He was quiet for such a long time that Kate finally said, “What happened?”
“I’d been sent out in a Land Rover with a squaddie driver to a village called Vorce to take some photos.”
He fell silent, as if lost somewhere closer to there than here and then than now. Again Kate had to prompt him. “Photos of what?” she asked.
Her voice brought him back to the present. “There were rumours that a whole lot of people had disappeared from the village, so I was looking for evidence of an ‘ethnic cleansing’. It’s amazing how two words can describe an infinity of cruelty and suffering, isn’t it?” he said.
“Anyway, the Land Rover broke down about a mile short of the village: close enough to see the cluster of whitewashed walls and red tile roofs, but not quite close enough to make out individual houses. It appeared to be a tranquil scene until I studied it through a pair of binoculars while the squaddie looked at the engine of the Land Rover. Most houses were undamaged, but others had blackened patches on the walls and ragged shell-holes in the tile roofs. A few were almost gutted.
“The pristine homes would be the ones Serb families had been living in, I guessed.
“The damaged dwellings would be the homes of ethnic Albanians who’d been driven out.
“The gutted ruins would have belonged to Albanians who’d refused to leave; old people who were too frail or weary or proud to flee the fury that had been unleashed in the valley. These were the houses I’d been sent to photograph, because the word was that the people who’d once lived in them had died in them. The chances were that the people who actually pulled the triggers would never be brought to justice, but my photographs would provide evidence for an indictment against the Serb commander who’d either ordered the killings or done nothing to stop them.”
Cameron was still looking at the hearth, but Kate got the feeling he was seeing the blackened stones of Vorce.
“The late afternoon sun streaming over my shoulder had a modelling effect, casting dramatic shadows, making straights lines stand out with razor sharpness and throwing even small things into stark relief,” Cameron said, obviously remembering the scene in every detail. “It was perfect light to capture the horror of what had happened there: the gutted shells would have a depth that made it clear people once lived in them; the last remaining traces of their everyday lives would be recorded—the little things that showed these ruined houses had once been homes.
“I knew there was only about an hour of that light left. When I asked the squaddie how long the Land Rover would take to fix, he said ‘about an hour.’
“I looked at the road leading to the village, trying to work out how long it would take to walk along it. Twenty minutes at the most, I thought. I could get there and take my shots before the light faded.”
“Wasn’t it a bit risky going into a place like that alone?”
“It was against standing orders to go anywhere alone, but the alternative was to wait for the Land Rover to be fixed, and by then the light would be gone. I’d have wasted the afternoon and would have to spend the next morning making the same journey again. It would be about noon when I got there, and the sun would be high in the sky or obscured by clouds. Either way the light wouldn’t have been as good as it was that afternoon. It seemed crazy to be so close and just turn back, so I told the squaddie I’d walk to the village and grab the shots I needed while he fixed the Land Rover.”
“That took guts, Cameron.”
“No, it didn’t. I knew there weren’t any Serb paramilitaries or regulars within 20 miles of the village. According to all the intelligence it had been ‘freed’ by the Kosovo Liberation Army. Any men with guns would be ethnic Albanians, and I thought they’d be glad to see someone taking pictures that showed what had happened to their friends and families, photos that would help bring those responsible to justice.”
“Seems like sound logic, so what went wrong?”
“The fact that logic had long since ceased to apply in Vorce and a thousand other places like it… The fact that even after all the things I’d seen I was still so naïve it never occurred to me that the survivors would be hell-bent on taking matters into their own hands, evening up the score without counting the cost or distinguishing between right and wrong, good and evil.”
He fell silent, then turned from Kate back to the hearth and said, “I’d counted five burnt-out houses when I first looked through the binoculars. Photographing the first four was perfectly straightforward. The light was as dramatic as I’d hoped, and I hardly even had to think about how to make the most of it.
“I was looking around the ruins of the fifth house when I heard a vehicle approaching. Thinking it was the Land Rover, I walked over to the door, ready to flag the squaddie down. But, as I approached the doorway, I realized the sound was coming from the wrong direction. I began to get a bad feeling, and crouched down in the shadows to one side of a broken window.
“The engine-beat grew steadily louder, then changed pitch, and I could tell that the vehicle was coming to a halt just outside the house I was hiding in.
“Moments later came the squeal of badly-worn brakes. It’s a sound I still hear in my sleep. If I’m lucky I wake up in a cold sweat at that point.”
“And if you’re not lucky?”
“The nightmare continues, and I relive the rest of what happened in Vorce,” he said.
Kate thought his voice sounded almost like that of a stranger, an automaton. She had to wait so long to hear it again that she thought she was going to have to ask him what did happen next, but he started to answer her question just before it was asked. “An old truck passed by the window,” he said. “It was moving so slowly I had time to make out a mud-streaked, maroon-colored cab. There were two men in it, both wearing the black berets and tiger-striped battledress of the KLA.”
Now Kate sensed that although he was looking into the hearth of Jamie’s cottage, he was seeing out of the broken window of a ruined house.
