Highland Fire: captivating romantic suspense full of twists

by Abigail Clements

  Caitlin’s door was open. I crossed the hall and peeked in. There was a rumple of blankets on the bed, but no Caitlin.

  I hurried down the stairs, cup in hand, feeling myself a failure both as housekeeper and surrogate mother.

  Caitlin, in her pink pyjamas, was sitting at the table by the rain-streaked window, drinking milky tea. Dominic sat across from her, and each studied the other with solemn dark-blue eyes.

  He jumped up as I came in and pulled out a chair for me. I took in the teapot on the table, the new fire flickering in the grate.

  ‘Hey,’ I said guiltily, ‘you’re doing my job. Why didn’t you wake me? I never heard you.’

  ‘I’m very, very quiet,’ he said, teasing. ‘Tea’s my job and so’s the fire, anyhow.’

  ‘That’s very nice of you,’ I said. ‘But the baby is my job,’ I added, wiping spilled tea off the table and her pyjamas.

  ‘She was accidental,’ he explained. ‘She followed me downstairs. I see you found her some clothes.’

  ‘I went to Lower Achbuie,’ I said. ‘Grisel suggested it.’

  ‘I see.’ If there was, as I imagined, a momentary change in his mood at the mention of the commune, it passed quickly. He was cheerful and bouncy, and so nice to me that I wondered if he wasn’t making some kind of unspoken apology for yesterday’s sharp words.

  I took him as I found him, though I was slightly wary. While I made breakfast, he played with Caitlin, rolling with her on the floor. I wondered where he got his energy; I hadn’t heard him come in last night, but it must have been very late again.

  After breakfast, we sat drinking coffee while I nervously watched Caitlin by the open fire. He saw my concern and suggested a childproof fire screen, promising to get it himself. He was so agreeable about everything that eventually I broke my self-imposed rule about minding my own business.

  ‘Is there a ferry or something across the loch at night?’ I asked.

  ‘There isn’t one in the daytime,’ Dominic said. He was playing with Caitlin and barely listening.

  ‘Then what would that boat have been doing?’

  ‘What boat?’ he said sharply, his attention very much with me then.

  ‘I saw one last night, on the loch.’

  ‘Saw one? How did you see a boat down there in the dark?’

  ‘It had lights,’ I said.

  ‘Lights!’ He looked astounded and I said, ‘Of course. It was dark, how else would I have seen it?’

  He didn’t react to that. After that brief outburst of amazement, a guardedness came over him. After a while he said slowly, ‘If you saw lights, it wasn’t a boat. You probably saw the headlights of a car on the road on the far side.’

  ‘The lights were in the water,’ I said.

  ‘A reflection, Caroline. As the car comes around a bend or something, the waves will catch the light for a moment. I’ve seen that, too.’

  ‘Never,’ I said firmly. ‘These were real lights. I watched them for a long time. They moved along the water.’

  For a long moment he stood silent behind my chair, looking over my head and out the rainy window. Then suddenly he leaped at me and I felt his strong hands go around the back of my neck. He scared me and I screamed.

  ‘Banshees!’ he yelled, laughing, his hands still gripping me.

  I caught at them, giggling and saying, ‘What on earth has got into you?’ He released my neck and for a moment caught up my hands and held them, leaning over me. I found myself liking the warmth and strength of him there, and pulled away, turning to face him.

  He let me go and leaned against the wall, laughing. ‘You scare easy,’ he said.

  ‘Well, what do you expect?’ I demanded. Caitlin had dropped her wooden bowl and was staring delightedly at us. ‘She thinks we’re crazy,’ I added.

  ‘Your lights,’ he said. ‘Banshees. The spirits are after you.’

  He made wavy scary gestures with his fingers and I said, ‘Oh, stop. I can’t bear it.’ I had seen that Disney movie about Ireland when I was twelve and hadn’t yet gotten over the horrible skeletal banshee in it. ‘Anyhow, what have they got to do with lights? Banshees are old scary women that wail when people die.’

