Two Years After ; Friends Who Lie ; No More Secrets

by Paul J. Teague

  She walked around the cottage. There wasn’t much to explore. It was single level with a living-dining area, one bedroom, a small kitchen and a shower room with a toilet. A crofting family probably brought up a family of ten kids in there in years gone by, but Katy thought it was the perfect size for one. Things were looking up. This was good. It was private, quiet and cosy. She had food and a phone. And the view was stunning. Alone at last. No Louis, no Olly, and no obligations. It would be perfect for a day or two. The only drawback was the long walk to the village.

  ‘Have you got everything you need?’ Judd asked. He was no doubt anxious to get back to his pal in the bar of the B&B. He’d found the mains switch and the house had fired into life, with most of the lights coming on at once.

  ‘All good,!’ said Katy. ‘Thanks for your help, Judd. And thank Ruby for me too, this place is great.’

  Judd left her and she took a second look around. The owners had told her to help herself to bedding and she found a pile of sheets and pillowcases neatly folded in one of the drawers. There was no TV, but they’d been thoughtful enough to leave some books on the shelves. She’d read some trashy novel. That would pass the time. There was even a small patio at the back with a table and chairs, and there was a stunning view of the hills.

  After making the bed, microwaving a chicken curry and finding a book to read, Katy decided to open the patio door at the back of the lounge and eat outside. It was unlocked already. It probably didn’t matter in such a rural spot, but she placed her plate and book on the outside table and played with the locking mechanism. She couldn’t get it to work. That wasn’t good. She didn’t want to spend a night alone with a door unlocked.

  There was a piece of wood tucked behind the curtain – it fell out while she was moving the door back and forth hoping for some miracle to fix the problem. She realised what it was for straightaway. By closing the door and inserting the wood between one end of the door frame and the wall, she could secure it fast. Relieved that she’d found a solution, Katy sat outside and ate her meal.

  She’d left the Nokia on charge in the kitchen. At first she’d thought the noise she could hear was a bird in the woods, but it was so persistent that at last she realised that someone was calling her. It was Emma.

  ‘Can’t I leave you for five minutes without getting into trouble? What happened? I got your email. I read the story online. Was that you, the person who found the body?’

  ‘It’s a crap signal, Ems. I’ve got one bar. If I disappear, it’s because I moved five centimetres to the right.’

  Katy brought Emma up-to-date. If they’d been sitting in a bar on a Friday night with a bottle of Prosecco in front of them, it would have been like any other night on the town.

  ‘You’ve got another one of those weird letters,’ Emma said when they’d exhausted the topic of the body in the car. ‘Do you want me to open it?’

  Katy was feeling braver sitting in the solitude of the cottage garden. Whoever it was, they couldn’t touch her out there. In London, perhaps, but nobody knew where she was now. She was safe.

  ‘Go on, but be gentle with me. Is it from Leytonstone again? Who do we know in Leytonstone? Nobody.’

  ‘Sorry, it’s more of the same,’ Emma said, as if she was responsible for the letter. ‘Yes, it is Leytonstone again. All it says is: Neither of us is without blame. What’s this all about, Katy? It sounds serious to me.’

  Katy felt suddenly vulnerable.

  ‘I don’t know, Ems. Could it be Louis? He’s the only person mad enough to send something like that. But who does he mean when he says “neither of us”?’

  ‘I’m so bloody pleased it was you who copped off with him that night and not me. I wish he’d just get lost. The man is a nutter. Do you want me to show these to the police?’

  ‘I wish I had my phone. You could email them to me and I could show DS Buchanan. He’d tell me what to do.’

  ‘I can MMS them to you. What about that?’

  ‘MMS? Isn’t that what the cavemen used to do?’ Katy laughed.

