The Dreams of Bethany Mellmoth

by William Boyd

  ‘Yeah, well, whatever. Good luck,’ I said and turned away.

  ‘What your name?’ she called after me.

  ‘Alec,’ I said.

  ‘Thank you, Alec. You nice man.’

  Yeah. Cut.

  As I drove on, now well past midnight, the traffic thinned and for long periods I seemed to be the only vehicle travelling north. I didn’t feel tired at all, enjoying the familiar romance of driving through the night, comfortable with the thrum of the tyres on the roadway, the music in my ears, thinking this wasn’t a bad way to earn a grand, cash.

  What is it that makes you notice these things? It was just past Penrith when I became aware of the lights in my rear-view mirror. Two hundred yards or so behind me, never wavering, never falling back, never attempting to overtake. I let ten minutes go by and then signalled and pulled into the hard shoulder. I watched a big black saloon flash by, its red tail lights soon lost to view round a curve in the motorway. You’ve been in too many crappy movies, mate, I said to myself, as I put KT-99 in gear and pulled into the near lane. Get a life.

  But a few minutes later, as I was approaching Carlisle, the lights in my mirror were back, sitting there, keeping their careful distance. All right, I thought, more fun and games being played – people had to stay awake somehow, let’s have a bit of a laugh and pretend to follow someone. So I pulled off the motorway at the next exit and headed for Dumfries on the A75. There were many ways to skin a cat and many roads to Scotland – and I didn’t want company, that much I was sure of.

  Part Three: Welcome to Scotland

  I saw the sign by the roadside, lit by my headlights – ‘Welcome to Scotland’ – and felt a curious flow of relief course through me. Job done, nearly. I turned off the A75, parked up on a grassy verge and had a pee in a small copse of trees a few yards from the road. It was distinctly colder these few hundred miles north from London. I inhaled and exhaled loudly and ran on the spot for two minutes. No fatigue at all, I was pleased to note – onwards.

  I swept through Glasgow in the small hours, heading west out of the city, and had reached Loch Lomond as the sun began to rise. I found a deserted campsite, parked up, and wandered down to the edge of the loch as the darkness leached out of the air and a watery, hazy sun began to fall across the hills. The water was as still and flat as heavy glass and the place possessed a primeval beauty because I couldn’t see any sign of our human presence anywhere. Across the loch, on the east side, the steep hills plunged abruptly into the burnished sheet-metal of the water’s surface, their reflections as fixed as a still photograph. I breathed deeply, arched my back, and went through a few t’ai chi exercises I remembered from that Samurai movie I’d been in for a couple of days. What was it called? Oh yes, Banzai Dawn. The less said about that one, the better.

  I was about three hours or so from Oban, I calculated, then on north towards Fort William and the A830 to Mallaig and the village of Alcorran on the coast across from the island of Eigg and the Sound of Sleat, the stretch of water separating the mainland from the Isle of Skye. I’d arrive with some hours to spare, I reckoned, so I could stop somewhere for a proper breakfast – lots of unhealthy saturated fats required. I sat down on a rock and listened to the birds begin their early-morning chirping. What was bothering me? …

  The following car, of course. Coincidence? Malign fun? And something about the wild girl in white was troubling me, also. I had left her at Watford Gap standing hitch-hiking to ‘Scottlan’. Three hours later she steps out of an articulated lorry just as I was filling up. That was fast … Hold on a second, Dunbar, I said to myself: did you actually see her get out of the lorry? No. She just appeared from behind it. I was jumping to too swift conclusions: for her to arrive at the service station at the same time as me she wouldn’t have been travelling in an articulated lorry. I told myself to forget it – in a few hours I would have delivered my River Jordan water to St Mungo’s Church and would be heading back to London on a train. I took one last look at the bonnie banks of Loch Lomond and strolled back to KT-99.

  I stopped for a proper fry-up, heart-attack-on-a-plate breakfast at a roadside café in Inverary, a small town on Loch Fyne. Eggs, bacon, sausages, baked beans, fried bread, black pudding and all washed down with a couple of mugs of scalding black coffee, heavily sugared. I was feeling tired by now – that tiredness you feel at the end of a long night-shoot – an ache in the joints, a sensation of fine grains of sand aggravating your eyeballs, an uncontrollable urge to yawn, the body craving oxygen, saying stop, stop, don’t do this to me any more.

