Page 3 of The Cottage in the Highlands

I turned around.

It was Mrs Cooke, an elderly lady I had interviewed recently. She had been swindled out of six hundred pounds by a dodgy landscape gardening company and had come to The Silver Ness News for help.

I followed up her story and thanks to the negative publicity and the attention my article attracted, Mrs Cooke was refunded the money these crooks had extracted from her, after claiming they had “recalculated the costs of pruning Mrs Cooke’s hedges and realised they had made an administrative error.”

“I just wanted to thank you so much for your help.”

“Oh, not at all Mrs Cooke,” I beamed, putting on a jokey voice. “Just doing my job.”

“No, you didn’t. You did far more than that. You were so very kind to me.” She leant in, clutching her wicker shopping basket. “I have written a letter of thanks to your editor, telling him how wonderful you are, but I’m sure he knows that already.”

I felt my cheeks zing with happiness and satisfaction. “Well, I hope he does but it won’t do any harm to remind him. Thank you.”

Mrs Cooke laughed and wandered off to inspect some new postcards outside the gift shop.

As I strolled back towards the office, an idea came to me. Maybe we could introduce a consumer complaints page for the local readers? Doug would often ask Frances and me to put forward any ideas we might have for the paper so that he could feed them back to Head Office.

The offices of The Silver Ness News were a whitewashed bevelled-window affair that used to be a pub that entertained the weary fishermen after their gruelling shifts out at sea during the early 1900s. It looked out from the high street and onto the moody vista of the beach.

As I drew closer, I noted that Doug’s black Hyundai was back and parked round the corner. Wow. If that had been a budget meeting, it had been a much quicker one than usual. They usually dragged on for a good couple of hours.

Doug would return, tie askew, complaining about people loving the sound of their own voices and refusing to stick to the timings on the agenda. Then he would always say he could murder a pint.

If I’d known he was going to return over lunch, I could have treated him to one of his favourites from the deli – a cream horn.

I closed the office door behind me, waggling the brown paper bag embossed with the deli logo. Inside, I was glowing from the kind praise from Mrs Cooke. I bounced across the newsroom. “The hunter-gatherer has returned.”

I turned to Frances and my smile withered. She was sitting behind her desk, dabbing at her wet eyes with a tissue.

The usually relaxed atmosphere in our little newsroom was edgy; unidentifiable.

I looked at Doug and then back to Frances. An uneasy feeling gripped my stomach. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

Doug shuffled from foot to foot, avoiding eye contact with me. “Switch on the office voicemail, would you please Leonie? We need to talk.”

Chapter Two

My stomach plummeted to the floor.

I felt as though I had been punched in the chest. “You’re joking. Please tell me you’re joking.”

Frances dragged her swivel chair round to sit beside me, her suit rumpled and her eyes stinging with more tears.

“I wish I were,” managed Doug.

“But closing the paper…”

Doug’s words carried more than a hint of sarcasm. “Not closing. Amalgamating.”

I couldn’t process this. The Clarity Newspaper Group had decided to amalgamate The Silver Ness News with one of our sister titles, The Drummond Post. Drummond was the neighbouring town to Silver Ness and a friendly rivalry had existed between the two ever since I could remember.

I rocked backwards and forwards in my chair, a rising panic clawing at me. I had been right to be concerned when Doug was summoned to Head Office like that. It wasn’t an urgent finance meeting. It was management lobbing a filthy great bomb into our lives.

Frances sniffed into her hankie.

I could guess what Doug was about to say, but I asked anyway. Part of me didn’t want to know. “But there must be something we can do,” I persisted, my voice dripping with desperation. “How about we try and modernise the paper a bit? Nothing radical, but just give it a bit of an update?”

“Leonie…” started Doug, looking defeated.