DC Rory Thomson
Major Investigation Team, Glasgow
Clio read the email carefully, then the attachments. They included the address of the cottage. She looked it up online and found that it was available for rent. Impulsively, she booked it for a few nights, threw some stuff in a bag, and began the journey up north. It would be a distraction, she thought. A way to tamp down her feelings about Lillian, channel them into action so she didn’t dwell on her grief. Lillian wouldn’t want that.
She broke the drive overnight in a motel where the décor matched her sense of desolation but felt better the next morning when she reached the Scottish Highlands, whose beauty left her a little awestruck. When she stopped for provisions in Fort William, she felt like she could breathe easier, as if the sights and sounds of this quest were replacing some of her muddled grief, or at least distracting from it.
After another hour of driving, she found herself standing on the shore of Loch Moidart beside the ruins of an ancient castle, watching a man load her things onto his boat. The island had no shop, no public transport, no access via land. She would be there for four nights.
Choppy waves roughed the loch’s surface. The water looked dark and deep, even though the sky was bright with autumn sun. The loch and its surroundings were wilder and more intimidating than they’d looked in the online pictures, and she thought, What am I doing here? But it was too late to turn back now.
The man’s hand swallowed hers as he helped her onto the boat. It was small and low to the water. As he readied them to leave the dock, the lenses of his sunglasses reflected the sky, the water, the castle, the prehistoric-looking copse on a tiny islet out in the loch. Clio could also see a reflection of herself perched in the prow of the boat, dwarfed by everything.
“What brings you here?” he asked once they were free of snaking sandbars and in open water, headed directly for a pier on spindly wooden posts that reached out from the island. She could see the cottage she’d booked. It was built from gray island stone and was flat fronted, with four windows, symmetrically arranged two on each side of the front door, one atop the other. It looked like a child’s drawing of a cottage.
“Bird-watching,” she said. A pair of brand-new binoculars, purchased in Fort William, hung around her neck.
He slowed the boat as they approached the pier, and the water behind it churned and frothed. He killed the engine, tied the boat to a post, and helped her out. The pier was scarcely wide enough for two people to walk along it together, so she followed him. The water looked gelatinous and dark through the wooden slats. It slapped the stilts and the rocky shoreline.
On land they followed a path. Where the shore ended, woodland began, and they were quickly surrounded by trees as far as she could see; some had trunks as thick as a man’s torso. Silver lichen clung to the branches. The leafy canopy of goldening green twitched and rustled above, and the ground was so thickly carpeted with acid-green moss that it was hard to know what was beneath it: stone or loam or fallen timber. Rich green scents thickened the air. Clio’s lungs felt more capacious with each breath. It was an otherworldly place.
They passed a small shed tucked to one side of the path, and the man—Ian Robertson, his name was, the same man who had looked after Eleanor Bruton when she lived here—yanked the door open and took a glance inside before shutting it again.
“What’s that for?” Clio asked.
“It’s where we leave groceries for long-term tenants, the ones who don’t like to be disturbed.”
“I guess if you want solitude, this is the place to come.”
“Yeah. Tenants leave trash there for us to pick up. It’s a good system, except when something tries to nest in there.”
“I guess you get a lot of people wanting solitude?”
He shrugged. “Some do. We had a woman staying until earlier this year for eight months.”
That would be Eleanor, Clio knew. He said no more about her. Not a good idea to tell a new tenant that the previous one had died here, she supposed.
“Eight months of solitude is a lot,” she said, hoping to draw him out, but he shrugged and said, “Suits some people.”
The cottage stood in a glade just above the shore. They approachedthe back of it down a slope. He dropped her bag in a small boot room inside the back door. “Make yourself at home. There’s a house book with all the instructions you should need. I’ll be here Friday same time to pick you up unless I hear from you in the meantime. If the weather looks bad, I’ll be in touch. If you can’t get a phone signal here, you need to walk further around the island.”
Clio checked her phone. One bar, which disappeared as she looked.
“Any questions?” he asked. She could tell he wanted to go. It was going to be dark soon. She was thinking there was probably something she should ask, but nothing came to mind. When the back door shut behind him, she heard total silence and felt the weight of stillness in the air.
She explored the space. The ground floor was one large room, kitchen and living space combined, two sofas around a stove, a large pine dining table that could seat six. The furnishings were colorful and warm. Logs and kindling were stacked by the fireplace. Two big windows borrowed watery light from outside that illuminated the interior softly. She got a fire lit after a few attempts, made a cup of tea, and spent a long time staring out the window.
“You know what, boss,” she said aloud, addressing Lillian. The sound of her voice was awkward in the quiet. What was she doing talking to a dead person? She carried on anyway. “I don’t know what happened to Eleanor Bruton, but if I was going to murder someone, this would be a perfect place to do it.”
A murder here would be without witnesses. The water provided an easy way to dispose of a body. The problem was access.
Pockmarks appeared on the surface of the loch. Rain. In a heartbeat, Clio was transported back to London, to the moment of Lillian’s death, to the questions nobody could answer. Like, why was there a CCTV glitch in one of the most camera-heavy areas of London for a couple of hours on that morning? Was it by chance or design that the number plate of the hit-and-run vehicle had been partially obscured? For Clio, these were already two coincidences too many.
Then there was the bad luck of the sudden downpour and the crowded streets and the fact that the accident had happened in the blink of an eye, meaning most witnesses had been preoccupied with wrangling umbrellas, or blinkered by hoods, or running for shelter. All the police had been able to glean from interviews was that the car that struck Lillian was likely a black sedan.
This had all needled at Clio. So had Lillian’s warning that she should be very careful.
When she gave her own statement to colleagues about that morning, she told them that she and Lillian had met for coffee and a wander through the museum. She described it as a personal goodbye after the big party, and nobody seemed to doubt it. They knew the two women were close.
