‘Ah, yes! You were there last night. I never forget a face. I’m Bastian. You work with Alice, don’t you? Did you enjoy the party?’
‘Gracie, surgery receptionist. Aye, it was certainly interesting,’ she replied in a rush. ‘Are you, eh, sticking around for a wee while?’
‘I think so,’ the man was saying, cocksure. Cary hated him even though he’d never hated anyone in his life. ‘Spending some quality time with my Alice. In fact, I’m looking for some breakfast bits so I can surprise her, poor girl’s barely slept…’
Cary had to listen while Gracie, evidently flustered and a bit giddy, filled him in on every shop in town.
‘Has Alice got any days off coming up soon?’ Bastian was asking. ‘Some leave she needs to take?’
‘She’s got some Thursdays, here and there, and Saturdays, of course. What have you got in mind?’
He’d reeled Gracie in like a salmon, but it was Cary who felt torn through with a barbed hook.
‘I was thinking of whisking her away to a romantic spa retreat. She’s exhausted, poor thing. Too much work.’
‘Oh, well, you’ve come to the right place!’ Gracie’s voice bubbled with excitement. ‘There’s loads of nice spas round here. Castle McLeod does a couple’s retreat with yoga and massages and that kind of thing. That’s where I get my nails done.’ Cary pictured her displaying her fingers to him.
‘Wow!’ he was saying, and not all too kindly, Cary thought.
Gracie carried on, oblivious. ‘If you tell Sonya on the booking line that Gracie from the surgery sent you, she’ll do you a discount.’
‘I’ll do that. Yep, things are going to change now that I’m around. She’s not going to slip back into old habits.’
Cary noted the silent pause, guessed that even in a fit of gossip-gathering excitement Gracie might detect something was seriously off about this guy.
‘Right,’ she was saying slowly.
‘Can’t have her burning out up here in the Highlands when, soon enough, she’ll be heading back home with me, back to the bosom of her family.’
‘In Manchester?’ Gracie had definitely got the measure of him now. Cary found her change in tone surprisingly gratifying.
‘Yup, when her stint here’s finished and we get her back to reality. So!’ He clapped his hands. ‘This way for the Post Office shop, you said, yeah?’
‘Aye. That way.’
And he was off, on his way, the sound of his self-satisfied whistling carrying across town as everyone else slept off their hangovers or nursed their aching feet.
Cary, never one to act on impulse previously, took himself straight into the cottage and up the stairs, hauling his suitcase down from the top of the wardrobe, and without anything else in his head but the vision of Alice with Bastian’s arm around her shoulders, he pulled clothes from their hangers and threw them in the case. It was time to go.
28
The postman rarely trekked all the way up to the cruive, tending to dump Finlay’s mail at the rangers’ station, but today there’d been the matter of a signature and a photograph to acquire; the letter was that important.
He’d found Finlay sitting dejectedly on the snail’s shell curve of the stormwall some way down the mountain from his hut, untouched coffee and sweet tablet by his side.
By the time the postie was tramping back down the path, chuckling at the photographic evidence of delivery (a dour, irritated Finlay protesting whether a picture was really necessary), Finlay had the envelope torn open.
He’d been expecting the notice of probate on his mother’s estate from the solicitors, Misters Giles and Knox of Edinburgh, and now it was in his hands, and there were some calculations attached which, even now that the solicitors had deducted their fees, made Finlay sweat.
How could the little house he’d been brought up in, with its cabbage-patch garden and creaky floorboards, have been worth this much?
‘People are mad,’ he’d exclaimed, looking at the bottom line, his inheritance.
What he hadn’t been expecting was a second letter, handwritten on the blue-lined notepaper he recognised so well. Before he unfolded the single page, he brought it to his nose, wondering if it still carried his mum’s soap and talcum powder scent. It did not, and he found himself wanting to cry.
She’d been gone for a whole year now, leaving her son the last of the Morlich line. Her influence, however, lived on within him: in his straight spine, ‘Good posture is the mark of a good man, Finlay’; in his unheard prayers, ‘Every night, without fail, remember’; in his rebellious appetite for confectionary, ‘Need I remind you, young man, greed is a sin.’
And yet he missed her.