“Moments later the back of the truck came into view.” He swallowed several times, as if fighting back a wave of nausea.
Kate’s dread mounted. This time she didn’t prompt him to continue.
But eventually he did. “There was a wooden-slatted cargo section of the sort that might have held cattle or sheep on their way to the abattoir in the days before the madness began,” he said.
Kate had an idea what he was about to say, so that she was fighting back a wave of nausea herself even before she heard his next words.
“It wasn’t the bewildered eyes of farmyard animals on the way to the slaughterhouse that peered out from between the slats, though,” he said. “It was the eyes of bewildered people. That’s all I could see of them—just their eyes—but it was enough to know that some of the people in the cattle truck were old and some were young and some were men and some women, some resigned to their fate, others frantic with fear—”
“Oh, Cameron!”
Either he didn’t hear her words or was far beyond the consolation they expressed. Whatever, he carried on in the same un-nervingly matter-of-fact tone of voice. “They weren’t looking at me, but in my nightmares they are. In my nightmares they look straight at me without blinking, and when I wake from the nightmares I have the feeling that they’re still staring at me, plaintively, accusingly, desperately.” He swallowed, as if it was getting harder to force the words out. “Sometimes even long after I’m awake I can still feel them staring at me. I can’t see them but they can see me. I know that they’re watching me, judging me, damning me.”
Kate got up from the rocker and put an arm around him. The touch of her arm startled him back from past to present and he looked at her with eyes almost as haunted as the ones he’d just been talking about.
“I’m sorry, Cameron, I didn’t mean to bring all this back,” she said.
“It’s never gone away. I don’t think it ever will,” he told her, and Kate was glad when he looked away again because it was frightening and heartbreaking
to see such a look in anyone’s eyes, let alone in the eyes of someone you loved.
“Maybe if it hadn’t been for the purple … The purple …”
“The purple what, Cameron?”
“The purple headscarf,” he said finally. There was something so unsettling about his voice and expression that Kate let her arm drop and took a step away from him. She felt the same thing that she did when a movie became too scary for her and she had to switch channels. Only this time the fear wasn’t contained in a little box that could be turned off and on at will.
“What headscarf?” she asked, filled with a mix of horrified curiosity and dread.
But Cameron was staring into the hearth and once more seeing the past rather than the present, and when he spoke it was to pick up from where he’d left off, rather than to answer her question. “The engine died just as the lorry disappeared from sight, and I knew it had pulled up outside the house next door.”
He lapsed into silence.
“What did you do?” Kate asked.
He didn’t answer right away. When he finally spoke it was in his own time, and Kate suspected that he hadn’t even heard her question. “I crawled across to the side window,” he said. “From there I could see the back of the truck. Sitting on the tailgate was a third uniformed man, machine gun at the ready, his back to me, guarding the human cattle.
“The doors on either side of the cab opened and the other two KLA men got out.
“They started walking towards the house next door. The driver unholstered a pistol. It was a Luger, and I remember thinking how appropriate that was. The other man unslung a shotgun. The driver banged on the front door of the house but there was no answer. He banged again, while the man with the shotgun made his way around the gable end, passing just a few yards from me.
“Just then, the back door of the house opened. An old woman in a black shawl and a purple … A purple …”
“A purple headscarf,” Kate said.
Cameron nodded. “Yes, an old woman in a purple headscarf hurried out just as the man with the shotgun turned the corner.
“The man shouted something, but the woman—she must have been the last remaining Serb in the village—ignored him and started to hurry away.
“The man shouted again. I couldn’t understand the words, but the tone of voice left me in no doubt that he’d shoot if the old woman didn’t obey his command. She must have sensed the same thing, because she stopped and turned slowly to face the man with the shotgun—and me.
“The man gestured towards her with his gun, indicating the direction he wanted her to go in. When she didn’t move he walked towards her, jabbing the muzzle into her side. I was close enough to see her wince and hear her groan.
“I knew that a good soldier would have drawn his gun at that point, and a good photographer would have raised his camera.
“A good man would have done something.
“But I also knew that even if I dropped the soldier with the shotgun there was a better-than-even chance I’d be shot by one of the others. So I didn’t draw my pistol.
“And I knew that if I took a photo there was a chance the man with the shotgun would hear the shutter being tripped, and that he’d let me have both barrels if he did. So I didn’t raise the camera.
“I just crawled on my hands and knees around to the front window, kneeling in the shadows and watching as the back of the truck was unhinged and the woman was herded towards it.
“There were a couple of moments when a brave man had a chance of taking out all three KLA fighters: the driver had holstered his Luger and was on his way back to the cab; the front-seat passenger had slung his shotgun and had both hands wedged into the old woman’s behind, shoving her into the lorry; and the soldier on the tailgate was reaching out to grab the woman’s shawl and pull her inside.
“Those were the moments when I found out that I wasn’t a brave man, because all I did was watch.”