  ‘I’ll give it a try when I’ve rung off. They’ll look small on an old Nokia, but at least you’ll be able to show him. The rest of your letters are notifications – gas, electricity, water. Oh, and there’s one about the TV licence. They want to know who’s living in your old house. I’ll post it back through the letterbox and the new owner can pick it up … Are you still there? Katy?’

  ‘Shh, hang on a sec.’

  ‘Are you okay? Is everything alright?’

  ‘Yes, it’s fine, but I thought I heard something. It’s getting dark here now. The house is surrounded by woodland – it must have been a critter. Do they have foxes in Scotland?’

  ‘Don’t ask me, I’m only a teacher,’ Emma laughed. ‘What do I know? Anyhow, what are your plans now? I assume we’re still on for Inverness? I can’t wait to spend nine hours on a train. I’ve been chatting to Sarah. Nathan’s away on business, but he’ll be back in time. He promised her he’d be there. Izzy said she’s still okay too. I think she’s forgiven me at last, she sounded quite relaxed about things … Katy? Katy? Are you there?’

  Katy had put the phone down. She was convinced that something – or somebody – was watching her from the woods.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Katy looked out into the half-darkness. There was no fence separating the cottage from the land beyond it. The two ran together as if the garden had been consumed by the surrounding landscape.

  She strained her ears. She’d been certain that she was being watched – it had come over her like a panic attack. Part of her wanted to bolt inside the house and barricade herself in, but the braver part of her was angry and ready to confront whoever it was. She cursed Louis. She’d thought she was well shot of him, but this is what a crazy man could do to a woman. And Olly too. Maybe it was Olly who’d unsettled her more. Katy was unable to shake off the feeling that things weren’t quite right with him, but she couldn’t put her finger on it.

  ‘Katy? Are you there?’

  Emma’s voice came through the phone. Katy had left it on the table, completely forgetting her conversation. As she picked it up, a wildcat emerged from the trees. Katy watched it as it ran about a hundred yards ahead of her. It looked like a tabby cat, but she could see that it wasn’t. It had a different look about it. The tail was thick, with distinctive black rings around it. That was no domestic animal.

  ‘Hi Emma, yes, I’m fine. I’m a silly cow, that’s all. If you ever see Louis again, kick him in the bollocks and tell him, that’s from Katy. These idiotic men I meet, they’re screwing with my mind.’

  Katy watched the cat disappear into a patch of gorse.

  ‘So we’re all set for Sunday,’ she continued. ‘Thanks for pulling that together.’

  ‘You should go on my Facebook profile and connect with everybody, if they haven’t already sent you friend requests.’

  It was getting close to the reunion. Katy felt nervous, but she didn’t know why. She’d seen a couple of friend requests waiting before her laptop had been handed over to the police, but something had stopped her from accepting them. It was the thought of them all together in one place … in that place. After that summer they’d stayed in touch, but things had never really been the same again. There was no hostility, they’d just drifted into other friendship groups.

  It was Sarah and Nathan who started the change. When they became an item, they pulled out of the planned house share at the last minute. Elijah’s room had been re-let already, and some hippy guy called Troy was moving in. Emma and Katy stayed friends, but Izzy, as ever, was very private and moved out well before the end of the first term. She got a flat on her own. She couldn’t stand the mess in the shared house. There was no big break up, it simply fell apart.

  Katy wondered why they’d arranged the reunion. Partly it was an age thing – past events never seem so bad when viewed in the rear-view mirror. And she needed to know. That summer had screwed them over in so many ways a
nd it was still affecting her life. They were stuck in the events of the past. Nathan and Sarah must have felt it – they were still together. Izzy was still working in the village shop. Emma and Katy … she paused for a moment. When she was being harsh with herself, she knew that they were like a broken record, stuck in the same old groove and never playing a new song. She’d never seen it with quite so much clarity before. She loved Emma, but Emma was part of the problem, a yoke from the past. She was going to have to let her go.

