Kissing Toads

by Jemma Harvey

  ‘Well, we haven’t,’ I snapped. We’d walked towards the village, since weather-prophet Dougal McDougall had said the day would turn foggy, and wandering round the loch might be dangerous. The Dirk and Sporran loomed up ahead, the inn sign swaying slightly in the wind. It showed a warrior in full Highland regalia, wielding his dirk and flaunting his sporran. It was Angus, I suspected, who had the questionable sense of humour. ‘We’re going into the pub. You aren’t having any alcohol because you’re too young, but I’m going to get a coffee and a cheese sandwich. Okay?’

  ‘I have alcohol frequently. I’m not a baby.’

  ‘Under law you’re too young. End of story. Are you coming with me or not?’

  We went into the pub, which was when Dirk filled me in on the roving journalists. Coffee was a sophisticated development for a bar in the wilds of Scotland, but Angus, ever shrewd, had extended his repertoire for the benefit of his new clientele. He was even talking of a cappuccino machine. I added lots of milk – it was on the bitter side – and fished for more information about the two hacks.

  ‘Do you know what paper they’re from?’

  ‘The Mail – the Mirror – no, the Scoop.’ Dirk shrugged. ‘They’ve been going round the village axing questions – ay, and offering folks money too. O’ course, nae decent body would ha’ a word to say to ’em, but there’ll always be one or two for whom money talks, e’en in Lochnabu.’

  ‘You’re very loyal to HG,’ I said doubtfully, ‘considering he isn’t really the Laird.’

  ‘Ay well, he’s been guid for business. He employs folk, spends money – he built the new school, for the kids under eleven. He supports us, we support him. We never had a laird as did sae muckle for the community.’

  Well done HG, I thought. Open-handed and clever. ‘Can you keep an eye on the journalists?’ I asked. ‘There’s no way to get rid of them, but it would be something to know what they’re up to.’ They weren’t really my problem, but there were enough pitfalls ahead, visible or otherwise, without adding tabloid scandal.

  ‘Mebbe there’s a way,’ Dirk said, looking pensive, but I didn’t take him seriously.

  I should have done.

  I walked back to the castle with Dorian in a silence that was constrained on his part and abstracted on mine – my thoughts were elsewhere. Getting Delphi’s text so horrified me I even forgot about the rogue journos, at least for a short while.

  It was evening before they were recalled to my attention.

  Delphi and I were in the dining room enjoying pre-dinner drinks with Mortimer and Nigel. (Actually, they were pre-pre-dinner drinks; on Sundays, we started early.) When I say ‘enjoying’, we were enjoying the drinks, even if we had mixed feelings about some of the company. Ash hadn’t showed up yet, Russell was last heard of heading for the bath, Alex (according to Delphi) was feeling off-colour, and Brie had appropriated the maid Basilisa brought back from Mande Susu and was having her toenails pedicured, her chakras re-energised, and so on. We were discussing Elizabeth Courtney, as usual, with Morty advancing a new theory that she’d had a fall, knocking her head and suffering from concussion, and had then wandered too close to the lake, slipped in and drowned.

  ‘Unlikely,’ Nigel said. ‘The body would have turned up. After drowning, gases are produced in the corpse which cause it to float. I’m not well up on the forensic details –’ he had already made it clear he knew more than the rest of us – ‘but I can assure you, if someone dies in the water the body has to be weighted to make it sink. Hence the – er – concrete boots favoured by gangsters.’

  ‘So if she went into the lake,’ Delphi said, ‘she had help. Someone put her there, and made sure she stayed on the bottom.’

  ‘I must say,’ I said, ‘I think it would be difficult for anybody to disappear as completely as she did by accident.’

  Morty looked as damped as his ego would allow, although the disparagement of his idea wasn’t personal. At least, not in my case. Delphi had never liked him and Nigel, I surmised, saw him as competition in the TV fame stakes.

  In short, it was a normal evening: overcurrents of polite disagreement, undercurrents of rivalry and nastiness. Being stuck on location with colleagues for far too long, even if the location is a luxury castle, is invariably detrimental to working relationships. Things were sliding gradually downhill.

  Then Harry came in, with Ash on his heels, and everything changed.

  I think I said, ‘What’s wrong?’ because it was so obvious something was.