  ‘Oh, no,’ he said, coming alive with interest in the subject. ‘Oh, not at all. Lights. Lights in the night. Lovely lights that see you in and out of the world.’ He made it sound beautiful.

  ‘In, too?’ I said. ‘I thought it was just when you die.’

  ‘Oh, yes. They come for the newborn, too. My grandmother saw them, the three white lights in the meadow, the night I was born.’

  ‘Really?’ I said. ‘Were you born in Ireland, then?’

  ‘No,’ he answered, with a wry smile. ‘Glens Falls, New York.’

  ‘Glens Falls?’ I said. ‘Banshees in Glens Falls? I thought they only happened in Ireland.’

  ‘Ireland,’ he said slowly and sadly, ‘is wherever the Irish are.’ And suddenly he wasn’t joking anymore.

  He seemed so saddened by something that I thought I would change the subject, and I did, but I changed it the wrong way. I said firmly, ‘Anyhow, my lights weren’t banshees. They were real live electric lights and they were on a boat.’

  He whirled around, suddenly furious, anger burning off that brief shadow of sadness. ‘All right then, so you saw a boat. I’ll tell you precisely what you saw, if you want. You saw a small fishing boat in which there were three or four local villagers practising the fine old custom of jacklighting ‒ fishing for salmon with a light as a lure, and scooping them up, fast as they come, with a net and a gaff. It’s absolutely illegal. But folk here have fished these lochs before there was a government in England to make it illegal. They feel entitled.’ He pronounced the last word slowly, with bitter emphasis.

  ‘It’s part of their rather meagre livelihood, Caroline. If word gets out about it, the law will be down on their heads. There’ll be a big fine, and no more salmon. You see, Caroline, around here there are some things about which we don’t talk. And you,’ he said harshly, ‘are going to have to learn when to keep your mouth shut.’

  He stopped, glaring at me. In the sudden silence I heard Caitlin whimpering. I wanted very much to show him that he wasn’t the only one in the house with a temper. But I reminded myself again that he was my boss and this was his house.

  I stood, gathered up the child, walked to the other side of the room, and said nothing. Dominic flopped moodily down in the chair by the fire, his back to me, breaking up the coals with the poker.

  I left Caitlin playing in a corner and set to clearing the table. Eventually Dominic got up and left the room, calling roughly over his shoulder, ‘Come into the office when you’re finished. I want you to do some letters.’

  I bit my lip in the kitchen, wondering why it mattered so much to me that I had made him angry. Particularly when he was so unreasonably angry.

  I hung up a last cup, shook out the dish towel, and spread it to dry in front of the fire in the front room.

  Hearing a car pull up, I went to the window and looked out. Kevin McGuire was just climbing out of the grey Land Rover when I heard the front door open. I watched Dominic walk down the gravel path with annoyance, half-expecting him to forget the letters and go off with McGuire. It would be like him.

  He didn’t. Instead he stood in the rain beside the Land Rover, arguing in a low voice with McGuire. They were apparently angry, gesturing roughly with their hands. Eventually Kevin McGuire shrugged his shoulders, with an odd insolence to show an employer. He climbed back into the Land Rover and drove off without looking back.

  Dominic walked slowly back to the house. He seemed preoccupied when he came in, as if his argument with Kevin McGuire had caused him to forget our own clash. He gestured to the typewriter, and when I had settled in front of it, he sat on the window ledge, quietly dictating letters. He was calm and businesslike and blissfully unaware of how much he had hurt me.

  We worked together for the rest of the morning, quite peacefully. After lu
nch, Dominic gave me the keys to the green minivan so that I might drive to Ullapool and shop for food and for clothes for Caitlin. He himself drove off to the distillery in the sand-coloured Range Rover in which he had returned from Edinburgh.

  I left Caitlin with Grisel MacLeod and drove cautiously along the rough road, past Rebecca Innes’s Achbuie Farm and down past Lower Achbuie. The road bent up over the hill, narrow and with an unnerving drop off to the right. I didn’t enjoy it, but I made it and was soon doubling back past the phone booth and down the long way through the open moorland to the Braemore road.