  This get-together was the end. It was a last supper. Something in her subconscious had known it all along, and only now had her conscious mind caught up. This was her divorce from Emma and everybody else in that group. She was shaking the dirt off her boots. This was the ending they should have got all those years back.

  She finished the call with Emma, who was completely unaware of her decision. She would see the place where it had all happened one more time to be certain that she remembered it right, but it was over. Emma was part of the problem. She couldn’t break away without ditching her best friend. They’d have a great weekend, get pissed and laugh themselves silly. Then she’d disappear abroad, blame poor internet connections and expensive roaming charges and disappear from the picture.

  Katy decided not to make the friend connections that Emma had suggested. She would wind down her social media. She was terrible at Facebook anyway, Emma had told her as much. She’d stop posting and then delete the account.

  It was time to move inside. There was a chill in the air. Katy scanned the trees one last time before closing the patio door behind her and inserting the piece of wood to secure it properly. She pushed on the handle both ways to reassure herself that it couldn’t be opened. She was locked in, safe for the night.

  One of the things that had surprised her since arriving in Fort William was how used to the London noise she’d become: the roar of traffic, screeching sirens, even the bustle of people. In Scotland all was quiet. The night was still. The only sound that she could hear was the electronic hum of the fridge in the kitchen. It was blissful yet also exposing. She was on her own with no fool of a man to mess things up. The Spice Girls would have her think that it was empowering. A bit of girl power. As she sat on the sofa thinking things through, it felt damn scary.

  She was pining for Wi-Fi. There was no way her phone would be receiving data, it could barely hang onto a phone signal out there. Besides, Buchanan’s phone was a heap of shit. Fancy making a mobile phone that could only be used to send and receive calls. She scouted around for a router. If they were going to be renting the place out, there had to be one there somewhere. Even anti-city types needed their Wi-Fi, if only to catch up on the latest from Pornhub. Eventually she found one in the kitchen drawer, along with a box of unopened kitchen knives and a corkscrew. It hadn’t been unpacked yet and the phone line still wasn’t connected. It was just a white wire stuck through a window frame. She’d have to settle for the book that she’d picked out earlier. She was going back to the Dark Ages.

  As it turned out, Katy didn’t get much reading done that night. She began to read on the sofa, but didn’t last more than five pages before she was out like a light.

  It was the bump of the book dropping onto the floor that startled her from her sleep. She was hot and sweaty, her mouth gummed up with whatever gunk it is that comes out to play in the night. She’d been asleep for some time. It was completely dark. You never got darkness like that in London.

  There was a noise, a persistent low mechanical noise. She tried to home in on the sound, but she was still struggling to wake up. Then she saw it: the piece of wood that she’d jammed in the door had dropped out onto the floor. A rush of adrenalin shook her out of her daze. And that sound that she could hear? It was the low growl of a car engine running outside the cottage. She was no longer alone.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  The cottage was in complete darkness except for the glow of sidelights reflected in the windows. The car was waiting, ready to drive off at any moment. Was it the police, maybe hoping to catch her awake still? Not at past two o'clock in the morning it wasn’t. Could it be a lost tourist searching for a campsite late at night? Maybe they were studying a map, perhaps considering knocking on the door and asking for directions.

  Katy wondered whether she should phone Buchanan, but decided to watch and wait. There had been no movement, no slamming of car doors, only the rumble of the engine on the road outside. She couldn’t make out the colour or even the type of car. Then, without warning, it suddenly drove off.

  She started to breathe again. She hadn’t realised how tense she’d been. Katy would never have described herself as nervous or paranoid, but perhaps her time with Louis had had more effect on her than she’d thought. It had only been a car pulled up outside after all. She despised herself that her first thought had been to find a cupboard or closet to hide in. Memories of Louis’s angry attempts to break into her house had come flooding back.

  She thought about the piece of wood jammed in the patio door. Is that what had woken her up? She’d heard the book thump on the floor, but the wood must have dropped out of the frame first, shaking her out of her sleep. She went over to investigate – it would need to be wedged in at more of an angle. It was a really cack-handed way of keeping that back door secure.