  I paid my bill at the counter. I was about two and a half hours from my destination, I thought: so I’d be there well before midday. I walked out into the car park thinking that maybe I should find a hotel in Mallaig or Fort William, have a break, get some sleep – when would I be back on the west coast of Scotland again? Il faut profiter, as my ex-wife, Séverine, used to remark (she was French – is French, I should say. A French actress. Tricky).

  I slipped the key into the front-door lock of KT-99 and was about to turn it when I saw the big black saloon turn into the car park behind the café. I went rigid. It swung by me and through the window of the front passenger seat I saw the pale feral face of the girl in white staring out at me, impassively, one palm spread on the glass pane. Then with a throaty roar of its powerful engine the car swerved round, pulled away and disappeared off down the road to Oban.

  Yeah. Got it. Scrub the coincidence explanation. Ditto the ‘malign fun’ notion. Something was going on here and I wasn’t happy about it.

  I opened the rear door and unfastened the lid of the cool box, lifting out the heavy glass flask. I stared at its limpid contents as if some answer might be found there. River Jordan water for a christening in a small church near a remote village … That was beginning to sound like a fairy tale. However, the sooner I reached the church the sooner I’d be out of this particular conundrum.

  I put the flask away and unfolded one of the ordnance survey maps Stella Devereaux had given me: two and a half inches to one mile, every rutted track and landscape feature of any tiny notable significance delineated. I didn’t need to take the main Oban–Fort William–Mallaig road to reach St Mungo’s – I was driving a Land Rover Defender, for heaven’s sake, so let’s go cross-country.

  Ah yes, Stella Devereaux, I thought: maybe she could throw some light on my unexpected and unwelcome companions. I took out my mobile phone – showing a weak signal that would probably weaken as I drove into the Scottish wilderness – now was the time to phone her. I punched out her number. It rang and rang – no voicemail. Right.

  I took the first single-lane road as I left Inverary and drove on through increasingly rugged and hilly countryside. There were great tracks of industrially planted pine forest on these lower slopes of the hills and a whole network of dirt roadways that connected them. As the day went on I bumped along rutted lanes, forded small rushing streams and manoeuvred myself northwards, pausing every now and then to consult the map. Such precise, loving detail, I thought – it was a thing of beauty.

  Two hours later I found myself in a remote glen. Small lochans gleamed like silver monocles amongst the tawny bracken and the heather and I could see on the highest mountains the first icing-sugar dusting of autumn snowfall. I looked back, looked ahead. There was a glen in front of me and an ascending array of small hills behind. Beyond them were big craggy mountains. Sunlight drenched the pewter clouds of a weather front moving in from the west. I was the only motor vehicle within the vast horizon that bounded me.

  I drove on down a track, heading for a junction that would put me back on the road north, the A82 to Fort William, passing a row of shooting butts as I circled what was a vast heather grouse moor. A lot of these muddy roads were for hunters as well, I realized. Grouse had been shot on these hillsides for well over a hundred years, and deer stalked, these criss-crossing tracks webbing the contours and undulations of this wild country had their own history.

  I allowe
d myself a small indulgent moment of smugness as I forded a shallow brown river and accelerated up the bank and on to the first metalled road I’d encountered in over two hours. And here was a signpost – A82 Fort William. I was going to be an hour later than planned but one thing was for sure – I’d be without company.

  Turning on to the road I saw the narrow waters of Loch Linnhe appear on my left. Across on the far side were the promontories of Ardgour and Moidart – Moidart where Alcorran was to be found. Nearly there. The day was breezy, the sky full of moving clouds – running shadows on the loch and luminous flashes of sunshine. I fitted my headphones into my ears and John Adams’s Short Ride in a Fast Machine set the heart beating in time to its mesmerizing rhythms. And, just as I began to speed up, I glanced in my rear mirror and there it was – a hundred yards behind me – the black saloon.

