours on either side had disappeared, and then, disconcertingly, she spied both of them at different locations. The session proceeded much as she had expected. Sympathetic enquiries were directed at the speakers and sympathetic answers bounced back. The converted were preaching to the converted, reassuring each other with every exchange. Only at the very end did any sense of theatre materialise. The Chairman, relaxed and jocular, a glass of whisky in his hand, enquired benignly if there were any developers present and, if so, did they wish to contribute to the evening. The hall fell unusually silent as its occupants looked around, craning their necks to see if any of the enemy was present. After a short interval, a single hand was raised and the Chairman, surprise unconcealed, invited this Daniel to address the lions.

  It was Ewan Potter of Firstforce, and spurning the putting of his question from the floor, he edged himself to the end of his row, strode to the stage and, more importantly, the microphone. Standing behind it he looked at the stunned audience, defiant and unbowed.

  ‘Yes, Mister Chairman, I have a question. We’ve heard, tonight, all the myriad reasons why there shouldn’t be wind farms in, as far as I can make out, any part of Scotland including the islands. So, what I’d like to know is…’ he waited for a few seconds, his sense of timing perfect, ‘where exactly in this country should the land-based wind farms be sited, bearing in mind global warming, government policy and so on?’

  At first, his query was met with an anxious silence, until his old adversary, Sue Lamont, stood up and faced him.

  ‘How about, Mr Potter…’ she began, voice a little shaky, ‘how about fifteen turbines, maybe more in the second stage, at Lawsmoor-you know, by Lanark. There’s a good wind harvest there, eh? Little birdlife, willing landlords, no peat… it’s got everything. All the prerequisites are met there. How about Lawsmoor?’

  Ewan Potter’s expression changed as he digested her words. Seconds before it had beamed a sort of aggressive self-satisfaction as if he had checkmated an army of opponents. Now his brow furrowed, uncertain of her next move but wary all the same. The man made no attempt to answer, and aware of her advantage Sue Lamont continued: ‘I understand that there’s an application in for Lawsmoor, not your company, of course, but one of your bigger rivals. And you know what, Mr Potter… well, I heard that-well, that you live there, and…’ she waited-he was not the only one who could work a crowd-‘that you are one of the objectors to it. In fact, that you started up the “Lawsmoor Protection Group”. Would that be right, now? So, how about there? Would you choose that place?’

  Peals of laughter erupted from the floor, mingled with the hum of excited whispers. To his credit, Ewan Potter did not take advantage of the crowd’s brief distraction to slink off the platform, but stayed, waiting for the noise to die down, and then replied: ‘No, not Lawsmoor. But my view that such a location would be unsuitable simply means, Miss Lamont, that either we are all nimbies, every single one of us, you included, or that there, genuinely, is nowhere appropriate within this land… even though it is blessed with an outstanding potential wind harvest. So we’ll all just let planet Earth burn, shall we?’

  So saying he strode off the stage, facing his onlookers, leaving them still digesting his response. Discreetly, Alice collected a few fallen chips from beneath her chair, added them to her fish supper packaging and joined the throng making for one of the exits. Stuck in a queue, she passed the time examining the stand closest to her, one devoted to the prevention of the Devonbridge Development. All the usual props were present on it and a middle-aged man was busy packing up the exhibits in cardboard boxes and polythene bags. A blown-up photo of the sun setting behind the summit of a hill caught her eye, and she looked at the simple caption below it: ‘Sunset on Devonhill’.

  And, immediately, she recognised the handwriting. Extricating herself from the shuffling line of people, she worked her way to the stand and managed to catch its keeper’s attention. Busy dismantling the exhibition, the fellow appeared exasperated by her late show of interest.

  ‘Look, if you are needing postcards, or whatever, for the Council, you’ll find them on the way out, OK? I’ve put all of mine away. They cover all the sites, including Devonhill.’

  ‘No,’ she replied, ‘I’ve got as many as I can use, thanks. Could you help me with just one thing, though, can you tell me who wrote the caption beneath the photo?’

  ‘You mean “Sunset on Devonhill”?’

  ‘That’s it.’

  ‘Yes, it’s my cousin, Colin. Colin Norris. Why do you ask?’

  ‘I’m from Lothian & Borders Police, and we may need his help. Can I borrow it?’

  ‘The photo?’

  ‘The caption. Just for a few days, if that’s all right with you. Where does your cousin live?’ ‘He stays in a wee cottage, up from the farmhouse at Blackstone Mains. In Kinross-shire, by the Scowling Crags boundary, if you know what I mean.’

  ‘Thanks. I know what you mean.’

  12

  Sound travelled unhindered in the open-plan room, and any sneeze, burp or hiccup coming from a member of the squad was heard by all. Consequently, very few private telephone conversations took place within it, and everyone knew everyone else’s business. Whispering or a lowered voice alerted all to the possibility of a confidential exchange, and the listeners then re-doubled their efforts to make out what was said. If it had to do with the investigation they wanted to know, and if it did not, then, sadly, they discovered that fact too late.

