by Louise Welsh
‘Can you remember any of it?’
‘I knew you were going to ask that, but no, I couldn’t really read it. He’d used some kind of indelible paint and written in this sort of oldfashioned curly script. There were numbers and symbols too, like a lot of algebra in a circle round the bed. Whatever it was it gave me the bloody heebies. I gave it a good hard scrub, tried turps, ammonia, everything I could think of, but it wasn’t for budging. In the end I had to hire a sander and take the surface off, then go down to B&Q, for deck varnish and seal it. I had to do the whole bloody floor or else the join would have shown. It was a fucking hellish job, dust everywhere.’
‘I don’t suppose you took a photo of it on your camera-phone or anything, just to show to your mates?’
‘Why would I want to show them sick stuff like that?
I wanted it gone before Baine came round and took the job of managing the flat off me.’
Murray started at the familiar name.
‘Who?’
‘Baine, the guy who owns the place. He’s a university bloke like yourself. Oh, Christ.’ John Rathbone’s voice filled with sudden realisation. ‘Don’t say you know him.’
‘No, I don’t think so. What does he look like?’
‘I never met him. I just speak to him on the phone and send any paperwork to his uni office over in Glasgow. He talks like he’s got a boiled sweet in his mouth, but then a lot of them do.’
‘No.’ Murray hoped the lie didn’t sound in his voice.
‘I don’t know him.’
‘Thank fuck. Not that I’m saying you would have grassed me up.’
‘But it would have been a waste of your decorating skills if I had.’
Rathbone gave a bitter laugh.
‘That’s the funny thing. He phoned up, thanked me for my help over the years, and asked if I could show the estate agents round. End of story. Told me to take him off my books, he was putting the place on the market. I would have been as well not bothering. I’ll tell you something for nothing, though.’
‘What?’
‘I got the feeling he was relieved to get the place back.
I think he’d rented it out to the old boy as a favour, a guy that’d done well helping out an old pal that was down on his uppers – kind of cool, when you think on it. Though why a professor would want to keep up with an old soak is beyond me. Maybe he had fond memories. Crippen told me that him and Baine went way back. I guess they were students together or something. He was an intelligent man, Crippen. Just pissed it up against the wall.’ The landlord sounded wistful. ‘It happens.’
Chapter Twenty-Two
MURRAY STOOD AT the top of the castle, gazing out to sea. He remembered Alan Garrett’s note, Interested in the beyond. Had Lunan had any interest in the occult? Some of his poetry held an atmosphere of the Celtic otherworld, and Christie’s novels were generally shelved in the bookshops’ horror section; but these were fictions while it seemed Bobby’s library had masqueraded as fact. He would need to visit the Geordie’s landlord. Buy him a whisky and see if he could remember any of the books’ titles. People sometimes recalled more when they had a drink in their hand.
Murray glanced at his watch. He would have to start walking if he were to be sure of catching the ferry home. He hopped down from the crag, thinking now about Fergus’s uncharacteristic kindness towards Bobby. Strange that a man’s charity should make him suspicious.
He felt his phone vibrate back into life, and then heard its irritating jingle. Murray glanced at the display and cursed as his fingers, clumsy with the cold, struggled to hit the right button to accept the call.
‘Murray?’
His stomach swooped at the sound of his name on her lips, but even with that one word he knew something was wrong. Rachel’s voice had lost its cool tone, the barrier of mockery she’d managed to preserve between them, even when he was inside her.
He asked, ‘Are you okay?’ and heard the answering note of concern in his own voice.
‘Yes, fine. Listen, have you checked your email?’
‘Not recently, no. Should I?’
There was a pause on the line. One of the horses grazing in the shelter of the castle looked at him with mild, brown eyes. He wondered where Rachel was. In the home he had never visited, or in her office, safe from prying ears. He listened for her breath, but couldn’t hear it beneath the sound of the wind.
‘Rachel?’
‘Yes, I’m still here. This is …’ She paused again and this time he waited, following the curve of the horse’s sleek brown back with his eyes, amazed, as he always was when he saw them in the flesh, at how big the creature was.