  My new feeling – smugness long gone – was alarm with a dressing of fear and a sprinkling of utter bafflement. What to do now? I remembered, all of a sudden, what I’d done myself in a rather good and underrated low-budget thriller called Incandescence where my character, who was in a car and was being followed, did exactly the opposite of what a man who is being followed was expected to do.

  Unfortunately in the movie I was then shot and killed but the ploy seemed to me an admirable one – particularly in these circumstances.

  I put my foot on the accelerator and sped away, though the saloon was soon safely at its usual distance. I was looking for a long stretch of straight road and after a couple of minutes I found it. Again I sped up and again I managed to put a few hundred yards between us for a moment. Then I braked and pulled off the road, stopping KT-99 on the grassy verge and flinging the door open.

  I stepped on to the road and waited. Here came the black saloon hurtling towards me. I held my hand up and stupidly shouted ‘Stop!’ It didn’t stop – it accelerated and came straight on at me. In the film Incandescence the pursuing car had stopped, turned and drove away – but here on the Fort William road it obviously wasn’t going to. Plan B, Dunbar.

  I hurled myself out of its way as it barrelled past and sped off into the distance. I dusted myself down. My throat was dry. No – this was no joke, I hadn’t signed up for this. I uttered a few colourful expletives and called Stella Devereaux again. Number unobtainable.

  Of course.

  The phone.

  That was how, despite my glen-crossing, stream-fording, hill-climbing evasion, they had picked me up so easily. I closed my eyes and exhaled. It was all coming back to me. There was a pilot I had shot in the US three years ago, what was it called? Oh yes, The Undead, Dying (it wasn’t picked up). Not my character but the character I was trying to kill thought all he had to do was switch his phone off and he couldn’t be followed, couldn’t be triangulated. Not so, sucker.

  I opened my phone and removed the battery. It’s the battery – they can always pinpoint you from the signal the battery gives out. So, here I was, phoneless. And I realized they would know – whoever was in the black saloon – that I had removed the battery, also. Time to make myself scarce. I took the first right turn off the Fort William road and drove as fast as I could. After ten minutes and three more random turns at junctions I stopped. There was a sunken farm with its steading a quarter of a mile away. The day was growing less kindly, big grey continents of clouds massing out to the west. I opened the cool box and took out the flask. I prised off the metal clamps and lifted the lid. I sniffed, nothing. I dipped a finger in the fluid, tasted it. Watery. I put the lid back on and sat there for a while, thinking.

  Something was wrong. Perhaps something was seriously wrong. Should I go to the police? … But nothing had really happened. What could I reasonably complain about? It seemed to me that all I had to do was earn my £1,000 and leave the problem, whatever it was, for somebody else – no doubt in my mind that this would be Miss Stella Devereaux, or whatever her real name was – to sort out herself. Various scenarios suggested themselves to me – some kind of family feud being the most likely, with the girl in white being some insane, aggrieved sister, or something – but I realized all speculation was fruitless. I was going to deliver this flask with whatever it contained to St Mungo’s Church in Alcorran and then, sayonara. However, after my acrobatics on the Fort William road I intended to do this with due caution, not to say exceptional, ridiculous caution. I looked at the map and calculated roughly where I was. I needed a town with shops. Fort William was a few miles away and, one thing I knew now, I couldn’t be followed any more. I started KT-99, turned her round and headed off. It was time I equipped myself.

  Part Four: The Church of Death

  In fact I didn’t head on to Fort William. A moment’s further thought made me retrace my steps and go back down the coast road to Oban – it seemed altogether more unexpected and therefore safer. I hadn’t made my initial rendezvous so I had ceased to worry about time any more. If my employer gave me an unobtainable number then what could she expect? – I might have had a puncture or a breakdown or an accident. Of course, I realized that I couldn’t be called myself, any more, now my phone was shut down. Still, there were other routes and methods of getting in touch – Stella Devereaux had all my information and contact numbers and there was always social media.

  Oban is a small resort town and important ferry port to the Hebrides and the Western isles, once rather pretty but now showing some of the signs of twenty-first-century tourism fatigue. Its heyday probably began in the 1890s and terminated in the 1960s. However, one advantage of twenty-first-century tourism was that there was always an Internet café to be found, somewhere. I asked a few passers-by and was directed to Oor Wullie’s Webcaff on Shore Street by the railway station.