  Just before our road came down to join the main one, I noticed another branching single-track road that went off to the right. This I knew from Dominic to be the way to the Sron Ban Distillery, which I had not yet seen. Dominic had promised me a tour of it, and I looked forward to it. I had never seen a distillery, even from a distance.

  When I returned from Ullapool several hours later, having found both food shops and a baby shop, I was already comfortable with the funny little car and the narrow British roads. I parked the car in front of Sron Ban House and went eagerly to the MacLeods’ to fetch my little girl. The easy routine of shopping and cooking and tending the house was beginning to make me feel domestic and comfortable. Caitlin fit too well into my life; I forced myself to remember that her stay there was only temporary.

  As the days passed, it became more and more difficult to keep that important fact in my mind. My work at Sron Ban was more domestic than secretarial.

  The books were handled at the distillery itself by the business manager. There were occasional letters from Caledonian Importers in New York; quite a few more referring to Dominic’s chief distributor in France. There were also personal letters, some from Marseilles in France, and a few from Ireland. These Dominic always kept separate, and I was not concerned with them. Indeed, I never saw them opened.

  Apart from the occasional morning or afternoon in the office, I spent my days cooking and cleaning and looking after Caitlin. I was glad, indeed, for her company, for Sron Ban, though peaceful and exquisitely beautiful, was lonely! Dominic was rarely there. He spent full days at the distillery ‒ or elsewhere; he did not always tell me where he was going. And now and then he was away late into the night and I would not see him until the following morning.

  Sometimes for most of a full twenty-four hours I would speak to no one but Caitlin, and hear nothing but the sheep maa-ing on the hills and the seagulls calling far over Loch Broom.

  Growing up in the crowded suburbs of New York, I had always yearned for a place far away from everyone. Finding it here, I began to realize how important it was to see people, and I was thankful for Grisel and Angus MacLeod, not too far away, and the red Land Rover of the postie, coming with the mail.

  When one morning Dominic came bounding in from the garden, grabbed me by the shoulders, and whirled me around, saying, ‘Guess what, it’s your day off, and I’m taking you to lunch in Ullapool,’ I was as delighted as the most housebound of housewives.

  He was in that mood that brought out the best in him. I had learned by now that there were two distinct and separate strains to his personality, one light and one dark. This was the light one; laughing and energetic, he teased me like a school kid. He was like that more than not and very good company, indeed.

  Just occasionally, like a few days ago, after Shona’s funeral, or sometimes, oddly, when he played with Caitlin, or other times for no obvious reason at all, that other mood would come on him. Then he seemed his forty-odd years or more. I always thought he was remembering back to something then. He’d sit looking into the fire, silent for long minutes, then suddenly get up, wordlessly, and leave the house. Sometimes he would just go out walking, up the hill path behind the house and out on the grey open moor. He’d be gone for hours, and when he came back, like as not, the mood was gone.

  And then there was that nightly ritual of the six o’clock news. I soon found out why that battery television set was there. I rarely saw Dominic miss the evening BBC broadcast, even if he came in for that alone and left immediately after.

  He’d sit nervously on the arm of a chair, glowering at the newscaster, waiting for the headlines; or more particularly, for one headline: Ireland.

  It didn’t take me too long to realize that he was deeply, even obsessively, interested in Ireland. The time I was at Sron Ban was at the height of the troubles in Ulster. Almost every night the lead story was of some new fighting, or bombing, or shooting, in the province. Dominic watched with terrible intensity.

  I knew he had connections in Ireland; I wondered if he had family there. I asked him once, and got in response one of those searing flares of temper that I had come to accept as the third part in his nature, that hot thread of anger that ran through him and of which I learned to be very wary.

  He never held a grudge; he forgot arguments long before I did. But the erratic intensity with which he would turn on me taught me to never, ever relax with him. At our closest, there was always a distance between us.

  That day, the day we went to Ullapool, was one of our very closest.

  Chapter Seven

  ‘I’ll have to see about Caitlin,’ I had said.

  ‘Grisel will take her for the day,’ he responded immediately. ‘I’ve asked her already.’

  I shrugged, laughing. ‘No excuses.’