  ‘The two hacks from the Scoop have gone walkabout,’ Harry said.

  ‘You mean they’re spying on us?’ Delphi demanded, looking round as if she expected to see eyes peering from the portraits, or a telescopic lens poking between the curtains.

  ‘That was probably the idea. They wanted to find a way into the castle grounds and someone in the village seems to have sent them to the far end of the loch. The terrain there is dangerous, there’s a mist come down, and they haven’t got back. We’re sending out search parties led by anyone who knows the area well enough.’ He was already booted and jacketed; so, surprisingly, was Ash.

  I remembered Dirk’s expression earlier in the day, and my own idle phrase: There’s no way to get rid of them. Suddenly, I felt like a murderess. ‘Oh God . . .’

  ‘What is it?’ Ash said, detecting more than normal horror in my face.

  ‘I think it might be my fault,’ I said, stammering a rapid explanation. The others treated it with the contempt it probably deserved – ‘I thought Delphinium was the one into self-dramatisation’ from Harry – but I still felt a relentless panic knotting in my stomach.

  ‘I’m coming with you,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t be silly.’ Delphi added her voice to the general disapproval. ‘You don’t know the area. And it’s dark and cold out there.’

  ‘For once,’ Harry said, ‘I agree. You’d just be in the way. We’re covering one section of the grounds with Young Andrew; Jules and Sandy are doing the other with Dougal McDougall and the dogs. Dirk and Angus are leading search parties round the village in case the buggers turned back. Sit down, finish your drink, eat your dinner. This is a job for the men.’

  Oops. I saw Delphi bristle. While prepared to exploit her femininity whenever it suited her, she didn’t react well to assertions of gender superiority. Harry was topping up a hip flask from a bottle of single malt; Ash turned to me and said, ‘He’s right, you know. There’s nothing you can do.’

  ‘Why are you going?’ Morty asked on a faintly scornful note.

  ‘I do rock climbing. It might come in handy.’ He really was full of surprises.

  ‘Wait for me,’ I said. ‘I won’t be in the way – that’s bullshit. You need all the back up you can get. I do first aid.’

  ‘So do I,’ said Ash and Harry in chorus, but I was already out of the room.

  Delphi followed. ‘If you’re going, I’m going,’ she said, a typical volte-face. ‘A job for the men, indeed! Huh, huh and triple huh!’

  ‘Anyway,’ I said, ‘we have eyes and ears. That’s what’s needed. Don’t forget your torch.’ We all had them in case of power cuts, or for walking back from the village in the dark.

  As we approached our rooms, Fenny came rushing out to greet Delphi, curly tail wagging furiously. He’d evidently decided to abandon master for mistress. It wasn’t a good move on his part.

  ‘We’ll take him!’ she declared, struck with sudden inspiration. ‘Elton and Sting have gone with the other group – we ought to have a dog too. And I’m sure he has bloodhound in him somewhere.’

  ‘He’s a pedigree bichon! Delphi—’

  ‘Spiritually,’ she insisted, ‘he’s a bloodhound.’

  I dived into my bedroom and dragged on boots and Barber at warp speed in the hope that if I got downstairs fast enough, Delphi – and Fenny – might be left behind. I knew the hope was vain, of course. When you wanted her to hurry, Delphi would take an hour to get ready; but should you want her to delay, she wa
s guaranteed to be with you in minutes. She emerged even as I closed my door, wearing fashion wellies patterned in raised gold swirls and a Vivienne Westwood jacket – a safer bet than Matthew Williamson on the faux fur issue – that appeared to have been patched together from a combination of leather and dead Wookie. The impression was vaguely reminiscent of a barbarian warrior-maiden in a sword-and-sorcery epic, only with less cleavage on view.

  ‘Is that . . . suitable?’ I faltered.

  ‘Just because I’m joining a search party,’ Delphi said, ‘it doesn’t mean I have to dress like a rescue worker in an earthquake. Besides, it keeps me warm.’

  I didn’t attempt further protest.

  We found Harry, Ash and Young Andrew waiting in the hall. (Harry had correctly guessed that if they didn’t wait we’d try to follow, and probably get lost ourselves.)

  ‘You’re not – bringing – that – dog!’ Harry expostulated, seeing Fenny under Delphi’s arm.