  I paid my money, bought a cappuccino and a cheese and tomato sandwich from the small snack counter and took a seat at a computer and logged on, wondering if there would be a perplexed message from Stella.

  There was no message from Stella but a lot of posts from me …

  I sat in a fog of incredulity reading about the holiday I was enjoying in Honduras, looking at photographs of myself, wearing the clothes that had been stolen from my flat the week before – my leather jacket, my Hawaiian baggie swimming trunks, my frayed panama hat. As Photoshop jobs went it was first class. My friends were envious and raucously abusive. I read on: ‘This place is amazing!’ I had posted. ‘I think I may never come back. Enjoy winter, losers!’

  For a moment I was tempted to replace my battery in my phone and make some calls but along with my incredulity came a colder awareness. This spontaneous invitation to drive to Scotland had been long in the planning and meticulous in its execution. Clearly, I had been targeted, duly investigated, set up and selected. The burglary, the partial destruction of my car, the invitation to the Transfigured Night audition, Stella Devereaux’s broken ankle … What seemed random events, part of the here and now of an ordinary urban life, were in fact beads carefully slipped on to a string. But what about the girl in white and the black saloon? Where did that fit? Were they trying to frighten me in some way? …

  The police, I thought again. But what could I complain about? An Internet prank? I suspected I had a little time on my side. Whatever was in the glass flask was key and now I had disappeared – vanished, temporarily – I could perhaps swing the power-pendulum my way. Of course, I reasoned, I could drop the flask in a roadside waste bin, abandon KT-99 and return to London and my life. But that cold awareness I was experiencing, that chill creeping round my kidneys, made me think that, even if I did that, I wouldn’t be safe for long. While I had the flask, I was valuable, I reasoned; as soon as I didn’t – I was expendable.

  I had a feeling that all the answers lay in St Mungo’s Church in Alcorran. Time to check it out.

  I sent Stella an email.

  ‘Breakdown. Running twenty-four hours late. See you tomorrow. Sorry! A.’

  Before I left the café I also searched online for a sports shop in Oban – camping, mountaineering, cliff-climbing – t
hat kind of emporium. I found it – Great Outdoors, a retail unit in an industrial estate on the outskirts of town on the Fort William road. I spent an hour there, filling my trolley with everything I’d need.

  When I made Exit Wound (2008) for Gregson David Defoe he had insisted that all the young actors spend two weeks in a boot camp run by ex-Royal Marines. We all hated it but we learnt a great deal, however reluctantly, and I think I can say I’ve never been as fit as that again in my life. I also became a bit of an outerwear fetishist as a result, I confess, with a finicky knowledge of fabric types, warmth-to-weight ratios, breathability quotients, types of walking boots, fleeces, thermal underwear, headgear and all the rest of the paraphernalia that the rugged, self-sufficient outdoorsman requires, with a pedantry and brand knowledge that would rival the most ardent fashionista.

  I bought wisely in the store and took my booty to the checkout desk where it was rung up and my credit cards were duly refused, one after the other. Again, I felt the muscle-stiffening weight of dread drape itself around my shoulders. Credit card refused – someone would be watching: they would know where I was.

  I used a wad of Stella Devereaux’s cash to pay and flung everything in the back of KT-99. I took out the ordnance survey map and searched for a place where I could hole up for the night. I’d scope out the church in the morning – see what was what. Now I had a plan, I felt better. There was always the option of cut-and-run, with whatever dangers that involved, but I had a feeling that once the flask with its ‘holy water’ was out of my hands the way ahead would appear obvious.

  Night was drawing in as I drove KT-99 up a steep dirt track heading for the summit of a mid-sized mountain on the Moidart peninsula called Clachan Mor. I’d chosen it because it seemed equipped, as far as I could tell, with more of its share of cliff faces and corries, rock buttresses, shale slopes and moraines. And sure enough, halfway up I saw a mass of huge boulders, the size of haystacks, detritus from some ancient glacier, with a Defender-sized gap at one end. I backed in and made camp.