Chapter 41

The sun had set by the time we pulled off the main roads. I drove slow on what were little more than dirt tracks, focussed on what was ahead. The headlights didn’t seem to slice through the darkness so well.

The fog was falling along with the temperature. We hit pockets of white that reflected the full beam of the headlights back on us.

The car was forced down to a crawl.

I hit the interior light so that Susan could read the directions.

She kept looking out the windows, squinting slightly, “I hate the country.”

“Really?”

She gave a little laugh, killed it quick. “I’m a city girl at heart. Streetlights, you know? Marvellous invention.”

I still couldn’t quite get over it; “City girl?”

“Dundee’s a city.”

“Hardly New York or LA. Not even Edinburgh.”

“The city with the small-town heart. Isn’t that one of the slogans the council tried out a few years ago?”

“Some shite like that,” I agreed. Since the late nineties, Dundee had been constantly trying to reinvent its public image. The problem was that until you spent any time in the city, old prejudices and half-truths stuck in your mind, coloured your view of the place.

What you saw from the outside was faded old buildings and empty factories, a downtrodden and desperate population trapped by the industries of the past that had left the city behind decades earlier.

It was a phenomenon, how only when you lived in the place did you discover another side. As though Dundee was desperate to keep itself hidden from outsiders. Seeing the true face of the city was something reserved for those who were prepared to take the time to understand it.

“The point is,” Susan said, still craning her neck to look out for any landmarks and turnoffs, “that I like streets. And buildings. And signposts. Out here, everything looks the same. There’s nothing to tell you where you are. One field is pretty much the same as the next.”

We hit a curve in the road. The headlights spun, caught a sheep who was standing by a barbed wire fence looking out at us with curiosity, maybe having been awoken by our approach. Reflecting back the glare of the bulbs, her eyes took on a supernatural-looking sheen. I felt a shiver.

What was the old saying?

Aye, like someone had walked over my grave.

“Next turn off,” said Susan.

“You’re sure?”

“On the right.”

She might have injected just a little authority into her voice.

It would have helped.

The building, as I had pictured it in my head, was a bright and sunny place. The front garden was well maintained – maybe with a few vegetable plots the girls would have tended when they were young – and there was an air of life and beauty to the structure that emanated from the brickwork itself.

Maybe I was just glomming onto Kathryn’s childhood memories.

It had been years since anyone had come to the wee bothy out in the middle of nowhere. Kathryn told us how she had come up once since inheriting the building to check on its structural integrity. When she could find the time, she said, she was considering tarting the place up, selling it on.

“Sometimes the past needs to stay in the past.”

Sing it, sister.

We rolled in front of the old cottage with its rough stone walls, single-glazed windows that glared balefully out at the night. The rickety front porch looked ready to blow over at the slightest hint of wind.

A rusty old axe was buried in an oak stump by the front door. I got the feeling no one had touched it for years.

Christ, happy childhood memories?

I’d have guessed nightmares, looking at the place.

But isn’t that what happens as the years pass? Entropy and decay. Nothing remains the same. No memory is sacred.

The front garden was surrounded by a low pile of rubble that might have once been called a wall. Weeds and long grass had become unkempt and unwelcoming.

As we pulled up, a dull light in one of the front windows suddenly extinguished itself. As though the house was trying to hide in the dark.

A beat up looking Ford sat beside the west wall.

I killed the engine and we sat there for a while.

Susan said, “She must have heard us.”

I nodded in agreement.

“We need to do this now. Take control of the situation.”

I nodded again.

Thinking about DI Lindsay sitting at my bedside, telling me how I was a human hurricane; a natural disaster of the worst possible kind.

What’s the old song?

King Midas in Reverse.

I looked at Susan.

She hadn’t wanted to be here. This wasn’t how she would have done things. She’d been pulled into this by my own greed and my own need to do things that worked out best for me.

I couldn’t help but wonder if the silence in the car was merely the calm before the storm.

I opened the door, swung my legs out of the car. Too late now for second thoughts.

Susan walked with me to the front door. Checked her mobile as we walked. “Another thing about the country,” she said. “The great bloody outdoors.” She shook her head. “No signal.”

I nodded. We were isolated.

Susan said, “Have you even thought this through?”

How do you answer that?

A smart quip?

Or pure silence.

The last defence of the man with no defences left.

I stopped at the front door; a barrier I did not want to cross.

Was it too late?

Could I turn back now, forget about all of this?

Some things had changed over the last year. I like to think I was a different person than I had been.

But in the end, maybe not that different.