‘Thank you for understanding,’ Carenza said through tight lips, as she opened her brolly to the rain, which was falling even more heavily now.
Ally shut the door. ‘Could they not have told us themselves? They’re actual adults,’ she said to her mum, before turning to face Jamie conveying his toy to Sachin at the triage desk. ‘You see? We’re two repairers down now and we’ve an empty shed! You could have done something to protect our reputation. Could have told Füssli to go gentle on us, or given a statement to the press to confirm we were innocent.’
‘O-kay,’ Jamie said slowly. ‘But, with respect, not checking for ownership of that obviously nicked jewellery was a silly thing to do.’
Ally’s annoyance swelled once more.
‘It’s no’ the laddie’s fault,’ Senga put in, only to be completely ignored.
‘Ally, listen…’ Jamie began.
She turned on her heel and walked out into the downpour, her thoughts barely coherent. She knew it was wrong to blame him. It was wrong to be sullen and storming, but it had to be this way if she was going to shake the peculiar feelings he set off inside her.
After a while spent dodging puddles, wondering why on earth she hadn’t grabbed one of the many municipal brollies from the stand by the repair shed door for anyone’s use, she reached the library, not registering how the two women at the issue desk hastily stopped whispering at the sight of her.
Calming herself with work, Ally spent the rest of the morning tinkering with her CV and scanning the jobs listings online, taking notes and filling in online applications. She didn’t stop until she was starving for lunch. She even let herself look at an online travel profile of Zurich, though she wasn’t sure why she’d torture herself like that.
Anyone looking at her would have seen a woman focused on her job search, someone not at all perturbed by sparks of curious feeling still racing in circuits through her body, no matter how hard she tried to switch them off.
‘I keep you safe,’ he’d said.
He hadn’t meant her specifically, but the community generally, she knew that. Yet hearing him say it had set off this strange spark of warmth in her belly, a warmth she’d only ever felt with Gray, right at the beginning, before she’d fallen heart first into catastrophe and learned a hard lesson about how these feelings of excitement and overwhelm (red flags in disguise) could not be trusted.
She worked on, obeying her fears while ignoring her hunger and her deeper instincts and curiosity about the Special Constable who, ever since he’d walked into her life, had heralded nothing but trouble for her family.
7
THAT EVENING
You might have heard the Cairngorms described as Britain’s Arctic, and never is that comparison clearer than in the white nights of summer.
At fifty-seven degrees north, on a late-June night, the sun has no sooner melted below the horizon than it is on its return journey above it once more, bringing in an early dawn. The birds barely have time to sleep.
Ally pulled her knees to her chest on the wide stone lintel of the glassless window directly above her home’s old wooden water wheel, her eyes set on the sky above her. The rain had blown over hours ago; weather changes swiftly in the Cairngorms.
Now the sky was a sapphire blue spotted with summer constellations while a waxing crescent moon glanced down on Cairn Dhu mountain with its plateau split in two like a broken molar tooth by a wide, ragged crevasse.
The mountain’s shape was so familiar and comforting to Ally and her brother, they’d both elected to tattoo the inner side of their left wrists with its outline, drawn in matching heather ink on their eighteenth birthday (when, seeing her poor brother red-faced and puffing at the pain, Ally had become all the more determined to convince the artist it didn’t hurt a bit when it came to her turn).
From this angle she could just about make out the ski centre, its snowless slope and chairlift lit up even in the summer season when all that was on offer during the day was dry-run tobogganing and the Ptarmigan après-ski nightclub at the foot of the slope. Many nights she’d gone there with her brother, their college friends (and random backpacking hillwalkers from all over the world) to drink Irn Bru cocktails and talk and dance until closing time. It was a Cairngorms institution.
She pictured the scene over there tonight. While happy people spilled out of taxis, the bar would be getting loud and wild, especially if the lads from the climbing and water sports centres were there with their clients from out of town.
It had been ages since she’d been anywhere after sunset. Gray had always wanted to stay at his place with her – to minimise his chances of being spotted with his other woman, she supposed.
She breathed in the night and blew out hard a few times over. It was difficult to sleep during the Highland white nights. Goodness knows how they cope up in Svalbard in the actual Arctic, and not all that far away, where the sun refuses to set at all for four months in summer.
Nights like these had always kept her out of bed. They made her think. She’d come here to her thinking spot over the water wheel, sometimes dangling her feet over the ledge so they almost touched the pitted, dry, wooden wheel and cogitate her way out of her problems.
She remembered her phone in her hands, and turned to scrolling through Instagram, deliberately searching for the profiles of Mhairi, Jo and Brodie, her oldest pals, and thinking tonight she might try sending a few messages saying she was ‘just checking in’ and hoping they were well. She knew they were busy, she might tell them, pointlessly, but if they had time, she’d be free for a meet up.
On second thoughts, their socials showed them and their partners amidst a whirl of baby scans, flat decorating, wedding photo edits, something called toddler sensory classes, work nights out and ghastly looking ‘team building exercises’ at the go-kart track, and, to her amazement, there were even a couple of ‘first day at nursery school’ pictures of little kids she’d felt sure were still only babies in arms.
She hastily sent appropriate reactions, love hearts and ‘wows’ with lots of exclamation marks and some ‘So happy for you guys’, but she couldn’t ignore the realisation that none of them had been in touch when her family were all over the news or when she’d deleted ‘In a relationship with @grayinthegorms97’ from her Facebook bio.
She told herself that hers were small, insignificant problems – a local news story and an ex-boyfriend – compared to the grown-up things they were facing. Hell, Brodie and her wife had gone through IVF and had their catering business to run; Jo was soon going back to her corporate job after her second baby, and Mhairi, well, there weren’t as many updates from her. She must be happy in the pre-schooler bubble. They probably hadn’t even noticed Ally’s tiny upheavals. Still, it stung. She hated to admit she was lonelier now than ever.
Could she have done more to keep in touch with them when they moved out of Cairn Dhu to get a foothold on the property ladder in the more affordable new villages? Definitely.
