“That all sounds easier said than done, Cameron. What sort of plan did you have in mind to act as bait?”
Before Cameron could confess that he hadn’t thought out the specifics, the green pull-around curtains of the consulting bay parted and Finlay walked slowly out, clutching a bottle of painkillers. Seeing the concern on the faces of Kate and Cameron, he said, “There’s no need to worry. Nothing’s broken; it’s just some bruising.
“Now, if you don’t mind, I’d like to get back and see how poor wee Hamish is doing.”
Cameron spent most of the drive back to Glen Cranoch thinking of how to make his plan work, but without success.
As they drove past the lochan, Finlay looked at it longingly and said, “It’ll be a while before I’m able to cast a rod again.”
“That just means there’ll be all the more fish to catch,” Kate said to cheer him up.
“That’s it!” Cameron said.
Kate and Finlay both looked at him, and then at each other …
And then they smiled as Cameron explained what he had in mind.
“Pity it’s not on the front page,” Kate said as she looked at The Inverness Morning Herald the next day. The paper had been delivered by one of the crofters who’d gone into town on an errand.
“It doesn’t matter, I’m sure Carling will still notice it,” Cameron said.
They were standing with Finlay and Miss Weir in the kitchen, looking at a story halfway down Page 3. It was headlined Fish farm plan for troubled glen.
“What exactly do you expect him to do when he sees it?” Miss Weir asked.
“I’m not sure, but I’m certain he’ll try to do something, and I want to be there to catch him on camera when he does. I’ll set up a night-time OP—sorry, an observation post—at the far end of the glen. If Carling tries to dump poison in the lochan, or something like that, he’ll do it as far away from the crofters’ cottages as possible, and probably under cover of darkness.”
Thinking about the far end of Glen Cranoch, Cameron realized he had a choice between setting up camp in the ruined cottages or the old church. He couldn’t bring himself to go inside the blackened cottages by day, let alone night, so he said, “I’ll use the church as a base.”
Finlay and Miss Weir exchanged uneasy glances, and Kate looked down at the stone flagged floor. Cameron looked from one to another for an explanation, but nobody would meet his questioning gaze.
“There’s an old shooting blind on the hillside above the road into the glen,” Finlay said at last.
“It’d be too far away from the water to take a good enough photo of any dirty tricks in the lochan,” Cameron told him. “What’s wrong with the church?”
There was another awkward silence.
“Don’t tell me it’s supposed to be haunted, too,” Cameron said. “I would have thought a church was the ideal place to go when you want to get away from ghosts.”
Again the silence was deafening.
Finally Miss Weir said, “I suppose you’d say it’s a haunting place rather than a haunted one, Mr. Fraser.”
“Something tells me that’s going to seem like a meaningless distinction once darkness falls.”
“It’s just that the last minister who preached there played an ungodly part in the clearing of the glen,” Finlay told him. “You could say he sold his soul to the devil, so it’s hard for the people who remain in Glen Cranoch to think of his church as a house of God.”
Cameron knew that Tony Carling would need time to work out a plan of his own in response to the newspaper article, and so was unlikely to try anything that night. However, he didn’t want to take the slightest chance of missing a clandestine visit by the businessman, so he spent the afternoon setting up his observation post in readiness for the fall of night. He packed his camera gear and flash units into a rucksack, while Kate carried a blanket to keep him warm through the chill of the night, a bottle of water, and some sandwiches.
Although it was a warm summer’s afternoon Cameron shivered when he entered the old church. Looking at the mould-speckled walls, empty pews, and deserted pulpit, he said, “The word ‘godforsaken’ somehow springs to mind, but I don’t know why. I’ve been in other disused churches and they don’t have an unsettling atmosphere like this one.”
Kate didn’t say anything.
Looking around, Cameron said, “I’m glad I don’t believe in God, because if I did I’d have the feeling this place had been abandoned by Him as well as by His worshippers.”
“Do you want me to spend the night here with you?” Kate asked in the sort of voice that made it clear she was hoping he’d politely decline the offer.
Her reluctance was so obvious that he couldn’t resist asking, “What would you do if I said ‘yes’?”
“Hope you changed your mind. There’s no one else I’d rather spend the night with, Cameron, but there are plenty of other places I’d rather spend it in.”
He smiled. “It’s okay, it’s probably better if I’m on my own, otherwise I’d end up talking to you instead of listening for Tony Carling.”
Kate couldn’t hide her relief, and Cameron couldn’t hide his amusement at it.
Later, though—once Kate had left and the bright shafts of sunlight had turned to gold and then disappeared into thin air, gone as completely as vanished youth and lost innocence—Cameron didn’t feel like smiling any more. As he looked around the empty church he tried telling himself that the coming of darkness would be a blessing, because it would hide the haunting signs of neglect and abandonment.
But he changed his mind when night began to fall because it seemed to bring the opposite of a blessing. He sat there mesmerized as shadows appeared all around like black magic spells made visible. He watched them slowly lengthen as if they were animated by some dark, relentless force, swallowing pulpit, pillar, and pew and leaving in their wake a darkness so complete it was hard to believe he would ever see daylight again.
