Maybe she ought to have celebrated their successes more, even though she’d sent all the cards and bought things from gift registries and travelled for engagement dos and hen dos and wedding receptions.
She hadn’t been able to reciprocate with big exciting invites of her own and, if she was really honest, she’d done her best, at first, to contribute to the baby discussions (which carrying sling is best? Which travel system safest? Where are the best schools and how much do houses cost in their catchment areas?), but it had been kind of hard to relate, if she told the truth.
She put down her phone. It was too late now to get back into their lives, most probably, and if they missed her the way she’d been missing them, wouldn’t one of them reach out and tell her?
The cool evening offered no answers. In fact, by the rustling noise coming from the ferns and long grasses on the other side of the garden wall across the low summer river, it sounded like yet more trouble might be coming her way. A clang of metal and some good Scottish swearwords shattered the quiet of the twilight.
‘Who’s there?’ she shouted. ‘Murray, are you muckin’ about down there?’ Not that Murray was the type to take a sunset walk around Cairn Dhu.
‘Sorry, who’s that?’ a voice shouted back; mortified, a bit posh. She recognised it as Jamie Beaton’s right away.
A head popped up over the stone wall. Even at this distance she could tell his hair was sticking up.
‘You all right there, officer?’
‘I fell over a… a roll of barbed wire. In fact… I’m a bit tangled up in it.’
She pulled her lips tight to stop the smile. ‘Stay still. I’ll get my pliers.’
Part of her expected to find a pair of abandoned trousers knotted in wire over the wall when she got there. Jamie wouldn’t like her seeing him caught red-handed prowling around her property. He’d be embarrassed.
Yet there he was, trying to lean, nonchalant, on the stones, still very much bound up, wearing off-duty clothes: jeans black and rolled at the ankles; boots, also black with thick dark socks over the top, and a heather coloured Henley, all three buttons done up. He looked good out of uniform too. The realisation shouldn’t have stalled her in her progress towards him, but it did, just for a second.
Luckily he was too riled to notice.
‘Who leaves rolls of barbed wire on a public footpath?’
‘Not us,’ she threw back. ‘This is Mill House land all the way down the hill to the ski slope. You’re on a private path.’
He looked around, neck stretched like a hare scenting wild dogs. ‘There’s no sign saying so.’
‘Isn’t this part of your beat? You ought to know whose land you’re on at all times,’ she said with a challenging smile, even as she kneeled to free him. ‘All the locals know not to walk this way. It’s boggy further down, even in summer. If a man is lucky enough to get away with his life he could still easily lose his wellies to the mud. Everyone walks the main road to get to the Cairn Dhu Hotel bar.’
‘I’m not looking for a drink,’ he said, glancing down at the top of her head as she crouched at his feet, working to unsnag him, before quickly averting his eyes with a sense of embarrassed propriety.
Surprised at the teensy lift in her spirits that he might have come searching for her, Ally didn’t say what she was thinking: what were you looking for, then?
‘There you go,’ she told him, getting to her feet. ‘Didn’t need to cut your jeans at all.’
‘Right, well, thank you.’ His face flared red as she met his eyes again. ‘You’ll need to tell your dad to get that shifted. It’s not safe.’
‘I will.’ The part of her that had wanted to fight earlier today surrendered. ‘Getting late for a walk, is it no’?’ she tried instead.
He looked all around, as though hoping for a rescue of some kind. None came, and he sighed at the realisation. With shoulders slumping in defeat he reached into his back pocket. ‘I was looking for this, actually.’ He showed her a fading photograph of a bridge, his thumb deliberately obscuring the figures in the image.
She peered at the shot, then at him. ‘That’s the Nithy Brig.’
‘That’s what one of the crofters told me, but he pointed me in this direction and said it was only a twenty minute walk from the police station, but it obviously isn’t. Unless it somehow magically moves locations. It’s never where people say it is.’
‘How long have you been looking for this bridge?’
‘Since I got here a few weeks ago. It doesn’t seem to be on any maps either.’
‘Maybe us locals want to keep it a secret.’
He crumpled his lips. ‘Are you going to tell me where it is?’
‘Well, it’s not as easy as twenty minutes in a straight line, that’s for sure.’ Seeing the darkness in his eyes, she added, ‘I can take you to it, if you like?’