  When a young, solidly-built woman entered the murder suite, most of its occupants registered her entry, together with the fact that she was striding, purposefully, in Eric Manson’s direction. Her quarry was sitting with his feet up on his desk, nose flattened against his newspaper, chewing loudly on a sausage roll. His entire attention was being bestowed on a half-naked model, and he let out a gasp of admiration on reading her vital statistics. A sharp rapping on the front of his paper made him drop his shield but his face lit up immediately on recognising his visitor. As he stood up to greet her, arms extended for a hug, she sat down on the chair beside his own. Unable to disguise his disappointment with the rebuff, he followed her lead and, now seated, went to kiss her cheek. She accepted his offering as her due, something to be endured, but made no move to bestow any peck herself.

  ‘It’s about my mum,’ the woman began coldly.

  ‘Let’s leave that for now, eh, darlin’?’ Eric Manson replied, glancing around the room as if to alert her to their uninvited audience. ‘Tell me, how have you been getting on at uni, eh? You fixed up with a flat y
et?’

  ‘No, we’ll not leave it, Dad. We’ll talk about it now. She’s back on the pills again and she needn’t be. If you just spent more… well, if you were ever there…’

  ‘I’ve a job to do, Kath, remember?’ he interrupted her, his tone conciliatory.

  ‘Yes, and so’s she. Every day she goes to that crappy surgery, answering abusive phone calls, fending off drunken patients and the like and then she has to return home to an empty house…’

  ‘It’s not always empty!’

  ‘Nearly always,’ Kathryn Manson corrected him. ‘And you spend a fair bit of your time in the pub, Dad, and she knows it. Think about it. She gave you a second chance, took you ba-’

  ‘Ssshhh… Kath, as I said, not here, eh, love?’ He looked at her plaintively and then nodded in the direction of Detective Sergeant Watt. The Sergeant was staring intently at his computer screen, occasionally typing a key at random, spellbound by the little domestic drama unfolding beside him.

  ‘Where, though, Dad? You don’t usually listen to me, but you know what? I think I’ve got ALL your attention right now. So let’s get on with it. My mum gave you a second chance, God alone knows why, and you’re throwing it back in her face. She thinks you’re seeing that cow from the papers again. Are you?’

  ‘Kath… Kath, for Pete’s sake. This is my office…’ Eric Manson begged.

  ‘So, are you?’ She was relentless.

  The Detective Inspector suddenly stood up, but seeing that his daughter remained seated where she was, he sank slowly down again, looking at her, pleading silently with her for the conversation to end, but she returned his looks, stony-faced.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Yes-no… I’m not sleeping with her…’ he sounded desperate and then, anger mounting, his voice changed. ‘It’s my bloody business. Not yours!’

  Kathryn Manson, however, was not easily intimidated. She had a mission, and was determined to accomplish it. He had raised the volume of their argument, so she would simply do the same.

  ‘It is my business, Dad. Because it hurts my mum. She only came back because you promised to lay off that woman,’ she shouted.

  ‘And I have… I am, for fuck’s sake!’ Eric Manson raged in return.

  At that very second DCI Robin Bruce walked into the murder suite with the Assistant Chief Constable, Laurence Body, in tow. Body, quick to sense the tension in the room, instantly marched over to the time-line to inspect it, leaving his Chief Inspector glaring at the antagonists. Kathryn Manson, dignity intact, rose to leave, but as she did so she bent towards her father’s ear and hissed, sotto voce but still audible to all, ‘You’d better have, Dad. Or I’ll be back. Back here, I mean.’

  Alice knew as soon as they arrived at the Astra that the journey à deux to the Scowling Crags site would be an ordeal. Manson, fury still bubbling, slammed the driver’s door so hard that the wing mirror came loose. They then exited the pound, tyres burning as if in hot pursuit of a gang of international thieves, before rattling over the cobbles, heedless of comfort or safety. Every red light was treated as a personal slight, obeyed with ill-grace, accelerator depressed, roaring, for a racing start. On finding himself unexpectedly ensnared in a queue at Blackhall, he thumped the steering wheel loudly with both hands before, on impulse, screeching into the bus lane in an attempt to evade the jam. Discovering that he was now trapped between two stationary double-deckers he swore, while jinking out straight into the path of an on-coming heavy goods vehicle. Alice, eyes tight shut, cursed Kathryn Manson and her domestic concerns. Thanks to continuing discord within that dysfunctional household she would soon be deprived of her life, or limbs at the very least. With the Forth Road Bridge in sight, the Detective Inspector swivelled his neck from left to right, attempting to work out which stream of cars was moving fastest through the booths. A rapid swerve to the left and they were in the chosen lane, having missed, by inches, a collision with a red Mercedes and a motor cycle. Rigid with fear and flattening imaginary brakes with her feet, Alice smiled weakly at the motor cyclist, fist now raised at her, snarling, and signalling her responsibility for his near-death encounter.