Rachel came back on the line.
‘I wanted to ask if you could do me a favour.’
‘Anything.’
He was as obedient as Pete’s grinning dog, with none of its bite.
‘I think you might have received an email by mistake. You’ll be able to spot it, it’ll have been sent yesterday by someone you don’t know and will have a rather large document attached. Will you delete without opening, please?’
‘Is it a virus?’
‘Yes.’ Relief sounded in her voice. ‘A particularly ghastly one. It’s designed to leech onto every contact in your address book. Clever, but nasty. Apparently it wipes the hard drive of any computer it’s opened on. I’m frantically phoning everyone I can think of.’ Her laugh sounded strange. ‘It’s embarrassing, like chasing ex-partners to let them know you’ve got VD.’
‘Rachel, are you okay?’
‘Fine, just …’ Her voice faltered. ‘Just a little overworked.’ ‘And your computer’s wrecked. Did you lose much?’
‘I’m pretty good at backing-up, it could be worse.’ Her voice wavered again. ‘I’ve got to go. I’ve an army of people to phone. But please, Murray, delete that email. I wouldn’t want you to lose all your research.’
He said, ‘I miss you.’
‘Don’t, there’s no point.’
The line went dead.
Murray stood there, the phone warm in his hand, watching the tide’s unstoppable shift. He supposed the view should give him a sense of proportion, but all he could think of was Rachel and Fergus, Fergus and Rachel. The wind flapped at his waterproof. He turned even though he knew no one was there. But there was something beyond the rustling noise of his hood. He could hear it. A distant pinprick of sound that rushed to a roar. His chest tightened and the thought, so this is how it goes, burst into his head, along with a vision of his father’s face. The herd of horses turned together and raced down into the glen, the thud of their hooves absorbed by the almighty surge of sound.
Murray felt himself drop to his knees, and then had an abrupt flash of comprehension as he saw the Harrier Jump Jet screaming through the valley. He could have shouted his lungs empty, and no one would have heard. But he simply whispered fuck, fuck, fuck under his breath, then got to his feet, wiping the mud from his knees, and started to make his way down.
*
He hadn’t reached Everest when he heard the rumble of Pete’s tractor behind him. Murray waited for it to stop, knowing the man had come to offer him something and hoping he was right about what it would be. Pete climbed from the cab, the terrier at his heels. This time his smile was shyer, as if he was already embarrassed at what he was about to say.
‘Were you serious about wanting to stay longer?’
‘Aye, deadly serious.’
‘I might have somewhere for you then, if you don’t mind roughing it.’
Chapter Twenty-Three
MURRAY SAT AT the island shop’s computer and logged into his email account. It wasn’t quite three o’clock yet, but it had started to rain again and the skies outside were already dark. It felt good to be in and warm while the island was washed by wind and rain once more. The lamps had been lit against the gloom and a Calor gas heater hissed in a corner by the counter. Somewhere a radio was tuned to drive time, and he could hear the presenter detailing news of roadworks i
n the centre of Inverness. The small store, which had been so busy on his last visit, was empty of other customers. The shop man had given him a mug of instant coffee and told him to shout through to the backroom if he needed anything else. Murray took a sip from the steaming cup, relishing the sense of aloneness and study that had been a comfort to him since he was a child.
The number of new messages made him feel helpless for a moment, but there was only one he was interested in reading. He scrolled through the previous day’s entries and found it, the sender’s address a combination of letters and numbers that looked random, the subject heading Tis Pity She’s a Whore, the attachment tantalisingly present.
He hadn’t believed Rachel’s story, but staring at the message with its strange title, remembering the strain in her voice, he wondered if he might be wise to delete it, as he’d promised. Rachel had never asked anything of him before, though God knows he’d wanted her to. He rested his hand on the computer mouse. It was in his nature to investigate, but some knowledge was tainting. Pandora’s box, Eve’s forbidden fruit, Bluebeard’s young wife with the key to her husband’s private room. Succumbing to temptation could signal disaster.