  (Men don’t expostulate much nowadays, it’s a little archaic, but Delphi has that effect on people.)

  ‘Of course I am,’ she said at her most irritatingly reasonable. ‘There are two people lost out there, maybe injured: he can sniff them out. Like a St Bernard. I’m training him to attack journalists, but I’m sure he’ll get the difference.’

  Ash succumbed to a smile; Harry looked murderous.

  ‘If he’s a nuisance,’ he said, ‘I’ll throw him in the loch. Can he walk, or do you carry him?’

  Delphi set the dog down, hooking the lead on to his collar. ‘Do we have an item of their clothing for him to pick up the scent?’ she enquired, ignoring his sarcasm.

  ‘Airhead,’ Harry snorted.

  On which note, we filed out into the dusk.

  Though spring was officially here, it grew dark early – we were a long way north – and the last of the daylight was fading rapidly from the rim of the sky. The air was cold and growing colder. A white mist lay along the borders of the loch, looking as if a cloud had drifted down and wrapped itself like an ermine stole around the shoreline. Twilight gleamed faintly on the open water. The dim slopes of the nearer mountains rose out of the mist like a fairy country that floats above an unattainable horizon. The castle was still clear, but the fog crept closer even as we stood there. We all switched on our torches. The beams didn’t show much except the ground immediately before us, but made the evening darker. Harry was having a word with Young Andrew. ‘Come on,’ he said to Delphi and me, ‘since you insist on coming.’

  His attitude was more than justified. We weren’t going to do any good. I was there from a hazy sense of guilt, relic of my conversation with Dirk that morning, Delphi out of sheer pig-headedness. Or maybe it was that neither of us wanted to spend the rest of the night waiting for news, with only Nigel and Morty for company. Fenny scurried along happily, checking out passing smells, obviously believing the whole exercise was entirely for his benefit.

  A wall marked the boundary of the garden and the transition to the uncultivated grounds. On the eastern side of the loch there were fields running down almost to the water where HG let local farmers graze their livestock, but here on the west the terrain was steeper and wooded. We went through the gate, latching it behind us, and began to follow a rough track that meandered between the trees. I’d often meant to explore this way, but work had left me little leisure and somehow when Sunday came around I was always too tired – or too lazy – for serious walking. Stupid, I thought. I’d been a footstep away from beautiful countryside and now when I got to investigate it was in darkness and fog. Nacht und Nebel. The allusion made me shiver. That was what the Nazis called it, when people were arrested and made to vanish without a trace, so even their nearest and dearest would never know what had happened to them. I didn’t like the idea of tabloid hacks on the prowl, but I hadn’t meant the villagers to dispose of them for good.

  I was overreacting on the guilt issue, I know. But in Scotland in the dark, even the flimsiest spectres can grow huge, acquiring claws and teeth.

  Harry was up ahead with Young Andrew, followed by Ash, then Delphi and me. Although we kept close together, we didn’t talk much. Harry and Young Andrew paused from time to time to consult.

  ‘Is he looking for tracks?’ Delphi whispered during one brief halt, referring presumably to the guide. ‘You know: broken twigs, footprints, that sort of thing.’

  ‘He’s not Aragorn,’ I whispered back. The vision of Young Andrew as Strider, listening, ear to the ground, for the rumour of distant feet, made me stifle a giggle.

  After a short exchange about our route, they went on. We trailed after them.

  The mist had closed in and beyond the torch beams was a grey, formless world. At Ash’s suggestion we used only one between us, saving the battery on the other since we had no idea how long we’d be out. Harry and Young Andrew also shared. Ash, no doubt accustomed to working in the dark, kept his switched off most of the time, following the two leaders without a stumble. Tree roots sprawled across the path like knobbled snakes, ready to trip the unwary, and the occasional low branch brushed my face with twiggy fingers, but our pace was slow and such hazards were a minor factor. There seemed to be little undergrowth and the trees grew some way apart. We couldn’t see far to either side; I knew the lake was on our left, quite close by, but the night was windless and the sleeping water made no sound. Once, there was a kind of slither and a soft splash a short distance away – we all jumped – but according to Young Andrew’s unruffled mumble it was only a small animal.