When he turned his back on the interior of the church and looked out of the broken window he felt the darkness like a threatening presence at his back, one that might reach out and claim him at any moment.
The hours before the moon broke through the clouds were an eternity of long, empty silences punctuated by moments of heart-stopping alarm. Unable to see anything but the impenetrable depths of night when he looked out of the broken window, he became totally reliant on his sense of hearing, and even the slightest sounds were accentuated as a result. Every so often, just as he was on the point of dozing off, a sudden noise would startle him frightfully and for several awful moments he’d use imagination rather than common sense when considering its cause: the squeak of warped door swinging on rusty hinges and rattle of ill-fitting window panes against wooden frame in a gust of wind; the scratching and scurrying of small animals in the foundations beneath his feet; the creak of roof timbers contracting overhead in the chill of night. Always the sounds came from within the old building, so that gradually the desolate church became his whole world and he almost forgot about the glen outside.
He soon began to feel as if his weren’t the only pair of watchful eyes in the creaking old building and that, while he was looking out into the blackness of night, all the other eyes were looking at him, judging him, condemning him to some unspeakably awful fate. He felt as if the pews were filled by a silent congregation of the damned—and that he was destined to join their ranks in a never-ending night. He half expected to feel a clutching hand fall on his shoulder at any moment, and spent almost as much time looking into the darkness of the church behind him as he did out of the broken window into the pitch black of the glen.
When the moon finally broke through the clouds even the glistening lochan, plunging quicksilver waterfall and magically limned outline of Greystane and Castle Crag appearing like something from a fairytale in the distance couldn’t hold his attention completely, for the interior of the church around him was, in its way, even more striking. Milky white moonbeams slanted through the a
rched windows, creating pools of ghostly light and monstrous shadows that bore no apparent relation to the things they were cast from. Cameron found himself in one of the shafts of silvery light and, even though he knew he would be silhouetted against it to anyone looking into the church from outside, still it took him the best part of a minute and all his strength of will to step into the shadows.
He was glad when clouds obscured the moon once more because, although he wouldn’t have believed it was possible, the spectral glow and slowly moving shadows within the church had been even more menacing than the total darkness.
Unsettling as the atmosphere in the church was, it only accounted for part of his disquiet. The rest was down to the thought of what a sound from outside the church might signal. Even with high-speed film and a fast lens he’d need a photographic flash to capture evidence of any wrongdoing—and from what he’d heard of Tony Carling, the big Englishman wouldn’t exactly behave like a deer caught in the headlights when the bulb went off.
There was no way around it: if he wanted to help Kate Brodie, he was going to have to take his chances with Tony Carling—and he knew the odds of coming out of such an encounter unscathed weren’t good.
Just when Cameron thought the night was never going to end, the sky showed the first signs of changing from black to blue. He thought at first he might be imagining it, but then palest amber appeared on the horizon, as though a dark canvas was being delicately colored by some great, invisible hand.
Slowly but surely the hills rose up out of the darkness on either side of the church, their dark, brooding bulk lightening as first the grey of rocky summit ridges appeared, then the mauve of heather and green of forest.
Soon the distinctive outline of the twin crags and Greystane emerged in the distance at the far end of the glen.
When Cameron rushed out of the church to greet the day, he felt like he’d escaped from a hellish halfway house between the living and the dead.
The walk back to Greystane eased the stiffness out of his bones but didn’t take the kinks out of his mind, for the disappointment he felt at a fruitless night was tempered by guilty relief at the fact that he hadn’t been forced to confront Tony Carling.
The smell of sizzling bacon as he approached the lean-to at the back of the banquet hall stimulated an appetite that had been suppressed by fear; the sandwiches lay behind in the church, and he hadn’t eaten all night.
Finlay and Miss Weir were just finishing breakfast when he walked into the kitchen. He tried to give them a “good morning” smile, but knew from the concerned look on their faces that he hadn’t come close to pulling it off. “It must have seemed like a long night, Mr. Fraser,” Finlay said.
Cameron nodded. He wanted to forget about the night behind him, and the one that lay ahead, so he quickly changed the subject by asking, “How about you, Finlay—did the tablets help?”
“Maybe they did, but I’m more inclined to think it was the wee dram I washed them down with that did the trick. Whatever, I slept like a baby and woke up feeling more like my old self.” His chirpiness deserted him when he added, “I’ll be able to take a turn in the church tonight, Mr. Fraser.”
Miss Weir gave a phoney little cough, and said, “Excuse me, I was just choking on the smell of burning martyr.”
Cameron laughed and felt better, thinking how good it was to be back in the land of the living. He sat down on a stool next to Finlay just as the kitchen door opened and Kate walked in. She wrapped her arms around him from behind. Resting her head on his shoulder, she whispered, “I missed you,” in his ear, and suddenly the darkness of the church seemed like part of another world.
By halfway through his second night in the old church Cameron recognized the sounds of the building for what they were, and so they no longer startled him. Without the prick of terror that unfamiliar noises had brought the night before, boredom rather than fear became his biggest enemy. As the night wore on, so he increasingly woke up with his chin hitting his chest after dozing off to sleep.