He trailed down his inbox, hovering on indecision, deleting junk and outdated messages from the department about meetings he was now exempt from. He scrolled down further, hoping for a message from Rab that might tell him why Professor James had it in for Fergus. There was nothing. But tucked in amongst the list of unsolicited offers and enquiries was a message from Lyn.
Murray leaned back in the chair and gazed at the ceiling of the shop. A couple of yellowing remnants of sticky tape swayed in the rising warmth from the heater. Left over from Christmas decorations, he supposed. He sighed, leaned forward and clicked open Lyn’s message.
Dear Murray
I’m a woman who keeps her promises. I asked around about your smiler, Bobby Robb, Crippen as you called him, Crowley as they called him here. It seems he was one of our regulars until three years or so back, though the word is he was still a slave to the bottle – it’s amazing the constitution you need to be a successful addict. I don’t have much for you beyond that except that he was ‘a scary shit’. Apparently he was into weirdigan stuff, spells, magic, and wasn’t above dropping a curse or two if it looked like someone might cross him. My source also said Bobby was a frightened man who slept with a ‘circle of protection’ round his bed – whatever that is. A word to the wise. Tempting as it might be for you to leap on this, you should remember that the streets are a hard place to survive. People develop different strategies for keeping themselves safe. If this was Bobby Robb’s, it seems like a pretty good one to me. A lot of our clients are daft enough to believe in different dimensions. I wish I could, I’d leave mine in a flash. I’m not sure how much you know about Jack’s activities. It’s easier for me to assume nothing. It would mean one less person took me for a fool. I can’t help wondering, though, that evening you asked me about Cressida Reeves. I thought you were interested in her for yourself, but maybe you knew? Either way, Cressida is off the market. Jack has moved out of our flat and in with her. I wish I could say goodbye to bad rubbish, but we’ve been together a long time. If you speak to him, please tell him I miss him. He won’t take my calls any more. I kept my promise to you, even though your brother broke all the ones he made to me.
Lyn x
The kiss at the end made Murray’s eyes tear. He blinked, then read the email again, cursing his brother even as he wrote the scant details Lyn had given him into his notebook.
Murray had no stomach for the rest of his messages, but somehow Lyn’s words had decided what he would do about the email Rachel had asked him to delete. If love was a game of cheating and deception, then it was better to know what you were up against. He found the anonymous email again and opened it.
Murray tensed, half-expecting the screen to descend into blackness or display some childish victory halloo before fading into computer codes and nothingness, but the body of the email was empty. He moved the cursor to the virtual paperclip, ready to click open the attachment, but then the photographs started to slowly unveil themselves without any help.
He remembered where he was and minimised the screen, glancing behind him to check whether anyone had seen his shame, but the shop was still empty, the proprietor still somewhere in the backroom. Murray half-turned his chair towards the door, the better to hear any new customers entering, and then looked at the image again.
It took him a moment to realise what he was seeing. Then he recognised the room, the familiar desk with its pile of unmarked essays, the uncomfortable chair he reserved for students, shoved to one side. It was the night she dumped him, the night he had rushed into the corridor, chasing after the intruder. He could see his own white arse caught midthrust on the screen, Rachel’s elegant legs inelegantly spread beneath him.
Murray glanced towards the counter, wondering how good a view someone standing behind it would have of the monitor, realising the computer had been cleverly positioned to allow minimum privacy. He rolled the cursor down the screen anyway, wondering how many snaps the prowler had managed to take. He would phone Rachel afterwards, reassure her that no one could know the woman was her, even if the photo were to be pasted billboard-high in George Square, or more likely distributed amongst a thousand pay-for-view websites.
Jesus, what a mess. But it was a mess they were in together.
He didn’t feature in the next image. Instead there was Rachel with a young man Murray thought he might recognise from postgraduate forums. He couldn’t be sure. The man’s face was turned away and he was naked, Rachel kneeling on the floor between his open legs, her features hidden in his groin. She was naked too, pale and beautiful.
Murray felt a sharp surge of jealousy, remembering that they had never completely undressed for each other.
The four remaining images were more of the same, Rachel and sex the only constant. Rachel with a grey-haired man who had kept his watch on. The time was half past three, and she was astride him, her hands fondling her breasts.