“It was three against one, Cameron. You can’t beat yourself up for not taking on those odds,” Kate said. “You wouldn’t have saved her life, just got yourself killed.”
Cameron didn’t turn to look at her, and she didn’t know if it was because he was too ashamed or if it was because he was so caught up in his memories of those awful moments that, again, he hadn’t heard.
“I didn’t even take a photo, even though there was little danger of being heard by then,” he said. “If I’d had a photographic record of those moments I would have had to explain to others what I was ashamed to admit to myself. So I just listened to the bolt of the tailgate sliding home and watched the woman disappear into the shadows of a truck that I knew might well be making the same sort of journey as the ones that take animals to an abattoir.”
Finally Cameron turned from the hearth at his feet to the woman at his side and said, “I didn’t tell anyone what had happened, Kate, so there was no court martial or disciplinary hearing, no blemish on my service record.
“There was plenty on my conscience, though. At best I was guilty of dereliction of duty or conduct unbecoming. At worst I was guilty of outright cowardice.
“The one plea in mitigation I could offer in the court of my own conscience was the notion that maybe the old woman and the others in the truck were being taken to a prison camp rather than a place of execution. I wanted to believe that so badly that, in time, maybe I would have … If I hadn’t seen the old woman’s purple scarf again a couple of weeks later.” Again he had to turn away from Kate.
“Where did you see it?” she asked.
He sighed heavily, then said, “At the bottom of an unmarked grave.”
“Oh, Cameron!”
“I didn’t feel fit to wear an officer’s uniform after that so I resigned my commission, and wasn’t pressed too hard to explain the ‘personal reasons’ I’d cited for doing so because my term of enlistment was almost up.
“I had vague notions of trying to make a living as a nature photographer in wild and lonely places, as far away from people as I could get. Then the telegram from Archie Cunningham arrived out of the blue.”
“And you came to Glen Cranoch to see if Jamie’s Cottage was the sort of place where a fresh start could begin.”
He nodded. “Life’s not that simple, though, is it?”
“Cameron, the evil men are the ones who drove former friends and neighbours from their homes, not the ones who didn’t sacrifice their lives in vain for strangers they couldn’t even have saved.”
“Who was it who said that all it takes for evil to prevail is for good men to stand by and do nothing?”
“Probably somebody who’d never been in a position where stepping forward would cost him his life,” Kate said. She tugged Cameron’s arm so that he faced her, and said, “You have to move on, Cameron. Dwelling on the past just screws up your future, and you deserve better than that—and so do I.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“I understand that it can’t be easy, but not why you think it’s impossible.”
“I can tell you why, Kate: it’s the knowledge that if I found myself in the same situation again I probably wouldn’t handle it any better than I did the last time.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Deep down I do. Maybe it does run in the family.”
“What?”
“A yellow streak.”
“It took courage to tell me what you just told me.”
“That’s a different kind of courage.”
“But a kind of courage all the same.”
He didn’t say anything.
“Cameron, in that village you probably acted just how anybody else would have acted in the face of odds like that—one pistol against a shotgun, a machine gun, and a handgun.”
For a few moments he didn’t respond. Then he said, “Kate, I wanted so badly to be the man of your dreams, because you’re the woman of mine.”
“Oh, Cameron,” she said, hugging him.
When they moved apart, she
saw that the unhappiness was still there in his eyes. “Cameron,” she said, “Miss Weir told me something a few days ago, when she saw how worried I was about what would happen if I had to sell the estate. She said, ‘You can’t take the weight of the world on your shoulders or it’ll crush you’.”
“I should have tried to carry that old woman’s share, though,” Cameron said.
“If you want to carry more than your share, how about helping me carry the weight of a little part of the world, a beautiful part that won’t stay that way if I have to hand it over to the people who want to take it from me.”
“You know I will, Kate.”
Again he was quiet, and she could tell how deeply troubled he still was. “I’m sorry for the old woman, Cameron,” she told him, “but I’m not sorry that you didn’t do something that would have got you killed, because then I wouldn’t be able to do this …” she ran a hand through his hair, brushing it back from his brow.
“Or this …” she hugged him even harder.
“Or this …” she kissed him.
“SO, KATE, DO YOU THINK YOU COULD DO THIS ON A REGULAR basis?” Cameron asked.
The wedding reception was in full swing. Miss Weir’s meal had been thoroughly enjoyed; everybody from the happy couple to Kate Brodie and, somewhat bizarrely, Bonnie Prince Charlie, had been toasted; the table top had been cleared and propped against the wall beneath the portraits, and now the old hall was echoing to a joyful bagpipe tune played by Finlay McRae and the carefree “heuchs!” of a Highland reel.
Kate nodded in answer to the question, thrilled by what she was seeing.
Cameron smiled and for some reason they both laughed, enjoying the feeling of getting closer to each other rather than slowly drifting apart.
Kate turned to look back at the wedding party: at the dancing men with their kilts constantly threatening to reveal all but somehow stopping just short of stopping short, their Braveheart shirts with lace-up fronts instead of
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