He came to with a start after one such sleepy interlude and was in mid-yawn when a sound from outside the church stopped him. At first he thought he’d imagined it.
But it grew louder the longer he listened, until he was sure of what it was: the crunch of tyres rolling very slowly over gravel. He had a clear view of the lochan, but the sound came from the track behind the church, to the left, near the pass that led into the glen. For a few moments all he saw was the dim glow of the water in the light of the waxing moon …
Then, to the accompaniment of a lightly revving engine, a dark shape came into view. The angular bulk of a Range Rover.
The crunch of gravel died away as the vehicle left the track and trundled down towards the lochan.
Cameron reached for his Nikon, palms sweating despite the chill of the night. As his hands closed on the camera sling he clearly heard the ratcheting of a handbrake being engaged, then a car door squeaking open.
A heavy footfall on shingle was followed by another as the driver got out onto the small pebble beach at the water’s edge.
Moments later a burly silhouette appeared against the quicksilver of the loch. The figure moved to the back of the vehicle, raised an arm and opened the top half of the hatchback trunk, then lowered the bottom half. There was a scraping, as if something heavy was being dragged from the trunk. The figure stooped, and for several seconds the silhouette was lost in the shadowy bulk of the car before reappearing against the lochan as the man carried a big crate down towards the water’s edge.
Cameron knew he was too far away for his flash to reach the Range Rover, let alone cast any light on what the man was doing down by the water, but he was too afraid to move closer. He just stood there, watching the silhouette disappear as the man squatted to set down the heavy crate.
After several seconds of noisy splashing the silhouette reappeared as the man stood up, lifting the crate easily now that it had been emptied.
Watching the man walk back to the rear of the Range Rover, Cameron’s legs were shaking, his whole body damp with the fear sweat that had been confined to his palms moments earlier. He was almost physically sick at the thought that he’d blown the chance to capture the man on film, and at the knowledge that he’d never be able to look Kate Brodie or Finlay McRae in the eye again as a result.
Filled with self-loathing, he waited for the man to close the boot, knowing the sound would have a finality that marked the end of his own hopes of ever finding happiness.
But instead of the soft thud of a closing door there was more scraping.
The man was taking another crate from the boot.
Feeling nothing that could happen to him in the moments to come could be as bad as the prospect of the future he’d been faced with moments earlier, Cameron slung the Nikon around his neck and padded quickly but silently out of the church and down towards the Range Rover.
He got to the edge of the narrow shingle beach just as the silhouetted man set the crate down at the water’s edge, no more than half a dozen yards away. Taking a deep breath, his hands shaking, Cameron tried to raise the camera.
Nothing happened. He felt powerless to move, capable only of listening.
The scrape of a crate being opened was followed by the frenzied splashing of living things entering the water.
The sounds somehow brought Cameron to life and, before he knew what he was doing, he raised the camera and pressed the shutter. Suddenly the night was ablaze with a cone of light as the flash fired, illuminating a stocky figure crouched at the edge of the lochan and a crate of big-clawed, lobster-like creatures that thrashed furiously when they entered the water. The man turned in surprise to face the blinding light. Cameron kept his finger on the shutter and fired off the whole roll of film. The man in front of him was captured in an action sequence of postures that went from crouching to standing, and a range of expressions from shock to snarling anger and then a mocking, challenging look that was even more intimidating than the snarl.
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br /> By the time the camera’s motor drive had fired off the last frame of film the man was advancing towards Cameron, into a slanting shaft of moonlight. Despite never having seen Tony Carling before, Cameron knew from Kate’s description that he was facing the Yeoman boss now.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Cameron said, trying in vain to keep the fear from his voice.
“A little fish farming of my own,” the man said in a London accent. He took another step towards Cameron, saying, “Now hand over the film, and I’ll let you keep the camera.”
Cameron stood rooted to the spot. He wasn’t giving away anything in terms of height or age, but knew by Carling’s bull neck, heavy shoulders, and barrel chest that he was giving away a lot in weight—and could tell by the look in the man’s eyes that he was giving away even more in terms of aggression. He tried to summon up the courage to fight a battle that he knew was well worth fighting …
But wasn’t able to, because he knew it was a battle he couldn’t hope to win.
Reading Cameron’s expression and what lay behind it, Carling sneered and reached for the Nikon.
There was something about the look on Carling’s face in that moment that reminded Cameron of the expression on the face of the bully who’d herded the woman with the purple headscarf onto the cattle truck—and suddenly, without thinking what he was doing, Cameron clenched his right hand into a fist and threw a haymaker that came out of the past and all the way up from his hip, connecting solidly with the other man’s jaw.
Carling staggered back but didn’t go down. Cameron knew he hadn’t knocked the fight out of him, but somehow he wasn’t scared any more. Instead of thinking about how he might get hurt in the coming fight, he was thinking about a crofter’s gutted cottage and a bride’s ruined wedding …
About Finlay McRae standing on a Normandy beach at the age of nineteen and playing Highland Laddie …
About Glen Cranoch and Kate Brodie, and how they were so well worth fighting for.
Waterfall Glen Page 24