Rachel bent over a chair in a hotel bedroom while a hirsute man with a slack belly and balding head held her rear and pointed his erect penis into her.
Rachel on her back, two men with her this time, and the faint blur of other undressed bodies in the background.
Rachel with her legs splayed, the head of some naked stranger pressed between them, her head thrown back, neck exposed so that Murray could see the hollow in her throat he had liked to kiss.
There was a sound behind him. He killed the image and spun round in his chair. Christie Graves was standing at the far end of the aisle, a newspaper and a loaf of bread in her basket. Their eyes met.
The pictures had been so big, so arresting, as loud in his head as the Jump Jet that had brought him to his knees.
He couldn’t imagine how she could have missed them.
Christie held his gaze for a moment, then looked away and went to the counter.
Murray sat staring at the blank monitor, hearing the shop man’s cheery greeting and Christie’s low replies, feeling a sense of loss that brought back other losses, too sad to even wonder who had sent him the photographs and what he could send them in return. He heard the door swing shut as Christie left the shop, but even then his eyes remained on the black screen of the sleeping machine.
Chapter Twenty-Four
PETE HAD BEEN apologetic about the state of the bothy, but in the afterglow of the race down Everest, Murray had thought it the perfect solution. Back then Rachel’s call had seemed like a spark of hope. She had thought of him, and even though she had hung up when he said he missed her, she’d sounded sad. Sadness had seemed something he might be able to work with. Now he felt that he might drown in it.
In the pale light of the afternoon the small cottage had appeared charmingly simple. Viewing its front room through the beam of his battery torch, Murray thought it embodied a decrepitude that matched his mood. The floor was covered in old c
ardboard, ‘your original underlay’ Pete had called it, to keep out the damp in the earth that sat directly beneath the wooden floor the crofter had laid when he and his family had camped there three years ago.
Pete dumped the carton of supplies they’d bought at the shop onto the makeshift table that took up most of the first room and swung the beam of his torch around the stone walls.
‘It’ll be a bit isolated for you after Glasgow, but we’re only a couple of miles down the road and I’ll drop by from time to time to see if there’s anything you need.’ Jinx padded around the room, sniffing into corners with an enthusiasm that hinted at vermin. ‘Hi, you. Sit,’ Pete commanded, ‘or you’re going out.’ He primed the Calor heater, the blue flames bursting into life on the third press of the ignition. The dog settled herself in front of the fire. Pete scratched her belly roughly. ‘That’s not for your benefit.’ He turned his attention back to Murray. ‘There’s an extra canister of gas for when this one runs out and there’s butane for the Primus stove. I’ve brought you the wind-up radio we used when we were down here. Do you know how to use an Aladdin lamp?’
Murray said, ‘I think so.’
But Pete showed him anyway. The room grew more present, but no more cheerful, in the lamp’s yellow glow.
‘You’re going back to basics. The kids loved it when we lived here, but that was in summer. I made damn sure our cottage was ship-shape well before the winter came.’
‘It’ll be fine.’ Murray opened the door to the cottage’s second room and saw the sleeping bag and extra blankets neatly folded on top of the camp bed. An upturned wooden box sat beside it, ready to serve as a bedside table. Something about the Spartan neatness of the arrangement made him wonder if Pete had been in the army. ‘I think you’ve thought of everything.’
‘I doubt that,’ the crofter grinned. ‘It’s been a bit of a rush job. But if there’s anything missing, you can let me know.’ He went out to the trailer and returned with a carton of supplies. ‘The plan’s always been to eventually turn this place into a summer let, but it’s got sidelined over the last couple of years. I’m afraid it’s not exactly tourist board standard.’ He set a car battery in a corner, then went back out and returned with another, which he placed beside it. ‘Okay, that’s you got one and one spare. I’ve another charging at home. I reckon they should last you a week at least, but if they don’t, drop round and I’ll swap them. I’ve set up the chemical toilet in the shit box, as Martin liked to call it.’ Pete laughed. ‘You know what teenage boys are like.’