Waterfall Glen (15 page)

“How about tomorrow?” he asked.

“Definitely. Now, if you’re showing me yours tomorrow, how about if I show you mine tonight?”

“Now there’s an offer I can’t refuse.”

“We’re still talking about houses here, remember?”

“For a moment I almost forgot.”

“Have you any plans for dinner?”

“Actually I do: a couple of sandwiches and a Mars bar in my camper, with LeeAnn Womack and Matraca Berg for company.”

“I’m almost being deafened by the sounds of violins, and I’m not just talking about your choice of music.”

“At least you didn’t make fun of my choice of music.”

“I’m a bit of a closet C&W fan myself. When it’s bad it’s awful, but when it’s good it strikes a symphony of chords … And I don’t think it gets any better than Lee-Ann Womack’s voice or Matraca Berg’s songs. Ever heard
Strawberry
—”

“Wine,”
he said, answering her question by completing the title of the song. “It’s my favourite country and western song,” he told her, “along with
I Hope
—”

“You Dance,”
Kate said, doing to him what he’d done to her a moment earlier.

They both laughed. “Sounds like we could do a duet,” Cameron said.

And then they weren’t laughing quite so hard because there had been a nameless longing in his voice and in her
eyes. For a moment neither of them spoke, then Kate said, “Seven o’clock at my place okay for you?”

“Seven is fine. Meantime, can I give you a lift to the crofters’ cottages?”

“It’s okay, thanks. I love walking through the glen. I don’t know how many more chances I’ll get, so I want to make the most of every one.”

“I understand. It’s that kind of place, isn’t it?” he said, looking around.

“Yeah,” Kate agreed, “it’s that kind of place.”

She walked with him to the camper and said, “See you at seven, then.”

He smiled and hesitated for a moment before nodding and getting in the van.

Kate was smiling, too, as she watched the van disappear in a cloud of dust.

Cameron Fraser hadn’t kissed her, but she knew that he wanted to.

T
HE WINDING TRACK FLATTENED OUT JUST AS
C
AMERON
was wondering if his camper van would make it to the summit of Jamie’s Crag, and the old cottage came into view.

His first sight of the ruined house gave him second thoughts about wanting to stay there. He’d expected dilapidation, but not that it would bring back sights and sounds and smells so vividly that he could almost be in another country, several thousand miles away, and at another time, several months ago. The walls here were plain stone rather than whitewashed, and the roof was grey-slated rather than red-tiled, but the cottage had the same ghastly, desolate air as the houses in that other country.

Walking around the outside of the cottage, Cameron saw all the little details that had given the overall impression of neglect: gaping black holes in the roof where slates were missing; the old wooden door hanging off its hinges; cracks in the tiny, dirty windows sunk into the thick stone walls.

Going over to the nearest of the two windows, he peered through an empty square where the glass was
missing altogether. It was like looking into a bottomless well or the darkest of midnight shadows. He moved to one side so he wasn’t blocking the daylight, but it made no difference. The inside of the house seemed to swallow the light and give nothing back. Even as his eyes became dark-adapted he couldn’t make out any distinction of shape or shade.

All he could see was why people might think the cottage was haunted.

He didn’t get such a sensation himself, however. His disquiet came from the presence of a different type of ghost, the kind that haunts the memory and torments the mind, a product of conscience that lingers in the shadows of consciousness.

When details finally started emerging they came from the darkness inside him rather than the blackness within the cottage. He saw an old woman with a gaudy headscarf, clutching a framed photograph to her chest…

A cattle truck filled with frightened people instead of cowed beasts …

Bodies hurriedly buried in forest clearings and un-ploughed fields.

When Cameron took a step back he wasn’t recoiling from Jamie’s Cottage but from his own past. The derelict cottage reminded him of that past so graphically that his first reaction was to drive flat out to Archibald Cunningham’s office in Inverness and instruct the lawyer to sell the place if he could. The impulse was so strong that he
reached for the handle of the camper door.

But he stopped without opening the door. He knew he’d have nowhere to go after leaving the lawyer’s office. He knew that this place was as remote as he could get. He couldn’t run away any further. He couldn’t run away forever. Jamie’s Cottage was at least a place to go, with a reason for going there. He could rebuild it, and with it maybe something of his life. He could make the outside weathertight and the inside habitable, a place he wouldn’t want to run away from, a door he could open without being overwhelmed by brooding darkness from within.

Then there was Glen Cranoch itself. Turning from the cottage to look at the glen spread out below he saw a chance to start afresh. It was everything he could hope for: a place where there weren’t many people, and the few he met would know little or nothing about him; where he could pretend to be a decent human being and maybe fool them.

In time he could maybe even fool himself.

Movement caught his eye from down in the glen. A slender figure with short blond hair. Kate Brodie. She’d almost reached the cluster of crofters’ cottages and was looking up at Jamie’s Crag and waving.

Before he knew it, he was waving back.