  I found myself muttering the traditional prayer Jennifer had taught us in childhood:

  From ghoulies and ghosties and long-legged beasties

  And things that go bump in the night,

  Good Lord, defend us.

  Delphi had always thought long-legged beasties meant spiders, of which she was terrified. I had marked reservations about ghoulies. But in the gloom it was all too easy to imagine a dripping head rising from a dim swirl of water, serpentine neck extended, or grey shaggy shapes flickering between the trees, trailing bits of shroud. I found myself wishing I’d never seen The Blair Witch Project or The Evil Dead. Woods in daylight are beautiful places, with the sun-spatter coming through the leaves and the piping of invisible birds, but by night they change, becoming shadow-forests haunted by our darkest fears. A few thousand years ago our ancestors trod lightly through such woods, in dread of nocturnal hunters: the wolf, the bear, the sabre-toothed tiger. And then there were the demons of our own invention, the blood-drinkers of nightmare and legend: the vampire and the werewolf, Grendel and his mother, the Ringwraith and the Grey King . . .

  ‘Should we call out?’ Delphi asked. ‘They might be nearby and not know we’re here.’

  ‘Good idea,’ Harry conceded.

  Every so often we called, paused, listened, called again. No answer. The ground grew more rugged, making walking harder. The damp of the mist and the chill of the night began to eat into me. Discomfort took the edge off my fears, but I had no intention of complaining: I wasn’t giving the men the chance to act superior.

  ‘Aren’t you c-cold?’ I said to Delphi, keeping my voice low.

  ‘Not really. This jacket is amazingly warm.’

  It would be. My supposedly practical and weatherproof Barber wasn’t doing the job at all. But then, I only had a light sweater underneath.

  ‘Your teeth are chattering,’ Ash said, passing me his scarf. It was long and wide and felt like cashmere. ‘Tuck that inside your jacket and wrap it round you. It’ll help.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  I saw the turn of Delphi’s head as she glanced towards me, but I couldn’t distinguish her expression.

  Fenny created a diversion by stopping to growl, and then bark, but whatever it was must have fled. There was a growing murmur up ahead, like the rush of water.

  ‘That’d be the Cawdron,’ Young Andrew said, in response to a question from Ash. ‘We maun go careful here. Mony folks ha’ slippit in wi’out seeing the e
dge i’ the dark.’

  ‘What’s the Cauldron?’ Delphi asked.

  ‘It’s a pool,’ Harry explained. ‘There’s a stream flowing into the loch via a couple of short falls and it’s scooped out the Cauldron among the rocks. It isn’t very wide or deep but the water swirls around like a whirlpool and the drop into it is about fifteen feet. If you missed your footing and went in you could easily be knocked out and drown.’

  We went forward cautiously. The murmur swelled to a roar, but fog and darkness alter your perceptions and it was hard to judge how close we were. Harry and Young Andrew halted suddenly, and the rest of us came up beside them, Delphi picking up Fenny in case he attempted to leap over the edge. The earth thinned to rock and a chasm opened at our feet, a roughly circular pit perhaps ten yards across at the widest point. Foam gleamed on the fall that poured down from above; the torch beams glanced along the steep sides enclosing the pool. Below, the water seethed and bubbled, spilling over another, shorter fall through an opening in the rocks down to the loch. Crawling plants trailed over the lip of the ravine; a stunted shrub clung to the further edge, root filaments webbing the rock face like a wispy growth of beard. My torchlight skittered downwards and arced along the rim of the pool. At one point the rock didn’t drop sheer into the water – perhaps the level was low – and there was an exposed sliver of earth or stone, a snarl of tangled stems. And something else, something white, hooked on the claws of the plant.

  A shoe.

  To be exact, a white canvas trainer. It was impossible to be certain in the torch-glimmer, but it didn’t look as if it had been there long. Bits of it were still clean enough to gleam in the probing light.

  Harry said: ‘Shit.’

  ‘Has anyone called the police yet?’ I said, stating the obvious.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘but the professionals won’t come looking till morning. You’ve got to be a local to risk a search at night.’ He added, after a pause: ‘Does anyone know if those hacks wore trainers?’

  No one knew.

  ‘I could climb down and take a look at it,’ Ash offered, discarding his jacket, which was padded and bulky.