  As they bumped rhythmically over the bridge, Alice looked westwards, up the Forth estuary, seeking any distraction from this unpleasant situation. Between black clouds, shafts of sunlight were falling on the water, casting a silvery sheen on the vast expanse of tranquil, grey sea. In seconds the sun itself began to emerge from behind the dark clouds shadowing it, drifts of a borage blue sky exposed in its wake, and, as the car crossed the border into Fife, Alice became aware that her chauffeur had, finally, begun to relax. The car was no longer hurtling along at breakneck speed, and other vehicles were even being permitted to overtake them. Eric Manson lowered his shoulders and leant back into the driver’s seat, letting out, as he did so, a deep sigh.

  ‘Families, eh? Who’d have them!’ he said ruefully.

  ‘Sometimes more pain than pleasure, but not usually.’

  ‘You travel light, though, Alice. No commitments anywhere.’

  ‘I’m not an orphan, Sir.’

  ‘You’ve no man yet?’ Him and Mrs McLaren. Great minds, she thought, determined to side-step the question, certain that it was yet another volley in his little war of attrition. On the other hand, this time her interrogator was, himself, bruised and battered, unlikely to intend to commence hostilities on such a loaded subject. So instead, she smiled at him indulgently and shook her head. No reason for him to know. After all, he had met Ian Melville and their mutual antipathy had produced combustion on first encounter. His views on her lover’s suitability were all too predictable and unwelcome, and his dislike had been, as far as she was concerned, a positive endorsement of Ian.

  Like the weighted, spherical toy clowns once favoured by little children and impossible to knock over, Eric Manson’s spirits soon bobbed back up, and by the time the Dunfermline turn-off was reached he was busy ripping the wrapping of a packet of cigars with his teeth, ready to smoke his companion out of the vehicle. Hands free of the wheel, he struck a match, sucked hard, and began to exhale acrid fumes into the enclosed space. His reluctant passenger wound down her window, aware that any complaint, or reminder that the car was her workplace, would be met with derision, the man’s delight in annoying her having been re-awakened with the resurgence of his normal, bumptious mood.

  They turned right off the Carnbo road up a track marked ‘Blackstone Mains’ and began to climb into the Ochils. Within minutes the wheels of the Astra had sunk deep into its rutted surface and a strange swishing noise came from the car as its undercarriage compressed the undergrowth. After about quarter of a mile they arrived at the Mains, an austere farmhouse surrounded by a quadrangle of steadings, and saw a handmade wooden sign directing them further up the hill to ‘The Cottage’. The gradient of the final slope was steeper yet, their route resembling a dried-up river bed, little more than pebbles and shale with occasional boulders washed up here and there. Where the road ended they parked their motor, glad to stretch their stiff limbs, and both feeling as if they had travelled into some more remote past, a sanctuary untouched by the new century.

  They looked around themselves in all directions, and saw laid out before them the glory of the place, a one hundred and eighty degree view of undeveloped countryside. Somehow they had reached paradise. Not the gaudy sort promised in every travel agent’s brochure, but something altogether finer and rarer, the true abode of the blessed. In the foreground were low undulating hills, scattered clumps of whin still yellow in bloom, and, sparkling in the bright sunlight, a series of burns bordered with flag irises and meadowsweet, culminating in marshland, larks and curlews calling high above. Beyond, in the distance, was a vast area of flat, fertile ground dotted with woodlands, the whole scene dominated by the great, shining expanse of Loch Leven. Looking on such a sight, the meanest spirit would have felt elated, a poet’s soul inspired.

  In its condition as a moss-clad ruin, the cottage in the shade of the huge sycamore
tree had once enhanced the rural idyll, but it was being restored, and its appearance now jarred, reminding the onlooker that, somewhere within the garden, the snake would be coiled. New PVC windows had replaced worn, wooden ones, and grey, cement tiles were edging out old, red pantiles. Even its sandstone facade had been marred by a patch of harling; metal gutters had been removed, plastic imposters taking their place. And all around lay the detritus of the DIY man: half-filled syringes of mastic, broken slates, soggy plasterboard and sheets of torn polythene. An unsightly yellow Portakabin had been dumped in the lee of the building, and the sound of drumbeats began to come from it. A whey-faced, teenage girl emerged. She saw the two strangers, but showed no alarm at their unexpected appearance.

  ‘Who yous after?’ she enquired dully, brushing a strand of dark hair out of her eyes with her hand.

  ‘Mr Norris. Colin Norris,’ DI Manson replied.

  ‘He’s out, away for the day.’

  ‘Where?’

  She shrugged her shoulders, ‘You’ll need to ask ma mum.’

  ‘And where’s she?’

  ‘Shops. She’ll be back soon. You’ll just have to wait.’

  A tall, thin boy, dressed all in black, leapt out of the cabin and flung his arms around the girl. She giggled and the two of them then returned, twined around each other, into their den. Instantly, loud laughter could be heard, followed by an increase in the volume of the music, which made the air vibrate to the pounding rhythm. Fleeing from the noise, an Indian runner duck waddled out of the cabin followed by its five upright ducklings, the family finding refuge through the open door of the cottage.

  ‘This place is a fucking pigsty,’ DI Manson muttered, lighting up another cigar.

  ‘I’d live here tomorrow,’ Alice said, knowing as soon as the words left her mouth that such a remark would be incomprehensible to her companion, a truth so impossibly unlikely that to utter it could only be a form of provocation.