  She would need to speak to Buchanan, share her worries with him and get some reassurance. She told herself she was being foolish, but she was rattled.

  The next day Katy got up late and was eating Coco Pops at eleven o'clock, tired and irritable after her disturbed night. She’d forced herself to stay in bed, dropping off again at seven o’clock or thereabouts, and then sleeping until the morning was almost gone. The birdsong was ridiculously loud and disturbed her more than the London traffic used to. She couldn’t believe that she’d polished off three bowls of cereal. She was famished. She’d get a big arse on her if she kept eating like that. Maybe more hiking wasn’t such a bad idea if she was going to start finding solace in sugary breakfasts now she was living a nomadic lifestyle.

  She showered and rinsed out some knickers and a T-shirt in the sink. There was no washing powder, so she used washing-up liquid instead. There was a small washing line outside, and she hung her few clothes out to dry before heading off to walk the short distance to the track leading to the site of the lodge.

  As Katy followed the narrow road, she thought over the next few days. Things weren’t going to plan. It was silly to keep walking backwards and forwards, and it made even less sense to stay in Spean Bridge. She should have headed back to Fort William, checked back in with Paige – if her room was free – and hired a car. Not for the first time since she left London, she cursed her lack of forethought. Roger Parry’s death had changed everything. The decisions she had taken had seemed sensible at the time, but as she walked along the road with only nature’s chorus to accompany her, it was clear that she needed to do things differently.

  Katy arrived at the point where the track left the road. It had only been a thirty-minute walk from the cottage, not too bad. From what she could remember, not much had changed. There used to be a five-bar wooden gate, but the posts had been replaced and it was now a sturdier and more functional metal structure. She remembered that because Izzy had been able to squeeze her moped through a gap at the sides, whereas the rest of them had had to open and close the gate to get the car through. In the end, they’d given up and left it open. Now it was completely enclosed, there would be no squeezing through at the sides.

  There was a Private Property sign on the gate. That hadn’t been there before. It wasn’t locked though – there was no need to lock anything out there. Even so, she decided to climb over it, and laughed to herself as she messed up her footing and landed awkwardly on the other side. It wasn’t quite Total Wipeout winning contestant stuff – she would open the gate next time.

  The track was as long as she remembered it and lined with trees. She wondered what possessed people to live in places like that. Lond
on ground to a halt with an inch of snow, but what would it be like out here when the weather got bad? No wonder it had taken the fire brigade so long to get there. What had made them holiday in that place? Only student naivety could explain it – and the fact that Google Maps hadn’t been invented. In the nineties it would have been almost impossible to see quite how remote it was before they went.

  Finally, the track ended and she came into the clearing where the lodge had been. It was a stunning outlook, quite breathtaking in fact. Her younger self hadn’t appreciated that. She’d been too busy looking for opportunities to sneak off for a quickie with Elijah. Scenery wasn’t the first thing on her mind back then.

  Katy surveyed the area, trying to remember how it had been set out. She had her backpack with her, and the photos were still inside. She pulled them out and tried to position herself roughly where the photographer had been standing. They were poor quality compared to the ones you’d be able to take on a smartphone.

  The lodge had been levelled, and there was nothing left of the original building. A one-storey brick structure had been put in its place, but it was unfinished. There were no windows or roof, only bricks and concrete blocks, the skeleton of a wooden roof frame and a lot of debris left around the place. It wasn’t even a work in progress, it had all been abandoned some time ago. Whoever owned it must simply have lacked the will to finish the project. They’d given up and left it. Maybe their money had run out, who knew?

  Did Elijah’s ghost still walk this place? Katy wasn’t superstitious, but the thought of there being some afterlife or spiritual presence fascinated her. If he could talk to her now, would he blame her? Could she have done more to make things right that day?