  Perhaps I should have been annoyed that our date was less by invitation than command. I wasn’t. His enthusiasm for life was infectious. I won’t say I couldn’t say no to him. I just didn’t want to.

  Within half an hour I had led Caitlin down the hill to Grisel’s, put on a skirt and my favorite purple sweater and my raincoat, and joined Dominic in the garden in front of the house. I opened the passenger’s door of the minivan but he stopped me, saying, ‘My lady rides in style.’ He took my arm and led me to the Range Rover, helping me up to the high seat.

  It was comfortable, new and gleaming inside, a luxurious version of the dependable rough-country vehicle that Kevin McGuire drove. Still I didn’t get much pleasure out of the drive across the hill. Dominic drove fast, too fast and too carelessly. He laughed and talked and showed me things out of the window. Sometimes even the back window. And always fast.

  I hung on to the edge of my seat, scared stiff as we roared up the steep hill, with the ground falling away beside us in a tumbling cliff, sometimes a full hundred feet high. I pulled my seat belt tighter instinctively and noticed that Dominic didn’t bother with his. He had a lot more faith in his wild driving than I had.

  I wanted to shout, ‘Slow down!’ I almost did. Then I caught myself. It wasn’t pride; I’d walked home before from a date with some college boy with a fast car and a heavy foot. I was too fond of living to be ashamed of being scared. But I was more scared of Dominic’s temper than I was of his driving. And most of all, I was scared of what he would do with a car if I made him angry.

  I kept my peace and hung on. The curve of the road away from the lochside cliff and onto the broad moor was a beautiful welcome vision. Here, the road was rough and hilly, but straight and essentially safe. He might break an axle up here, but he probably wouldn’t break our necks.

  I relaxed slowly, by degrees, and tried to enjoy the rest of the ride. We swung, skidding, onto the branch road that led to the distillery. Like the Sron Ban road, it was unsurfaced, and the centre grew high with grass. It looked very rarely travelled and I asked, ‘Where do the distillery workers come from?’

  ‘Braemore, mostly,’ Dominic replied.

  ‘Do they come up this road then? It doesn’t look like it’s ever used.’

  ‘It isn’t. Except by me and McGuire. There’s another road on the other side of the distillery, which goes right to Braemore. My workers use that.’

  ‘Do you employ a lot of people in Braemore?’ I asked.

  ‘Just about everybody who isn’t farming. And some who are a bit.’

  ‘It must be a pretty big business,’ I said thoughtfully.

/>   ‘See for yourself,’ he answered, with a quick hand gesture toward the weathered grey roofs that appeared then around a bend. If it hadn’t have been for the roof of the main building, I would have taken the place for a collection of barns and big warehouses. But that roof was unique and distinctive, surmounted by short square towers, each of which was topped by another little roof, slanty and shaped like a Japanese pagoda. Beneath the pagodas were the old pot-stills that brewed the ancient native wine of Scotland, uisge beatha, the water of life.

  The building that housed the still was one of several. Dominic showed me the wooden sheds where they stored the old empty sherry casks, imported from Spain, soon to be filled with the product of the still and left to stand till time made it whisky.

  We went into the malting shed, and while Dominic talked with two of his workers, I watched two others carefully turning the damp heaps of barley on the malting floor, watching for the first signs of sprouting, when the dormant starchy grain would become growing embryonic malt, rich in sugar and ready for fermentation.

  Then the damp malted grain would be dried carefully over low peat fires, in a kiln through which the smoke was allowed to pass freely. By the time it was ready for the great open fermenting vats, the taste of the peat smoke was in it forever.

  Outside the grey stone building that sheltered the fermenting vats, two old trucks were loading with the dross, the brown-yellow used mash, robbed of some of its sugars but still useful for cattle feed. The trucks dripped and splashed, leaving pools of the strong-smelling ‘distiller’s beer’, which ran from the soaked mash, on the ground.

  Most of that ‘beer’ made it into the big pot-stills, however, and there by a trial of fire emerged from the condensing coils as a colourless liquid, fiery with alcohol.