Long after Kate had disappeared inside one of the whitewashed cottages Cameron was still thinking about her; about the sparkle in her eyes when she smiled, the way she tilted her head back a little when she laughed. Suddenly he wanted to see her smile and hear her laugh again,
whereas before he met her he hadn’t wanted anything to do with anyone.

For a little while Cameron Fraser forgot about the things he’d remembered when he looked into the blackness of the cottage. He forgot about the things he’d seen the previous winter, during the months he’d spent shooting people dead.

It had been a long and bitter winter, and Cameron had shot a lot of people. Men and women, old and young, innocent and guilty alike. He shot them point-blank, so that he could see each harrowing detail on every single face.

He could still see those faces now. They stared at him when he daydreamed, filling his empty moments with waking nightmares …

They peered at him from the blackness when he switched out the light at the end of the day …

And when he closed his eyes they were still there, staring at him sightlessly—part of the darkness that had become a part of him.

He hadn’t shot them with the Browning automatic pistol holstered on his hip, but with the Leica R6 camera hanging around his neck, loading up with 35mm film cartridges instead of 9mm bullets.

He was what the army called a technical specialist, and his specialty was photography. They thought of him as a
soldier who just happened to know how to take photos, but he thought of himself as a photographer who just happened to wear a uniform. No matter how much time he spent on firing ranges he still felt clumsy and awkward with the Browning in his hands, like he was missing a couple of fingers or had too many thumbs. He trembled ever so slightly when he took aim, and had never learned to squeeze the trigger smoothly. He always hesitated and then snatched at it, and, each time he fired, he recoiled a little before the gun did. He never felt like a soldier, even with the Browning in his hands—especially with the Browning in his hands—but he always felt like a photographer. When he’d had the Leica in his hands it felt like part of him and he’d felt quietly confident about getting the job done.

Until the job was shooting people dead.

Before that winter his assignments had comprised portraits at passing-out parades and stunted action shots for Press releases and posters—photos of fit young people doing adventurous things in exotic places.

Then one day, out of the blue, he was asked how he’d feel about being seconded to a United Nations special investigation unit in Kosovo. The fact that he’d been asked rather than ordered gave him an idea that the assignment would be pretty rough. The thought filled him with dread, but alongside the dread was the knowledge that he’d had a free ride and now it was time to earn his keep; there was the feeling that he was a phoney, wearing a uniform but only playing at being a soldier; a desire to prove something
to his father—and himself—by swapping easy street for a combat zone; and the urge to actually do something that truly mattered, to earn the pride and satisfaction that came from taking on a difficult job that had to be done.

He’d been warned that it would be harrowing, and thought he had a rough idea what to expect… But there are some things that other people’s words and your own imagination can’t prepare you for, however stark their words and however vivid your imagination. The sort of things he saw in a forest outside Blace on his first sortie with the unit.

He’d always loved forests, felt at peace whenever he set foot in them. It was something to do with the way it was always a little cooler than the surrounding area on a hot day and hotter on a cool day, stiller when it was windy, and drier when it was raining …

It was the welcoming give of the ground that makes up a forest floor …

The half-heard, half-imagined sounds of countless unseen little creatures as they went about their lives; the gentle whispering of branches overhead, as if the trees were talking to each other in a language he couldn’t understand but could listen to forever just for the lyrical sound of it, and the perfect peacefulness of the silence that punctuated the words and sentences …

And it was the quality of light, subtly transformed in ways more magical than any filter on a lens could achieve: soft in some places, hard in others; falling in bright tigerstriping
or enchanted, slanting beams and shafts with little universes suspended in them; or hanging in ethereal, pearlescent mists.

Maybe it was instinct, maybe it was just an overwrought imagination, but the forest outside Blace had seemed strangely different. He’d felt that from the moment he set foot in it. There were no slanting shafts of daylight, just bone-chilling tendrils of mist. The trees were gnarled and twisted, more dead than alive. The branches lacked leaves and the wind didn’t whisper through them, it howled and wailed and moaned. Raindrops gathered on the bare branches like tears on eyelashes before falling to the ground in a ceaseless sobbing, and he had the feeling that if you drank from the little hollows where the water pooled it would be as bitter as bile. It seemed like a place that spring would never reach, let alone summer; where sweet-scented flowers would never blossom and butterflies would never flutter their brightly-colored wings. It was a place where you could feel lonely even when surrounded by other people, and lost even when you had a map in one hand and a compass in the other. It was a place that held shadows where there shouldn’t be any; where the silences could be uncomfortably long, and far more disturbing than any sound.

It was a place where rumour had it the inhabitants of a village had been taken after being rounded up in the middle of the night.

The rumour said that the villagers had been herded into a
clearing in the trees, and never came out of the forest again.

Even before Cameron’s unit came across the forest clearing, with its tell-tale dark swath of recently disturbed earth, he’d known instinctively that the rumour was true.